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War communism or military communism (Russian: Военный коммунизм, Vojenný kommunizm) was the economic and political system that existed in Soviet Russia during the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1921. War communism began in June 1918, enforced by the Supreme Economic Council (Russian: Высший Совет Народного Хозяйства), known as the Vesenkha. It ended on 21 March 1921, with the beginning of the New Economic Policy, which lasted until 1928. The system has often been described as simple authoritarian control by the ruling and military castes to maintain power and control in the Soviet regions, rather than any coherent political ideology. The Soviet propaganda justified it by claiming that the Bolsheviks adopted this policy with the goal of keeping towns (the proletarian power-base) and the Red Army stocked with food and weapons since circumstances dictated new economic measures.

The deadly Russian famine of 1921–22, which killed about five million people, was in part triggered by Vladimir Lenin's war communism policies, especially food requisitioning. However, the famine was preceded by bad harvests, harsh winter, drought especially in the Volga Valley which was exacerbated by a range of factors including the war, the presence of the White Army and the methods of war communism. The outbreaks of diseases such as cholera and typhus were also contributing factors to the famine casualties.

Policies

War communism included the following policies:

1. Nationalization of all industries and the introduction of strict centralized management
2. State control of foreign trade
3. Strict discipline for workers, with strikes forbidden
4. Obligatory labor duty by non-working classes
5. Prodrazvyorstka – requisition of agricultural surplus (in excess of an absolute minimum) from peasants for centralized distribution among the remaining population
6. Rationing of food and most commodities, with centralized distribution in urban centers
7. Private enterprise banned
8. Military-style control of the railways

It has long been debated whether "war communism" represented an actual economic policy in the proper sense of the phrase, or merely a set of measures intended to win the civil war.

Background and aims

Historians have noted that both Tsarist Russia government councils and other opposition parties had advocated for food requisitioning prior to the ascent of the Bolsheviks. However, the goals of the Bolsheviks in implementing war communism are a matter of controversy. Some commentators, including a number of Bolsheviks, have argued that its sole purpose was to win the war. Vladimir Lenin, for instance, said that "the confiscation of surpluses from the peasants was a measure with which we were saddled by the imperative conditions of war-time." Other Bolsheviks, such as Yurii Larin, Lev Kritzman, Leonid Krasin, and Nikolai Bukharin, argued that it was a transitional step towards socialism. Commentators, such as the historian Richard Pipes, the philosopher Michael Polanyi, and economists, such as Paul Craig Roberts or Sheldon L. Richman, have argued that war communism was actually an attempt to immediately eliminate private property, commodity production and market exchange, and in that way to implement communist economics, and that the Bolshevik leaders expected an immediate and large-scale increase in economic output. This view was also held by Bukharin, who said that "We conceived War Communism as the universal, so to say 'normal' form of the economic policy of the victorious proletariat and not as being related to the war, that is, conforming to a definite state of the civil war".

Results

Military

War communism was largely successful at its primary purpose of aiding the Red Army in halting the advance of the White Army, and in helping the Bolsheviks to re-conquer most of the territory of the former Russian Empire.

Social

In the cities and surrounding countryside, the population experienced hardships as a result of the war. Peasants, because of the extreme scarcity, were beginning to refuse to co-operate in giving food for the war effort. Workers began migrating from the cities to the countryside, where the chances to feed themselves were higher, thus further decreasing the possibility of barter of industrial goods for food and worsening the plight of the remaining urban population and further weakening the economy and industrial production. Between 1918 and 1920, Petrograd lost 70% of its population, while Moscow lost over 50%. Barrier troops were also used to enforce Bolshevik control over food supplies in areas controlled by the Red Army to protect against raids from anti-communist forces.

A series of workers' strikes and peasants' rebellions against war communism policies broke out all over the country, such as the Tambov Rebellion (1920–1921), which was neutralized by the Red Army. A turning point came with the Kronstadt rebellion at the Kronstadt naval base in early March 1921, which also ended with a Bolshevik victory. The rebellion startled Lenin because Bolsheviks considered Kronstadt sailors the "reddest of the reds". The nature of these uprisings and their leadership were also of significant concern because they were generally left-wing uprisings led by opposition leftists, thus creating competition with the Bolsheviks. According to David Christian, the Cheka, the state Communist Party secret police, reported 118 peasant uprisings in February 1921.

David Christian, in his book Imperial and Soviet Russia, summarises the state of Russia in 1921 after years of war communism:

A government claiming to represent the people now found itself on the verge of being overthrown by that same working class. The crisis had undermined the loyalty of the villages, the towns and finally sections of the army. It was fully as serious as the crises faced by the tsarist government in 1905 and February 1917.

The deadly Russian famine of 1921–22, which killed about five million people battered an already war-torn Russia, Vladimir Lenin's war communism policies took an unintended negative turn. The measure were harsh, but it did help the Bolsheviks to win the Civil War and stabilize the crisis of the nation. Trotsky had proposed the principles underlying the N.E.P. in 1921 to the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to mitigate urgent economic matters arising from war communism and reproached Lenin privately about the delayed government response in 1922–1923.

