Q:

What was Lenin's "New Economic Policy" and what complications did it have?

I have recently read an article on Lenin's New Economic Policy, and I was wondering if there were two sides to the story. What were some of the complications of this policy? In addition to this, was it advantageous to the Russian economy or not?

A:

Lenin's NEP was the Bolshevik controlled Soviet State's turn to capitalism.  (Pirani)  Inside the Soviet economy a number of critical crises occurred simultaneously in late war communism.  The Soviets—a system of predominantly geographical councils monopolised by the Bolsheviks and Left SRs as a bourgeois revolutionary state—had thoroughly alienated rural proletarians, largely by direct massacre and suppression of their revolutionary organs (Makhno, etc.).  The peasantry was significantly alienated by theitself controlled by a party dominated by intelligentsia.  The NEP was a natural outgrowth of the Bolshevik Party's substitutionalism. (Lenin)
Finally, the rural and urban production crises spurred the State, ie: the leadership of the party, to react to the crisis of production.  They did this by reintroducing capitalism management in the factories (Kollontai), destroying the power of the workplace soviets, the only remaining revolutionary organ of the working class, replacing it with one man management.  By legalising trade in rural commodities and "encouraging" private capitalist development of agriculture.
This has the effect of increasing the price of rural commodities, and of taking the price of this out of the standards of living of the urban working class.  In trade the urban working class got access