War communism began in June 1918, enforced by the Supreme Economic Council (Russian: Высший Совет Народного Хозяйства), known as the Vesenkha.
[1] The Soviet propaganda justified it by claiming that the Bolsheviks adopted this policy with the goal of keeping towns (the proletarian power-base) and the Red Army stocked with food and weapons since circumstances dictated new economic measures.
The deadly Russian famine of 1921–22, which killed about five million people, was in part triggered by Vladimir Lenin's war communism policies, especially food requisitioning.
[7] Historians have noted that both Tsarist Russia government councils and other opposition parties had advocated for food requisitioning prior to the ascent of the Bolsheviks.
[12] Commentators, such as the historian Richard Pipes, the philosopher Michael Polanyi,[13] and economists, such as Paul Craig Roberts[14] or Sheldon L. Richman,[15] have argued that war communism was actually an attempt to immediately eliminate private property, commodity production and market exchange, and in that way to implement communist economics, and that the Bolshevik leaders expected an immediate and large-scale increase in economic output.
[20]The deadly Russian famine of 1921–22, which killed about five million people battered an already war-torn Russia, Vladimir Lenin's war communism policies took an unintended negative turn.
in 1921 to the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to mitigate urgent economic matters arising from war communism and reproached Lenin privately about the delayed government response in 1922–1923.
The ruble collapsed, with barter increasingly replacing money as a medium of exchange[24] and, by 1921, heavy industry output had fallen to 20% of 1913 levels.