1 Works I have found helpful are Kindleberger, Charles P., The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Berkeley, 1973)Google Scholar; Eichengreen, Barry, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939 (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar; the useful historical introduction to IPE, Frieden, Jeffry A., Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; and especially the non-academic narrative of Ahamed, Liaquat, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (New York, 2009)Google Scholar.

2 In both bringing greater temporal precision to the rise and fall of NEP and putting money (i.e. the gold standard) at the center of it, this article builds on Goland, Yurii, “Currency Regulation in the NEP Period,” Europe-Asia Studies 46, no. 8 (1994): 1251–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Woodruff, David M., “The Politburo on Gold, Industrialization, and the International Economy, 1925–1926,” in Gregory, Paul and Naimark, Norman, eds., The Lost Politburo Transcripts: From Collective Rule to Stalin’s Dictatorship (New Haven, 2008)Google Scholar; and Sanchez-Sibony, Oscar, “Depression Stalinism: The Great Break Reconsidered,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 23–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Those and other texts, such as Reiman, Michal, The Birth of Stalinism: The USSR on the Eve of the “Second Revolution” (Bloomington, 1987)Google Scholar, and Sloin, Andrew, The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power (Bloomington, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, have established the critical role that external crises played at the end of NEP.

3 Stephen Cohen characterized the argument for a Lenin-Stalin continuum, critically, as: “Out of the totalitarian embryo would come totalitarianism full-blown,” Cohen, Stephen F., Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917 (New York, 1985), 6Google Scholar. Martin Malia responded that, “the only practical way to realize the Marxist purpose was through Leninism; and the only practical way to complete the Leninist project was through Stalinism,” in The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York, 1994), 314. This is at the core of the “anticapitalism” category Stephen Kotkin uses in his biography of Stalin, Stalin, Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (New York, 2014).

4 To recall the famous historiographical discussion around Cohen, Stephen F., Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography 1888–1938 (New York, 1973)Google Scholar.

5 A position associated with E. H. Carr and his multi-volume study of early Soviet history, A History of Soviet Russia, 14 vols. (New York, 1950–1978).

6 Perhaps for even longer than twenty-five years. See the discussion in Ball, Alan M., Russia’s Last Capitalists: The Nepmen, 1921–1929 (Berkeley, 1987), 25–27Google Scholar. Lenin’s full admonishment is worth recovering: “The policy is a long-term one and is being adopted in earnest. We must get this well into our heads and remember it, because, owing to the gossip habit, rumours are being spread that we are indulging in a policy of expedients, that is to say, political trickery, and that what is being done is only for the present day. That is not true.” V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 32 (Moscow, 1965), 429.

7 I have explored the crisis the gold standard caused at the end of NEP, this article’s sequel, in Sanchez-Sibony, “Depression Stalinism.”

8 This is what I characterize as the first socialist project, juxtaposing it with the ad hoc non project that was War Communism, and the ad hoc reinvention that was Stalinism—the Soviet Union’s second attempt at a comprehensive socialist project. Ultimately the critique is against the idea of NEP as an ideological and historical parenthesis.

9 A point wryly made in Graeber, David, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, 2011)Google Scholar, following Caroline Humphrey’s conclusion that “[n]o example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing,” in “Barter and Economic Disintegration,” Man 20, no. 1 (1985), 48.

10 Humphrey, Caroline and Hugh-Jones, Stephen, Barter, Exchange and Value: An Anthropological Approach (Cambridge, Eng., 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 In Wray, Randall, ed., Credit and State Theories of Money: The Contributions of A. Mitchell Innes (Cheltenham, Eng., 1996)Google Scholar, chapter 8.

12 Graeber, Debt, 21–41.

13 Banks create money when loans are deposited in other banks, so that loans and not savings become the basis for more loans. Tobin, James, “Commercial Banks as Creators of Money,” in Carson, Deane, ed., Banking and Monetary Studies (Homewood, IL, 1963)Google Scholar.

14 The most systematic and useful exploration of this idea is Ingham, Geoffrey, The Nature of Money (Cambridge, Eng., 2004)Google Scholar.

