Russian revolution. A very short introduction

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,

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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

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ownership and state regulation with communism all served to determine the policy choices taken. Lenin may have concluded that War Communism was an error, but the command-administrative system and militarized ideology that it engendered proved to be lasting elements of the Soviet system.

Looting the looters

The collapse of industry and the grave food shortages led to the breakdown of urban life. Between 1917 and 1920, the percentage of the population living in towns fell from 18% to 15%, but the population of Petrograd fell by almost 70% and that of Moscow by half. The desperate search for food forced people to truck and barter and to pillage furniture, wooden fences, any available tree to stay warm. The literary critic V. Shklovsky wrote: 'People who lived in housing with central heating died in droves. They froze to death - whole apartments of them.' It was against this background of extraordinary crisis that the centuries-old division between propertied Russia and the toiling masses was wiped out in a matter of months. Seldom has history seen so precipitate and so total a destruction of a ruling class. In its editorial to mark New Year 1919, Pravda proclaimed:

Where are the wealthy, the fashionable ladies, the expensive restaurants and private mansions, the beautiful entrances, the lying newspapers, all the corrupted 'golden life? All swept away.

The nationalization of industry and the banks constituted the principal mechanism through which the assets of the capitalists were expropriated. In the countryside, of course, the peasants turfed the landowners off their estates although not infrequently they allowed them to stay in their ancestral homes. In addition, Soviets and Chekas, strapped for cash and obsessed with putting 'all power into the hands of the localities', exacted 'contributions' and 'confiscations' from those they considered burzhui. In Tver' the soviet demanded sums ranging

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from 20,000 to 100,000 rubles from local traders and industrialists, threatening to send them to Kronstadt if they did notcomply. Given the weakness of the local authorities, such expropriations were often barely distinguishable from banditry, as the leading Chekist M. I. Latsis conceded:

Our Russian figures: 'Don't I really deserve those pants and boots that the bourgeoisie have been wearing until now! That's a reward for my work, right? So, I'll take what's mine.'

Hit by'requisitions', forced to share their apartments with poor families and to do humiliating work assignments, landowners, capitalists, and tsarist officials sold what they could, packed their belongings, and headed for White areas or abroad. Between 1917 and 1921,1.8 million to 2 million emigrated, overwhelmingly from the educated and propertied groups. A surprising number, however, chose to hang on: A. A. Golovin, scion of an ancient family, worked in the garage of the Malyi Theatre in 1921 and his son went on to become famous for his film portrayals of Stalin. These 'former people' - a term once applied to criminals -struggled to conceal their origins and to steer clear of politics. Yet despite their severe reduction in circumstance, they continued to be viewed with mistrust by the regime, seen as the potential fifth column for a White-Guard restoration.

For the multifarious middle classes, opportunities to adapt to the new order were more plentiful, although the revolution also brought a sharp diminution in their privileges. While Lenin despised the intelligentsia, he was quick to understand that the revolution could not survive without 'knowledgeable, experienced, businesslike people'. As well as paying engineers relatively high salaries, doctors, dentists, architects, and other professionals were allowed to practise privately. Nor was it unusual for former factory owners to sit on the industrial-branch boards of the