Table Of ContentTHE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY
AND THE PARTY CRISIS
AFTER THE DEATH OF LENIN
REMINISCENCES OF MY WORK AT THE VSNKH
DURING THE NEP
by
N. VALENTINOV (VOLSKY)
Edited by J. Bunyan and V. Bu tenko
With an Introduction by Bertram Wolfe
Hoover Institution Press
Stanford University, Stanford, California
Hoover Institution Foreig n Lan gua ge Publications
Н. ВАЛЕНТИНОВ (ВОЛЬСКИЙ)
НОВАЯ
ЭКОНОМИЧЕСКАЯ ПОЛИТИКА
И КРИЗИС ПАРТИИ
ПОСЛЕ СМЕРТИ ЛЕНИНА
ГОДЫ РАБОТЫ В ВСНХ ВО ВРЕМЯ НЕН
ВОСПОМИНАНИЯ
Под редакцией Я. Бунина и В. Бутенко
с предисловием Бертрама Вольфа
The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace,
founde d at Stanford University In 1919 by the late President
Herbert Hoover, is a center for advanced study and research
on public and international affairs in the twentieth century.
The views expressed in its publications are entirely those
of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of
the Hoover Institution.
© 1971 by the Board of Trus tees of the Leland S tanford J unior University
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 76-129736
Printed in West Germany
Printer : I. Baschkirze w Buchdruckerei,
8 Munchen 50, Peter-Muller-Str. 43.
ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ
Introduction by Bertram Wolfe VII
Предисловие автора XV
ГЛАВА I
Рождение НЭП-а и «Лига наблюдателей» 1
ГЛАВА II
Разброд в партии и болезнь Ленина . 28
ГЛАВА III
Левая оппозиция и борьба за власть 65
ГЛАВА IV
Смерть Ленина 86
ГЛАВА V
Дзержинский в ВСНХ СССР 94
ГЛАВА VI
Пятилетние планы и роль Ю. Л. Пятакова
а) Преображенский и его теория перво-
начального социалистического накоп-
ления ....................................................... 142
б) «Освок» и методология планирования 157
ГЛАВА VII
М. К. Владимиров — заместител ь Дзержин-
ского .............................................................. 179
ГЛАВА VIII
Л. Троцкий в ВСНХ 195
ГЛАВА IX
Орган ВСНХ — «Торгово-Промышленная Га-
зета» .............................................................. 229
ПРИЛОЖЕНИЕ
Участники «Лиги наблюдателей» 255
INTRODUCTION
One of the pleasures of those who work in the field of recent Russian
intellectua l and social history has been to come across an article signed
" N. Valentinov. " After the crude, dogmatic simplifications of Lenin the
toneless , self-answering , catechetica l style of Stalin , the bumptious , occasion-
ally amusin g vulgarit y of Khrushchev , and the gray clich6s of Brezhnev and
consorts , it is always a joy to find an article that can be counted upon to
be origina l and penetrating in thought, vivid and precis e in expression , and
reassuring in its affirmation that the "great, powerful, truthful and free
Russian tongue" that consoled Turgenev in his hours of gloom somehow
lived on into the degenerat e age of bureaucrates e and sloganese . It took me
some time to realize that N. Valentino v and E. Yurevsky were one and the
same writer, and that both w ere pseudonyms for Nicolai Vladislavovich
Volsky.
Volsky lived a long and fruitful life, never ceasing to write until his
death at the age of eighty-five . For the last few years he could write only
lying in bed, but he continue d almos t to the very end to write on literature
and philosophy , politics and economics , and the cultura l and intellectual
history of Russia , as well as his warm individua l and personal correspond-
ence with many friends in many fields of thought and in many lands. The
persona l letters were likely to be signed N. Volsky , but so far as I know
he never used his real name to sign an article or a book.
When I got to know him personally and visited him and his wife in their
diminutive , sparsely and poorly furnished apartmen t in the workingmen’s
quarter of Plessis-Robinson on the outskirts of Paris, he explained with a
mischievous twinkle in his eye that he never used the name Volsk y vor
public purposes "because it sounds like the name of a Polish tenor."
But he had at least two other reasons . When at the age of eightee n in
1897 he entered the Petersburg Institute of Technology , he was preoccupied
like so many of the student youth of his generation with choosing between
Populism and Marxism . He chose Marxism, was expelled from the technologi-
cal institute for his enthusiasti c novice activities , and sent to live under
police surveillanc e in Ufa (today the capital of the Bashkir Republic).
Thereupon his father, descendan t of ancient Lithuanian nobility and Marshal
of the Nobility of Morshansk in the Province of Tambov , disinherited his
wayward son and cut off his allowance . Proud as his father, with the
well-known pride of the Lithuania n and Polish nobility , young Nikolai Vladi-
slavovich got himself a job in the railway shops of the roundhouse at Ufa.
