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Soviet Union [USSR] Civil War and War Communism
Soon after buying peace with Germany, the Soviet state found
itself under attack from other quarters. By the spring of 1918,
elements dissatisfied with the Communists (as the Bolsheviks
started calling themselves, conforming with the name change from
Russian Social Democratic Labor Party to Russian Communist Party
[Bolshevik] in March) established centers of resistance in southern
and Siberian Russia against the Communist-controlled area
(see
fig. 4). Anti-Communists, often led by former officers of the tsarist
army, clashed with the Red Army, founded and organized by Trotsky,
now serving as commissar of war. A civil war to determine the
future of Russia had begun.
The White armies enjoyed, to varying degrees, the support of
the Allied Powers. Desiring to defeat Germany in any way possible,
Britain, France, and the United States landed troops in Russia and
provided logistical support to the Whites, whom the Allies trusted
to resume Russia's struggle against Germany after overthrowing the
Communist regime. (Japan also sent troops, but with the intention
of seizing territory in Siberia.) After the Allies defeated Germany
in November 1918, they opted to continue their intervention in the
Russian Civil War against the Communists in the interests of
averting world socialist revolution.
During the Civil War, the Soviet regime also had to deal with
struggles for independence in regions that it had given up under
the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (which the regime immediately
repudiated after Germany's defeat by the Allies in November 1918).
By force of arms, the Communists established Soviet republics in
Belorussia (January 1919), Ukraine (March 1919), Azerbaydzhan
(April 1920), Armenia (November 1920), and Georgia (March 1921),
but they were unable to win back the Baltic region, where the
independent states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been
founded shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution. In December 1917,
during a civil war between Finnish Reds and Whites, the Soviet
government recognized the independence of Finland but was
disappointed when that country became a parliamentary republic in
1918. Poland, reborn after World War I, fought a successful war
with Soviet Russia from April 1920 to March 1921 over the location
of the frontier between the two states.
During its struggle for survival, the Soviet state placed great
hopes on revolution's breaking out in the industrialized countries.
To coordinate the socialist movement under Soviet auspices, Lenin
founded the Communist International (Comintern) in March 1919.
Although no successful socialist revolutions occurred elsewhere
immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Comintern provided
the Communist leadership with the means through which they later
controlled foreign communist parties. By the end of 1920, the
Communists had clearly triumphed in the Civil War. Although in 1919
Soviet Russia had shrunk to the size of sixteenth-century Muscovy,
the Red Army had the advantage of defending the heartland with
Moscow at its center. The White armies, divided geographically and
without a clearly defined cause, went down in defeat one by one.
The monarchical cause was effectively killed when Communists shot
the imperial family in July 1918. The Allied governments, lacking
support for intervention from their war-weary citizenry, withdrew
most of their forces by 1920. The last foreign troops departed
Siberia in 1922, leaving the Soviet state unchallenged from abroad.
During the Civil War, the Communist regime took increasingly
repressive measures against its opponents within the country. The
Soviet constitution of 1918 deprived members of the former
"exploiting classes"--nobles, priests, and capitalists--of civil
rights. Left-wing SRs, formerly partners of the Bolsheviks, became
targets for persecution during the Red Terror that followed an
attempt on Lenin's life in August 1918. In those desperate times,
both Reds and Whites murdered and executed without trial large
numbers of suspected enemies. The party also took measures to
ensure greater discipline among its members by tightening its
organization and creating specialized administrative organs.
In the economic life of the country, too, the Communist regime
sought to exert control through a series of drastic measures that
came to be known as war communism. To coordinate what remained of
Russia's economic resources after years of war, in 1918 the
government nationalized industry and subordinated it to central
administrations in Moscow. Rejecting workers' control of factories
as inefficient, the regime brought in expert managers to run the
factories and organized and directed the factory workers as in a
military mobilization. To feed the urban population, the Soviet
government carried out mass requisitions of grain from the
peasantry.
The results of war communism were unsatisfactory. Industrial
production continued to fall. Workers received wages in kind
because inflation had made the ruble practically worthless. In the
countryside, peasants rebelled against payments in valueless money
by curtailing or consuming their agricultural production. In late
1920, strikes broke out in the industrial centers, and peasant
uprisings sprang up across the land as famine ravaged the
countryside. To the Soviet government, however, the most
disquieting manifestation of dissatisfaction with war communism was
the rebellion in March 1921 of sailors at the naval base at
Kronshtadt (near Petrograd), which had earlier won renown as a
bastion of the Bolshevik Revolution. Although Trotsky and the Red
Army succeeded in putting down the mutiny, the rebellion signaled
to the party leadership that the austere policies of war communism
had to be abolished. The harsh legacy of the Civil War period,
however, would have a profound influence on the future development
of the country.
Data as of May 1989
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