The period of the New Economic Policy was a time when the Bolshevik government was forced to reconsider its attitude towards the market, as NEP involved the introduction of market elements into Soviet society. This thesis is a comparative study of eleven Soviet economic theorists from this period; Bukharin, Preobrazhenskii, Strumilin, Bazarov, Groman, Kondrat'ev, Oparin, Sokol'nikov, Yurovskii, Chayanov, and Blyumin. It asks two basic questions: how did each theorist conceive of the market, and how did they relate this conception to socialism? The primary source material used is the works of these theorists, and in many cases this material has not been previously discussed by scholars. A theoretical framework places these conceptions into a historical context. The basic result obtained is that there were many diverse conceptions of the market prevalent in this period. The bulk of the thesis investigates these various conceptions, and suggests that their theoretical roots lie in various currents of economic thought: classical, neo-classical, Marxist, and socialist. During NEP these currents were allowed to mix freely to a certain extent, although pressure to censor them began to build towards the end of the 1920s.