city conditions

• industrial production decline

  • short supply of raw materials
  • worker conscription
• severe shortage of food, fuel and basic necessities
• blockade of trade reduced supplies
• bread ration was 50g per person in Petrograd
• two-thirds of food from black market
• violence and chaos

  brutal seizure of women and sackmen
• deaths

  5 million from disease and starvation; Typhus epidemic killed 3 million in 1920
• treaty of brest-litovsk


  agricultural regions lost therefore peasant hoarding and food shortages
• Kronstadt Mutiny 1921


  Kronstadt naval base sailors against Red Terror and one party dictatorship
• Kronstadt mutiny events

  10,000 Mensheviks & SRs on strike; psoters calling for freedom and not to live by Bolshevik decrees; LW opposed the lack of union representation; manifesto sent to Lenin for a genuine democracy and a Soviets without Bolsheviks
• Bolshevik reaction to mutiny

  Trotsky took sailors' families hostage, bombed fortresses with artillery

  • 16th March - 18 hour standoff
  • 15,000 rebels imprisoned
• significance of mutiny

  caused divisions in Bolsheviks; led to formation of LW Workers' Opposition under Alexandra Kollontai and Alexander Shlyapknikov
• Workers' Opposition

  protect workers' rights and oppose continuation of war communism - believed Bolsheviks became too authoritarian and strayed too far from 'all power to soviets'; objectified State-appointed trade union leaders
• NEP

  state controlled large-scale industries and small-scale industries were privatised again; ended rationing and workers paid according to how much work done rather than at a centrally low wage
• large-scale industries

  coal, oil, steel
• NEP impact - city

  Stabilised economy by private businesses reopening because Nepmen and private traders got more money flowing freely. However, manufacturer products were scarce therefore prices remained high
• Scissor-Crisis city impact

  High commodity prices meant not enough money to purchase manufactured goods