ABSTRACT
Hardly a week passes without one or more Soviet commentators, scholars, or political leaders invoking the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s as the legitimate socialist precursor of the reforms currently taking place in the USSR. Soviet publicists and historians have revived a Bukharinist view of the NEP as Russia's last chance to avoid the terrors of Stalinism. In retrospect, they prefer an alternative path of moderate, evolutionary economic change, whereby socialism would grow out of a mixed system of state sector and private market; peasants would come willingly to cooperative forms of agriculture, with coercion and administrative methods replaced by education, persuasion, and example. Viktor Danilov described the current debate over alternatives in a lecture delivered at Columbia University on April 21, 1988. Nikolai Shmelev's views have appeared in a new journal entitled Studentchesky meridian, in many scholarly economic joournals, and in the Soviet popular press.
