ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the general meaning of people's new economic policy, its causes and its objectives, along with its importance in the general perspective of their national economy’s development toward communism. The causes of the “new course” were deeply imbedded in people's economy and became visible in an unusually acute sociopolitical crisis during the spring of 1921. The most “urgent” and pervasive task was that of providing the country with a Red defense. Victory over the counter-revolutionary forces is the historical justification for this policy. Conditions were such that “expedient planning,” insofar as its elements were present, inevitably involved transforming the plan from one of developing production and proper distribution into one of efficient consumption, giving secondary priority to production. The class equilibrium that had been established during the civil war was based not on a “normal” economic process, but on the shared wartime interests of the proletariat and the peasantry.
