The Bolshevik government created discontent among those who had supported it. But Lenin's disappointment with the proletariat was just as strong. (He had always been unhappy with the peasantry.) Within a few months after the revolution, the Russian working class, whose "political maturity" Lenin had praised, proved itself in his eyes to be immature, not proletarian enough, and lacking in the training necessary to run the country.
The Utopian dreams of State and Revolution, written on the eve of October, evaporated upon contact with reality. In March 1918 Lenin wrote a new Utopian program, an article called "The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government," in which he spelled out the most important features of "communism" (which later came to be called war communism, after its failure became apparent). The "task of suppressing the resistance of the exploiters," Lenin wrote, had been fulfilled for the most part. "Now we must administer Russia." This second task was as easy as the first, in the author's view. It could be accomplished simply by establishing "nationwide accounting and control of the production and distribution of goods."28 In October 1921 Lenin described his 1918 program more fully:
At the beginning of 1918 we made the mistake of deciding to go over directly to communist production and distribution. We thought that under the surplus food appropriation system the peasants would provide us with the required quantity of grain, which we could distribute among the factories and thus achieve communist production and distribution. I cannot say that we pictured this plan as definitely and clearly as that; but we acted approximately on those lines.29
It was precisely at the beginning of 1918 that Lenin, according to Trotsky, then his closest comrade-in-arms, constantly repeated at Sovnarkom meetings: "In six months we will have built socialism." Ten years later, Andrei Platonov would write The Strange Herbs of Chevengur, a novel about some revolutionary dreamers who decide to build socialism "at one blow," using "the fighting methods of revolutionary conscience and compulsory labor service."
Unlike Platonov's characters, Lenin had vast resources at his disposal for realizing his communist Utopia. In industry, "control of production" gave way to nationalizations. Private trade, the foundation of the capitalist system, was banned. And compulsory labor service was introduced. "We ought to begin," Lenin wrote, "by introducing compulsory labor service for the rich."30 Later these principles would gradually be extended to the majority, the workers and peasants. The example of wartime Germany served as confirmation to Lenin that such a scheme could succeed. "German imperialism... displayed its economically advanced position by the fact that it went over, earlier than any of the other warring powers, to a system of compulsory labor service."31 Lenin's plan had the simplicity of genius: the Kaiser's Germany plus Soviet power equals communism.
Compulsory service was applied to the peasants in the form of government decrees in May and June 1918 instituting grain requisitioning. Under the so-called surplus food appropriation system (prodrazverstka) peasants were obliged to sell the state all their surplus, at fixed prices. This requisitioning of grain, Lenin said, "must become our fundamental activity" and "must be pursued to the end. Only when this problem is resolved will we have the socialist foundations on which to build the glorious structure of socialism."32
The ban on private trade and the absence of any state trading system brought famine to the cities, an outcome that must have seemed incomprehensible to a population which had revolted because of food shortages. Lenin formulated his scheme for building the "glorious structure" in the following manner: "There are two ways to fight hunger, a capitalist one and a socialist one. The first consists of free trade. ... Our path is that of the grain monopoly."33 And so the battle for grain began. In order to confiscate grain, the government organized "food detachments," a measure Lenin described as the "first and most momentous step toward the socialist revolution in the countryside."34 Poor peasants' committees were established by decree on June 11, 1918, to help bring the "revolution to the countryside." Part of the grain discovered and confiscated by these committees was to be distributed to the poor peasants themselves, as a "material incentive."
Bonch-Bruevich offers these recollections of the period of "war communism":
The onrush of revolutionary events.. . changed our social relations to such an extent that we considered it best to nationalize absolutely everything, from the biggest factories down to the last hairdressing shop run by one hairdresser owning a clipper and two razors, or down to the last carrot in a grocery store. Roadblocks and checkpoints were put up everywhere so that no one could get through with food [smuggled from the countryside]. Everyone was put on government rations.35
Bonch-Bruevich does not explain that the rations varied considerably and that certain categories of the population did not get any at all or that only "speculation by bag traders," who smuggled foodstuffs past the roadblocks, saved the urban population of the Soviet Republic from death. In 1918 and 1919 city dwellers obtained 60 percent of their food from the black market. The grain monopoly and the government's food policy contributed greatly to the demoralization of citizens by forcing them to resort to illegal measures, fostering crime on a huge scale and giving birth to an extremely powerful black market. The grain monopoly and the ban on private trade trained people to think that commerce, in and of itself, was a counterrevolutionary activity or at best an unworthy occupation. The grain monopoly, like all the acts of the Soviet government, had not only a concrete goal but also an "educational" function, undermining both the administrative structures of the old society and its moral foundations as well.
On January 13, 1918, a decree on the separation of church and state deprived the church of all its property and legal rights, in effect outlawing it. In September a decree on the family and marriage and one on the schools were adopted almost simultaneously. Marriage (only civil marriage was recognized; religious marriage was abolished) and divorce were made freely available. Alexandra Kollontai declared the family's obsolescence, both to the state, because it prevents women from doing work useful to society, and to family members themselves, because the state would gradually take over childbearing.
However, the state could not afford to assume this task immediately after the revolution, although articles were inserted in the legal code making it possible in the future. The government's intentions were made clear at a national educational conference in remarks by Zlata Lilina, Zinoviev's wife and the director of public education in Petrograd, who called for the "nationalization" of all children, to remove them from the oppressive influences of their families, because children, "like wax, are highly impressionable" and because "good, true Communists" could be made out of them.