Yes, raising grain prices would have slowed instustrialization. But given how many people rapid industrialization killed one can make a good case that such an alternative path would have been better. Industrialization is not a purely positive phenomenon.
> > So there is no point
> > -in saying USSR would be better had NEP policies been kept
> > -after 1928. Instead I would believe the situation would evolve
> > -(1) to capitalist restoration or (2) to a huge economic crisis
> > -(not discarding a combination of 1 and 2).
>
> (1) had already happened by 1928 (and was solidified by the five year plans)
>
> -I didn?t understand your point here
Capitalist restoration had already occured by the time the NEP was implemented (although it was still called 'socialism'). The USSR was state-capitalist from day one of it's creation.
> Other alternatives to Stalin's policies within a bolshevik framework
> include the
> models applied in Tito's Yugoslavia and Mao's China.
>
> -None of them particularly much better succeded than Stalin policies, were
> them?
Well, there weren't mass famines in Tito's Yugoslavia, were there. And outside of a bolshevik frame work there are many things that could have been done which would have been vastly superior to stalinism.