>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^M00:00:03 ^M00:00:23 >> Grant Harris: Well good afternoon, I am Grant Harris, I am head of the European Reading Room here at the Library of Congress. And I welcome you to the European Division, we're here in the European Division conference room and we're going to listen to Jonathan Kapiloff speak about quantifying the Soviet economic and social crisis of 1920, food supply, rail transport, fuel and demographics. Mr. Kapiloff has earned his BA in 1980 from Columbia University where he studied under the notable historian of Russia Mark Raeff. He earned his MA and C Phil degree in 1984 from the University of California at Berkeley where he studied under notable historians Nicholas Riasanovsky and Martin Malia. Now this is really a kind continuation if you will of a talk that Jonathan gave last year, really a brilliant talk here in this same room November 12 of 2015. That talk was entitled the Geography of Hunger, how Lenin handled Russia's food supply crisis of winter 1919/1920. And we're very happy to have Jonathan back here again. Jonathan has done some really deep research using Library of Congress resources and we're very pleased to have him uncover all these resources that we have and make use of them and he's a good speaker as you will see. So Jonathan, I'll turn this over to you, thank you for being here. ^M00:02:13 ^M00:02:17 >> Jonathan Kapiloff: Great, thanks very much for the very kind introduction, I think it may have been a little too charitable. I do want to stress that this talk is a thematic and historical continuation of the talk I gave last November that was mainly focused on food supply. And a significant part of this talk will come back to food supply later on in the hour. >> Grant Harris: Let me just ask can you hear okay from there? >> Jonathan Kapiloff: Yeah. But the focus of this is going to be more on the issue of transport and fuel and really the crisis and near collapse of the entire Russian Soviet rail network by early 1920. And so what I want to emphasize from the beginning and again, I could not be more thankful to the Library of Congress for this, is that I've mainly been working almost exclusively really with primary source materials from the period 1919, 1920. I've used a couple of primary source materials and actually a key monograph that was published in 1922 and that monograph in 1922, which is very, very rare volume helped me tie all this together. But again, what I've seen is that there's a trance amount of material, primary source material printed at the time that I consider to be very reliable in terms of information about what was going on both quantitatively and qualitatively during this period. So I really want to try to share with everyone and especially the library staff give them a sense of the uniqueness and special quality of a lot of these primary source materials. That's really one of the main things I want to accomplish in the talk today. I'm here to give a narrative on this subject that I've talked about and according to the title. But I'd also like to address three other questions and if I haven't, then I kind of left everyone hanging a little bit in terms of what this primary source material offers. And so in addition to talking about demography, food supply and especially about the transport system and specifically the rail transport system I'd like to answer three questions. One is the role that wood played during the Civil War and I'm going to spend a lot of time on that. If one can't understand the role that wood played as crucial fuel during the Civil War period, especially compared to what existed prior to 1917 you really can't get an understanding of what was going on in European Russia and especially how the peasants were living and what the state expected of peasants at the time. Two other questions I want to address are what was Lenin's role in all of this, but I wanted to focus again on what was going on qualitatively and quantitatively and then bring Lenin back in towards the very end. And then finally and although it has pejorative connotation and I don't mean it this way, I wanted to answer the question of something that was discussed at the time it had a specific connotation the phrase I'm about to use in 1920. The English translation is those who do not work they shall not eat [foreign language]. What did that mean? It had a very specific policy connotation, it honestly has potentially much more pejorative connotation in the context of the Civil War and lack of food and so forth. But in the process of this talk I want to try to answer those questions as well. Let me just start by saying that I do feel that the amount of primary source material here at the Library of Congress for the period 1919, 1920 has been vastly underappreciated, that's what I've been working with. I'm not here to make comparisons with other libraries or brother institutions, I've done a lot of work in the former Soviet Union, I also did a lot of work at the Hoover Institution. I do believe that there are several volumes here that are probably unique in Western libraries. I don't think I could have put together the picture that I am going to try to present to you today without having access to the Hoover and then some very special things that are here at the Library of Congress. And just to give you one example the library has a complete run in the original of the bulletin of the People's Commissar to Transport issues numbers 1 through 288, the entire run for calendar year 1920, it's really remarkable. And without materials like that I wouldn't have been able to put together the presentation that I'm about to give to you. So what I wanted to start and this is not meant as a review it's meant to compare and contrast what was going on immediately before World War 1 and then I'm going to move forward briefly to the war itself and then to 1920 to give you a sense of what was going on with transport and specifically fuel. So I'm just going to step to the map here and give a quick synopsis of some things that happened going back even before 1914 at the beginning of World War 1. And I'm going to point to the city of Baku here on the Caspian Sea. And Baku was really the first center in the entire world where oil was not only discovered, but started to be produced in industrial quantities. It even proceeded a lot of what happened in the United States in the development of standard oil under the Rockefellers. And this is documented it was such a major development in the world economy that it's not just something to be documented in narrow Russian sources. If anyone has read the key book called The Prize by Daniel Yergin they will know that Baku is where oil first started to be used on a commercial/industrial level. And that was in the late 1870's, very early 1880's. And what happened was beginning around 1880 and this was a key technological breakthrough as well