NEP

The first issue of LEF (Left Front of the Arts), published in March 1923, contained a theoretical article entitled ‘From Where to Where?’ by Sergei Tretyakov. After the high jinks and exuberance of Mystery Bouffe, Radlov's popular comedy, Foregger's machine dances, Eisenstein's Wise Man and even Meyerhold's Death of Tarelkin, the Russian Futurist theatre was ready to make something more substantial and more profound.

LEF was essentially a journal of the period of Lenin's New Economic Policy, which was introduced at the Tenth Party Congress of March 1921. The policy aimed to bring the peasants into the new Bolshevik state and to stabilise the country after the hoped-for revolutions in western Europe had failed to materialise. ‘The goal is set’, wrote Trotsky, ‘to accommodate ourselves to the new, more prolonged period which may be necessary for the maturing of the revolution in the west.’ Food requisitioning was brought to an end, and there were significant concessions to agriculture and to free trade. Zinoviev described it in December 1921 as ‘a temporary deviation, a tactical retreat’ when, in Trotsky's words, ‘a radical reconsideration of the methods of soviet power became necessary’.

Remarkably rapidly, shops, small-scale businesses and factories sprang into being, along with restaurants, cafés, nightclubs and brothels. The NEP cafés and clubs were to some extent a resurgence of the pre-revolutionary phenomenon: little theatres like Crooked Jimmy, the Hermitage and the Grotesque mounted revue-style productions which often used material from the 1910s, though new ‘small form’ dramas, parodies and satirical sketches by writers like Nikolai Erdman were also forthcoming. The most commented-on feature of the period, however, may have been the rise of the ‘NEPmen’, spivs on the make, racketeers turning a quick rouble by dubious means, dressed up, with ostentatious cars and flash jewellery, and satirised in many Futurist works, like Tretyakov and Eisenstein's A Wise Man.

Many people, especially the young and those supporting the regime, saw NEP as a betrayal of the revolution, and their resentment helps to explain the acceptance by the end of the decade of Stalin's second-wave revolution.