The New Economic Policy was introduced by Lenin at the 10th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), later the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in March 1921. It represented a considerable relaxation of the strict ‘war communist’ economic policy introduced immediately after the second (Bolshevik) revolution of 1917. The banking system, which had been completely abolished, was reintroduced (though as state, nationalized banks), internal trading was allowed much more freely and without state planning controls on the movement and distribution of goods, and limited private trading for profit was allowed. In other words, it allowed a slight movement back towards a capitalist form of economics, and made sense to many who felt that Russia had to go through the equivalent of a bourgeois capitalist revolution before communism proper would have a foundation to build on.
It was largely forced on Lenin anyway, because of riots over food shortages and a fear that the economy, and especially the agricultural economy, would collapse, and with it would vanish revolutionary control over the country. It had always been feared by many revolutionaries that, unless the rest of Europe went communist almost immediately, the revolution would not be able to survive alone in Russia. To doctrinaire Marxists, who had wanted to create total communism overnight, abolishing even money, the policy was unacceptable. But it was not until Stalin introduced the first of his five-year plans in 1929, using force and violence to suppress the opposition Lenin had tried to buy off, that the NEP was abolished.
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