Position 1: The Bolsheviks and the Nation State

The existence of nations along ethnic and linguistic lines were an omnipresent feature post World War one as a result of the Versailles Conference of 1919 which had identified that dynastic rule over ethnic minorities should give way to the national principle so as not to generate a repeat of the Balkan crisis which preceded the 1914 conflict. This is exposed through the Austo-Hungarian intent on preventing a unified Serbia, while Germany sought to utilise these and other regional antipathies to establish it's 'place in the sun'.

Although the Versailles treaty can be viewed as containing content anathema to the prospect of a potential German war, it's existence as a barometer of the institution of the nation state at the expense of the empire is often overlooked in favour of it being an imposition on Germany. The facticity of the nation as a preferred institution explains largely why the Soviets played a geopolitical game in lieu of the supposed necessary moves that would lead to the dissolution of the state. I think this gets to the crux of a failure of economic determinism, particularly in respect to the isolation of an economic brand within a market system which facilitated the need for the New Economic Policy. 

This isolation is elucidated not specifically as an economic phenomena but as a cultural one which becomes consolidated through it's practice. If Marxism expounds a synopsis which concludes with the withering away of the state, yet in the 1920's the Soviet Union used self determination through the republics as a tool to forge a distinction between the tenets of Socialism and that of Capitalism - capitalism being that concomitant to Imperialism - then to use this decentralisation instrumentally serves to undermine the aforementioned imperatives of state dissolution by generating a permanence to ethnic divergences.