* A recent study by Michael Carley, Revolution and Intervention: The French Government and the Russian Civil War, 1917–1919 (Kingston-Montreal, 1983), 57–60, 67–70, places rather more direct responsibility on the French, but it confuses general assistance given Savinkov with involvement in his uprising.
*Baumgart, Ostpolitik, 237–38. It seems that Lenin was planning to move the seat of government to Nizhnii Novgorod: Ibid., 237, note 38. In 1920, Lenin told Bertrand Russell that two years earlier neither he nor his colleagues had believed their regime stood a chance of surviving. Bertrand Russell, Bolshevism: Practice and Theory (New York, 1920), 40.
*In his brief recollections of this episode—apparently its only mention in Soviet literature—Chicherin, while confirming Helfferich’s account, indicates that the matter was settled by Lenin personally: “Lenin i vneshniaia politika,” Mirovaia politika v 1924 godu (Moscow, 1925), 5. See also his article in Izvestiia, No. 24/2059 (January 30, 1924), 2–3.
*Kurt Riezler, who at this point fades from the picture, returned after the war to his professorship in Frankfurt. When Hitler took power, he emigrated to the United States, where until his death in 1955 he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
*Baumgart, Ostpolitik, 315–16. Vatsetis served as Soviet CIC until the summer of 1919, when he was arrested on charges of participating in a “counterrevolutionary conspiracy.” After being released, he taught at the Soviet Military Academy. In 1938, during a classroom break, he was rearrested and soon afterward executed: Pamiat’, No. 2 (1979), 9–10.
At about the same time the Cheka, then directed by the Latvians M.I. Latsis and Ia. Kh. Peters, engaged in a classic Russian police provocation. It sent a Latvian officer to Lockhart to say that his men were ready to abandon the Bolsheviks. Lockhart turned them over to the British intelligence agent Sidney Reilly, who gave them a considerable sum of money. This ploy was later used to justify Lockhart’s arrest. See IA, No. 4 (1962), 234–37, and Uldis Germanis, Oberst Vacietis (Stockholm, 1974), 35.
*The text of the treaty, minus one of the three secret clauses, is reproduced by J. Wheeler-Bennett in Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace (New York, 1956), 427–46.
*This clause was first published in Europäische Gespräche, IV, No. 3 (1926), 149–53. It is reproduced in Wheeler-Bennett, Forgotten Peace, 436.
* Europäische Gespräche, IV, No. 3 (1926), 150. Ioffe’s acceptance: Europäische Gespräche, 152. Cf. H. W. Gatzke in VZ, III, No. 1 (January 1955), 96–97.
†Baumgart, Ostpolitik, 203. This third secret clause became public knowledge only after World War II. It was first published by Baumgart in Historisches Jahrbuch, LXXXIX (1969), 146–48.
*Ioffe in VZh, No. 5 (1919), 45. Because of his close association with Trotsky, Ioffe later fell into disgrace: he committed suicide in 1927. See Lev Trotskii, Portrety revoliutsionerov (Benson, Vt, 1988), 377–401.
*This point is vigorously and persuasively argued by Brian Pearce in How Haig Saved Lenin (London, 1987).
15
“War Communism”
The term “War Communism” has acquired over the years in Communist and non-Communist literature a precise meaning. In the words of the Soviet Historical Encyclopedia:
War Communism: The name given to the economic policy of the Soviet Government during the years of the civil war and foreign intervention in the U.S.S.R., 1918–20. The policy of War Communism was dictated by the exceptional difficulties caused by the civil war [and] economic devastation.1
The notion that War Communism was “dictated” by circumstances, however, does violence to the historical record, as shown by the etymology of the term. The earliest official use of “War Communism” dates to the spring of 1921—that is, to the time when the policies so labeled were being abandoned in favor of the more liberal New Economic Policy. It was then that the Communist authorities, in order to justify their sudden turnabout, sought to blame the disasters of the immediate past on circumstances beyond their control. Thus, Lenin in April 1921 wrote: “ ‘War Communism’ was imposed by war and ruin. It was not and could not be a policy that corresponded to the economic tasks of the proletariat. It was a temporary measure.”2 But this was hindsight. While some of its measures were indeed taken to meet emergencies, War Communism as a whole was not a “temporary measure” but an ambitious and, as it turned out, premature attempt to introduce full-blown communism.3
That Bolshevik economic policies in the first years of the regime were neither improvisations nor reactions is confirmed by no less an authority than Trotsky. Allowing that War Communism entailed “systematic regimentation of consumption in a besieged fortress,” he goes on to say that
in its original conception it pursued broader aims. The Soviet Government hoped and strove to develop these methods of regimentation directly into a system of planned economy in distribution as well as production. In other words, from [War Communism] it hoped gradually, but without destroying the system, to arrive at genuine communism.4
This view is corroborated by another Communist authority. War Communism, he says,
was not only a product of war conditions and of other, spontaneously acting forces. It was also the product of a definite ideology, the realization of a sociopolitical design to construct the country’s economic life on entirely new principles.*
Nothing attests more convincingly to the long-range Communist goals of the policies which the Bolsheviks pursued during the Civil War than the systematic assault on the institution of private property. The laws and decrees to this end, passed at a time when the Bolshevik regime was fighting for its life and which contributed nothing to its survivability, were inspired by an ideological belief in the need to deprive the citizens of ownership of disposable assets because they were a source of political independence. The process of expropriation began with real estate. The so-called Land Decree of October 26, 1917, deprived non-peasant owners of landed property. This was followed by decrees concerning urban real estate, which was first (December 14, 1917) withdrawn from commerce and later (August 24, 1918) expropriated on behalf of the state.5 In January 1918 all state debts were repudiated. A decree of April 20, 1918, forbade the purchase, sale, and leasing of commercial and industrial enterprises. Another decree on that day required securities and bonds in private possession to be registered.6 A major step in the abolition of private property was taken on May 1, 1918, with a decree outlawing inheritance.7 None of these fell into the category of “emergency measures”: each was intended to deprive private persons and associations of title to productive wealth and other assets.
In its mature form, which it attained only in the winter of 1920–21, War Communism involved a number of sweeping measures designed to place the entire economy of Russia—its labor force as well as its productive capacity and distribution mechanism—under the exclusive management of the state, or, more precisely, the Communist Party. It was intended both to undercut the economic base of the opposition to the Communist regime and to enable that regime to reorganize the national economy in a thoroughly “rational” manner. These measures were: