The state hardens
March 1921
NEP, and the ban on factions
The market was allowed back into the shop. It was not allowed back into the party.
The New Economic Policy replaced grain seizure with a tax in kind and permitted private trade and small manufacture. It ended the immediate peasant war and revived cities. “NEPmen,” private traders, became a hated and tolerated class.
At the same congress that passed it, Lenin pushed through a ban on factions. The Workers’ Opposition (including Alexandra Kollontai and Alexander Shlyapnikov) was finished as an organized voice. Succession politics after Lenin’s strokes happened inside one party, by control of appointments — Stalin’s advantage as general secretary — not by a public contest.
Where to check it · Resolutions of the Tenth Congress; Lenin’s writings of 1921–22; Schapiro.