After thrashing the White armies in 1920, the Bolsheviks devoted all of their energies to 'peaceful construction', to attempts to address industrial collapse, transportation breakdown, shrinking rations and dying cities. The party declared war on economic ruin, filth, disease and hunger, addressing the need to restore industry, raise productivity and mobilise labour armies at the rear. It extendedlabourbonuses and introduced a labour ration based on the type of work one did. It stepped up its campaign to involve citizens in unpopular volunteer workdays (subbotniki). It set up labour disciplinary courts to deal with absenteeism, instituted one-person management and restructured unions to raise productivity. These measures, as well as use of bourgeois specialists, piece- rate wages and labour books to control movement, provoked waves of unrest in Russia, uniting workers who otherwise had little in common and once again showing how they created themselves as workers. In turn, labour disturbances ended a period of relaxation in the party's tolerance of rival socialist parties, just as it gave rise to opposition groups within the Communist Party.
49 Aves, Workers against Lenin, passim.
50 Raleigh, Experiencing, pp. 367-77; and Narskii, Zhizn', pp. 461-8.
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.[179] 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.[180]
Conclusion
In accounting for the Bolshevik victory in the civil war, historians have emphasised the self-sacrifice, relative discipline and centralised nature ofthe Bolshevik Party; its control over the Russian heartland and its resources; the military and political weaknesses of the Whites, particularly their failure to promote popular 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.
Industrial production fell to less than 30 per cent of the pre-1914 level and the amount of land under cultivation decreased sharply.[181] 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 centralisation, 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 circumstantially 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,[182] it was not simply a matter of regression, but also of new structuring, which focused on the necessities of physical survival. People had little time for political involvement, resulting in 'estrangement from the state',[183]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.
Building a new state and society: NEP, 1921-1928
ALAN BALL
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 measures 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 i922. In Moscow, Petrograd and other principal cities, diminishing food rations in the winter of 1920-1 sparked strikes among workers who hadbackedthe 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 i920s. On Lenin's initiative, the same Tenth Party Congress that authorised dramatic economic concessions also ordered an end to factions in the party itself.i
182
Moshe Lewin, 'The Civil War: Dynamics and Legacy', in Koenker et al.,
183
Robert Argenbright, 'Bolsheviks, Baggers and Railroaders: Political Power and Social Space, 1917-1921',