For many months it has been recognized that the Soviets have abandoned the attempt to establish communion by force. The first effort to impose collective ownership of all equipment, all land, and all products has been relaxed, and under the individualistic regime, the agencies unhampered by communistic control have advanced in number, prosperity, and importance.
The New Economic Policy, or NEP, as it is hastily called, permitted the reopening of private trade and speculation in marketing. Small cliques of vigorous and illiterate men have rapidly risen in each city through trade in potatoes and wheat. The cabarets and hotels are again flourishing under the patronage of these nouveaux riches. As yet manufacture has remained in government hands partly because of legal and political impediments and partly because of lack of sufficiently large accumulations of private capital. As a reservoir of capital is formed from commercial profits, the industrial field will soon cease to be monopolized by the government. In agriculture, the communistic artels have shrunk to less than one-fourth of their original size and members. Those which still operate have abandoned the purely communistic system for an arrangement of guaranteed minimum wages and devotion of a small part of each member's product to common needs, such as farm equipment. Cooperative societies, however, both for marketing the district's product and for securing credit, are universally found throughout the provinces of Russia. The peasant whom Tolstoy believed he understood so well, has rejected Tolstoyan collectivism, but one good result of the feverish uproar of the last six years endures the closer cooperation of the peasant-farmers through local cooperative societies.
Predictions adverse to collectivism have been fully justified. Commerce, and that means all distributive channels, have come into the hands of private operatives. Industry is on the way toward individual direction and ownership. Agriculture has continuously maintained its individualistic character and among the farming artels neither the character of the families engaged for the quality of the finally measurable returns lead the most enthusiastic doctrinaire to expect any strengthening of the collectivist ideal among the people of Russia.