oil is transported from Baku a couple hundred miles along the Caspian Sea to the mouth of the Volga River. And from there it was carried up the Volga by boat, stopped in major cities [inaudible], Saratov, Samara, Kazan, [inaudible] and then eventually made its way either by river or later by train to Moscow and Saint Petersburg. This is before the end of the 20th century in very, very large amounts. And I have in my handout a separate explanation of Russian weights and measurements that existed at the time of the revolution, prior to the revolution, through the revolution, through the Civil War. And the key Russian measurement was a pood which was approximately 36 pounds. And so from one of the sources that I have, although there were contemporary resources before Word War 1. I just wanted to mention how many millions of poods of oil was transported from Baku on the Caspian Sea up to the mouth of Volga near [inaudible] and then subsequently up the Volga, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, all the other major parts of European Russia. ^M00:09:58 So in 1912 and the source for this is a special volume here at the Library of Congress called [inaudible], it was a journal published by the Supreme Council of National Economy. So an article that appeared in 1920 talks about in 1912 268 million poods of oil were transported from the Caspian up to the Volga River and [inaudible] subsequently up. In 1913 270 million poods, 1914 244 million poods, 1915 first full year of World War 1 increased 319 million poods, 1916 337 million poods. Then as the war took more of a toll on Russia a lot of men were drafted, there were labor shortages. In 1917 it fell to 280 million poods. Now here is the real introduction to my talk. In 1918 it went from 280 million poods in 1917 down to 74 and in 1919 it was zero. The reason being that with the conflict going on during the Civil War the Volga River was cut at that time actually initially by some Czech forces who were there to participate on the Russian front in World War 1. And really what happened during most of the Civil War was that the Soviet Regime did not have access to Baku oil, there was no oil. And so that had tremendous consequences for the entire economy. The numbers that I cited should indicate that prerevolutionary Russia, Russia during World War I and even at the beginning of 1917 was a very, very oil dependent economy. It was not as an advanced economy overall industrially as countries in Western Europe, but there was a very advanced oil economy and a transport economy. And one of the things that is discussed in many sources I've seen and it's referred to in Daniel Yergin's book is that really by 1890's large amounts of foreign capital, names that we would recognize. The Nobel family the Rothschild family they were investing very heavily in this entire industry and the transport of oil up the Volga very, very large investments. The Nobels and Rothschilds actually controlled most of the production and the transport of oil along the Caspian Sea up the Volga and then into Russian. >> Grant Harris: And what time did it start this? >> Jonathan Kapiloff: It was certainly by 1900, certainly by 1900 and there's a very pronounced change with each passing decade. Beginning around 1890 it's a lot more than it was in 1880, it really got started in late 1870's, early 1880's, the 1900's is already a benchmark compared to 1890. Now I don't want to create the impression here that the [inaudible] economy was stronger than it really was, the country as a whole had a lot of very serious and social and economic problems and just it's kind of something very interesting that Yergin points out in his book. But because of rising anti-Semitism in 1912 and it was probably a very good business move in retrospect the Rothschilds basically withdrew almost all their investments, so they were not expropriated at the time of the revolution. I don't believe that was the same case with the Nobel family. The other thing that I wanted to talk about was the development of the coal industry and this is an area that's now been recently in the news, mainly in the Donetsk basin in Eastern Ukraine. And so without going into a long synopsis of the development of the Russian rail system the Eastern Ukraine became a major source of coal that powered the Russian rail system. And I want to talk about some other areas that also produced coal and go over some economic geography. But from what I believe is a unique source here at the Library of Congress published in 1922 I have information about how much coal was produced and used in Russia. So in 1903, use of coal by Russian rail network was over a billion poods, again a pood is 36 pounds. By 1913 and again, Russia had a lot of economic and social problems, issues about revolution and social justice. But the fact is by 1913, what was slightly over a billion poods used by the Russian rail network in 1903 that had more than doubled by 1913, as well as the length of the Russian rail network, excuse me. Now I also want to stress that while there's a tremendous amount of coal production in the Eastern Ukraine there was so much demand for coal in the Russian economy that coal was imported by England. I don't know whether it was from Newcastle or not, but a tremendous amount of coal was imported into Saint Petersburg. Most of the coal that was used in Saint Petersburg for heating actually came from England. And there was also coal from England that was imported to feed the Russian rail network and to power the Russian rail network. So these are two kind of key geographical economic facts of what happened prior to the revolution. And I'm going to skip forward for one second and indicate and I'll give more of the detail about this that as a result of the revolution and the Civil War the Soviet Regime really did not have access to Donetsk coal. A couple of other places that should be mentioned in terms of the poor economic background for what I'm going to start talking about 1920 in a few minutes is that there were [inaudible] sources of coal in the Ural Mountains near Chelyabinsk and north of there. There was also coal in Western Siberia and Western Siberia really isn't on this map, we're getting close, but it's not included in this map. And so those sources of coal were used and prior to 1914, certainly 1917 the vast majority of the Russian rail network used coal. There was some use of wood, wood was much harder to use, much less energy-efficient than either coal or oil. But basically by 1914 and according to this mini chronograph I found here at the Library of Congress, around 75% of the Russian rail network was powered by coal, around 10% by oil and there's a way to power locomotives using oil, and then approximately 5 to 10% by wood. But all of the main rail connections in European Russia, the major rail routes use coal or oil, wood was used only on local lines or in Siberia in particular