Compromise and Preparation

Abstract

The end of the Civil War presented the Soviet leadership with a whole series of new issues, some immediate and some more long term. If the White armies were defeated, internal discontent was growing rapidly, fueled by the catastrophic economic situation and resentment of the party dictatorship. In 1920 in the Tambov province in central Russia a major revolt of the peasantry broke out, largely unpolitical but no less fervent. It required major army forces under Tukhachevskii to suppress it. As the army moved into Tambov province, the sailors of Kronstadt rose in revolt. The revolt at the naval base in the harbor of Petrograd was much more visible and more political. The sailors had been crucial supporters of the Bolsheviks in 1917, and now they were calling for Soviets to be elected without Communists, a direct challenge to the emerging Soviet system. At the end of March, 1921, Trotsky sent troops across the ice to retake the fort with much loss of life, the whole event illustrating the fragility of Soviet power. The revolts and the obvious failure of War Communism led to a sharp turn in economic policy. As the fighting raged in Kronstadt, Lenin and the party abolished the system of compulsory grain deliveries, substituting a tax in kind and permitting the peasantry to trade freely in the products left after the payment of the new tax. This step was the foundation of the New Economic Policy, known as NEP. A return to a money economy soon followed, and with it came permission from the state, even encouragement, for private individuals to trade and set up businesses to supply a population starved of the most basic consumer goods. Socialism was no longer on the immediate agenda. Industrial recovery would eventually provide a basis for further development, and at an indefinite point in the future peasant agriculture would be drawn somehow into the socialist system (a process called “collectivization”). The next immediate issue was the famine that appeared in 1922, the result of years of devastation, neglect of equipment and infrastructure, the absence of peasants from the fields while fighting in the various armies during the Civil War, the Soviet grain requisitions that discouraged farming, and general death and destruction. The Soviets took up the offer of the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover, fresh from relief operations in Belgium, to provide food to stricken areas in the south and the Volga region. Relief and the return of peace could contain the famine, but longer-term issues remained. The outcome of the revolution and civil war was that the peasantry finally controlled virtually all arable land in Russia. With the urban economy devastated, however, they at first had little incentive to sell their grain to the cities. Yet NEP depended precisely on the peasant sale of grain for consumer goods, and eventually it worked. The peasants now had cloth, industrially manufactured consumer goods, and some farm equipment to buy in return for their grain. At this point, the party did little to advance any sort of socialist agriculture. It abandoned the experiments with the “communes” of the Civil War era, and settled for modest cooperatives among the peasants while trying to build a basic party network among them, especially from younger peasants who had served in the Red Army.