HISTORY
11. THE DEBATE ABOUT THE NATURE OF "WAR COMMUNISM"
SOURCE. Peter J. Boettke, "The Soviet Experiment with Pure Communism," Critical Review: A Journal of Books and Ideas, Vol. 2 No. 4 (Fall 1988), pp. 149-182.
From mid-1918 until 1921, when Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy, the Bolshevik regime strove to subject the already weakened Russian economy to a rigidly centralized system of planning and management that later came to be known as "war communism." (1) The experiment is generally acknowledged to have been a fiasco. But what was "war communism"? Why was it established and kept going for close on three years?
There are two opposed schools of thought on this question. Many economic historians -- Boettke focuses on Maurice Dobb, E. H. Carr, and Stephen Cohen -- have interpreted war communism as a short-term expedient imposed on the Bolsheviks by the emergency demands of civil war and foreign intervention. According to this version, the system was never intended to last into normal peacetime conditions and had no special ideological significance. While this has since become "the standard account," several well-informed economists writing in the 1920s, such as Boris Brutzkus and Leo Pasvolsky, viewed war communism in a much more ideological light -- as an attempt to realize Marx' anti-market socialist or communist utopia.
The author marshals evidence from Lenin and other Old Bolsheviks to demonstrate that while they may have tried half-heartedly after the abolition of war communism to rationalize the experience as a temporary expedient AT THE TIME they did believe that they were establishing socialism. Those who discount the abundant evidence to this effect ignore the ideological commitment of the Old Bolsheviks and the influence that early 20th-century Marxism had on their thinking.
In fact, the evidence in favor of the ideological nature of war communism is so clear and so abundant that one is tempted to question the motives of those who refuse to accept it. Boettke suspects that one motive may be the desire to protect personal ideals of humanistic Marxian socialism from the inference that what failed was not just the specific system called "war communism" but socialism or communism itself (at least in its Marxian variant).
This cannot be excluded. But I think that in some cases we are dealing simply with the naturally incredulous reaction to apparent ideological motivation of people brought up in the tradition of Anglo-Saxon pragmatism and empiricism. They themselves do not care a jot about ideas, and consequently they cannot imagine that anyone else really cares either: however often and however loudly some may claim to have ideological motives, they must be dismissed a priori as a meaningless façade.
Nevertheless, those who interpret war communism as an attempt to establish communism do tend to oversimplify matters in certain respects. First of all, the Leninists saw the socialist revolution as a product of imperialist and civil war: revolution and war were inextricably combined in their thinking. So communism for them was BOTH an expedient of war AND an ideal. All one can say is that they did not regard it SOLELY as an expedient.
Second, Lenin and his comrades did not believe in 1918-21 that they could keep socialism (as they then conceived of it) going for very long in Russia UNLESS victorious socialist revolutions in the more advanced countries of Western Europe, and above all in Germany, came to their aid. In that event, Russia would be guided by the superior model of socialism that they expected to emerge in Germany. In either case the Russian war communism would be temporary.
At that time the Bolsheviks shared the Mensheviks' view that material and cultural conditions in Russia were too backward for the successful construction of socialism. They were determined nonetheless to BEGIN building socialism in the hope that by "breaking the weakest link in the imperialist chain" they would trigger maturing socialist revolutions in Western Europe. In this sense the retreat to NEP was a response not only to the peasant rebellion in Tambov and the uprising of the Kronstadt sailors, but also to the defeat of the revolutions in Hungary and Germany.
Was "the Soviet experiment with pure communism" the decisive failure of Marxian socialism? It was certainly A failure, but one that occurred under specific highly unfavorable conditions. One cannot draw the direct conclusion that Marxian socialism would equally fail under all conceivable conditions. Again, one can plausibly argue that the Russian experience of 1918-21 demonstrated (if such a demonstration were needed) the inadequacy of socialism as Marx conceptualized it -- in particular, the need for new solutions to the problems of economic calculation and coordination in socialism. But it does not follow that further development of the socialist idea into a more adequate form is in principle impossible.
NOTE
(1) For a feel of how the system worked, see the translated extract from the memoir of I. Rapoport in RAS No. 2 (Item 11). Rapoport worked as a specialist in the management of the forestry industry in 1919 and 1920.
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