sit former employers and responsible officials and managers of business, and the unprepared visitor … who is personally acquainted with the former commercial and industrial world would be surprised to see previous owners of big leather factories sitting in Glavkozh [the leather syndicate], big manufacturers in the central textile organization, etc.90
But Lenin’s and Trotsky’s insistence on the need to utilize the skills of “bourgeois specialists” in the service of the “socialist” cause ran into resistance from Left Communists, trade union officials, and Factory Committees. Resenting the power and privilege which the members of the old “capitalist” elite enjoyed in Soviet industries by virtue of their expertise, they harassed and intimidated them.91
Until the end of the Civil War, the government had great difficulty enforcing the principle of personal management. In 1919, only 10.8 percent of industrial-establishments had individual managers. But in 1920–21, Moscow vigorously resumed the campaign, and at the close of 1921, 90.7 percent of Russian factories were run in this manner.92 The argument in favor of “collegiate” management, however, did not die down, its proponents arguing that individual management alienated workers from the regime and allowed “capitalists” to retain control of expropriated plants in the guise of serving the state.93 Before long, this argument would be raised at the national level by the so-called Workers’ Opposition.
The narrowly economic objective of Soviet industrial policies under War Communism was, of course, to raise productivity. Statistical evidence, however, demonstrates that the effect of these policies was precisely the contrary. Under Communist management, industrial productivity did not merely decline: it plunged at a rate which suggested that, if the process continued, by the mid-1920S Soviet Russia would be left without any industry. There exist various indices of this phenomenon.
I. OVERALL LARGE-SCALE INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION* 1913 100 1917 77 1919 26 1920 18
II. OUTPUT OF SELECTED INDUSTRIAL GOODS IN 192094 (1913 = 100) Coal 27.0 Iron 2.4 Cotton yarn 5.1 Petroleum 42.7
III. PRODUCTIVITY (in constant rubles) of the Russian worker95 1913 100 1917 85 1918 44 1919 22 1920 26
IV. NUMBER OF EMPLOYED INDUSTRIAL WORKERS† 1918 100 1919 82 1920 77 1921 49
In sum, under War Communism, the Russian “proletariat” fell by one-half, industrial output by three-quarters, and industrial productivity by 70 percent. Surveying the wreckage, Lenin in 1921 exclaimed: “What is the proletariat? It is the class engaged in large-scale industry. And where is large-scale industry? What kind of a proletariat is it? Where is your [sic!] industry? Why is it idle?”96 The answer to these rhetorical questions was that Utopian programs, which Lenin had approved, had all but destroyed Russian industry and decimated Russia’s working class. But during this time of deindustrialization, the expenses of maintaining the bureaucracy in charge of the economy grew by leaps and bounds: by 1921 they absorbed 75.1 percent of the budget. As for the personnel of the Supreme Economic Council, which managed Russia’s industry, it grew during this period a hundredfold.*
The decline in agricultural production was less drastic, but because of the small margin of food surplus, its effect on the population was even more devastating.
The Bolshevik Government treated the peasant population as a class enemy and waged on it a regular war by means of Red Army units and detachments of armed thugs. The program of 1918—to choke off all private trade in agricultural produce—had to be modified in view of fierce peasant resistance. In 1919 and 1920, the government extracted food from the peasantry by a variety of means: forced deliveries, barter of food for manufactured goods, and purchases at somewhat more realistic prices. In 1919, it allowed limited quantities of food to be sold on the open market. Dairy products, meats, fruits, most vegetables, and all foodstuffs growing wild were initially exempt from state control but later regulated as well.
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:
PRODUCTION OF CEREAL GRAINS IN CENTRAL RUSSIA99 (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.