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War Communism

Soviet history
Written and fact-checked byThe Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors.
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Vladimir Lenin
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Vladimir Lenin, 1918.
© Photos.com/Thinkstock
Date:
June 1918 - March 1921
Key People:
Vladimir Lenin
Leon Trotsky

War Communism, in the history of the Soviet Union, economic policy applied by the Bolsheviks during the period of the Russian Civil War (1918–20). More exactly, the policy of War Communism lasted from June 1918 to March 1921. The policy’s chief features were the expropriation of private business and the nationalization of industry throughout Soviet Russia and the forced requisition of surplus grain and other food products from the peasantry by the state.

(Read Leon Trotsky’s 1926 Britannica essay on Lenin.)

These measures negatively affected both agricultural and industrial production. With no incentives to grow surplus grain (since it would just be confiscated), the peasants’ production of it and other crops plummeted, with the result that starvation came to threaten many city dwellers. In the cities, a large and untrained bureaucracy was hastily created to supervise the newly centralized, state-owned economy, with the result that labour productivity and industrial output plummeted. By 1921 industrial production had dropped to one-fifth of its prewar levels (i.e., in 1913), and the real wages of urban workers had declined by an estimated two-thirds in just three years. Uncontrolled inflation rendered paper currency worthless, and so the government had to resort to the exchange and distribution of goods and services without the use of money.

Learn more about how inflation functions in the economy.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

By early 1921 public discontent with the state of the economy had spread from the countryside to the cities, resulting in numerous strikes and protests that culminated in March of that year in the Kronshtadt Rebellion. In response, the Bolsheviks had to adopt the New Economic Policy and thus temporarily abandon their attempts to achieve a socialist economic system by government decree.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Michael Ray.