Black Sea. By mid-1920 the Reds had consolidated their hold on the country.
In part the Bolshevik triumph can be attributed to superior organization and better understanding of the political dimensions of the civil war. But in the ultimate analysis it was due mainly to the insurmountable advantages that they enjoyed. The Reds controlled the heartland of what had been the Russian empire, inhabited by some 70 million Russians, while their opponents operated on the periphery, where the population was sparser and ethnically mixed. In nearly all engagements the Red Army enjoyed great preponderance in numbers. It also enjoyed superiority in military hardware: since most of Russia's defence industries and arsenals were located in the centre of die country, it inherited vast stores of weapons and ammunition from the tsarist army. The Whites, by contrast, were almost wholly dependent on foreign aid.
One of the most significant results of the Bolshevik victory was the reintegration of those borderland areas inhabited by non-Russians that had been separated from Russia at the time of the 1917 Revolution. Although the Bolsheviks originally had encouraged this separatist process, advancing the slogan of "national self-determination", once in power, they moved decisively to reconquer these territories - realizing that Ukraine, for example, was vital for the economic viability of Russia. Except for those regions that enjoyed strong British or French backing - Finland, the Baltic area, and Poland - by 1921 the Red Army had occupied all the independent republics of the defunct Russian empire, including Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Lenin's original nationality policy had been based on the assumption that nations would choose to stay in a close relationship writh Russia, but this proved not to be the case. Many republics wanted to be independent in order to develop their own brand of national communism. The comrade who imposed Russian dominance was, ironically, Joseph Stalin, a Georgian. As commissar for nationalities, he sought to ensure that Moscow rule prevailed.
In 1922 Bolshevik-controlled Moscow proclaimed the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, composed of Russia, Belorussia (now Belarus), Ukraine, and the Transcau- casian Federation. The first USSR constitution was formally adopted in January 1924. In 1925 the All-Union Communist Party, later the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), was formed. Nominally a league of equals, the USSR was from the beginning dominated by Russians. The federated state structure was a facade to conceal the dictatorship of the Russian Communist Party, the true locus of power.
For Lenin and his associates Russia itself, however, was no more than a springboard from which to launch a global civil war. They feared that if the revolution remained confined to backward, agrarian Russia it would perish under the combined onslaught of the foreign "bourgeoisie" and the domestic peasantry. In their view it was essential to carry the revolution abroad to the industrial countries of the West, whose workers, they believed, were anxious to stop fighting one another and topple their exploiters. To organize and finance this effort, they formed in March 1919 the Third International, or "Comintern". This organization was a branch of the Russian Communist Party, and it decreed that communist parties abroad were to be accountable to Moscow and not to their domestic constituencies.
Hoping to exploit the political and economic turmoil afflicting central Europe after the Allied victory, Moscow sent agents with ample supplies of money to stir up unrest. By the early 1920s the Comintern succeeded in forming in most European countries, especially France and Italy, Communist Party affiliates that it used as pressure groups. The idea of world revolution, however, had to be postponed indefinitely, which compelled the Bolshevik leadership to concentrate on building in Russia an isolated communist state. Ironically, the methods of government that they devised, centred on the one- party monopoly and known since the early 1920s as "totalitarian", were emulated not by elements sympathetic to communism but by nationalistic radicals hostile to it, such as Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Germany.
Creating a Communist Economy
While the Bolsheviks were fighting the Russian Civil War, they had initiated a series of unprecedented measures intended to destroy all vestiges of private property and inaugurate a centralized communist economy. These measures, which in 1921 received the name "War Communism", had two primary objectives. One was politicaclass="underline" as Marxists, the Bolsheviks believed that private ownership of the means of production provided the basis of political power. By nationalizing it, they undermined the opposition. They further acted in the conviction that a centralized and planned economy was inherently more efficient than a capitalist one, and would in no time turn Soviet Russia into rhe most productive country in the world.
War Communism entailed four sets of measures: (1) the nationalization of all the means of production and transportation, (2) the abolition of money and its replacement by barter tokens, as well as by free goods and services, (3) the imposition on the national economy of a single plan, and (4) the introduction of compulsory labour. In 1918 all but the smallest industrial enterprises were nationalized. Agricultural land, the main source of national wealth, was for the time being left at the disposal of peasant communes, with the understanding that sooner or later it would be collectivized. Private ownership of urban real estate was abolished, as was inheritance. The state (in effect, the Bolshevik Party} became the sole owner of the country's productive and income-yielding assets. Management of this wealth was entrusted to a gigantic bureaucratic organization, the Supreme Council of the National Economy, whose purpose was to allocate human and material resources in the most rational manner.
Money was effectively destroyed by the unrestrained printing of banknotes, which led, as intended, to an extraordinary inflation: by January 1923 prices in Soviet Russia, compared with 1913, had increased 100 million times. Ordinary citizens, along with the rich, lost their life savings. Barter and the issuance by government agencies of free goods replaced normal commercial operations. Private trade, whether wholesale or retail, was forbidden. All adult citizens were required to work wherever ordered. The independence of trade unions was abolished, and the right to strike against the nationalized enterprises outlawed.
The policies of War Communism brought about an unprecedented economic crisis. In 1920, when the civil war was for all practical purposes over, industrial production was about one-quarter of what it had been in 1913, and the number of employed workers had fallen by roughly one-half. Productivity per worker was one-quarter of the 1913 level. Most painful was the decline in the production of grain. Compelled to surrender all the grain that government officials decided they did not require for personal consumption, fodder, or seed, and forbidden to sell on the open market, the peasants kept reducing their sown acreage. Such reductions, combined with declining yields caused by shortages of fertilizer and draught animals, led to a steady drop in grain production: in 1920 the cereal harvest in central Russia yielded only two-thirds of the '1913 crop. In the cities bread rations wrere reduced to one or two ounces a day.
It required only one of the periodic droughts that customarily afflict Russia to bring about a massive famine: this happened in early 1921. There was a catastrophic plunge in foodstuff production in the areas that traditionally supplied the bulk of grains. At the height of the famine some 35 million people suffered from severe malnutrition. The hungry resorted to eating grass and, occasionally, to cannibalism. The losses would have been still more disastrous were it not for assistance provided by the American Relief Administration, headed by the future US president Herbert Hoover, which, with moneys from the US Congress and voluntary contributions, fed most of the starving. Even so, the human casualties of the 1921 famine are estimated at 5.1 million.