War Communism Sputters

Fall 1920

By the autumn of 1920, the Bolsheviks could feel that they were close to achieving their cherished dream. Why had they struggled for all those years? Why had they formed underground organizations, languished in prisons and exile, suffered hard labor? Why had they endured long years in emigration? And, once the tsarist government was overthrown, why had they worked tirelessly to gain the upper hand over the Provisional Government? Why had they bled during the Civil War? This was it – their goal was within reach!

The goal was a communist society. Most people did not have a very clear concept of what that meant. In the future, every Soviet citizen would go through life – at school, at university, at collective farms, factories, and institutes – bored to death by tedious political education on the features of a communist society. But back in 1920, people had only the vague notion that communism would fundamentally transform Russian life. For the better, of course.

What did people expect to happen? Oh, many marvelous things. First of all, inequality would disappear. The slogans “Land to the Peasants” and “Factories to the Workers” sounded very appealing. Immediately after the Bolsheviks came to power, the peasants rushed to plunder the homes of noble landowners and divide up their land. Intoxicated by revolution, people did not much think about the fact that, technically speaking, the land now belonged to the state – not them. That was a minor detail.

Three years before, in the very first months after the October Revolution, Russia saw a phenomenon that Lenin, with endearing frankness, referred to as the “Red Guard attack on capital.” Put simply, everything was quickly nationalized: the banks went to the state during the very first days, and “worker oversight” was established in all the factories, with special commissions demanding access to all of the proprietor’s papers and the right to approve every decision. Owners who refused were quickly kicked out, their property confiscated. Those who did play along also lost their property, just a little later. That supposedly resolved the problem of inequality. There was still some private property in the country, but less with each passing day.

Communism also meant the “withering away of the state.” After all, long before 1917 Marx had promised that the disappearance of the “exploiting classes” would make state violence obsolete. Naturally, this would bring about a beautiful world of free communes where everyone would prosper and be able to freely develop.

For some reason, that is not how it turned out. You would think that once the bourgeoisie was overthrown a new society would immediately arise to take its place. Describing the events of October 1917, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky joyously proclaimed:

October,
   as usual,
      blew its winds.

The tracks
   having slithered across the bridge,
the trams
   continued
      to hurry
but now –
  under socialism.

Дул,
  как всегда,
    октябрь ветра́ми.

Рельсы
  по мосту вызмеив,
гонку
   свою
       продолжали трамы
уже —
   при социализме.

It was really so simple – power was seized, and there you had it! Socialism! And communism was soon to follow. But where was all the promised prosperity? Where were the joyous and well-fed workers? And where was the free development of the individual? And when would the state, which (according to Marxists) had for centuries served the sole purpose of oppressing the toilers, finally vanish, taking oppression along with it?

It should be recognized that the Bolsheviks did, up to a point, actually believe in this utopia. For the first few months they took concrete steps toward not only transforming the economy, but also “withering” the state.

The army was the tool of the exploiters. Replace it with a volunteer militia! 

The state apparatus served the interest of the bourgeoisie. Power to the soviets: elective bodies truly of the people!

The volunteer militia lasted about two months. There were conspicuously few volunteers eager to spill their blood for the new powers that be. Conscription had to be urgently organized. As for the soviets (the word means “council” in Russian), they did indeed proliferate across the country. But, working in parallel with them were very different entities that did not fit very well with the idea of universal freedom. Party committees held the real power, and they felt they had the right to dictate to the soviets. When workers expressed surprise that power, which was supposed to belong to them, was actually in the hands of party officials, Lenin matter-of-factly explained that the party knows what the workers want better than they themselves do, so everyone must submit to the will of the party. And if someone failed to recognize the correctness of that thinking, the Cheka (the chrezvychainaya komissiya or extraordinary commission – basically the political police and precursor to the KGB) would set them straight.* 

Of course, all that oppression was perceived as temporary. After all, there was a civil war going on: somehow the bourgeoisie and the nobility failed to appreciate why their property had been confiscated and were putting up a fight. But just as soon as the Party triumphed, the country would make a great leap forward toward communist freedom. For the time being, people waited for that freedom, and efforts were focused on fighting inequality.

And so it began. If the nationalizing that took place in the revolution’s immediate aftermath was a “Red Guard attack,” what should we call what followed? With every passing month, more and more enterprises came into the hands of the state. And, beginning in 1919, the peasants had almost their entire harvests unceremoniously expropriated. In exchange, they were promised some sort of mysterious “manufactured goods” that could supposedly be retrieved somewhere in the city, but in fact simply did not exist. The reason they did not exist was that the factories were essentially at a standstill. And the reason they were at a standstill was that commerce had been banned. And the reason commerce was banned was that, under communism, there would be no commerce. And no money.

Indeed, by 1920, money had withered away on its own. Wages were paid in those few goods that were being produced. Food was purchased with ration coupons. Former exploiters were not even eligible for such coupons. “He would does not work, does not eat.” If you, Citizen Bourgeois (Nobleman, Priest, Lawyer, Journalist, or Writer) want to work, go to the factory. Or serve the new authorities in some other way. If you don’t, then go ahead and die of hunger. Or you can try to exchange your gold chain for a crust of bread on the black market. That assumes that the peasants manage to hide some of their grain from the armed expropriators and sneak something edible into town.

As the country continued down the path toward communism, what they saw in the distance looked less and less like a golden age, which generally isn’t thought to include famine, typhus, summary executions, torture, and arrests. By the autumn of 1920, this disparity between the vision and reality was plainly evident. The Bolsheviks, like anyone fanatically devoted to an idea, nevertheless tried to force reality into the communist mold. If communism was the goal, there would be communism.

They just had to redouble their efforts. This meant making apartments and transportation free (there wasn’t anything to pay for them with anyway), and “exploiters” were drafted into a labor army, where they could be “re-educated” through menial labor. The effort to abolish private property was also redoubled. The few little workshops with a handful of employees that had survived were now placed under the control of... The people? The state? It was a little unclear. What mattered was that private property was a thing of the past. Famine and destruction were temporary problems. Prosperity was right around the corner. The harder life was in the short term, the easier it would be in the future.

But for some reason, it never got easier. The glorious idea of communism no longer seemed so appealing. The countryside despised the new authorities; the city was starving and freezing. It took a few sizable uprisings before the Bolsheviks finally realized that they had better pull back on the Red Guard attack. In the spring of 1921, the New Economic Policy was announced. Some industry was transferred into private hands, commerce was decriminalized, and the country breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that the madness had come to an end. Alas, not for long. Worse horrors lay ahead.

Many years later, when the Soviet authorities had a firm hold on power, someone came up with the following joke:

The elderly granddaughter of a Decembrist asks some revolutionary sailors what they want. They respond: “For there to be no more rich people.”

“How strange,” she replies. “My grandfather wanted for there to be no more poor people.”