High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The NEPmen were businessmen and women in the young Soviet Union who took advantage of the opportunities for private trade and small-scale manufacturing created by the New Economic Policy (NEP). The NEP was a response to revolts against meager rations in the USSR during the early 1920s under Lenin`s policy of War Communism. Lenin responded by instituting the NEP, which encouraged private buying and selling, even to, as one official put it, "get rich".