Lenin’s Economic Policy
Mr. Briggs * Track #4 On The USSR 1917-1943
Lenin’s Economic Policy Annotated
The Bolshevik revolutionary takeover in October 1917 was followed by over two years of civil war in Russia between the new Communist regime (with its Red Army) and its enemies--the conservative military officers commanding the so-called White armies. The struggle saw much brutality and excesses on both sides with the peasants suffering most from extortionate demands of food supplies and recruits
by both sides.
The repressive and dictatorial methods of the Bolshevik government had so alienated the mass of peasants and industrial working class elements that the erstwhile most loyal supporters of the regime, the sailors at the Kronstadt naval base, rebelled in March 1921 to the great embarrassment of senior Bolsheviks.
Though the rebellion was mercilessly crushed, the regime was forced to moderate its ruthless impulses.
The New Economic Policy (NEP) was the result, a small concession to the capitalist and free market instincts of peasant and petty bourgeois alike. Moreover, victory in the civil war was assured by this stage, thus allowing a relaxation of the coercive methods symbolized by the War Communism of the previous two to three years.
The New Economic Plan (NEP) had specific goals for the country and for communism. They included, but were not limited to:
• Ease public resentment against the emergency measures of the civil war that took food forcefully from the peasants
• To regularize supply and production through a limited reintroduction of the market system (capitalism)
• To increase the “grass-roots” economy (economy led by the work and production of peasant farmers and factory workers) and to generate more money to industrialize Russia
• To lay the foundation for the transition to socialism at some unspecified time in the future
The New Economic Plan (NEP) was not to create the communism suggested by Marx in “The Communist Manifesto,” but rather to strengthen the Russian economy to where it could be self-sufficient and strong enough to support the beginnings of a world wide communist revolution.