Soviet Union Study_7.pdf

Soviet Union: A Country Study
into account political, military, and other noneconomic considerations.
Past Priorities
The Bolsheviks (see Glossary), who assumed power in late 1917,
sought to mold a socialist society from the ruins ofold tsarist Russia.
This goal was ambitious and somewhat vague; Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, who developed Marxism (see Glossary), provided
no blueprints for specific economic policies and targets. Chaotic
conditions produced by World War I and subsequent struggles during
the Civil War (1918-21) made pursuit of coherent policies
difficult in any case. The economic policies initially adopted by
the regime were a mixture of principle and expedience.
Soon after taking power, the regime published decrees nationalizing
the land, most industry (all enterprises employing more than
five workers), foreign trade, and banking. At the same time, for
tactical reasons, the government acquiesced in the peasants' seizure
of land, but the new leaders considered the resulting fragmented
parcels of privately owned land to be inefficient.
Beginning in 1918, the government made vigorous but somewhat
haphazard efforts to shape and control the country's economy
under a policy ofwar communism (see Glossary). But in 1920,
agricultural output had attained only half its prewar level, foreign
trade had virtually ceased, and industrial production had fallen to
a small fraction of its prewar quantity. Such factors as the disastrous
harvest of 1920, major military actions and expenditures by
the Red Army, and general wartime destruction and upheaval exacerbated
the economy's problems.
In 1921 Vladimir 1. Lenin called a temporary retreat from application
of the ideological requirements of Marxist doctrine. His
new approach, called the New Economic Policy (NEP), permitted
some private enterprise, especially in agriculture, light industry,
services, and internal trade, to restore prewar economic strength.
The nationalization of heavy industry, transportation, foreign trade,
and banking that had occurred under war communism remained
in effect.
In the late 1920s, Stalin abandoned NEP in favor-Of centralized
planning, which was modeled on a project sponsored by Lenin in
the early 1920s that had greatly increased the generation of electricity.
Stalin sought to rapidly transform the Soviet Union from
a predominantly agricultural country into a modern industrial power.
He and other leaders argued that by becoming a strong centrally
planned industrial power, the country could protect itself
militarily from hostile outside intervention and economically from
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