because there was a lot of wood in Siberia. And so one of the things I want to talk about just getting back briefly to this oil be transported from Baku up to the mouth of the Volga River is that initially when [inaudible] came to the Volga River it used wood, wood was the source. It was only after 1880 that you had use of oil to power the Volga fleet. And as you see the development of the Volga fleet, especially after 1890 and into the beginning of the 20th century it is making leaps and bounds in terms of how energy-efficient it is and how much cargo it can carry. So for instance in 1914 there are over 200 million poods of various grains that were conveyed up the Volga. And basically in 1903 Rudolf Diesel licensed the diesel engine to the Nobel family. And you have the initial construction of diesel tugboats. Some of these diesel tugboats on the Volga could carry as much on barges at one time, just one diesel engine tugboat carrying several large barges, 500,000 poods of grain. That would be the equivalent of 500 rail cars of grain. There is a recognition from a lot of material both primary and secondary before the revolution during 1917 and afterwards that one railcar, standard Russian railcar, could carry around a thousand poods of grain, which is 36,000 pounds so approximately 18 tons. So you had a tremendous increase in the intensity and efficiency of the Volga commercial fleet in terms of delivering many things. Not just grain, but all kinds of building supplies, raw materials, salt, many other things that were needed by the economy. And what we'll see is that by 1920 the Soviet Regime had been going for an entire full-year, for all of 1919 and really a good part of 1918 as well, would have access to any sources of coal or oil. And so I think one of the things that has really not been appreciated in history of what was going during the Civil War period was that the economy really became entirely dependent on wood. ^M00:19:58 Wood is a much more inefficient source of energy than oil or coal. It is very hard to use wood as the main source for locomotives and that was the underlying reason why there was such a large transport crisis in the Soviet control territory in European Russia by 1920. And in fact, what I found in all of these sources and it's -- I'm going to make an argument people may want to swat me for it, but I'm going to make an argument that [inaudible] Izvestia are very, very important sources for understanding what was going on at the time. And not only in [inaudible] Izvestia, but all of the primary source materials I found here at the Library of Congress they always talk about the use of wood and they convert it to what they believed and they had good scientific basis for this, they may be approximations. What was the equivalent energy use of either coal or oil and especially dealing with railroads they talk about the equivalent wood used and what that would have amounted to in coal. And so I'm also going to explain in April 1920 the local Azeri government Baku which was supported by the British, the Red Army eventually captured Baku in late April 1920. And all of a sudden there is a change in the picture. A country that has not had access to oil suddenly has some access to oil. It's limited amounts, but it changes the whole economic perspective of what is going on. And it doesn't mean that everything changes immediately, in fact it doesn't and I will skip ahead and say for instance, that at least through the end of 1920, well into 1921 and beyond wood remained the single largest source for powering the Russian rail network. And that's what the Soviet Regime had to deal with was this gathering of wood, the transporting of wood and getting this wood to local rail depots, local rail lines. Procuring wood is a very, very difficult thing in large amounts. It has to be chopped, it has to best transported. There are two ways really of transporting wood in large volumes of the type that a real network would need. You either need to send it down rivers or you have to have peasants haul it. And so one of the main things that peasants did for the regime and basically was a form of labor conscription was hauling wood so that the rail system could work. The other way to do it if you send it downriver has its downside and this is discussed a tremendous amount in the primary source materials is the wood has a certain amount of humidity in that it is that much more difficult to burn in the boiler of a locomotive. And there are numerous references to the fact that boilers either explode or break because the wood that is being put into them is too humid. These are kind of what may sound like small details, but when you look at them from a larger picture and realize that wood was the main source for the Russian rai network really beginning the 1918 you get a sense of what people were really dealing with in trying to make this transport system work. So I wanted to just -- I've given a handout and in in the handout, one of the handouts I talked about and I'm just going to summarize it quickly here if I can find the right page here what are the energy equivalents of wood compared to oil and coal. And it's very, very interesting because and I found it on the last page of the handout key Russian weights and measurements used at the time of the revolution and during the Civil War period. And basically because there were other sources of coal other than the coal here in the Donetsk basin in Eastern Ukraine it's very interesting. So it basically say the basic measurement for wood was not by weight it was by volume and it was called a cubic sazhen. I've been trying to find out exactly what a cubic sazhen equaled in terms of volume, I've seen references in the law library, a special volume there that I think is unique to the Library of Congress that one railcar could hold 2.3 cubic sazhens of wood. But whatever it was one cubic sazhen of wood was equivalent to a hundred poods or approximately 3,600 pounds of Donetsk coal. It was also equal to 100 poods of Siberian coal. And there was coal in the [inaudible] as I mentioned. [Inaudible] coal was less rich as an energy source than Siberian or Donetsk coal. So one cubic sazhen it took 150 poods of [inaudible] coal to equal one cubic sazhen of wood. There was some very low-grade coal near Moscow. That was the only coal that the regime had access to. And so coal from Moscow, it took 250 poods of coal from the Moscow basin to equal one cubic sazhen of wood. And then what is very, very interesting is it took only 70 poods of oil to be the equivalent of cubic sazhen of wood. So I'm also going to mention just briefly two key data points here that give you a sense of what was going on with the Russian rail network and what a tremendous difficulty it presented for running the entire economy. First of all and this is in several primary sources, this is also mentioned in the key article in [inaudible] by the head of