War Communism

• The shortage of grain in spring 1918 led to Lenin taking radical action of food requisitioning.

  • This meant farmers had their produce forcefully taken off them.
• Lenin called for a creation of collective farms but this happened in very few cases.
• From May 1918, detachments of soldiers and workers went to the countryside and ensured produce was delivered to the state but they often helped themselves.
• Farmers were paid a fixed price but often left with very little, they had little motivation therefore to grow crops and production fell.
• It appears that Lenin made these changes due to the extreme circumstances of the Civil War rather than a shift in ideology.
• However, centralisation and nationalisation certainly fitted with socialist principles.
• Certainly, little care seemed to be in place over the conditions of ordinary people.
• The kulaks who had flourished under the Tsarist system were now treated as "enemies of the people" and were liable to have their entire crop seized and often clashed with requisition squads with murders on both sides.
• Banks, the Putilov Iron Works, railways, power companies and eventually all businesses from November 1920 were nationalised.
• The experts and professional managers who had been thrown out of their jobs by the workers were brought back in.
• Strong discipline in the factories, longer working days, wages that were replaced with clothing and lodgings and internal passports were brought in.
• With conscription and people trying to escape the cities in search of food, the population of Petrograd and Moscow halved.
• Hyperinflation was a major problem led to many resorting to barter.

  • Tram tickets in 1921 were a million times higher than in 1917.
• Production in 1921 was about a third of what it was in 1913.
• The population fell from 171 million in 1913 to 131 million in 1921.
• In 1921, things were so bad that people resorted to cannibalism.