In what ways were the lives of people in Russia affected by the Bolshevik government in the years 1917-21?

There is a modern saying: ‘Fur coat and no knickers’ to describe a lifestyle which has a veneer of success, but which hides desperate failures in the things that matter.  It describes perfectly how the lives of people in Russia were affected by the Bolshevik government in the years 1917-21. 

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A Communist Society

In the first few months of power, the Bolsheviks introduced a torrent of decrees installing a new, communist society.  They declared the end of autocratic government and the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’; they pulled out of the imperialistic war; the Decree on Land announced the transfer of land to the peasants; the western calendar was introduced; a swathe of Workers Decrees promised a minimum wage, an 8-hour day, unemployment pay and pensions; the Family Code of 1918 gave women equal status to men, and a Women’s Bureau (Zhenotdel) was established to achieve their emancipation; a Commissariat of Health was set up to develop a state-run health system; education was expanded, focussing on literacy, vocational training and communist indoctrination; there was to be a cultural revolution – Agitprop trains travelled the country showing films, and music, ‘agitation art’ & street-theatre were taken to the people; there was even talk of abolishing money.  Novels and pamphlets proclaimed the coming of the ‘New Soviet Man’ who would be a true communist, living only for the interests of the community. 

The reality was far different. 

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Upper and middle classes

Given the Communist mantra that ‘property is theft’, anyone who had anything above the ordinary – upper and middle class, intelligentsia etc.  – was likely to have it taken from them as the government declared a ‘war on privilege’.  The homes of the wealthy were looted.  Bolshevik squads went into the banks and cleared out the safety deposit boxes.  To track down any burhooi (the common term for ‘bourgeois’), the government set up ‘People’s Courts’ where twelve elected judges would distribute justice according to their ‘revolutionary conscience’.  They made up laws and punishments as they saw fit; one looked at how soft the accuseds’ hands were to find them guilty.  A favourite punishment was to make them accept other families into their home, and to demote them to living in the servants’ quarters. 

They became 'former people' (byvshchie liudi).  ‘Those who don’t work, don’t eat’, said Lenin … so countesses ended up working in kitchens, or selling food or even matches on the streets – General Brusilov, who had commanded the Army in the June 1917 Offensive, took a job as an archivist.  Many survived only by pawning their jewellery.  Nearly half Petrograd’s prostitutes were from gentry or bourgeois families selling themselves for a loaf of bread. 

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The Clergy

Alongside the war on privilege there was a war against religion.  The Bolshevik believed religion to be to ‘opium of the masses’, and wished to replace the worship of God with veneration of the state (eg instead of baptism, children were ‘octobered’).  The Decree on the Separation of Church & State, Jan 1918, declared all Church property to be the property of the State, and in 1922 local Soviets were ordered to remove all items of value from churches … resulting in 1,400 recorded riots as worshippers tried to prevent this.  The outcome was that Lenin issued a secret order for the extermination of the clergy, as a result of which 7,100 priests were killed and more than 10,000 imprisoned

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The Towns

Of course, all this was happening against – and intensified by – a backdrop of the Civil War, a war which, until 1920, the Bolsheviks were losing. 

The railway system had collapsed under the Provisional Government, which ruined industry because it could not get hold of the raw materials it needed.  It also caused starvation, because food could not be supplied to the towns – especially since the peasantry were refusing to sell because they wouldn’t accept the worthless government paper money.  Long queues formed outside the bakeries, and the daily intake of food in Petrograd fell to less than 2,000 kcal/day – half the recommended diet; townspeople were eating half the amount of bread and a third of the meat they had in 1913.  Horses, dogs & cats disappeared, to go into ‘civil war sausage’. 

Towns were destroyed, either directly by the war, or by the economic collapse that accompanied it.  Inflation rendered money useless.  Real wages, which in 1918 had fallen to a quarter of their 1913 value, were worth only a fiftieth in 1919, when a month’s wages could only buy food for 3 days. 

With the burhooi, who were fleeing the war on privilege, the workers – many of them peasants who had moved to the towns for work during WWI – fled to the countryside.  As Yudenich advanced towards Petrograd, the government too upped sticks and moved to the Kremlin in Moscow. 

