Talk:New Economic Policy

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 7 January 2019 and 24 February 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Peer reviewers: Jrichers.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 05:11, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

"further reading"
why does this article contain two obvious propaganda books in the "further reading" section by a "Golitsyn, Anatoliy" ... "The Communist Strategy of Deception and Disinformation"? even stranger, the other one seems to be about Perestroika, which hardly happened during the NEP era. I don't think books like these qualify for a supposedly neutral Wikipedia article?
 * - Shok 45

Nobody has responded, and these books indeed are unrelated and have a clear anti-communist slant. Given that, I think it is fair to remove the two books now.

Spartan2600 (talk) 11:35, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

The Second NEP
There was a second timespan when USSR again used NEP, and it again helped the economy. I don't know the exact years by memory and will be very busy for the next few weeks, too busy to look it up, but maybe someone out there already knows the dates or can look them up? This one should be simple to add (or at least link to) in the article. --Jeff

Hello --Jeff —Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.124.117.24 (talk) 20:54, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

silly sovietophobic bias
"Howeveytdsyatryetu vb u 3oov7 t wvuv iluavui lhfr... restored only to the 1913 level" Those deprecating pis me off. It was a hrough devastating WWI, Rusty Revolution, Civil War914-1922). Total chaos. And all recovered in only 6 years! ("only to 1909 level").

A related thing, an urban legend that bolsheviks destroyed Russia. Yes, they screwed it up, but later. In the beginning it was Tsar, who by entering WWI disrupted the economy immensely: Food riots started without any bolshevik help. mikka (t) 9 July 2005 06:27 (UTC ů   Èω
 * removed frn for several years
 * neveretheless had to be fed
 * The economy turned into was gears, i.e., useless for population.
 * The economy turned into was gears, i.e., useless for population.

Response to "Silly Sovietophobic Bias"
It would be nice if you could find sources to backup your claims. It would be even nicer for you to spell words more correctly too. AWDRacer 18:20, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

"...tried to regain alliances with foreign countries."
I have not found this as one of the motives in any of my research. I am not saying this is untrue, I just wish to know if anyone has a source for this.

Heavy Stalin-centric Bias
"[the NEP] Bolshevik"

Blatently untrue. Even the left of the party supported the new economic policy. Even Preobrezhenskii's law of primitive socialist accumulation was based around the free market of the NEP, the same law which Stalin later plagerized and exaggerated when he spoke of demanding "tribute" from peasants because Russia had not any colonies.

"We are taking one step backward to later take two steps forward", suggesting that Stalin's five year plan was a fulfillment of Lenin's testament."

This completely ignores the body of work in Lenin's later years that stressed the fundimental importance of the smychka (on which the NEP was based) between the peasantry and the non-rural sector.

I took the liberty of removing the emphasis on the Stalinist myth of the nepmen as an explanation of the grain shortage.

Glaucon 20:35, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Response: When you state that the Left of the party supported the NEP then obviously you have not looked at the polices;

1) Free Trade 2)Specialists from the west brought in to help with the modernisation of Russia

These policies ran completely AGAINST the communist points of view; Free trade and capitalism were ideas from the West and the left-wing of the party wanted to distance themselves from the west as much as possible. Thanks J.F

What about the Great Depression?
Did the Great Depression outside the Soviet Union force central planning from the inside. Former Soviet dissident Boris Kagarlitsky had this to say:

"Then in 1928-29, around the time when the great depression was starting, something happened that was not really noticed by historians for quite some time. In both Russian and western writing of history it was very difficult to consider that the fact that these two things were happening simultaneously was not simply an accident. They were not. I spent quite a lot of time studying the archives of the Soviet economy, which is now referred to as the Russian Government Archives of Economy (previously the People’s Economy Archives).

I discovered that the great depression was a huge setback for the whole Soviet industrialisation project, which was based on exporting grain and importing technologies in order to develop. This plan was destroyed by the great depression.

Secondly, the global crisis rapidly brought to the surface the many contradictions that were built into NEP, including the price gap between industrial and agricultural products. In this new situation, peasants simply stopped producing products that were least profitable within this price gap. For example, they started shifting from corn to potatoes, because corn was being sold on the international market and, although its price collapsed, the Bolshevik government was trying to get as much corn at the cheapest price possible as a way of compensating for the loss of the global market. The peasants simply shifted to potatoes which were not being sold internationally and this led to the famous ‘crisis of bread supply’, which saw not only insufficient bread production for export, but also for domestic consumption.

