Encyclopedia of Russian History

War communism was not an economic success. Food procurements rose at first, but industrial production and employment, harvests, and living standards fell continuously. The fact that the Bolsheviks emerged victorious from the civil war owed more to their enemies’ moral and material weaknesses than to their own strengths. Despite this, they did not abandon war communism immediately when the war came to an end. By the spring of 1920, fighting continued only in Poland and the Caucasus. Still, war communism was upheld. While Lenin defended the system of food procurement against its critics, other Bolsheviks advocated extending control over peasant farming through sowing plans and over industrial workers through militarization of labor.

Such dreaming was rudely interrupted in early 1921 by an anti-Bolshevik mutiny in the Kronstadt naval base and a wave of peasant discontent concentrated in the Tambov province. It was not the end of the civil war, but the threat of another, that brought war communism to an end. This does not prove that the Bolsheviks had always intended to introduce something like war communism; however, it shows that Lenin was disingenuous to suggest that war communism was only a product of circumstances. In the case of war communism, the Bolsheviks willingly made virtues out of apparently necessary evils, then took them much further than necessary. Moreover, one product of civil war circumstances was never abandoned: the one-party state underpinned by a secret police. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; OCTOBER REVOLUTION; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boettke, Peter J. (1990). The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism: The Formative Years, 1918-1928. Boston: Kluwer Academic. Carr, Edward Hallett. (1952). The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, vol. 2. London: Macmillan. Davies, Robert W. (1989). “Economic and Social Policy in the USSR, 1917-41.” In The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 8: The Industrial Economies: The Development of Economic and Social Policies, eds. Peter Mathias and Sidney Pollard. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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WAR ECONOMY

Lih, Lars T. (1990). Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921. Berkeley: University of California Press. Malle, Silvana. (1985). The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918-1921. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nove, Alec. (1992). An Economic History of the USSR, 1917-1991, 3rd ed. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. Zaleski, Eugene. (1962). Planning for Economic Growth in the Soviet Union, 1918-1932. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

MARK HARRISON

WAR ECONOMY

The German invasion of June 22, 1941, was an event for which the Soviet Union had been preparing for fifteen years. Soviet war preparations were started in the mid-1920s at a time when no immediate threat of war existed. Stalin and other Bolshevik leaders were preoccupied by the fate of the Russian Empire in World War I. Although Russia entered that war with a substantial food surplus, its economy was destabilized by the mobilization of industry; this deprived the countryside of manufactured commodities, and peasant farmers ceased to sell food in exchange. As a result, the towns and military units went increasingly hungry to a point where industry and the army collapsed. Stalin intended to avoid a repetition. Forced industrialization would raise the economy’s capacity for producing weapons, while farm collectivization would prevent the peasants from retreating again into self-sufficiency. Although brutally and wastefully executed, these policies contributed significantly to Soviet resistance when Germany attacked.