Soviet Calm between Two Storms

The middle twenties in the Soviet Union was a period of relative calm between two storms. The worst horrors of revolutionary terror and civil war, with their accompaniment of famine and mass epidemics, were in the past. The extreme policies of so-called war Communism, a combination of utopianism and war necessity, had been replaced by the milder NEP, or New Economic Policy.

A limited free market and a money system had come into existence; the peasants were being coaxed to produce more instead of being forced to surrender their surplus at the point of the gun—an admirable policy for insuring an absence of surplus in the future. People breathed more freely; the Soviet regime was seeking and getting the cooperation of the educated classes; despite the one-party dictatorship there was probably more freedom of expression, political, economic and literary, than at any other time in Soviet history. It is just possible that Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago could have been published in Russia in those years.

WC

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William Henry Chamberlin

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The middle twenties in the Soviet Union was a period of relative calm between two storms. The worst horrors of revolutionary terror and civil war, with their accompaniment of famine and mass epidemics, were in the past. The extreme policies of so-called war Communism, a combination of utopianism and war necessity, had been replaced by the milder NEP, or New Economic Policy.

A limited free market and a money system had come into existence; the peasants were being coaxed to produce more instead of being forced to surrender their surplus at the point of the gun—an admirable policy for insuring an absence of surplus in the future. People breathed more freely; the Soviet regime was seeking and getting the cooperation of the educated classes; despite the one-party dictatorship there was probably more freedom of expression, political, economic and literary, than at any other time in Soviet history. It is just possible that Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago could have been published in Russia in those years.