Russian revolution. A very short introduction

by S. A Smith

  the agenda, since he ratified decrees nationalizing the banks, railways,

  merchant fleet, and many mines and joint-stock companies. However,

  during the harsh winter his enthusiasm for nationalization cooled; by

  March 1918 he was claiming that 'state capitalism will be our salvation',

  by which he meant that most enterprises would remain in private

  ownership but be subject to regulation by state-run cartels. This proved

  to be a non-starter, since few capitalists were ready to cooperate with

  the proletarian state. Moreover, this was precisely the time when

  pressure for nationalization was intensifying at the grass roots, as-

  factory committees and Soviets 'nationalized' enterprises whose owners д

  о

  had fled or were suspected of sabotage. Between November 1917 and | March 1918, 836 enterprises were'nationalized'from below in this way. = Unable to resist this momentum, and aware that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk made it liable to pay compensation to German nationals owning shares in private Russian companies, the government on 28 June moved decisively towards full-scale nationalization, taking some 2,000 joint-stock companies into state ownership. Henceforth the drive to nationalize proved unstoppable, fuelled mainly by the conviction that it was evidence of progress towards socialism.

  After October 1917 the lamentable level of industrial productivity plunged still further as a result of wear-and-tear on machinery, supply problems and the fall in labour intensity, which was itself due to poor diet, absenteeism (brought on by the search for food and the necessity of working on the side) and, not least, by the breakdown in labour discipline. From early 1918, the trade unions struggled to combat falling productivity by restoring the piece-rate which linked wages to output.

  73

  As part of his more sober evaluation of revolutionary prospects, Lenin now pronounced that the key task facing the Russian worker was to 'learn how to work'. From spring 1918, he campaigned for a single individual to be put in charge of each enterprise, a demand that struck at the heart of workers' self-management. Throughout 1919 he faced stiff resistance from those who defended the existing system of collegial management, whereby nationalized enterprises were run by boards comprising one-third workers plus representatives of technical staff, trade unions, and state economic organs. But Lenin was never one to give up. By 1920,82% of enterprises were under one-person management. At the same time, he campaigned for the authority of technical specialists to be restored and for them to receive salaries commensurate with their expertise, arguing that the latter was more important than 'zeal', 'human qualities', or 'saintliness'. This, too, proved deeply unpopular. As one worker told the Ninth Party £ Conference in September 1920:'I'll goto my grave hating spetsy g [technical specialists].... We have to hold them in a grip of iron, the e way they used to hold us.' By the end of the civil war, not much was left jg of the democratic forms of industrial administration promoted by the 1 factory committees in 1917, but the government argued that this did not matter since industry had passed into the ownership of a workers' state.

  During the civil war the autonomy of trade unions was also drastically curtailed. As early as January 1918 the First Trade-Union Congress rejected Menshevik demands that the unions remain 'independent', contending that in a workers' statetheirchief function was to'organize production and restorethe battered productive forces of the country'. From 1919, however, efforts to place workers under military discipline led to much friction between unions and government. This culminated in August 1920 in Trotsky's peremptory replacement of the elected boards of the railway and water-transport unions with a Central Committee for Transport that combined the functions of commissariat, political organ, and trade union. This sparked a fierce debate in which

  74

  Trotsky and Bukharin called for the complete absorption of the trade unions into the state; M. P. Tomsky, on behalf of the trade unions, defended a degree of trade-union autonomy but concurred that their principal task was to oversee the implementation of economic policy; and the Workers' Opposition urged that the unions be given complete responsibility for running the economy. The Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 castigated the latter view as an 'anarcho-syndicalist deviation' and gave overwhelming backing to a compromise resolution from Lenin that backed away from the idea of rapid 'statization' of the trade unions, insisting that they still had a residual function of defending workers' interests and stressing their role as 'schools of communism'.

