This article is partly based on research done under an IREX grant in 1980-1981 at the Central State Historical Archive in Leningrad. Further discussion can be found in my Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921 (University of California Press, forthcoming).

1. During the Menshevik trial in 1931 N.S. Sukhanov stated that “Groman was the author ofWar Communism. When did he proclaim it? He proclaimed it soon after the February Revolution… .He took the Kadet Shingarev by the throat and squeezed out of him the basic element of WarCommunism, namely, the grain monopoly “; cited in Naum, Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties: Names to be Remembered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972, p. 100 Google Scholar.

2. See the discussion in chapter 10 of Imperialism, especially the passage found in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., 27: 425. From the 1918 polemic with the Left Communists to which Leninreferred in 1921: “We still have too little of the mercilessness necessary for the success of socialism.And not because of a lack of decisiveness…. But we don't have the ability to catch sufficiently quickly a sufficient number of speculators, predators, capitalists—destroyers of Soviet undertakings.And this ability can only come about as a result of the organization of registration and monitoring[uchet i control’], [And] there is not enough firmness in our courts, where bribe takers are given sixmonths in jail rather than being shot. Both of these defects have one social root: the influence of thepetit bourgeois element [stikhiia] and its flabbiness” (PSS, 36: 305).

3. This phrase was used by A. D. Tsiurupa in a speech at the Fifth Congress of Soviets (Piatyi Vserossiiskii s “ezd Sovetov, stenographic report [Moscow, 1918], pp. 135–145).

4. Such arguments are made by A. Sviderskii in Chetyre goda prodovol'stvennoi raboty (Moscow: People's Commissariat of Food Supply, 1922) and Khalatov, A. B. in Vnutrenniaia torgovlia soiuza SSR za X let (Moscow: Narkomtorg, 1928 Google Scholar.

5. Material on the proposed changes by the Provisional Government can be found in the Central State Historical Archive, Leningrad, fond 1276, opis’ 14 , delo 483.

6. Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow, 1959) 2: 353–354.

7. Because of this general retreat, it is misleading to see the razverstka as just a systemization of the food-supply dictatorship. Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (London: Penguin, 1969), p. 59. Silvana Malle notes the retreat in food-supply policy in the second half of 1918 but sees therazverstka as an indication of the failure of that retreat (The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918–1921 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], p. 373). Malle stresses the ill effectsof collective commodity exchange, an element of continuity in food-supply policy not discussed inthis article. The distribution of scarce exchange items to those without a grain surplus was defendedboth as a welfare measure and as a material incentive for help in collecting the razverstka. Martin Malia is one of the few historians who see civil war food-supply policy as a retreat from earlier policy: Comprendre la revolution russe (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980), pp. 132–134.

8. Sometimes razverstka or a translation is not used at all, and civil war food-supply policy issimply described with the term grain requisition or with the redundant forcible requisition. E. H. Carr, who barely alludes in passing to the razverstka itself as one of many “constantly changing expedients,” uses this last term in The Bolshevik Revolution, 3 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 2: 150–151, 227–228). This term, however, is unfortunate because it completely slides over the question of theterms of the forced sale and, indeed, seems to be understood by some writers simply as confiscation.The term requisition is best restricted to individual acts of forced sale or provision of services, if onlybecause the burden of these (as distinct from the general obligation of the razverstka) became a majorsource of peasant discontent on the eve of NEP.

9. In Bukharin, and Preobrazhenskii's, Azbuka Kommunizma (Moscow, 1920), pp. 209–210 Google Scholar, it isasserted that “the fulfillment of this task [of laying the foundations of a planomernyi economy] beginsin practice with an uchet.“

10. Lenin, PSS, 35: 63 (November 1917).

11. Shlikhter, A. G., Agrarnyi vopros i prodovol'stvennaia politika v pervyi gody sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow: Nauka, 1976, pp. 411–414 Google Scholar. The cited statement was written in 1920.

12. The necessity of improving the statistical base through better registration was not forgotten, since state needs could not be the sole determinant of the razverstka total. On this see Strizhkov, Iu. K. , “Priniatie dekreta o prodovol'stvennoi razverstke i ego osushchestvlenie v pervoi polovine 1919 g.,” in Oktiabr i sovetskoe krest'ianstvo, 1917–1927gg (Moscow: Nauka, 1977, pp. 131–163 Google Scholar.

13. N. A. Orlov, Sistema prodovol'stvennoi zagotovki (Tambov, 1920).

14. The evolving nature of the razverstka is stressed by Andreev, V. M. in “Prodrazverstka ikrest'ianstvo,” Istoricheskie Zapiski 97 (1976): 5–49.Google Scholar

15. Food-supply policy was not debated at any party congress until the tenth in 1921. It evidently did not raise any matter for principled debate. The subject did come up regularly at the congresses of Soviets, where the Boslheviks tried to make contact with the nonparty peasants.

16. Compare this to Victor Serge's portrait of Tsiurupa as a fanatic blind to reality in Memoirs of a Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 113. Tsiurupa's speech is found on pp.121–131, 163–166 of Sed'moi vserossiiskii s “ezd Sovetov (Moscow, 1920).

17. Kaganovich's speech is in Sed'moi vserossiiskii s “ezd Sovetov, pp. 158–159.

18. Secondary accounts seldom mention this crackdown. The following description is based primarily on Vladimirov, M. K., Meshochnichestvo i ego sotsial'no-politicheskoe otrazhenie (Kharkov, 1920)Google Scholar; Terne, A. M., V isarstve Lenina (Berlin: A. Terne, 1922), pp. 253–259 Google Scholar; Badaev, A. E., X let bothy i stroitel'stvo (Leningrad: Priboi, 1927, pp. 87–90 Google Scholar.

