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The effects of the Russian Civil War - Coggle Diagram
The effects of the Russian Civil War
Economic Effects
Destruction of infrastructure:
7000 bridges, 17,00km of railway, and 90,000km of telegraph wire destroyed. Villages razed to the ground.
International Blockade:
reduced Russian
imports
from 967 million pounds in 1913 to 0.5 million in 1919 and
exports
from 1,472 million to 0.0001 million
Industrial production
down to around 15% of its pre-war level
Value of industrial production fell
to 1/7 of 1913 level and agriculture fell to 1/3
Political Effects
Bolsheviks:
Communist Party
swelled to 750,000
. The new power was a singular party;
not
the masses,
not
the soviets,
not
the democracy from below, but
the party
Only existing
effective national force
was the authoritarian bureaucracy
Social movement from the revolution was now dead
as democracy was destroyed and the terms of Lenin's decree in 1917 were
disregarded
for the absolute power of the state
Cheka established
: killed over a million people by 1922, these were "enemies of the people"
War Communism
This
broke the promises made in Lenin's decree in 1917
("Peace, Land and Bread")
Nationalised Industry:
all production belonged to the state. Factories, banks and land all belonged to the one party state. Workers forced to work long hours for little recompense.
Internal passports
prevented people from escaping to the countryside
Grain Requisitioning:
Rising inflation caused peasants to hoard food stocks, meaning the cities were starving. To combat this, Lenin sent out requisition squads to forcefully buy grain from these peasants, creating lots of opposition from peasants, especially from Kulaks who were targeted more
Rationing
introduced to save resources, traditionally upper class people received the smallest rations while the lower classes received more
Ban on private trade
to eliminate any sense of capitalist ideals and maintain a classless society
Social Effects
Human Cost:
RCW ended with around
15 million dead
, very bloody especially when compared to WW1 of the American Civil War.
1.5 million combattants
died,
12 million civilians
died of cold, hunger or disease (almost
10% of the population
). Similar scale to WW2
Industry:
working class shrank
from 2.5 million to barely a million workers.
Wages had been reduced
to a third of pre-war level. Cities
starved of food, fuel and raw materials
leading to them being emptied as people fled to the countryside. Conditions too poor for any workers left to continue production.
People desperate for jobs; men and women who made the revolution were
sucked into the administration and the army
1921 Famine:
millions die of starvation + 3 million from typhus