War Communism, the NEP and Society Under Lenin
Two Economies in Three Years
In a span of three years between 1918 and 1921 the Bolsheviks ran two completely different economies. The first, War Communism, was a wartime emergency that nationalised industry, banned private trade and seized grain at gunpoint. The second, the New Economic Policy, was a partial retreat to the market that allowed peasants to keep their surplus and small workshops to operate for profit. Lenin called the NEP a ‘temporary tactical retreat’. Behind both lay the same political question: how could a Bolshevik regime committed to socialism govern a country whose population was 80 per cent peasant and overwhelmingly hostile to its grain policy? Alongside these economic shifts, Lenin’s government carried out radical social reforms in marriage, education and religion that reshaped daily life for Soviet women, children and the Orthodox Church.
War Communism (1918–21) imposed grain requisitioning, full nationalisation of industry, a ban on private trade and labour conscription. The New Economic Policy (March 1921) replaced grain requisitioning with a tax in kind, allowed small private trade and small private workshops, and kept the ‘commanding heights’ (heavy industry, banks, foreign trade, transport) under state control. Lenin replaced the first with the second after the Kronstadt Mutiny and the 1921 famine made further peasant revolt the regime’s greatest danger.
War Communism, 1918–21
When the Civil War began in the summer of 1918, Bolshevik-held territory was cut off from Ukraine’s grain. Sovnarkom responded with War Communism. Armed grain detachments were sent into the villages to requisition surplus food. All large-scale industry was nationalised from June 1918, and almost all private trade was banned. Wages became part-cash, part-rations of bread and goods. Workers were conscripted into labour duties as if into the army; transport, fuel and food distribution all came under direct state control.
Strong students see War Communism as both ideology and emergency. The hardline left of the party welcomed it as a leap into socialism. Lenin himself, more cautiously, presented it as the means by which a besieged Soviet state could feed the Red Army and the cities. Either reading was tested in late 1920. The cities had emptied: Petrograd’s population had fallen from 2.4 million in 1917 to about 750,000 by 1920. Industrial output stood at roughly 20 per cent of its 1913 level. Peasants had stopped sowing more grain than they needed because the surplus would simply be taken.
The 1921 Famine
The collapse of grain production met two bad seasons in a row. The harvests of 1920 and 1921 failed across the Volga region. Peasants who had eaten their seed grain to survive the winter had nothing to plant. Cannibalism was reported in the worst-affected villages. Estimates of deaths run to around five million. The Bolsheviks accepted aid from the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover, who fed perhaps 10 million people at the peak of operations. The famine destroyed any remaining argument that War Communism could be sustained politically.
Students often write that War Communism was abandoned because it didn’t work. Lenin’s own argument at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 was sharper than that. He told the Congress that peasant discontent was now ‘more dangerous than Denikin, Yudenich and Kolchak combined’ — the political danger of further peasant revolt, after Kronstadt and the Tambov rising, was now greater than any economic objection to retreat. The famine, the strikes in Petrograd, the Tambov peasant war and Kronstadt all pushed the same direction: concession to the peasantry was now a political necessity. Strong answers explain the abandonment as politically driven, not economically inevitable.
The New Economic Policy, March 1921
At the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 Lenin announced the New Economic Policy. Grain requisitioning was replaced with a tax in kind: peasants paid a fixed share of their harvest in grain and could sell the rest on the open market. Small workshops employing fewer than twenty workers were returned to private ownership; small private trade was legalised. The state, however, kept the ‘commanding heights’ — banks, foreign trade, large factories and transport.
Reactions varied. War-weary peasants were relieved; food production recovered quickly and by 1925 grain output approached pre-war levels. Petty traders nicknamed ‘Nepmen’ appeared in the cities, opening shops, restaurants and workshops. Bukharin defended the NEP as a long-term road towards socialism via the peasantry. Hardline Bolsheviks were appalled: to them the Nepmen were capitalists thriving in a workers’ state. Trotsky accepted the retreat but pressed for faster state-led industrialisation. Inside the party, the policy was the great economic divide of the 1920s, and would frame the succession struggle after Lenin’s death.
Students often describe the NEP as a return to capitalism. It was not. The state retained the ‘commanding heights’ — heavy industry, banks, transport and foreign trade. What was privatised was retail, small workshops and the peasant grain market. Lenin himself called the NEP ‘state capitalism’ and a ‘temporary tactical retreat’. By 1924 around three-quarters of retail trade was in private hands, but more than 80 per cent of industrial output remained in state factories. Strong answers separate the partial retreat in agriculture and small trade from the continuing state grip on heavy industry.
Under the New Economic Policy from March 1921, peasants paid a fixed tax in kind (a share of the harvest) and could sell the rest on the open market. Small private workshops and trade were legalised. The state kept the ‘commanding heights’ — heavy industry, banks, foreign trade and transport. Small private traders, the ‘Nepmen’, returned to the cities.
Women, Family and Education
Bolshevik social policy in the early 1920s was extraordinarily radical for its time. Marriage was made a civil registration; divorce became a postcard formality (the ‘postcard divorce’) requiring only one partner’s notification. In 1920 Soviet Russia became the first European country to legalise abortion on demand. Women gained equal pay in law, the vote, and the right to property and education. Alexandra Kollontai, as Commissar for Social Welfare, drove much of this legislation and pressed for state-funded maternity leave, communal kitchens and nurseries to release women from domestic labour into industrial work.
Education was reorganised under Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Commissar for Enlightenment. Schooling became free, secular and co-educational. Mass literacy campaigns — the Likbez — aimed to abolish illiteracy among adults. Roughly 5 million adults were enrolled in literacy classes by 1925. Religious teaching was banned in schools. Strong answers note the gap between sweeping legislation and slow rural reality: in many villages the new family law took a decade to bite, and the more radical experiments — such as communal living — were always urban and minority.
Religion, Culture and the Limits of Liberation
The Russian Orthodox Church was the regime’s major ideological rival. Church and state were formally separated in January 1918; Church land was nationalised, religious education in schools was abolished, and clergy lost the vote and ration cards. During the 1921–22 famine the regime confiscated Church valuables, ostensibly for famine relief, killing perhaps 8,000 clergy and lay believers in the operation. The League of the Militant Godless, founded in 1925, ran anti-religious propaganda and museums of atheism. Many of the early radical experiments — especially around the family — would be partially rolled back under Stalin in the 1930s, when divorce became harder, abortion was restricted, and traditional family roles were reinstated as Soviet ideals.