the [inaudible] Fuel Administration a guy named Alexander Lomov is it took one full railcar of wood to move a train that was carrying let's say 11 to 12 cars of either grain, wood, whatever. It took one full railcar of wood to move that train and the cars it was carrying a hundred [inaudible], which is only 66 miles. So if you wanted -- here's Moscow, here is [inaudible], the distance from Moscow to [inaudible] is approximately 275, to Kazan it's around 500 miles. If you wanted to move a train from Kazan to Moscow and you weren't going to pick up any wood on route you need to have in effect five railcars just full of wood to get it that far. That gives you some sense of the inefficiencies and the huge headache quite frankly of trying to make a rail system like this work. It's very interesting, after Baku was captured by the Red Army in late April 1920 there are numerous references to the fact that those railcars which can be converted to oil because again, there's no coal available or very little coal only from the Moscow basin, some from the [inaudible]. There is a reference to once they can start reconverting some of these locomotives to oil use it would more than double the efficiency of what's involved in transporting any cargo. And there's a specific reference to we can use twice the number of locomotives than we could before to transport very scarce food supplies, especially grain. So can see from some of these key data points how the transport system really constructed the entire economy and I've got a lot more to say about that. But if you just start from those data points you start to be able to see what it looked like for the people living at the time and you get a sense of what Lenin and the people and the People's Commissar of Transport and [inaudible] People's Commissar of Transport for most of 1920 what they were dealing with in trying to make this beast work. It is really something that is almost unimaginable and what I would say just to sum up this part of my presentation is you can see that in many ways European Russia under Soviet control and there's a separate editorial comment which I don't want to get into how much might have been [inaudible] fault for this, not their fault, was it circumstances, I'm not here to editorialize on that. But you can see that if you look at where things were in 1920 just given some of the data points I've cited that this is a country that went back to a time at least 50 years in its past. It may not have been as advanced as a lot of Western European countries industrial and otherwise, but it had a very, very advanced oil industry. The economy was very dependent on the use of oil in factories, coal, the rail transport system, etcetera, etcetera and basically what happened was the Soviet Regime had to deal with the situation where they were trying to manage an economy and run the country that had gone more than 50 years back into its economic past. And wood was really what this was about it's how did you procure the wood, how did you transport to rail depots and rail lines, how did you line up enough railcars of wood if you had to move a train let's say 400 miles, that's a lot of verst, a verst is .66 miles approximately. ^M00:30:05 So what I want to say is and I'm going to go into more detail later, I'm starting to run short on time already is that by 1920, by really late 1919, the Civil War in effect is over militarily, there's a war separately between Soviet Russia and Poland. But in terms of the white armies that whether they had democratic roots or these so-called counterrevolutionary forces they were more people representing the land of gentry, wanted to get back their property. The Civil War had really come to an end by October 1919, late October 1919. At one point white forces had cut off the Volga River that was in 1918. They were pushed back. During the spring of 1919 they came very close to the Volga, but did not cut it off. In the spring of 1919 Anton Denikin organized a major military push out of the Ukraine in the direction of Moscow, he got within 250 miles of Moscow. But in late October before he got to the key town of Kaluga where there were major arms [inaudible] that supplied the Red Army [inaudible] and that was basically late 1919. So basically what happened by the beginning of 1920 as you find this situation where there is a perception by the Soviet Regime that they need to worry about Poland, there's an understanding that Poland could be a future aggressor, but for the first time there's really very little in terms of real military action going on between the Red Army and various white forces wherever they were coming whether it was Siberia, the [inaudible], the Ukraine, so forth. The military conflict isn't over, but Kolchak is being pushed very far back in Siberia very, very quickly. He's surrendering, a lot of his forces are giving up. Denikin is quickly falling back [inaudible] was in Ukraine. There was kind of a last stand in the Crimea, but really for all intents and purposes the military conflict is over. And so what I found the single most important source I ever found about the Civil War in terms of what was going with the economy what [inaudible] regime had to deal with once this was all over was something almost found by chance, it wasn't even in the main catalog, it was in the [inaudible] catalog. And it was a key meeting that happened on the 25th of January 1920. I believe this is a unique document, I'm not a bibliographer I'll leave it to the bibliographers to try to figure it out. But basically it was a key meeting in Moscow, I believe that there were at least 5 or 600 people attending, had key speeches by Alexei Rykov, Trotsky I'm sure you've heard of, some other people. And it says on the out of this, it's only 34 pages, this was copy forwarded by American July 30, 1920, that's what's on the cover here. This was a meeting that happened approximately five and a half months earlier on January 25th. And basically I've never seen a meeting or a speech like this, although there was a lot of very open talk while [inaudible] were censored, it is remarkable how much openness there was and what they talked about. But this speech mainly by Alexei Rykov who's head of the Supreme Council of National Economy he speaks as someone who believes in the communist regime and in the communist project. But it's really couched in terms that anyone who believes in the market economy of any kind, whether capitalist or whatever wouldn't have given this speech. And what Rykov says in this speech is that the economy is destroyed. And then he proceeds to give a lot of key data points for that. One of the things that I've read, kind of one of the most famous histories of the Civil War period by Edward Carr talks in general terms about the fact that the economy declined by two thirds between 1917 and 1923. And there's a general recognition by all historians that what the revolution and