ere not unprecedented in socialist states. The New Economic Policy implemented by Lenin in the Soviet Union in 1921 served in many ways as a model for later reforms in the socialist bloc. Yosif Stalin terminated the New Economic Policy in 1928. In the mid- 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev introduced significant economic reforms in the Soviet Union that were terminated by Leonid Brezhnev in the mid-1960s. Elsewhere in eastern Europe, both Yugoslavia and Hungary implemented economic reforms in the 1960s, and, in 1979, the People's Republic of China implemented far reaching economic changes.
In 1921, Soviet agriculture was in a shambles (Mazour, 1967, p. 71). Soviet farmers simply were not cooperating with collectivization. The New Economic Policy was introduced to boost agricultural output, and incentives were implemented to promote private agriculture (Medvedev, 1986, p. 41). Lenin was pragmatic about the New Economic Policy. Lenin held that, given the existing circumstances, some compromise with capitalism was required if the
...