“We Shall Live” (Budem Zhit’): From Experience of Fighting Private Trade in the Urals in the Days of the New Economic Policy (NEP)
| 03 April 2025
Posted in
News
Kilin A.P., Ekaterinburg, Russia
“We Shall Live” (Budem Zhit’): From Experience of Fighting Private Trade in the Urals in the Days of the New Economic Policy (NEP)
Abstract
In the period of the New Economic Policy private trade was set in opposition to state trade and cooperation, which resulted in ambiguity of private traders’ social status and marginality of their legal status. Thus, we obtain data on this social group from materials giving it a negative assessment. Drawing on investigatory and court records (1929) the article reviews a case from trade practices of Mirkin brothers, shopkeepers in Sverdlovsk. To optimize the profit they used alphabet code to reference to shop cost of the goods. The cipher key was phrase Budem zhit’ (“We shall live”), which not only served its utilitarian purpose, but also motivated the staff. The cipher key phrase stroke a discordant note to the state policy aiming to eliminate of private trade and contrasted with the image of Sverdlovsk as proletarian capital of the Urals. The reaction of authorities to the phrase was predictably negative: they saw it as a sign of challenge and protest. The author concludes that state tax structuring was pervasive, while record-keeping system in private sector aimed to conceal traders’ profit. The fiscal control was far from ideal. Tax officials neglected their duties and levied taxes on private trades based on standard income of “typical” shop, that is, on sector average. Preponderance of ideology over economy resulted in assessment of any occurrence in terms of class theory as struggles between the old and the new, the evil and the good. Accordingly, tax authorities were not only an instrument of government revenue replenishment, but that of requital and expropriation of ill-gotten gains in benefit of socialized sector in keeping with Yevgeni Preobrazhensky’s theory of “primitive socialist accumulation”.
Keywords
Archive, source, trade, NEP, tax, prices, methods, expedients, alphabet code, the Urals.
Download the article: pdf
About the authors
Kilin Alexey Pavlovich, PhD in history, assistant professor of the document and information support of management department of the history faculty of the First President of Russia Boris Yeltsin Ural Federal University, Ekaterinburg, Russian Federation, +7-922-227-12-25, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it