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war
communism was introduced as a temporary measure, which was
necessitated by the exceptionally difficult conditions of national
defense. it helped the bolsheviks to prevail over the anti-bolshevik
movement. however, many of the party leaders soon began to see war
communism as a necessary stage in the rapid transformation from
capitalist to communist patterns. the attraction of war communism to
many communists was that its economic policies were implicit in the
doctrine of revolutionary marxism. they rested on the same
fundamental principle that, as the bolsheviks believed, was to be
the cornerstone of the socialist mode of production: a market
economy, in which production was carried out by independent,
autonomous producers for exchange on the open market, was to be
replaced by a centrally planned, state-controlled economy.
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war
communism seemed to have already made big strides toward achieving
that objective: private ownership was virtually abolished,
production and distribution were put under full control of the
state, and the market and even money seemed almost redundant. to
many communists, it looked as if the first and most essential steps
on the road to communism had been taken. even as the civil war came
to an end, they no longer considered the policies of war communism
as temporary measures to survive and win the war, but began to see
them as an important breakthrough in the direction of a genuinely
nonmarket socialist economy.
the
problem was that this was not the view of war communism shared by
the russian population. angered by the continued confiscations of
their crops, the peasants responded with armed antigovernment
rebellions in different parts of the country. from peasants the
discontent spread to the armed forces. in march 1921 in kronstadt,
the biggest naval base of the baltic fleet situated on an island in
the gulf of finland some twenty miles off petrograd, 16,000 sailors
and soldiers rose in an open armed revolt against the communists.
they demanded free elections to the soviets, freedom for all
socialist parties, and broad freedom for the peasantry to farm and
to dispose of the results of their labor as they chose. the
insurgents were brutally crushed. yet the populationæ¯ widespread
resistance to the governmentæ¯ plans to institute centralized
planning compelled the bolsheviks to reverse war communism.
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