NEPmen (Russian: Нэпманы, romanized: Nepmani) were businesspeople in the early Soviet Union, who took advantage of the opportunities for private trade and small-scale manufacturing provided under the New Economic Policy (NEP, 1921-1928). The famine of 1921-1922 epitomized the adverse effects of War Communism, and to mitigate those effects, Vladimir Lenin instituted the NEP, which encouraged private buying and selling, with people even being encouraged to "enrich yourselves", as one Bolshevik leader, Nikolai Bukharin, put it. However, many Bolsheviks saw the policy as "a step backwards". That included Lenin himself, who defended the measure as "taking one step backward to take two steps forward later on".