The Russian Revolution полностью

† Reproductions of Russian currency for the revolutionary period can be found in N. D. Mets’s Nash rubV (Moscow, 1960). According to Katzenellenbaum, the earliest Soviet currency came out in mid-1918 in Penza (Russian Currency, 81).

*In fact, prices increased 100 million times.

*M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, I (Tübingen, 1947), Pt. 1, Chap. 2, 12. These strictures were directed at Otto Neurath, who believed he had worked out a system of keeping accounts without reference to money.

*Lenin, Khronika, VIII, 243, 267. While most of the economic planners of this period fell afoul of Stalin and were shot, Larin, a victim of childhood polio, had the good fortune in 1932 to die a natural death.

*The organization of defense industries is not clear. In August 1918, the Supreme Economic Council set up a Commission for the Production of Articles of Military Ordnance under the direction of Krasin. This commission received and passed on to industrial enterprises orders from the military which were mandatory. In time, responsibility for supplying the armed forces came under the Council of Defense (Sovet Oborony).

*Litvinov in Pravda, No. 262 (November 21, 1920), 1. Professor Scheibert (Lenin, 210) mistakenly deciphers the acronym Glavanil to mean “Vanilla Trust.”

*Kritsman, Geroicheskii period, p. 162. Figures in Narodnoe Khoziaistvo SSSR v 1958 godu (Moscow, 1959), 52–53, show a 69 percent decline in overall industrial production in 1921 compared with 1913, and a 79 percent decline in heavy industrial production.

†A. Aluf, cited in S. Volin, DeiateVnosf menshevikov v profsoiuzakh pri sovetskoi vlasti, Inter-University Project on the History of the Menshevik Movement, Paper No. 13 (New York, 1962), 87. By 1918, of course, which is here taken as the base year, the number of employed workers had declined considerably compared with 1913–14.

*Buryshkin in EV, No. 2 (1923), 141. The figures for the Supreme Economic Council are 318 employees in March 1918 and 30,000 in 1921.

*Possession of a card entitling one to the lowest ration (paëk) served the Cheka as a means of identifying members of the “bourgeoisie.” The holders of such cards were natural victims of terror and extortion.

*The notion that man works only to avoid starvation Trotsky took from Marx, who had found it in the writings of the Reverend J. Townsend on the Poor Laws: Das Kapital, I, Chap. 25, Sect. 4.

*N. Bukharin, Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda, Pt. 1 (Moscow, 1920), 5–6, 48. The second part, which was to have provided empirical data (p. 6), never appeared.

16

War on the Village

By the spring of 1918, the communes had distributed to their members the properties they had seized since the February Revolution. There was little subsequent distribution: the demobilized soldiers and industrial workers who arrived late rarely managed to secure allotments. But the peasant who expected to be able to enjoy his loot in peace would soon be disabused. To the Bolsheviks, the “Grand Repartition” of 1917–18 was only a detour on the road to collectivization. They laid claim to the harvest of 1918 by virtue of edicts which appropriated for the state all the grain over and above what the peasant required for his consumption and seed. The free market in grain was abolished. The peasant, bewildered by the unexpected turn of events, fought back ferociously in defense of his property, rising in rebellion that in numbers and territory involved exceeded anything seen in tsarist Russia. It was to little avail. He was about to learn that “to rob” and “to be robbed” are merely different modes of the same verb.

Perhaps the greatest paradox of the October coup d’état was that it sought to establish the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in a country in which workers (including self-employed artisans) constituted at best 10 percent of those gainfully employed, while fully 80 percent were peasants. And, in the view of Social-Democrats, the peasants—except for the minority of landless agricultural laborers—formed part of the “bourgeoisie” and, as such, were a class enemy of the “proletariat.”