The Russian Revolution

16

War on the Village

By the spring of 1918, the communes had distributed to their members the properties they had seized since the February Revolution. There was little subsequent distribution: the demobilized soldiers and industrial workers who arrived late rarely managed to secure allotments. But the peasant who expected to be able to enjoy his loot in peace would soon be disabused. To the Bolsheviks, the “Grand Repartition” of 1917–18 was only a detour on the road to collectivization. They laid claim to the harvest of 1918 by virtue of edicts which appropriated for the state all the grain over and above what the peasant required for his consumption and seed. The free market in grain was abolished. The peasant, bewildered by the unexpected turn of events, fought back ferociously in defense of his property, rising in rebellion that in numbers and territory involved exceeded anything seen in tsarist Russia. It was to little avail. He was about to learn that “to rob” and “to be robbed” are merely different modes of the same verb.

Perhaps the greatest paradox of the October coup d’état was that it sought to establish the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in a country in which workers (including self-employed artisans) constituted at best 10 percent of those gainfully employed, while fully 80 percent were peasants. And, in the view of Social-Democrats, the peasants—except for the minority of landless agricultural laborers—formed part of the “bourgeoisie” and, as such, were a class enemy of the “proletariat.”

This perception of the class nature of the self-employed (or “middle”) peasant was at the heart of the disagreement between the Social-Democrats and Socialists-Revolutionaries, the latter of whom classified peasants along with industrial workers as “toilers.” Marx, however, had defined the peasant as a class enemy of the worker and a “bulwark of the old society.”¹ Karl Kautsky asserted that the objectives of the peasantry were contrary to those of socialism.² In a statement on the agrarian question which it submitted in 1896 to the Congress of the Socialist International, the Russian Social-Democratic delegation referred to peasants as a backward class, closed to socialist ideas and best left alone.³

Lenin shared this assessment. “The class of small producers and small cultivators …,” he wrote in 1902, “is a reactionary class.”⁴ However, in line with his general policy of drawing into the revolutionary process every group and class that for one reason or another had a quarrel with the status quo, he made allowance for the “petty bourgeois” peasantry helping the “proletarian” cause. In this respect—and it was a question of tactics only—he differed from the other Social-Democrats. Lenin assumed that rural Russia was still in the grip of predominantly “feudal” relations. To the extent that the peasantry struggled against this order, it performed a progressive function:

We demand the complete and unconditional, not reformatory but revolutionary abolition and destruction of the survivals of serfdom; we acknowledge as the peasants’ those lands which the gentry government had cut off from them and which to this day continue to keep them under de facto slavery. In this manner we become—by way of exception and by virtue of special historic circumstances—defenders of small property. But we defend it only in its struggle against that which has survived of the “old regime” …⁵

It was from such purely tactical considerations that in 1917 Lenin took over the SR land program and encouraged Russia’s peasants to seize privately owned landed property.

But once the objective of this tactic—the collapse of the “old regime” and its “bourgeois” successor—had been attained, the peasant, in Lenin’s eyes, reverted to his traditional role as a “petty bourgeois” counterrevolutionary. The danger of the “proletarian revolution” in Russia drowning in a sea of peasant reaction obsessed Russian Social-Democrats, conscious as they were of the role which the French peasantry had played in helping suppress urban radicalism, especially in 1871. Bolshevik insistence on spreading their revolution to the industrial countries of the West as rapidly as possible was in good measure inspired by the desire to avoid this fate. To leave the peasants in permanent possession of the land was tantamount to giving them a stranglehold on the food supply to the cities, the bastions of the Revolution. Lenin noted that European revolutions had failed because they had not dislodged the “rural bourgeoisie.”⁶ For some of Lenin’s more fanatical followers, even the landless rural proletarian, whom Lenin, following Engels, was willing to see as an ally, could not be relied upon because he, too, was “after all, a peasant—that is, potentially a kulak.”⁷

Lenin was determined not to let history repeat itself. Much as he counted on the outbreak of revolutions in the West, he would not allow the fate of the Russian Revolution to depend on developments abroad over which he had no control. In contemplating the peasant problem in Soviet Russia, he thought in terms of a two-phase solution. Over the long run, the only satisfactory outcome was collectivization—that is, the expropriation of all the land and its product by the state and the transformation of peasants into wage earners. This measure alone would resolve the contradiction between the objectives of communism and the social realities of the country in which it first came to power. Lenin regarded the 1917 Land Decree and the other agrarian measures which the Bolsheviks had introduced during and after October as temporary expedients. As soon as the situation permitted, the communes would be dispossessed and turned into state-run collectives.* No secret was made of this long-term objective. In 1918 and 1919 the Soviet authorities on numerous occasions confirmed that collectivization was inevitable: an article in Pravda in November 1918 predicted that the “middle peasantry” would be dragged into collective farming “screaming and kicking” (vorcha i ogryzaias’) as soon as the regime was able to do so.⁸

Until then, in Lenin’s view, it was necessary to (1) assert state control over the food supply by means of a strictly enforced monopoly on the grain trade and (2) introduce Communist power bases in the countryside. These objectives required nothing less than declaring civil war on the village. Such a war the Bolsheviks launched in the summer of 1918. The campaign against the peasantry, virtually ignored in Western historiography, constituted a critical phase in the Bolshevik conquest of Russia. Lenin himself believed that it prevented a rural counterrevolution and ensured that the Russian Revolution, unlike its Western precursors, would not stop halfway and then slide backward into “reaction.”

To understand the successes as well as the failures of the Bolshevik assault on the village it is necessary to form an idea of the effects of the Revolution on Russia’s rural economy. As previously noted, in October 1917 the Bolsheviks had set aside their own agrarian program, centered on the nationalization of land, in favor of the SR land program, much more popular among the peasantry, which called for the expropriation, without compensation, and distribution among the communes of all privately held lands, except those belonging to small peasant proprietors.

There is no dispute that the peasants of central Russia welcomed the Land Decree, which realized their old dream of a “Black Repartition.” Even peasants who stood to lose from it because their private holdings were likely to be taken away from them bowed to the inevitable.

But it is a different question altogether whether these essentially demagogic and tactical measures either significantly improved the economic status of the Russian peasant or benefited the country at large.

Land, being an immovable object, can, of course, be distributed only there where it happens to lie. In pre-revolutionary Russia, the bulk of private (non-communal) land subject to expropriation under the Land Decree had been located not in the central, Great Russian provinces, which the Bolsheviks controlled and which had the greatest incidence of rural overpopulation, but on the periphery of the Empire—the Baltic areas, the western provinces, the Ukraine, and the North Caucasus, all of which after October 1917 were outside Bolshevik control. As a consequence, the pool of land available for distribution in Bolshevik-held areas fell considerably short of peasant expectations.

But even in these areas it proved difficult to achieve an equitable land distribution because the peasant refused to share his loot with both outsiders (inogorodnye) and peasants from adjacent communes. Here is a contemporary description of land distribution as it worked in practice:

The agrarian question is solved in a simple manner. The entire land of the landlord has become the property of the commune. Every rural community receives its land from its previous landlord, and does not yield one inch of it to any outsider, even if it has too much and the neighboring communities are short.… It prefers to leave the [surplus] land in the landlord’s hands, as long as none of it falls into the hands of peasants from another community. The peasants say that as long as the landlord uses the land, they will still be able to earn something, and when it becomes necessary, they will take it away.⁹

It is not easy to determine how much arable land the Russian peasantry actually obtained in 1917–18: estimates vary widely from as little as 20 to as much as 150 million desiatiny.¹⁰ A major obstacle lies in the imprecise use of the term “land” (zemlia). As employed in the various statistical surveys conducted after the Revolution, it applies to very different things: arable land (pashnia), its most valuable form, but also meadow, forest, and land of no economic use (desert, marsh, tundra). It is only by lumping these diverse objects under the meaningless rubric of “land” that one can arrive at the fantastic figure of 150 million desiatiny—first introduced by Stalin in 1936 and for long mandatory in Communist literature—allegedly acquired by Russian peasants in consequence of the Revolution.¹¹

Reliable statistics indicate a much more modest result. Figures compiled by the Commissariat of Agriculture in 1919–20 showed that peasants received a total of 21.15 million desiatiny (23.27 million hectares).¹² This land was very unevenly distributed. Fifty-three percent of Russian communes gained no land from the Revolution.¹³ This nearly corresponds to the number of villages (54 percent) that, according to the same source, said they felt “unhappy” over the results of land redistribution.¹⁴ The remaining 47 percent of the villages acquired arable land in very unequal shares. Of the thirty-four provinces for which figures exist, the communes in six received less than one-tenth of one desiatina per member; those in twelve gained between one-tenth and one-quarter desiatina; in nine they obtained between one-quarter and one-half; peasants of four acquired from one-half to a full desiatina; and only in three provinces did the peasants secure between one and two desiatiny.¹⁵ Nationwide, the average communal allotment of arable land per peasant, which before the Revolution had been 1.87 desiatiny, rose to 2.26.¹⁶ This would represent an increment of 0.4 desiatina of arable land per communal adult (edok) or 23.7 percent. This figure, first cited in 1921, has been confirmed by recent studies, the most authoritative of which somewhat vaguely says that the land which the average peasant received “did not exceed” 0.4 desiatina, or approximately one acre*—far below what the peasant had expected from the Black Repartition.

