Apologists for the bloody disaster that was the October Revolution of 1917 feel the need to remind us regularly of the ‘gains’ of October. That is to say, the October Revolution made possible all the progress that Russia enjoyed in the twentieth century, and that without it, Russia would be a medieval backwater much like Afghanistan today. This is quite an insult to a nation that, even before the Bolshevik disaster, was producing impressive men of science, literature and philosophy, people who would have played a decisive role in modernising the country under any regime. Moreover, it ignores all the modernisation that was taking place even before the Bolshevik seizure of power in the sphere of the economy, arts and so much else. It is underpinned by the dogmatic, Marxist belief that the planned economy is inherently progressive compared to free-market capitalism (which is empirically false), and that the former USSR could not possibly have developed on the basis of a capitalist system. I would refer these people to the work of respectable academics who have posited otherwise. There is no reason to believe that Russia could not have continued its pre-war trajectory of capitalist modernisation had it had a competent administration. If the Tsarist regime, with all its flaws, could oversee significant progressive development in the productive forces, there is no reason to believe that a non-Communist regime – or even a Bolshevik regime that retained a reformed version of the NEP – could not have done the same. The calamity of the First World War interrupted the process of development and brought about the collapse of the regime, but there is no reason why the successors to the Tsars could not have retained private property rights and kick-started a full recovery – no reason, that is, except for Communist dogma. It is in the interests of Trotsky and his ilk to suggest that Tsarism represented nothing but backwardness, and that its cultural and economic achievements meant nothing, because it allows them to glorify the Communist despotism that came after it, and its so-called ‘modernisation’ of the former Russian Empire. I am thinking of the ridiculous conclusion of his History of the Russian Revolution, when he says that the Tsarist cultural elite ‘contributed nothing essential to humanity’ – a moronic claim that even he cannot have believed.
As Martin Malia said in his book The Soviet Tragedy (New York: Free Press, 1996), p.511:
There is absolutely no way a country of European culture as huge and as rich in natural resources as Russia would not have been a major industrial power by the end of the twentieth century, whatever its non-Communist government. It is absurd to argue–as is almost invariably the case when we start from modernization theory, especially when it is overlaid with socialist expectations–that Communism was necessary to bring Russia from backwardness to modernity. Such reasoning reflects the real determinist fallacy in Sovietology, to wit, that because industrialization in fact happened the Communist way, it could only have happened that way. On the contrary, the Bolshevik road to “development” was a very poor imitation of the real thing; indeed, it was largely counterproductive in almost every sphere–the economy, culture, and morality–and left behind after its failure a crippled, stunted, and, in Yeltsin’s term, a “sick” society.
An objective look at what Ted Grant referred to as the ‘balance sheet’ of October will demonstrate, to any sound mind, that the October coup and the subsequent Leninist despotism cost far more than it is was worth.
The Russian Economy under Tsarism
In his book on Russia, Grant asserts the following:
In 1917, tsarist Russia was far more backward than present-day India. It lagged far behind the West. It was the barbaric land of the medieval wooden plough, used by peasants who had only achieved emancipation from serfdom two generations before. Russia had been ruled by tsarist despotism for centuries. The industrial working class was a small minority – less than four million out of a total of 150 million. Seventy per cent of the population could neither read nor write. Russian capitalism was extremely feeble and rested upon the crutches of foreign capital: French, British, German, Belgian and other Western powers controlled ninety per cent of Russia’s mines, fifty per cent of her chemical industry, more than forty per cent of her engineering, and forty-two per cent of her banking stock. The October Revolution attempted to transform all this, showing the way forward to the workers everywhere and preparing the road for the world socialist revolution. Despite the immense problems and obstacles, the planned economy revolutionised the productive forces in the USSR and laid the basis for a modern economy. The pre-war period saw the build-up of heavy industry through a series of Five-Year Plans and laid the foundations for the advances of the post-war years.
Without in any way denying that Tsarist Russia was a deeply backward country, it is worth looking at all the data that indicates progress despite the obstacles. Economic historian Davis Kedrosky notes the following:
Russian industry was growing much faster over 1870-1914 than that of any other European country—at 5.1 percent per annum, versus 4.1 percent in Germany and just 2.1 percent in France and England. Industrial capital per worker rose by 55 percent between the 1880s and 1913, and the overall growth rate (8-9 percent) of the capital stock was greater than that in other industrializers of the period.
Why shouldn’t industry have located in Russia? The country was well-endowed with cheap unskilled labor and boundless stocks of cheap energy, including charcoal, coal, and oil. Industrial technology was available from abroad, though import tariffs did make it costlier than necessary. Russian interest rates were slightly higher than Western European during the Belle Epoque, on par with those of land-rich Argentina and Brazil; state investment guarantees attracted enormous foreign investment from France, Germany, and Britain. By the time that war broke out, Russia’s foreign debt was the world’s largest. Investors were pretty sure that the Tsarist regime was a good bet, insured by budgetary orthodoxy and the gold standard. Even so, Russia’s foreign investment as a share of NNP was just -1.4 percent, which is similar to the US over 1869-88 (-1.0) and far less than Canada or Australia (-7.9 and -5.1 respectively).
