Lenin announces NEP

Since the end of the First World War, economic development of the Soviet Union has taken a catastrophic course because of a rigid Bolshevist economic policy („warfare communism“) and the continuing civil war. On 8 March 1921 at the Xth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Vladimir I. Lenin announces the introduction of the „New Economic Policy“ (NEP).

Source: vulture-bookz.de Lenin in his office in the Moscow Kremlin, November 1921

He is able to achieve the course change in spite of strong opposition in the party. With the NEP, “profit-oriented production” and private property are legalised from now on, and domestic commerce is facilitated. With the introduction of a “tax in kind,” the peasants are supposed to be freed from arbitrary compulsory levies. In 1928 Lenin’s successor, Josef Stalin, will abandon the NEP and – inter alia through forced collectivisation of agriculture – carry out a purely socialistic economic policy.