ABSTRACT
Evgeny Preobrazhensky (1886–1937), economic guru of the Bolshevik Party’s strident ‘left opposition’ to the more conciliatory and ‘consumerist’ facets of NEP, has remained one of the world’s most noted proponents of forced industrialization in a peasant society under a socialist regime. His Prospects of NEP (1921) argued that the mixed economy established by the fledgling ‘proletarian dictatorship’ was only a battleground on which resurgent private enterprise would prepare for an ‘inevitable’ showdown with the state sector, whose expansion would have to be funded mainly through progressively increasing ‘deductions from the income of the petit bourgeois encirclement’. He favoured six main sources of ‘accumulation’ for the socialized sector: progressive taxation of capitalist incomes; profits from the state monopoly of foreign trade; the profits of state industry; new currency emissions, proportionate to economic expansion; imported venture capital, on which the payoff to the state sector would amply exceed the ‘extortionate interest rates’ charged by foreign capitalists; and imported human capital, or ‘proletarian colonization’ of Russia by millions of Europe’s unemployed workers. The faster this mixed economy developed, the sooner the ‘inevitable’ showdown would ensue.
