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War Communism

   Also found in: Wikipedia, Hutchinson 0.06 sec.

War Communism

(1918–21) Soviet economic policy applied by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. Its chief features were the expropriation of private business and the nationalization of industry, as well as the forced requisition of surplus grain and other food products from the peasantry. These measures caused a rapid decline in agricultural production, labour productivity, and industrial output. Real wages declined by two-thirds, and uncontrolled inflation made paper currency worthless. By 1921 public discontent resulted in strikes and protests, culminating in the Kronshtadt Rebellion. In response, the Bolsheviks adopted the less-radical New Economic Policy.



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Thus, within the Soviet matrix there were marked fluctuations in coercive power: from Lenin's War Communism of 1918-21 to the semi-market New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921-29; from Stalin's "revolution from above" of the early 193 Os to his Great Terror of the decade's end; and so on to the perilous wartime and imperial postwar periods.
To make this argument, Meisner brackets the war communism of Lenin, which both Stalin and Mao actually continued and which Pol Pot in fact carried to its logical conclusion.
He argues that War Communism was not simply an unfortunate tactic necessitated by the brutal conditions of civil war but the systematic application of Lenin's Marxist utopianism through traditional Russian methods, revived and updated.
 
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