Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century
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donald j. raleigh
While workers’ strikes in Petrograd at this time are well known and usually
viewed as a prelude to the soldiers’ revolt at Kronstadt in March 1921, recent
research documents similar ferment in Moscow and perhaps most provincial
capitals. In fact, the party announced the end of grain requisitioning and
approved the NEP not only in response to rural unrest, but also in response to
the powerful wave of industrial strikes – which the party represented as a work
slowdown or volynka – in key urban centres.
51
In Saratov, for instance, an ‘all
but general strike’ broke out, which the party brutally repressed by sentencing
219 workers to death and others to various prison terms, and by expanding its
network of informants throughout the province.
52
Conclusion
In accounting for the Bolshevik victory in the civil war, historians have empha-
sised the self-sacrifice, relativediscipline and centralised nature of the Bolshevik
Party; its control over the Russian heartland and its resources; the military and
political weaknesses of the Whites, particularly their failure to promote popu-
lar social policies; the subaltern nature of the Green opposition; the inability of
the Bolsheviks’ opponents to overcome their differences; the tentative nature
of Allied intervention; the effectiveness of Bolshevik propaganda and terror;
and, during the initial stage of the conflict, the support of many workers and
peasants. In defeating the Whites the Bolsheviks had survived the civil war, but
the crisis of March 1921 suggests that mass discontent could have continued to
fuel the conflict. It did not, owing to the concessions ushered in by the NEP,
which gave the impression that the Leninists had fallen under the influence of
their rivals’ programmes, and which took the edge off the opposition, since
so many longed to have order restored. The famine also helped to keep the
Bolsheviks in power by preventing popular discontent from flaring up again.
The Russian civil war caused wide-scale devastation, economic ruin, loss of
life through military operations and disease and the emigration of an estimated
1–2 million middle- and upper-class Russians. Most estimates of human losses
during the ordeal range from 7 million to 8 million, of which more than
5 million were civilian casualties of fighting, repression and disease. These
figures do not include the estimated 5 million who died from the famine
of 1921–3. Moreover, the civil war produced a steep decline in the standard
of living, causing the destruction of much of the country’s infrastructure.
51 Aves, Workers against Lenin, 111–57; and Raleigh, Experiencing, ch. 12.
52 Raleigh, Experiencing,pp.387–91.
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The Russian civil war, 1917–1922
Industrial production fell to less than 30 per cent of the pre-1914 level and the
amount of land under cultivation decreased sharply.
53
Soviet policies resulted in
a large measure of de-urbanization, created a transient problem of enormous
proportions, militarised civilian life, ruined infrastructures, turned towns into
breeding grounds for diseases, increased the death rate and victimised children.
Furthermore, War Communism strengthened the authoritarian streak in
Russian political culture by creating an economic order characterised by cen-
tralisation, state ownership, compulsion, the extraction of surpluses, forced
allocation of labour and a distribution system that rhetorically privileged the
toiling classes. Six years of hostilities, of wartime production that exhausted
supplies, machinery and labour, and of ideologically inspired and circum-
stantially applied economic policies had shattered the state’s infrastructure,
depleted its resources, brutalised its people and brought them to the brink
of physical exhaustion and emotional despair. In political terms, the party’s
economic policies contributed to the consolidation of a one-party state and
the repression of civil society as the population turned its attention to
honing basic survival strategies. In practical terms, the price of survival was
the temporary naturalisation of economic life, famine and the entrenchment
of a black market and a system of privileges for party members.
The sheer enormity of the convulsion shattered traditional social relations.
Although it has been argued that a ‘primitivisation’ of the whole social system
occurred,
54
it was not simply a matter of regression, but also of new struc-
turing, which focused on the necessities of physical survival. People had little
time for political involvement, resulting in ‘estrangement from the state’,
55
and contributing to the Bolsheviks’ winning the civil war. Everyday practices
mediated or modified in these extreme circumstances of political chaos and
economic collapse became part of the social fabric, as the desire to survive and
withdraw from public life created problems that proved difficult to solve and
undermined subsequent state efforts to reconfigure society. In this regard, the
civil war was not a formative experience, but a defining one, for it ordained
how the Bolsheviks would, in subsequent years, realise their plan for social
engineering: many of the practices we associate with the Stalinist era became
an integral part of the new order already during the civil war, as did the
population’s strategies of accommodation and resistance.
53 Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War,p.287.
54 Moshe Lewin, ‘The Civil War: Dynamics and Legacy’, in Koenker et al., Party, State, and
Society, p. 416.