But even this modest figure overstates the economic benefits of the repartition, for a good part (two-thirds) of the land which the peasants seized in 1917–18 they had previously leased. The “socialization” of that land, therefore, did not so much increase the arable land available to them as absolve them from the payment of rent.¹⁷ In addition to being freed from such rents, estimated at 700 million rubles a year, the peasants also benefited from the cancellation by the Communist regime of their debts to the Peasants’ Land Bank, amounting to 1.4 billion rubles.¹⁸

The peasants viewed their title to the new land skeptically, for they heard that the new government intended someday to introduce collectives: the Decree on the Socialization of Land issued in April 1918 stated that the transfer of land to the communes was “provisional” or “temporary” (vremennoe). They wondered for how long they would be allowed to keep it and decided to act as if it were only until the next harvest was over. Hence, rather than incorporate the acquired land into communal holdings, they kept it separate, so that if required to surrender the new land, they could still hold on to their old allotments. ¹⁹ † As a result, the much-lamented strip farming (cherespolositsa) intensified. Many peasants had to travel fifteen, thirty, and even sixty kilometers to reach their new allotments: if the distance was too great, they simply abandoned them.²⁰

So much for the economic benefits which the Russian peasant derived from the Revolution. They were by no means free. Historians usually ignore the costs of the agrarian revolution to the peasant, although they can be shown to have been considerable. These costs were of a twofold nature: the loss of savings due to inflation and the loss of land held by peasants in private (non-communal) ownership.

Before the Revolution, Russian peasants had accumulated considerable savings, some of which they kept at home and the rest of which they deposited in government savings banks (sberegatel’nye kassy). These savings grew considerably during the prosperous war years and the first year of the Revolution when peasants benefited from rising food prices. It is impossible to calculate precisely the amount of peasant savings at the time of the October coup, but some idea may be obtained from official figures as supplemented by informed estimates. At the beginning of 1914, the government savings banks had on deposit 1.55 billion rubles.²¹ Between July 1914 and October 1917, they are estimated to have taken in an additional 5 billion, of which 60–75 percent is believed to have come from rural depositors.²² If the same ratio had held for pre-1914 depositors, the peasants may be estimated to have had on deposit in savings banks at the time of the October coup some 5 billion rubles, to which must be added the moneys they kept at home. The Bolsheviks exempted government savings banks from the decree nationalizing private banks, so that in theory peasants and other small depositors retained access to their money. But it was not long before inflation rendered these deposits as worthless as if they had been confiscated outright. As shown in the preceding chapter, the Bolsheviks proceeded deliberately and systematically to devalue money: during their first five years, the purchasing power of the ruble depreciated millions of times, which had the effect of turning it into colored paper. As a consequence Russian peasants, far from receiving the landlord’s land free of charge, paid for it dearly. For the 21 million desiatiny which they had been allowed to appropriate, they lost in bank savings alone an estimated 5 billion rubles.* If one accepts the contemporary estimate that they kept in mattresses and buried in the ground an additional 7 to 8 billion, then it follows that for his average allotment of one acre of arable land (0.4 desiatina) the peasant paid 600 pre-1918 rubles. Before the Revolution, the average price for this land would have been 64.4 rubles.†

Peasants paid for their new allotments in still another way. When speaking of privately owned land in Russia one tends to think of the properties of landlords (pomeshchiki), the Crown, merchants, and clergy which the Land Decree specified as subject to confiscation and distribution. But a great deal—over one-third—of private agricultural land (arable, forest, and meadow) in Russia before the Revolution was the property of peasants, held individually or, more usually, in associations. In fact, on the eve of the Revolution peasants and Cossacks owned nearly as much land as “landlords.” Of the 97.7 million desiatiny of land (arable, woodland, and pasture) in private ownership in European Russia in January 1915, 39 million, or 39.5 percent, was held by landlords (gentry, officials, and officers) and 34.4 million (34.8 percent) by peasants and Cossacks.²³

Lenin’s Land Decree exempted from expropriation the holdings of “ordinary peasants and ordinary Cossacks.” But in many localities in central Russia communal peasants ignored this provision and proceeded to seize the land belonging to their fellow peasants along with that of the landlords, placing it in the communal pool for distribution. Included in these seizures were both khutora and otruba, including onetime communal land whose cultivators, taking advantage of the Stolypin legislation, had withdrawn from the commune.* As a result, in no time at all, the peasants wiped out much of the achievement of Stolypin’s agrarian reform: the communal principle swept everything before it. Communal peasants treated the landed property which members of the commune had purchased outside the commune the same way: this land too was added to the communal reserve. Here and there, communes left peasants their properties on condition that they reduce them to the size of communal allotments: in January 1927, on the eve of collectivization, of the 233 million desiatiny of peasant land in the Russian Republic (RSFSR), 222 million, or 95.3 percent, were held communally and only 8 million, or 3.4 percent, as otruba or khutora—that is, in private property.²⁴

In view of these facts, it is misleading to say that the Russian peasantry gained from the Revolution, free of charge, large quantities of agricultural land. Its gains were neither generous nor free. The Russian peasantry cannot be treated as homogeneous: the term “Russian peasantry” is an abstraction covering millions of individuals, some of whom had succeeded, by dint of industry, thrift, and business sense, to accumulate capital, which they held in cash or invested in land. All this cash and nearly all this land they now lost. Once such factors are taken into account, it is clear that the muzhik greatly overpaid for the properties which he had seized under the Communist-sponsored duvan.

The agrarian revolution made peasant holdings more equal. In the repartitions which took place across Russia in 1917–18, the communes reduced holdings that were larger than the norm, their principal criterion for redistributing allotments being the number of edoki, or “eaters,” per household. This procedure resulted in the number of households with large allotments (four desiatiny or more) being reduced by almost one-third (from 30.9 to 21.2 percent of the total), while the number of those holdings less than four desiatiny significantly increased (from 57.6 to 72.2 percent).* These figures indicate that there occurred a sizable rise in the number of “middle peasants,” whose ranks were swollen both by the decrease in the number of land-rich peasants and by the granting of allotments to some peasants who previously had had no land: the number of the latter was cut almost in half.²⁵ In consequence of this leveling, Russia became more than ever a country of small, self-sufficient farmers. One contemporary compared post-revolutionary Russia to a “honeycomb in which small commodity producers … have succeeded in equalizing control over the partitioned land, creating a network of parcels, approximately equal in size.”²⁶ The “middle peasant” of Marxist jargon—one who neither hired labor nor sold his own—emerged as the greatest beneficiary of the agrarian revolution: a fact which it took some time for the Bolsheviks to acknowledge.

Not everyone, of course, profited from the Black Repartition: its main beneficiaries were those who already had held communal allotments in 1917 and dominated the communal assemblies. Many of the peasants who in 1917 and 1918 had streamed back to the village from the cities to claim allotments found themselves either excluded from the redistribution or forced to accept substandard lots. The same applied to that one-half of the landless peasants (batraki) who ended up empty-handed. Better-off peasants ignored the wishes of the Bolshevik authorities who in the Land Socialization Decree had instructed village soviets to show particular solicitude for the landless and land-poor peasants.²⁷ Russia simply lacked sufficient agrarian land to give his norm to everyone who demanded it in the name of “socialization.” As a result, the landless and land-poor communal peasants received only small allotments at best.²⁸

The Russian Revolution carried the rural commune to its historic apogee: paradoxically, it was the Bolsheviks who brought about its golden age, even though they despised it. “The commune that had been whittled back in the course of the preceding decade blossomed over virtually all of the agricultural land in the country.”²⁹ This was a spontaneous process that the Bolsheviks did not immediately oppose because the commune for them performed the same functions that it had under tsarism—namely, guaranteeing fulfillment of obligations to the state.

The economic and social consequences of the Revolution thus aggravated the problem which the Bolsheviks had faced from the beginning: not only had they declared the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in a country that was already overwhelmingly “petty bourgeois” but their policies made it even more so. It is against this background that in the early summer of 1918 Moscow took the decision to storm the village. The exact circumstances under which this decision was taken are not known, but enough information is available to make it possible to provide a general account of its antecedents and intent.

