A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

After his adventures in the civil war Dmitry Os'kin took over the command of the Second Labour Army in February 1920. Formed from the surplus troops of the Second Red Army after Denikin's defeat, it was set the task of restoring the devastated railways on the Southern Front. Instead of rifles the soldiers carried spades. 'There was a general feeling of anti-climax not to be involved in the fighting any more,' Os'kin later wrote. 'It was a dull life in the railway sidings.' The only compensation for the commissar was the knowledge that the work was essential for the restoration of the economy after the ravages of the revolution and the civil war. The southern railways carried vital supplies of grain and oil to the industrial cities of the north. During the civil war some 3,000 miles of track had been destroyed. There were huge cemeteries of broken-down engines. Travelling from Balashov to Voronezh, Os'kin noted the general ruination: 'The stations were dead, trains rarely passed through, at night there was no lighting, only a candle in the telegraph office. Buildings were half-destroyed, windows broken, everywhere the dirt and rubbish was piled high.' It was a symbol of Russia's devastation. Os'kin's soldiers cleared up the mess, and rebuilt tracks and bridges. Military engineers repaired the trains. By the summer the railways began to function again and the operation was declared a great success. There was talk of using the troops to run other sectors of the economy.¹ Trotsky was the champion of militarization. On his orders the First Labour Army had been organized from the remnants of the Third Red Army in January 1920. After the defeat of Kolchak, the soldiers had been kept in their battle units and deployed on the 'economic front' — procuring food, felling timber and manufacturing simple goods, as well as repairing the railways. The plan was in part pragmatic. The Bolsheviks were afraid to demobilize the army in the midst of the economic crisis. If millions of unemployed soldiers were allowed to congregate in the cities, or join the ranks of the disenchanted peasants, there could be a nationwide revolt (as there was in 1921). Moreover, it was clear that drastic measures were needed to restore the railways, which Trotsky, for one, saw as the key to the country's recovery after the devastations of the civil war. In January 1920 he became the Commissar for Transport: it was

the first post he had actually requested. Apart from their chronic disrepair, the railways were dogged by corrupt officials, who were like a broken dam to the flood of bagmen who brought such chaos to the system. Petty localism also paralysed the railways. Every separate branch line formed its own committee and there were dozens of district rail authorities competing with each other for scarce rolling stock. Rather than lose 'their' locomotives to the neighbouring authority they would uncouple them before the train left their jurisdiction, so trains would be held up for hours, sometimes even days, while new locomotives were brought up from the depot of the next authority. Despite the best efforts of the railway staff, it took a whole week for one of Trotsky's senior officials to travel the 300 miles from Odessa to Kromenchug.²

But at the heart of Trotsky's plans there was also a broader vision of the whole of society being run on military lines. Like many Bolsheviks in 1920, Trotsky envisaged the state as the commander of society — mobilizing its resources in accordance with the Plan — just as a General Staff commanded the army. He wanted the economy to be run with military-style discipline and precision. The whole population was to be conscripted into labour regiments and brigades and despatched like soldiers to carry out production orders (couched in terms of 'battles' and 'campaigns') on the economic front. Here was the prototype of the Stalinist command economy. Both were driven by the notion that in a backward peasant country such as Russia state coercion could be used to provide a short-cut to Communism, thus eliminating the need for a long NEP-type stage of capital accumulation through the market. Both were based on the bureaucratic fantasy of imposing Communism by decree (although in each case the result was more akin to feudalism than anything to be found in Marx). As the Mensheviks had once warned, it was impossible to complete the transition towards a socialist economy by using the methods that had been used to build the pyramids.