Economic

A black market emerged in Russia, despite the threat of martial law against profiteering. The ruble collapsed, with barter increasingly replacing money as a medium of exchange and, by 1921, heavy industry output had fallen to 20% of 1913 levels. 90% of wages were paid with goods rather than money. 70% of locomotives were in need of repair, and food requisitioning, combined with the effects of seven years of war and a severe drought, contributed to a famine that caused between 3 and 10 million deaths. Coal production decreased from 27.5 million tons (1913) to 7 million tons (1920), while overall factory production also declined from 10,000 million roubles to 1,000 million roubles. According to the noted historian David Christian, the grain harvest was also slashed from 80.1 million tons (1913) to 46.5 million tons (1920).

See also

• Barracks communism
• Council of Labor and Defense
• Family in the Soviet Union
• Left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks

Footnotes

1. Himmer, Robert (1994). "The Transition from War Communism to the New Economic Policy: An Analysis of Stalin's Views". The Russian Review. 53 (4): 515–529. doi:10.2307/130963. JSTOR 130963.
2. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "War Communism". Encyclopaedia Britannica.
3. Mawdsley, Evan (2007). The Russian Civil War. Pegasus Books. p. 287. ISBN 978-1-933648-15-6.
4. Götz, Norbert; Brewis, Georgina; Werther, Steffen (2020). Humanitarianism in the Modern World: The Moral Economy of Famine Relief. Cambridge University Press. p. 44. ISBN 978-1-108-49352-9.
5. Heinzen, James W. (2004). Inventing a Soviet Countryside: State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917–1929. University of Pittsburgh Pre. p. 52. ISBN 978-0-8229-7078-1.
6. Raleigh, Donald J. (2021). Experiencing Russia's Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917–1922. Princeton University Press. p. 202. ISBN 978-1-4008-4374-9.
7. Werth 2013, p. .
8. Lih, Lars T. (2023). What Was Bolshevism?. Brill. p. 149. ISBN 978-90-04-68479-9.
9. Baykov, Alexander (1946). the development of the soviet economic system. CUP Archive. p. 16.
10. Sanborn, Joshua A. (2014). Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire. Oxford University Press. p. 256. ISBN 978-0-19-964205-2.
11. Lenin, V. I. (1965). Collected Works. Vol. 32. Moscow: Progress Publishers. p. 187.
12. Szamuely, Laszlo (1974), First Models of the Socialist Economic Systems, Budapest, pp. 45–61{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
13. Polanyi, Michael (1960). "Towards a Theory of Conspicuous Production". Soviet Survey (34): 90–99.
14. Roberts, Paul Craig (1990) . Alienation and the Soviet Economy: The Collapse of the Socialist Era. Independent Studies in Political Economy (2nd revised ed.). Oakland, California: Independent Institute.
15. Richman, Sheldon L. (Winter 1981). "War Communism to NEP: The Road From Serfdom" (PDF). Journal of Libertarian Studies. 5 (1): 89–97.
16. Bukharin, Nikolai (1967). The path to socialism in Russia. New York: Omicron Books. p. 178.
17. Richard Pipes (2011). Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. Knopf Doubleday. p. 371. ISBN 9780307788610.
18. Lih, Lars T., Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921, University of California Press (1990), p. 131
19. Pipes, p. 373.
20. Christian, David (1997). Imperial and Soviet Russia. London: Macmillan Press Ltd. p. 239. ISBN 0-333-66294-6.
21. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "War Communism". Encyclopaedia Britannica.
22. Mawdsley, Evan (2007). The Russian Civil War. Pegasus Books. p. 287. ISBN 978-1-933648-15-6.
23. Deutscher, Isaac (2003). The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921. Verso. pp. 414–415. ISBN 978-1-85984-441-0.
24. R. W. Davies; Mark Harrison; S. G. Wheatcroft (1993). The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945. Cambridge University Press. p. 6. ISBN 978-0-521-45770-5.
25. "Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921". publishing.cdlib.org. Retrieved 2021-10-27.
26. "Twentieth Century Atlas – Death Tolls". necrometrics.com. Retrieved 2017-12-12.
27. Christian, David (1997). Imperial and Soviet Russia. London: Macmillan Press Ltd. p. 236. ISBN 0-333-66294-6.

Further reading

• Ball, Alan M. Russia's Last Capitalists: The Nepmen, 1921–1929 (U of California Press, 1990) online free pp 10–38.
• Boettke, Peter J (1988). "The Soviet experiment with pure communism". Critical Review. 2 (4): 149–182. doi:10.1080/08913818808459545. S2CID 145695319.
• Markevich, Andrei, and Mark Harrison. "Great War, Civil War, and recovery: Russia's national income, 1913 to 1928." Journal of Economic History 71.3 (2011): 672–703. online
• Malle, Silvana. The Economic Organization of War Communism 1918—1921 (Cambridge University Press, 2002. — 568 p.) ISBN 0521527031.
• Roberts, Paul C. "'War Communism': A Re-examination," Slavic Review 29 (June 1970): 238–261
• Werth, Nicolas (2013). Histoire de l'Union soviétique de Lénine à Staline 1917–1953 (in French) (4th ed.). Paris: Presses universitaires de France. ISBN 9782130623328. OCLC 1022270516.

• 1918 establishments in Russia
• 1921 disestablishments in Russia
• 1910s in economic history
• 1920s in economic history
• Russian Civil War
• Soviet phraseology
• Economic history of the Soviet Union