It is worth noting that even after the Bolshevik regime disavowed all of Russia’s debts after coming to power in 1917, foreign investors were still clamouring to do business with the Bolsheviks, believing that their Marxist agenda was simply hot air and that they would become pragmatic capitalists within no time. Even Russian businessmen were keen to do business with a regime that professed to be anti-capitalist. There was no ‘objective’ barrier to capitalist development:
Although they had no result, the mere fact of these negotiations [between the Bolsheviks and Russian business] taking place helps explain the puzzling equanimity of Russia’s business community toward a regime which openly threatened it with economic ruin and even physical annihilation. Russia’s bankers and industrialists treated Bolshevik pronouncements as revolutionary rhetoric. In their view, the Bolsheviks would either turn to them for help in restoring a collapsing economy or fall. So it happened that in the spring of 1918, the Petrograd Stock Exchange, formally closed since the outbreak of the war, suddenly came to life, as securities, especially bank shares, rose in over-the-counter trading. The optimism of big business, reinforced by Bolshevik overtures and the knowledge that the government was negotiating with Germany a trade agreement that would open Russia to German capital, caused it to turn a deaf ear to the pleas of White generals for financial assistance. In the spring of 1918, the White movement appeared to businessmen a hopeless gamble compared with the prospects of collaboration with the Bolshevik Government.
-Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution 1899-1919 (Hammersmith: Fontana Press, 1992), p.677
So much for all that talk of ‘counterrevolutionary sabotage’. There was nothing in Russia’s situation which made the planned economy necessary. Kotkin argues in his extraordinary biography of Stalin that ‘Private capital and dictatorship are perfectly compatible…nothing prevented the Communist dictatorship from embracing capital–nothing, that is, except idees fixes.’
As Kedrosky argues:
…it’s sufficient to argue that growth could have occurred under the Romanovs, especially if institutions continued to get better. Protectionism and industrial policy could have succeeded in growing up competitive industries, especially given Russia’s large internal market, low wages, and cheap energy.
Instead of viewing the Revolution of 1917 as an inevitable outcome of limited development, we should accept the more obvious answer: that the destruction of the Russian economy during the First World War—GDP per capita fell by 20 percent—combined with an already-fragile political and economic situation to induce mass unrest. Without the war, it’s possible that Russian growth and (potentially) institutional change would have delivered the goods and forestalled the violent destruction of the old order.
Land Reform
Another ‘gain’ of October is supposed to be that the peasants were given the land that they had so long been yearning for, kept from them by the kleptocratic gentry and their allies in the Tsarist regime. Even before the October coup, however, the peasants had been seizing the land for themselves and making their own redistributions of the communal land. The Bolsheviks merely recognised this with their ‘Decree on Land’. In any case, it is clear that the ‘gains’ of October in terms of land reform were, on closer inspection, limited.
Reliable statistics indicate a much more modest result. Figures compiled by the Commissariat of Agriculture in 1919-20 showed that peasants received a total of 21.5 million desiatiny (23.27 million hectares). This land was unevenly distributed. Fifty-three peasant of Russian communes gained no land from the Revolution. This nearly corresponds to the number of villages (54 percent) that, according to the same source, said they felt “unhappy” over the results of land redistribution. The remaining 47 percent of the villages acquired arable land in very unequal shares. Of the thirty-four provinces for which figures exist, the communes in six received less than one-tenth of one desiatina per member; those in twelve gained between one-tenth and one-quarter desiatina; in nine they obtained between one-quarter and one-half; peasants of four acquired from one-half to a full desiatina; and only in three provinces did the peasants secure between one and two desiatiny. Nationwide, the average communal allotment of arable land per peasant, which before the Revolution had been 1.87 desiatiny, rose to 2.26. This would represent an increment of 0.4 desiatina of arable land per communal adult (edok) or 23.7 percent. This figure, first cited in 1921, has been confirmed by recent studies, the most authoritative of which somewhat vaguely says that the land which the average peasant received “did not exceed” 0.4 desiatina, or approximately one acre – far below what the peasant had expected from the Black Repartition.
But even this modest figure overstates the economic benefits of the repartition, for a good part (two-thirds) of the land which the peasants seized in 1917-18 they had previously leased. The “socialization” of that land, therefore, did not so much increase the arable land available to them as absolve them from the payment of rent. In addition to being freed from such rents, estimated at 700 million rubles a year, the peasants also benefited from the cancellation by the Communist regime of their debts to the Peasants’ Land Bank, amounting to 1.4 billion rubles.