As had been the case with the October coup, in launching the invasion of the countryside, the Bolsheviks acted in the name of spurious objectives. Their true purpose was to consummate the October coup by imposing control over the peasantry. But since this would not have been a popular slogan, they carried out the campaign against the peasantry for the ostensible purpose of extracting from the “kulaks” food for the hungry cities. Food shortages, of course, were a very real problem, but as will be shown below, there existed easier and more effective ways of drawing supplies from the countryside. In their internal communications, the authorities frankly admitted that food extraction was a subsidiary task. Thus, a secret Bolshevik report, referring to the decree ordering the creation in every village of Committees of the Poor, explained the measure as follows:

The decree of July 11, concerning the organization of the village poor, defined the nature of the organization and assigned it supply functions. But its true purpose was purely political: to carry out a class stratification in the village, to arouse to active political life those strata that were capable of assimilating and realizing the tasks of the proletarian socialist revolution and even leading onto this path the middle toiling peasantry by freeing it from the economic and social influence of the kulaks and rich peasants who had seized control of the rural soviets and transformed them into organs of opposition to Soviet socialist construction.³⁰

In other words, the extraction of foodstuffs (“supply functions”) for the cities was camouflage for a political operation designed to bring Bolshevism to the village by inflaming social animosities.

In pre-revolutionary Russia, the bulk of the food reaching the market came either from large private estates or from farms of well-to-do peasants, both of which employed hired labor: middle and poor peasants consumed nearly all the food they produced. The confiscation and distribution to the communes of all the gentry land and much of the land held by peasants in private ownership, aggravated by the government’s prohibition on the employment of hired labor (even though it was widely ignored), removed the main source of food supply for the non-agrarian population. With rural Russia reverting to the self-sufficiency of the pre-capitalist era, the non-agricultural population faced starvation. This fact alone contributed to the severe food shortages that occurred after the Bolshevik coup.*

Even under such adverse conditions the peasant might have been able to feed the townspeople if the Bolsheviks, for what appear to have been mainly political reasons, did not deprive him of incentives to part with the surplus.

One of the few measures passed by the Provisional Government that the Bolsheviks retained was the law of March 25, 1917, establishing a state monopoly on commerce in grain. The law provided that all the grain that the producer had left over after satisfying his personal needs and providing for seed belonged to the state and had to be sold to its agencies at fixed prices. Surplus grain that was not turned over was subject to being requisitioned at half price. The Provisional Government obtained in this manner 14.5 percent of the harvest,³¹ but even so, as long as it was in power, the grain trade went on as before. The Bolsheviks, however, enforced this rule with increasing brutality, treating all sales of grain and its products to the consumer as “speculation” subject to severe penalties. In its first months the Cheka expended most of its energy pursuing peasant “bagmen” (meshochniki) and confiscating their merchandise: sometimes it sent peasant peddlers to jail and even executed them. Undeterred, the peasants kept on coming, feeding millions.

The Bolshevik Government insisted that the peasants sell the grain surplus to state agencies at prices that inflation made increasingly absurd: on August 8, 1918, the official tariff was set (depending on the region) at between 14 and 18 rubles per pud (16.3 kilograms) of rye grain, which on the free market was fetching in Moscow 290 and in Petrograd 420 rubles a pud.* There was a similar disparity between fixed and free market prices on other staples, such as meat and potatoes which became controlled in January 1919. The peasant responded to this pricing policy both by hoarding and by curtailing his acreage. The decline in the grain harvest followed inexorably.³²

If one further allows that, as a result of the Brest Treaty, Russia lost the Ukraine, which previously had supplied the country with more than one-third of its cereals, and that in June 1918 the Czechoslovak rebellion cut off access to Siberia, the tragic situation confronting the urban inhabitants of central and northern Russia in mid-1918 becomes apparent. All the cities and industrial centers, and an increasing number of villages located in the less productive regions or with developed cottage industries, suffered hunger and faced the almost certain prospect of a devastating famine should the weather take a turn for the worse.

For the Bolsheviks this situation held dangers as well as opportunities. Hunger in the cities and industrial regions stimulated discontent and eroded their political base. In 1918, Russian cities were in constant turmoil from food shortages. The situation was especially explosive in Petrograd, where in late January 1918 the daily ration consisted of 4 ounces of bread adulterated with milled straw.³³ Since this ration was not adequate to sustain life, the inhabitants had to resort to the open market, where prices were driven artificially high by the Cheka’s harassment of food peddlers. Here, the price of bread fluctuated between 2 and 5 or more rubles a pound, which placed it out of the reach of workers, who, if fortunate enough to find employment, earned at best between 300 and 400 rubles a month.³⁴ During 1918, the food ration in Petrograd was adjusted every few days either upward or downward, depending on the ability of supply trains to run the gauntlet of armed deserters and peasants who lay in ambush: if they succeeded in overpowering the guards they stripped the train in no time, and it reached Petrograd empty. In March, the bread ration in Petrograd rose slightly to 6 ounces, only to drop toward the end of April to 2 ounces. The situation was no better in the provincial cities. In Kaluga, for instance, the daily bread allotment in early 1918 was set at 5 ounces.³⁵

To escape the hunger, urban inhabitants fled the cities in droves: among the refugees were many peasants who had come during the war to work in the defense industries and demobilized garrison troops. Contemporary statistics indicate a drastic fall in the population of Petrograd: by April 1918, 60 percent of the industrial workers employed there in January 1917 (221,000 out of 365,000) had fled to the countryside.³⁶ An exodus of nearly equal proportions occurred in Moscow. During the Revolution and the Civil War, Moscow would lose one-half of its population and Petrograd two-thirds,³⁷ a process which dramatically reversed the urbanization of Russia and enhanced her rural character.* Russian statisticians estimate that between 1917 and 1920, 884,000 families, or some 5 million people, abandoned the cities for the countryside.³⁸ This nearly corresponds to the number of peasants who had moved into the urban areas during the war (6 million).

Those who stayed behind grumbled, demonstrated, and sometimes rioted over food shortages. Lower-class men and women, crazed by hunger, looted food warehouses and stores. Newspapers carried reports of housewives running in the streets screaming “Give us bread!” Peddlers who demanded exorbitant prices risked lynching. Many cities issued ordinances excluding outsiders. Petrograd was tightly sealed off: in February 1918 Lenin signed a decree forbidding nonresidents to enter the capital and certain areas in northern Russia. Other cities passed similar laws.³⁹

In the atmosphere of hunger and lawlessness, urban crime soared. Police records indicate that in the third month of Bolshevik rule the inhabitants of Petrograd reported 15,600 burglaries, 9,370 incidents of store looting, 203,801 incidents of pickpocketing, and 125 murders.⁴⁰ How many crimes went unreported there is no way of knowing, but there must have been very many, since it was common at the time for ordinary criminals to rob under the pretext of carrying out “expropriations,” which the victims were too terrorized to report.

The countryside was in the grip of similar lawlessness. In some provinces (such as Voronezh) food was abundant; in others (such as nearby Riazan) it was desperately short. It was not uncommon for one district to enjoy a comfortable surplus while its neighbors went starving. As a rule, those who had a surplus either disposed of it on the free market or hoarded it in expectation that the state grain monopoly would collapse. Charity was unknown: well-fed peasants refused to feed the hungry ones, and if they came begging, chased them away.⁴¹

The picture of rural life in the first half of 1918 provided by the contemporary press is one of unrelieved horror. An account published in Riazanskaia zhizn’ in early March may not be quite representative, because Riazan suffered extreme food shortages, but it gives some idea how rapidly the Russian village deteriorated under Bolshevik rule, plunging into primeval anarchy. Having looted state liquor stores, the peasants of this province were in a state of perpetual drunkenness. They fought each other in wild orgies, assisted by old men and young girls. To keep them quiet, children were plied with vodka. Afraid of losing their savings through confiscation or inflation, peasants gambled frantically, usually at blackjack; it was not uncommon for an ordinary muzhik to lose one thousand rubles in an evening.

The old men … buy pictures of the Last Judgment. Deep in their hearts the peasants believe that the “end of the world” is near.… And before hell comes, everything that exists on earth and that has been built so recently with such effort is being demolished. They so smash everything that the noise reverberates throughout the district.⁴²

In areas where the food situation was especially desperate, the peasants staged “hunger rebellions,” destroying everything in sight. After one such uprising in a district of Novgorod province, the local Communist authorities imposed on the 12,000 inhabitants a “contribution” of 4.5 million rubles, as if they were rebellious natives of a conquered colony.⁴³

Hunger posed dangers, but from the Bolshevik point of view it also had a positive side. For one, the state monopoly on the food trade, even though detrimental to the supply of food, enabled the regime to maintain a rationing system that served to control the urban population and discriminate in favor of its supporters. Second, hunger depressed the spirit of the population, robbing it of the will to resist. The psychology of hunger is not well known, but Russian observers noted that it made people more willing to submit to authority. “Hunger is a poor companion of creativity,” one Bolshevik observed, “it inspires blind destructiveness, dark fear, a desire to surrender, to hand over one’s destiny to the will of someone who will take it and organize it.”⁴⁴ Starving people, if capable of putting up a fight, dissipate their energies battling each other for food. Such political apathy, being self-induced, does more to promote submissiveness than even police repression.

