Question

Initially, the communist forces looked to be the weaker of the two and the ‘Whites’ made good progress, pushing inwards from the north, south and east. In fact, the western powers actually created a new opposition government in the north at a place called Archangel. Of course, the Russian economy had to provide the army with the supplies it needed and to achieve this, the communists introduced ‘War Communism’.

4. What exactly did ‘War Communism’ involve? Which two procedures did the government undertake to assist the take over the Russian economy?

Answer 1

War communism was an economic and political system applied in the Soviet Union during the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1921, introduced by the Bolsheviks to continue supplying cities and the Red Army with food and weapons under conditions where all normal economic systems were halted by the war.

Its characteristic features were the extreme centralization of economic management, the nationalization of large, medium and even small industries, the state monopoly on many agricultural products, surplus appropriation, the prohibition of private trade, the curtailment of commodity-money relations, equalization in the distribution of material wealth, and the militarization of labor. This policy was based on communist ideology, in which the ideal of a planned economy was seen in the transformation of the country into a single factory, the head office of which directly controls all economic processes.