The economic program of the Left Communists drew strong support from party members and workers, beneficiaries of workers’ control, who in no time formed a new interest group: they no more wanted to give up the factories they had taken over in 1917 than the peasants to surrender the seized land. The Left SRs also sympathized with these ideas. Lenin viewed them skeptically but he had to give in: it was the price of regaining the popularity lost at Brest. In June 1918, under conditions which will be detailed below, Lenin decreed the nationalization of Russian industries. This measure ended the possibility of “state capitalism” in the sense in which Lenin understood the term. It was a leap into the unknown.
The architects of War Communism, its theorists and executors—Osinskii, Bukharin, Larin, Rykov, and others—had only the most superficial acquaintance with the discipline of economics and no experience in business management. Their knowledge of economics derived largely from socialist literature. None of them had run an enterprise or earned a ruble from manufacture or trade. Except for Krasin, who did not take part in these experiments, the Bolshevik leaders were professional revolutionaries, who, save for brief stints at Russian or foreign universities (devoted mostly to political activity), had spent their entire adult lives in and out of jail or exile. They were guided by abstract formulae, gleaned from the writings of Marx, Engels, and their German disciples and from radical histories of European revolutions. What Sukhanov said of Larin applied to all of them: “a poor cavalryman who knew no obstacles to the leaps of his fantasy, a cruel experimenter, a specialist in all the branches of state administration, a dilettante in all his specialties.”27 That such rank amateurs would undertake to turn upside down the fifth-largest economy in the world, subjecting it to innovations never attempted anywhere even on a small scale, says something of the judgment of the people who in October 1917 seized power in Russia. Observing these people in action, one recalls Taine’s picture of the French Jacobin:
His principle is an axiom of political geometry, which always carries its own proof along with it: for like the axioms of common geometry, it is formed out of the combination of a few simple ideas, and its evidence imposes itself at once.… Men as they really are do not concern him. He does not observe them; he does not require to observe them; with closed eyes he imposes a pattern of his own on the human substance manipulated by him; the idea never enters his head of forming any previous conception of this complex, multiform, swaying material—contemporary peasants, artisans, townspeople, curés and nobles, behind their plows, in their homes, in their shops, in their parsonages, in their mansions, with their inveterate beliefs, persistent inclinations, and powerful wills. Nothing of this enters into or lodges in his mind; all its avenues are stopped by the abstract principle which flourishes there and fills it completely. Should actual experience through the eye and ear plant some unwelcome truth forcibly in his mind, it cannot subsist there; however obstreperous and telling it may be, the abstract principle drives it out …28
These qualities were nowhere more evident than in early Bolshevik fiscal experiments designed to introduce a moneyless economy.
Marx had written a great deal of sophisticated nonsense about the nature and function of money, in which he employed Feuerbach’s concepts of “projections” and “fetishes.” He defined money variously as the “alienated ability of mankind,” something that “confounds” all the “natural human qualities,” “crystallized labor,” and a “monster” which separates itself from man and comes to dominate him. These ideas greatly appealed to intellectuals who neither had money nor knew how to earn it but longed for the influence and gratifications that money brings. Had they been more familiar with economic history, they would have realized that some unit of measurement, whether or not called “money,” had existed in every society practicing the division of labor and the exchange of goods and services.
Under the spell of these ideas, the Bolsheviks both overrated and underestimated the role of money. They overrated it in respect to “capitalist” economies, which they viewed as totally controlled by financial institutions. They underestimated it in respect to “socialist” economies, which they believed could dispense with it: as Bukharin and Preobrazhenskii put it: “Communist society will know nothing about money.”29
