ABSTRACT
The Soviet Union during the 1920s remained a predominantly agrarian country, underdeveloped and backward in many regions. Industrialization, the Bolsheviks’ main developmental goal, was dependent upon increasing grain yields, in order to both feed the towns and factories, and generate a sufficient surplus to sell on the foreign exchanges. The New Economic Policy, pioneered by Lenin in 1921, specified grain as a tax in kind (prodnalog). By allowing private trade (with the incentive to sell surplus grain, rather than merely seeing it confiscated by the state), whilst simultaneously permitting the peasant freedom to hire and lease labour, the NEP facilitated a dramatic rise in harvest yields. However, it also produced sharp imbalances within the economy, exemplified by the so-called ‘scissors crisis’ of 1923, where higher prices on factory products led in turn to extensive grain hoarding by peasants in the countryside. By October 1923, industrial prices were three times higher, relative to agricultural prices, what they had been before the First World War.2
