State Regulation of the Economy in the Era of War and Revolution

C. M. Moore
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Abstract

I. V. Potkina’s new monograph examines state intervention in the economy during World War I by analyzing legislation enacted by the tsarist and Provisional governments between 1914 and 1917. Her analysis highlights the main areas of economic intervention, the economic priorities of the respective administrations, the quantitative distribution of regulatory activity by year, and the evolution of the legislative process in response to the extraordinary circumstances of wartime. The author concludes that the imperial government regulated the economy effectively during the war and more successfully than its Provisional successor. This conclusion challenges the prevailing narrative of the “backward” autocracy’s mismanagementof the war effort as the primary reason for its collapse and compels a reconsideration of the question: If the tsarist regime efficiently managed the wartime economy, then why was it overthrown? This review focuses on Potkina’s treatment of regulatory policies regarding wartime prohibition and the establishment of fixed prices for necessities to illustrate the discrepancy between official and popular perceptions of the relative success of the state’s interventional measures. Prohibition was greeted with pogroms of premises trading in spirits and cases of poisoning by non-potable substances such as denatured alcohol, and most of the government’s price-fixing resolutions applied only to goods procured for the armed forces, not those sold to the population in the rear. Potkina attributes the causes of the revolution to the disloyalty of public organizations that constituted the liberal political opposition, but this explanation fails to account for the popular dimension of the events of February, which remains a task for future researchers.
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战争与革命时期国家对经济的调控
Potkina的新专著通过分析沙皇和临时政府在1914年至1917年间制定的立法,研究了第一次世界大战期间国家对经济的干预。她的分析强调了经济干预的主要领域,各自政府的经济优先事项,每年监管活动的数量分布,以及应对战时特殊情况的立法程序的演变。作者的结论是,帝国政府在战争期间有效地调控了经济,比其临时继任者更成功。这一结论挑战了“落后的”独裁政权对战争努力管理不善是其崩溃的主要原因的主流叙述,并迫使人们重新思考这个问题:如果沙皇政权有效地管理了战时经济,那么为什么它被推翻了?这篇评论的重点是Potkina对战时禁令和必需品固定价格的管制政策的处理,以说明官方和民众对国家干预措施相对成功的看法之间的差异。禁酒令引发了对烈酒交易场所的大屠杀,以及变性酒精等非饮用物质中毒的案件。政府的多数价格固定决议只适用于为武装部队采购的商品,而不适用于出售给后方民众的商品。Potkina将革命的原因归因于构成自由政治反对派的公共组织的不忠,但这种解释未能解释二月事件的大众层面,这仍然是未来研究人员的任务。
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0.50
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20
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