The peasants viewed their title to the new land skeptically, for they heard that the new government intended someday to introduce collectives: the Decree on the Socialization of Land issued in April 1918 stated that the transfer of land to the communes was “provisional” or “temporary” (vremennoe). They wondered for how long they would be allowed to keep it and decided to act as if it were only until the next harvest was over. Hence, rather than incorporate the acquired land into communal holdings, they kept it separate, so that if required to surrender the new land, they could still hold on to their old allotments. As a result, the much-lamented strip farming (cherespolositsa) intensified. Many peasants had to travel thirteen fifty and even sixty kilometers to reach their new allotments: if the distance was too great, they simply abandoned them.
So much for the economic benefits which the Russian peasant derived from the Revolution. They were by no means free. Historians usually ignore the costs of the agrarian revolution to the peasant, although they can be shown to have been considerable. These costs were of a twofold nature: the loss of savings due to inflation and the loss of land held by peasants in private (non-communal) ownership.
…For the 21 million desiatiny which they had been allowed to appropriate, they lost in bank savings alone an estimated 5 billion rubles. If one accepts the contemporary estimate that they kept in mattresses and buried in the ground an additional 7 to 8 billion, then it follows that for his average allotment of one acre of arable land (0.4 desiatina) the peasant paid 600 pre-1918 rubles. Before the Revolution, the average price for this land would have been 64.4 rubles.
-Pipes, The Russian Revolution, pp.718-719
As if that was not enough, those peasants and Cossacks who owned small plots of land as private property (34.4 million desiatiny worth of land before 1917) were reduced to a mere 8 million desiatiny of land. Even though in theory Lenin’s Land Decree left peasant private property intact, in practice, the peasants themselves forced peasants with privately-owned farmland to reduce them to the size of communal allotments. (Pipes, The Russian Revolution, p.720). So much for all that nonsense about giving land to the peasants. As Pipes says on that same page:
In view of these facts, it is misleading to say that the Russian peasantry gained from the Revolution, free of charge, large quantities of agricultural land. Its gains were neither generous nor free. The Russian peasantry cannot be treated as homogeneous: the term “Russian peasantry” is an abstraction covering millions of individuals, some of whom had succeeded, by dint of industry, thrift, and business sense, to accumulate capital, which they held in cash or invested in land. All this cash and nearly all this land they not lost. Once such factors are taken into account, it is clear that the muzhik greatly overpaid for the properties which he had seized under the Communist-sponsored duvan.
Let us not forget of course that the Communists would go on to wage war on the peasantry and attempt to turn the lands they had ‘given’ to the peasants into collective farms as part of that misnamed policy called ‘War Communism’, the predecessor of Stalinism.
The Planned Economy
Grant repeats a set of impressive-sounding figures which appear to vindicate the Soviet model of development:
From a Marxist point of view, the function of technique is to economise human labour. In the 50-year period from 1913 to 1963, the growth of productivity of labour in industry, the key index of economic development, advanced by 73 per cent in Britain and by 332 per cent in the USA. In the USSR, labour productivity rose in the same period by 1,310 per cent, although from a very low base. The periods of tremendous economic advance in Russia largely coincided with periods of crisis or stagnation in the capitalist West. The strides forward of Soviet industry in the 1930s coincided with the great slump and Depression in the capitalist world, accompanied by mass unemployment and chronic poverty. Between 1929 and 1933, American industrial production dropped 48.7 per cent. The American National Research League estimated the number of jobless in March 1933 was 17,920,000. In Germany, there were more than six million unemployed. These comparisons alone show graphically the superiority of a planned economy over the anarchy of capitalist production.
These statistics are less impressive when you remember that the USSR was developing from a very low base. Additionally, there is no reason why it could not have achieved the same or better under a capitalist model of development. We must also bear in mind that the statistics are presumably from none other than the Soviet bureaucracy itself, which routinely falsified said statistics in order to sustain the myth of the planned economy. Grant does not appear to question these fraudulent statistics at any point. He does not bother to give his sources. The claim about productivity increase is particularly ludicrous. In fact, as Leonard Kukić has found, the period 1928-1990 saw productivity grow by a mere 2% a year. (Notice the sleight of hand in which Grant starts from a baseline of Tsarist backwardness in 1913, with his timeline ending in 1963 (precisely the decade when productivity growth began to stagnate.) The real figure for productivity growth would therefore be 124% over the whole period. Kukic notes the following: ‘During the 1950s, labour productivity gains averaged 4.1 per cent on an annual basis – the highest that the Soviet Union ever achieved. These growth rates, however, are mediocre when placed within a European postwar perspective.’
