War Communism

Formation

War Communism was not introduced as a single plan. It accumulated as decrees under the pressure of civil war. The food dictatorship decree of 13 May 1918 declared a state monopoly on grain, the decree of 28 June nationalized large-scale industry, and private trade was prohibited by the end of that year. A Sovnarkom decree of 11 January 1919 institutionalized grain requisitioning by regional quota, the prodrazvyorstka. In November 1920 nationalization was extended to small enterprises with as few as five employees.

Labour and distribution were recast in the same direction. Labour obligation became universal, labour armies were formed, and rations were graded by class in favour of manual workers. Money was not abolished, but hyperinflation stripped it of function, so a large share of wages was paid in kind and transfers between enterprises took the form of physical allocation.

Two readings

The party was divided over what the system was. One reading held it to be a temporary measure forced by war. The other treated the disappearance of money and markets as a direct transition to communism. Bukharin's Economics of the Transition Period (1920) set out the second position theoretically, and several programmatic texts of these years described moneyless distribution as a near prospect.

Lenin settled the argument retrospectively after 1921. His case for NEP rested on the claim that War Communism had been forced by war and privation and could not serve as a model for socialist economic policy.

Outcome

By 1920 large-scale industrial output had fallen to about one seventh of the 1913 level, and sown area and grain harvests fell with it. Urban populations dispersed into the countryside in search of food, and Petrograd and Moscow lost close to half their inhabitants. Much of what the cities did eat came through the prohibited trade of the bag-men, a share estimated in the literature at more than half of urban grain.

Peasant resistance grew into large risings from 1920: the Tambov rebellion, the West Siberian rising, and the peasant bands of Ukraine. In March 1921 the Kronstadt naval mutiny shook the regime's own social base. That same month the Tenth Party Congress replaced prodrazvyorstka with a tax in kind and War Communism ended. The famine that struck the Volga and the Urals in 1921 and 1922 broke out on the agricultural collapse this system left behind.