Civil War did to Soviet Russia economically was a disaster, it was basically a complete collapse. But Rykov really puts some meat on the bones of this that I think is unique and makes that [inaudible]. So one of the things he says is he says that because of the collapse of the transport system and then Trotsky also supports him on this and in some important articles contributes to [inaudible] is Rykov says we're here in Moscow, the Soviet Regime kind of controls the central European part of Russia. But he says that we have no contact with [inaudible]. We don't have enough trains, we can't make them work well enough and the [inaudible] is basically a separate economy, it's been largely destroyed or to a very large extent destroyed during the Civil War. But if we wanted to import iron ore from the [inaudible] to Moscow and make metal Moscow and in Saint Petersburg factories right now given the amount of trains and transport capacity we have it would take us many decades to just get that started. And then he says, there was a very large textile industry in Russia before the revolution. He said if we wanted to take the cotton from Uzbekistan and bring it to Moscow and Saint Petersburg and there were large numbers of unemployed textile workers he said that would take 20 years. So what the discussion about in this long speech by Rykov and he talks about the destruction of national wealth almost as if he was a market economist. There are there other references and other things. But what he says is there's a tremendous destruction of national wealth here and the fact is that the transport system is not something that allows us to recreate this whole national economy that existed before World War 1 and that clearly had suffered a lot during the course of World War 1 as well. I don't want to minimize the importance of that. And so what he's saying is we don't have the trains to bring the grain from the Volga region to central Russia. These are basically grain deficit areas, they don't grow enough grain to feed the local population. We don't have the trains to bring the coal from Eastern Ukraine to make our locomotives work. And so the question is at the beginning of 1920, is it possible to basically stitch together the whole country, is it possible. And they really want to rule out is it possible at all and then B, if it is possible how do we do it. And one of the interesting things that Rykov cites is he says specifically and I'm not an economist, I'm not here to get into economic statistics or how much did the economy decline I'm much more interested in the qualitative aspects of what was going on with some important quantitative measurements. But Rykov does cite the fact that the economy has declined by two thirds. He does use that number. And then he cites another very scary statistic, he says that because we don't have access to oil, this is in early 1920, we lack all the lubricants that we need to do railroad repairs. We can't feed the workers who would be fixing locomotives because they've run away to the countryside, that's where the food is, there's no real food in Moscow because trains can't bring it there in sufficient quantities. And so it's kind of a Rubik's cube how do you start putting this all back together. And he cites in addition to the constraints that I mentioned about how much wood do you need to make things move and, you know, you need one railcar of wood just to move one of these trains a 100 verst or 66 miles. But what happens is that because there's been no ongoing repairs of locomotives for many years now and it started to really decline in 1914, he cites the fact that he believes and there are no exact numbers it's a period of really tremendous economic chaos. He says we believe at this point we have 3,800 locomotives that are operational. They may not be in good repair, but at least they're moving. They may need repairs, but we're down to 3,800. The number in 1914 of locomotives that were available was 20,000. And there was a lot of information in all these primary resource materials, what were the number of locomotives that were produced in 1919, it was 149. In the years before the revolution and there are a lot of statistics in these Soviet journals from 1920 that are unique here at the Library I believe in terms of complete set, the economy was building up a thousand locomotives a year. And so there was a key article in Pravda that raises the question, it's a logical question I haven't seen it addressed anyplace else, at what point do we get to a number of locomotives as they're declining where we can't really effectively move anything. It may be that the [inaudible] are a separate economy themselves, the Ukraine is a separate economy, there's a wish to bring grain from Siberia because Western Siberia is actually a net grain producing area. ^M00:40:00 That comes up later in the 20's I don't want to get into it when Stalin wants to get more grain he goes after the [inaudible], it's called the [inaudible] Siberian method. He's after extra grain in the [inaudible] and in Western Siberia. And Western Siberia probably had a grain surplus of around 100 million poods a year. Lenin is very interested in that let me assure you. But the problem is even if they could get their hands on it how do you transport this when one railcar will take you 66 miles okay. That's assuming you have the wood to begin with. So what I found in this key article in Pravda is the question is asked specifically, what's the number where the system no longer works at all, it's very much on the verge of collapse. And a very interesting fellow writes an article in Pravda and says, if we get to 2,500 it's over, we shouldn't even start trying anymore, there's going to be no more economy, you know, there won't be a regime. And there's a lot of open discussion about can the regime survive. The word in Russian [foreign language] is used throughout these primary source documents. On a couple of occasions Lenin uses it, it's rare, but he uses it. He even makes reference to the way things were at the end of 1919, the regime cannot continue that way he says it in a key speech that's included in his collective works. So what Rykov explains at this key meeting at the American Consulate in [inaudible] is that he thinks they have around 3,800, 2,500 seems to be kind of the barrier where you can just forget about it. And the concern is is that with each passing month there are 200 less working locomotives every month. So they start doing projections that if it keeps going this way by the end of 1920 there's nothing more to talk about. That's why there are these discussions about it's a fight for survival. They use the word [foreign language] in Russian fight, they use the word [foreign language] survival. And so really what happens and I know time is short here is that Trotsky takes the lead, Trotsky is really the key person in 1920 other than Lenin. And Trotsky comes up