Incredibly, the USSR, despite its massive population, had a ‘labour shortage’. This can be laid at the feet of the planned economy, which insisted on full employment, leading to enterprise managers hoarding more workers than they actually needed, denying them to other parts of the economy, as well as the low productivity of the workers and the ridiculously high turnover of the workforce. Another big culprit is the millions that died in collectivisation and WWII. Kukic notes the following: ‘Allen estimates that, in the absence of collectivization and the Second World War, the Soviet population at the end of the 1980s would have been 30 per cent higher.’ Unfortunately, this would have required Stalin not to be a Marxist and not to make an alliance with Nazi totalitarianism. If the horrors that Bolshevism inflicted on the USSR from 1917 to 1945 had been inflicted on a country with a fraction of the population, it is hard to see how such a regime could have survived – something Martin Malia mentions in The Soviet Tragedy.
Grant also argues that the growth of the Soviet economy in a period when Western economies were grappling with the Great Depression proves the superiority of the planned economy. He leaves out the homelessness, starvation, waste, the phenomenon known as ‘hidden unemployment’ (also known as ‘we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us’), the scarcity of goods which made the wages that Soviet workers earned almost worthless (a direct result of the state’s near-total emphasis on heavy industry, and its reluctance to squander the regime’s hard currency on the import or production of consumer goods), and the senseless destruction of agriculture that made this ‘miracle’ of socialist industrialisation possible. (He begrudgingly concedes bureaucratic ‘distortions’ later on in that chapter, but the overall portrait he is painting is gushing.) Moreover, he ignores the fact that, in the post-war period, when the planned economy began stagnating, the West was enjoying rapid economic growth. I guess that shows the superiority of capitalism. Vitaly Melyantsev, in a 2003 paper, has the following figures which compare Soviet economic development to that of other nations:
The calculations made show that the economic dynamics of the USSR was generally quite “modest”. Despite the colossal costs, the average annual rate of growth of per capita GDP in the USSR and Soviet Russia is unlikely to have increased more than one and a half times compared to the last decades of tsarist Russia – from 1.5% in 1885-1913 to 2.2-2.4% in 1913-1990 The Soviet “record” was not unique, it was surpassed by Japan and Taiwan (3.3-3.5%), as well as South Korea, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Turkey, Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, Sweden, Greece (2.4-2.9%; Maddison, 1995, p.194-206). It should be noted that unlike the USSR, where there was an administrative-command system and planned tasks practically replaced the economic mechanism, the economic growth of these countries was more full-fledged, because it was corrected by real effective demand Population.
In another paper by Melyantsev, he suggests that that by the end of the Soviet period, Soviet GDP per capita relative to that of the developed countries of the world had decreased from 28-30% in 1913 to 16-18% in 1990. In other words, despite the supposed wonders of the planned economy, the USSR was poorer relative to the advanced nations than ‘backward’ Tsarist Russia had been. Additionally, in a 1994 paper by William Easterly and Stanley Fischer, we are told that between 1960 and 1989, the USSR had the worst growth in the world if one controls for investment and human capital. Martin Malia, in his book The Soviet Tragedy, suggests, based on the CIA statistics (in turn based on Soviet statistics), that ‘with the appropriate deduction of 2 percent suggested by the Russian economists, by 1979-1980 the Soviet Union had probably entered the zone of negative growth’. (p.363). It is worth bearing in mind that the CIA statistics are now accepted to have been an overestimate, hence the deduction suggested. Vladimir Popov, in a 2006 paper, argues that the planned economy’s inability to quickly replace outdated machinery doomed the Soviet economy to experience a slowdown of growth in the 1960s, 30 years after the ‘big push’ of Stalinist industrialisation. Indeed, the main reason the slowdown didn’t happen sooner is that much capital stock had to be rebuilt in the aftermath of WWII, giving another ten years of service life to the stock. He suggests that the Soviet economy would have been better off transitioning to a market economy in the 1960s, before the economy began descending into negative growth.
Nekrich and Heller, in their book, Utopia in Power, expose the poverty behind any notion that the planned economy was superior. We are told that by the end of the Stalin era, ‘Estimates by Western researchers suggest that, in the best of cases, the cost of living increased by a factor of between nine and ten from 1928 [before collectivisation] to 1954.’ (Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr D. Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, New York: Summit Books, 1986, p.475). Additionally, we are told that in 1952, ‘for the same amount of work, a British worker could buy 3.5 times more produce than a Soviet worker and an American 5.5 times more.’ (p.476). Grant continues parroting Soviet propaganda:
In the former USSR, whilst the population grew by 15 per cent, the number of technicians grew by 55 times; the numbers in full-time education by over six times; the number of books published by 13 times; hospital beds nearly ten times; children at nurseries 1,385 times. The number of doctors per 100,000 people was 205, as compared to 170 in Italy and Austria, 150 in America, 144 in West Germany, 110 in Britain, France and Netherlands, and 101 in Sweden. Life expectancy more than doubled and child mortality fell by nine times. Between 1955 and 1959 urban housing space (state and co-operative) more than doubled, while private space more than tripled in size. By 1970, the number of doctors had increased from 135,000 to 484,000 and the number of hospital beds from 791,000 to 2,224,000.