  Many of the same pressures that led to the centralization of decisionmaking within the party also led to hyper-centralization of the economic organs. In response to scarcity and fragmentation of powerat the local level, where often a multiplicity of inexperienced Soviets, economic councils, trade unions, and factory committees vied to commandeer resources and resolve local problems, the Supreme Council of the Economy struggled to impose central coordination. It was responsible chiefly for administering and financing industry, but it also intervened in the procurement and distribution of supplies, and even in transportation, food, and labour allocation. It was hardly a watchword for efficiency, being organized according to a dual principle. Boards, each with its own vertical hierarchy, presided over each branch of industry but competed with a geographically organized hierarchy of county- and province-level economic councils. In practice, this meant that dozens of overlapping and autonomous hierarchies functioned with few if any horizontal links to the relevant government commissariats. Trotsky described how in the Urals one province ate oats, while another fed wheat to horses; yet nothing could be done without the consent of the food commissariat in Moscow. On 30 November 1918 the whole system was capped by a Defence Council, vested with extraordinary powers to mobilize material and human

  75

  resources for the Red Army and to coordinate the war effort at the front and in the rear. The most that can be said is that the system succeeded in targeting scarce supplies of materials, fuel, and manufactures on the Red Army. The drawbacks were that it was wasteful and hugely bureaucratic - the ratio of white-collar employees to workers in nationalized industries rising from one in ten in 1918 to one in seven in 1920.

  The most critical problem facing the Bolshevik government in these years was that of food supply. To the existing reluctance of peasants to market grain were added new problems. First, the break-up of the landowners' estates strengthened subsistence farming at the expense of cash crops. Second, the loss of Ukraine deprived the Bolsheviks of a region that had produced 35% of marketed grain, and the grain area at its disposal was further cut when war came to many Volga provinces £ and to Siberia. Meanwhile the snarl-up on the railways, which was due g to fuel shortages, the deterioration of track and rolling stock, and the

  i

  e devolution of control to local railway unions, meant that much of the jg food that was procured vanished or rotted before it reached the centres 1 of consumption. Finally, the attempt to regulate grain supply was undermined by the boom in profiteering. The winter of 1917-18 was exceptionally severe: by early 1918 the bread ration in Petrograd was down at times to as little as 50 grams a day. In addition to the desperate efforts of workers' organizations to lay their hands on grain, profiteering by petty traders flourished. In Ivanovo-Voznesensk province so-called 'baggers' imported about 3 million puds of grain (one pud being equal to 16.5 kilograms) between 1 August 1917 and 1 January 1918, two-and-a-half times the amount procured by food authorities. Buying up grain in grain-surplus provinces for 10-12 rubles a pud, they sold it for 50-70 rubles, at a time when the fixed price was still only 3-4 rubles.

  In the first months the government hoped desperately that by boosting production of goods such as fabrics, salt, sugar, and kerosene, it would

  76

  11. A country market in the 1920s

  i

  n

  be able to induce the peasants to sell their grain. But the persisting|

 
shortage of consumer goods, together with spiralling inflation, nullified н. the policy. In Siberia it is reckoned that in the first half of 1918,12 million puds of grain were requisitioned, but 25 million were converted into moonshine. Knowing that there was still plenty of grain available, on 14 May the Bolsheviks announced a food dictatorship'whereby all surpluses above a fixed consumption norm would be subject to confiscation. In minatory fashion the decree warned that 'enemies of the people'found to be concealing surpluses would be jailed for not less than ten years. In theory, peasants were still to be recompensed - 25% of the value of requisitions would be in the form of goods, the rest in money or credits - but according to the most generous estimate, only about half the grain requisitioned in 1919 was compensated for, and in 1920 only around 20%. Some indication of what the policy meant in practice can be gleaned from the fact that in 1918,7,309 members of food detachments, most of them workers, were murdered as they tried to seize surpluses.

  77

  The Bolsheviks were convinced that it was 'kulaks', or wealthy peasants, who were sabotaging grain procurement, so the food dictatorship was linked to a 'war on the rural bourgeoisie'. Committees of the rural poor (kombedy) were created in the hope that poor peasants could be organized so as to provide the regime with a social base in the countryside. In reality there were relatively few peasants in the kombedy, which mainly consisted of members of the food detachments, military personnel, and party workers. This was hardly surprising given that they were closely associated with arbitrary confiscation of grain, fines, illegal arrests, and the use of force. This is not to say that there was no support at all for the kombedy. In Orel province peasants petitioned:

  Send us help, even if it is only a small Red Army detachment, so that we shall be saved from an early death from hunger.... We will point out to you the well-fed grain kings who shelter by their treasure chests.