with a plan how do we start repairing these locomotives, how do we do that. And what you see is there is a period of late, I know this sounds very specific, but there's a period in late February 1920 until approximately the first weeks of April where everyone is questioning whether the regime will survive. And it's in exactly that time that Lenin, Trotsky, the whole senior Bolshevik leadership makes a very concerted effort to turn this around and I have some statistics in the handbook and it starts to show that this decline of approximately 200 locomotives a month is staunched, they're just starting to hold even. And then as you get into summer 1920 Trotsky as commissar of transport starts to really turn this around. Not in a big way it doesn't get them a lot of breathing room, but the fact that the regime is on life support it's on the precedence that comes to an end. They're not making the rail system as a whole work a whole lot better, but there's no longer a sense our necks are on the block that is just not the case. So I'm running a little short on time. I wanted to say a couple things about Trotsky. The Library here has Trotsky's complete works or close approximation to them were published. The Library has a complete, has all of the volumes. Volume 15, which I know may sound esoteric that covers everything he did in 1920. And basically what Trotsky did in late May 1920 as commissar of transport was he issued what became a famous order, it was called order number 1042. And that was an industrial plan to produce spare parts so that these locomotives could be fixed. And in the meantime, they're starting to get a little trickle of oil from Baku by summer 1920 and it's coming up the Volga and they're starting to make, they're starting to refigure and redo some of the locomotives that could only use wood. And they're starting to see tremendous advantages from that. They're not really getting Donetsk coal and I've included in the document in the handout that shows as late as October 1920, only a 10th of the mine workers that were working in the Donetsk coal basin before World War 1 were employed at that time. So the maximum amount that it produced was 1/10. There was a tremendous amount of chaos and economic anarchy in the Ukraine, a lot of fighting back and forth. When the Pols did attack in April, May 1920 they got very far into Ukraine, they actually captured Kiev, they didn't get that far. Stalin was in the Ukraine for most of 1920 and his goal was to try to restore the coal industry in the Ukraine. When the Pols attacked his focus was much more on the military side of things. So what I wanted to just talk about briefly and this is what I think one of the key things I got out of all the primary source documents I used here I do think the documents at the Hoover are very important, the things I got in the Soviet archives are very important too is that there were three key government bodies throughout the course of 1920 that made policy, debated policy, etcetera, etcetera. And those were basically the Soviet hierarchy, the senior part of that was the Council Peoples Commissars. Lenin was chairman of the Council Peoples Commissar, so under Council People Commissar you had the commissar of transport, you had the commissar of the food supply, etcetera, etcetera. And then obviously you had the Communist Party and there was a Politburo. The Politburo really made overarching general policy decisions. So when the Pols attacked for instance questions about how that attack should be handled in general terms were decided by the Politburo, but the Politburo really didn't do a lot more than that. The key institution and when I was at Columbia this was [inaudible] always suggests, always emphasized to me is that if you can get a hold of kind of the institutional history of what was going on you can really kind of almost decode the most important things after that. And what happens in early February, although it's going this direction in January at the time of the speech that I referred to is Lenin reinforces what was previously called the Council of Defense. The Council of Defense coordinated all defensive industrial activity as the Red Army fought the white armies really up until October 1919. And what Lenin and Trotsky decide and this is as much Trotsky as Lenin is they decide that the council of defense has to be expanded and it's renamed the Council of Labor and Defense. And so what happens during the course of 1920 and there's a very good book that goes into the research of this, it's the translation of English, there's an English translation. It's documents from the Hoover Institution called the Origin of Forced Labor in the Soviet State 1917-1921 if you just want to pass it around. The Council of Labor and Defense actually becomes the key central economic organ to deal with this mess that I've described, the transport system, lack of food, the demographic issues of workers running away from the main industrial centers and then factories are not open. Rykov sites the fact that there are probably 3,300 factories under Soviet control. He says that over 1,800 them are closed, there's no one working there. They're barred, they're shut. That's because workers have run away, they can't be fed, if they can't be fed they're not going to work. And the regime can't provide them enough food to stay there and work. It's really incredible the whole speech and analysis by Rykov on January 25th, 1920. And so what happens is the Council of Labor and Defense becomes the central economic planning organ and it's really through the Council of Labor and Defense that Trotsky organizes this effort to retool and repair locomotives. If you want to accept the number 3,800 in January 1920 and they're going down 200 a month. That gets turned around through Trotsky's efforts as minister of transport and then working through the Council of Labor and Defense. And the reason the Council of Labor and Defense is so important is that it also organized conscript labor, especially peasant labor to go chop the wood and transport it. And the main interaction between the Soviet state and the vast majority of the Russian population, which was the peasantry was getting them to do conscript labor to get wood because otherwise, you didn't have a transport system. So I wanted to wrap up by saying that a lot of Trotsky's political career was tied up with this whole idea of conscripting the peasantry to go chop this wood and cart it, that's what they were doing. ^M00:50:05 There were limitations on how much the regime could enforce that, very, very serious limitations because it didn't have enough food to have Red Army soldiers do it. Red Army soldiers were now conscripted on a regular basis to perform labor obligations. The reason that the peasantry was particularly an inviting target was the peasants were told if you perform your labor obligations you bring your own bread, we don't have to supply