The main planks of the system, which was overseen by VSNKh, were the nationalization of industry (beginning with large factories by a decree of 28 June 1918 and spreading to small enterprises by a decree of 20 November 1920); a high degree of central control over the production and distribution of goods; a state monopoly on foreign trade and a strict regulation of internal trade, to the extent that all private trade came to be regarded as illegal by 1920; the imposition of strict discipline in the factories; obligatory labor service for members of the bourgeoisie; the requisitioning of grain and other agricultural products from the peasantry (prodrazverstka) under a state “food dictatorship”; the rationing of food and other products; and a tendency for direct exchange of goods and services to obviate the need for currency. (It is of note, however, that fixed prices, rationing, and a state monopoly on grain purchases were not Bolshevik inventions; they had been introduced to Russia by the imperial government during the First World War and had been maintained by the Provisional Government in 1917.) However, the chaotic circumstances of the civil wars meant that the program could not be introduced fully or uniformly (if, indeed, it was a true program, rather than a series of ad hoc, desperate measures); for example, the black market (through bagmen) was responsible for the supply of most food consumed by urban dwellers throughout the period.
Although it is generally agreed that War Communism helped the Soviet government win the civil wars, it also aggravated many of the hardships suffered by the population. Peasants resented the requisitioning and turned against the Bolshevik regime from the spring of 1918 onward, and workers fled the cities to seek food, decreasing the production of manufactured goods that might have been bartered with the peasantry for food. Petrograd lost almost 75 percent of its population between 1918 and 1921, and Moscow lost at least 50 percent, while Soviet industrial production in 1921 reached just 21 percent of Russia’s prewar levels. The consequence were such episodes as the Belovodsk uprising, the Pitchfork Uprising, the Chapan War, the Tambov Rebellion, the Western Siberian Uprising, and the Kronshtadt Revolt (although, contrary to many accounts, the decision to abandon War Communism in favor of the New Economic Policy had been reached by Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee many weeks before the outbreak of the rebellion at Kronshtadt). Following resolutions made at the 10th Party Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in March 1921, a series of measures were introduced that replaced the system of War Communism with the mixed-economy NEP.
WARSAW, TREATY OF (21–24 April 1920). This secret agreement between the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) and the Second Polish Republic recognized Polish sovereignty over Western Volhynia and Eastern Galicia (Western Ukraine) and was fiercely opposed by the government-in-exile of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, which also laid claim to those territories.
Under the terms of the treaty, the Ukrainian–Polish border was established as running along the Zbruch River, continuing northeastward to Vyshgorodok, then farther east from Zdolnuiv, along the eastern boundary of the Rivne (Rovno) district to the Pripiat River. In return, the UNR secured Polish recognition of its independent existence and (under an annex to the treaty) an agreement for joint Polish–Ukrainian military action to expel Bolshevik forces from Ukrainian soil. Both countries agreed to protect the national and cultural rights of their ethnic minorities and vowed not to make third-party agreements that ran contrary to the Treaty of Warsaw. Poland, however, breached the terms of the agreement in signing the Treaty of Riga (18 March 1921) with the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (and in recognizing the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic) at the end of the Soviet–Polish War, having launched the offensive against Kiev that reactivated that conflict on 25 April 1920, the day after securing the military alliance with UNR and its Ukrainian Army that the Treaty of Warsaw incorporated.
WEAPONRY (RED ARMY). Almost the entire stock of weapons and ammunition of the Imperial Russian Army was inherited by the Soviet government and its armed forces, as well as the plant to produce more (notably in the shape of the huge arsenal at Tula). The arms industry was overseen by VSNKh, and by 1920 its 2,000 factories claimed to have produced 3,000,000 rifles, 21,000 machine guns, 1,600,000 handguns, and 3,000 artillery pieces (as well as 5,600,000 greatcoats and 4,000,000 summer uniforms). Throughout the period, however, the supply of weapons to the Red Army was complicated by the great diversity of available equipment—more than 60 makes of artillery pieces and 35 types of rifle, for example—meaning that spare parts were often hard to obtain, and users of the weaponry had to frequently retrain.
Of the 1,300,000 rifles left over from the tsarist army, the majority were the Russian 7.62mm Mosin-Nagant M.1891, commonly known as the trekhlineika (literally, “the little three-liner,” from its caliber in the old Russian system). Most of these had been produced domestically, but some were manufactured to order during the First World War by the Remington Company in the United States. They were available in several versions: pekhotnaia (infantry), the shorter and lighter dragusnkaia (dragoon), and the bayonet-less kazachskaia (Cossack). Numerous foreign-manufactured rifles were also used, including 7.92mm German Mauser M.1898, the 8mm Austrian Mannlicher M.1895, the Japanese Ariska M.1905, and a version of the American Winchester M.1895 that had been adapted for Russian ammunition. The most commonly used revolver of the civil-war period was the 7.62mm Nagant M.1895, although members of the Cheka and military commissars greatly favored the German Mauser.
With regard to bladed weapons (which, because of the shortage of spare parts, often had to be resorted to), cavalrymen and artillerymen used the Cossack or (hand-guardless) Caucasian shashka (saber) or kinzhal (dagger), which could be intricately decorated, while all mounted forces also used the M.1910 lance.
The most widely used machine gun was the Maxim M.1910, although the French Hotchkiss M.1914, the American Colt, and the British Lewis M.1915 were also to be found. All types of machine gun could be mounted on a tachanka, and some were mounted on aircraft.
The most common mortar among Red Army forces was the imperial Russian Likhonin 47–58mm, while the 3-inch field gun M.1902, the 3-inch mountain gun M.1909, and the M.1910 Howitzer constituted the bulk of the light artillery deployed by the Reds. Heavy artillery was largely made up of the 107mm field gun M.1910 and the 6-inch M.1910 Howitzer, with some of the French 120mm cannon M.1878. Also deployed in smaller numbers were the 6-inch M.1904 siege gun, the British 6-inch and 8-inchVickers Howitzers, the 11-inch Howitzer M.1914, the 12-inch Obukhov Howitzer M.1915, the 10-inch coastal cannon, and the 37mm trench gun M.1915, as well as the 37mm and 40mm automatic guns.
In the early months of the civil wars, the Red Army’s access to artillery was limited, as most guns were located in areas of the front that had not yet come fully under Soviet control, but this situation eased by the spring and early summer of 1918. Thereafter, for ease of movement, artillery was often mounted on armored trains or trucks and on military flotillas. The Reds also utilized a number of tanks. In all circumstances, all sides in the civil wars tended to favor artillery operations in the “direct fire” mode, but this was more the case with the Reds (who often lacked training) than the Whites. Also, dominance was usually established by the side that could deploy its artillery first and fastest, so efforts to find concealed positions on the open steppe were kept to a minimum. The Soviet leadership were also fascinated by the potential presented by the German Army’s “Paris Gun,” which in March–July 1918 had bombarded Paris from a distance of 80 miles, and during the summer of 1918 they established a special subcommittee of the Artillery Directorate of the Main Field Staff of the Red Army to investigate means of increasing the range of its own artillery to a comparable distance (although nothing concrete was achieved during the civil-war years).