A Century of NEP Studies: Time to Take Stock?

ISSN 1019-3316, Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2022, Vol. 92, Suppl. 8, pp. S729–S736. © The Author(s), 2022. This article is an open access publication. Russian Text © The Author(s), 2022, published in Rossiiskaya Istoriya, 2020, No. 5. A Century of NEP Studies: Time to Take Stock? M. Yu. Mukhin# Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia e-mail: Received October 28, 2022; revised November 1, 2022; accepted November 1, 2022 Abstract—The chronicle of the study of the most important aspects of the history of the New Economic Policy (NEP) over the century that has elapsed since the beginning of the NEP reforms is analyzed. Three definite periods can be distinguished in the NEP historiography: the Soviet stage, the Perestroika period, and the post-Soviet phase. At the same time, each period is characterized by a specific political situation, which left an imprint both on the degree of relevance and the priority of certain subjects in the study of NEP and on the methodological approaches to the study of these subjects. The author believes that, in the future, the most promising NEP studies will focus on the interface of areas: economic history and social history, economic history and the history of state institutions, military history and social history, etc. Keywords: New Economic Policy, NEP, historiography of NEP, study of NEP, history of science DOI: 10.1134/S1019331622140088 The role and significance of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the history of our country are well known. Being in a crisis by the end of 1920, the Soviet economy began sharp and, most importantly, steady growth starting from 1921. By and large, the transition to NEP was of key importance for the preservation of Soviet statehood, and in the realities of those years, this meant the preservation of domestic statehood as such, since it was obvious that only the Bolsheviks were able to ensure the territorial unity and controllability of Russia. It is probably not too much of a mistake to say that the Soviet state overcame an extremely important barrier by choosing a new course that ensured the rapid recovery of the economic sphere. A century separates us from the beginning of the NEP reforms. Considering the fact that attempts to analyze and comprehend those events historically began almost immediately after the end of NEP, we can talk about a hundred-year period of the historiography of the New Economic Policy. During this time, in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, a whole area of historical research has developed—nepovedenie (NEP studies)— which has become an important part of historical science. Conferences and symposia on various aspects of it are held regularly, and new scientific papers are published just as often. However, the approaches and main vectors of NEP historiography have repeatedly changed. NEP rather quickly became the subject of close interest of both historians and political scientists, and often politicians, who sought to justify certain decisions with references to “historical experience” (or to what they considered such). It was appealed to when discussing the economic reforms of the 1950s, it was seen as a way to build “socialism with a human face” during the years of perestroika, and subsequently it began to be mentioned in the controversy about the merits and demerits of socialist and capitalist economic models. Academic studies of the processes and trends of that brief period were sometimes used as illustrations or proofs of one political concept or another, but most often they were simply ignored. Meanwhile, scientific research began already in the 1930s and has not stopped to this day. True, it should be noted that there are relatively few historiographic works devoted to the history of the study of the NEP period, and, as a rule, they are either devoted to the historiography of certain aspects of that period, and not to the 1920s generally,1 or consider mainly the 1 In this series one can note Vas’ko, A.A. (2009) “NEP and the # Mikhail Yur’evich Mukhin, Dr. Sci. (Hist.), is a Professor and Chief Researcher at the RAS Institute of Russian History. S729 Problem of Civil Society in Russia: Modern Historiography,” Izvestiya vysshikh uchebnykh zavedenii. Severo-Kavkazskii region, No. 3, 134–138; Karmazin, A.S. (2006) “Historiography of the Social Policy of the Soviet State towards the Working Class in 1921–1941: On the Materials of the Ural Region,” Extended Thesis of the Doctoral (History) Dissertation, Tyumen’; Leikina, S.A. (2000) “The Development of Handicraft Cooperation in Irkutsk Province in the 1920s (Historiographic Review),” in Irkutskii istoriko-ekonomicheskii ezhegodnik: 2000 [Irkutsk Historical and Economic Yearbook: 2000], Irkutsk, pp. 124–130; Chernysheva, A.V. (2004) “Problems of Management of the Soviet PreKolkhoz Village in Modern Historiography,” in Vek XX: Istoriografiya, istochnikovedenie, regional’naya istoriya Rossii. Sbornik nauchnykh trudov [Century 20: Historiography, Source Studies, Regional History of Russia: Collection of Scientific Papers], Nizhny Novgorod, pp. 259–270; Lysenko, Zh.N. (2020) “The Problem of Opposition to Power in the Era of NEP in Modern Historiography,” in Problemy nauchno-prakticheskoi deyatel’nosti. Poisk i vybor innovatsionnykh reshenii [Problems of Scientific and Practical Activity: Search and Selection of Innovative Solutions], Kirov, pp. 87–91; Kilin, A.P. (2020) “Private Entrepreneurship in the Years of NEP: Historiography of the 1990s–2000s,” Gumanitarnye nauki v Sibiri 27 (2), 62–68. S730 MUKHIN works of post-Soviet researchers, phasing Soviet historiography out.2 In addition, such studies and especially reviews are often “a set of reviews of the works of individual authors, without giving … a complete picture.”3 Thus, at the moment, the problem of analyzing the NEP historiography has not yet been resolved. This article is devoted to this issue. Of course, such a voluminous subject can be considered in detail only within the framework of a monographic study; thus, it will inevitably have the character of a brief, almost concise review. Nevertheless, it seems that an analysis of the development of the NEP issues in the historiography of the past years will make it possible to understand which issues have been the focus of research and which are still awaiting study. The historiography of NEP, i.e., the process of writing its history, began almost immediately after the curtailment of this course and the transition to the policy of mass industrialization. Although a number of domestic researchers4 believe that the Soviet period of historiography should be conducted from the works of V.I. Lenin, N.I. Bukharin, and L.D. Trotsky, apparently, this is some exaggeration. Historiography is still written by historians, not politicians. In fact, S.A. Pokrovskii5 became the first historiographer of the NEP. Then, back in the prewar period, a collective monograph6 was publ (...truncated)