SMYCHKA

S mychka, meaning "alliance" or "union" in Russian, was used during the New Economic Policy (NEP), particularly by those Bolsheviks who supported a moderate policy toward the peasantry, to describe a cooperative relationship between workers and peasants.

In 1917 the revolutionary alliance of proletariat and peasantry against the tsarist ruling classes led to victory, but by the end of the Civil War the smychka had been severely weakened by harsh War Communism policies of forcible confiscation of grain. Vladimir Lenin introduced the NEP in 1921 to restore the smychka, ending confiscatory policies toward the peasantry and allowing limited private enterprise.

The Bolsheviks were in the awkward position of claiming to represent the proletariat but actually ruling over a peasant population that they regarded as potentially bourgeois. In the 1920s they debated what policies should be applied to the peasantry, that is, what the smychka should mean. In his last writings, particularly "On Cooperation" and "Better Fewer, But Better" (both 1923), Lenin argued that the smychka meant gaining the peasants' trust by recognizing and meeting their needs. Through cooperatives, he said, the vast majority of peasants could be gradually won over to socialism. Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and others members of the right built their program of gradual evolution to socialism on Lenin's last writings, seeing the smychka as a permanent feature of Soviet life and calling for concessions to the peasantry. The left feared that the peasant majority could swallow the revolution and resisted concessions, hoping that rapid industrialization would end the need for alliance with the peasantry.

The inherent tensions between Bolshevik goals and peasant needs threatened to rupture the smychka. In the 1923 Scissors Crisis, prices for agricultural products plummeted at the same time that those of state-produced manufactured goods rose sharply, opening a price gap that discouraged peasants from marketing agricultural products. Adjustments kept the smychka in place, and 1925 was the high point of pro-peasant policies. The Grain Crisis of 1928 and subsequent defeat of the right weakened the smychka, and the massive collectivization drive of 1929–1930 ended it completely.

See also: collectivization of agriculture; grain crisis of 1928; new economic policy; scissors crisis; war communism