“War Communism”

The economic wages of "War Communism," as this period was retroactively labeled after the more extreme measures of State control were abandoned after 1921, were devastating. By 1920 Moscow and Petrograd, once the crown jewels of a fabulously wealthy empire, had become ghost towns. The pre-1917 population of Petrograd (about 2.5 million) had been reduced to 750,000. Emaciated city residents stumbled around in a perpetual half-stupor, with barely the energy to stand on line at government rationing centers for bread (which sold on the black market for thousands, then millions, of rubles). Both Petrograd and Moscow had nearly run out of fuel, with entire buildings being torn down for wood. Water pipes had cracked in cold, leaving residents without running water. With streetlamps having ceased to function, the streets were dark and menacing at night. Trams and trolleys had stopped running. Colonel Edward Ryan, an American Red Cross commissioner, crossed Bolshevik lines from Estonia without official authorization in early 1920 to investigate the humanitarian situation. He left behind a vivid description of the horror that had overtaken Russia's once-great capital cities: "Both Moscow and Petrograd are indescribably filthy in outward appearance... [I] was told the streets had not been cleaned for more than three years... The dirt and rubbish is in all places at least ankle deep and in most places it is up to one's knees, and there are many places where it is as high as one's head."

The government's own employees, with access to the highest level of ration cards, ate better than did ordinary people, but this was little consolation to those who fell ill. With garbage piling up in the streets and shortages of everything from soap to running water to medicine, epidemic disease was rampant. Cholera hit Petrograd in summer 1918, soon followed by typhus and dysentery. There was little solace for sick patients in the hospitals, because the doctors and nurses were dying, too. Colonel Ryan, on an impromptu visit to a hospital in central Moscow favored by regime elites, learned that "during the preceding three months seventy-five percent of the personnel of this hospital had died." This comparatively well-off facility had sheets and mattresses, at least, but surgeries were still rarely performed because there were "very few surgical instruments and few anesthetics." Ryan was not allowed to visit hospitals in poorer districts, which, presumably, were even worse off. In the frigid swamps of Petrograd, matters were even worse, with so many people dying by 1919 that the morgues and cemeteries could not keep up: corpses lay around for months waiting to be buried.

Source: The Russian Revolution. A New History. (2017) by Sean McMeekin.