Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "New Economic Policy" in English language version.
[...] the writ of centralized state power did not extend much beyond the cities and the (partially destroyed) rail lines connecting them. In the broad expanses of the countryside, peasants, who comprised upwards of 80 percent of the total population, hunkered down in their communes, having both economically and psychologically withdrawn from the state and its military and food detachments.
[...] by 1925 the 'policy of recovery' had relieved the worst of the economic shortages and restored a semblance of health to the country. A kind of freeness had occurred on the heels of Lenin's New Economic policy. Major transformation was occurring politically, economically, culturally, and spiritually. Small-scale and light industries were largely in the hands of private entrepreneurs or cooperatives. Some people in the top echelons of government were Buddhists or involved with spiritual organizations [...].
Sosnovsky coined the phrase 'the automobile-harem factor' in relation to the rise of the bureaucracy. Aspiring bureaucrats would marry the daughters of bourgeois and aristocrats and imitate their outlook and habits. The big cars of the officials and their 'painted ladies' recalled the protest of Gracchus Babeuf at a similar phenomenon in the period of Thermidorean reaction [...]
The parasitic bureaucracy, setting itself above society, fed on concealed privileges in the midst of general destitution. [..] Vladimir Sosnovsky [...] invoked the 'harem-automobile factor' - the secretary-mistress and the fancy car being inseparable privileges and symbols of power
