The NEP

After the Red army's victory in the civil war, the economic troubles of Russia and loss in Bolshevik support drove Lenin to stop War Communism and craft the NEP. The New Economic Policy (NEP) Stalin wanted Russia to be an industrially advanced country like, say, the US or the UK. "50 or 100 years behind". The NEP just wouldn't be able to cut it. It had to be abandoned. The New Economic Policy was replaced by Stalin's first Five Year Plan in 1928. Forced requisitioning of farm produce was replaced by tax in kind. This meant peasants could sell their surplus.

Industrial enterprises were returned to private ownership. This allowed a large sector of the market to return to normal.

The commanding heights of industry (coal, steel, transport etc.) remained in government hands.

A purge of Party membership, a reduction in persecution of ‘class enemies’ and the creation of law codes to allow a return to normal life Lenin enforced a truce with the peasantry. This was the opposite of War Communism. Introducing the NEP, Lenin said the road to socialism was longer that originally thought. "Our poverty and ruin are so great that we cannot at one stroke restore full-scale factory, state, socialist production." - Lenin ‘one step backward in order to take two steps forward’ Success of the NEP Economic recovery was at first held up by the 1921-22 famine as well as a financial crisis in 1923, but by 1926 (after Lenin's death in 1924) the economy had regained the 1913 level of production. Growth slackened after 1926: the NEP didn't maximise industrial development (there was no communist future without industrialisation)

The communist party could not let the free market continue as the disease of capitalism might infect the minds of the proletariat.

There were problems within the economy (for example a so called "scissor crisis").

Worry about external security --> connections between industrialisation and defense. Failure of the NEP The end of the NEP