Historama, March 16

Chaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet,” Lenin’s free market, and the first Soviet passenger car await you in tonight’s Historama.

Free market in the Soviet Union

Today in 1921, the Bolsheviks adopted Lenin's New Economic Policy, or NEP for short.

NEP included some free-market principles, allowing small businesses to operate for private profit while banks, foreign trade and large enterprises were kept under state control.

Life got more leisurely under NEP as money got easier to make and the entertainment industry flourished. However, NEP's success threatened the Socialist system, so the Party scrapped the policy in 1928.

Read more about NEP in our "Russia Now" section

First Soviet passenger car

The first passenger car M-1, or Emka, was produced on this day in 1936 at the Soviet Union’s Gorky car factory.

The model was developed in cooperation with the Ford Company, whose Model B car was taken as the base model and adapted for the Soviet market. Emka became one of the symbols of the 1930s, as all senior Soviet army commanders drove it.

In the 1940s, however, most of them switched to the Ford GP.