Sometimes I feel that I take more from my lectures than from the students. According to the program I am supposed to teach, but in reality it turns out that in the classroom I first teach myself. This happened during a recent lesson on NEP. When it comes to Soviet economic reforms, especially the later ones, from Kosygin to Gorbachev, there is usually one explanation for their halting. The country's leadership feared that economic freedom would lead to political freedom. You allow self-financing and market components, and then conversations will begin about a multi-party system, freedom of speech and other matters that for the party leadership were much worse than a decrease in labor productivity. But the NEP presents exactly the opposite picture. From an economic point of view, it was a huge step back from war communism. The excess allocation method was replaced by a tax in kind, private trade and small-scale production were allowed, money and the market returned, concessions were offered to foreign capital. A whole social group of nemesis appeared, whom the Soviet satire mocked with special pleasure, but in fact they traded, got rich and furnished apartments. Just a few years ago, doing this could get you fired as a speculator. And at the same time, the state did not give any slack in politics. On the contrary, in the 1920s the supervision became more strict, and what is even more interesting for a historian - more systematic. Look at the revolution and the civil war. The authorities there operated in manual mode, improvising and responding to each new challenge according to the situation. The extraordinary committee was called that because it was seen as a temporary body, born out of circumstances. And in 1922, the moment was canceled and the GPU was created, which a year later became the OGPU. It was headed by the same Dzerzhinsky, but the meaning of the change was different: the mechanism of repression from an emergency became permanent, built into normal and peaceful state life. More will come. In the same year 1922, Galvelit appeared, and the censorship acquired its own department with staff and instructions.

Sometimes I feel that I take more from my lectures than from the students. According to the program I am supposed to teach, but in reality it turns out that in the classroom I first teach myself. This happened during a recent lesson on NEP. When it comes to Soviet economic reforms, especially the later ones, from Kosygin to Gorbachev, there is usually one explanation for their halting. The country's leadership feared that economic freedom would lead to political freedom. You allow self-financing and market components, and then conversations will begin about a multi-party system, freedom of speech and other matters that for the party leadership were much worse than a decrease in labor productivity. But the NEP presents exactly the opposite picture. From an economic point of view, it was a huge step back from war communism. The excess allocation method was replaced by a tax in kind, private trade and small-scale production were allowed, money and the market returned, concessions were offered to foreign capital. A whole social group of nemesis appeared, whom the Soviet satire mocked with special pleasure, but in fact they traded, got rich and furnished apartments. Just a few years ago, doing this could get you fired as a speculator. And at the same time, the state did not give any slack in politics. On the contrary, in the 1920s the supervision became more strict, and what is even more interesting for a historian - more systematic. Look at the revolution and the civil war. The authorities there operated in manual mode, improvising and responding to each new challenge according to the situation. The extraordinary committee was called that because it was seen as a temporary body, born out of circumstances. And in 1922, the moment was canceled and the GPU was created, which a year later became the OGPU. It was headed by the same Dzerzhinsky, but the meaning of the change was different: the mechanism of repression from an emergency became permanent, built into normal and peaceful state life. More will come. In the same year 1922, Galvelit appeared, and the censorship acquired its own department with staff and instructions.