55 Robert Argenbright, ‘Bolsheviks, Baggers and Railroaders: Political Power and Social
Space, 1917–1921’, Russian Review 52, 4 (1993): 509.
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Building a new state and society:
NEP, 1921–1928
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As 1921 dawned, the Bolsheviks could proclaim themselves victors in the civil
war and celebrate an accomplishment that would stand as one of the great
triumphs in official lore for the rest of the Soviet era. At the same time they
presided over a nation whose borders were uncertain and whose peasantry
protested ever more aggressively against grain requisitioning and other mea-
sures of the civil war that continued beyond the conflict itself. In fact, growing
opposition to these exactions was the principal development that convinced
Lenin to change course in the direction of what soon became known as the New
Economic Policy. By February, in Tambov province alone, tens of thousands
of peasant fighters faced Bolshevik commanders who could not be certain
of the loyalty of their own troops. Similar peasant violence gripped many
other regions, and some areas, notably the lower Volga provinces and Siberia,
were not pacified until the summer of 1922. In Moscow, Petrograd and other
principal cities, diminishing food rations in the winter of 1920–1 sparked strikes
among workers who had backed the Bolsheviks during the civil war. Mutiny at
the Kronstadt naval base in March 1921 may have delivered the severest shock,
given that the sailors’ support for the Bolsheviks reached back to 1917. But
the inflamed countryside had already convinced Lenin that a new approach
was required, and he made this clear in March to delegates at the Tenth Party
Congress who approved what turned out to be the first major plank of the
New Economic Policy. To be sure, none of this signalled a wavering of the
Bolsheviks’ political monopoly, for they continued to arrest leaders of other
parties active beside them in the revolutionary ferment of previous years. Only
the Bolshevik (Communist) Party remained to guide the nation to socialism,
and even this vanguard faced tighter discipline during the 1920s. On Lenin’s
initiative, the same Tenth Party Congress that authorised dramatic economic
concessions also ordered an end to factions in the party itself.
1
1 Vladimir Brovkin, Behind theFrontLines of theCivilWar: Political Parties and SocialMovements
in Russia, 1918–1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Robert Service, Lenin:
A Political Life, vol. iii: The Iron Ring (London: Macmillan, 1995).
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Building a new state and society: NEP, 1921–1928
The New Economic Policy (NEP) emerged neither as a single decree nor a
planned progression but as a label pinned eventually on a series of measures
that appeared over the course of several months beginning in the spring of
1921. NEP was ‘new’ – that is, a departure from the practices of the civil-war
era – in a number of ways. Most important initially, grain requisitions were
replaced by a fixed tax, lower than the grain requisition targets. Soon peasants
were also allowed to sell at free-market prices any produce left after their taxes
had been paid. Not long thereafter, most of the rest of the population received
the right to engage in small-scale trade and manufacturing, with the result that
cities and towns followed the countryside in acquiring a legal private economic
sector that coexisted with state-run factories and stores.
2
Large-scale industry, retained by the state, also found itself placed on a new
footing. No longer could enterprises expect to receive raw materials and other
resources from Moscow, and they could not rely on the state to absorb their
output regardless of cost or demand for the products. Wartime privation and
turmoil had undermined such support in any case, but NEP did so officially.
Efforts to administer industry from Moscow had grown so unwieldy during
the civil war that the state now sought to place thousands of its factories
on a cost-accounting basis (khozraschet). Individual enterprises were grouped
into trusts, organised most often according to activity – the State Associa-
tion of Metal Factories, for instance, or the Moscow Machine Building Trust.
Whether subordinated directly to the Supreme Economic Council in Moscow
or to local economic councils, a trust’s factories were now instructed to cut
expenses and produce goods that could be marketed successfully to other
state customers or, in some instances, to private entrepreneurs. They could
not anticipate automatic assistance from Moscow, where officials were busy
cutting the central budget sharply in an effort to gain control over spend-
ing that had borne little relation to actual government resources during the
civil war.
This aspect of NEP did not mean that the Bolshevik leadership had aban-
doned dreams of a centrally planned system of state industry, just as the legal-
isation of private trade did not replace the long-term goal of socialism. In fact,
NEP’s initial year witnessed not only the announcement of khozraschet and the
concessions to private enterprise, but also the formation of the state planning
agency (Gosplan). However, the time seemed propitious for theory rather than
practice, as Gosplan’s employees occupied themselves more with the study of
2 Alan Ball, Russia’s Last Capitalists: The Nepmen, 1921–1929 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987).
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planning than its implementation. Vital factories might receive orders and sub-
sidies from the centre, and provincial party secretaries intervened on occasion
in the operation of local industry. But economists in Moscow had no means of
obtaining comprehensive data about the nation’s trusts and individual enter-
prises that would have been necessary to establish a planned economy – little
suspecting that such a campaign was less than a decade away.
