Life Under War Communism vs NEP

Corin and Fiehn p146:

• Between 1918 and 1921 life in Russia was a matter of survival
• Less than 1/3rd of the urban diet came from state rations, with workers selling homemade goods in exchange for food
• This meant that many workers would be absent from factories in 1918
• The Bolsheviks under war communism used the Cheka to stop these "bag-men" and raid markets, but they could not be everywhere all the time - plus bribery was a common theme amongst officials
• Wages in 1919 were 2% of what it was in 1913, with workers paying 3/4 of their salary for food
• Between 1919 to 1920, 3000 houses in Petrograd were stripped down and hundreds of trees cut to keep people warm in the winter - the sanitary conditions were terrible, with people having to collect water from pumps in the streets
• The Burzhui had it worse as they weren't allowed to work in the first place. They would sell anything they had to get a loaf of bread. A study done in the 1920s found that 42% of prostitutes in Moscow were from bourgeois families

p159:

• Despite the NEP's…