it, but then we'll let you go. That is just the reality of what happened during 1920. The story with the industrial labor force in the major factories where they need to produce spare parts for the railroads is and I have some information taken from 1920 contemporary numbers, how much food were these workers getting. On average it was something like 15 to maybe 20 pounds of bread a month. That is not enough to perform heavy industrial labor. And I think the most thing point about the whole chaos and just the whole fluidity of the situation throughout 1920 and beyond because as I said, wood remained the main source for fueling the Soviet transport system long after 1920, long into the new economic policy when the food supply dictatorship ended. Was that these factories were not given enough food and I cite statistics from these primary source documents. Some of the major factories that were trying to produce spare parts or build new Soviet locomotives a lot of them were fulfilling no more than 10% of the orders that they were asked to fulfill. There was one factory in the course of a month produced .9% of what Trotsky wanted under order number 1042. And so what you see is tremendous numbers of workers being encouraged, invited, cajoled to come back to the factories where they were with the promise that they will be fed. And they're fed for a while and then food supply deliveries, whatever reason don't work out. And so there was approximately 100% labor turnover throughout the course of 1920 and there's a lot of very good information about this, even if it isn't exact it's close enough to give you a sense of the fluidity of the situation. But how do you make this work if you're in control of the regime, how do you do this if you're Lenin and you stop governing bodies. And the labor turnover for just the second half of 1920 after they started to get some oil, a little bit of coal starts to come from the Ukraine, it was 60% just during the last six months of 1920. So I think I ought to wrap it up here it's been an hour. There's a lot more that I could say, I would have liked to say more about Trotsky's role in this, but I've got to be. >> Grant Harris: Five more minutes if you need. >> Jonathan Kapiloff: Okay, thank you very much Grant. So I guess what I wanted to say is if you compare the initial situation as of January 25th, 1920 when Rykov gives this speech and talks about there's a separate bureau [inaudible] and there's a separate economy in the Ukraine, you've got central European Russia kind of surviving on its own and most of it if it isn't a net grain deficit situation it's just barely producing enough food to feed itself. What you see is during the course of 1920 a very, very concerted effort to start trying to stitch all of these pieces back together. And what I can say is that by the end of 1920 the progress was very, very limited, very, very limited partly because the coal industry in the Ukraine had really made any significant progress. There was a key document, you know, Trotsky brought all of his papers with him when he was sent into exile by Stalin and they've been donated to the Harvard University, there's the Trotsky archive at Harvard. And so there's a key document in there, I believe it's dated early November. Thank you. And he talks about the fact that the coal industry in the Donetsk basin still isn't working at the end of 1920. You do see some real progress in the [inaudible] by the end of 1920 compared to where it was in January. And by the way, the first labor army are created in the [inaudible]. The [inaudible] is basically Trotsky's, I don't want to call it province, but it's his area. His people are in control there, they're the ones that are trying to reestablish [inaudible] metal industry, the coal industry in the [inaudible] and so forth. And what's very, very interesting again, the primary source material is really almost overwhelming, is that the Supreme Council of the National Economy despite its name did not run the economy. It was just basically the commissar of heavy industry. And what you see is all this territory is recaptured by the Soviet Regime and eventually Siberia as well, within the Supreme Council of the National Economy there are four or five separate divisions. So there is basically a division that controls industry in European Russia and that is separate and Rykov runs it, he's the chairman. But there's a separate, a whole separate division of the Supreme Council of the National Economy just for Ukraine and it has no interaction with the Central European one. And then down here where the Cossack area is there is a separate Supreme Council of the National Economy for Southeast Russia and there's a separate one for the [inaudible] and then finally one for Siberia. That is still the case at the end of 1920. So there is some progress made, but it's very limited and I will end here now by saying that this key monograph that I found that was published in 1922 it looks back at the end of 1920 and 1921. And basically what it says is that with the limited resources that the regime had it started to get some oil, it started to get a little bit of coal, coal also from the [inaudible] that the geographic dimensions of the area that the regime was controlling overwhelmed the resource, even the limited resource it could bring to bear when it started to get oil and coal that simply the Ukraine remained separate from European Russia. The [inaudible] and Siberia remained separate from European Russia. And I do believe that that underlying economic crisis had a lot to do, not just the issue about food, had a lot to do with the recognition by Lenin and say the government that they really had to make a major change and that had a lot to do with why the new economic policy was declared in the spring of 1921. There are obviously other reasons we know about the [inaudible] revolt and a lot of sailors and workers were revolting against the regime. But if you look at the real underlying economic reality of where things stood by 1920 and the limited progress that was made by the end of 1921 in effect the regime did not control the territory it had won from the white armies, it did not. It did several years later, but this was a tremendously difficult process and it was a wood economy that took the entire country back more than 50 years. So I'm going to end there. >> Grant Harris: Jonathan thank you, that's stellar, that's really. >> Jonathan Kapiloff: Thank you, thanks very much. >> Grant Harris: We'll try if anybody has a question or two, this has gone just [inaudible] now, but any questions right now? >> So what about I guess within Soviet Union in terms of trade, did they trade for oil, [inaudible] like Southeast Asia or? >> Jonathan Kapiloff: Okay, yeah so I want to answer your question, but let me just you a little bit of background about what was going on. So obviously one of the things I didn't mention was during