15 Ingham, The Nature of Money, 80-85.

16 This follows the state theory of money developed by German economist Georg Friedrich Knapp’s State Theory of Money (London, 1924), first published in German in 1905. Its ideas were picked up by Keynesian economists such as Hyman Minsky, and are today defended by chartalists like Randall Wray. A useful historiographical account is Bell, Stephanie, “The Role of the State and the Hierarchy of Money,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 25, no. 2 (2001): 149–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Or even one “thing” in any particular time and place. Viviana A. Zelizer has theorized and documented the ways in which monies are differentiated personally and socially, with each source of money made subject to differing obligations and expectations, in The Social Meaning of Money (New York, 1994).

18 This builds on David Shearer’s critique in Industry, State and Society in Stalin’s Russia, 1926–1934 (Ithaca, 1996).

19 Money was also central to the re-evaluation of meaning in the cultural life of the early Soviet period. In Lida Oukaderova, “The Currency of Representation: Money and Literature in Russia, 1917–1935,” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2005).

20 The most recent reiteration of this process in Russia, in the 1990s, is the subject of Woodruff, David M., Money Unmade: Barter and the Fate of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, 1999)Google Scholar.

21 This conception allows for the kind of socio-cultural history of money Rebecca Spang rendered for the French Revolution in Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2015).

22 A good account of gold movements and Gosbank’s policies in the prerevolutionary era is Drummond, Ian M., “The Russian Gold Standard, 1897–1914,” The Journal of Economic History 36, no. 3 (September 1976): 663–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Seigniorage is the spending power the government accrues in the difference between the cost of producing circulating money (for example, a paper note) and the value of that money.

24 It did not happen all at once, but was certainly part of the radicalization Rosenberg, William G. and Koenker, Diane P. document in “The Limits of Formal Protest: Worker Activism and Social Polarization in Petrograd and Moscow, March to October, 1917,” American Historical Review 92, no. 2 (1987): 296–326CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 The confrontational relationship between state and society in the context of increased state allocation and market disintegration is explained in Rosenberg, William G., “The Problem of Market Relations and the State in Revolutionary Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36, no. 2 (April 1994): 356–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 370.

26 Yurovsky, Leonid N., Currency Problems and Policy of the Soviet Union (London, 1925), 16–18Google Scholar. The Kerenki, as the name suggests, were notes issued in sheets by Kerensky’s Provisional Government.

27 For example, Peter Rutland’s explication of Soviet planning makes this “Marxist” axiom the starting point for his analysis of money and prices in the planned economy, in The Myth of the Plan: Lessons of Soviet Planning Experience (La Salle, IL, 1985), 124–28. Another argument often proposed is that money ended up mattering despite original intent, argued for example in Gregory, Paul R., The Political Economy of Stalinism: Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives (Cambridge, Eng., 2003), 213CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 R. W. Davies discusses the resurrection of this debate at the end of NEP, when again there was a divide between academics and those actually in charge of economic policy, in The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia, Volume 3: The Soviet Economy in Turmoil 1929–1930 (Basingstoke, Eng., 1989), 173–78.

29 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial΄no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI), fond (f.) 670, opis΄ (op.) 1, delo (d.) 22, list (l.) 4.

30 For a thorough critique see Ingham, Geoffrey, “Money Is a Social Relation,” Review of Social Economy 54, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 507–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Here is an interesting, secular parallel to Daniel Smail’s historiographical account of the ways in which old, ignored narratives nevertheless endure as metanarratives that continue to structure the ways in which we periodize histories large and small, Smail, Daniel, “In the Grip of Sacred History,” American Historical Review 110, no. 5 (December 2005): 1336–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 The classic critique in Soviet history is Krylova, Anna, “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 119–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Sloin, Andrew and Sanchez-Sibony, Oscar, “Economy and Power in the Soviet Union, 1917–39,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 7–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 In Alan Ball’s words, for example, a “delay on the journey to socialism,” in Ronald Grigor Suny, ed., The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume III: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Eng., 2006), 180.

34 See Ball’s NEP synopsis in ibid., 182–91. For a recent example, see Chatterjee, Choi, Kirschenbaum, Lisa A., and Field, Deborah A., Russia’s Long Twentieth Century. Voices, Memories, Contested Perspectives (London, 2016), 60–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Economists too have largely ignored money. Markets, without much ado, are simply “restored,” as in the otherwise helpful contributions in Davies, R. W., Harrison, Mark and Wheatcroft, S. G., The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945 (Cambridge, Eng., 1994)Google Scholar.

