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110 ANDREA GRAZIOSIThe third knot is that marked by the beginning of the New EconomicPolicy. Piatakov, still a "true believer," accepted the new policy withoutreserve, but in his own way. To do this he appealed to the analyses made inNovember 1917, when, on the basis of Hilferding, he had admitted the possibilitythat in a backward country the nationalized commanding heightscould coexist for some time with small property, especially in the countryside.Care was necessary, though, to ensure that this compromise work infavor of large industry. In the words of Bukharin, who in 1921 still sharedPiatakov's positions, the main danger was the economic razrukha and themain task the building of "our great socialized industry." Since, to fulfill thelatter, more products were needed, it was right to give more space to thoseable to guarantee these products (i.e., the petit-bourgeois economic formations)so long as they were used for building large industry.Paradoxically, then, the NEP did mark a "dangerous" break (due to theopenings which it created for the petite bourgeosie), but beneath it therewas a continuity embodied by the pursuit of the interests of large "socialized"industry. When this industry, to quote Bukharin again, was once more"v polnuiu boevuiu gatovnost'," the moment would have come to turn thetiller in a new direction (it was on the basis of these arguments that, in1925, against Bukharin's "betrayal," Piatakov was to demand a perelom ineconomic policy).The period of the launching of the NEP was also marked by othersignificant ideological developments. In 1922, for example, Piatakovpresided over the trial of the Socialist Revolutionary party, the first of theSoviet "show" trials of international renown. In so doing he expressed on anew level of intensity that fanatic anti-socialism, that mania for "unmasking,"and that ferocious sectarianism, which were the birthmarks ofBolshevism. On the one hand, this gives us a measure of the abyss whichthe years of the Civil War had opened between the Bolsheviks, even the"old" ones, and the humanitarian traditions of European socialism. On theother, it gives us a clue to the variety of materials that were going into theconstruction of the "Stalinist" ideology, which also fed on the extremizationof already existing elements, an extremization that, at least ideologically,was perhaps in the beginning a product of true believers like Piatakov.Here, perhaps, we have a lesser example of Stalin's extraordinary ability,which he showed in the 1920s (and which cannot fail to strike whoeverexamines that decade), to "listen" to the most widely differing contributions,and then to use them in his own way. 77Far more interesting from this point of view are the origins of a substantial part of Stalin's1928-1929 antiworker "workerism" (whose spell has charmed more than one Western