ABSTRACT
War Communism designates the economic policies of the Soviet government from June 1918 to March 1921. The policies were a series of ideologically guided improvisations to replace market relationships with nonmarket allocation of resources and distribution of products and to mobilize human and productive resources in response to economic deterioration and war. Antecedents may be found in the state regulation of wartime economies, particularly in Germany, during World War I, and in several measures of the first eight months of Bolshevik rule, before the outbreak of civil war.
