Von Hagen Mark. In this characterization, culture in the s has been tied in important ways to the Bukharinist view of the New Economie Policy as a Soviet variant of reform socialism and Russia's last chance to avoid the terrors of Stalinism.
Furthermore, the 'pessimistic' historians6 stress that those who actively defended the compromise policy of the NEP both among the leadership and the politically articulate population were few, and that they were clearly outnumbered by militant groups among the workers, youth, and also the Red Army who pressed for an end to the injustices and contradictions of the.
NEP political economy, without necessarily seeking, I emphasize, the Stalinist system that emerged in its place. The problem with the Bukha- rinist view, however, as is true for ail assertions of radical discontinuity or fun- damental breaks in historical development effected by a small leadership circle, is illustrated by the inability of especially Stephen Cohen to explain the emergence of Stalinism as a new, momentous and eventually pervasive political phenomenon.
These sources are the flood of Khrushchev-era memoirs from mostly cultural and intellectual figures who survived the ravages of the Stalin years and who, in retrospect, recalled the NEP years with understandable nostalgia as a golden age. There had always been dissident voices among the memoirists, but their more critical views of the NEP either attracted the historians of the totalitarian school who saw ail of Soviet history as unrelieved mi sery and for whom more nuanced distinctions among individual periods were assigned less importance.
Those few memoirs of figures who could distance them- selves from the intervening years interestingly these are often figures more intimately involved in political and ideological matters found NEP to be a very hard period for society. As one ex-Stalinist summarized the s, the NEP was good for the strong by which he meant the kulaks, the Nepmen speculators and cabaret-owners, the cozy cliques of high party officiais and their bureaucratie elite collaborators , but bad for the many.