What Grant does not mention is that, for all the supposedly impressive achievements of the USSR in health, it lagged behind in terms of health outcomes relative to that bastion of capitalist reaction, the USA. Soviet spending on health was the lowest of any developed nation. Moreover, capitalist countries in Western Europe have had no problem creating generous welfare states that have produced health systems as good as, if not better than, that of the USSR. Malia emphasises how, throughout the period of the 1920s and 30s, the option existed to turn away from the bloody disaster of Marxism-Leninism, if the party had so desired: ‘At each point in the escalation of the drama, the only alternative road was to abandon the Marxist fantasy and settle for a welfare state that “capitalism” could produce less painfully and more efficiently.’ (p.504)
As for Grant’s unsourced claim about urban housing space, a cursory look at Nekrich and Heller will give us the following statistics: ‘in 1950, there were 513 million square meters of housing space in the entire country; in 1955, 640 million; in 1960, 958 million; and in 1964, 1,182 million.’ (p.559). So much for the claim that urban housing space ‘more than doubled’ between 1955 and 1959.
Grant makes a truly astonishing claim about Soviet agriculture:
Despite the terrible blow to agriculture by Stalin’s forced collectivisation in the early 1930s, from which agriculture never fully recovered, progress was made, allowing Russia to feed her population adequately. Such economic advance, in so short a time, has no parallel anywhere in the world. The amount of cultivated land was increased in just three years, between 1953 and 1956, by a staggering 35.9 million hectares, an area equivalent to the total cultivated land of Canada. This achievement lies in stark contrast to the dire position of the masses in India, Pakistan and the rest of the third world.
In fact, as late as the 1970s, the USSR was importing food from the West to feed itself.
In 1972 the USSR brought 18 million metric tons of grain from the United States, but this record amount was exceeded in 1979, when 25 million metric tons of grain were bought, again from the United States. Under an agreement concluded earlier, the USSR could buy 15 million metric tons of grain annually for five years without having to get special authorization from the U.S. government.
The signing of this agreement the first of its kind was frank acknowledgement of the failure of the Soviet agricultural policy. One-fourth of the economically active population in the USSR was employed in agriculture in 1978. In the United States the figure was 2.5-3 percent. Neither the size of the workforce, nor the use of technology and chemical pesticides and fertilizers could hep the situation. One fact speaks louder than words: the hourly wage of a Soviet agricultural worker was 44 kopeks (59 cents at the official exchange rate), as opposed to $2.35 in the United States. A ton of grain could be purchased from the United States at half the cost of a ton of grain produced in the USSR. For the USSR, it was cheaper to buy grain from other countries than to produce it at home. Under détente the credits necessary to make these purchases could also be found in the West.
-Nekrich and Heller, Utopia in Power, p.647
Grant says of the USSR’s post-war economic development, ‘This advance of the Soviet economy is even more incredible given the chronic backwardness that characterised its starting point.’ Nonsense. Countries like Japan, South Korea, and Brazil were able to enjoy rapid growth on the basis of state-directed capitalism. There are plenty of paths to modernisation that do not involve the collectivisation of agriculture and the outlawing of the market. In many ways, the USSR was still a backward society. In 1980, one fifth of the population lived without running water, and over half without access to hot water. In America in the same year, ‘over 97 percent of homes had access to all plumbing facilities, 99 percent had heating equipment, and 60 percent even had air conditioning.’. In a country full of timber, there was a toilet paper shortage. As late as 1989, a group of Siberian miners went on strike for, among other reasons, a lack of something as basic as a bar of soap. As of 1982, the Soviet Union’s per capita output of goods and services was below that of the U.S. and Italy, with only 6% of its population owning a car, whilst per capita meat consumption was only 48% of the U.S. level. In that year, the Soviet Union had to import 20% of its grain, in a country where a quarter of the population worked in agriculture. A disproportionate amount of its food (‘30% of the country’s meat and milk, 50% of its fruit and 30% of its vegetables’) came from the tiny amount of agricultural land that the government allocated for private farming (1.4%). The distribution system was appalling – potatoes grown on collective farms would rot before getting to market, whilst wheat from the fields would fall out of the distribution trucks because of the poor quality roads. They were twelve years behind the USA in the production of microcomputers. Nor can we forget the damage done by the planned economy to the environment (e.g. the Aral Sea), nor can we pretend that bureaucracy is not inherent to the very workings of the planned economy. The terrible truth is that the USSR was nothing more than a failed modernisation project, as Martin Malia wrote in the 1990s:
Russia is indeed industrial and urban, but this does not mean that she partakes of the full complex of modernity. To begin with, there is a radical disequilibrium between an elephantine industrial–or rather military-industrial–sector, a dysfunctional agricultural sector, and a barely developed service sector. At the same time, Russia’s onetime main asset, the industrial sector, is essentially noncompetitive in the modern world market; and insofar as she does participate in that market, she does so as a producer of arms or, like some Third World country, as an exporter of raw materials.