Before a year w as up he had mastere d the locksmith’s trade. To spare his
father embarrassmen t as muc h as to complicate the work of the police, he
began using a succession of pseudonyms , finally settling on Valentinov,
presumab ly derived from his wife’s Christian name , Valentina.
But the pseudonyms did not seem to throw off the police. He was too
tall and strong, and too exuberan t in his activities , to escape notice in
VII
any crowd . In Kiev, his next place of residence , he enrolled at the Poly-
technica l School, where he organized a sports and athletic circle for which
he incurred the mockery of serious comrade s who proteste d that they were
preparing to be technica l and social engineers , not circus performers . Not
only did he exce l as an athlete , but as an orator . He found a ready audience
among the workingmen of Kiev, who were hungry for meetings , demonstra-
tions, lecture s and speeches . Between 1901 and 1903 he was arrested three
times by the Okhrana . The second arres t came after he had resisted a
police attemp t to break up a workingmen’ s meeting , resisted so energetically
that he was finally knocked unconsciou s by a blow on the head from a
cossack’s sabre . He got nearly a year in prison for that performance , and
though the wound healed readily he was to be plagued by frightfu l headaches
for the next three decades.
Scarcely out jail, he was arrested again when some black hair dye he
had applied as a disguise (the dye was manufacture d by the Bolshevik
chemistry professo r Tikhvinsky ) began to run in the hot sun, revealing
streaks of fair hair before he had finishe d speaking for fifteen minutes to a
gathering of about twenty-five hundred striking railway workers . This time
the police had such an abundanc e of evidence agains t him that he knew he
could expec t nothing less than a long prison term followed by deportation
to some remote corner of Siberia.
The first two arrests had not been so bad. They had authenticate d him as
a revolutionary , and incarceratio n had given him time to study economics,
philosophy , and foreign languages . But this third arres t was different , for
this time he was in love . He was as ardent in love as in study, in athletics,
in demonstration s, in speeches , in all he undertook . It seeme d only yesterday
(actually it was a few months) since he had met, wooed , and won the
beautifu l young actress Valentina Nikolaevna , and move d with her into a
"commune " with two other student s of the Polytechnica l who were, like
him, budding Marxists . The four communard s shared their incomes , meals,
studies , joys and sorrows and dreams . Togethe r they read the second and
third volumes of Marx’s Capital (it was nothing to have read the first),
discussed the lates t article s in revolutionar y journals , shared enthusiasm for
Lenin’s first "Leninist " programmati c work, What Is to Be Done? Valentinov
was in no moo d to be separated now from his young bride and his life in
the commune ; so withou t consultin g the other political s in the detention
prison or giving them an acceptabl e propagand a reason , he went on a
hunger strike to force his release . It was a complete fast, not one of those
so commo n now in which the faster allows himself water , vitamins , and
fruit juice. Since he stubbornly refused to give an acceptabl e reason , his
comrade s denied him suppor t and urged him to call off his hunger strike.
"I was strong as a bull in those days," Valentino v wrote in his Vstrechi
s Leninym (translate d into English as Encounter s with Lenin, Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1968). "I did many foolish things during my hunger strike . . . .
To show that I 'could take it,’ I used up all my strength wrestling with my
cellmate s during our prison walks . . . . On the seventh day of the fast I
committ ed my greates t blunder . I did not want to miss my turn at the hot
water and took a hot bath. It was devastating . ... I started to lose conscious-
ness, could hardly climb out of the tub, and scarcely manage d to crawl to
my cell. . . . By the end of the eleventh day I could hardly stand on my feet."
VIII
Then occurred a miracl e such as would not be possible in the prisons
and concentratio n camps of the age of Stalin , Khrushchev , and Brezhnev.
During his earlie r imprisonmen t, while he was recuperatin g from the head
wound inflicted by the cossack sabre , no less a personag e than Genera l of
Gendarme s Novitsky had come to his prison hospita l to inquire concerning
his condition . Now, to his own and his comrades ’ amazement , on the eleventh
night of his hunger strike he was visited and told he would be released.
His wife was given the same information . On the following day, New Year's
Eve, he was freed to go home to his bride and his commune , where a hero’s
welcome awaited him. The three communard s stuffed their starving hero
with enormou s portion s of ham and sausage well covered with mustard;
acute indigestio n and a stomach ulcer followed the feast.
The released prisone r needed nothing so muc h as a rest, but his home-
comin g celebratio n was no more than half an hour under way when chemis-
try professo r Tikhvinsk y — he of the dissolvin g hair dye — appeared with
a message from one of Lenin's chief emissarie s in Kiev, the enginee r Krzhi-
zhanovsky . The professo r bore a note : "Come at once." The joy and the rest
were over. The hero left the feast and followed Tikhvinsky to his flat. There
Krzhizhanovsk y assured him the release from prison was a "trap." He would
surely be rearreste d and sent to a more distan t prison where his hunger
strike would attrac t less attention . He was to leave his wife and fellow
communards , keep away from the commune , and cross the border into
Poland the next night , fortified with suitable instruction s and a letter to
Lenin.
