A tribute to Trotsky

The political, economical and ideological tussles that plagued the peace quotient of Russia in the early twentieth century led the Bolshevik party react and respond to the whole situation in a manner beyond the understanding of mere political theories. The economic low Russia that plunged into, after the Revolution, made the scenario worse for the now in power Bolshevik party, which, we must keep in mind were novice administrators. Their course of action was defined within their ideological tendencies of a Marxist response. Therefore whether what we encompass as war communism were merely pragmatic economic policies or whether they were more about the ideology is a debate that continues to intrigue historians. We will see in lots of instances that their policy took its shape due to their Marxist subscriptions rather than their understanding of what the situation demanded. Also in certain instances the two, pragmatic policies and ideological imperatives very comfortably overlapped, like in the case of nationalization and state distribution of assets. The belief, underlying the later economic policies of War Communism, that Russia was on the brink of the definitive transition to communism, had scarcely any justification in Marxist theory.
Whatever economic theories had sprung up during the time, did so due to two fold reasons, the need to fight a civil war and the Party’s notion of how to build a socialist party. David Christian calls War Communism ‘the uneasy combination of Utopian and practical elements that characterized the economic structures”.
Propaganda was a crucial tool in the eyes of the Bolsheviks. Their propaganda included all that they’d require to build the idealized socialist state they’d dreamt of before coming to power. But the economic conditions held them from painting their dreams true. To cope with a desperate situation, they turned to more radical policies and, in the process, tried to extend the sphere of centralized government control much further and faster than they had originally intended. Faced with numerous threats they start to build a coercive machinery of power, the army, a new police system, a disciplined ruling group and the fiscal machinery needed to support these structures. The defensive forces, there was a conflict whether it should be more like a socialist militia or if it should be more like the traditional trained, disciplined and mobilized.
In response to the crisis of May, 1918 about the advancing Czechs, the government announced compulsory military services for the working class and began to mobilize the Red Armies. Here was where they showed their power to go beyond ‘social support’. With the triumph of proletarian revolution, the transition to communism was imminent.
Socialists in principle believe that all members of the society should have some share in the control of society’s resources. The problem arises with the issue as to how this shared control was to be exercised. In practice, The Civil War forced the Bolsheviks to control it from the centre. Thus comes up one of their key policies, which was Nationalization of assets. In December the Supreme Council of the National Economy was set up. Soon after the October Revolution they nationalized banking and credit. As far as private industries are concerned, they began with something like Putilov, which was already closely involved in Government projects on defense. Local soviets expropriated plants on their own authority. Some of the plants were nationalized on the petition of their workers, who had driven out the old management, or even on the petition of managers who wanted protection against unruly workers. Summer of 1918, the government issued a decree nationalizing all large-scale industry, and by the autumn of 1919 it was estimated that over 80 per cent of such enterprises had in fact been nationalized. But the workers or owners or managers at times, in practice were not able to manage running these plants and industries. Because workers themselves could not keep the plants going by organizing the supply of raw materials and distribution of finished products, the plants often just closed down. So amidst an already sinking economy Russia’s industries shut down because of their inability to sustain, thus adding to the economic pressure on the government. Although in theory the entire sphere of production was in the hands of the Bolsheviks. It was a ‘centrally directed’ economy, as put by Fitzpatrick.
Many ideological theorists saw in this traces of socialism although some accepted they might have merely been the result of social and military crisis.
The second blow to the Bolshevik effort was their strategy of prohibition of free trade. It rendered them penniless by the end of Civil War. Fitzpatrick says-“From their predecessors they inherited rationing in the towns (introduced in 1916) and a state monopoly on grain which in theory required the peasants to deliver their whole surplus (introduced in the spring of 1917 by the Provisional Government).” But these weren’t enough to satisfy the huger of millions in the mass, especially in the villages. The peasants refused to sell their grains because of the unavailability manufactured goods in the market to buy. After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks tried to increase grain deliveries by offering the peasants manufactured goods instead of money in exchange, sort of bringing back the system of barter. They also nationalized wholesale trade and, after the outbreak of the Civil War, prohibited free retail trade in most basic foodstuffs and manufactured products and tried to convert the consumer co-operatives into a state distribution network. There was even an attempt to construct a budget on a commodity rather than a money basis. Justifying this in ideological terms the explanation came in the form of the phrase 'withering away of money'. It indicated how close the society had already come to communism. In a way it was disguised runaway inflation. Such was their disillusionment that they failed to identify the difference between rampant inflation currency devaluation and the withering away of money under communism.
One of the most delicate balances was to be built on the rungs of the peasantry. The sensitive crowd had to be dealt with, especially after being subjected to a horrible economic scenario, for which the government was totally accountable. The basic problem the Bolsheviks faced with the peasantry was the unavailability of food. State procurements of grain were not improved either by outlawing private grain trading or by offering manufactured goods instead of money in payment. The State had a whole Red Army to feed. They had little choice but to take the peasants' produce by persuasion, cunning, threats, or force. The Bolsheviks adopted a policy of grain requisitioning; they called it Prodrazverstka. It included sending workers' and soldiers' brigades-usually armed, and if possible provided with some goods for barter-to get the hoarded grain out of the peasants' barns. These took a toll on the class that once was in their league.
