If we regard it as a central feature of Russian economic and social reality in 1917 that the overwhelming majority of the population had not yet entered into the industrial age, we are bound to assign great significance to the surplus dose of backwardness and underdevelopment occasioned by the Civil War. In conditions where merely staying alive was difficult enough, it was normal that the most sophisticated forms of human organization should have been the most vulnerable, while the most basic forms of activity, providing at least some food and fuel, had the best record of survival. As regards economic, demographic, political and cultural indicators, the regime’s starting point in 1921 was in fact some fifty years in arrears. Many landowners and businessmen had been killed during the Civil War; many more had emigrated. The landowning class (about 500,000 people, including family members) and the grande bourgeoisie (125,000 people) had disappeared. A mere 11–12 per cent of former landowners – most of them small ones – remained in the countryside, working in the manner of peasants. The losses in the ranks of the intellectual professions were also heavy. On the eve of the First World War, 136,000 people with a university education were employed in the economy, and an even larger number of semi-professionals. They were mostly hostile to the new regime and it is assumed that a high proportion of them emigrated, although we do not possess precise figures. It is known, however, that a majority of doctors remained and continued to work. But the ravages of war, revolution and civil war were even greater than the numbers betray. As a consequence of the war and the events of 1917, about 17.5 million people (more than 12 per cent of the population) were displaced and lived a precarious existence. Several million more were uprooted in the course of the next few years. Large towns lost many of their inhabitants. Between 1917 and 1920 the combined populations of Petrograd and Moscow fell from 4.3 million to 1.96 million (more than 2 million people emigrated). During the 1921–2 famine, many of those who stayed became refugees in search of food.
Some 3 million soldiers were killed in combat or died of their wounds or disease. Some 13 million civilians died prematurely, mainly because of the 1921–2 famine and a series of epidemics that gripped Russia (particularly the Spanish flu that struck the whole of Europe). In January 1923 the population of the USSR hit its lowest point – some 6 to 9 million below the January 1914 total. The combined events of 1914–21 plunged the Russian population into misery and inflicted colossal losses. Naturally, the economy was also devastated. The output of large-scale industry was only 13 per cent of the 1913 total (iron and steel a mere 4 per cent). Grain output was no more than two-thirds of the 1909–13 level, and that was a miracle which can only be explained by peasant vigour and endurance. Foreign trade had collapsed, and at the beginning of 1921 a disastrous fuel, transport and food crisis supervened. Protest and unrest spread among industrial workers, who were regarded as pillars of the regime.[2] Never had the country touched such a nadir. The political effects of this enormous regression generated an ‘archaicization’ of society, with the destruction of many elements of civilization accumulated in the past. The consequences were momentous. There can be no doubt that such conditions were conducive to the formation of a primitive autocracy. In the short term, however, they triggered the New Economic Policy, which in many respects was successful and dictated a redefinition of the regime’s strategy.
In 1917–19, Lenin, who belonged (as we have said) to two worlds, reacted to the crisis of socialism in the West as a disappointed member of the Second International by creating the Third International (1919). Two years later he was facing a West that had begun to recover its strength and a Russia that was more backward than ever and scarcely the site from which to direct a world revolution. Moreover, it was now saddled with the challenge its revolutionary slogans and the creation of the Comintern presented to the West and East. One way or another, everything had to be rethought and placed in historical perspective. True to character, Lenin recognized the depth of the changes in Russia and the world and began to reconsider many aspects of the previous strategy, mapping out an entirely new one. Forced to react to dramatic historical developments, he switched perspectives and strategy. This rules out imputing any inflexibility to his ‘ism’, despite a widespread view to the contrary that is itself utterly inflexible.
LENINISMS AND THE LAST REVISION
The relevant ‘ism’ was largely shaped by abruptly changing historical conditions. The prewar period, when the forthcoming revolution was supposed to be a liberal one; the crisis unleashed by the First World War; 1917 with its very different perspectives; the Civil War and war communism; and finally the NEP – each involved sufficiently divergent conjunctures to require in each instance a change not just of diagnosis but also of strategy and the very goals to be pursued. It may well be that the essence of ‘Leninism’ consisted in Lenin’s ability to conceptualize and initiate these turns. If so, there were at least three different Leninisms, the last of which is especially interesting.
In 1921, with the advent of a period of domestic peace, the revision and adaptation Lenin engaged in involved all aspects of the system to be constructed, including its ideology. On 27 March 1922 he declared to the Eleventh Party Congress (the last one he participated in) that ‘the car is not travelling in the direction the driver thinks he is headed in’. This was a ‘classic’ Leninist declaration – especially when he added: ‘We need to rethink our ideas about socialism.’ This was followed by other public utterances of the same tenor in the course of 1922 and up until May 1923, in what became known as his ‘testament’.[3] But already at the Eleventh Congress, frail as he was due to illness, Lenin had advanced a set of new ideas that paved the way for a substantial revision of previous concepts and practices.
Lenin now made a general recommendation: ‘We must learn from anyone who knows more about something than us’ – whether it be national and international capitalists, humble employees in a commercial firm, or even former ‘white guards’ if they were competent. For the important thing was to demonstrate to the peasantry that the new masters of the country were willing to learn; that they knew how to run the country and to do so to the peasantry’s advantage. This was followed by a stern warning: ‘Either we pass the exam of competition with the private sector, or things will be a total failure.’ Not unexpectedly, he then reverted to the idea of ‘state capitalism’ that he had already toyed with in 1918, and which seemed to him the best solution as long as it was kept within certain limits by the new state. This was a concept that allowed for a degree of realism while retaining a socialist perspective, even if it was postponed to a distant future. In his speech to the Fourth Congress of the Comintern on 13 November 1922, Lenin reminded his audience that he had already raised this idea in 1918 (it had been inspired by the German war economy operated by Walter Rathenau). But it now had to be geared to the needs of a social alliance. He still saw Russia’s socio-economic system as composed of five structures, from private peasant farms to state-owned firms (dubbed ‘socialist’). The issue he now raised was whether ‘state capitalism’, which came second in the scale of progressive socio-economic formations, should not take precedence over socialism in the immediate present and future.[4]
2
The data on Civil War losses are taken from different sources, in particular R. W. Davies,