War Communism and New Problems
With the summer of 1918, War Communism began to acquire a definite shape. The nationalization of industry, which began shortly after the revolution, was extended by the law of June 28, 1918. To cite Carr's listing, the state appropriated "the mining, metallurgical, textile, electrical,
timber, tobacco, resin, glass and pottery, leather and cement industries, all steam-driven mills, local utilities and private railways together with a few minor industries." Eventually private industry disappeared almost entirely. Compulsory labor was introduced. Private trade was gradually suppressed, to be replaced by rationing and by government distribution of food and other necessities of life. On February 19, 1918, the nationalization of land was proclaimed: all land became state property to be used only by those who would cultivate it themselves. The peasants, however, had little interest in supplying food to the government because, with state priorities and the breakdown of the economy, they could not receive much in return. Therefore, under the pressure of the Civil War and of the desperate need to obtain food for the Red Army and the urban population, the authorities finally decreed a food levy, in effect ordering the peasants to turn in their entire produce, except for a minimal amount to be retained for their own sustenance and for sowing. As the peasants resisted, forcible requisitioning and repression became common. Communism, military and militant, swung into full force.
The rigors of War Communism on the home front largely resulted from and paralleled the bitter struggle the Soviet regime was waging with its external enemies. Beginning with the summer of 1918 the country entered a major, many-faceted, and cruel Civil War, when the so-called Whites - who had rallied initially to continue the war against the Germans - rose to challenge the Red control of Russia. Numerous nationalities, situated as a rule in the border areas of the former empire of the Romanovs, proceeded to assert their independence from Soviet authority. A score of foreign states intervened by sending some armed forces into Russia and supporting certain local movements and governments, as well as by blockading Soviet Russia from October 1919 to January 1920. In 1920, Poland fought a war against the Soviet government to win much of western Ukraine and White Russia. It appeared that everyone was trying to strike a blow against the Communist regime.
The Civil War
The counterrevolutionary forces, often called vaguely and somewhat misleadingly the White movement, constituted the greatest menace to the Soviet rule, because, in contrast to Poland and various border nationalities, which had aims limited to particular regions, and to the intervening Allied powers, which had no clear aims, the Whites meant to destroy the Reds. The counterrevolutionaries drew their strength from army officers and cossacks, from the "bourgeoisie," including a large number of secondary school students and other educated youth, and from political groups ranging from the far Right to the Socialist Revolutionaries. Such
prominent former terrorists as Boris Savinkov fought against the Soviet government, while the crack units of the White Army included a few worker detachments. Most intellectuals joined or sympathized with the White camp.
After the Soviet government came to power, civil servants staged an unsuccessful strike against it. Following their break with the Bolsheviks in March 1918 over the latter's determination to promote class struggle in the villages, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries tried an abortive uprising in Moscow in July. At about the same time and in part in response to the action of the Left SR's, counterrevolutionaries led by the local military commander seized Simbirsk, while Savinkov raised a rebellion in the center of European Russia, capturing and holding for two weeks the town of Iaroslavl on the Volga. These efforts collapsed, however, because of the insufficient strength of the counterrevolutionaries once the Soviet government could concentrate its forces against them. Indeed, it became increasingly clear that the Communist authorities, in particular the Cheka, had a firm grip on the central provinces and ruthlessly suppressed all opponents and suspected opponents. True to their tradition, the Socialist Revolutionaries tried terrorism, assassinating several prominent Bolsheviks, such as the head of the Petrograd Cheka, and seriously wounding Lenin himself in August 1918. Earlier, in July, a Left Socialist Revolutionary had killed the German ambassador, producing a diplomatic crisis. Yet even the terrorist campaign could not shake Soviet control in Moscow - which had again become the capital of the country in March 1918 - Petrograd, or central European Russia. And it provoked frightful reprisals, a veritable reign of terror, during which huge numbers of "class enemies" and others suspected by the regime were killed.
The borderlands, on the other hand, offered numerous opportunities to the counterrevolutionaries. The Don, Kuban, and Terek areas in the south and southeast all gave rise to local anti-Bolshevik cossack governments. Moreover, the White Volunteer Army emerged in southern Russia, led first by Alekseev, next by Kornilov, and after Kornilov's death in combat by an equally prominent general, Anthony Denikin. Other centers of opposition to the Communists sprang up in the east. In Samara, on the Volga, Chernov headed a government composed of members of the Constituent Assembly. Both the Ural and the Orenburg cossacks turned against Red Moscow. The All-Russian Directory of five members was established in Omsk, in western Siberia, in September 1918, as a result of a conference attended by anti-Bolshevik political parties and local governments of eastern Russia. Following a military coup the Directory was replaced by another anti-Red government, that of Admiral Alexander Kolchak. A commander of the cossacks of Transbaikalia, Gregory Semenov, ruled a part of eastern Siberia with the support of the Japanese. New governments
emerged also in Vladivostok and elsewhere. Russian anti-Bolshevik forces in the east were augmented by some 40,000 members of the so-called Czech Legion composed largely of Czech prisoners of war who wanted to fight on the side of the Entente. These soldiers were being moved to Vladivostok via the Trans-Siberian Railroad when a series of incidents led to their break with Soviet authorities and their support of the White movement. In the north a prominent anti-Soviet center arose in Archangel, where a former populist, Nicholas Chaikovsky, set up a government supported by the intervening British and French. And in the west, where the non-Russian borderlands produced numerous nationalist movements in opposition to the Soviet government, General Nicholas Iudenich established a White base in Estonia to threaten Petrograd.