The Beginning and the End of the New Economic Policy: The Kronstadt Rebellion and the Shakhty Trialh[Начало И Конец Новой Экономической Политики: Кронштадтское Восстание И Шахтинское Дело]

The New Economic Policy (NEP) was implemented in Soviet Russia from 1921 to 1928, thus replacing the policy of war communism during the Russian Civil War. During the NEP, the use of market principles and the attraction of foreign capital in the form of concessions were combined with state regulation of a mixed economy using planning instruments. The principles and ideas of the early Soviet NEP had a noticeable influence on the policy of Hungary, Yugoslavia and communist China in the 1980s. This monograph is devoted to two events that marked the beginning and end of the NEP era. The first part of the book is about the Kronstadt armed uprising, during which the crews of warships and residents of the city in 1921 fought against the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks and the policy of war communism. Brief biographies of the leaders of the revolutionary committee: Stepan Petrichenko, Sergey Vershinin, Pyotr Perepyolkin – and the special investigator of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (Cheka) Yakov Agranov are presented. The complex historiography of the «mutiny or uprising» problem is examined in detail with references to sources. The second part is about the Shakhty Trial of 1928. This staged political trial of the technical intelligentsia and German specialists became a significant event as it marked the transition from the NEP to the "socialist offensive" in the economy. It also caused a major crisis in Soviet-German relations. The third part of the book is devoted to episodes from the biography and works of one of the leading participants in the events, the revolutionary Leon Trotsky. For the first time in Russian, the history of the revolutionary's inaugural Japanese and Korean publishers is discussed. The historiographic sections analyze more than three hundred sources on the topics. The book is the first volume in the series "Economics and Politics at the Beginning of the 20th Century". It will be useful both for specialists and for a wide range of readers interested in economic, legal, diplomatic and military history. It will also be useful for those fascinated by the history of the USSR and the Russian Empire at the beginning of the XXth century.