36 This narrative arch is made explicit in Martin Malia’s aforementioned work, as well as in Daniels, Robert V., The Rise and Fall of Communism in Russia (New Haven, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Brovkin, Vladimir N., Russia after Lenin: Politics, Culture and Society, 1921–1929 (New York, 1998)Google Scholar.

37 An important theoretical exploration is Rosenberg, “The Problem of Market Relations.”

38 Contrast this notion of currency as a state project with one seen as an exogenous and impersonal “economic force” in which the introduction of the chervonets in 1924 meant that inflation “stopped playing into the hands of the state, which now had to pay the peasants in good coin,” Graziosi, Andrea, “‘Building the First System of State Industry in History’: Piatakov’s VSNKh and the Crisis of the NEP, 1923–1926,” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 32, no. 4 (1991), 549Google Scholar. But for the state this was precisely the point, not an unwelcome burden.

39 See Yurovsky’s discussion in Currency Problems.

40 Reproduced in Dobrokhotov, L. N., Kolodezhnyi, V. H., Pushkarev, V. S., eds., Denezhnaia reforma 1921–1924 gg.: sozdanie tverdoi valiuty. Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow, 2008)Google Scholar,

41 Goland, “Currency Regulation in the NEP Period,” 1272.

42 “Money functions as a means of circulation only because in it the value possessed by commodities has taken on an independent shape.” Marx, Karl, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Fowkes, Ben (New York, 1976), 212Google Scholar.

43 Carr, E. H., The Interregnum, 1923-1924 (London, 1954), 28Google Scholar.

44 RGASPI, f. 670, op. 1, d. 23, l. 14.

45 Dobrokhotov, Kolodezhnyi, Pushkarev, eds., Denezhnaia reforma, 94.

46 RGASPI, f. 670, op. 1, d. 23, ll. 9–10. Sokol΄nikov complained to Kalinin that compared with 1921, the budget for 1922 was four and a half times larger, “in the meantime we have not grown four times richer since last year.” No proto-Keynesian, he. Austerity measures were the centerpiece of the financial plan Sokol΄nikov sent to Lenin in August 1922, reproduced in Dobrokhotov, Kolodezhnyi, Pushkarev, eds., Denezhnaia reforma, 195–98. By the fall of the same year, Sokol΄nikov could report a fair amount of progress, with the formerly six million people on the government’s payroll cut down to three million. See RGASPI, f. 670, op. 1, d. 19, l. 92.

47 The analogy Sokol΄nikov made was with the way Aleksei Brusilov was used during the Polish-Soviet War to muster support from conservative soldiers and generals. From a speech in March 1922, RGASPI, f. 670, op. 1, d. 19, l. 56.

48 Ibid.

49 RGASPI, f. 84, op. 2, d. 21, ll, 6–7.

50 Stalin, along with Kamenev and Zinoviev, only came around by December 1922, as per Lenin’s December 15 letter to Stalin in ibid., l. 17.

51 For example, Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov reported to Lenin in June 1921 of the difficulties he and Commissar of Foreign Trade, Leonid Krasin, were having selling valuables, platinum, and bonds in world markets for lack of demand: “We must rely mainly on the sale of gold, especially foreign gold. Everything else does not amount to anything,” in Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven, 1996), 126–27.

52 For work that stresses the role of the Dawes Plan as a political and social settlement between and within the major powers, see Schuker, Stephen A., “The Gold-Exchange Standard: A Reinterpretation,” in Flandreau, Marc, Holtfrerich, Carl-Ludwig, and James, Harold, eds., International Financial History in the Twentieth Century: System and Anarchy (New York, 2003), 77–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Dobrokhotov, Kolodezhnyi, Pushkarev, eds., Denezhnaia reforma, 191.

54 Yurovsky, Currency Problems, 118. In Sokol΄nikov’s estimation, sovznak seigniorage and devaluation provided more than ten times the revenue derived from sovznak taxes in January 1922, as per his February 1923 report in Dobrokhotov, Kolodezhnyi, Pushkarev, eds., Denezhnaia reforma, 278.

