and ruin that for a time everything must be sub-
ordinated to this fundamental consideration –
at all costs to increase the quantity of goods.. .’
Principal among these goods were food and med-
icine. The aid of Hoover’s American Relief
Administration was, therefore, later accepted. Yet,
all such efforts had only a limited effect in the face
of the scale of the disaster. No understanding of
the early years of Soviet rule is possible without an
appreciation of the suffering of the Russian peo-
ple amid mounting chaos such as had not
occurred in the history of Europe in modern
times. Foreign military intervention, albeit half-
hearted, contributed to the general breakdown.
Lenin, whose authority towered above that of
his frequently arguing lieutenants, heading a
Communist Party which at first was only small,
sought to establish some sort of stable basis on
which communism could be built. Between 1919
and 1922 the Bolshevik Party became a mass
movement of 700,000 members, by no means all
of whom were still revolutionary. In Lenin’s poli-
cies there was little consistency – they were more
reactions to successive emergencies. During the
civil war the Red Army of 5 million men as well
as the workers in the cities had to be fed. The
term ‘war-communism’ is used to describe the
measures taken during the years from July 1918
to 1921, which were as extreme as was the situ-
ation facing Lenin. A Supreme Council of
National Economy had already been created in
December 1917 to take over such industry and
finance as it considered necessary and to plan cen-
trally the Soviet economy. After June 1918,
industrial enterprises were rapidly nationalised
and workers and managers subjected to rigid
control. As money became virtually valueless with
the collapse of the economy, theorists saw one
advantage in the misfortune: communism might
be attained not gradually but in one leap; state
industries could now be ‘purely’ planned – the
money economy abolished and with it all private
enterprise and trade.
The key problem of the war-communist period
was how to secure food from the peasants, whose
alliance with the urban proletariat Lenin had
declared to be essential to the success of the rev-
olution. The value of money had been reduced to
almost nothing; the factories were not producing
goods that could be bartered. The peasants obsti-
nately clung to the ownership of their land and
refused to join state farms. Lenin at first
attempted to divide the peasants, the poor from
the better off – the kulaks, or exploiters, as they
were called. This no doubt succeeded in spread-
ing hatred in the villages but it did not yield grain.
Then he wooed the so-called ‘middle peasants’ –
the supposedly less poor (these categorisations
corresponded to policy tactics rather than reali-
ties: only one in a hundred peasant households
employed more than one labourer). Force was
applied since the state could give nothing to the
peasants in exchange for what were defined as
‘surpluses’. With the utmost ruthlessness, detach-
ments were sent into the countryside to seize
food. Peasants were shot for resisting expropria-
tion. Villages were searched, peasants left desti-
tute. Bolshevik punitive expeditions attempted to
overcome peasant resistance and violence. The
excesses of war-communism were encouraged by
Lenin. The only answer he could find as the crisis
deepened in early 1920 was even more ruthless
pressure on the peasants. Those who were
accused of retaining food were condemned as
‘enemies of the people’. The civil war, above all,
and the policies of war-communism resulting
from it, led, however, to the total collapse of what
remained of the Russian agricultural and indus-
trial economy. Transport had broken down and
there was a large exodus from the starving towns
and idle factories back to the country.
During his years of power, Lenin never
wavered from his insistence on the supreme
authority of the party and centralised control. No
sectional interest of workers or peasants organised
in the form of trade unions should act as a coun-
terpoise to the party. Power was to be retained by
the centre with iron discipline. In this he was
strongly supported by Trotsky, who wished to
rebuild Russia by mobilising the people under
military discipline. Under the harsh realities of the
civil war and its aftermath Lenin had given up
his earlier views that once the revolution had suc-
ceeded the state would begin to wither away and
socialism would evolve by the spontaneous enthu-
siasm and work of the masses. He convinced
1
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