That the Bolsheviks were aware of the political benefits of hunger is attested to by their refusal to relieve it in the only feasible way, the one they would adopt in 1921 when confident of their control over Russia: reinstating the free market in grain. As soon as this was done, production soared and before long attained prewar levels. That this would happen is known not only by hindsight. In May 1918, a grain specialist, S. D. Rozenkrants, explained to Zinoviev that the food shortages were due not to “speculation” but to the absence of production incentives. Under the grain monopoly the peasant had no inducement to grow grain beyond his own immediate needs. By planting the surplus acreage with root vegetables (potatoes, carrots, beets) for sale on the open market, as the authorities permitted him to do, he earned more money than he knew what to do with: at the free market rate of 100 rubles for a pud of such produce, one desiatina earned him 50,000–60,000 rubles. Why should he bother with grain only to have the state confiscate it at its ridiculous “fixed prices”? Rozenkrants expressed confidence that if the government adopted a more businesslike approach it would resolve the food problem in two months.⁴⁵

Some Bolsheviks liked this solution. Rykov, the head of the State Planning Commission, advocated a combination of compulsory grain deliveries and collaboration with rural cooperatives and private enterprise.⁴⁶ Others suggested that the government purchase grain at close to market prices (60 rubles per pud minimum) and sell it to the population at a discount.⁴⁷ But all these proposals were rejected for political reasons. As the Menshevik Socialist Courier would explain,⁴⁸ the grain monopoly was essential to the survival of the Communist dictatorship: with the immense rural labor force outside its control, it had to resort to the control of the agrarian product. Indeed, according to this source, by early 1921 the Bolsheviks were discussing a proposal by Osinskii to transform peasants into state employees who would be permitted to cultivate the land only on condition of sowing an area predetermined by the authorities and turning over all the surplus—a proposal that had to be shelved with the outbreak of the Kronshtadt rebellion and the adoption of the New Economic Policy. If the food trade were set free, the peasant would soon accumulate wealth and gain even greater economic independence, presenting a serious “counterrevolutionary” threat. Such a risk could be taken only after the regime was indisputably master of Russia. Lenin’s government was prepared to subject the country to a famine claiming millions of lives if this was required to ensure its hold on state power.

Such being the political realities, all the economic measures with which the Bolsheviks sought to improve the food situation in the first half of 1918 proved of no avail. They kept on issuing decrees that either modified procedures for the collection and distribution of food or else threatened food “speculators,” whom they persisted in treating as the cause of the shortages rather than their consequence, with the most dire punishments. Among the most irrelevant of such decrees was one drafted by Lenin at the end of December 1917. “The critical situation of the food supply, the threat of famine caused by speculation,” Lenin wrote, “the sabotage of capitalists and bureaucrats, as well as the prevailing chaos, make it necessary to take extraordinary revolutionary measures to combat the evil.” These “measures,” however, turned out to have nothing to do with the food supply, but instead consisted of nationalizing Russia’s banks and declaring a default on the domestic and foreign debts of the Russian Government.* According to Alexander Tsiurupa, the strike of the 1,300 employees of the Commissariat of Supply protesting the Bolshevik dictatorship aggravated the situation, because they were replaced with officials who had no idea what to do.⁴⁹

Unwilling to give up the monopoly on grain, the Bolsheviks did nothing to forestall the famine predicted by the contemporary press. Like the tsarist regime when confronted with a domestic crisis, they resorted to bureaucratic reshufflings and procedural changes. Since this was not the manner which the Bolsheviks adopted when confronting problems that really concerned them, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that hunger was not in that category.

On February 13, Trotsky was appointed head of the Extraordinary Commission for Supply. His task as “Supply Dictator” was to organize the flow of foodstuffs to the cities with the help of “extraordinary revolutionary measures,” “revolutionary” in this instance being a euphemism for military force.⁵⁰ But he had hardly assumed this responsibility when he was appointed Commissar of War: there is no record of his having accomplished anything. The regime kept on flooding the country with appeals to help starving Petrograd and Moscow,⁵¹ appeals laced with invective against the domestic and foreign “bourgeoisie,” which was blamed for the shortages. In February 1918, the government ordered the death penalty for “bagmen.”⁵² On March 25, Moscow tried to draw out food from the countryside with resort to barter. It allocated 1.16 billion rubles—the two-week output of Soviet printing presses—for the purchase of consumer goods to be exchanged for 2 million tons of grain.⁵³ But because the consumer goods on which the whole scheme depended could not be found, the project fell through. In April, having run out of ideas that had any semblance of realism, the government conceived the plan of building a new railroad to carry grain from the surplus areas.⁵⁴ Not one foot of track was ever laid down, nor would it have made any difference if it had.

By the beginning of May the Bolsheviks no longer could play at solving the food shortages, for the supply situation in the cities and industrial areas had reached alarming dimensions: telegrams poured into the Kremlin reporting that the workers, the recipients of the most generous rations, were going hungry.⁵⁵ In Petrograd, a pound loaf of bread on the open market, which in January had fetched 3 rubles, now cost between 6 and 12.⁵⁶ Something had to be done. Since opening the grain trade to the free play of the market forces, which the experts urged and the factory workers demanded, was unacceptable on political grounds, another solution had to be found. That solution was invading and conquering the village by force of arms.

Sverdlov announced the new policy on May 20, 1918:

If we can say that revolutionary Soviet authority is sufficiently strong in the cities … then the same cannot be said in regard to the village.… For that reason we must most seriously confront the question of the differentiation of the village, the question of creating in the village two contrasting and hostile forces.… Only if we succeed in splitting the village into two irreconcilably hostile camps, if we are able to inflame there the same civil war that had occurred not so long ago in the cities … only then will we be in a position to say that we will do that in relation to the village that we were able to do for the city.⁵⁷

This extraordinary pronouncement meant that the Bolsheviks had decided to incite one part of the rural population against another, unleashing a civil war among citizens who were living peacefully side by side, in order to gain in the village the power base which had so far eluded them. The assault troops designated for this campaign were to consist of urban workers as well as poor and landless peasants: the “enemy” were the rich peasants, or kulaks, the rural “bourgeoisie.”

Lenin hated what he perceived to be the “bourgeoisie” with a destructive passion that fully equalled Hitler’s hatred of the Jews: nothing short of its physical annihilation would satisfy him. The urban middle class—the professionals, financiers, merchants, industrialists, rentiers—gave him little trouble, for they submitted at once, corroborating the thesis of the founding manifesto of Russian Social-Democracy of 1898 that the further east one moved, the more supine the bourgeoisie. When told to shovel snow, they shoveled snow, and even posed for photographs, smiling wanly. When subjected to “contributions,” they dutifully paid up. They studiously avoided contacts with anti-Bolshevik armies or underground organizations. Most of them hoped for some miracle, perhaps German intervention, or perhaps the evolution of Bolshevik policies toward greater “realism.” In the meantime, their instincts told them to lie low. When in the spring of 1918 the Bolsheviks, in an effort to raise productivity, began to reemploy them in industrial enterprises, their hopes rose. As Pravda put it, from such a “bourgeoisie” there was nothing to fear.⁵⁸ The same applied to the socialist intelligentsia whom the Bolsheviks dubbed “petty bourgeois”: they too, for their own reasons, refused to resist. They criticized the Bolsheviks, but whenever the opportunity presented itself to fight, they looked the other way.

The situation was different in the countryside. By Western standards, Russia, of course, had no “rural bourgeoisie,” only a class of peasants who were marginally better off by virtue of a few hectares of additional land, an extra horse or cow, some cash, and the occasional services of a hired hand. But Lenin was obsessed with the image of “class differentiation” in the Russian village. As a young man, he had scrutinized zemstvo statistics, noting the slightest shifts in the economic condition of the various rural strata: anything that indicated a growing divergence between rich and poor peasants, no matter how minute, spelled to him a potential for social conflict which the revolutionaries could exploit.⁵⁹ To penetrate the village, he had to incite a civil war there, and to do that he required a class enemy. For this purpose he created the myth of a powerful, numerous, and counterrevolutionary class of kulaks bent on destroying the “proletariat.”

