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

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.