3
Ambitious social and economic projects appeared far beyond reach in 1921
amid the accumulated death and destruction inherited from the First World
War and the civil war. Millions of city residents had perished, emigrated or
returned to the villages of peasant relatives, leaving Russia even less an urban
society than it had been at the end of the nineteenth century. Metropolises
tended to experience the largest proportional declines, with Moscow and
Petrograd losing more than half of a combined population that had reached
4 million by 1917. The nation’s industrial workforce shrank even more rapidly
than the general urban population during the civil war, gutting the class on
whom the Bolsheviks depended most for support. By 1922 only 1.6 million
people were counted as workers, less than two-thirds the number shortly
before the First World War.
4
This proved to be the low point, however, as cities recovered in the compara-
tive calm of NEP and again attracted millions of peasants seeking permanent or
seasonal work. Demobilisation reduced the Red Army’s ranks from 4.1 million
to 1.6 million in 1921, worsening overpopulation in the hungry countryside and
boosting migration to cities. Roughly a million peasants settled permanently
in towns during the decade’s middle years, and a few million more arrived for
temporary employment – accounting together for over 75 per cent of urban
population growth at this time. While not all sought industrial occupations,
enough did to help swell the proletariat to the neighbourhood of 5.6 million
and ease fears that the regime’s pillar of social support was eroding.
At last the Soviet state emerged from nearly a decade of crises that had
plagued the people of the region and their successive governments. The death
rate declined steadily, and in 1925 the nation’s population passed the level it had
reached before the First World War. Meanwhile, currency reform eliminated
3 David Shearer, Industry, State, and Society in Stalin’s Russia, 1926–1934(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1996); Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 2nd edn (London:
Penguin Books, 1989).
4 Diane Koenker, William Rosenberg and Ronald Suny (eds.), Party, State, and Society in
the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1989); Lewis Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions, 1918–1929
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1992); Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution,
2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
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Building a new state and society: NEP, 1921–1928
the inflation that had rendered the rouble nearly worthless over the period
1921–3, and by fiscal year 1923/4 the government had managed to produce a
balanced budget, with a surplus following in 1924/5. Industrial production,
both heavy and light, as well as foreign trade improved far above the abysmal
levels of the civil war and the beginning of NEP. Rail transport recovered so
impressively that in 1926 it surpassed the level of traffic in 1913, to say nothing of
1921. As the number of workers increased, the improvement in their standard
of living seemed all the more striking when measured against their plight just
a few years before.
5
Encouraging as these signs were for those promoting the construction
of socialism’s foundation, NEP also encompassed a variety of developments
difficult to reconcile with Bolshevik visions. More galling than private trade
itself was an atmosphere of extravagant consumption among newly wealthy
entrepreneurs and others in the largest cities. In contrast to the privation and
egalitarian dreams of War Communism, the Soviet Union’s principal urban
centres seemed to have joined the Roaring Twenties. ‘Moscow made merry’,
observed the Menshevik Fedor Dan in the winter of 1921–2, ‘treating itself with
pastries, fine candies, fruits, and delicacies. Theatres and concerts were packed,
women were again flaunting luxurious apparel, furs, and diamonds.’ Casinos
and nightclubs opened, American jazz bands arrived and Hollywood’s movies
reached Soviet screens by the hundreds, exceeding the number of Soviet films
released from 1924 until the end of NEP.
6
The raucous nightlife seemed particularly unpalatable to Bolsheviks
because it flourished alongside extensive social misfortune, especially during
the decade’s early years. In the second half of 1921, a famine withered countless
villages in the Volga basin, all the way from the Chuvash Autonomous Region
and the Tatar Republic through Simbirsk, Samara, Saratov and Tsaritsyn
provinces down to Astrakhan’ on the Caspian Sea. Beyond the Volga region,
starvation extended as far north as Viatka province, as far east as Cheliabinsk
and the Bashkir and Kirghiz republics and west as far as southern Ukraine.
Severe drought that year, combined with the legacy of protracted warfare,
had given rise to a catastrophe destined to claim at least 5 million lives. Not
until the end of 1922 did a better harvest and a relief campaign mounted by
5 Roger Pethybridge, One Step Backwards, Two Steps Forward: Soviet Society and Politics in
the New Economic Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Nove, Economic History;
Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society.