55 Ibid., 184.

56 Ibid.

57 Yurovsky, Currency Problems, 84.

58 As per the October 1922 decree giving the State Bank the green light for issuing gold-backed banknotes, Dobrokhotov, Kolodezhnyi, Pushkarev, eds., Denezhnaia reforma, 209.

59 RGASPI, f. 670, op. 1, d. 19, l. 95

60 Ibid., ll. 92–93.

61 Ibid., l. 93.

62 Ibid., 94–95.

63 Yurovsky, Currency Problems, 71, 135. See also Carr, E.H., A History of Soviet Russia, 14 vols. (London, 1950–1978)Google Scholar; Goland, Yurii, “Currency Regulation in the NEP Period;” Sokolnikov, Gregory Y. and Associates, Soviet Policy in Public Finance, 1917–1928, trans., Varneck, Elena (Stanford, 1931)Google Scholar; Kaz’min, A. I., “Opyt perekhoda k rynochnoi ekonomike. Denezhnaia reforma, 1922–24 gg.,” Den΄gi i Kredit 9 (1990): 65–72Google Scholar; Nikitin, M., “Trudnosti i protivorechiia perekhoda k tverdoi valiute v 20-e gody,” Voprosy ekonomiki 6 (1990): 123–30Google Scholar.

64 Dobrokhotov, Kolodezhnyi, Pushkarev, eds., Denezhnaia reforma, 277.

65 RGASPI, f. 19, op. 4, d. 306, ll. 16–20.

66 RGASPI, f. 19, op. 4, d. 307, l. 4–4ob.

67 Dobrokhotov, Kolodezhnyi, Pushkarev, eds., Denezhnaia reforma, 279–80.

68 RGASPI, f. 670, op. 1, d. 19, l. 167–167ob. From a letter by Sokol΄nikov to Sheinman dated May 9, 1923.

69 Dobrokhotov, Kolodezhnyi, Pushkarev, eds., Denezhnaia reforma, 311–17.

70 Ibid., 313.

71 As per a letter by Sokol΄nikov to the Politburo in which he describes these conditions as “well known.” In Dobrokhotov, Kolodezhnyi, Pushkarev, eds., Denezhnaia reforma, 333.

72 This is the context of Kutler’s commentary during a meeting of bank managers in April about the need to build more reserves and to print chervontsy in smaller denominations in order to spread the currency among farmers who were becoming ever wearier of sovznaki. In Dobrokhotov, Kolodezhnyi, Pushkarev, eds., Denezhnaia reforma, 307.

73 RGASPI, f. 670, op. 1, d. 20, ll. 4–5.

74 This turn to extreme austerity—which also included tax increases and anti-speculation campaigns—has been noted before, see Ball, Alan, “Nep’s Second Wind: ‘The New Trade Practice,’” Soviet Studies 37, no. 3 (July 1985): 371–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Explanations usually involve a Bolshevik penchant for anticapitalist administrative action. Viewing government action from its root purpose, financial austerity, gives the opposite impression.

75 RGASPI, f. 670, op. 1, d. 20, l. 4–4ob.

76 For example Commissar of Foreign Trade Leonid Krasin, along with the famous economist and then member of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture Nikolai Kondratiev, advocated increasing exports for precisely those reasons. See Michael R. Dohan, “Soviet Foreign Trade in the NEP Economy and Soviet Industrialization Strategy” (PhD diss., MIT, 1969), 183. So did Sokol΄nikov, in RGASPI, f. 670, op. 1, d. 20, l. 4ob.

77 From Vinokur, A. P. and Bakulin, S. N., eds., Vneshniaia torgovlia Soiuza SSR za period 1918–1927/28 gody. Statisticheskii obzor (Leningrad, 1931)Google Scholar, table 5, p. XXII and Harrison, Mark, “Prices in the Politburo, 1927: Market Equilibrium versus the Use of Force,” in Gregory, Paul R. and Naimark, Norman, eds., The Lost Politburo Transcripts: From Collective Rule to Stalin’s Dictatorship (New Haven, 2008), 226Google Scholar.

