For Equalization of Wages

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Just before NEP was introduced, the Central Committee, under Lenin's leadership, emphasized the “necessity, again and again, of directing the attention of the party toward the struggle to introduce greater equality: first, within the party; second, within the proletariat and among the masses of working people as a whole; and third and last, among various government offices and groups of personnel, especially ‘spetses’ [specialists] and top personnel, as compared with the masses’’.

Of course the introduction of NEP brought big changes not only in the economy but in everyday life, and gave rise to conditions that run counter to equality. This does not mean, however, that the party can bow in silence before the bourgeois tendencies of NEP, either in this area or in others.

It is a highly alarming symptom, therefore, that in late 1925 — five years after the introduction of NEP — when an attempt was made to place the question of greater equality on the agenda, it was met by quite a hostile attitude on the part of a number of leading party functionaries. Meanwhile, among the mass of the people, in the heart of the working class, and within the party itself, the question of greater equality has not been abandoned as a topic of discussion and cannot be removed from the agenda.

An inattentive and even hostile attitude toward the unskilled or semiskilled sections of the working class, as some “gray mass” which has not come up to the “high” level of our bureaucrats and therefore dreams of equality, has become more and more widespread (especially incorrect on this point have been the speeches of Comrade Uglanov). Such an I attitude toward the poorly paid sections of the working class is a typical sign of opportunism and of a retreat hum the masses — and so, too, is the reluctance to take up in a practical way the question of systematically introducing greater equality despite the circumstances of NEP.