Failure of the state to make successful use of the price system to generate sufficient grain sales was met with a regimen of increasingly harsh administrative sanctions against the Soviet peasantry.
[1] Viewed by most Soviet contemporaries as a temporary wartime expedient, this system of "War Communism" was extremely unpopular with Russia's grain-producing peasantry and the cause of a massive wave of unrest and revolts that threatened to fatally destabilize the government.
[6] The period of War Communism saw Soviet cities largely depopulated when former peasants returned en masse to their native villages amidst the ongoing economic collapse.
With access to world capital markets severely restricted to the revolutionary Soviet regime, these funds that would need to be generated by the state either through a loosening of the backing of the gold-based currency, a raising in the level of taxation of the largely rural population, or some combination of these factors.
[9] Moreover, these rural Communists, who took leading roles in village soviets and cooperatives, included a disproportionate number of comparatively well-to-do peasants — a social group, party and non-party, which dominated local administration.
[10] This persistent strength of so-called "kulaks" in the Soviet countryside further contributed to the dissatisfaction with the economic status quo on the part of many members of the largely urban Communist Party.
Throughout the early years of the Russian revolution the peasantry faced a shortage of basic farm and household items, including agricultural implements, construction material, cloth, and finished consumer goods.
[18] Party leader Joseph Stalin depicted the shortfall as political in nature, the result of "sabotage" by the rich peasantry in an effort to force the state to raise grain procurement prices.
[22] Only a minority supported Bukharin and his call for continued social peace between the state and the peasantry and his criticism of those who would "neglect a sense of moderation, to skip over necessary stages" on the slow and measured path to industrial development.