War Communism

Question 1

WC - reasons - economic

Answer 1

peasants relutant to sell foodstuffs for money

• collapse of consumer production and the huge inflation of prices, peasants could buy less and less with the rouble fortunes they were being offered for their produce.
• reduced their production, shifted to crops not subject to state control, or hid their surpluses from the governments procurement agents

petty trade - bagmen

• leave the cities with bags of clothes and household goods to sell or exchange in the rural markets, and return with bags of food.
• The railways were paralysed by the armies of ‘bagmen’.
• trade cooperatives by 1918, they claimed to serve the needs of a hundred million consumers (70 per cent of the population).

industry chaos

• Many of the committees gave their own anarchic gloss to the Decree on Workers’ Control, taking it to mean the right of the workers to divide between themselves the products of their labour
• On the average day in the average factory 30 per cent of the workforce would be absent.

Question 2

WC - reasons - political - means of civil war

Answer 2

• the policies of War Communism were seen by the Bolsheviks as an instrument of struggle against their social or ‘internal’ enemies (Figes)
• kept in place for more than a year after the White armies had been defeated.
• means of making civil war (Figes)
• stem the chaos of the bag-trade and to get a firm grip on industry, if they were to avoid certain defeat.

Question 3

WC - reasons - political - necessary by war

Answer 3

• Vladimir Lenin said that “the confiscation of surpluses from the peasants was a measure with which we were saddled by the imperative conditions of war-time.”
• “War Communism was thrust upon us by war and ruin. It was not, nor could it be, a
  policy that corresponded to the economic tasks of the proletariat. It was a temporary
  measure.”

Question 4

WC - reasons - political - ultimate goal of revolution

Answer 4

• “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” Bukharin
• “War communism was the deliberate aim of the revolution and unrelated to the civil war” Sheldon Richman
• needs of the Civil War were at best a secondary consideration; indeed, some of the measures introduced under War Communism impeded the war effort. (Pipes)

Question 5

WC - elements

Answer 5

1. nationalization of all industries and the introduction of strict centralized management (28 June Decree on nationalization)
2. introduction of State control of foreign trade
3. strict discipline for workers, with strikes disallowed
4. imposition of obligatory labour duty onto non-working classes
5. prodrazvyorstka – requisition of agricultural surpluses (in excess of an absolute minimum) from peasants for centralized distribution among the remaining population
6. rationing of food and most commodities, with centalized distribution thereof in urban centers
7. private enterprise became illegal
8. the State introduced military-style control of railways

Question 6

WC - requisitioning

Answer 6

• he ‘Food Army’ led this onslaught on the ‘kulak hoarders’. Its armed requisitioning brigades (prodotriady) were empowered to occupy the villages and extract their surplus grain by force
• their 76,000 members were made up mainly of the unemployed, the rootless and migrant lumpen elements, and former soldiers with nowhere else to go
• ‘often used coercion against the peasantry’, and that they took from them not only surplus grain but vital stocks of seed, private property, guns and vodka.
• quotas of the food levy were set from above, by the central state, in accordance with its general needs and then simply divided among the provincial authorities.

Question 7

WC - requisitioning - effects

Answer 7

• July and August 1918 there were over 200 uprisings against the food brigades.
• he food brigades had no effective means of accounting for the harvest. The kombedy pursued their own local interests at the expense of the centre, sometimes even keeping the grain for themselves.
• fifth of levy collected by end of year

Question 8

WC - economic impacts

Answer 8

• industrial production by 1920 was 20% of pre-war volume
• gross agricultural output fell from 69 million tonnes in 1909-13 to less than 31 million in 1921
• • Throughout the period of War Communism the trains continued to be filled by bagmen (it was easy for them to bribe the railway officials). Lenin himself acknowledged that at least half the foodstuffs reaching the towns had been brought in by the …. The Bolsheviks had little choice but to tolerate this private trade, without which the workers would have starved
• The ruble collapsed and barter increasingly replaced money as a medium of exchange
• 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

Question 9

WC - social impacts

Answer 9

• Three-quarters of Russia’s factories were hit by strikes during the first six months of 1920.
• • 1917-21 population down by 16 million, not counting war and emigration
• Moscow and Petrograd, population declines 58.2%
• 118 separate peasant uprisings alone in February 1921.

Question 10

WC histo

Answer 10

Pipes: ‘Instead raising productivity to unprecedented heights, War Communism had reduced it to levels that threatened Russia’s very survival.’