Smychka

The concept

Smychka is everyday Russian for a link or coupling, used as a policy watchword for the joining of workers' power to the peasant economy. The word carried within it the question of what conditions could sustain a proletarian dictatorship in a country where peasants were the overwhelming majority.

In introducing NEP, Lenin held that this joining had to be achieved through trade. The alliance would hold only if the exchange functioned normally, with the state supplying manufactured goods to the countryside and the peasant bringing surplus grain to market. His last writings, which treated cooperatives as the channel for drawing the peasantry toward socialism, rested on the same problem.

Tested

The alliance was tested at once. In the scissors crisis of 1923 industrial prices rose much faster than agricultural ones and weakened the peasant's incentive to sell, and the party answered by cutting industrial prices and adjusting procurement. After 1925 the problem ran the other way, as grain repeatedly failed to come in at the prices the state offered.

At this point smychka became the language of policy dispute. The Left Opposition held that surplus had to be transferred out of the peasant sector to fund industrialization, while the Right Opposition around Bukharin treated the maintenance of the alliance as the prior condition. Both sides invoked the smychka; their judgements of what it cost were opposite.

Abandonment

When emergency measures were invoked in the grain crisis of 1928 and forced procurement returned, the language of alliance was abandoned in practice. From 1929 rural policy was described in the language of class struggle rather than coupling, and the liquidation of the kulaks was placed at its centre.

Bukharin's Notes of an Economist, published in early 1929, was the last open defence to warn against the destruction of the balance. After his removal smychka disappeared from official vocabulary, and Soviet agricultural policy was recast around the efficiency of extraction rather than the conditions of an alliance.