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.
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. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; OCTOBER REVOLUTION; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH
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.
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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.
The German invasion of June 22, 1941, was an event for which the Soviet Union had been preparing for fifteen years. Soviet war preparations were started in the mid-1920s at a time when no immediate threat of war existed. Stalin and other Bolshevik leaders were preoccupied by the fate of the Russian Empire in World War I. Although Russia entered that war with a substantial food surplus, its economy was destabilized by the mobilization of industry; this deprived the countryside of manufactured commodities, and peasant farmers ceased to sell food in exchange. As a result, the towns and military units went increasingly hungry to a point where industry and the army collapsed. Stalin intended to avoid a repetition. Forced industrialization would raise the economy’s capacity for producing weapons, while farm collectivization would prevent the peasants from retreating again into self- sufficiency. Although brutally and wastefully executed, these policies contributed significantly to Soviet resistance when Germany attacked.
At first the war went worse than envisaged in the most pessimistic prewar plans. Soviet territory was deeply invaded; the real output of the territory under Soviet control fell by one-third; and the burdens of defense increased both relatively and absolutely. By 1943 three-fifths of Soviet output was devoted to the war effort, the highest proportion observed at the time in any economy that did not subsequently collapse under the strain. A railway evacuation of factories and machinery from the zones threatened by occupation shifted the geographical center of the war economy hundreds of kilometers to the east. The production of weapons rose to a level that exceeded Germany’s throughout the war. There was little detailed planning behind this; the important decisions were made in a chaotic, uncoordinated sequence. The civilian economy was neglected and it declined rapidly. By 1942, food, fuels, and metals produced had fallen by half or more. Living standards fell on average by two-fifths while millions were severely overworked and undernourished; however, the state procurement of food from collective farms ensured that industrial workers and soldiers were less likely to starve than peasants. Still the process might have ended in another economic collapse without the stunning victory over the German army at Stalingrad at the end of 1942. This enabled a return to economic planning and a partial restoration of resources to civilian uses. Foreign (mostly American) aid, which added about 5 percent to Soviet resources in 1942 and 10 percent in 1943 and 1944, also relieved the pressure.
The war had lasting economic consequences. It took the lives of one in six Soviet citizens living at its outset, and destroyed perhaps one quarter of the Soviet prewar capital stock. Economic and demographic recovery took decades. The success of the war effort also had lasting consequences: It confirmed the authority of Stalin, as well as that of a new generation of wartime industrial and political managers who survived him and remained in power for thirty more years. The success of the war economy was used to discourage critical thinking about basic economic policies and institutions. For example, Stalin claimed that the war demonstrated the superiority of the Soviet system over capitalism for organizing economic life in both wartime and peacetime. See also: COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE; STALINGRAD, BATTLE OF; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH; WORLD WAR I; WORLD WAR II
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barber, John, and Harrison, Mark. (1991). The Soviet Home Front: A Social and Economic History of the USSR, 1941-1945. London: Longman. Harrison, Mark. (1996). Accounting for War: Soviet Production, Employment,
