Lenin and the New Economic Policy

Abstract

The New Economic Policy, initiated in 1921, was a response to a number of circumstances and forces, understood by the politicians of the time in mutually inconsistent ways. In this chapter, I shall be arguing that Lenin’s own views were to some extent internally inconsistent. Among the factors involved were: revolutionary emergency, ideological preconceptions, political tactics, and just harsh overriding necessity, all of which tended to interact. Thus it is extraordinary how often the most cogent ideological reasons are found for doing what must be done. It would be wrong to present a clear but superficial picture.

This paper appeared in Lenin and Leninism, edited by Bernard W. Eisenstadt, Lexington, 1971, and was presented at a conference held in Stillwater, Oklahoma. The whole question of Lenin and NEP is now (1989) very much at the centre of historians’ attention in the Soviet Union, as part of the discussion on the nature of NEP and of the alternatives to stalinism. Did Lenin, by the time he was struck down by disease, have a coherent ‘gradualist’ alternative? Or was it just a matter of reculer pour mieux sauter?