78 Strong, Anna Louise, The First Time in History. Two Years of Russia’s New Life (New York, 1924), 91–92Google Scholar.

79 Goland, “Currency Regulation in the NEP Period,” 1262.

80 From Vinokur and Bakulin, eds., Vneshniaia torgovlia Soiuza SSR.

81 Probably for institutional reasons, Piatakov often complained about austerity measures, for example, in Dobrokhotov, Kolodezhnyi, Pushkarev, eds., Denezhnaia reforma, 232–33. On the critical role of institutional interests in Soviet politics see Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Politics as Practice: Thoughts on a New Soviet Political History,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 27–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On institutional interests as fault lines in the resistance against Narkomfin see Mau, Vladimir, Reformy i dogmy, 1914–1929. Ocherki istorii stanovleniia khoziaistvennoi sistemy sovetskogo totalitarizma (Moscow, 1993)Google Scholar.

82 RGASPI, f. 670, op. 1, d. 23, l. 57.

83 RGASPI, f. 670, op. 1, d. 20, l. 137.

84 On the Leninist and Bukharinist idea that NEP would lead to socialism by overcoming itself see Lih, Lars, “Political Testament of Lenin and Bukharin and the Meaning of NEP,” Slavic Review 50, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 241–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 RGASPI, f. 670, op. 1, d. 21, l. 64.

86 Notwithstanding the way Sokol΄nikov has been written out of the industrialization debate in favor of Politburo members like Trotskii, Kamenev and Zinov΄ev.

87 Stalin, J. V., Works, Volume 7, 1925 (Moscow, 1954), 375–81Google Scholar. I am not the first one to note the lack of substance in Stalin’s political polemics. Concerning foreign policy positions, see Carley, Michael Jabara, Silent Conflict: A Hidden History of Early Soviet-Western Relations (Lanham, 2014), 285, 365–70Google Scholar. On financial policy, see Woodruff’s comment on Stalin’s boltologiia in “The Politburo on Gold,” 215.

88 Stalin, Works, 310. He finished his paean to balanced development with a declaration of policy that Karl Marx would understand as clear a statement of labor exploitation and capital formation as anyone has unwittingly invoked: “We could raise wages of the workers to the utmost, not merely to the pre-war level, but higher; but that would reduce the tempo of development of our industry, because under our conditions, in the absence of loans from abroad, in the absence of credits, etc., the expansion of industry is possible only on the basis of the accumulation of a certain amount of profit necessary for financing and promoting industry, which, however, would be excluded, i.e., accumulations of any serious magnitude would be excluded if the tempo of raising wages was excessively accelerated.” Note that Stalin’s invocation of “our conditions” is exclusively determined by the relationship between the Soviet economy and foreign capital.

89 RGASPI, f. 84, op. 2. d. 2, l. 37.

90 From Vinokur and Bakulin, eds., Vneshniaia torgovlia Soiuza SSR, table 11a, p. XLVI–XLVII.

91 For a closely documented study of the social and cultural repercussions of these austerity measures in the industrializing regions of Belorussia, see Sloin, The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia.

92 The move to administrative measures was in fact global, though grain-growing countries sought their own administrative solutions. See Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 78–81.

93 See, for example, Mikoian’s comments in August 1928 about devaluing the chervonets quickly before the five-year plan came into operation; devaluing later would mean having to overhaul the whole plan after its implementation. RGASPI, f. 84, op, 2, d. 6, l. 97.

94 This was still the goal at the Central Committee plenum of July 4–12, 1928, in V. P. Danilov, O. V. Khlevniuk, and A. Iu. Vatlin, eds., Kak lomali NEP. Stenogrammy plenumov TsK VKP(b), 1928–1929 gg., vol. 2 (Moscow, 2000). See also the import/export indicative plan Mikoian drew up in May, in which solutions to the deficit all involved balancing payments and strengthening reserves, rather than currency devaluation or going off of gold altogether. In RGASPI, f. 84, op, 2, d. 5, l. 150.

95 This story is beyond the scope of this article, which leaves off where Sanchez-Sibony, Oscar, Red Globalization: The Political Economy Soviet Foreign Relations from Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, Eng., 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar picks up.

96 Schumpeter, Joseph A., “Money and Currency,” Social Research 58, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 499–543Google Scholar. The italics are Schumpeter’s.