The border crossing in the dead of winter proved even more hazardous
than it sounded . At Kamenetsk-Podols k, where there had just been a police
raid, those who were supposed to provide instruction s and a guide were
not accessible . How was Valentino v to spend a subzero January night in
a strange town withou t attractin g attention ? By a stroke of good luck, the
first person to spot him prowling in backyard s in the dark was a young
girl whom he knew from the studen t movemen t in Kiev. She had managed
to arrange for her own guide and planned to cross the border next evening,
withou t invitatio n from Lenin and with the aim of makin g the Bolshevik
leader explain to her the split he had just engineere d at the Second Congress
of the Social Democrati c Party. When the two crossed the frozen Dniester
with their guide , instead of the border guards he had bribed they me t guards
who had not been bribed . Their guide disappeare d at the first rifle shot,
leaving his two charges to hide through the night in a snowdrift , eluding
random shots in below-zer o weather . The girl, a victim of "galloping con-
sumption, " died in Geneva a few months later . Weakened from fasting and
feasting , Valentino v contracte d tuberculosis.
His lung disease was eventually arrested , but what with its inevitable
ravages , the prison sentences , the hunger strike , and the ulcer, the "athlete
strong as a bull" was shorn of his strength . Lenin after hearing his story named
him, after the biblica l Samson , "Samsonov, " the pseudonym he bore while in
the Bolshevik faction . When I got to know him he still had the tall frame of
his youth , but he was painfully thin and had the sunken chest of one who
suffers from chronic lung trouble . Yet he lived beyond his eighty-fifth
birthday and all his life exhibited the same ardor of spiri t he had shown
in his youth . His last few years were spent in bed because of emphysema,
IX
but even then and to the very end he kept working on the precious intel-
lectual and literary heritage from which so many of us have learned.
At twenty-thre e he began his career as a writer with contribution s to
the Kievskaia Gazeta-, from 1905 on, living illegally in Moscow , he published
books, articles , and essays under various pseudonyms ; and in 1908 he
published three books: My eshche pridem! О sovremenno i literature (We
Shall Be Back! On Contemporary Literature) ; Filosofskie postroeniia Mark-
sizma (The Philosophica l Structure of Marxism) ; and Mach and Marxism . The
last two were targets of scorn in Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism.
In 1909 Volsky returned to Kiev, where he manage d to legalize his
existence under the name of N. Valentinov . Under that name he published
many articles in Kievskaia Mysl' (Kievan Thought). From 1911 on, back in
Moscow, he became a contributo r to Russkoe Slovo (The Russian Word),
the journal of the newspape r tycoon Ivan Dimitrievich Sytin who, having
risen from the lower depths of society , made it the purpose of his vast
publishing enterprise s to bring books and journals o f high quality and low
price to the people.
From 1914 to 1917 Volsky worked on what he intended to be his most
importan t work, Russia and Russian Culture , but during the lean, hungry
and cold year 1918, the first of Lenin’s rule, the complete d manuscript
perished ignominious ly when an illiterate old woman used it as fuel to
feed a Primus stove. During the same hard years he wrote in the journal
Vlast' Naroda until Lenin, who felt the stings of his criticism, shut it down.
Lenin sent him many messages offering him importants posts, but he stead-
fastly refused, earning a meager ration instead as librarian and dispenser
of sweets in the Red Army rest home.
But as soon as Lenin gave up the mad fanaticism of what has since
come to be known as the period of "war communism ," when he adopted the
New Economic Policy (NEP) and gave up the harsh policy of seizing the
peasants ' "surplus" products without compensation and shooting as "specu-
lators" the peasants who brought to the cities bags of food to be exchanged
for nails and matches and tools, then Volsky saw the hope of restoration
for the ruined Russian economy. He accepted work in the Supreme Council
of National Economy and for the next eight years edited the council’s Tor-
govo-Promyshlennai a Gazeta (The Gazette of Trade and Industry) , though
a Bolshevik party membe r figured on the masthead as editor in chief. Twice
he broke down from overwork and exhaustion and was permitted to go to
a sanitarium in Western Europe to recuperate . The second time, the year
being 1928, he encountered Gregory Piatakov , who was working in Paris
as Trade Representativ e of the Soviet Government , and was asked by him
to accept a post as his assistant . From 1929 to late 1930 he edited in Paris
La Vie Economique des Soviets . But when he learned that Stalin had begun
his grim war on the peasants and established by armed force a new
state-controlle d serfdom in the kolkhozes , he finally broke with the regime
he had worked so hard to serve in the recovery of Russia.
From then on he and his wife lived in the proud and nostalgic poverty
of the emigration . He worked as a free-lance writer of books and articles.
His writings were published in the journals of a number of lands, and he
ghosted or helped in the research and writing of the books of others . His
work was in great demand but the payments exiguous . He wrote for Novoe
X
