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War Communism was the cluster of coercive economic policies developed during the Russian Civil War, especially from mid-1918 to early 1921. Military supply, urban hunger and monetary collapse shaped those policies, but Bolshevik hostility to private trade and hopes of moving rapidly beyond a market economy also mattered. Historians disagree about the relative weight of emergency and ideology. In March 1921 Lenin’s government began replacing War Communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP). Grain requisitioning gave way to a tax in kind, most small-scale private trade became legal again and peasants could sell surplus produce. The state retained control of…