  We are having to work in unbelievably difficult conditions. Every peasant hides grain, digging it into the earth. Our district was one of first to deliver only because we took repressive measures against those holding it back: namely, we sat peasants in cold barns until they eventually took us to the place where the grain was hidden. But for this they arrested our comrades, the commander of the squad, and three commissars. Now we are still working but less successfully. For hiding grain we confiscate the entire herd without payment, leaving only the 12-funt hunger ration, and we send those who hide their grain to detainment in Malmysh where they have only an eighth of a funt of bread per day. The peasants call us internal enemies and look upon the food officials as beasts and as their enemies. Report of a food-sup ply official, Viatka, March 1920

  78

  12. A food requisition group, 1918

  But even as the kombedy were multiplying in autumn 1918, the party leadership was beginning to doubt the wisdom of the policy. In November the Sixth Congress of Soviets, commenting on the 'bitter dashes between kombedy and peasant organs of power*, called for their abolition.

  In January 1919 a 'turn to the middle peasantry* was accompanied by the institution of a quota assessment (raszverstka% whereby the food commissariat set a grain quota for each province on the basis of estimates of 'surpluses*. Formally, it introduced some predictability into requisitioning, since each county and village knew its quota; but in reality the food detachments continued to operate much as before. The amount requisitioned steadily increased, so that by the third procurement of 1920-1,237 million puds were raised in European Russia, about 23% of gross yield. This was no more than the procurement of 1916-17, yet it represented a huge burden of suffering for the peasantry, since output had almost halved in the intervening period. In March 1920 the chair of Novgorod provincial executive committee reported: 'The province is starving. A huge number of peasants are eating moss and other rubbish.* That the specific policies of requisitioning adopted made

  79

  the food crisis worse is incontrovertible, particularly given that the Bolsheviks did nothing until late in 1920 to try to halt the reduction in sown area. A less rigid policy - perhaps including elements of a tax in kind and greater reliance on the cooperative network - might have helped forestall the disaster that was building up. Nevertheless, even if the Bolsheviks had not taken a single pud of grain, peasants would still have had no incentive to market surpluses. Under Kolchak in Siberia, where there was no requisitioning, lack of manufactures and inflation caused peasants to reduce their sown areas. So it is unlikely that requisitioning could have been avoided. Fundamentally, the Bolsheviks had no choice but 'to take from the hungry to give to the hungrier', for the poor in the towns and grain-deficit provinces simply could not afford to feed themselves at free-market prices.

  That said, at least half the needs of the urban population were met £ through the illegal and semi-legal market. Hundreds of thousands of g 'baggers' scoured the countryside in search of food. The law prescribed e draconian penalties for 'speculation', and 'baggers' ran the risk of jg arrest by the Cheka or by the road-block detachments, whose 1 behaviour was described by the Soviet CEC as a 'shocking disgrace'. Yet the battle against private trade was never consistent, since the government knew that without it townsfolk would starve. Thus even as the nationalization of trade was being proclaimed, the authorities in the two capitals allowed peasants to sell one-and-a-half puds of food per family member on the open market. At the same time, rationing was extended in line with the long-term Bolshevik aspiration to substitute planned distribution of goods for the anarchy of the market. In July 1918 the so-called class ration was introduced in Petrograd, followed by other cities, which grouped the population into four categories. It was designed to discriminate in favour of workers and to al low t he burz/iu/, in Zinoviev's words, just enough bread so that they would not forget its smell. Yet shortages meant that it was frequently impossible to fulfil the rations even of those in category one. A joke went the rounds:

  so

  13. A child's cartoon. The caption reads *A Bolshevik is a person who doesn't want there to be any more burzhui.*

  A religious instruction teacher asked his secondary school: 'Our Lord fed 5,000 people with five loaves and two fishes. What is that called?' To which one wag replied: The ration system'.

