War communism’s focus was on the consolidation of the new military-power hierarchy under civil war conditions, even though it simultaneously exacerbated the economic situation. Meanwhile, Lenin held that socialism, as a system that had reached completion, would only be composed of voluntary associations of economic-productive communities organized from below. It was still a state, though, for “there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie” in order to defend the “equality of labor” and public property.13 Lenin differentiated between state and social property even at its inception; before the introduction of war communism, he believed that the productive classes would themselves have to create socialist conditions. War communism was, however, a consistent system of compulsory state-military measures; according to some writers it carried certain traits of the state economic policy of “German war socialism.” Lenin kept the formative theory in sight even while making his most propagandistic political speeches, indicating that until his last day he continued to view the history of the revolution through the lens of Marxist theory (as reconstructed by him).14 Until March 1919, Lenin did not even use the term war communism, and did so afterward mostly in quotation marks. This means that, not just had Lenin not planned “war communism” in either theory or practical political terms, but also that the war communist measures only “coalesced” into a system much later, by the summer of 1919. The “naturalization” of production and distribution, along with the introduction of the ration system and the persecution of private trade, were not a priori economic measures, but sprang from immediate political and social needs.

Just as war communism was not the application of a theory, neither was the NEP the experiment or exercise of one. The Soviet government implemented both war communism and the NEP under the pressure of concrete circumstances, requirements, and needs – without foreseeing its internal or international effects. In both cases their ideologies – the theoretical justification of the “systems” – were developed either parallel to their introduction, or as a follow-up (though war communism incorporated a number of elements from German war economic policy, and the NEP included elements from the “market economy” of the winter and spring of 1918). The NEP meant substituting militarized production – including the ration system, strict state distribution, and the compulsory appropriation of grain – with money and market conditions, reinstituting free trade and introducing taxes in kind. Often forgotten is that, at the same time, the partial reinstatement of capitalist conditions entailed a general social transformation, a restructuring of social classes and groups, and a change in their relationships.

The introduction of a market economy and direct democracy – broadening “workers’ democracy” – also proved to be a contradiction that could not be bridged. Significant segments of the laboring masses became tired of the sacrifices they were called upon to make and were demanding a “loosening of the bolts,” but very few were in possession of the skills required for direct democracy. Lenin later expressed the necessity of the NEP, neatly and self-critically summarizing it at the 11th Party Congress in the spring of 1922: “We must organise things in such a way as to make possible the customary operation of capitalist economy and capitalist exchange, because this is essential for the people”.15 One of the main trends of the current historical literature16 emphasizes the capitalist market characteristic of the NEP, but also that – with its well-known measures permitting rural wage labor from 1922 onward – the Soviet state integrated social conflicts into the as yet not fully formed “web” of Soviet society, which later threatened instability and inner combustion, and finally had a major role in the later defeat of the NEP.

The concept of state capitalism is used in two senses here: on the one hand as a sector of a mixed market economy. On the other it is a term from formation theory denoting the economic method and arrangement for the transitional period and seen as a phase of it. It is a type of “state capitalism,” in quotes, that cannot be found in “any textbooks,” “nor in the writings of Marx and Engels”.

“Soviet state capitalism” – the way Lenin thought of it, and the party congress declared it – was intended to establish the political and cultural preconditions of socialism. This was a matter of serious contention between Lenin and the Mensheviks, Western social democrats, liberals, and others, who doubted the “reasonability of the Bolshevik experiment” while remaining insensitive to its uniqueness. Lenin saw himself as the representative of a historical alternative, in circumstances in which no other reality had materialized on the left. He repeatedly said the originality of the Russian Revolution was that the prerequisites of socialism came into existence not before it – but after.

Though the NEP had been “made to last,” theoretical socialism was never struck off Lenin’s agenda, even under the everyday circumstances of market restoration. As he explained it: “Formerly the stumbling block for very many socialists” was how to first subordinate the “concession to the peasant as a trader, or to the principle of private trade,” “for the sake of common interests” only to come around once again in the process to the cooperative as a solution. Though he knew that thinkers and politicians who had been nursed by the market and state looked down upon cooperatives, even “from the standpoint of transition to the new system by means that are the simplest, easiest and most acceptable to the peasant.” He knew that incorporating the whole population in voluntary cooperatives of production and consumption would take an epoch to realize – precisely on account of the absence of the cultural-civilizatorial preconditions – and yet he insisted on posing this problem.17 The precise relationship between cooperatives and socialism that Lenin had in mind becomes clear in the light of his whole approach, the complete coherency of his thoughts. The cooperatives, as he wrote, are the products of capitalism; they are “collective capitalist institutions” in which the future of socialism can be glimpsed. Producers have the opportunity to shape the cooperatives in their own image in the course of a revolutionary reform of state power, similarly to how in the NEP, “when we combine private capitalist enterprises … with enterprises of the consistently socialist type … the question arises about a third type of enterprise, the cooperatives, which were not formally regarded as an independent type differing fundamentally from the others.” He spoke about the possibility of coexisting state socialist and cooperative socialist enterprises, though a differentiation between the two forms of cooperative, state and self-governed, would come due.18 By the mid-1920s, nearly 10 million people had been pooled into state-organized and state-subsidized consumer cooperatives. Lenin marked out explicitly that a shift must be made from the interpretation of socialism previously reached (war communist, state powered, and politicized) to the position of “cooperative socialism”: