The Russian Revolution (14 page)

The question lying behind the debate is how quickly the Bolsheviks thought they could move towards communism; and the answer depends on whether we are talking about 1918 or 1920. The Bolsheviks' first steps were cautious, and so were their pronouncements about the future. However, from the outbreak of the Civil War in mid-1918 the Bolsheviks' earlier caution began to disappear. To cope with a desperate situation, they turned to more radical policies and, in the process, tried to extend the sphere of centralized government control much further and faster than they had originally intended. In 192o, as the Bolsheviks headed towards victory in the Civil War and disaster in the economy, a mood of euphoria and desperation took hold. With the old world disappearing in the flames of Revolution and Civil War, it seemed to many Bolsheviks that a new world was about to arise, phoenix-like, from the ashes. This hope, perhaps, owed more to anarchist ideology than to Marxism, but it was nevertheless expressed in Marxist terms: with the triumph of proletarian revolution, the transition to communism was imminent, possibly only weeks or months away.

This sequence is clearly illustrated in one of the key areas of economic policy, nationalization. As good Marxists, the Bolsheviks nationalized banking and credit very quickly after the October Revolution. But they did not immediately embark upon wholesale nationalization of industry: the first nationalization decrees concerned only individual large concerns like the Putilov Works that were already closely involved with the state through defence production and government contracts.

A variety of circumstances, however, were to extend the scope of nationalization far beyond the Bolsheviks' original short-term intentions. Local soviets expropriated plants on their own authority. Some plants were abandoned by their owners and managers; others were nationalized on the petition of their workers, who had driven out the old management, or even on the petition of managers who wanted protection against unruly workers. In the summer of 1918, the government issued a decree nationalizing all largescale industry, and by the autumn of 1919 it was estimated that over 8o per cent of such enterprises had in fact been nationalized. This far exceeded the organizational capacities of the new Supreme Economic Council: in practice, if the workers themselves could not keep the plants going by organizing the supply of raw materials and distribution of finished products, the plants often just closed down. Yet, having gone so far, the Bolsheviks felt impelled to go further. In November 1920, the government nationalized even small-scale industry, at least on paper. In practice, of course, the Bolsheviks were hard put to name or identify their new acquisitions, let alone direct them. But in theory the whole sphere of production was now in the hands of Soviet power, and even artisan workshops and windmills were part of a centrally directed economy.

A similar sequence led the Bolsheviks towards an almost complete prohibition on free trade and a virtually moneyless economy by the end of the Civil War. From their predecessors they inherited rationing in the towns (introduced in 1916) and a state monopoly on grain which in theory required the peasants to deliver their whole surplus (introduced in the spring of 1917 by the Provisional Government). But the towns were still short of bread and other foodstuffs because the peasants were unwilling to sell when there were almost no manufactured goods on the market to buy. Shortly after the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks tried to increase grain deliveries by offering the peasants manufactured goods instead of money in exchange. They also nationalized wholesale trade and, after the outbreak of the Civil War, prohibited free retail trade in most basic foodstuffs and manufactured products and tried to convert the consumer cooperatives into a state distribution network.14 These were emergency measures to cope with the food crisis in the towns and the problems of Army supply. But obviously the Bolsheviks could-and did-justify them in ideological terms.

As the food crisis in the towns worsened, barter became a basic form of exchange, and money lost its value. By 1920, wages and salaries were being paid partly in kind (food and goods), and there was even an attempt to construct a budget on a commodity rather than a money basis. Urban services, in so far as they still functioned in the decaying cities, no longer had to be paid for by the individual user. Some Bolsheviks hailed this as an ideological triumph-the `withering away of money' that indicated how close the society had already come to communism. To less optimistic observers, however, it looked like runaway inflation.