6 F. I. Dan, Dva goda skitanii (Berlin: Sklad izd. Russische Bucherzentrale Obrazowanje,
1922), p. 253; Denise Youngblood, Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society
in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
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foreign organisations (notably, Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Adminis-
tration) provide reason for hope. Alarm over the nation’s food supply faded
through the following year, but other evidence of human trauma persisted.
Millions of juveniles had already found themselves abandoned or otherwise
homeless in the seven years before 1921, as families disintegrated through
violence, starvation or disease brought by the First World War and the civil
war. The subsequent Volga famine played an even greater role in severing
youths from their parents, and destitute juveniles flooded numerous Soviet
cities at the beginning of NEP. Street children gained recruits not only through
the deaths of mothersandfathersbutalsowhen parentsabandoned dependants
they could no longer feed. Principal municipalities in the Volga epicentre of the
famine accumulated hundreds of new waifs each day by the spring of 1922,
and cities at major rail junctions in the region contained tens of thousands.
In the early 1920s, estimates of the nation’s contingent of street children
settled at around 7 million, including tens of thousands drawn to Moscow itself.
Whether in the capital or provincial towns, they laboured to sustain themselves
through begging, petty street trade, theft and prostitution. Almost at once
they overwhelmed orphanages into which they were crammed. Revolutionary
visions of collective childcare – to emancipate women from household chores
and instil socialist principles in a new generation – dissolved in the reality of
institutions that could offer little more than a piece of bread and a spot on the
floor, and from which children often departed as fugitives or corpses. Not until
the middle of the decade did the number of street children decline steadily,
providing reason at last for optimism that a blight the Bolsheviks associated
with capitalist society could be removed from their own.
7
For that to happen, however, the circumstances of families and especially
single mothers would have to improve considerably, and here NEP gener-
ated mixed results. Industry, for example, revived briskly, but women seeking
employment encountered new obstacles at the factory gate and inside. They
had poured into the proletariat during the First World War and represented
close to half of the industrial labour force that remained at the beginning of
1921, many of them working in branches of production where they could not
have expected employment in 1913. As labour patterns reverted during NEP
to gender divisions more common before 1914, women were concentrated in
textiles and other light industries and in lower-paying, lower-skilled occupa-
tions – if they were able to escape the ‘last hired, first fired’ retrenchment at
7 Alan Ball, And Now My Soul is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918–1930
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
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Building a new state and society: NEP, 1921–1928
enterprises placed on khozraschet. A variety of other factors appear to have
played a part in augmenting the ranks of unemployed women, including a
belief among employers that men, on average, possessed a higher level of
industrial skills and could cope more readily with heavy physical labour. Party
organisations also instructed state labour exchanges to assign priority to plac-
ing demobilised soldiers in jobs, while labour laws barred women from certain
industrial occupations and stipulated that they receive substantial time off for
maternity and the care of sick children. All of this hindered women in compet-
ing for jobs against male candidates who arrived on the scene in large numbers
beginning in 1921.By1923, women and juveniles (also protected under labour
laws that restricted their use by factory directors) accounted for over half of
all unemployed workers.
8
Thus,labour laws formulatedto benefit womenwithsuch rights as generous
maternity leave yielded results in practice that were difficult to celebrate. Much
the same could be said of broader Bolshevik legislation on women and the
family.Less than a yearafter the revolution, a Code on Marriage, the Family and
Guardianship had proclaimed equal standing for men and women regarding
divorce and alimony, while removing legal stigmas attached to ‘illegitimate’
children and their mothers. In 1926 a new Family Code recognised de facto
marriage, effectively eliminating the legal distinction between common-law
and officially registered unions. Modified alimony and child-support provisions
from the first code were joined by a declaration that property acquired during
marriage belonged jointly to husband and wife. When a relationship turned
sour, divorce could be obtained as easily as sending a postcard of notification
to one’s partner.
These measures, intended as a stride towards emancipation and equality,
met with a chilly reception from most Soviet women during NEP. Three out
of four were peasants, and patriarchal views on family relations proved tena-
cious in the countryside. Even in the cities, reformers found women more
cautious than exultant over the new freedom of divorce and the legal accep-
tance of unregistered relationships. They suspected, correctly, that alimony
would be difficult to collect, and that men, more than women, would avail
themselves of the new opportunity to secure divorce on demand at a time
when NEP had opened a forbidding landscape before single mothers. The
same budget-cutting imperatives that had prompted the state to place facto-
ries on khozraschet also led to reductions in government spending on childcare
8 Wendy Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
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facilities and other social services sorely needed by women left to support chil-
dren on their own. For the jurists who drafted these codes, talk of liberation
clashed with reality throughout the period and found little support even from
the intended beneficiaries.
