The Defeat of the Reform Movements

Abstract

From the summer of 1920 the economic crisis gradually developed into a political crisis of the regime. Strife within the party was paralleled by peasant uprisings and worker protest culminating in the Kronstadt events of March 1921. The atmosphere, an observer noted, was ‘steeped in the spirit of protest’.1 It was at this time that Bertrand Russell asserted that free elections would have swept the Bolsheviks from power. Food shortages were compounded by disorganisation on the railways, and a drought not only spoilt much of the harvest but also made drinking water unsafe in Moscow. Fires in the peat workings and forests reduced fuel supplies and smothered the city in a pall of smoke for several weeks, much to the inconvenience of the delegates to the II Congress of the III International in July. In September, cold weather set in earlier than usual. To compound the difficulties there were rumours that the government was planning to close the markets and stamp out the vestiges of free trade.2 In short, the period was marked by the collapse of the war communist economy.3 Manifestations of discontent were made easier by the fact that the immediate threat of a White restoration had been lifted, while hopes for an imminent socialist revolution on a world scale had declined and with it the prospects of assistance from the outside to halt the all too obvious spiral of decline in industry.