ABSTRACT
Soviet leaders in the Mikhail Gorbachev years have either initiated or tolerated radical challenges to the Stalin interpretation. The first challenge came in the reinterpretation of the character and contemporary significance of the New Economic Policy. The fundamental rationale for collectivization was questioned, a number of its opponents were rehabilitated and their analyses sympathetically reviewed, and realistic estimates of the enormous human and economic costs of the process were publicly discussed for the first time. Gorbachev's present program for shifting from the conventional state and collective farms to long-term land leases to cooperating groups or individual families is clearly inspired by the New Economic Policy (NEP) example. Gorbachev's present program for shifting from the conventional state and collective farms to long-term land leases to cooperating groups or individual families is clearly inspired by the NEP example. His words recall those of Bukharin in the 1920s, and of the rehabilitated company of distinguished agrarian economists purged by Stalin.
