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ambition to retain as much of Russian territory aspossible for the impending socialist experiment. Theresult, which was attained only with Bolshevik successin the Civil War of the post-revolutionary period, wasthat self-determination gave way to territorial expansion.The urge to secure the greatest possible terrainfor the socialist cause was thwarted in such places asPoland and Finland, but not so in other peripheral landsof the USSR such as the Ukraine. 'Once the boundarieswere secure and the party apparatus in place throughoutthe federation, however, policy could revert to a lesscontentious approach to nationality, except of coursein places where active resistance continued.Lenin's New Economic PolicyBroadly speaking, then, most of the decade of the1920s, characterized by Lenin's New Economic Policy(NEP), featured a comparatively permissive attitudeon the part of the Bolshevik leadership toward bothpeasants and the nationalities in their respectiverepublics. As between these two strands of thinkingand policy, the nationalities problem seemed the moresettled in this period. The Ukraine, for example,enjoyed a veritable flowering of its national cultureunder the program of "Ukrainization" led by partyleader Mykola Skrypnyk from 1927 to 1933. ' On theother hand, there was a more or less continuous debateabout economic policy, notably between those favoringthe abandonmentof NEP for the sake of socializationof the countryside and the defenders of a very gradualdeparture from NEP, thereby making it clear that therespite of NEP for the peasantry would be reversedsooner or later. 4 At the same time, some party leaders,Stalin prominent among them, regarded the two issuesas indissolubly linked, suggesting that measuresdesigned to cope with the peasantry and agriculturalsector would address the nationality question also.Even the defenders of NEP could not deny thecontinuing problem of grain procurement in thecountryside, a problem the intensity of which variedwith success or failure ofharvest and with the uncertaintractability of the peasants. A downward trend inprocurements in 1927-28, sufficiently drastic to threatensupplies to the cities and to other sectors of the economy,set in motion a campaign to extract the neededagricultural products, employing techniques that werereminiscent in their severity of the Civil War period.Peasants found to be withholding surplus grain weretreated as speculators and their supplies subject toconfiscation. The rhetoric accompanying the campaigntended to be couched in the terms of class struggle,focusing on allegations that the more favored agriculturalproducers were profiting at the expense of poorerpeasants and of urban workers. This made the procure-ment struggle a kind of preview of, and dress rehearsalfor, the collectivization drive that Stalin launched thefollowing year."Primitive Accumulation"The argument for proceeding with measures ofsocialization in the countryside had so far come mainlyfrom elements of the party usually referred to as theLeft and associated with opposition to Stalin's increasingcontrol over the party. Preobrazhensky in particularhad advocated a deliberate exploitation of the peasantry,what in Marxian terms would be called "primitive"accumulation, as the best way to finance economicdevelopment in general. His ideas had been renouncedby the party officially, and Stalin was supposed to beamong those rejecting such measures. By the time ofthe procurement crisis, Stalin's dominance within theparty had been secured, as demonstrated by thereluctance of party leaders to do or say anything thatmight identify them as defenders of the kulaks, themore prosperous peasants who now figured as theenemy in this phase of class struggle. And Stalin's shiftin position by 1928-29 was perhaps less abrupt thanit seemed.That shift revealed itself as a sudden adoption ofthe Preobrazhensky line, whereby peasants would beunderpaidfor their output while paying excessive pricesfor the purchases they had to make, the whole enterprisemasked as an attack on the kulaks for theirexploitation of less favored segments of the peasantpopulation. The emergency measures of 1928 produceda deepening division within the party, Bukharin joinedby Tomsky, Rykov, and others in advocating moderationwhile Molotov and Kaganovich supported Stalinin his draconian approach to procurement.' The splitbecame more evident toward the end of the year andearly in 1929 as Stalin took an increasingly explicitstand on rapid industrialization at the expense ofagriculture, as reflected in the upward movement ofthe targets stipulated in the Five Year Plan, drafted in1927 and intended to run through 1931-32. At the sametime, he intensified his effort to isolate the oppositionand mobilize the party behind his program. Yet as lateas April 1929, the crucial Sixteenth Party Conferenceappeared to maintain the essence of NEP with respectto agriculture. Though the socialized sector, state andcollective farms, was to be developed further, ninetypercent of agricultural production was still expectedfrom individual farmers. Given the renewed emphasison industrial development, this cautious outlook foragriculture contained a serious contradiction.108 GENOCIDE