Encyclopedia of Russian History

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 counterrevolution. 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

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

WAR COMMUNISM

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

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

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.