From the end of 1926 demand among planners and party activists for a new program of mass industrialization that would modernize the largely peasant country. Although NEP was seen at the time as a permanent structure throughout 1927, the 15th Congress of the VKP(b), held in Moscow in December 1927, acceded to this sentiment, approving a new program for the industrialization of the USSR — an acceleration which would ultimately prove incompatible with a small peasantry freely exchanging a comparatively small fraction of its production in the marketplace.