republics.
The White movement did pose a deadly threat to the Reds. Ultimately there could be no compromise between the two sides. The White armies were many, contained an extremely high proportion of officers, and often fought bravely. The Reds, however, had advantages that in the end proved decisive. The Soviet government controlled the heart of Russia, including both Moscow and Petrograd, most of its population, much of its industry, and the great bulk of military supplies intended for the First World War. The White armies constantly found themselves outnumbered and, in spite of Allied help, more poorly equipped. Also, the Red Army enjoyed the inner lines of communication, while its opponents had to shift around on the periphery. Still more important, the Reds possessed a strict unity of command, whereas the Whites fought, in fact, separate and unco-ordinated wars. Politics, as well as geography, contributed to the White disunity. Anti-Bolshevism represented the only generally accepted tenet in the camp, which encompassed everyone from the monarchists to the Socialist Revolutionaries. Few positive programs were proposed or developed. The Whites' inability to come to terms with non-Russian nationalities constituted a particular political weakness. White generals thought naturally in terms of 'Russia one and indivisible' and reacted against separatism; or at least, they felt it quite improper to decide on their own such fundamental questions as those of national independence and boundaries. Thus Denikin antagonized the Ukrainians by his measures to suppress the Ukrainian
language and schools, and Iudenich weakened his base in Estonia because he would not promise the Estonians independence.
In the last analysis, the attitude of the population probably determined the outcome of the Civil War in Russia. Whereas the upper and middle classes favored the Whites, and the workers, with some notable exceptions, backed the Reds, the peasants, that is, the great majority of the people, assumed a much more cautious and aloof attitude. Many of them came to hate both sides, for White rule, as well as Red rule, often brought mobilization, requisitions, and terror - as cruel as, if less systematic than, that of the Cheka. In many areas anarchic peasant bands attacked both combatants. Indeed, this so called green resistance proved to be in scope, casualties, and, alas, cruelty quite comparable to the more prominent struggle between the Whites and the Reds, although it was by its very nature local rather than national. Still, on the whole, the peasants apparently preferred the Reds to the Whites. After all, they had obtained the gentry land following the October Revolution, while the Whites were associated in their minds - not entirely unjustly - with some kind of restoration of the old order, a possibility that evoked hatred and fear in the Russian village.
The first Soviet constitution was adopted by the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets and promulgated on July 10, 1918. It created the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, or the R.S.F.S.R. Local Soviets elected delegates to a provincial congress of Soviets, and provincial congresses in turn elected the membership of the All- Russian Congress of Soviets. The latter elected the Executive Committee, which acted in the intervals between congressional sessions, and the Council of People's Commissars. Elections were open rather than secret, and they were organized on a class basis, with the industrial workers especially heavily represented. By contrast, the 'non- toiling classes' received no vote. In effect, the Communist party, particularly its Central Committee and Political Bureau headed by Lenin, from the beginning dominated the government apparatus and ruled the country. Besides, the same leading Communists occupied the top positions in both party and government, with Lenin at the head of both. On December 30, 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics came into being as a federation of Russia, Ukraine, White Russia, and Transcaucasia. Later in the '20's three Central Asiatic republics received 'Union Republic' status. Compared to the empire of the Romanovs, the new state had lost Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Polish territories, all of which had become independent, and had lost western Ukraine and
western White Russia to Poland, Bessarabia to Rumania, and the Kars-Ardakhan area in Transcaucasia to Turkey. Also, as already mentioned, Japan evacuated all of the Siberian mainland of Russia only in 1922, and the Russian half of the island of Sakhalin in 1925. In spite of these reductions in size, the U.S.S.R. emerged as an enormous country.
At the end of the Civil War Soviet Russia was exhausted and ruined. The droughts of 1920 and 1921 and the frightful famine during that last year added the final, gruesome chapter to the disaster. In the years following the originally 'bloodless' October Revolution epidemics, starvation, fighting, executions, and the general breakdown of the economy and society had taken something like twenty million lives. Another two million had left Russia - with Wrangel, through the Far East, or in numerous other ways - rather than accept Communist rule, the emigres including a high proportion of educated and skilled people. War Communism might have saved the Soviet government in the course of the Civil War, but it also helped greatly to wreck the national economy. With private industry and trade proscribed and the state unable to perform these functions on a sufficient scale, much of the Russian economy ground to a standstill. It has been estimated that the total output of mines and factories fell in 1921 to 20 per cent of the pre-World War level, with many crucial items experiencing an even more drastic decline; for example, cotton fell to 5 per cent, iron to 2 per cent, of the prewar level. The peasants responded to requisitioning by refusing to till their land. By 1921 cultivated land had shrunk to some 62 per cent of the prewar acreage, and the harvest yield was only about 37 per cent of normal. The number of horses declined from 35 million in 1916 to 24 million in 1920, and cattle from 58 to 37 million during the same span of time. The exchange rate of an American dollar, which had been two rubles in 1914, rose to 1,200 rubles in 1920.
The unbearable situation led to uprisings in the countryside and to strikes and violent unrest in the factories. Finally, in March 1921, the Kronstadt naval base, celebrated by the Communists as one of the sources of the October Revolution, rose in rebellion against Communist rule. It is worth noting that the sailors and other Kronstadt rebels demanded free Soviets and the summoning of a constituent assembly. Although Red Army units ruthlessly suppressed the uprising, the well-nigh general dissatisfaction with Bolshevik rule could not have been more forcefully expressed. And it was against this background of utter devastation and discontent that Lenin, who, besides, had finally to admit that a world revolution was not imminent, proceeded in the spring of 1921 to inaugurate his New Economic Policy in place of War Communism. Once more Lenin
proved to be the realist who had to overcome considerable doctrinaire opposition to have his views prevail in the party and, therefore, in the entire country.
The New Economic Policy was a compromise, a temporary retreat on the road to socialism, in order to give the country an opportunity to recover; and it was so presented by Lenin. The Communist party, of course, retained full political control; the compromise and relaxation never extended to politics. In economics, the state kept its exclusive hold on the 'commanding heights,' that is, on finance, on large and medium industry, on modern transportation, on foreign trade, and on all wholesale commerce. Private enterprise, however, was allowed in small industry, which meant plants employing fewer than twenty workers each, and in retail trade. The government's change of policy toward the peasants was perhaps still more important. Instead of requisitioning their produce, as had been done during War Communism, it established a definite tax in kind, particularly in grain, replaced later by a money tax. The peasants could keep and sell on the free market what remained after the payment of the tax, and thus they were given an obvious incentive to produce more. Eventually the authorities even permitted a limited use of hired labor in agriculture and a restricted lease of land. The government also revamped and stabilized the financial system, introducing a new monetary unit, the
The New Economic Policy proved to be a great economic success. After the frightful starvation years of 1921 and 1922 - years, incidentally, when many more Russians would have perished, but for the help received from the American Relief Administration headed by Herbert Hoover, from the Quakers, and from certain other groups - the Russian economy revived in a remarkable manner. In 1928 the amount of land under cultivation already slightly exceeded the pre-World War area. Industry on the whole also reached the prewar level. It should be added that during the N.E.P. period, in contrast to the time of War Communism, the government demanded that state industries account for costs and pay for themselves. It was highly characteristic of the N.E.P. that 75 per cent of retail trade fell into private hands. In general, the so-called Nepmen, the small businessmen allowed to operate by
