The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  Through a combination of coercion and inducement, the government managed somehow to feed the cities and industrial centers, not to speak of the Red Army. But the prospects for the future looked bleak because the peasant, having no incentives to grow more than he needed for himself, kept on reducing the cultivated acreage. In the grain-growing provinces, between 1913 and 1920, the area under cultivation diminished by 12.5 percent.97 The decline in sown acreage, however, does not fully reveal the fall in cereal production. First of all, since the peasants either consumed or set aside for seed three-quarters of the harvest, a decline of 12.5 percent in sown acreage meant that the arable land available to produce a grain surplus for the non-agrarian population dropped by one-half. Second, yields kept on declining at the same time that the sown area shrank, due largely to the shortage of draft horses, one-quarter of which had been requisitioned by the armed forces. The yields per acre in 1920 were only 70 percent what they had been before the war.98 A 12.5 decline in acreage accompanied by a 30 percent decline in yields meant that the grain output was only 60 percent of the prewar figure. A Communist economist provides statistics which show that this, indeed, is what happened:

  P

  RODUCTION OF

  C

  EREAL

  G

  RAINS IN

  C

  ENTRAL

  R

  USSIA

  99

  (in millions of tons)

  1913

  78.2

  1917

  69.1

  1920

  48.2

  It required only a spell of bad weather for the harvest to fall to the level of starvation. Under Communist management, there was no surplus and hence no capacity to absorb the consequences of a poor harvest. That such a calamity was in the offing became a near-certainty in the fall of 1920, when Communist papers began to carry warnings of a new “enemy”—zasukha, or drought.100

  True famine, Asiatic famine such as neither Russia nor the rest of Europe had ever experienced and in which millions were to perish, still lay in the future. For the time being, there was hunger, a permanent state of undernourishment that drained energy, the ability to work, the very will to live. A leading Bolshevik economist, analyzing in 1920 the decline in industrial productivity, ascribed it principally to food shortages. According to his calculations, between 1908 and 1916 the average Russian worker had consumed 3,820 calories a day, whereas by 1919 his intake was reduced to 2,680 calories, not enough for heavy manual labor.101 This 30 percent drop in caloric intake, in his opinion, was the main cause of the 40 percent decline in worker productivity in the large cities. This, of course, was a great oversimplification, but it pointed to a very real problem. Another Communist expert estimated that using pre-revolutionary criteria, according to which an annual bread consumption of 180–200 kilograms meant hunger, the Soviet worker in the northern regions in 1919–20, with a consumption of 134 kilograms, was starving.102 If Russian cities at this point did not collapse from hunger, it was due to the fortuitous coincidence that just as this was about to happen, the Bolsheviks won the Civil War and reconquered Siberia as well as the North Caucasus and the Ukraine, which under non-Communist rule had managed to accumulate rich stores of grain.

  In the words of Trotsky, “the socialist organization of the economy begins with the liquidation of the market.” Indeed, to the Marxist, the market, the arena for the exchange of commodities, is the heart of the capitalist economy, just as money is its lifeblood. Without it, capitalism cannot function. The choking off of the free exchange of products and services, therefore, constituted a central objective of Bolshevik economic policy. Nationalization of the market and centralization of distribution were not, as is often erroneously argued, responses to shortages caused by the Revolution and the Civil War, but positive initiatives directed against the capitalist enemy, which caused shortages.

  The Bolsheviks went to extreme lengths to eliminate the free exchange of commodities. They spelled out their intention in the 1919 party program:

  In the realm of distribution, the task of Soviet authority at present consists in steadfastly pursuing the replacement of trade by a planned and nationally organized distribution of products. The objective is the organization of the entire population in a single network of consumer communes which will be capable, most speedily, in a planned manner, economically and with the least expenditure of labor, of distributing all the necessary products, strictly centralizing the entire mechanism of distribution.

  103

  The Bolsheviks pursued this goal by a variety of means, including the confiscation of the means of production of goods other than food, forceful requisitions of foodstuffs and other commodities, a state monopoly on trade, and destruction of money as a medium of exchange. Goods were distributed to the population by means of ration cards, initially (1918–19) at nominal prices, later (1920) free of charge. Housing, utilities, transport, education, and entertainment were also withdrawn from the market and eventually made available at no cost.