In the harsh winter of 1918 there was no running water because water pipes cracked, and electricity was limited to 2-3 hours of an evening only; people made their own nedyshalka (‘don’t breathe’) lamps from used cooking fat.  Fences and empty houses were demolished for firewood.  The streets were piled with uncollected rubbish leading to vermin leading to disease. 

Returning from the United States in 1920, the anarchist Emma Goldman found Petrograd: "as if a hurricane had swept over it.  The streets were dirty and deserted….  The people walked about like living corpses; the shortage of food and fuel was slowly sapping the city; grim death was clutching at its heart".  Its population had fallen from 2 million in 1917 to just ½ million. 

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The Soldiers

When peace was declared in 1918, 15 million soldiers looked to return home.  But the Red Guards – even though their number had swollen to half a million by the end of the Civil War – were no match for the White Armies … especially as the collapse of industry meant that they were woefully under-equipped: watching the Red Guards march past in 1918, Lenin declared that they looked like "bags of sand", and Trotsky worried in 1919: "although we have not been brought down by Denikin or Kolchak, we may yet be brought down by boots". 

To win the war, the government restored everything it had promised to abolish.  Order Number 228 called up all the former Tsarist Officers.  Soldiers’ Committees were abolished, saluting and discipline was re-introduced, and when troops fled at the battle of Kazan, their Commissar was shot. 

Then, in 1918, the Army began mass conscription. 

Despite a propaganda campaign in the army to turn the soldiers into ‘conscious revolutionary fighters’, the general response was one of horror.  The peasant communities called on the government to negotiate a peace.  Of the first levy of 275,000, only 40,000 turned up.  A ‘Military Opposition’ grew up believing that the government had betrayed the principles of the revolution.  There were literally millions of desertions, and increasing mutinies ...  until, of course, in 1924 the government was forced to backtrack on War Communism altogether. 

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Workers

For the moment, however, with Trotsky in charge of the war effort, the response of the government was to apply military discipline also to industry and society; "nothing did more to shape the ruling attitudes of the Bolsheviks than the experience of the civil war," wrote the historian Orlando Figes (1996).  In the summer of 1918, the government imposed martial law throughout the country. 

By 1918, Soviet industry had collapsed.  The 1917 Decree on Workers’ Control, which expelled the factory managers and put the workers in control, had created chaos, but far worse had been the collapse of the currency.  By spring 1918 the workforce of Petrograd’s factories had fallen from a quarter of a million to 50,000.  With paper money worthless, workers took their pay in product (eg a bag of nails) and then stayed off work to barter it.  At work, they used part of their worktime, and their factory facilities, to make goods to sell (this was called ‘cigarette-lighterism’, because a popular product was cigarette lighters).  Then, at the weekend, hundreds of ‘bagmen’ would travel into the countryside to barter goods for food. 

The Bolshevik answer was ‘War Communism’.  In your textbooks, you may have seen this interpreted as a ruthless program to win the war, but Orlando Figes argues that it was much more: that it was "a necessary phase of the revolution" when the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ – which was fighting the Whites in the field of battle, at the same time waged an ‘internal’ war against capitalism and the ‘grain-hoarding’ peasants. 

As in the Army, the government reneged on its promises.  The Sovnarkom Decree (June 1918) took 2,000 joint-stock companies into state ownership, brought back state-appointed bourgeois managers to run them, and re-introduced workforce discipline; by 1920 the country’s heavy industry had been militarized, with 3000 factories under martial law, military discipline on the shop floor and persistent absentees shot for desertion.  Subbotniki (work holidays) were introduced, where workers would ‘voluntarily’ give up their weekends and holidays to do community work.  The Cheka raided markets and tried (unsuccessfully) to stop the bagmen. 

As in the Army, there was mass-opposition.  The number of strikes increased.  The ‘Extraordinary Assemblies of Factory and Plant Representatives’, formed in 1918 under the influence of Mensheviks & SRs, began taking control of the Soviets and, in June was organising a mass-strike.  The government arrested and shot the organisers, and outlawed the Extraordinary Assemblies. 

