NEPman
네프맨
The merchants, middlemen and small entrepreneurs who grew rich on the private trade legalized under the New Economic Policy. Inside the party they came to symbolize a capitalist revival, and they were wiped out by taxation, arrests and confiscation when NEP was abandoned at the end of the 1920s.
In depth
Conditions of appearance
When private trade was legalized in 1921 distribution passed quickly into private hands. State trading bodies and cooperatives kept the upper hand in wholesale, but at the retail level the private share reached around three quarters by 1923. The civil code of 1922 permitted leasing, brokerage, and small manufacture, widening the field further.
The layer called NEPmen was not one group. The name covered retailers running market stalls and shops, merchants brokering grain and raw materials between state enterprises and the countryside, lessees operating rented workshops or premises, and manufacturers with shops employing a few dozen hands. Many came from prewar trading families or had built capital in the illegal trade of the civil war years.
Social position
NEPmen were economically permitted and politically excluded. Trading income carried steeply progressive taxation, private traders were classed among the disenfranchised and barred from soviet elections, and they were disadvantaged in housing allocation and in their children's access to higher schooling. This double status, lawful business alongside loss of civic rights, compresses the character of NEP itself.
Their cultural representation was largely hostile. Satirical magazines and posters drew the NEPman as a fat speculator, and the fiction of Zoshchenko and of Ilf and Petrov treated the world of the private trader as material for ridicule. Inside the party the NEPman was read as an index of capitalist revival, and that reading fed distrust of NEP as a whole.
Disappearance
Fiscal and administrative pressure intensified from 1927. In 1928 and 1929 the speculation provisions of the criminal code were applied broadly, making trading itself a punishable act, and closures, confiscations, and arrests followed. The private share of retail fell to about a quarter by 1928 and had effectively vanished by the early 1930s.
The word NEPman left Soviet vocabulary afterwards, but the language that cast the private trader as a criminal survived in the stigma of the speculator and lasted to the end of the Soviet period. It was this memory that prompted talk of a return to NEP when cooperatives and individual enterprise were permitted again in the late 1980s.