-Malia, The Soviet Tragedy (p.509)
Grant claims that WWII, and the successful performance of the planned economy in producing the weaponry needed for the defeat of Nazism, also vindicates the planned economy:
The Second World War in Europe was a further testimony to the achievements of the planned economy. The war had in reality been reduced to a titanic battle between the USSR and Nazi Germany, with Britain and the USA as mere spectators. It cost the USSR an estimated 27 million dead. A million died in the siege of Leningrad alone. Vast areas of Russia were annexed by Hitler or completely destroyed in the Nazi’s ‘scorched earth’ policy. Almost fifty per cent of all urban living space in occupied territory – 1.2 million houses – was destroyed, as were 3.5 million houses in rural areas. “Many towns lay in ruins. Thousands of villages were smashed. People lived in holes in the ground. A great many factories, dams, bridges, which had been put up with so much sacrifice in the first Five-Year Plan period, now had to be rebuilt,” stated historian Alec Nove. (Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, p. 292.)
What is not mentioned are the ways in which the planned economy was relaxed by the regime in order to mobilise popular support against Hitlerite tyranny:
In order to keep the country fed, the regime closed its eyes to a great enlargement of the peasants’ individual plots at the expense of the kolkhoz. Even on the collectively tilled lands, many kolkhozes introduced the zveno, or “link” system, in which families took on the responsibility for food production, both for the state and for private sale. But this of course meant expansion of the market, and again the regime expediently closed its eyes. At the same time, the disruption of normal administration led to the creation of local defense committees; operating under a three-member directorate chosen from the Party, the soviet, and the NKVD, these committees were charged with mobilising volunteers for combat as well as production. The regular Plan was scrapped as industry was turned entirely towards meeting military needs, and factory workers were encouraged to provide their own food by cultivating nearby vacant fields. In short, amidst the turmoil and uncertainty of the time, the rigid structures of life developed during the thirties were generally relaxed, and the population found a new place for exercising independent initiative. Russia was once again becoming “fluid”. It would be too much to say that this amounted to a new NEP, but it did represent a significant erosion of the system. In the short term, this furthered the war effort; in the long term, it presented a threat to the very nature of the system.
…Geography and chance alone gave the system [the planned economy] time enough to work; but the system became truly effective only with Stalingrad, when it was supported by the patriotic commitment and formidable tenacity of the population. Nor was the Soviet effort at national mobilization a unique wartime exploit. The American mobilization of some fifteen million men together with their materiel–a mobilization, moreover, which started from zero–and their projection across two oceans, was a considerably more impressive feat of “modernity”.
-Malia, The Soviet Tragedy (pp.288-290)
Nor is any mention made by Grant of the important role played by the lend-lease agreement signed with the U.S., which helped keep its population from starving and allowed it to equip itself with valuable vehicles and aircraft. Capitalist countries like the U.S. and Britain had no problem switching to a war economy even with the means of production under private ownership. Here, too, the planned economy wasn’t as indispensable as we are told.
Civil War and Mass Killings
Lenin’s disastrous revolution brought about a devastating civil war that killed about 10 million people. (The highest estimates suggest up to 12 million died, four times the number of people who died in WWI.) The famine of 1921-1922, caused as a direct result of Bolshevik policies of grain theft, killed off about 5 million people. (Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War, Edinburgh: Birlinn Limited, 2017, p.399). Lenin openly admitted prior to seizing power that he wanted to bring about civil war. He made no bones about it, and those Leninist apologists who insist that the Bolsheviks wanted nothing more than to begin the peaceful work of building socialism are telling bare-faced lies. But this is precisely what Grant does in his book:
No sooner had the workers and peasants taken power, than they were faced with armed imperialist intervention to overthrow the Soviet power. Early in 1918, British and French naval forces occupied Murmansk and Archangel in northern Russia. Within days their forces were marching on Petrograd. In April, the Japanese landed at Vladivostok, and an “Omsk All-Russian government” was established. Within two months this government was overthrown by a coup which established Admiral Kolchak as dictator. Meanwhile, German imperialism occupied Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and the Ukraine in collusion with White Guard Generals Krasnov and Wrangel. The pretext used was to assist the “population struggling against Bolshevik tyranny”. In a pincer movement, the Bolsheviks were in danger of losing Petrograd in the autumn of 1919. “We were between hammer and anvil,” wrote Trotsky. (My Life, p. 411.)
A lot of noise is made about the so-called Red Terror and the violent means used by the Revolution to defend itself. But what is conveniently forgotten is that the actual October Revolution was virtually peaceful. The real bloodbath occurred in the civil war when the Soviet republic was invaded by 21 foreign armies.
