The right to strike was considered fundamental to labor’s interests and was reconfirmed as such at the trade unions’ Third All-Russian Conference in June 1917.149 The Communist Government neither then nor later issued a decree outlawing strikes: it was obvious, nevertheless, that the Bolsheviks would not tolerate work stoppages against state enterprises. They were inhibited from outlawing strikes by legislative fiat as long as the overwhelming majority of industrial enterprises were in private hands, but they were not prepared to confirm this right. At the Congress of Trade Unions in January 1918, the trade unionist G. Tsyperovich moved that the “professional worker movement continues, as before, to regard the strike as a means of defending its interests” with the understanding that under “the new conditions of workers’ control of production, [strikes] can be more soundly implemented.” The congress, dominated by Bolsheviks, ignored this resolution.150 In practice, strikes were permitted against privately owned enterprises, as long as these existed, but not in state enterprises. The progressive nationalization of industry had the effect of making strikes unlawful. The implications of the de facto abolition of the right to strike in Soviet Russia are thus defined by one scholar:
The first assumption [of the Soviet Government] was that collective bargaining and the strength of the unions did not rest on the right to call a work stoppage, but on its political relationship with the state and Party. In all cases, the burden of responsibility for avoiding and terminating strikes was now transferred to the trade unions, the very institutions for which the right to strike was vital. The trade unions were left in the impossible position of having to deny the one power that would give them strength and enable them to protect their membership.151
This spelled the death of trade unionism in Soviet Russia.
The policies subsequently christened War Communism were meant to raise economic performance to a peak never known: it was the most ambitious attempt ever made until then to rationalize completely production and distribution through the elimination of market forces. Did it produce the desired results? Clearly not. Even the most fanatical advocates of these policies had to admit that after three years of experimentation the Soviet economy lay in shambles. As rapidly as the regime nationalized everything in sight, the illicit free market expanded, threatening to absorb what remained of Russia’s wealth. And there was not that much left to absorb. Russia’s Gross National Income in 1920 fluctuated between 33 and 40 percent of what it had been in 1913. The living standard of workers by then had declined to one-third of its prewar level.152
The facts were indisputable, but their interpretations differed. The Left Communists and other advocates of immediate socialization, standing in the midst of the wreckage they had wrought, facing the prospect of imminent famine, refused to concede failure. In a treatise published in 1920 Bukharin spoke glowingly of the collapse of the Soviet economy. In his view, it was the legacy of “capitalism” that was being destroyed: “such a grand debacle had never happened before,” he boasted. It was all “historically inevitable and historically necessary.” His book, filled with Marxist clichés, contained no facts, statistical or other, on the actual condition of Soviet Russia’s economy: facts that would have demonstrated that the culprit was not “capitalism” but Bolshevism.*
Other Communists found the cause of the economy’s calamitous condition in the survival of the private sector. They had always insisted that socialism could not succeed under conditions of partial nationalization and now felt vindicated: the trouble lay not in the government’s pressing socialism too hard, but in not pressing it hard enough. A typical defense of War Communism in this spirit appeared in
