Lenin and the economy
Cards (21)
- Capitalism - degree of state control but private markets would remain.
- •The conditions of the Civil War meant the inefficiencies of State Capitalism couldn’t continue anymore.•War Communism saw the loss of many of the freedoms after the October Revolution and a return to strict government control over the economy. Lenin justified this as a necessary measure to defeat the White Army
- •In 1920 there was a large peasants rebellion in Tambov Province, south-west of Moscow.•The peasants were unhappy with grain requisitioning and they formed a group called the Union of Toiling Peasants (UTP).•It grew in popularity and issued a manifesto calling for political equality, land reform, an end to the civil war and other reforms.•The UTP was led by Alexander Antonov, a former SR who had been a police officer under the Provisional Government.
- •By 1921, he had organised the Tambov peasants into an army of more than 20,000 men which were known as the “Blue Army” (to distinguish themselves from the Reds and Whites).•Lenin denounced the uprising and declared the Tambov army a rabble comprised of kulaks. Privately, he realised they posed a danger to Moscow.•More than 100,000 Red Army troops were sent to Tambov, led by experienced commanders like Tukhachevsky. They were ordered to shoot all suspected rebels and poison gas was used to flush them out of hiding•Antonov evaded capture until 1922 when he was killed.
- •The Kronstadt soldiers were renowned for their role in the revolution. They were the first to mutiny in the 1905 revolution and they sailed the Aurora battleship into the River Neva in the October Revolution. Trotsky called them “the reddest of the red”.•But, the conditions of War Communism led them to turn against the Bolsheviks and they presented a petition to Lenin demanding the end of War Communism and the end to one-party Communist government (“Soviets without Bolsheviks”).
- •This enraged the Bolshevik leaders and Trotsky organised a military campaign to crush them.•Kronstadt was an island fortress but it was winter and the sea around the base had frozen.•Trotsky sent 60,000 soldiers with white camouflage and heavy artillery across the ice. They besieged the fortress for three weeks until Kronstadt finally fell.•The sailors fled north to try to reach Finland. About 2,000 were captured, taken to the forests outside Petrograd and executed.•Tambov and Kronstadt together made Lenin realise that something had to change.
- •The crisis was over by 1926
- · Lenin introduced the Decree on Land in October 1917 which abolished private ownership of land, legitimising the peasant seizures and declared that all land belonged to the “entire people”. Further decrees in November recognised workers “control” over their own factories, giving them the right to “supervise management” through the establishment of factory committees, and similar committees were set up for rural areas.
- · December 1917, Veshenka (the Council of the National Economy) was set up to supervise and control economic development. Lenin resisted demands within the party that he should nationalise industry.
- · Lenin’s fears about peasant and worker control were well-founded. Workers didn’t organise their factories efficiently and output shrank when it was most needed. Some workers gave themselves unsustainable pay-rises, others helped themselves to stocks and equipment (workers cut the conveyor belts to make soles for boots) but they mostly lacked the skills needed for successful management.
- More money than goods was available so there was high inflation. Peasants hoarded their produce instead of selling it for worthless money making the food shortages in the towns worse (and the loss of the Ukraine to the Germans made it even worse). Citizens of Petrograd were living on rations of just 50 grams of break per day by February 1918 and food riots were threatening to undermine Bolshevik control.
- · 1918, faced with another “grain crisis”, Lenin introduced grain requisitioning (taking grain and other foodstuffs from the peasants at a fixed rate to supply urban workers and soldiers; the rate took no account of harvests or local conditions).
- · May 1918, a food-supplies policy was introduced where detachments of soldiers and workers from the towns were sent to the countryside to ensure grain was delivered to the State. They were supposed to be paid a fixed price but grain, livestock carts and firewood were often brutally confiscated.
- · The poor peasants were seen as allies of the urban proletariat but the “kulaks” were seen as “the grasping fists” and “enemies of the people”. They had their stocks seized, bringing misery to rural areas and causing resistance. Peasants hid crops, grew less and murdered members of the requisition squads. The Cheka were used extensively to enforce the policy.
- · Nationalisation was also taking place: the railways, banks, merchant fleet, power companies and the Putilov Iron Works. Workers lost the freedom they had formerly enjoyed and professional managers were employed by the State to reimpose discipline and increase output (these were often the same “sepcialists” who had recently been removed from factory ownership). Working hours were extended and ration-card workbooks replaced wages. Internal passports were introduced to stop employees drifting back to the countryside.
- · All private trade and manufacture were forbidden. Was this a transition to a socialist economy, as money was replaced by a system of barter? There is no evidence that Lenin intended to radicalise the economy so quickly. “It is easy to see that War Communism existed to ensure that the Red Army was supplied with munitions and food by the towns but whether there was more to it is unclear; it is an issue that has vexed contemporaries and historians alike.”
- · War Communism created more problems than it solved. Production declined and by 1921, industrial output had fallen to roughly 20% of pre-war levels and rations were cut. Cholera and dysentery was ride and a typhus epidemic swept through the cities, killing more than 3 million in 1920. Some workers went on strike and others ignored the passport system, braving the guards to go to the countryside.
- · But the situation in the countryside was little better. Grain supplied fell to dangerous levels and there was a famine in 1921 where millions died of malnourishment and disease. “Russia’s population, which had stood at 170.9 million in 1913, had fallen to 130.9 million by 1921. Conditions were so bad that there were even reports of cannibalism and trade in dead bodies.”
- · Gosplan was formally established, bya. Sovnarkom decree in February 1921, to advise on a New Economic Policy, which was formally announced at the 10th Party Congress in August 1921. It was supported by Bukharin, Zinoviev and most of the leadership but many rank and file Bolsheviks saw the NEP as an ideological betrayal.
- · Grain requisitioning ended although peasants still had to pay some grain to the state as a form of tax. They were permitted to sell any surplus though.
- Crisis was short-lived and by 1926, production levels of 1913 had breen reached again. This brought better living standards, an end to revolts and disputes and some favourable trade agreements with Britain and Germany. A money economy and private wealth returned as the Nepmen flourished by buying grain and industrial goods and reselling them around the country and the kulak class reemerged.