“The New Economic Policies 1921-1929” in the Kenez text).

(Read Chapter 3 pp.41-80 “The New Economic Policies 1921-1929” in the Kenez text).
1. Describe conditions in Russia during War Communism that led to the Bolshevik need to change course. Include economic conditions for the peasants and laborers, emigration, the revolt of the military, ideological disputes, dissolution of a market for exchange of goods and currencies etc. Make sure to cement your thoughts with historical detail. For example, when you examine the failure of the military to support the Bolsehviks, describe the Kronstadt rebellion, or when you examine the failure of the peasantry to support the Bolsheviks, support it with details like the uprising of the Tambov peasants.
2. How did the Bolsheviks become a party of administration and rule, rather than of revolution during the NEP? Use historical specifics like “democratic centralism”, the “cult of Lenin”, demise of the Mensheviks, “transmission belts”, Komsomol, literacy as propaganda, one-party rule, “Declaration of Rights” for nationalities, commissars as ruling functionaries, creation of the USSR.
3. How did the Bolsheviks manage the economy 1921-29? Why is this management called a NEP (New Economic Policy)? Would you call it “capitalistic” ( and explain what capitalistic means)? Did it dovetail with the Bolshevik ideology? In the system, who owned the “capital” and controlled the market system?
4. What is the intelligentsia (Harvard maybe)? How was this class used by the Bolsheviks? (The intelligentsia in Russian history has been a favored class and accepted into the ranks of the upper class culturally if not politically. It provided the wellspring of great writers like Tolstoy, ballet and music artists like Tchaikovsky, and scientists like Lomonosov. Under the tsars, this pampered class fulfilled a quest for Russia to be “modern” and “western”. The intelligentsia during the Bolshevik era was also grounded in Western philosophical Marxism (communism) but at the same time it concentrated on modernization of the country. How did belief in “communism on the horizon” take the place of the Russian Orthodox church in terms of reaching a perfect world and human being?
5. Why in 1922 was Lenin disappointed with the state he had created? With Lenin’s decline in 1922, what differences in ideological and economic viewpoint emerged between contestants to take over power?
6. Explain the major debate among historians regarding the nature of the NEP—a policy of necessity or a Golden Age of Bolshevism? Do a little internet research that allows you add depth to this answer and critique Kenez’s view.