  While the production of industrial goods was turned over to the Supreme Economic Council, responsibility for the distribution of commodities was assigned to the Commissariat of Supply (Kommissariat po Prodovolstviiu), another bureaucratic empire with an array of its own glavki and a network of distribution agencies. Its head, Alexander Tsiurupa, had only limited business experience, having been employed before 1917 as manager of a landed estate. His commissariat was a very costly operation. Komprod, as it was popularly known, first and foremost received and distributed the foodstuffs which the government managed to collect through purchase, barter, or forceful requisitions. It was also supposed to receive for purposes of barter consumer goods from the nationalized industrial establishments and household industries. For distribution, it relied to some extent on its own network of state-run stores, but mainly on the consumer cooperatives which had developed before the Revolution and which the Bolsheviks, with some reluctance, retained after removing the SRs and Mensheviks from their directing staffs.104 In the spring of 1919 these cooperatives were nationalized. A decree of March 16, 1919,105 ordered the creation in all cities and rural centers of “consumer communes” (potrebitel’skie kommuny), which all the inhabitants of a given area, without exception, had to join. The communes were supposed to provide food and other basic necessities upon presentation of ration cards. Such cards came in several categories, the most generous ones being issued to workers in heavy industry: the “bourgeoisie” received at best one-quarter of a worker’s ration, and often nothing.106* The system lent itself to terrible abuses: in Petrograd in 1918, for instance, one-third more ration cards were issued than there were inhabitants, and in 1920, the Commissariat of Supply distributed ration cards for 21.9 million urban residents whereas their actual count was only 12.3 million.107

  In the words of Milton Friedman, the more significant an economic theory, “the more unrealistic the assumptions.” The Soviet experiment in the nationalization of trade amply corroborated this statement. The measures enacted under War Communism, instead of eliminating the market, split it in two: in 1918–20 Russia had a state sector, which distributed goods by ration cards at fixed prices or free of charge, and, alongside it, an illicit private sector, which followed the laws of supply and demand. To the surprise of Bolshevik theoreticians, the more the nationalized sector expanded, the larger loomed what one Bolshevik economist called its “irremovable shadow,” the free sector. Indeed, the private sector battened on the state sector, for the simple reason that a large part of the consumer goods which the workers bought at token prices or received gratis from state stores or “consumer communes” found their way to the black market.108

  The government inaugurated free public services in October 1920 with a law exempting Soviet institutions from paying for telegraph, telephone, and postal services; the following year, these were offered free to all citizens. During this time government employees received all utilities gratis. In January 1921, residents o
f nationalized and municipalized houses were freed from the payment of rents.109 In the winter of 1920–21, Komprod is estimated to have assumed responsibility for supplying, at virtually no cost, the basic needs of 38 million people.110

  Obviously, such largesse was possible only temporarily, as long as the Bolshevik regime could spend capital inherited from tsarism. It was able to dispense with the collection of rents because it neither built housing nor paid for its maintenance: nearly the entire residential housing of urban Russia, consisting of about half a million structures, had been built before 1917. When War Communism was at its height, the government constructed and repaired only 2,601 buildings in the country.111 The other factor which made the policy of free distribution possible was the food that was extracted from the peasants without compensation or with make-believe compensation in the form of worthless money. Clearly, neither situation could continue forever, as buildings decayed and the peasant refused to grow surplus food.

  In the meantime, the private sector burgeoned. It traded every conceivable commodity, and above all, foodstuffs. The bulk of the food consumed by the non-agrarian population of Soviet Russia under War Communism came not from state outlets but from the free market. In September 1918 the regime was forced to permit peasants to bring into the cities and sell at market prices up to one and a half puds (25 kilograms) of cereals.112 These polutorapudniki, or “one-and-a-half-puders,” accounted for the lion’s share of the bread and produce consumed by the cities. A Soviet statistical survey conducted in the winter of 1919–20 indicated that urban inhabitants obtained only 36 percent of their bread from state stores; the remainder came, as the survey evasively put it, “from other sources.”113 It has been established that of all the foodstuffs consumed in Russian cities in the winter of 1919–20 (cereals, vegetables, and fruits), as measured by their caloric value, the free market furnished from 66 to 80 percent. In the rural districts, the proportion of victuals supplied by the “consumer communes” amounted to a mere 11 percent.114

  A foreign visitor to Russia in the spring of 1920 found nearly all the stores closed or boarded up. Here and there small shops stayed open to dispense clothing, soap, and other consumer goods. Outlets of Narkomprod (Commissariat of Supply) were also few and far between. But the illicit street trade was booming:

  Moscow lives. But it lives only in part from rationed goods and from earned money. In large measure, Moscow lives off the black market: actively and passively. It sells on the black market, it buys on the black market, it profiteers, profiteers, profiteers …

  In Moscow money is made on everything. Everything is traded on the black market: from a pin to a cow. Furniture, diamonds, white cake, bread, meat, everything is sold on the black market. The Sukharevka in Moscow is a black-market bazaar, a black-market warehouse. From time to time, the police carry out raids, but these do not suppress the black market. It is a proliferating hydra, it reappears with a thousand heads.

  Moscow has free markets, a number of them, officially tolerated markets, supplementary ones, delicatessen markets. For example, there is a supplementary market near Theater Square, dealing in cucumbers, fish, biscuits, eggs, vegetables of all sorts. It is a tumult on a long sidewalk. There are booths on the curbs, traders squat, traders whisper offers into the ears of buyers.

  A cucumber costs 200–250 rubles, an egg 125–150 rubles: other items fetch corresponding prices. This is not much when converted into Western European currency, especially dollars. During my stay in Moscow, currency speculators paid 1,000 Bolshevik rubles for one dollar. I was told that one American exchanged $3,000 for 9 million Bolshevik rubles. It is forbidden to speculate … But there is speculation in currency. Profits are made on everything, naturally also on money …

  This profiteering, this black marketeering, this hoarding hinders work. Profiteering sits in the soul of workers. They profiteer while they work, they profiteer while they should be working.

  115

  Many of the peddlers were soldiers who were disposing of their uniforms, which explains why at this time so many Muscovites appeared on the streets in military garb.116 Dignified ladies could be seen standing self-consciously on the sidewalks offering for sale personal belongings from happier days.

  The “unconquerable stubbornness of small production in its insistence on the methods of commodity economy,” as one Soviet economist described the vitality of the free market,117 defeated all government efforts to monopolize distribution. The government found itself in the absurd situation in which the strict enforcement of its prohibitions on private trade would have caused the entire urban population to starve to death. A Soviet economic publication in early 1920 ruefully conceded that the private (“speculative”) market was flourishing at the expense and with the help of the state supply system. “One of the most striking contradictions of our current economic reality,” it wrote,

  93. A common sight on the streets of Moscow and Petrograd in 1918–21.

  is the contrast between the gaping emptiness of Soviet stores with their signs “Haberdashery Store of the Moscow Soviet,” “Bookstore,” … and so on, and the teeming activity of the market trade on Sukharevka, the Smolensk market, Okhotnyi Riad, and other centers of the speculative market.… [The merchandise for the latter] has its exclusive source in the warehouses of the Soviet Republic and reaches Sukharevka by criminal routes.

  118

  So powerful did the private sector become that when in early 1921 the government finally faced reality and (temporarily) gave up the monopoly on trade under the New Economic Policy (NEP), it was only acknowledging the status quo. “In certain respects,” writes E. H. Carr, “NEP did little more than sanction methods of trade which had grown up spontaneously, in defiance of Government decrees and in face of Government repressions, under War Communism.”119

  In October 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd in the name of the “proletariat.” The Soviet state was declared the embodiment of the will of the working class and the “vanguard” of the socialist order. This being the case, one might have expected Bolshevik labor policies greatly to improve, if not necessarily the economic, then certainly the social and political status of industrial labor compared with what it had been under the “bourgeois” Imperial and Provisional governments. But in this respect, too, the effects were the very opposite of proclaimed intentions: the status of Russia’s working class deteriorated significantly in every respect but the symbolic. In particular, it now lost its hard-won right to organize and to strike, the two indispensable weapons in labor’s self-defense.

  It can be argued, of course, and the argument has been made, that under conditions of revolution and civil war the Bolsheviks had no choice but to curb the rights of labor in order to keep the economy going: to save the “proletarian revolution” they had to suspend the rights of the “proletariat.” In this interpretation, Bolshevik labor policies, like the rest of War Communism, were regrettable but unavoidable expedients.

  The trouble with this interpretation is that the anti-labor measures introduced when the Bolshevik regime was indeed struggling to survive turned out to be not just temporary devices but expressions of a whole social philosophy which the situation made it possible to justify as emergency measures but which outlasted the emergency. The Bolsheviks regarded compulsory labor, the abolition of the right to strike, and the transformation of trade unions into agencies of the state as essential not only for victory in the Civil War but for the “construction of communism”: which is why they retained their anti-labor policies after the Civil War had been won and their regime was no longer in danger.

  The concept of compulsory labor was embedded in Marxism. Article 8 of the Communist Manifesto of 1848 called for the “equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.” Obviously, in a regimented economy, without a free commodity market, it made no sense to maintain a free market in labor services. Trotsky, who often spoke on the subject, reinforced the economic argument w
ith a psychological one—namely, that man is basically indolent and driven to work only by the fear of starvation: once the state assumed responsibility for feeding its citizens, this motive disappeared and it became necessary to resort to compulsion.* In effect, Trotsky presented forced labor as an inseparable feature of socialism. “One may say that man is rather a lazy creature,” he said. “As a general rule, man strives to avoid work.… The only way to attract the labor power necessary for economic tasks is to introduce compulsory labor service.”120 Lest some Soviet citizens delude themselves that compulsory labor was only a transitional measure, meant for the “duration” of the crisis, Trotsky put them on notice this was not so. In March 1920, at the Ninth Party Congress, convened after the Whites had been for all practical purposes defeated and the Civil War was virtually over, Trotsky minced no words:

  We are making the first attempt in world history to organize labor in the interests of that laboring majority. But this, of course, does not mean liquidating the element of compulsion. The element of compulsion does not disappear from historic accounts. No, compulsion plays and will play an important role for a significant period of history.

  121

  Trotsky spoke especially bluntly on this subject at the Third Congress of Trade Unions in April 1920. Responding to a Menshevik motion calling for the abolition of compulsory labor on the grounds that it was less productive than free labor, Trotsky defended serfdom: