This book grew out of an essay I wrote in 1987 for a volume on reform in Russian history. That was a heady time to be in Soviet studies, for after years of economic sluggishness, political stagnation and increasing social malaise, big changes were underway in the USSR. Among those changes was what might be called “retrospective glasnost,” a peering into the Soviet past to uncover new lessons for the then present. At first tentatively and then with increasing boldness, novelists, film directors, playwrights, editors and eventually professional historians seized upon the ever-expanding opportunities for reinterpreting the past. Much of the reinterpretation was devoted to undermining the credibility of the Stalinist administrative-command system that arose in the course of the 1930s and continued to cast its shadow over daily life. This deconstructive effort sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly legitimized an earlier model of statecraft and economic management, that of the New Economic Policy (NEP). In this model, the Communist Party exercised a monopoly of political power but tolerated market forces and a measure of private ownership. It seemed as if I had hit on a “hot” topic.

But even as I began formulating the outlines of this book, extending its chronological dimensions back to civil war and discovering that a great deal more was going on in the 1920s than the elaboration of the NEP model, a strange thing was happening.