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Peasants

Under the Provisional Government, the countryside had ‘balkanised’ (set up its own systems of government) and learned to live with the central government.  Under the Bolsheviks, it learned to live without the towns, as workshops were set up which supplied versions of the machines and tools which farmers had been getting from industry.  The countryside was becoming a self-sufficient, subsistence economy. 

This was unacceptable for the Bolsheviks, who needed the peasants for conscripts as well as for grain.  In May 1918, therefore, the government set up the Grain Monopoly; it took whole control of the supply of grain, issued ration coupons, and distributed it centrally from government warehouses. 

In the countryside, the ’battle for grain’ began.  Kombedy (Committees of the Rural Poor) were set up to confiscate the wealth of the kulaks and identify how much grain the local villages could supply.  There was mass-resistance.  Members of the kombedy were assassinated.  Some villages declared themselves ‘neutral republics’, and set up armies to fend off both the Reds and the Whites.  A band of deserters, calling themselves the ‘Greens’, formed a guerrilla army and hid in the woods. 

The January 1919, therefore, the government introduced the prodradverstka (food levy).  Requisitioning brigades (prodotriady) toured the countryside, torturing the peasants until they gave up their grain.  Some villages even bought grain to be able to have some to give to the brigades, but others fought back; in one village, after a brigade had killed some villagers, they ambushed them, killed them, and put their heads on poles; the Red Army shelled the village and burned it to the ground. 

Millions of peasants were drafted into labour teams to fell timber, build roads & railways, and collect the harvest.  Thousands of peasants were sent to as ‘corrective institutions’ (ie concentration camps) for those peasants who resisted, or just didn’t work hard enough. 

And, in February 1919, the Statute on Socialist Land Organisation started setting up Collective farms – placing the farms themselves under government control (there were 16,000 by the end of 1920). 

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The Terror

In August 1918, the anarchist Fanny Kaplan tried (unsuccessfully) to assassinate Lenin. 

The Revolution had been deadly from the start.  The secret police organisation, the Cheka, had been formed in December 1917 to "extinguish the resistance" to the revolution.  In February 1918 Lenin had authorised Revolutionary Tribunals, with orders to ‘shoot on the spot’ "enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans and counter revolutionary agitators".  Now, however, the terror was fuelled by a paranoia that the revolution was surrounded by enemies. 

The Cheka was given a free hand to arrest, torture, ransom or execute as they saw fit.  No one was safe, and the inmates of the Cheka jails included politicians, ex-judges, merchants, traders, officers, prostitutes, children, priests, professors, students, poets, dissident workers and peasants.  The Russian people lived under a Terror far worse than anything under the Tsar – as the Petrograd poetess Zinaida Gippius wrote: "there was literally not a single family that had not had someone seized, taken away, or disappear completely". 

Under Lenin, the Cheka grew to become a vast police state, employing more than a quarter of a million people (Figes takes a page listing some of its tortures, too horrific to reproduce here), and hundreds of thousands of people were killed – Figes thinks it is possible that more people were murdered by the Cheka than died in the battles of the civil war. 

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The Party Elite

Only one group of people went through this period comfortable and well-off, and that was the Party elite.  Not Lenin – every lunchtime his wife Nadezhda would leave the Kremlin to go down to the food distribution warehouse to collect their ration of bread and soup, and he took part in the subbotniki also.  But mafia-like corruption was rife and the party elite lived luxuriously.  5,000 Bolshevik families lived in the Kremlin and hotels in Moscow.  The Kremlin had 2,000 staff and its a shopping mall which included a hairdresser, sauna, hospital, nursery, and three restaurants with cooks trained in France.  The top party leaders had their own landed estates which they had requisitioned from the nobles. 

The Party ran the state, and the bureaucracy ballooned.  Seeing an opportunity, 1.4 million people joined the Bolshevik party 1917-20, 94% of whom did not have an education beyond primary level.  ‘Radishes’, Trotsky called them, looking for a meal ticket … but they were submissive, and willing to do anything the Party asked to keep their place.