9
Nowhere was this more glaring than in Soviet Central Asia, once activists
embarked on a drive to emancipate Muslim women from a variety of customs
deeply rooted in the region. During the mid- to later years of the decade, a
series of laws banned such practices as polygamy and the abduction of a fianc
´
ee,
while strengthening women’s property rights in marriage. Mutual consent
paved the way for divorce, and courts favoured women more often than not
in cases where spouses failed to reach agreement. Taken together, the laws
invited women to enjoy public rights equal to men – an endeavour described
by Bolsheviks as vital to modernise a region they viewed as backward. The
Women’s Section of the party and the Communist Youth League (Komsomol)
often led the charge by staging public events at which women removed their
long veils or renounced other traditions. These efforts assumed the form of
an all-out campaign by 1927, but most Central Asian women (let alone men)
saw little to tempt them. The few who did unveil, adopt Russian clothing
or join the Komsomol risked ostracism and, in scattered instances, murder.
Eventually, at the end of the decade, Moscow reined in the endeavour. The
hostility it caused had come to seem counter-productive and a distraction from
goals more important to the new Stalinist leadership bent on industrialising
the nation.
10
∗∗∗∗∗
The frustrating venture in Central Asia underscored one of the challenges
faced by the Bolsheviks from the moment of their revolutionary triumph.
They presided over scores of non-Slavic regions whose inhabitants had not
always relished their experience as part of the tsarist empire and now contem-
plated warily a union of soviet republics. In 1921 the fragmented remains of
the tsarist empire included six republics bearing the name Soviet – the Russian
Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (by far the largest) and counterparts in
Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan – along with more
nebulous ‘republics’ in Central Asia and the Far East. Bilateral treaties signed
9 Wendy Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life,
1917–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
10 H
´
el
`
ene Carr
`
ere d’Encausse, The Great Challenge: Nationalities and the Bolshevik State,
1917–1930 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1992); Douglas Northrop, ‘Nationalising
Backwardness: Gender, Empire, and Uzbek Identity’, in Ronald Suny and Terry Martin
(eds.), A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001).
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between the Russian Republic (RSFSR) and the other five created a confus-
ing impression that suggested both an understanding between independent
nations and an administrative reform of a single state, depending on the por-
tion of the document consulted. As Bolshevik leaders prevailed in the civil
war, they gained the opportunity to exert their will in outlying regions and
thereby address this unstable equilibrium. From 1920 to 1922, taking advantage
of the leading role played by the Russian Communist Party in all six republics,
Moscow transferred an ever-larger share of authority to itself. Even the Com-
missariats for Foreign Affairs, symbolic bastions of independence in the other
five republics, yielded to the Kremlin and allowed Russia to speak for all six at
the Genoa Conference early in 1922. This vexed Ukrainian officials in particu-
lar, but dismay over evaporating sovereignty rang out most loudly in a smaller
republic further south.
Not long after the Red Army conquered Georgia in February 1921, friction
developed between Georgian Bolsheviks leading the new Georgian Soviet
Republic and plenipotentiaries sent from Moscow to supervise government
in the Caucasus. Regarding the formation of a union of soviet republics, for
instance, the Georgians desired to preserve their republic’s individual identity
and enter on the same terms as, say, the Ukrainians rather than as part of a single
Transcaucasian Republic that would also include Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Moscow’s representatives, led by Sergo Ordzhonikidze and backed by Stalin,
insisted that all three join the Soviet Union together as one republic. The
dispute grew bitter – Ordzhonikidze pinning the label of selfish nationalism
on the Georgians who responded with charges of Great Russian chauvin-
ism – and by 1922 it had alarmed Lenin. He had no particular objection to
bringing Georgia into the Soviet Union as part of a Transcaucasian Republic,
but he, more than Stalin or Ordzhonikidze, was troubled by cries of Great
Russian chauvinism, which he described as much more reprehensible than
local nationalism rising in defence of a small region menaced by large pow-
ers. Lenin also showed concern about propaganda consequences that might
ensue in other soviet republics and abroad from heavy-handed treatment of the
Georgian comrades. Nevertheless, his misgivings over the process under way
in Georgia were not fundamental, and as his health deteriorated he watched
Georgia pressed into a Transcaucasian Republic that signed a treaty with the
RSFSR, Ukraine and Belorussia, joining them all in a new Soviet Union on
30 December 1922.
In this larger venture, too, Lenin did not see eye to eye with Stalin, though
here again the difference was more a matter of methods and appearances
than ultimate goals. Lenin argued that each republic should participate in
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