Recently, a notable feature of Western studies of Soviet history of the 1920s and 1930s has been the controversy aroused by the work of a younger generation of social historians. Their conceptual approach eschewed the conventional wisdom of concentrating on leading personalities and ‘high polities’ and offered fresh insights and a more profound understanding of the events of this period by examining the interaction and influence of political pressures and movements ‘from below’, at the grassroots of Soviet society, on the determination and implementation of Stalin's ‘revolution from above’. I considered that this methodological framework could be usefully applied to the era immediately preceding Stalin's revolution of the 1930s: the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the 1920s. I have embarked upon a study of one region: Siberia. My goal is to stimulate further debate on the impact of NEP at the grassroots and to explain better why Stalin and the majority of the central party leadership decided to abandon it in early 1928 and return to a more ideologically rigid policy of collectivisation and rapid industrialisation.

The sources I have relied upon are primarily Siberian party publications (stenographic records of plenums, annual reports, journals) and statistical investigations of the countryside of the period, previously unused in the West. Although this inevitably raises the problem of bias, I believe that the Bolshevik party until 1928 was still one in which differing viewpoints and perspectives could be expressed openly and this is reflected in the sources.