94. A typical peasant “bourgeois-capitalist.”

The trouble was that whereas Hitler would be able to produce genealogical (“racial”) criteria for determining who was a Jew, Lenin had no standards to define a kulak. This term never had a precise social or economic content: in fact, one observer, who spent the Revolution in the countryside, found that the peasants themselves did not use it.⁶⁰ It had entered the Russian vocabulary in the 1860s, at which time it referred not to an economic category but to a type of peasant who, by virtue of his personality, stood out from the mass of the communal peasantry: it was used to describe what in American slang would be called a “go-getter.” Such peasants tended to dominate village assemblies and the volost’ courts; sometimes they also acted as moneylenders, but this was not their defining quality. Radical publicists and novelists of the late nineteenth century, enamored of an ideal, perfectly egalitarian commune, gave kulaks a bad name as village exploiters, but there is no evidence that their fellow peasants regarded with hostility those to whom the term applied.⁶¹ In fact, radical agitators who in the 1870s went “to the people” discovered that deep in his heart every peasant aspired to becoming a kulak. Not surprisingly, therefore, neither before nor after 1917 was it possible to distinguish a middle peasant from a kulak by any objective criteria—a fact that even Lenin, in a moment of candor, was forced to admit.⁶²

How difficult it was to assign the term “kulak” a precise, operative meaning became apparent when the Bolsheviks attempted to unleash a class war in the countryside. To the commissars charged with organizing the “poor” peasants against the kulaks, this was a next-to-impossible task because they found nothing corresponding to these concepts in the communes with which they came in contact. In the province of Samara, one such official concluded that 40 percent of the peasants were kulaks,⁶³ while Bolshevik officials in the province of Voronezh informed Moscow that “it is impossible to wage the struggle against kulaks and the rich, because they constitute the majority of the population.”⁶⁴

But Lenin had to have a rural class enemy: as long as the village remained outside their political control and under SR influence, the Bolshevik bastions in the cities remained highly vulnerable. The refusal of the peasants to surrender food at fixed prices offered Lenin an opportunity to rally the urban population against the peasantry, ostensibly for the sake of extracting food but, in fact, as a device to bring it to heel.

It was Engels who had said that the poor and landless rural proletariat could, under certain conditions, become an ally of the industrial working class. Lenin adopted this point of view.⁶⁵ This premise he now put to use. In August 1918, he loosely bandied about statistics on the class structure of the Russian village which were to have deadly consequences. “Let us allow,” he said,

that we have in Russia some 15 million agricultural peasant families, taking into account previous Russia, before the robbers had detached from us the Ukraine, etc. Of this 15 million, certainly about 10 million are the poor, who live from the sale of their labor or enslave themselves to the rich, or who lack surplus grain and have been especially ruined by the burdens of the war. About 3 million must be counted as middle peasants, and hardly over 2 million are kulaks, rich men, bread speculators.⁶⁶

These figures bore not the slightest relationship to reality: they merely repeated in rounded numbers the kind of calculations that Lenin used to make before the Revolution on the “class differentiation” of the Russian village. Thus, in 1899 he had calculated that the proportion of rich to middle to poor peasant households was 2 to 4 to 4. In 1907, he concluded that 80.8 percent of the peasant households were “poor,” 7.7 percent “middle,” and 11.5 percent well-to-do.⁶⁷ Lenin’s most recent figures ignored the fact that, as a result of the agrarian revolution, the number of poor and rich peasants had declined. Half a year after declaring the “poor” to be two-thirds of the peasantry, he described the middle peasantry as the “most powerful force.”⁶⁸ Clearly, his figures were not statistical data, but political slogans, drawn from Engels, who had laid it down in 1870, in regard to Germany, that “agricultural laborers form the most numerous class in the countryside.”⁶⁹ Whatever validity this generalization may have had for late-nineteenth-century Germany, it had none for post-1917 Russia, where the “most numerous class in the countryside” consisted of self-employed middle peasants.

The vaunted “class differentiation” in the Russian village was also a figment of the imagination of urban intellectuals who drew their information from statistical abstracts. How did one define rural capitalism? According to Lenin, “the principal symptom and indicator of capitalism in agriculture is hired labor.”⁷⁰ Now, according to the agrarian census of 1917, in the nineteen provinces for which information was available, only 103,000 rural households out of nearly 5 million employed hired labor, which would yield a proportion of rural “capitalists” equal to 2 percent. But even this figure loses significance when one takes into account that these 103,000 households employed a total of 129,000 laborers, or barely more than one per household.⁷¹ Such laborers may have been hired because someone in the household had fallen ill or been drafted into the army. In any event, with a mere 2 percent of the households employing on the average one hired hand, it would stretch this concept to its most extreme limits to speak of the penetration of “capitalism” into the Russian village, let alone to claim that 2 million kulaks were exploiting 10 million “poor” peasants. Using another criterion—namely, lack of access to communal land—Communist statisticians have determined that less than 4 percent of the rural population qualified as “poor.”⁷²

Lenin ignored this empirical evidence: determined to unleash a “class war” between town and country, he drew a fantastic picture of socioeconomic conditions in the rural areas so as to have an excuse for invading them. His true criteria for determining who was “bourgeois” in the village were not economic but political: in his eyes, every anti-Bolshevik peasant qualified as a kulak.

The agrarian decrees which the Bolsheviks issued in May and June 1918 had a fourfold purpose: (1) to destroy the politically active peasants, almost to a man loyal to the SRs, by labeling them “kulaks”; (2) to undermine communal landholding and lay the groundwork for state-run collective farming; (3) to revamp the rural soviets by ejecting the SRs and replacing them with urban Bolsheviks or non-party Bolshevik sympathizers; and (4) to extract food for the cities and industrial centers. Food collection was given the greatest prominence in government propaganda, but in Bolshevik plans it was assigned the lowest priority. When the smoke cleared, the quantity of food extracted from the villagers turned out to be piddling: the political results were another matter.

The campaign against the village was conducted with the precision and brutality of a military operation. The main strategic decisions received approval at meetings of the Sovnarkom on May 8 and 9, presumably after having been previously voted on by the Bolshevik Central Committee. The Sovnarkom reconfirmed the state monopoly on the grain trade. The Commissar of Supply, Tsiurupa, received extraordinary powers to enforce the provisions of the decree of May 13,⁷³ which required every peasant to deliver his surplus grain to designated collection points in return for a payment at fixed prices. Peasants who failed to do so and hoarded their surplus or used it to make moonshine were declared “enemies of the people.” The masses were exhorted by Lenin to wage a “merciless and terroristic war against the peasant bourgeoisie.”⁷⁴ This campaign was designed as a two-pronged offensive against the “kulak”: from within by means of a fifth column, composed of poor peasants organized into Committees of the Poor (kombedy), and from without by means of “food detachments” (prodovol’stvennye otriady) of armed workers who were to march on the village and force the “kulaks” at gunpoint to disgorge their hoard.

The preamble of the May 13 decree accused the “village bourgeoisie” of having waxed rich on the war and refusing to sell food to the government so as to be able to dispose of it on the black market at speculative prices. The alleged aim of the rich peasants was to force the government to give up its monopoly on commerce in grain. Should the government succumb to this blackmail, the decree went on, ignoring the relationship between supply and demand, bread prices would skyrocket and place food entirely beyond the reach of workers. The “stubbornness” of village “kulaks” had to be broken: “Not a single pud of grain should remain in the hands of peasants except for that needed to sow the fields and feed their families until the next harvest.” Detailed procedures were worked out concerning the manner in which food was to be extracted. Every peasant without exception was to deliver within one week of the decree all his surplus grain. Those who failed to do so were to be turned over to Revolutionary Tribunals, where they faced prison sentences of no less than ten years, confiscation of all property, and expulsion from the commune.*

Armed bands, sometimes formed into Red Guards, had been raiding villages in search of food since the preceding winter. They usually ran into fierce resistance from the peasants, reinforced by soldiers who had come home from the front with their weapons; they usually returned to town empty-handed.⁷⁵ Lenin had proposed in January 1918 the formation of “several thousand supply detachments,” with ten to fifteen workers each, empowered to shoot recalcitrant peasants, but the idea failed to gain support.⁷⁶ It was only in the spring of 1918 that the Bolsheviks proceeded systematically to organize rural terror units. The earliest measure was an appeal to the workers of Petrograd, issued on May 21 over the signature of Lenin.⁷⁷ Other appeals and instructions followed. The notion of extracting food by force was clearly modeled on the armée révolutionnaire created, as one of its first acts, by the French Committee of Public Safety in June 1793, and accompanied by laws prohibiting the hoarding of produce.

