ABSTRACT
Just as the capitalist world was forced to accept the existence of the Bolshevik regime, the Bolsheviks had to reconcile themselves with the fact that their state existed side by side with bourgeois states in the international system. After the Civil War, foreign capital and foreign experts were needed for Russia’s reconstruction, and so was the domestic mobilization of private enterprise. To get the country going, the peasants were allowed to sell their surplus on the market and to hire labor; small-scale entrepreneurs were allowed to operate in the cities (above all in the service sector). It should be remembered that the overall impact of this economic deregulation – known as the New Economic Policy or NEP – was fairly limited. In retrospect, however, the NEP years would appear as a golden age, especially to the Soviet peasants.1
