In it, Lenin accepted terms which took from the Russian Empire 62,000,000 people, 1,267,000 square miles of her arable lands, 26 percent of her railroads, 33 percent of her factories, 75 percent of her coal mines and 75 percent of her iron mines. In addition to this, Lenin promised that Russia would pay the Central Powers 1 ½ billion dollars in indemnities!
Such was to be the end of a war that had cost the Russian people 8 ½ million casualties.
The First Attempt to Communize Russia
With Russia out of the war, Lenin now felt sufficient confidence to subordinate the whole Russian economy to the theories of Communism. He confiscated all industry from private owners and set it up under government operation. He seized all land which belonged to the aristocracy, the Tsar and the church. He also seized all the livestock and implements which ordinarily served this land. He then abolished wages and replaced them with direct payment “in kind.” This saddled Russia with a sluggish and primitive barter system. He ordered all domestic goods to be rationed among the people according to their class. For example, a worker or soldier was allocated thirty-five pounds of bread, while a nonworker, such as a manager, received only twelve. Lenin also made all labor subject to mobilization. People with technical skills could be compelled to accept any work assigned to them. The selling of retail goods was taken over by the government.
As for the peasants, Lenin distributed the confiscated land to them, but required them to work the land without hiring any help and without selling any of the produce. It was all to go to the government. Furthermore, the land could not be sold, leased nor mortgaged.
In March, 1918, the Bolsheviks changed their name to the “Russian Communist Party.”
But from the very beginning the Russian people did not take well to the new order. Without any personal incentive among the workers, production on the farm and in the factory dwindled to a trickle. The factories were soon down to 13 percent of what they had been producing before the war started, and the farmers cut their production in half. Black markets began to flourish. Workers often stole goods from the factories to exchange for food which the peasants secretly withheld from the government. Before long, the peasants were holding back more than one-third of their crops.
As might have been expected, this decomposition of the Russian economy brought down upon the heads of the people all the wrath and frustration of the Bolshevik leaders. Every terror method known was used to force the people to produce. This led to retaliation.
During the summer of 1918, violent civil war broke out as the “White Guard” vowed they would overthrow the Reds and free the Russian people. The western Allied Nations, though hard-pressed themselves, were sympathetic to this movement and sent supplies, equipment and even what troops they could spare to help release the Russian people from the Bolshevik grip.
Lenin knew this was a crisis of the highest order. He therefore decided to strike back in three different directions simultaneously. To resist organized military groups, he authorized Trotsky to forcibly mobilize a Red Army which ultimately totaled five million. To resist the people’s anti-Bolshevik sentiment and refusal to work, he organized the secret police or Cheka. This body could investigate arrest, adjudicate and execute suspected persons. Authorities state that during the civil war, literally tens of thousands went down before its firing squads. Finally, Lenin struck out at the Tsar. To prevent any possibility of a new monarchial party being developed, he had the Tsar, the Empress, their children and all their retainers shot to death at Yekaterinburg and their bodies completely destroyed. This mass assassination occurred July 16, 1918.
Six weeks later the scalding vengeance of the White Russians nearly cost Lenin his life. The Bolshevik aristocracy was caught under vulnerable circumstances and a volley of rifle fire assassinated the Cheka chief and seriously wounded Lenin. To avenge itself, the Cheka summarily executed 500 persons.
When the end of World War I came on November 11, 1918, it had little effect on the situation in Russia. The civil war continued with even greater violence, and the Bolsheviks redoubled their efforts to communize Russia. Lenin continued to set up Soviets or workers’ councils, in every part of the empire, and these Soviets in turn sent delegates to the supreme Soviet at the capital. Through the channels of this Bolshevik-dominated labor-union empire, Lenin carried out his policies. Behind the Soviets stood the enforcing power of the Red Army, and the terror of the Cheka secret police.
In spite of all these coercive methods, however, Lenin eventually discovered he was fighting a losing battle. For a while he took courage from the fact that United States, England, France and Japan began withdrawing their troops and supplies under the League of Nations policy of “self-determination for all peoples,” but the ferocious fighting of the White Russians continued.
The breaking point for Lenin came in 1921–22 when the economic inefficiency of the Bolshevik regime was compounded by a disastrous famine. There was a complete crop failure along the Volga—the bread basket of Russia. Nikolaus Basaeches wrote: “No one who was ever in that famine area, no one who saw those starving and brutalized people, will ever forget the spectacle. Cannibalism was common. The despairing people crept about, emaciated, like brown mummies…. When those hordes fell upon an unprepared village, they were apt to massacre every living person.”
Packs of wild, orphaned children roamed like hungry wolves through cities and country sides. It is estimated that during the year 1922, over 33 million Russians were starving, and 5 million died. The people of the United States were so shocked by this almost inconceivable amount of human suffering that they raised funds for the Hoover Commission to feed over 10 million Russians during 1922.
The End of a Communist Dream
Even before this disaster, however, Lenin had forced himself to admit that he had assigned his country an impossible task. His Bolshevik revolution had not brought peace to Russia, but a terrible civil war in which 28 million Russians had lost their lives. The principles of socialism which Lenin had forced upon the people had not brought increased production as Marx had promised, but had reduced production to a point where even in normal times it would not adequately clothe nor feed half the people.
It was under these circumstances and in the light of these facts that Lenin acknowledged defeat and ordered a retreat. As early as 1921 he announced that there would be a “New Economic Program”—afterwards referred to as the NEP.
This humiliating reversal of policy was adopted by the Communists to keep from being dethroned. Lenin brought back the payment of wages to workers, which immediately generated the circulation of money in place of the old barter system. In place of the government trading centers, he allowed private concerns to begin buying and selling so that in less than a year three-fourths of all retail distribution was back in private hands. He violated the sanctity of Marx’s memory by even encouraging the peasants to lease additional land and hire other peasants to work for them. He also tried to encourage private initiative by promising the peasants they could sell most of their grain on the open market instead of having it seized by agents of the government as in the past.