  Inability to meet rations fuelled pressure on groups to get themselves into a higher category. By April 1920 in Petrograd, 63% of the population was in category one and only 0.1% in the lowest category. Rationing also fed corruption: by 1920 there were 10 million more ration cards in circulation than members of the urban population.

  A terrifying crisis was building up, yet the scent of victory caused the Bolsheviks by 1920 to believe that the draconian methods used to win the civil war could be turned to the construction of socialism. Trotsky

  81

  was the most enthusiastic exponent of the idea that 'obligation and compulsion' could be used to 'reconstruct economic life on the basis of a single plan'. Not all Bolsheviks were enamoured of the idea of the labour army as a microcosm of socialist society, but for the best part of a year, the leadership committed itself to a vision of army and economy fused into a single, all-embracing military-economic body. During the first half of 1920 as many as 6 million people were drafted to work in cutting timber and peat. In March -with absenteeism on the railways running between 20% and 40% -Trotskytookoverthe Commissariat of Transport and set about imposing militarization on the workforce. This was a fortress built on shifting sand, however, since in some sectors 'labour desertion' ran as high as 90%. In a similar way, some now hailed the fact that black market prices were running at thousands of times their 1917 level as a sign that money was about to disappear, a sign of the arrival of communism. Lenin cautioned that 'it is impossible to £ abolish money at once', yet the effort to stabilize the currency and g maintain money taxes now gave way to a plan to replace currency with e 'labour units' and 'energy units'. In the first half of 1920,11 million jg people, including 7.6 million children, ateforfree in public canteens, 1 where food was meagre
and badly cooked and conditions often filthy. Later in the year, payments for housing, heating, lighting, public transport, the postal service, medical care, theatre, and cinema were abolished, although this was motivated as much by practical concern at the relative cost of collecting payment for these services as by a desire to abolish money perse. Indeed the process of 'naturalizing' the economy took place almost entirely independently of the will of the Bolsheviks; what was distinctive was that they now seized on this as evidence that the transition to socialism was well underway.

  Over the winter of 1920-1 such euphoria was rapidly dispelled. The Volga region, which in 1919-20 had supplied almost 60% of grain procurements, was hit by drought in summer 1920. The drought grew worse in 1921 and by summer it was estimated that 35 million people in an area centred on the Volga, but including parts of southern Ukraine,

  82

  Kazakhstan, and western Siberia, were in the grip of famine. Its severity was compounded by the cut-back in agricultural production, by losses of livestock and equipment due to war, by breakdown in transport and, of course, by requisitioning. As many as 6 million may have died, not only from starvation but from scurvy, dysentery, and typhus. The Commissariat of Enlightenment received grotesque reports that mothers were tying their children to separate corners of their huts for fear that they would eat each other.

  In October 1921 Lenin finally conceded that War Communism had been a mistake, claiming that it had been dictated by 'desperate necessity' and also, rather confusingly, 'an attempt to introduce the socialist principles of production and distribution by "direct assault"'. There can be little doubt that the collapse of industry, chaos in the transport system, and the destruction wrought by war placed severe constraints on the Bolsheviks' room for manoeuvre. Moreover, the war determined that grain procurement and industrial production be concentrated on the needs of the Red Army rather than consumers. That circumstances of war did much to dictate policy can be seen from the fact that even White regimes, committed to the free market, resorted to measures of economic compulsion in the 'interests of state'. Moreover, policies, whether carefully crafted or hastily cobbled together, threw up entirely unintended consequences that set parameters for future action. The imposition of fixed prices on agricultural products, for example, a policy introduced by the tsarist regime, did much to stoke hyperinflation which, in turn, served to undermine the ruble. Nevertheless if structural constraints and contingencies did much to shape the policies that constituted War Communism, one may not conclude that those policies were simply the outcome of 'desperate necessity'. Policy choices were not unilaterally 'imposed' by objective circumstances: they were defined by the dominant conceptions and inherited dispositions of the Bolshevik party, sometimes as matters of explicit choice, sometimes as unconscious reflexes. Antipathy towards the market, and the equation of state