New Economic Policy and Death

Eventually, Lenin’s party was victorious.  The system that was immediately put into place caused complete chaos in the country and left it completely broke.  Most of the country was dealing with famine and poverty.  As a result the peasant class that had resulted in Lenin being victorious began to revolt again against the terrible conditions of the country.  To help prevent this from happening, Lenin reversed most of his policies and introduced the New Economic Policy (Vladimir Ilich Lenin, 1998).

The New Economic Policy gave peasants the ownership of all of their land and instead instituted a tax.  This started initially as in kind but later became cash.  Instead of having all of their crops taken from them and redistributed throughout the country, each landowner was allowed to keep whatever they had left after the tax was paid and sell it on an open and free market.  Big industrial businesses, however, were still led by the government (Vladimir Ilich Lenin, 1998).

In 1918, Lenin suffered from an assassination attempt that left him injured and his health never fully recovered.  In 1922 Lenin suffered two strokes that severely hurt his health.  Realizing that he his health was fading, he began to think about how Russia would go on without him.  He wrote what would become to be known as his Testament where he told of his regrets of how the dictorial approach dominated the Soviet Government and how he was very disappointed in his soon to be successor Joseph Stalin who had begun to gain great power.

In early 1923, Lenin suffered his third stroke.  This one took away his ability to speak which ended his involvement in political affairs.  He died ten months later in January of 1924 (Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 2014).