What was Lenin's New Economic Policy? Discuss the main economic and social experiments of the 1920s.

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Lenin’s New Economic Policy came about in March of 1921 as a result of a disagreeable Bolshevik policy known as Prodrazvyorstka that existed during a period known as War Communism. This policy called for the seizure of all agricultural surpluses from the peasantry, without any form of compensation for their toiling. Although a very far cry from the ‘for-the-people’ ideology pledged by the Bolshevik faction leaders to the masses, it was justified through the implementing of Lenin’s War Communism which was meant to give the Soviet government all the means necessary to win the Civil War, and in that sense it was a success. But the effects of wartime communism took a great toll on the population, not only within the rural peasantry, but also on the urban proletariat in the main city centers. Between 1918 and 1920, Petrograd found 75% of its population flooding into the countryside so as to be able to feed themselves better than if they were industrial labourers within the urban centers. This caused heavy industry output to drop to 20% of 1913 levels, and a complete collapse of the rouble which lead to a system of bartering and resulted in 90% of wages being paid by way of goods instead of currency. All of this caused great unrest with the peasants, and in August 1920 saw the Tambov Uprising as a result of the grossly unfair and unpopular requisition policy of grain production. The dilemma, that can be seen know with 20/20 hindsight, was that when the peasants knew that all of the surplus grain they harvested was going to be essentially stolen from them, they had no incentive to continue working and trying to reach above and beyond the government quota for that region. Their ability to labour, which was said to be the main protectorate of the Soviet ‘vanguard’, was now a dangerous weapon, and that weapon was one the people used very effectively against the regime. In
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