ABSTRACT
In May 1918 the All-Russian Congress of Economic Councils opposed the spontaneous expropriation of single factories: the disrupted capitalist economy of Russia needed a more cautious transition to socialist forms. Thus the first general nationalization decree was a product of both the civil war and the war with Germany, a strong political gesture without economic content. All economic measures were taken under the spur of military expediency, and as the Red Army gained the lost provinces, within their ruins was created the skeleton of a centralized economic administration. Lenin had linked the War Communist economy to the improvement of the country’s technical equipment by cooperation with revolutionary Germany. For Lenin, the principal task of the unions was not to administer but to form a link between the governmental bodies and the broad masses, and to act as schools of Communism and economic management.
