The New Economic Plan; could it have worked?

Lets say Lenin manages to live past 1924, or he dies but Stalin is marginalized and rendered incapable of assuming any significant role in the post-Lenin government. In any event, the "New Economic Plan" is put into full swing, as opposed to the Five Year Plans.Could it have worked in the long term? Would the USSR have become industrialized enough that it could weather WW2 (assuming it isn't butterflied away somehow) and beyond?
 
As I recall, the NEP was already in a troubling position by the time it was historically ended. It has been more than a year since I've studied the history of the USSR, and so my memory could be wrong, but I distinctly remember an economic effect called the "Scissors" I think it had to do with the dependence of the industrial sector on the agricultural sector, and the relative indifference by the latter towards the former. If I remember things correctly, the largely agricultural nature was seen as a real problem in the USSR from the civil war on, and the NEP was at least partially an attempt to guide the agricultural sector towards supporting Russian industrialization. If I have my facts straight, it didn't work as planned by the end. If Lenin lives, which is perhaps doubtful, as some posters here have argued he was syphilitic at the time of his death, and had implicitly been so long before his party's rise to power, then I doubt the NEP would continue indefinitely. Lenin, of all people, is not going to allow the USSR to become a fully capitalist state.

If someone with considerable more knowledge of Russian History thinks I've made a fool of myself, I apologize.
 
If It Worked??:confused::confused:
My Understanding is that it was working to well. Especially in the Ukraine, where there were a lot of Pre GW ?Kupeks? who where getting Richer than they were pre war.
 
As other posters have stated thus far, it did work to some notable extent and it is quite unfair to unilaterally classify it as an unequivocal failure. Of course, it did manage to serve the agricultural side of the Soviet economy far more than the industrial sector, leading to some issues which prevented development. As the manufacturing elements of the economy could not meet the demand for the mechanized implements of modern farming as the plan initially envisioned, its base began to crumble. Instead of both aspects of the economy complimenting one another, the peasantry ran amuck with its newly found liberties.

Of course, it was still in more ways than not a positive development over the state of economic production during the civil war and under the policy of war communism, so you sort of need to take it in the proper context. Agricultural output was stabilized to levels which were nearing there pre-war state, and in that sense the policy was a success.
 
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