However, a coalition meant that not all members would be loyal to the Bolsheviks. So, to keep members complaisant, the CHEKA were formed. The CHEKA were supposedly a ‘secret police’ force, but the CHEKA soon turned to terrorising and murdering not just Bolshevik enemies and unfaithful party members, but their friends and family as well.
When the civil war started, the violence and terror used by the CHEKA soon became known as the ‘red terror’.
When the communist party were rising to power in 1918 people of the elite classes decided to set up the white army to fight the up and coming revolution. Armies were set up in other countries and all over Russia, for a while it looked like the Reds, made up of workers and peasants, had no chance. But when the red terror developed things began to change. People from other parties, with non-Bolshevik beliefs, were executed. These were usually landowners, business owners and the bourgeois.
Trotsky was the superb leader of the red army. He inflicted fear into the minds of the soldiers with orders such as, ‘every soldiers who voluntarily deserts his post will be shot’. Trotsky also supported the army on the fronts. His personal train, which became known as the armoured train, carried supplies such as ammunition and new uniforms for the reds. Trotsky was also an expert propagandist, he used the fact that The Whites were so weak and undisciplined in his posters and in newspapers and even portrayed them as dogs leashed under western leaders.
Many factors helped the Reds win the civil war but mainly the weak organisation and corrupt leaders of the Whites lead the Bolsheviks to victory.
Propaganda continued to be used through out the Communist ruling. Promises were constantly made to the worker and peasants that class equality was sequential.
In late spring of 1918, the Communist government introduced a wide range of economic policies: requisitioning of agricultural products, nationalization of industry, state control of all trade, central control of production and distribution, and increased reliance on state allocation of goods and barter in place of money.
As inflation was developing, peasants began refusing to sell their goods and produce for crappy sums of money. This gave the government problems because the armies and labour forces in the cities couldn’t be fed. Now the peasants were no longer the favorable class and became the communists ‘class enemies’. Harsh requisitioning grain armies were set up to seize produce from the villages. The peasants began distorting their out put returns, stopped cultivating, switched crops, concealed crops and even harvested at night.
Peasants soon were refusing to farm their lands, so in 1920 militarization of labour began. People were forced to work and were subjected to military discipline. Even so, industrial and agricultural outputs seriously declined. Grain requisitioning had led to less production and widespread famine, and nationalization had not stopped the decline of industry. Extreme inflation had led to the virtual disappearance of money.
In the winter of 1920-1921 a drought-induced famine, general material hardship, growing peasant resistance to grain requisitioning, and general opposition to unpopular government policies led to widespread strikes and uprisings, to which the regime responded with more repression.
In March 1921 the sailors at the Kronshtadt naval base, who previously had been allies of the Bolsheviks, staged a revolt against the regime’s economic policies and repression of workers’ strikes.
In late 1921 War Communism was abandoned and Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP). The NEP relaxed government control and allowed the bourgeois to return in order to encourage economic recovery, although the state remained in control of large companies.
CONC
SOCIALIST COUNTRY AT WHAT COST?
