Quotes About NEP

Within a year or two of Lenin's death he was clearly the party's boss: having solidified his power, he was ready to resume the drive for Communism interrupted in 1921 by the introduction of the NEP. He had three related objectives: to build a powerful industrial base, to collectivize agriculture, and to impose on the nation complete conformity.

The Tenth Congress was a political setback for Trotsky. He came out a loser in the trade union controversy, and the NEP was implicitly a repudiation of the line that he had publicly been taking in economic policy.

Hence class struggle, of which the recent emergency measures were an expression, must be seen as a normal phenomenon under the NEP.

But institutionally authoritarian as it was, the Soviet party-state of the NEP years was a far cry from the dread bureaucratic leviathan conjured up by our image of a "totalitarian system."[490]

In the NEP era Soviet society was not yet the tightly controlled organism that it would become during the Stalinist thirties as a result of the revolution from above that Stalin initiated in late 1929, when the power to do so was finally in his hands.