19. Bychkov, S., “Organizatsionnoe stroitel'stvo prodorganov do NEPa,” Prodovol'stvie i revoliutsiia, no. 5–6 (1923), p. 192.Google Scholar

20. Vladimirov, Meshochnichestvo.

21. Badaev's account is in X let bor'by i stroitel'stvo, pp. 87–90. The events in Rostov are recounted in Terne, V tsarstve Lenina, pp. 253–259.

22. Space does not permit any discussion of the “sowing committee” legislation of December 1920. This legislation was explicitly based on the long-term predominance of the single-owner peasantfarm.

23. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, 2: 345.

24. Lenin also worried about this; see PPS, 41: 146–147 (June 1920).

25. Bumazhnye den'gi v epokhu proletarskoi diktatury (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1920), pp. 48–58, 78–84.

26. Internal memorandum cited in Strizhkov, , Prodovol'stvennye otriady v gody grazhdanskoi voiny i inostrannoi interventsii, 1917–1921 (Moscow: Nauka, 1973), p. 106 Google Scholar. In Bukharin's words, “Theexhausted towns cannot at first give an equivalent for grain and services [povinnosti]…. Therefore coericon is also here an absolute and imperative necessity” (Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda [Moscow: Gosizdat, 1920], p. 146; emphasis added).

27. E. G. Gimpel'son adopts this popular understanding of the razverstka as taking grain without compensation.Although he can easily show that this procedure was only a temporary necessity, hisaccount cannot explain why Bolshevik officials defended the razverstka as such. He also goes too farin dismissing the monopoly principle, as well as the razverstka method, as merely a dispensableemergency response ( “Voennyi kommunizm” [Moscow: Mysl', 1973], pp. 48–56). Paul Craig Roberts also fails to distinguish between the monopoly principle and the razverstka method but draws theopposite conclusion: principled approval of the monopoly is used as evidence for similar devotion tothe razverstka (“'War Comunism'—A Product of Marxian Ideas,” Slavic Review 29 [June 1970]: 238–261).

28. The usual translation of prodnalog as tax-in-kind is in one respect unfortunate: the reader hasa tendency to read it as tax-'m-kind, that is, as opposed to a money tax. In 1921, however, theprodnalog was opposed to the prodrazverstka, so that the term should be read as wx-in-kind asopposed to a razverstka-m-kind.

29. Gimpel'son is thus mistaken in pointing to the ineffectual civil war tax-in-kind as a forerunnerto NEP. In reality, the razverstka itself, with its stress on using material incentives to the extentpossible, is closer to NEP than this early tax-in-kind.

30. Poliakov, Iu. A., Perekhod k NEPu i sovetskoe krest'ianstvo (Moscow, 1967), pp. 94–96 Google Scholar.

31. PSS, 39: 408 (July 1919).

32. For example, see PSS, 41: 359–360 (October 1920). Moshe Lewin claims that during the civil war, Lenin saw the razverstka as the essence of socialism (Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974], p. 79). Lewin cites two texts from 1919 (PSS, 39: 167, 274). But the razverstka is not mentioned in either of these texts: what Lenin sees asessential to socialism is the replacement of free trade with state distribution—a position Lenin never repudiated.

33. “O prodnaloge,” PSS, 43: 219–223.

34. PSS, 44: 157, 159 (October 1921). Even here Lenin does not claim that the razverstka itselfwas a communist method.

35. Compare Gimpel'son's discussion of the fall version (“Voennyi kommunizm” pp. 229–233).

36. For example, Lewin writes “There was even a stronger sedative for whoever might have had qualms about … harsh practices: the belief that something more than the war economy justified them. The term ‘war communism’ implied that the most progressive system on earth was just installed deus ex machina by the most expedient, unexpected, but irreversible leap to freedom (Political Undercurrents, pp. 78–79).

37. PSS, 36: 374; 37: 31–33.

38. Similarly, the only attempts to conduct commodity exchange without money came in 1918 and 1921. M. I. Davydov, “Gosudarstvennyi tovaroobmen mezhdu gorodom i derevnei v 1918–21gg,” Istoricheskie Zapiski 108 (1982): 55–56.

39. Nove, Economic History, p. 47; Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, 2: 55.

40. Stephen Cohen, for example, calls the problem of the peasantry “the blind side of warcommunism “; Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1971), p. 95. See also Merle, Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled, 1st ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 93 and 98Google Scholar, and Charles, Bettelheim, Class Struggles in the USSR, 1917–1923 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976, pp. 352–355 Google Scholar.

41. In 1925, Bukharin distinguished between two methods for the overcoming (preodolenie) of bourgeoìs elements: towards the NEPmen, the method would be crowding out, but towards the peasants, it would be reworking (pererabotka). Kritika ekonomicheskoi platformy oppozitsii (Leningrad: Priboi, 1926), pp.45–51.

42. Ocherk khoziaistvennoi zhizni… (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1920), p. 23.

43. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, 2: 169; Nove, Economic History, p. 66. In similar fashion, Cohen argues that because Bukharin in 1920 rejected the commodity market, he was therefore reduced either to hoping that the peasants would volunteer grain out of revolutionary enthusiasm or tosupporting “a system of permanent requisitioning” (Bukharin, p. 95).

44. Malle so argues in Economic Organization, pp. 453, 514. While it is true that fixed prices during the civil war were slanted toward the towns, a distinction should be made between manipulation of the terms of trade and a principled reliance on coercion as opposed to exchange.

45. For example, David Dallin at the Eighth Congress of Soviets in Decmeber 1920 explicitlydenied that his critique of Bolshevik food-supply policy was a defence of free trade. Vos'moi vserossiiskii i'ezd sovetov, stenographic report (Moscow, 1921), pp. 197–199.