Untitled research work

Lenin, in a speech delivered to an audience of workers a few days after the announcement of NEP, distinguished three classes in the Soviet social order: the proletariat, which, as the result of its superhuman exertions in the revolution and the civil war, was now “extremely weary and exhausted and extremely worn out”; the petty bourgeoisie, which he identified with the peasantry and described as “an independent class, that class which, after the annihilation of landowners and capitalists, remains the only class capable of resisting the proletariat”; and the “landowners and capitalists”, who were “here … at present nowhere to be seen”, but still constituted a powerful enemy abroad.1 After nearly two years’ experience of NEP, in one of his last published articles, Lenin eliminated the “landowners and capitalists” but introduced a new category: the social order in the Soviet republic was “based on the cooperation of two classes — workers and peasants — to which are now also admitted on certain conditions the nepmen, i.e. the bourgeoisie”.2 From this time the “new bourgeoisie” or “new bourgeois strata” were constantly mentioned in party literature, being identified with “traders, private lessees of enterprises, various free professions in town and country, rural kulaks etc.” or, more briefly, “kulaks in the country, nepmen in the town”.3