Peasants clashed with the food-supplies commissars across the country. According to official figures, 344 rebellions are reported as having broken out by mid-1919.49 In 1920, severe trouble was reported from the Volga provinces, especially Tambov, from Ukraine, Siberia and the North Caucasus. The villages were in revolt. They hated the conscription of their menfolk, the requisitioning of foodstuffs, the infringements of customary peasant law, the ban on private trade with the towns and the compulsion of households to supply free labour to the authorities for the felling of timber and the clearing of roads.50 The Bolshevik party assumed that the answer was to intensify repression. Industry and agriculture, too, were to be brought more firmly under the state’s control. Trotski proposed that Red Army soldiers, instead of being demobilized, should be transferred into labour armies; Lenin was firmly attached to the policy of requisitioning foodstuffs through a centrally-assigned set of quotas: the economic programme of the Civil War was to be maintained in peacetime.
The other way out of the emergency for the Russian Communist Party was socialist revolution in Europe. During 1919 they had continued to probe opportunities to link up with the Hungarian Soviet Republic until its collapse in August. The Bavarian Soviet Republic had been overturned in May. Yet the cities of northern Italy, too, were in ferment: as one door closed, another was thought to be opening. The party’s optimism was all the more striking since Red rule in the borderlands of Russia remained under threat. Conflicts with the Poles took place in the course of the year, and erupted into full-scale war when Józef Piłsudski invaded Ukraine and took Kiev in May 1920. The Red Army gathered support at this conjuncture from Russians in general. The arthritic former Imperial commander Alexander Brusilov came out of retirement to urge his former subordinates to fulfil their patriotic duty by seeing off the Poles; and, by July, Piłsudski’s army was fleeing westwards.
Lenin spotted his chance to carry revolution into central Europe. The Red Army was instructed to plunge into Poland and then into Germany. To his colleagues Lenin confided: ‘My personal opinion is that for this purpose it is necessary to sovietize Hungary and perhaps Czechia and Romania too.’51 Italian communists in Moscow for the Second Congress of Comintern were told to pack their bags and go home to help organize a revolution. In fact the other Politburo members were doubtful about Lenin’s judgement; they especially questioned whether the Polish working class would rise to welcome the Red Army as its liberator. But Lenin had his way and the Reds hastened across eastern Poland. A pitched battle occurred by the river Vistula, short of Warsaw, in mid-August. The Reds were defeated. The dream of taking revolution to other countries on the point of a bayonet was dispelled.
The débâcle in Poland concentrated minds upon the difficulties at home. Even before the Polish-Soviet War there had been attempts to modify economic policies. The most notable was Trotski’s proposal to the Central Committee in February 1920 that, in certain provinces and with certain restrictions, grain requisitioning should be replaced with a tax-in-kind that would be fixed at a lower level of procurement. He was turned down after a heated debate in which Lenin denounced him as an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism.52
Such disputes demonstrated how hard it was to promote any change of policy; for Trotski’s proposal seemed bold only within a milieu which viscerally detested capitalism. Lenin, too, suffered as he had made Trotski suffer. When a Soviet republic was set up in Azerbaijan in April 1920, Lenin proposed that foreign concessionnaires should be invited to restore the Baku oilfields to production. Since 1918 he had seen ‘concessions’ as vital to economic recovery, but his suggestion now caused outrage among Bolshevik leaders in the Transcaucasus. If Baku oil were to be exploited again by the Alfred Nobel Company, hardly any non-private industry would be left in Baku.53 Lenin also urged, at the Eighth Congress of Soviets in December 1920, that richer peasant households should be materially rewarded for any additional gains in agricultural productivity rather than be persecuted as kulaks. The Congress was horrified and most of Lenin’s scheme was rejected.54 The party leadership at the centre and the localities was determined to maintain existing economic policy.
And so it came about that the great controversy in the Bolshevik party in the winter of 1920–21 was not about grain requisitioning or about the return of foreign companies but about the trade unions. In November, Trotski had proposed that the unions should be turned into agencies of the state. Strikes would be banned; wage increases would be forgone. The Workers’ Opposition criticized this as yet another sign of the bureaucratization of the October Revolution. Others in the party, including Lenin, simply felt that Trotski’s project was unrealizable at a time of turmoil in the country. Ferocious debate broke out within the party. But as Bolshevik leaders haggled over Marxist doctrine on the labour movement, the Soviet economy moved towards catastrophe and a growing number of peasants, workers, soldiers and sailors rebelled against the victors of the Civil War.
7
The New Economic Policy
(1921–1928)
The basic compound of the Soviet order had been invented by Lenin and his fellow communist leaders within a couple of years of the October Revolution. There had been created a centralized, one-ideology dictatorship of a single party which permitted no challenge to its monopoly of power. The Bolshevik party itself was strictly organized; the security police were experts at persecution and there was systematic subordination of constitutional and legal propriety to political convenience. The regime had also expropriated great segments of the economy. Industry, banking, transport and foreign trade were already nationalized and agriculture and domestic trade were subject to heavy state regulation. All these elements were to remain intact in ensuing decades.
The Civil War had added to the pressures which resulted in the creation of the compound. On taking power in 1917, the communist leaders had not possessed a preparatory blueprint. Nevertheless they had come with assumptions and inclinations which predisposed them towards a high degree of state economic dominance, administrative arbitrariness, ideological intolerance and political violence. They also lived for struggle. They wanted action; they could barely contain their impatience. And they were outnumbered by enemies at home and abroad. They had always expected the party to be ‘the vanguard’ of the Revolution. Leadership was a key virtue for them. If they wanted to prevail as the country’s rulers, the communists would have been pushed into introducing some kind of party-run state even in the absence of a civil war — and, of course, the way that the October Revolution had occurred made a civil war virtually certain.
This in turn meant that once the Civil War was over, the party-state was unlikely to be dismantled by the Russian Communist Party. The party-state was at the core of the Soviet compound. Without the party-state, it would not be long before all the other elements in the compound underwent dissolution.