NEPman

NEPmen (Russian: Нэпманы, romanized: Nepmani) were businesspeople in the early Soviet Union, who took advantage of the opportunities for private trade and small-scale manufacturing provided under the New Economic Policy (NEP, 1921-1928). The famine of 1921–1922 epitomized the adverse effects of war communism, and to mitigate those effects, Vladimir Lenin instituted the NEP, which encouraged private buying and selling, with people even being encouraged to "enrich yourselves", as one Bolshevik leader, Nikolai Bukharin, put it. However, many Bolsheviks saw the policy as "a step backwards". That included Lenin himself, who defended the measure as "taking one step backward to take two steps forward later on".

The biggest group of the 3 million or so NEPmen were engaged in handicrafts in the countryside, but those who traded or ran small businesses in the cities faced the most negative attitudes, especially because some amassed considerable fortunes. One of the main objectives of the Communist Party was to promote socialism, and the capitalist behavior of the NEPmen challenged that goal. However, given the economic benefits that NEPmen provided, the government allowed their existence. As they gained a better standard of living compared to their poor, working class counterparts, NEPmen became reviled, and stereotyped as greedy. Among ordinary folk, traditional hatred of profiteers found focus in the NEPmen, some of it acquiring an antisemitic tinge. That was reinforced by the official media representation of NEPmen as vulgar nouveaux riches. As Joseph Stalin consolidated his power, he moved aggressively to end the NEP and to put NEPmen out of business, eventually abolishing private commerce in 1931.