ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Developments in the Soviet Union of the 1920s have been the object of renewed interest in recent years, largely because various historical options were still open at that time and because of the high standard of debates in various arenas on how the Soviet Union should develop. The period of the New Economic Policy (NEP) from 1921 to 1929 is of particular interest, because NEP represented an attempt to construct a non-coercive socialist policy towards a peasantry which was not conceived of as a class or as a unified social force. The historically anti-democratic effects on the Soviet Union (and on world politics) of the failure of this attempt are extremely well known, at least in broad outline. There is a lot to be gained from the analysis of the reasons for this failure, both in terms of understanding the contemporary Soviet Union and in terms of the pertinence of the problems faced under the New Economic Policy to the contemporary problems of developing countries. This acknowledgement of the importance of the 1920s provides the justification for many of the studies of that period, yet precisely because of the complexity of these developments, the richness of the empirical sources and the high standards of the various debates, the contemporary debates in the West about the 1920s are still continuing. This contribution attempts to investigate some relatively neglected aspects of the debate, in the light of the growing view in some quarters that the policy of forced collectivisation of the peasantry was not only economically and politically unnecessary, but actually impeded the implementation of the first Five Year Plan.
