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Abstract.
The article examines problematic issues regarding social development during the New Economic Policy (hereinafter NEP) period of 1921-1928 in the USSR. The paper presents the views of various scholars on the stated issues and analyzes the transformation of research approaches to the subject. The purpose of the study is to reveal the main problems of social development during the NEP years and to demonstrate the destructive influence of social deviations on public life. The article considers the main approaches to the essence and causes of social problems during the NEP era; based on archival data from the Criminal Investigation Department, statistics on drunkenness, banditry, and prostitution are presented. The scientific novelty of the study lies in providing, for the first time on the basis of materials from the Penza Governorate, a comprehensive characterization of deviant behavior among the adult population during the NEP period (1921-1928) through a historiographical review and the analysis of archival data. In the presented work, drunkenness, banditry, and prostitution are examined as a unified complex of social development problems that destructively impacted society during the NEP years. This approach made it possible to assess and explore the causes and scale of social issues during the specified period. The study succeeded in identifying the mechanisms for eliminating banditry, proving the systemic nature of the threat posed by moonshining to the local government apparatus, and substantiating the latent nature of prostitution in the region.
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