What is not mentioned by Grant is that the British were invited to land in Murmansk by none other than Lenin and Trotsky, who saw them as a bulwark against the Germans. There was no serious, sustained attempt by foreign forces in Russia to remove the Bolsheviks (the allegation that they began ‘marching on Petrograd’ is simply made up). Most of the powers concerned were not very interested in the civil war or who came to power as a result of it – they had their own agendas. Hardly anyone thought the Bolsheviks would last. Moreover, in his brilliant history of the Russian Revolution, Pipes goes into lavish detail about the extent to which the Imperial German government collaborated with the Bolsheviks, and in fact saved them from near-defeat at the start of the civil war. Without German protection it is unlikely the Bolsheviks would have survived their first year in power.
…nothing suited Germany better than a Bolshevik Government in Russia. German internal communications from 1918 were replete with arguments that the Bolsheviks should be helped to stay in power as the only Russian party prepared to make far-reaching territorial and economic concessions and because their incompetence and unpopularity kept Russia in a state of permanent crisis. State Secretary Admiral Paul von Hintze expressed the consensus when in the fall of 1918 he stood up to those Germans who wanted to topple the Bolsheviks as unreliable and dangerous partners: eliminating the Bolsheviks “would subvert the whole work of our war leadership and our policy in the East, which strives for the military paralysis of Russia.”
Pipes, The Russian Revolution, p.574
Besides, as Pipes points out in his history, the Bolsheviks, with their injunctions to the entire working-class of Europe to overthrow their rulers, could hardly complain when those same governments decided to intervene in their internal affairs. (p.608) The Bolsheviks laid down the gauntlet to the entire capitalist system, and they reaped the whirlwind. In any case, as has already been stated, German support was vital to Bolshevik survival in the first year of regime. Things came to a head when the Czechoslovak Legion revolted in the summer of 1918 as a result of Trotsky’s idiotic demand that these innocent prisoners-of-war (who wanted nothing more than to go back home to a newly-independent Czechoslovakia, and who were mostly leftists who sympathised with the revolution) lay down their arms, despite having no local troops with which to enforce this order. The Kaiser responded by agreeing not to attack the Bolsheviks whilst they withdrew troops from the Petrograd area against the Czechoslovaks (p.634). It is never mentioned in any Leninist chronicle of the civil war period that Kaiser Wilhelm, with a mere word, saved Lenin and his criminal band from almost certain defeat. They prefer to indulge in conspiracy theories about how the legion revolted due to Allied pressure and their desire to sabotage the Bolshevik regime. On pp.657-659, Pipes explains why this conspiracy theory doesn’t stand up and reminds the reader that the Allied forces sent to the ports of Murmansk, Archangel and Vladivostok were there at the invitation of the Bolshevik government, and for the purpose of countering the Germans. This was true to the Bolshevik policy of playing off the different imperialist camps against each other. In any case, Allied counter-revolutionaries played little role in the civil war, for all the attempts of today’s Trotskyists to rewrite history.
It should also be said that Grant’s figure of ’21 foreign armies’ is a ludicrous statement that in and of itself should invite questioning. I never knew how Grant got to this figure and it puzzled me even when I was in the organisation. I went onto the Wikipedia page of the Russian Civil War and counted up all the non-Russian nationalities that are listed as having been involved in some way. I got to 21. I now see how Grant got to this number. He simply added up every single non-Russian participant, regardless of whether they were actually foreigners or simply inhabitants of the Russian Empire that weren’t Russians. (A couple of the nations listed on Wikipedia did not in fact take part in the civil war at all, namely, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, because they were both collapsing as states, as would finally happen in 1918.)
This is self-evidently absurd. The Russian Empire was majority non-Russian, peopled by a vast array of Finns, Ukrainians, Georgians, Azeris, Armenians, nomadic peoples in the -stan countries, Belorussians, Poles, Jews, Cossacks and Kalmyks. To count every single participant in the war that was not ethnically Russian as being a ‘foreign imperialist army’ is absolutely bonkers, particularly as most of these nations were simply fighting, not to destroy the Bolshevik revolution, but for their independence from Russia. The war was being fought on their territory. They were not foreigners, they were already living there and had a perfect right to assert their own vision for a post-war, post-Tsarist future. It was the Bolsheviks who imposed Great Russian imperialist domination on, for example, the Ukrainian nationalists, who were denied the national self-determination that Lenin claimed to care about so much. Likewise, the Georgian Mensheviks had their government destroyed and replaced with a Bolshevik puppet regime. Grant unwittingly plays into Russian nationalist narratives by identifying Lenin and the Bolsheviks with Russia, and all the enemies of Bolshevism with ‘foreign armies’. To the peoples of Ukraine, Georgia, Mongolia etc, it is the Bolsheviks who would have been the foreigners, not them. All the territories of the former Russian Empire were reconquered in just this way by the Red Army over the course of the civil war. There is a reason why many Russian nationalists ended up giving ‘critical support’ to the Bolsheviks – because they saw them as restorers of Russia’s lost patrimony.
