Utopia i kryzys. Lars T. Lih i rozważania wokół komunizmu wojennego
Utopia and Crisis. Lars T. Lih and Reflections on War Communism

Summary/Abstract: The article concerns the policy of ‘war communism’ in Soviet Russia during the civil war. In historiography, there are two dominant views regarding this phenomenon – while some researchers argue that it was a crisis policy (pragmatic and determined by external circumstances), others are inclined to claim that it was a utopian policy (a frantic attempt to immediately implement the communist ideal). Based on the revisionist works by Lars T. Lih, the author argues with the interpretation of the Bolshevik utopian policy, focusing on the analysis of three basic elements of this interpretation, namely: the contingent policy in the countryside, Leon Trotsky’s book entitled Terrorism and Communism and the work entitled The ABC of Communism by Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky. Thus, the article is an attempt to create a different picture of the Bolshevik policy in the first years after the revolution from the one that is popular in the Polish historical discourse.

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