Reading the archives, it is clear how afraid the Soviet leadership was of the whole system falling apart. There was a real possibility of a complete decomposition of the Soviet state in the period of the great depression."

(http://www.aglob.ru/en/analysis/?id=596) Darth Sidious 09:42, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Left and Right?
My understanding of this topic is that it was the "right" faction (bukharin, etc) that championed the NEP, and it was the 'left' faction (Trotsky) who favored an immediate and rapid industrialization ("militarization of the working class" in the words of trotsky) and the realization of socialism. My suspicions are further raised by the lack of citations. If anyone else shares my understanding of this or has a different insight, clarificaton/joint research efforts would be appreciated. --Detruncate 06:58, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

Yes the right of the party favoured the NEP whilst Trotsky and the Left Opposition wanted collectivisation and despised the capitalistic elements of the NEP. Wikipedia articles on Trotsky and the other principle actors explain this well. The article seems to have gotton its right and left wings of the Bolsheviks confused, and would make perfect sense as is by replacing "Right-wing" with "Left Opposition", which I will do. No good citations yet, the easiest way would be to raid the citations of the Trotsky and other Bolshevik history articles, which all seem to have good citations to online Marxist collections. 58.173.51.73 (talk) 13:10, 20 May 2008 (UTC)


 * There is a limited amount of truth in this but the policy needs to be looked at through the fact that it was a response to the peasant revolts. According to Figes, Lenin feared the peasant wars of 1921 even more than the Whites and on the fourth anniversary of the February Revolution, it looked like the reaction to War Communism was going to bring the government down. Up to then, requisitioning of grain from peasants had been done by brute force and once the peasants started to fight back, the system became unworkable.


 * Prior to this, the peasants had been forbidden from selling grain and the Bolsheviks had done everything they could to close down the cooperative markets so that grain production could be centrally controlled. With hundreds of thousands of peasants on the move around the country bartering goods for grain, the Central Committee had little or no control so travel permits had to be issued. Eventually, rather than allowing the markets to exist between the state and the peasant farmers and the factory workers, Trotsky decided to act. Thousands of peasants were terrorised by squads of armed thugs acting on the orders of the Central Committee and many were imprisoned, tortured, raped or murdered under suspicion of being kulaks.


 * Once the peasant revolt began, organised gangs of armed peasants ran around in rural areas, killing Bolsheviks with absolute brutality, the grain requisitioning programme ground to a halt and virtually nothing got through to the cities. This resulted in extensive strike action by factory workers which bore a remarkable resemblance to the activities of February 1917. While many soldiers became sympathetic to the strikers and even joined in - their own families were going hungry too - dozens of strikers were shot.


 * Eventually, it dawned on Lenin that the policy was not working and could even bring down the government so the grain requisitioning policy was changed and the peasants were allowed once again to sell to whoever they liked as long as they provided 10% as tax in kind to the government.


 * So rather than being an ideological response, the NEP was a simple matter of practicality but one could be excused for thinking it would have been far less bloody had the Bolsheviks recognised the benefits of free markets a lot sooner.


 * As far as the left/right of the Bolsheviks is concerned, the only part which really matters is that those who supported the workers opposition were eventually shot by Stalin, Kollontai being one of the few exceptions.


 * Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924.Flanker235 (talk) 03:22, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Irrelevant material?
I have no access to the book but this sentence seemed entirely jarring and out of place. I've removed it in the hope that someone else knows whether it's conspiracist guff or factual. I'm challenging "Some people in the top echelons" if it was only an insignificant number or less than "top echelon".

Quoted removed material: "Some people in the top echelons of government were Buddhists or involved with spiritual organizations such as the Masons and Rosicrucians."

JohnHarris (talk) 21:01, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Neutrality
the more I read this article, the more I got an ominous feeling that there was some strategic politicizing being done, especially in the "Policies of NEP" section. Sure enough, I look down and find three Mises.org (via the "The Journal of Libertarian Studies") citations, hardly a neutral source. I think any reliance on Mises.org needs to be removed wholesale. Mises.org has a clear anti-marxist, anti-communist agenda.

Two especially bad sections;

"Under the NEP, the state moved away from Communist ideals and embraced a more liberal approach to modernizing the economy. The Soviet state abandoned the idea of nationalizing particular industries. The Soviet government reformed the private sector under the NEP and severely cut the central government budget. The Soviet Union under the NEP welcomed foreign investment, notably from Western nations, in order to fund industrial and developmental projects."

"The Bolsheviks’ view towards village life was dismal. The old way of village life was reminiscent of the Tsarist Russia that had been thrown out with the October Revolution. With the NEP, which sought to repudiate the “old ways,” methods were set in placed which promoted peasants to pursue their self-interests. However, the state only allowed private landholdings because the idea of collectivized farming was met with much opposition."

