this is the funniest thing I've read about the bolshevik revolution, the entire economic mismanagement that took hold from 1917 until 1923(with some help of WW1) is mindbogglingly stupid
>During the civil war the regime had collected no taxes, funding itself by confiscating grain and other goods and printing paper money. Confusion enveloped the countryβs monetary base. The populace still used nikolaevki (rubles under Nicholas II), dumskie (rubles associated with the Duma period), and kerenki (rubles under Kerensky and the Provisional Government), which the Soviet regime itself printed for a time without the crown on the double-headed eagle, as well as foreign currency, which circulated illegally and at ever steeper exchange rates.The Whites in territories they controlled had accepted Soviet-printed kerenki, but not Soviet rubles (sovznaki) on which the Whites stamped βmoney for idiots.βThe resulting runaway inflation made vodka a major means of exchange and store of value, as barter took over the economy. Things were not as bad as Weimar Germanyβs hyperinflation, where the Mark went from 60 to $1 in 1921 to 4.2 trillion to $1 two years later, but a top tsarist-era economist estimated that between 1914 and 1923 the ruble depreciated by 50 million times.
>Some Bolshevik fanatics asserted that the hyperinflation constituted a form of class war, and one called the printing presses the βmachine-gun of the finance commissariat.β Ideologues also asserted that the βend of moneyβ marked an advance in the stages of civilization, toward Communism.