The only ‘foreign imperialist armies’ on Russian soil during the war were the Germans, the Czechs, the Japanese, the British, the French and the Americans. (I will not count the Poles because they were part of the Russian Empire, and in invading Bolshevik Ukraine they were still operating within formerly ‘imperial’ territory that was well beyond the boundaries of the Great Russian heartland that made up the core Bolshevik territories, even if it was technically foreign.) That is a total of six nations. Of these, the Japanese were confined to Siberia, and were never a serious threat. The Germans, as aforementioned, were de facto allies of the Bolshevik government from the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty in March 1918, until the collapse of Imperial Germany in November 1918 and the subsequent end of World War One. The Czechs rebelled because of Trotsky’s own stupidity, and the British, French and Americans, with their tiny contingents of troops, played very little role in the war. They were initially there to deter German aggression and reopen the Eastern Front, although later they did participate in limited action against Bolshevik forces in alliance with the Whites. They were not sustained efforts and made no difference to the war. Winston Churchill was the only Western statesman who seriously wanted to overthrow the Bolshevik regime, and he was supported by practically no one. Only the Germans, whilst they were involved, actually had the manpower and the resources to overthrow the Bolsheviks if they had so wanted.
Lenin wanted civil war from the beginning:
To Lenin it [civil war] meant the global class conflict between his party, the vanguard of the “proletariat,” and the international “bourgeoisie”: “class war” in the most comprehensive sense of the term. He not only expected civil war to break out immediately after his taking power, but took power in order to unleash it. For him, the October coup d’etat would have been a futile adventure if it did not lead to a global class conflict. Ten years before the revolution, analysing the lessons of the Paris Commune, Lenin agreed with Marx that its collapse was caused by the failure to launch a a civil war. From the moment the World War broke out, Lenin denounced pacifistic socialists who called for an end to the fighting. True revolutionaries did not want peace. “This is a slogan of philistines and priests. The proletarian slogan must be: civil war.” “Civil war is the expression of revolution. …To think that a revolution is possible without civil war is the same as to think it possible to have ‘peaceful’ revolution,” wrote Bukharin and Preobrazhenskii in a widely read manual of Communism. Trotsky put it even more bluntly: “Soviet authority is organised civil war.” From such pronouncements it should be evident that the Civil War was not forced on the Communist leaders by the foreign and domestic “bourgeoisie”: it lay at the heart of their political program.
-Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime 1919-1924 (London: Harvill Press, 1994), p.6
Civil war he wanted and civil war he got. When one tallies up all those who died in the civil war because of his criminal recklessness and disregard for human life, together with those who died in the famines caused by his economic mismanagement (arising out of the direct application of Marxist principles to relations with the peasantry), you get a grand total of 15 million dead. Add this to the 9 million killed by Stalin, and you have 24 million dead. I’m not even including the avoidable deaths on the Eastern Front in WWII as a result of Stalin’s monstrous pact with Hitler. I hope this puts paid to the notion that Stalin was more murderous than Lenin because he killed party members and Lenin did not. The murderous principles of Communist despotism flow straight out of what Lenin did as head of the revolutionary state. I defy anyone to tell me that these sacrifices were worth it.
Andrei Markevich and Mark Harrison state the following:
Table 7 confirms that the Great War and Civil War rank first among
Russia’s economic disasters of the last century. National income per head
fell by more than three-fifths from 1913 to 1921. We approximate the
consumption loss from agricultural production per head, which fell by
more than one-half. The overall burden of excess deaths was around 9
percent of the prewar population. Normalized by the prewar population,
the demographic burden fell not far short of that of World War II. Hunger
related causes were the most important factor in excess mortality,
followed by fighting and terror in the Civil War.
Conclusion
The Bolsheviks plunged a sixth of the earth’s surface into violence, beggary and bankruptcy. They promised the masses a socialist paradise. Lenin lied, and millions died. The ‘balance sheet’ of October is that millions of people died in exchange for a ramshackle approximation of a modern state that had little going for it other than its arms industry, oil and gas, its massive population, its enormous landmass and an ideology that could be weaponised for the regimentation of entire nations and peoples for a utopian goal, and for violent struggle against an inhuman enemy. No wonder so many Third World nationalists took inspiration from the USSR. As a model of development for civilised nations, it should be shunned by sober minds. As a model of development for backward nations, the only thing it has achieved is to export the disasters of Soviet socialism to territories outside of Eurasia. The peoples of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Cuba, Somalia and many other nations – they too know the horrors of Bolshevism. That, too, is part of the ‘balance sheet of October’.