Addressing the Eighth Conference of the Communist Party in early December 1919, Lenin spoke with confidence about the rapid turn of fortunes enjoyed by the Soviet regime:
We see opening before us the road of peaceful construction. Of
course, we need to remember that the enemy will be lying in wait at every turn of the way, and will seek to throw us off course by any means necessary: violence, lies, bribery, conspiracy, and so on. Our task is to utilise all our experience and knowledge from the military front in addressing the challenges of peaceful construction.3
With his words on the immediate future of the republic, Lenin foreshadowed the controversial discussions that developed in the second half of December over the 'militarisation' of labour, stemming from an article published by Leon Trotsky in Pravda calling for the leadership to embrace the principles of compulsion in work. Trotsky, who was never shy to weigh in on any sphere of public policy, directed attentions to the model for economic construction provided by the successful organisation of the Red Army, particularly to the controversial embrace of conscription and hierarchies of command that he had championed in 1918. Seeing the demobilisation of the Red Army as a welcome consequence of victory in the Civil War, Trotsky advocated utilising the machinery of the army to conscript the labour force of the Soviet Republic, such that that force could be deployed strategically and efficiently in vital industries and in pursuits to rebuild the economy and expedite the transition to socialism. The obligation to work as a basic component of citizenship had been a part of Communist discourse since the very first days of the revolution. Civilians had been mobilised for trench digging, road maintenance and track clearing in an ad hoc fashion in both the cities and villages throughout the Civil War, much as they had been by the tsarist government before the revolution.4 But the principle of labour obligation had never been openly embraced on such an ambitious scale by the regime until this point. Lenin proved enthusiastic about the ideas, championing Trotsky and his vision in the face of aggressive criticism from the trade union representation in the Communist Party. At the turn of the year, Lenin helped oversee the creation of a Commission of Labour Duty, to be chaired by Trotsky, on top of his responsibilities as Commissar for War.5
The challenges of economic revival were enormous. Industrial production had largely collapsed in the years that followed the fall of the tsar in February 1917, and the Soviet government's attempts to contain and reverse the decline had proven ineffective. By the start of 1920, the output of large-scale industry was less than a fifth of what it had been on the eve of the First World War. Output for small-scale industry was better, but still significantly less than 50 per cent of its pre-war levels.6 Essential pursuits, such as mining and timber production, vital for both the transport system and industry, were in desperate need of revival, and when the project of mobilising the labour force assumed a more concrete form in 1920, it was to these pursuits that attention turned. The first test case for the creation of a 'labour army' deployed for urgent economic needs came in western Siberia, where the Revolutionary Military Council of the 3rd Red Army, whose soldiers had contributed significantly to reversing the advance of Kol- chak's Siberian Army, placed itself at the disposal of Trotsky and his project. Not required for the further pursuit of Kolchak's dwindling forces, and at the time largely idle owing to the difficulties with the overloaded rail network, the opportunity was thus available to assign the men of the 3rd Red Army to work felling timber, clearing snow, repairing infrastructure, and other tasks in the region. This was not the conscription of civilian labour that had originally been proposed by Trotsky, and which had stirred such controversy among the trade unions, but it was a start that brought together the parallel processes of demobilisation and economic reconstruction.7
Setting off for Ekaterinburg on 8 February 1920 to oversee the processing of the soldiers of the 3rd Red Army and their redeployment to productive tasks, Trotsky's mind was clearly focused on economic challenges and looked towards peacetime. Having travelled throughout the country almost continuously during the previous two years, Trotsky's engagement with economic matters had been largely in connection with military challenges. But as he was among the most prominent of Soviet political leaders and in some respects the most visible to the wider public, Trotsky was regularly in receipt of letters and petitions from average civilians. As his personal train made its way to his destination in the Urals, he took considerable time to pen a reply to one such letter from a peasant named Ivan Sigunov of Penza province, who had written to express grievances over the shortages being endured in the countryside, and the seemingly endless demands placed upon the farmers by the agents of the state.
In his reply of 12 February, Trotsky explained the dilemmas currently facing the Soviet Republic, faithfully sticking to the party line, particularly as regards the razverstka. The razverstka was a policy introduced in 1919 that moved away from talk of 'surpluses', and instead defined the needs of the state and collected food from village communities on the basis of strictly defined targets. Whereas the Soviet state had previously requisitioned surpluses with the promise of equivalent exchange of manufactured goods and other items of basic necessity, it eventually had to recognise that such a system of goods exchange was a fiction, and that requisitioned grain would be forfeited by producers as a sort of 'loan' to the state, an investment in the victory of the revolution. 'The peasants currently hold many credit notes,' Trotsky wrote, acknowledging that the patience of people such as Sigunov was being tested.
The current situation is not with that, however. What we need are goods, manufactured products, the kinds of things that a person requires both for himself and his household. We need to revive textile and metals production, lumber mills, chemicals, and so on, such that our people no longer suffer shortages ... But currently we produce only little, as our country is all but destroyed, machines are worn out, factories are in disrepair, raw materials are in short supply, there is no fuel, and workers, mindful of their plight, have fled [the cities].
The first step towards resolving this problem, according to Trotsky, was to collect enough food to sustain a viable industrial workforce, which had shrunk considerably in the years of civil war as families went to the countryside to, in essence, be closer to the food:
The workers of Moscow, Petrograd, the Ivanovo-Voznesensk region, the Don Basin and even the Urals have suffered terrible food shortages, and at times have genuinely been starving. Moscow and Petrograd proletarians have gone hungry for a matter of years, not just for days. The railroad workers are going hungry. Hunger weakens not only the body, but the soul as well. The [worker's] arms drop, as does the will. It is difficult to rouse a hungry worker to perform disciplined, vigorous and organised work. The first job, therefore, is to feed the workers.8
Without the grain taken from the peasants, no revival in industry could be expected. (The title given by Trotsky to the letter, when it was published at the time, referred to the current state of ruin in Russia and the 'tasks' of the peasantry.) However, as Trotsky was aware, without non-agricultural goods to offer in exchange, grain would be secured from the peasants begrudgingly, at best.
In fact, the Soviet state's efforts at food procurement had been punctuated by violence. In 1918, after a failed attempt to work within a system of fixed prices for grain and the criminalisation of the market, the state sought to implant new institutions at the local level - the committees of the poor - that would empower the poor and landless peasants at the expense of the so-called 'kulaks' in the village. With a hope that class conflict could be fomented and harnessed to expedite grain procurement, the Soviet state promised that a portion of hidden 'kulak' surpluses revealed through the work of the committees would be redistributed among the poor in the community, as would any additional confiscations of property carried out as punishment for non-compliance. The committees proved ineffective in the second half of 1918, and in several provinces they provoked much violence, with village communities either closing ranks against perceived 'outsiders' who assumed prominent positions in the new committees, many of whom perished in a wave of violence that accompanied the procurement campaign, or clashing with state procurement agents with the insistence that there were neither kulaks nor surpluses to be found in their village.