Unfortunately for the Bolsheviks, ideology and practical imperatives did not always converge so neatly. The divergences (together with some Bolshevik uncertainties about what their ideology actually meant in concrete terms) were particularly evident in policies affecting the working class. In regard to wages, for example, the Bolsheviks had egalitarian instincts rather than a strictly egalitarian policy in practice. In the interests of maximizing production, they tried to retain piecework in industry, though the workers regarded this basis of payment as essentially inegalitarian and unfair. Shortages and rationing probably tended to reduce urban inequalities during the Civil War period, but this could scarcely be counted as a Bolshevik achievement. In fact, the rationing system under War Communism favoured certain categories of the population, including Red Army personnel, skilled workers in key industries, Communist administrators, and some groups of the intelligentsia.

Factory organization was another touchy question. Were the factories to be run by the workers themselves (as the Bolsheviks' 1917 endorsement of `workers' control' seemed to suggest), or by managers appointed by the state, following the directions of central planning and coordinating agencies? The Bolsheviks favoured the second, but the effective outcome during War Communism was a compromise, with considerable variation from place to place. Some factories continued to be run by elected workers' committees. Others were run by an appointed director, often a Communist but sometimes the former manager, chief engineer, or even owner of the plant. In yet other cases, a worker or group of workers from the factory committee or local trade union was appointed to manage the plant, and this transitional arrangement-halfway between workers' control and appointed management-was often the most successful.

In dealing with the peasantry, the Bolsheviks' first problem was the practical one of getting food. State procurements of grain were not improved either by outlawing private grain trading or by offering manufactured goods instead of money in payment: the state still had too few goods to offer, and the peasants remained unwilling to deliver their produce. Given the urgent necessity of feeding the towns and the Red Army, the state had little choice but to take the peasants' produce by persuasion, cunning, threats, or force. The Bolsheviks adopted a policy of grain requisitioning, sending workers' and soldiers' brigades-usually armed, and if possible provided with some goods for barter-to get the hoarded grain out of the peasants' barns.15 Obviously this produced strained relations between the Soviet regime and the peasantry. But the Whites did the same thing, as had occupying armies throughout the ages. The Bolsheviks' need to live off the land probably surprised themselves more than it surprised the peasants.

But there were other aspects of Bolshevik policy that evidently did surprise and alarm the peasantry. In the first place, they tried to facilitate grain procurements by splitting the village into opposing groups. Believing that the growth of rural capitalism had already produced significant class differentiation among the peasants, the Bolsheviks expected to receive instinctive support from the poor and landless peasants and instinctive opposition from the richer ones. They therefore began to organize village Committees of the Poor, and encouraged them to cooperate with Soviet authorities in extracting grain from the barns of richer peasants. The attempt proved a dismal failure, partly because of the normal village solidarity against outsiders and partly because many formerly landless and poor peasants had improved their position as a result of the land seizures and redistributions of 1917-18. Worse still, it demonstrated to the peasants that the Bolsheviks' understanding of revolution in the countryside was quite different from their own.

For the Bolsheviks, still thinking in terms of the old Marxist debate with the Populists, the mir was a decaying institution, corrupted by the Tsarist state and undermined by emergent rural capitalism, lacking any potential for socialist development. Moreover, the Bolsheviks believed, the `first revolution' in the countrysideland seizures and egalitarian redistribution-was already being followed by a `second revolution', a class war of poor peasants against rich peasants, which was destroying the unity of the village community and must ultimately break the authority of the mir.16 For the peasants, on the other hand, the mir was perceived as a true peasant institution, historically abused and exploited by the state, which had finally thrown off state authority and accomplished a peasant revolution.