Russian workers had no taste for such methods. They could be mobilized against the burzhui or the landlord, from whom they were separated by an unbridgeable cultural gulf, but not against the village, where many of them had been born and still had relatives. They felt none of the class animus against the peasant, even the relatively well-to-do peasant, which Lenin and his followers attributed to them. The Left SRs, who enjoyed considerable support among Petrograd workers, protested against Bolshevik measures kindling class hatred between workers and peasants. The Left SR Central Committee actually forbade its party members to enroll in the food detachments. Zinoviev ran into considerable difficulties when he tried to implement the May decrees, even though he offered the volunteers generous inducements. On May 24 he announced that detachments would depart in search of food in two days, but hardly anyone turned up. Meetings at Petrograd factories, organized by workers’ plenipotentiaries, passed resolutions opposing this measure.⁷⁸ Five days later, Zinoviev repeated the appeal, coupling it with a threat to the “bourgeoisie”: “We shall give them 1/16th of a pound a day so they won’t forget the smell of bread. But if we must go over to milled straw, then we shall put the bourgeoisie on it first of all.”⁷⁹ The workers remained unmoved, preferring, with a common sense sorely lacking among the Bolshevik intelligentsia, to solve the food shortage by freeing the trade in cereals. In time, however, by a combination of threats and inducements, Zinoviev managed to form some food detachments, the first of which, a unit of 400 men, departed for the countryside on June 1.⁸⁰

The food detachments proved disappointing. Since bona fide workers stayed away, the majority of those who joined up were urban riffraff that went to the village to loot. Lenin soon received complaints to this effect.⁸¹ Shortly after the first supply detachments had made their appearance in the villages, he sent the following message to the workers of one industrial establishment:

I very much hope that the comrade workers of Vyksa will carry out their admirable plan of launching a mass movement for bread with machine guns as genuine revolutionaries—that is, that they will staff the detachments with picked individuals, reliable men, not looters, who will work according to instructions in full agreement with Tsiurupa for the common task of saving from hunger all those who go hungry and not only for themselves.⁸²

Judging by peasant complaints, it was common practice for the armed bands from the cities to load up on stolen produce and get drunk on requisitioned moonshine.⁸³ Despite threats of severe punishment, such activities persisted and in the end the government had to allow members of food detachments to retain for their personal use up to 20 pounds of foodstuffs, including a maximum of 2 pounds of butter, 10 pounds of bread, and 5 pounds of meat.⁸⁴

But neither threats of punishment nor concessions to self-interest worked and before long the regime had to turn to the newly formed Red Army. It was no coincidence that the decree introducing compulsory military service into Soviet Russia, issued on May 29, 1918, coincided with the establishment of food detachments. There was a revealing directive from Lenin’s hand, drafted on May 26 and approved by the Central Committee the following day, which indicates that the earliest mission of the newly constituted Red Army was to wage war against the Russian peasant:

1. The Commissariat of War is to be transformed into a Military-Supply Commissariat—that is, nine-tenths of the work of the Commissariat of War is to concentrate on adapting the army for the war for bread and the conduct of such a war for three months: June–August.

2. During the same period, place the entire country under martial law.

3. Mobilize the army, separating its healthy units, and induct nineteen-year-olds, at least in some regions, for systematic operations to conquer the harvest and to gather food and fuel.

4. Introduce the death penalty for lack of discipline …

. . . . .

9. Introduce collective responsibility for entire [supply] detachments, the threat of execution of every tenth for each incident of looting.⁸⁵

Only the outbreak of the Czech rebellion prevented the entire Red Army from being assigned to fight the peasantry; even so, it played a considerable role in this campaign. As the Red Army was forming, Trotsky announced that its mission in the next two or three months would be “fighting hunger,”⁸⁶ which was a delicate way of saying “fighting the peasant.” Although no medals were issued for this campaign, the war against the muzhik provided the Red Army with its first combat experience. Ultimately, 75,000 regular soldiers joined 50,000 armed civilians in battling the nation’s food producers.⁸⁷

The peasants responded to force with force. Contemporary newspapers are filled with accounts of pitched engagements between government units and peasants. The commanders of military and civilian units marching on the villages reported routinely on “kulak uprisings,” but the evidence makes it clear that the resistance they encountered was spontaneous defense by the peasants of their property, involving not only the “rich” but the entire rural population. “When more carefully examined, the so-called kulak rebellions seem nearly always to have been general peasant uprisings, in which no class distinctions can be traced.”⁸⁸ The peasants cared not a whit about the needs of the city and knew nothing of “class differentiation.” All they saw was armed bands from the cities, often ex-peasants in leather jackets or army uniforms, come to rob them of their grain. They had never been made to surrender their harvest even under serfdom and they were not about to do so now.

The following contemporary newspaper account of incidents in the second half of 1918 in scattered rural areas is representative of the genre:

When the supply detachment arrived in the Gorodishchenskaia volost’ of Orel province, the women, instead of turning the produce over, dumped it into the water, and fished it out after the unexpected visitors had departed. In the Lavrov volost’ of the same province, the peasants disarmed a “Red detachment.” In Orel province requisitions are carried out on the broadest scale. Preparations are made as if for a regular war. “In some districts … during the requisitioning of bread, all private automobiles, saddle horses, and carriages have been mobilized.” In the Nikolskaia volost’ and its neighborhood regular battles take place: there are wounded and killed on both sides. The detachment requested by wire to have Orel send ammunition and machine guns.… It is reported from Saratov province …: “The village has become alerted and is ready for battle. In some villages of the Volskii district, the peasants met Red Army troops with pitchforks and compelled them to disperse.” In Tver province, “the partisan detachments sent to the village in search of food meet everywhere with resistance; there are reports of encounters from various localities; to save the grain from requisition, the peasants hide it in the forests [and] bury it in the ground.” At the bazaar in Korsun, in the province of Simbirsk, peasants came to blows with Red Army troops attempting to requisition grain; one Red Army soldier was killed, several were wounded.⁸⁹

In January 1919, Izvestiia carried a report of a government investigation of a “White Guard kulak” uprising in a village in the province of Kostroma which illustrates what the assault on the village “bourgeoisie” really involved. The investigation revealed that the chairman of the village Executive Committee regularly beat peasant petitioners, sometimes with canes. Some of his victims were stripped of their shoes and forced to sit in the snow. So-called food requisitions were really ordinary robberies, in the course of which peasants were pummeled with Cossack nagaiki. As it approached a village, the food detachment would open machine gun fire to frighten the peasants. Then the beatings would begin. “The peasants had to put on five or more shirts to ward off the blows, but that did not do much good because the whips were laced with wire: after a beating the shirts stuck to the flesh and dried, so they had to be loosened by soaking in warm water.” Members of the detachment urged the soldiers to beat the peasants with whatever they could lay their hands on, “so that they would remember Soviet authority.”⁹⁰

As the government pressed its campaign, the countryside rose in revolt. This was an event unprecedented in Russian history, for previous uprisings, such as Razin’s or Pugachev’s, had been regional affairs, usually confined to the eastern and southeastern borderlands. Nothing like it had ever occurred in the heartland of Russia. Rural resistance to the Bolsheviks that erupted in the summer of 1918 represented, in both extent and numbers involved, far and away the greatest peasant rebellion that the country had ever experienced.* Its course, however, is still imperfectly known, because of the refusal of the authorities in charge of Soviet archives to release the relevant documents and the inexplicable lack of interest in the subject by Western historians.* The Cheka reported that in 1918 there occurred 245 rural “uprisings” (vosstaniia) which cost the lives of 875 Bolsheviks and 1,821 rebels. In addition, 2,431 rebels were executed.⁹¹ This figure, however, can reflect only a fraction of the casualties, perhaps only those suffered by Cheka’s own personnel. A recent work by a Communist historian states that, judging by incomplete data, between July and September 1918 alone, in twenty-two provinces, some 15,000 Soviet “supporters” (storonniki) had been killed, by which are meant Red Army troops, members of supply detachments, and Communist officials.⁹² A history of the Communist Party in Cheliabinsk shows a photograph of a Red Army detachment of 300 men posing around a machine gun. According to the caption, the entire unit, save for a single survivor, perished in the course of a “kulak uprising.”⁹³ Obviously, comparable casualties must have been incurred in other regions and provinces, on both sides.⁹⁴

The anti-Communist peasant rising of 1918–19, whose course is not even approximately known, was ultimately suppressed. Although the peasant rebels exceeded government forces manifold, they were handicapped by lack of firepower and, above all, lack of organization: each rising was spontaneous and localized.⁹⁵ The SRs, despite their dominant role in the village, refused to organize the peasants, almost certainly out of fear of playing into the hands of the Whites.

Notwithstanding the brutality of the supply detachments, only negligible food supplies reached the cities: the little food that they managed to extract was appropriated by their members. On July 24, 1918, two months after the food detachments had been instituted, Lenin informed Stalin that as yet no food had reached either Petrograd or Moscow.⁹⁶ This fiasco of the most brutal policy conceivable drove Lenin into paroxysms of fury. As the time for the harvest approached and dispatches from the rural “front” indicated continued lack of success, he berated Bolshevik commanders for their irresolution and ordered ever more savage reprisals. On August 10, he cabled Tsiurupa:

1. It is an arch-scandal, an insane scandal, that Saratov has bread and we are unable to collect it.…

2. A decree project: in every bread-producing district, 25–30 hostages from among the rich, who answer with their lives for the collection and delivery of all the surplus.⁹⁷

When Tsiurupa responded: “One can take hostages when one has real power. Does it exist? This is doubtful.” Lenin wrote back: “I propose not to take the ‘hostages’ but to designate them.”⁹⁸ This was the earliest mention of the practice of hostage-taking, which four weeks later, under the “Red Terror,” would be carried out on a mass scale. That Lenin was earnest about this barbarian policy is evident from an instruction that he sent to Penza province, where a peasant revolt was in progress:

While suppressing the uprising in the five districts, apply all efforts and adopt all measures in order to remove all the grain surpluses from their owners, accomplishing this concurrently with the suppression of the uprising. For this purpose designate in every district (designate, do not seize) hostages, by name, from among kulaks, rich men, and exploiters, whom you are to charge with responsibility for the collection and delivery to assigned stations or grain-collecting points and for turning over to the authorities of all the surplus grain without exception.

The hostages are answerable with their lives for the accurate and prompt payment of the contribution …^l99

On August 6, Lenin decreed an “intensification of the merciless mass terror” against the “counterrevolutionary” part of the “bourgeoisie” and the “merciless extermination of the traitors” who used hunger as a “weapon.” All who resisted seizures of surplus grain, including “bagmen,” were to be turned over to Revolutionary Tribunals, and if caught armed, to be shot on the spot.¹⁰⁰ In a spell of mindless wrath, Lenin ordered that the “kulaks” be deprived not only of their surplus grain but also of that required to sow the next crop.¹⁰¹ His speeches and written instructions of this period indicate that his frustration at the peasantry’s resistance robbed him of the ability to think rationally. This is evident from his appeal to industrial workers in August 1918, in which he exhorted them to “the last, decisive battle”:

The kulak insanely detests Soviet authority and is ready to suffocate, to carve up hundreds of thousands of workers.… Either the kulaks will cut up a boundless number of workers, or the workers will mercilessly crush the uprisings of the thievish minority of the people against the power of toilers. There can be no middle ground here.… The kulaks are the most beastly, the coarsest, the most savage exploiters.… These bloodsuckers have waxed rich during the war on the people’s want, they have amassed thousands and hundreds of thousands.… These spiders have grown fat at the expense of peasants, impoverished by the war, of hungry workers. These leeches have drunk the blood of toilers, growing the richer the more the worker starved in the cities and factories. These vampires have gathered and continue to gather in their hands the lands of landlords, enslaving, time and again, the poor peasants. Merciless war against these kulaks! Death to them.*

As one historian has aptly observed, “this was probably the first occasion when the leader of a modern state incited the populace to the social equivalent of genocide.”¹⁰² It was characteristic of Lenin to disguise an offensive action as self-defense, in this case defense against a completely imaginary threat on the part of the “kulaks” physically to annihilate the working class. His fanaticism on the subject knew no limits: in December 1919 he said that “we”—a pronoun he did not further define but which was unlikely to include himself and his associates—“will sooner all perish” than allow free trade in grain.¹⁰³

To overcome peasant resistance, the Sovnarkom on August 19 placed the Commissar of War, Trotsky, in charge of all units involved in this action, including the civilian supply detachments, which had until then been subordinate to the Commissariat of Supply.¹⁰⁴ The following day Tsiurupa issued instructions militarizing the food-requisitioning operation. Supply detachments came under the command of the provincial and military authorities and were subject to military discipline. Each detachment was to have a minimum of 75 men and two or three machine guns. They were to maintain links with nearby cavalry units and arrange for combining several detachments into one should the strength of peasant resistance require it. Assigned to each detachment, as to regular Red Army units, was a political commissar, whose responsibility it was to organize the Committees of the Poor.¹⁰⁵

As previously noted, these Committees of the Poor were intended to function as a “fifth column” inside the enemy camp that would assist the Red Army and the supply detachments. By playing on the economic resentments of the most indigent rural elements, Lenin hoped to rally them against the richer ones and, in the ensuing clash, gain political entry into the village.

His expectation was disappointed for two reasons. The actual social structure of the Russian village bore no resemblance to the one that he took as his point of departure: Lenin’s notion that three-quarters of the peasants were “poor” was sheer fantasy. The “landless proletariat,” the core of the village poor, constituted in central Russia at most 4 percent of the rural population: the remaining 96 percent were “middle peasants” with a scattering of “rich.” The Bolsheviks thus lacked a realistic social base from which to instigate a class war in the village.

To make matters worse, even that 4 percent would not cooperate. Much as the peasants bickered among themselves, when threatened from the outside, whether by the authorities or by peasants from other areas, they closed ranks. On such occasions, rich, middle, and poor became as one family. In the words of a Left SR: “When the food detachments show up in a village, they obtain no food, of course. What do they accomplish? They create a united front from the kulaks to your landless peasants who fight the virtual war which the city has declared on the village.”¹⁰⁶ A peasant foolhardy enough to turn informer against his fellow villagers, in the hope of securing the rewards promised him by the regime, signed his social and even physical death warrant: the moment the supply detachment withdrew, he would be chased out of the commune, if not killed. Under these conditions, the whole concept of pitting the “poor” against the “rich” in a “merciless” class war proved utterly unrealistic.

Lenin either did not know these facts or chose to ignore them because of overriding political considerations. As Sverdlov had conceded in May, the Bolshevik Government was weak in the countryside and it could insinuate itself there only by “inflaming civil war.” The soviets, which had originated in the cities, were not popular among the peasants because they duplicated the village assembly, the traditional rural form of self-government. In the summer of 1918, most rural localities had no soviets; where they existed, they functioned rather perfunctorily under the leadership of the more outspoken peasants or the village intelligentsia, adherents of the SR Party. This situation Lenin was determined to change.

The ostensible purpose of the Committees of the Poor was to help the supply detachments and Red Army units uncover hoards of grain. But their true mission was to serve as nuclei of new rural soviets directed by reliable urban Communists and acting in strict conformity with the directives of Moscow.

The Ispolkom discussed the creation of these committees, or kombedy, on May 20 and decreed their establishment throughout Russia on June 11.¹⁰⁷ When it came up for discussion at the Ispolkom, there was vigorous criticism from the Mensheviks and the Left SRs,¹⁰⁸ which the Bolshevik majority overruled. The regime issued a “Decree concerning the organization and provisioning” of the village poor, which provided for the establishment in every volost’ and large village (selo), alongside existing soviets and under their supervision, of Committees of the Poor made up of both local peasants and new settlers, with the exclusion of “notorious kulaks and rich men,” heads of households disposing of a surplus of grain and other produce, those who owned commercial and industrial establishments, and those who employed hired labor. The task of the committees was to help Red Army units and supply detachments locate and confiscate food hoards. To secure their cooperation, members of kombedy were promised a share of the confiscated hoard, free of charge until June 15 and at a token cost after that date. To make membership in the kombedy still more attractive, the committees were also authorized to confiscate from the “village bourgeoisie” and divide among themselves its equipment and inventory. Thus, one part of the rural population was encouraged to denounce and despoil the other.

Although the consequences for those to whom it applied were certain to be immense, the provisions of the decree were vague. Who were the “notorious kulaks and rich men” and how were they to be distinguished from other peasants who had surplus grain? In what sense were the kombedy subordinated to the local soviets, which had charge of local government and responsibility for food distribution?

As it turned out, the poor peasants were as unwilling to enroll in the kombedy as the industrial workers were to join the supply detachments. Despite immense pressure, as of September 1918, three months after they had been decreed, only one village in six was reported to have a Committee of the Poor. Many provinces, among them Moscow, Pskov, Samara, and Simbirsk—major agricultural regions—had none.¹⁰⁹ The government kept on allocating large sums of money for this purpose, without much success. Where rural soviets did not exist, the order was ignored. Where they did exist, they usually declared kombedy to be redundant, and instead created their own “supply commissions,” which defeated the whole purpose of the undertaking.

Undaunted, the Bolsheviks pressed the campaign. Thousands of Bolsheviks and Bolshevik sympathizers were sent to the countryside to agitate, organize, and overcome the resistance of rural soviets. The following incident illustrates how such methods worked:

From the protocols of the Saransk district conference of volost’ and village soviets and the representatives of the Committees of the Poor held on July 26, 1918:

Resolved: that the functions of the Committees of the Poor are to be entrusted to the volost’ and village soviets.