The absolute worst is "The Bolsheviks’ view towards village life was dismal." That is not a statement of fact, it is a value judgment. It doesn't belong anywhere in Wikipedia unless it is a quote from a relevant individual in a relevant article.

Much of this article has been written with some sort of American-Libertarian/Capitalist bias. I'm not an expert on the NEP, but the un-academic and biased nature of this article is obvious. Spartan2600 (talk) 11:24, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Reading more I found this outrageous bit, the last part is the most ridiculous.

"The New Economic Policy essentially embodied a move away from the true ideals of communism. The fact that it was tainted by capitalistic principles angered many Soviet statesmen. More importantly, the leaders’ problems with the new system reflected a daunting belief that maybe true communism could never exist and that maybe, capitalism was the only economic system that could work effectively." Spartan2600 (talk) 11:28, 17 June 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Spartan2600 (talk • contribs) 11:20, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

So where's the problem. The question isn't does the author have a bias, but are his claims true. Yes, the statement "The Bolsheviks’ view towards village life was dismal." is a value judgement. But the question is 1.) Who's valuejudgment is it and 2.) Was it true. If this was indeed, the Bolshevik view, then what is the problem? You're confusing some ideal standard of objectivity with what is academically allowable. Scholars make value judgments all the time. Further there is nothing in the Description of the NEP that is innaccurate. 99.173.22.220 (talk) 22:32, 14 July 2010 (UTC) Spiker_22


 * I think he has a point. Yes, there is some truth in the reference material but I think it is perfectly reasonable to question the agenda of an organisation like mises.org. The NEP was introduced to quell the peasant wars, something which does not seem to come up in the Mises article, making it incomplete and not completely impartial. It should also be pointed out that Karl Marx did not view capitalism as anything more than a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. That meant that it could co-exist within a state where production was a controlled by the government at certain levels, as was espoused in the NEP. I do not see this as a repudiation of communist policy in favour of libertarian capitalism, as the Mises article seems to claim. Flanker235 (talk) 03:29, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Liberal and conservative?
The section Disagreements in leadership refers to Trosky's collectivism as "liberal" and Stalin's state capitalism as "conservative." This is inaccurate. Liberalism traditionally refers to a more free-market system, whereas conservatism simply means maintaining the status quo. Using "liberalism" to refer to left-wing ideology and "conservatism" to refer to right-wing ideology is based on modern American politics and has no place in an article about the USSR in the early 20th century. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.179.154.52 (talk) 16:54, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Bias Checking
I tried to fix the section on the end of the NEP; a lot of information seemed distorted. Provided accurate reference as well. I think this article needs checking for bias. The information I removed was definitely hostile towards Western research. I know this has been brought up already; just affirming. AATroop (talk) 03:08, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Not a single sentence in this article about the response of the West/America
Why is that?-- Ubikwit  連絡見学/迷惑 19:59, 8 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Probably because it didn't matter much. Is there anything specific you have in mind? Here's a source found after a quick search - - which says US, UK and "other Western nations" were "cautiously optimistic".Volunteer Marek (talk) 20:19, 8 August 2014 (UTC)


 * The Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement of 1921 might be worth mentioning though .Volunteer Marek (talk) 20:29, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Did the Soviets really not compensate peasants before the NEP?
I doubt that there was a time when peasants produced and got nothing in return. Wouldn't they have starved to death? Socialistguy (talk) 00:20, 15 April 2016 (UTC)
 * WIkipedia isn't about doubts but about reliable sources.
 * Some of them survived, some starved to death.Xx236 (talk) 10:46, 17 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Not all the production were confiscated; with luck, the portion that remained in the hands of the peasants

will be enough to eat.--MiguelMadeira (talk) 15:04, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

Hunger in Volga region 1919-25
I don't have the book, but as fa as I understand the famine continued under the NEP.
 * V.A. Polyakov, Hunger in Volga region 1919-25 Xx236 (talk) 11:53, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

What could you replace the biased material of the article with to give the reader a broader viewpoint of NEP? — Chargrad2020 (talk) 09:26, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: HIS 347
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Merge from NEPman
Heavily duplicated subject. But possibly some new content. Not to say that the article NEPman is heavily confused: this is a colloquial insulting term for people who got rich due to NEP. Surely it was not applied to petty street vendors. And this can be easily covered in a single paragraph in the main article. - Altenmann >talk 16:21, 12 April 2024 (UTC)