A Concise History of the Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes

Author:Richard Pipes [Pipes, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307788580
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-27T04:30:00+00:00

The Factory Committees, once a basis of Communist strength, gradually faded from the picture as professional specialists assumed managerial responsibility. Trade unions, in which the Bolsheviks had to compete with the Mensheviks, survived but they no longer represented their members. Treated as organs of the state, they lost the right to elect officials: as in all other branches of the administration, these were appointed by the Party. They also lost the right to strike, which was declared redundant on the grounds that it made no sense for workers to strike against themselves.

The Left Communists could not fail to realize that their ambitious economic plans had failed: instead of raising productivity to unprecedented heights, War Communism had reduced it to levels that threatened Russia’s very survival. They were not disheartened, however. Bukharin, a leading Left Communist, boasted that War Communism performed a positive role in that it thoroughly demolished the legacy of capitalism, clearing the way for communism. Others argued that its failures were due to the maintenance of a dual economy under which agriculture remained in private hands and the management of the economy was entrusted to “bourgeois specialists.” The remedy was to collectivize agriculture and train cadres of proletarian specialists who would make it possible to proceed in earnest with the construction of socialism.

But whatever the explanation or excuse, two facts were indisputable. Soviet Russia had lived during her first three years largely on inherited capital, capital that had been dissipated by the end of 1920. And her economy had suffered, in the words of L. Kritsman, one of the architects of War Communism and its first historian, a calamity “unparalleled in the history of mankind.”

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