The impact of the war communism policies was profound. It left every section of the society affected, mainly bruised after the depressing years of Civil War. . In the first place, they tried to facilitate grain procurements by splitting the village into opposing groups. Believing that the growth of rural capitalism had already produced significant class differentiation among the peasants, the Bolsheviks expected to receive instinctive support from the poor and landless peasants and instinctive opposition from the richer ones. They therefore began to organize village Committees of the Poor, and encouraged them to co-operate with Soviet authorities in extracting grain from the barns of richer peasants. But the poorer peasants were now in a better position to have really aroused to the angst of being the underprivileged, therefore rendering their attempt a failure.
Though the Bolsheviks had let the peasants have their way in 1917-18, their long-term plans for the countryside were quite as disruptive as Stolypin's had been. They disapproved of almost every aspect of the traditional rural order, from the mir and the strip system of dividing the land to the patriarchal family. The Bolsheviks' real interest was large-scale agriculture, and only the political imperative of winning over the peasantry had led them to condone the breaking up of large estates that took place in 1917-18. On some of the remaining state lands, they set up state farms (sovkhozy). They were the socialist equivalent of large-scale capitalist agriculture, with appointed managers supervising the work of waged agricultural labourers. The Bolsheviks preferred collective farms (kolkhozy) in political terms to traditional or individual small-holding peasant farming. The collective farms did not divide their land into strips, like the traditional peasant village, but worked the land and marketed produce collectively.
Coming to the policies affecting the working classes, the Bolsheviks had egalitarian instincts rather than a strictly egalitarian policy in practice as far as wages were concerned. In the interests of maximizing production, the Bolsheviks tried to retain piece-work in industry, though the workers regarded were not happy with this kind of payment. Shortages and rationing reigned the Civil War period but that’s hardly an achievement even though it helped bridgethe gap between the urban and the rural. In fact, the rationing system under War Communism favoured certain categories of the population, including Red Army personnel, skilled workers in key industries, Communist administrators, and some groups of the intelligentsia.
When it came to factories, as to who runs them and how, they were always in support of managers appointed by the State, centrally guided and directed. But this varied from place to place. Some factories continued to be run by elected workers' committees. Others were run by an appointed director, often a Communist but sometimes the former manager, chief engineer or even owner of the plant. In yet other cases, a worker or group of workers from the factory committee or local trade union was appointed to manage the plant, and this transitional arrangement-halfway between workers' control and appointed management-was often the most successful.
Ideologically their utopian texts were mainly Marx and Engels, the all encompassing explanation of all their policies. Lenin's State and Revolution (1917) where he suggested that administration would ultimately cease to be the business of full-time professionals and would become a rotating duty of the whole citizenry. Lenin’s approach was highly realistic and he believed more in meeting the situation demands than following Marxist ideals to the letter.
The ethos of revolutionary liberation and the cause of the women and the family formed a major part of the Bolshevik concern. The Bolsheviks supported the emancipation of women, as most members of the Russian radical intelligentsia had done since the 1860s. By the end of the Civil War, laws that made divorce easily attainable, removed the formal stigma from illegitimacy, permitted abortion, and mandated equal rights and equal pay for women were enacted. The Bolshevik Party established special women's departments (zhenotdely) to organize and educate women, protect their interests, and help them to play an independent role.
The political power also changed hands by the end of the Civil War. Their war communism strategies created a separate wing to handle administration altogether. At first, the central government (Council of People's Commissars) seemed the hub of the new political system. But by the end of the Civil War, there were already signs that the Bolshevik Party's Central Committee and Politburo were tending to usurp the government's powers, while at local level the party committees were becoming dominant over the soviets. The Bolsheviks' political thinking revolved around the belief that society was divided into antagonistic classes, and that the political struggle was a reflection of the social one, and that members of the urban proletariat and other formerly exploited classes were the revolution's natural allies. The internal conspiracy was all the more threatening coming from the old privileged class because, as both theory and the reality of foreign intervention in the Civil War demonstrated, it was backed by the forces of international capitalism. Bolsheviks believed, it was necessary not only to eliminate the old patterns of class exploitation but also to reverse them.
This primacy of party over state organs was to become a permanent feature of the Soviet system. Fitzpatrick rightly puts it-“Lenin, the realist, wanted a real government, not some kind of improvised directorate, just as he wanted a real army, real laws, and perhaps even, in the final analysis, a real Russian Empire. It was a party with authoritarian tendencies, and one that had always had a strong leader-even, according to Lenin's opponents, a dictatorial one.” The party's authoritarian, illiberal, rough, and repressive traits may well have been reinforced by the influx of working-class and peasant members in 1917 and the Civil War years. The peasants came to see the Civil War as a struggle between socialist parties and therefore they chose to remain indifferent to it.
There was shift from spontaneity to discipline thus reinforcing the ideals of socialism. Secret police, The Cheka, rigid press censorship, suppression of internal opposition, apparently democratic constitution, again and again revealed a disguised form of extreme socialism, only failing to acquire a totalitarian form, as of now. The Civil War had murdered the democratic traditions of revolutionary underground ever. It was almost as if opposition was intolerable. Instead a new ruling group was formed, organized and managed by the Communist party. Thus Socialism had already taken roots.