The end of grain requisitioning and a fixed tax with relaxed labor regulations. 2
Had Lenin not died things would have been different, but nobody could say what Stalin would have done before the events took place.3
It was not just a breathing space in between the war and the upheaval in the 30s. It was a time when the powers that be had to come to terms with the social and cultural leftovers from before the war that didn't go away on their own. It was a time of moving forward, but trying not to lose the good from the past. 3
Famine coincided with the war and low birth rates to lessen the population by 28 million people. 5
The country was still overwhelmingly rural, but the support was largely being given to the urban areas. It was the peasant that suffered. The industry in the city collapsed. 5
The communist ideal could not be solved in the countryside. This was an urban model and thus people needed to move to the cities and the cities needed to prosper in order to give jobs to all the people. 7
The lack of funds needed to create industry in the cites meant that there needed to be a tax base, but this could not just be from the peasants again like it was during War Communism.
Clark, Katerina. The "Quiet Revolution" in Soviet Intellectual Life:
NEP is seen in the West as a normalization of things in Russia. There was greater political pluralization and the economy matched better with the western model during this time more than any other time before. 210
It was not the great time of intellectual freedom as is often thought. There was little freedom without any of the funding. Intellectual life in the Soviet Union became soviet. Poetry, art and theatre dominated during War Communism, but during the NEP prose fiction, film and architecture were given more. The intellectuals got to do more of what they wanted for longer not because of anything NEP, but because they were not the main concerns of the powers that be or the Komsomol. The shift intellectually moved to the center in part because the small groups of artists that had funding now had to get viewers to pay for their art and thus the collectives and journals shut down. 213
The break with the past in regards to many aspects of artistic and political structures were made during the NEP period, but had their roots in the February revolution, not with anything particularly Soviet. 214
The move back to the center was a reaction after war communism when many aspects of intellectualism moved away from the center as a need and as a reaction of the centralized way of life under the imperial system. During NEP they came back in. 219
The war communism literature dealt with the questions of the modernization and the urban center. During NEP this was looked at only by the lesser writers. The big names looked at what the intellectuals role in the new society would be. 221
The new intellectuals were split in 2 groups. 1 is sometimes called the professoriate or the academicians and museum curators and such. They are the intellectuals or the intelligentsia. They were largely middle class and privileged and filled with their own self worth. 222
The other side were maybe called the antiacademists. The were those that joined the LEVFRONT and were of the same class as the academics, but without the social justice. They were interested more in the high art and the revolution and tended to be of a more varied ethnic background. 223
Socialist Realism draws itself largely from the proletarian culture of the NEP period. 227
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