most of the Civil War period, certainly through 1919 there was a major trade embargo the Western European countries that Lenin referred to as the top powers refused to trade because they were actively supporting the white armies. And there's a lot of talk about there was some British soldiers dropped off up here near the Donetsk area and [inaudible] maybe was 600. The real ally contribution to the white cause was that the armaments given bullets, machine guns, and everything a lot of good economic work has been done equaled the entire production of what the limited Soviet arms industry could produce with the Red Army. It was a major, major contribution. That embargo ended in January 1920, it's reported, you know, in big bold letters in Pravda and Izvestia and it's very important. The reality was that there was no real trade until later. But what happens in January, February, March 1920 and I do want to answer your specific question is Trotsky's predecessor of the commissar of transport, a very skilled engineer named Krassen [phonetic] goes to England because the idea is he wants to start buying locomotives and there's a Soviet trade delegation [inaudible] into Western Europe. There are a lot of things the Soviet economy needs or I would say the European Russian economy under Soviet control needs. They need a lot of things, they need grain, they need many things. The only thing that Krassen is trying to get is locomotives. ^M00:59:59 And Trotsky says in some of his key speeches in his collected works and they're really remarkable. I can just tell you the notes just in that volume have information that you won't find any place else. But basically Trotsky says we won't be able to get any locomotives. And in terms of oil what happened is when -- this is why the regime got very lucky and I should have mentioned this and I want to get to your question. When the Red Army captured Baku the big deal was that there were 200 million poods of oil that had already been taken out of the ground. I don't know if they were literally in barrels, but they were ready to be shipped. And there had been a lot of destruction to some of the oil infrastructure in Baku. And so before 1914 Baku have seen a lot of information. Trotsky writes about it, Trotsky is an incredible writer and not just flowerily, but he talks about things in great detail. He's of incredible use to anyone who wants to seriously study this period. And so up to 35 million poods of oil is being produced a month in Baku before the war. When the Red Army captures it it's only 10 to 15 million. But the 200 million that's there allows them to start using it. And there's even talk that given how much they need to use if they can transport it that they're going to run out by 1922. And I'm sure we all have recognized the name Arm and Hammer. It was Arm and hammer that helped the Soviet Union restore this. And so in terms of trade I can't, I would think that there's a lot more in The Prize by Daniel Yergin and about how much oil if any was traded. But basically what you have by the beginning of 1920 is the effective end of the embargo, although there was no real trade until late 1920. Then there was talk of trade with the Western countries. And one of the main things that the regime had to trade was wood from the far northwest, from the far -- that's one of the main things that they thought they could trade. Because the wood resources of European Russia not even talking about Siberia they're more than a third of all the forestry in the world at the time going back to that time. So just to repeat your question again, there is some trade. I think that the regime needed whatever oil it had. I don't know if it traded any oil. One of the things that was very interesting that they were trying to trade and it gives you a sense of how special. Siberia was a tremendous producer of very high quality butter and so there was a tremendous amount of butter exported from Siberia for instance to England Western Europe. And so that was one of the things they were looking at trading wood, butter, those were the two main things. I believe they wanted to hold on to the oil, but there were other things they needed technology. You see during this period that the entire telegraphic system becomes totally unreliable. All the telegraph and coding equipment was imported from the West, so they're after that, you know, anything they could to restore the telegraph system they want to do that. Telephones, telephones were produced in Russia before the revolution, but there are not a lot of people around who know how to fix them and the skilled laborers that run away to the countryside the regime is looking where are the people that can repair our telephones and our telegraphs. Go ahead. >> Grant Harris: Jonathan, I think it was the trade with Southeast Asia. >> Jonathan Kapiloff: Southeast Asia I'm sorry. ^M01:03:38 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M01:03:41 Well there was always traditionally, I mean you can see Iran right in this little right, there was a [inaudible] amount of trade on the Caspian Sea between Russia and Iran prior yes. But I don't think there was any oil going to Southeast Asia, I don't believe so. But I would look at Yergin because he is really the definitive source on all of this, it's an unbelievably good book yes. I hope that answers your question at least part. But no, there's no real large amounts of trade it's only later in, you know, 1922, 1923 that the regime starts trading. I also want to add one more thing about locomotive, why was it so hard to repair all these locomotives. Well you had all these private companies before the revolution producing locomotives, so there wasn't one standard locomotive. So if you needed a spare part for company number 23 that was producing locomotives in Saint Petersburg and you couldn't find it down in Samara how did you repair the locomotives there. It was an incredible problem, that's what Trotsky was looking at of a way to systemize which spare parts we had and which we didn't. And really what happened was you had and this is the term at the time that's used throughout all the primary source materials, you had what were called locomotive graveyards because locomotives that weren't working they were stripped of their spare parts. And if locomotive number 23 from that company in Saint Petersburg, you know, could be found and there was another locomotive 23 that needed that particular spare part it was just stripped away. And they had, you know, they had locomotive graveyards of hundreds of locomotives at a time they were just stripping them, that's what they were doing. >> Grant Harris: I think we're about out of time. Any quick question? So we'll have to end there. Thank you so much for coming, thank you Johnson. >> Jonathan Kapiloff: Thank you, thanks very much. Thanks, thanks. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress, visit us at LOC.gov.