War communism

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The Bolshevik Party seized power in Russia in October 1917. Historians use the term war communism for the economic system of Soviet Russia during the civil war that followed this revolution. This term, not used at the time, was first applied when the civil war had already drawn to a close. In the spring of 1921, advocating a shift toward a more liberalized internal market, Lenin described the system as "that peculiar war communism, forced on us by extreme want, ruin and war." He went on to define its core as the centralized system of confiscating all of the peasants' food surpluses, and more, in order to feed the urban workers and the soldiers of the Red Army. He meant that war communism was a temporary phenomenon - not real communism - just a necessary evil required by wartime circumstances. He intended thereby to distance himself from it and inaugurate a more relaxed regime later known as the New Economic Policy (NEP).

A few years later, however, Stalin adopted policies that resembled war communism in several features, including specifically the confiscation of peasant food surpluses. Consequently many historians now reject Lenin's claim that war communism was an unintended consequence of special circumstances, and argue that the Bolsheviks always intended to build a society based on centralization and force.

It took more than six months for a full-scale civil war to break out after the October 1917 revolution. The Bolsheviks did not try immediately to centralize the economy. They negotiated for a separate peace with Germany to take Russia out of World War I. They brought representatives of the non-Bolshevik left into a coalition government. While they legislated to nationalize the landed estates of the aristocracy, they sought a coexistence of capitalist and commercial private property with state regulation and workers' rights of inspection.

The results, however, threatened the Bolsheviks with a loss of control on each front. The peace treaty signed with Germany in March 1918 provoked military intervention by Russia's former allies. Its humiliating terms drove the Bolsheviks' coalition partners toward the monarchist counter-revolution. Under the treaty, Russia lost the Ukraine; this cut the food available to Russia's nonfarm population. The wartime system of food distribution that the Bolsheviks had inherited from the imperial government was ineffective: While the urban population was entitled to receive a food ration at low fixed prices, at the same prices the peasants would not sell food to the government for distribution. As the situation worsened, many groups of workers blamed the factory owners, expelled them, and declared the factories to be state property. In the countryside, instead of government takeover of the great estates, the peasants divided the land among themselves.

As of 1918 the Bolsheviks began to travel a path of extreme political and economic centralization. They nationalized the banks in January. In April they enacted state monopolies in foreign trade as well as internal trade in foodstuffs. In June they brought the commanding heights of industry into the public sector. This path ended in a one-party state underpinned by a secret police and a demonetized command economy with virtually all industry nationalized and farm food surpluses liable to violent seizure. The Bolsheviks traveled willingly, justifying their actions in the name of socialism. They blamed their difficulties on a minority of speculators and counterrevolutionaries with whom there could be no compromise. This intensified the polarization between Reds and Whites that ended in civil war.

Food shortages drove this process along. Shortages were felt first by the towns and the army, because peasants fed themselves before selling food to others. Shortages arose primarily from the wartime disruption of trade, the loss of the Ukraine, and the government's attempts to hold down food prices. The Bolsheviks overestimated peasant food stocks; this meant that when they failed to raise food they blamed the peasants for withholding it. They specifically blamed a minority of richer peasants, the so-called kulaks, for speculating in food by withholding it intentionally so as to raise its price. Between April and June of 1918 they slid from banning private trade in foodstuffs to a campaign to seize kulak food stocks and then to confiscate their land as well. Since rural food stocks were smaller and more scattered than the government believed, such measures tended to victimize many ordinary peasants without improving supplies.

Under war communism between the summer of 1918 and the spring of 1921, goods were distributed by administrative rationing or barter; with more than 20 percent monthly inflation, prices rose in total by many thousand times, and the money stock lost most of its real value. The government seized food from the peasantry, but, as there was not enough to meet workers' needs, black markets developed where urban residents bartered their products and property with peasants for additional food. Industry was nationalized far more widely than the commanding heights listed in the June 1918 decree. By November 1920 public ownership extended to many artisan establishments with one or two workers. Public-sector management was centralized under a command system of administrative quotas and allocations.

War communism was not an economic success. Food procurements rose at first, but industrial production and employment, harvests, and living standards fell continuously. The fact that the Bolsheviks emerged victorious from the civil war owed more to their enemies' moral and material weaknesses than to their own strengths. Despite this, they did not abandon war communism immediately when the war came to an end. By the spring of 1920, fighting continued only in Poland and the Caucasus. Still, war communism was upheld. While Lenin defended the system of food procurement against its critics, other Bolsheviks advocated extending control over peasant farming through sowing plans and over industrial workers through militarization of labor.

Such dreaming was rudely interrupted in early 1921 by an anti-Bolshevik mutiny in the Kronstadt naval base and a wave of peasant discontent concentrated in the Tambov province. It was not the end of the civil war, but the threat of another, that brought war communism to an end. This does not prove that the Bolsheviks had always intended to introduce something like war communism; however, it shows that Lenin was disingenuous to suggest that war communism was only a product of circumstances. In the case of war communism, the Bolsheviks willingly made virtues out of apparently necessary evils, then took them much further than necessary. Moreover, one product of civil war circumstances was never abandoned: the one-party state underpinned by a secret police.

Bibliography

Boettke, Peter J. (1990). The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism: The Formative Years, 1918 - 1928. Boston: Kluwer Academic.

Carr, Edward Hallett. (1952). The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917 - 1923, vol. 2. London: Macmillan.

Davies, Robert W. (1989). "Economic and Social Policy in the USSR, 1917 - 41." In The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 8: The Industrial Economies: The Development of Economic and Social Policies, eds. Peter Mathias and Sidney Pollard. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Lih, Lars T. (1990). Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914 - 1921. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Malle, Silvana. (1985). The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918 - 1921. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Nove, Alec. (1992). An Economic History of the USSR, 1917 - 1991, 3rd ed. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books.

Zaleski, Eugene. (1962). Planning for Economic Growth in the Soviet Union, 1918 - 1932. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

—MARK HARRISON

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War communism or military communism (Russian: Военный коммунизм, 1918 - 1921) was the economic and political system that existed in the Soviet Russia during the Russian Civil War, from 1918 to 1921. According to Soviet historiography, this policy was adopted by the Bolsheviks with the aim of keeping towns and the Red Army supplied with weapons and food, in conditions in which all normal economic mechanisms and relations were being destroyed by the war. "War communism", which began in June 1918, was enforced by the Supreme Economic Council, known as the Vesenkha. It ended on March 21, 1921 with the beginning of the NEP (New Economic Policy), which lasted until 1928.

War communism included the following policies:

1. All industry was nationalized and strict centralized management was introduced.
2. State monopoly on foreign trade was introduced.
3. Discipline for workers was strict, and strikers could be shot.
4. Obligatory labour duty was imposed onto "non-working classes".
5. Prodrazvyorstka – requisition of agricultural surpluses from peasants in excess of absolute minimum for centralized distribution among the remaining population.
6. Food and most commodities were rationed and distributed in a centralized way.
7. Private enterprise became illegal.
8. Military-like control of railroads was introduced.

Because all of these measures were implemented in a time of civil war, they were far less coherent and coordinated in practice than they might appear on paper. Large areas of Russia were outside the Bolsheviks' control, and poor communications meant that even those regions loyal to the Bolshevik government often had to act on their own, lacking any orders or central coordination from Moscow. It has long been debated whether "war communism" represented an actual economic policy in the proper sense of the word or merely a set of desperate measures intended to win the civil war at any cost. ^[1]

The goals of the Bolsheviks in implementing war communism are a matter of controversy. Some commentators, including a number of Bolsheviks, have argued that its sole purpose was to win the war. Lenin, for instance, said that "the confiscation of surpluses from the peasants was a measure with which we were saddled by the imperative conditions of war-time." ^[2] Other commentators, such as the historian Richard Pipes, have argued that War communism was actually an attempt to immediately implement communist economics and that the Bolshevik leaders expected an immediate and large scale increase in economic output. This view was also held by Nikolai Bukharin, who said that "We conceived War Communism as the universal, so to say 'normal' form of the economic policy of the victorious proletariat and not as being related to the war, that is, conforming to a definite state of the civil war" ^[3].

War communism aggravated many hardships experienced by the population as a result of the war. Peasants refused to co-operate in producing food, as the government took away far too much of it. Workers began migrating from the cities to the countryside, where the chances to feed oneself were higher, thus further decreasing the possibility of the fair trade of industrial goods for food and worsening the plight of the remaining urban population. Between 1918 and 1920, Petrograd lost 75% of its population, whilst Moscow lost 50%. A black market emerged in Russia, despite the threat of the martial law against profiteering. The ruble collapsed and was replaced by a system of bartering and, by 1921, heavy industry had fallen to output levels of 20% of those in 1913. 90% of all wages were "paid with goods" (payment in form of goods, rather than money). 70% of locomotives were in need of repair and the food requisitioning, combined with the effects of 7 years of war and a severe drought, contributed to a famine that caused between 3 and 10 million deaths.[1]

As a result, a series of workers' strikes and peasants' rebellions, such as the Tambov rebellion rolled over the country. The turning point was the Kronstadt rebellion at the naval base in early March, 1921. The rebellion had a startling effect on Lenin, because the Kronstadt sailors had been among the strongest supporters of the Bolsheviks. After the end of the civil war the policy of War Communism was replaced with the New Economic Policy.

See also

• History of the Soviet Union
• State capitalism
• Russian Civil War of 1918

References

1. ^ See Nicolas Werth, Histoire de l'Union Soviétique de Lénine à Staline, 1995 (French)
2. ^ Lenin, V.I., Collected Works, volume 32, 1965. Moscow: Progress Publishers. pp. 187
3. ^ Nikolai Bukharin, The path to socialism in Russia, 1967. New York: Omicron Books, pp. 178

• Sheldon L. Richman, "War Communism to NEP: The Road From Serfdom", Journal of Libertarian Studies, Winter 1981, 5(1), pp. 89-97.

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