ABSTRACT
October, 1920, not until the remnant of Baron Wrangel's army at the end of November had abandoned its crusade to win back Russia for civilisation, and the Donbas and the Baku oil-fields and the Turkestan cotton belt and the trans-Ural wheat area had returned to the sphere of the Soviet Government, that attention could seriously be turned to the inadequacies of \Var Communism as an economic system. Even when attention had been given to such an enquiry, an answer was not easily forthcoming in the circumstances of the time. People were too close to the particular problems of the past t,vo and a half years, which had cro\vded upon them without giving breathing space for reflection, to be capable at once of evaluating the situation correctly. War Communism, created from the necessities of those years, had served an important function during a crucial period. In the confusion it was not easy to tell how far its disadvantages had been merely incidental or an inseparable product of it, or to judge the degree to which the altered circumstances of peace-time modified the necessities in which it had been cradled.