Though the Bolsheviks had let the peasants have their way in 1917-18, their long-term plans for the countryside were quite as disruptive as Stolypin's had been. They disapproved of almost every aspect of the traditional rural order, from the mir and the strip system of dividing the land to the patriarchal family (The ABC of Communism even looked forward to the time when peasant families would give up the `barbaric' and wasteful custom of eating supper at home, and join their neighbours at a communal village dining roomy). They were meddlers in village affairs, like Stolypin; and although they could not in principle share his enthusiasm for a small-farming petty bourgeoisie, they still had enough ingrained dislike of peasant backwardness to continue the Stolypin policy of consolidating the households' scattered strips into solid blocks suitable for modern small farming.18

But the Bolsheviks' real interest was large-scale agriculture, and only the political imperative of winning over the peasantry had led them to condone the breaking up of large estates that took place in 1917-18. On some of the remaining state lands, they set up state farms (sovkhozy)-in effect, the socialist equivalent of largescale capitalist agriculture, with appointed managers supervising the work of agricultural labourers who worked for wages. The Bolsheviks also believed that collective farms (kolkhozy) were preferable in political terms to traditional or individual small-holding peasant farming; and some collective farms were established in the Civil War period, usually by demobilized soldiers or workers fleeing hunger in the towns. The collective farms did not divide their land into strips, like the traditional peasant village, but worked the land and marketed produce collectively. Often, the early collective farmers had an ideology similar to that of the founders of utopian agricultural communities in the United States and elsewhere, pooling almost all their resources and possessions; and, like the utopians, they rarely made a success of farming or even survived long as harmonious communities. The peasants regarded both state and collective farms with suspicion. They were too few and weak to constitute a serious challenge to traditional peasant farming. But their very existence reminded the peasants that the Bolsheviks had strange ideas and were not to be trusted too far.

Visions of the new world

There was a wildly impractical and utopian streak in a great deal of Bolshevik thinking during the Civil War.19 No doubt all successful revolutions have this characteristic: the revolutionaries must always be driven by enthusiasm and irrational hope, since they would otherwise make the common-sense judgement that the risks and costs of revolution outweigh the possible benefits. The Bolsheviks thought they were immune from utopianism because their socialism was scientific. But, whether or not they were right about the inherently scientific nature of Marxism, even science needs human interpreters, who make subjective judgements and have their own emotional biases. The Bolsheviks were revolutionary enthusiasts, not laboratory assistants.

It was a subjective judgement that Russia was ready for proletarian revolution in 1917, even though the Bolsheviks cited Marxist social-science theory to support it. It was a matter of faith rather than scientific prediction that world revolution was imminent (in Marxist terms, after all, the Bolsheviks might have made a mistake and taken power too soon). The belief, underlying the later economic policies of War Communism, that Russia was on the brink of the definitive transition to communism had scarcely any justification in Marxist theory. The Bolsheviks' perception of the real world had become almost comically distorted in many respects by t92o. They sent the Red Army to advance on Warsaw because, to many Bolsheviks, it seemed obvious that the Poles would recognize the troops as proletarian brothers rather than Russian aggressors. At home, they confused rampant inflation and currency devaluation with the withering away of money under communism. When war and famine produced bands of homeless children during the Civil War, some Bolsheviks saw even this as a blessing in disguise, since the state could give the children a true collectivist upbringing (in orphanages) and they would not be exposed to the bourgeois influence of the old family.

The same spirit was noticeable in the Bolsheviks' early approach to the tasks of government and administration. The utopian texts here were Marx and Engels's dictum that under communism the state would wither away, and the passages in Lenin's State and Revolution (1917) where he suggested that administration would ultimately cease to be the business of full-time professionals and would become a rotating duty of the whole citizenry. In practice, however, Lenin always kept a hard-headed realism about government: he was not among those Bolsheviks who, seeing the old administrative machinery collapsing in the years 1917-20, concluded that the state was already withering away as Russia approached communism.

But the Bolshevik authors of The ABC of Communism (1919), Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, got much more carried away. They had the kind of vision of a depersonalized, scientifically regulated world that the contemporary Russian writer Evgenii Zamyatin satirized in We (written in 1920) and George Orwell later described in Nineteen Eighty-four. This world was the antithesis of any actual Russia, past, present, or future; and in the chaos of the Civil War that must have made it particularly appealing. In explaining how it would be possible to run a centrally planned economy after the withering away of the state, Bukharin and Preobrazhensky wrote: