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112 ANDREA GRAZIOSIPiatakov's other personal reaction to the events of the end of 1923—yetanother important step along the road taken in 1919—must be seen in thiscontext. The explanation for the scissors crisis that Piatakov, Osinskii, andV. M. Smirnov advanced is a good illustration of this point. Larindenounced the "istericheskii idealizm," the "idealizm eserovskogo gimnazista"which animated it, and, in fact—as in the German case—everything was made to depend on subjective factors. A multiplication ofsubjective commitment and personal effort was thus the solution also proposedfor internal matters. For Piatakov, that translated itself into a renewedadministrative effort at the VSNKh, aimed, in his own words, at acceleratingas much as possible the construction of the first "sistema gosudarstvennoipromyshlennosti" in history.These considerations profoundly influenced Piatakov's type of opposition,which became increasingly less political and increasingly tied to therhythms and directions of "building." This position led him to move closerto whomever might satisfy those needs and, in particular, laid the basis forconvergence with Stalin. Certainly, the "socialism in one country" that Stalinproposed was still, in Piatakov's eyes, tainted by Bukharin's influence,which gave it a pacific, moderate, and isolationist content. But there is nodoubt that Piatakov was encouraged to distance himself from Trotsky (whoalways put politics and internationalism first) and to approach the Stalinistgroup because of his idea of concentrating on building within the USSR,leaving aside international politics (partly because of the pessimism mentionedabove) and—why not?—leaving aside internal politics too, sincewhat really counted, after all, was the economy. This convergence wasobjectively encouraged by the policies Piatakov followed at the VSNKh,which accelerated the NEP crisis and left Stalin and his followers facing theneed to make decisions.What remained, now, of Piatakov's Marxism, or, better still, what had itbecome? Its humanitarian aspect, linked to socialist traditions, had beenswept away, as we have seen, by the Civil War. At a theoretical level, thereremained a resistant core of certain categories that were, in fact, so manyfilters deforming reality. I have in mind, for example, Piatakov's mythicalvision of the functioning of the economy—to which we shall return in thelast section—which was a major influence in determining the decisions thatled to the NEP crisis. On the political plane, one could refer once again tothe want of the Marxist theory of the state, which blinded Piatakov in a contextcharacterized by the birth and expansion of a new great state; to theobsession with "class" analysis, which distracted attention from moreimportant phenomena, and to the "theoretical" aversion for the peasants—the great majority of the population.