After the vote had been taken, Comrade Kaplev [the deputy chairman] informed the conference in the name of the local committee of Communists-Bolsheviks that apparently the majority of those attending the conference had voted against the decision of the central authority due to a misunderstanding. For this reason, on the basis of the decree and instructions concerning the matter, the party will send to the localities its representatives, who will explain to the population the significance of the Committees of the Poor and proceed to organize them, in accordance with the [government’s] decree.¹¹⁰

In this fashion, party officials invalidated the vote of the peasants rejecting the creation of Committees of the Poor. Using such strong-arm methods, by December 1918 the Bolsheviks organized 123,000 kombedy, or slightly more than one per two villages.¹¹¹ Whether these organizations actually functioned or even existed it is impossible to tell: one suspects that in many cases they existed only on paper. In the majority of cases, the chairmen of the kombedy either belonged to the Communist Party or declared themselves “sympathizers.”¹¹² In the latter case they were under the thumb of outsiders, mainly urban apparatchiki, for at this time there were almost no peasants in the Communist Party: a statistical survey of twelve provinces of central Russia indicated in 1919 only 1,585 Communists in the rural areas.¹¹³

Moscow saw the kombedy as a transitional institution: it was Lenin’s intention to have them transformed into soviets. In November 1918 he declared: “We shall fuse the kombedy with the soviets, we will arrange it so that the kombedy will become soviets.”¹¹⁴ The next day, Zinoviev addressed the Congress of Soviets on this subject. He declared that it was the task of the kombedy to reshape rural soviets so that they would resemble urban ones, that is, become organs of “socialist construction.” This required nationwide “re-elections” to the rural soviets on the basis of rules which the Central Executive Committee would lay down.¹¹⁵ These rules were announced on December 2.¹¹⁶ Here it was stated that because the rural soviets had been elected before the “socialist revolution” reached the countryside, they continued to be dominated by “kulaks.” It had now become necessary to bring rural soviets into “full harmony” with the urban ones. Nationwide réélections to soviets on the village and volost’ level were to take place under the supervision of the kombedy. To ensure that the new rural soviets acquired a proper “class” character, the executives of the provincial city soviets would supervise the elections and where necessary, remove from them undesirable elements.* Kulaks and other speculators and exploiters were to be disenfranchised. Ignoring the provisions of the 1918 Constitution that all power in the country belonged to the soviets, the decree defined the “main task” of the freshly elected rural soviets to be the “realization of all the decisions of the corresponding higher organs of the Soviet authority”—that is, the central government. Their own authority—closely modeled on that of the zemstva of tsarist Russia—was to be confined to raising the “cultural and economic standards” of their area by such means as gathering statistical data, promoting local industry, and helping the government to appropriate grain. In other words, they were to be transformed primarily into conveyors of bureaucratic decisions and secondarily into institutions charged with improving the living conditions of the population. Once they had accomplished their mission, kombedy were to be dissolved.†

The reelections to the volost’ and village soviets, which took place in the winter of 1918–19, followed closely the pattern previously established by the Bolsheviks in the cities.¹¹⁷ All executive posts were preassigned to members of the Communist Party as well as to “sympathizers” or “partyless.” Since the peasants stubbornly elected and reelected their own candidates, Moscow devised methods that ensured the results it wanted. In most localities, the voting was done in the open,¹¹⁸ which had an intimidating effect, since a peasant who did not vote as directed risked being labeled a “kulak.” No party other than the Communist was allowed to participate: this was ensured by a provision that only those parties and factions could put up candidates which “stood on the platform of Soviet authority.” Protests that the 1918 Constitution made no mention of parties taking part in soviet elections were brushed aside.¹¹⁹ In many localities, Communist Party cells insisted on approving every candidate who stood for the election. If, these precautions notwithstanding, “kulaks” or other undesirables still managed to win executive positions, as seems frequently to have happened, the Communists resorted to their favorite technique of declaring the election invalid and ordering it repeated. This could be done as often as necessary until the desired results were obtained. One Soviet historian says that it was not uncommon for three or four or more “elections” to be held in succession.¹²⁰ And still, the peasants kept on electing “kulaks”—that is, non-Bolsheviks and anti-Bolsheviks. Thus, in Samara province in 1919 no fewer than 40 percent of the members of the new volost’ soviets turned out to be “kulaks.”¹²¹ To put an end to such insubordination, the party issued on December 27, 1919, a directive instructing party organizations in the Petrograd region to submit to the rural soviets a single list of “approved” candidates.¹²² This practice, in time extended to other areas, put an end to the rural soviets as organs of self-government.

If one were to assess the results of the Bolshevik campaign against the village in the military terms in which it was conceived, one would have to declare the village the winner. While the Bolsheviks did gain some of their political objectives, they failed both to divide the peasantry against itself and to extract from it significant quantities of food. Even its political gains were soon erased: for as the Red Army units were recalled in 1919 to meet the threat from the White armies, the village reverted to its old ways.

The extraction of foodstuffs also gave the regime little cause for satisfaction. Communist sources are uncharacteristically reticent about the quantities of food obtained by means of forceful seizures, but such evidence as they do provide suggests they were minuscule. It is said that during the 1918 harvest (lasting from mid-August to early November) the supply detachments, assisted by the Red Army, and the Committees of the Poor extracted from the twelve provinces with surpluses 35 million puds, or 570,000 tons, of grain.* Since the 1918 harvest yielded 3 billion puds, or 49 million tons,¹²³ it appears that all that effort and all that brutality—troops firing machine guns, pitched battles, hostages with death sentences hanging over their heads—brought in only one-hundredth of the harvest. The authorities acknowledged the failure of the policy of raiding the countryside when they introduced on January 11, 1919, taxation in kind (prodovol’stvennaia razvërstka or prodrazvërstka), which replaced confiscations of all surplus with strict norms specifying the quantities the peasant had to turn over. These were established on the basis of the state’s needs, without regard to the producers’ ability to deliver. To ensure delivery, the government reverted to the Chinese-Mongol system of imposing quotas on districts and subdistricts, which then distributed the load among their villages and communes. The latter were bound, as in earlier tsarist days, by collective responsibility (krugovaia poruka) for meeting their obligations. This system, which at least introduced some order, originally covered grain and feed, but was later extended to include virtually all foodstuffs. For the goods which he was compelled to turn over the peasant received money which bought nothing: in 1920 Lenin described to the visiting Bertrand Russell with a chuckle how his government forced the muzhik to take worthless paper for his grain.* ¹²⁴ And even so, barely two years later, in the spring of 1921, yielding to stubborn reality, Lenin, who had said that he would rather have everyone die of hunger than allow free trade in grain, had to back down and give up the grain monopoly.

The regime also failed to unleash a class war in the village. The small minority of “rich” peasants and the equally small minority of “poor” ones drowned in the sea of “middle” peasants, all three of whom refused to wage fratricidal war. In the words of one historian, “the kulak stood for the village and the village for the kulak.”¹²⁵

In two months, the Bolsheviks realized their mistake. On August 17, 1918, Lenin and Tsiurupa issued a special directive ordering a drive to win over the middle peasantry and unite it with the poor against the rich.¹²⁶ Lenin repeatedly asserted afterward that his regime was not an enemy of the middle peasant.¹²⁷ But such verbal concessions meant little, given that the middle peasant had the food and hence was the main victim of Bolshevik food-extraction policies.

Peasants were utterly confounded by Bolshevik agrarian policies. They had understood the “Revolution” to mean volia, or anarchy, which to them meant relief from all obligations to the state. Peasants were heard to complain: “They promised to turn over all the land, not to collect taxes, not to take into the army, and now what …?”¹²⁸ Indeed, their obligations to the Communist state were much heavier than under tsarism: by calculations of Communist scholars at the very least twice as heavy, since they now consisted not only of taxes but also of forced labor and other obligations, of which the duty to cut and cart lumber was the most onerous.¹²⁹ The vocabulary of sutsilism, as they called it, which urban agitators tried to foist on them, struck the peasants as gibberish, and they reacted as they had always done under similar circumstances, retranslating foreign words into language familiar to them. They began to suspect they had been had, but they were determined to hold out, believing themselves to be indispensable and, therefore, invincible. In the meantime, common sense told them that as long as they could not dispose of it on the open market, there was no profit in producing a surplus. This led to a steady decline of food production that in 1921 would contribute greatly to the famine.

The Bolsheviks could claim to their credit that they had at last penetrated the village by inserting there a network of soviets under their control. But this was to some extent an illusion. Studies carried out in the early 1920s revealed that the villages ignored the Communist soviets, set up at such cost and effort. Authority by then had reverted to communal organizations, run by heads of households, just as if there had been no Revolution. The village soviets had to obtain approval of their resolutions from the commune; many did not even have their own budget.¹³⁰

In the light of these facts, it is astonishing to have Lenin claim that the campaign against the village had not only been a complete success but transcended in historic importance the October coup. In December 1918 he boasted that during the past year the regime had solved problems that “in previous revolutions had been the greatest impediment to the work of socialism.” In the initial stage of the Revolution, he said, the Bolsheviks had joined with the poor, middle, and rich peasants in the fight against the landlords. This alliance left the rural “bourgeoisie” intact. If that situation were allowed to become permanent, the Revolution would have stopped halfway and then inevitably receded. Such a danger was now averted because the “proletariat” had awakened the rural poor and together with them attacked the village bourgeoisie. The Russian Revolution thus had already progressed beyond the Western European bourgeois-democratic revolutions, creating the basis for a merger of the urban and rural proletariats and laying the groundwork for the introduction in Russia of collective farming. “Such is the significance,” Lenin exulted,

of the revolution which occurred during the current summer and fall in the most out-of-the-way corners of rural Russia. It was not noisy, it was not clearly visible, and it did not strike everyone’s eyes as much as did the October Revolution of last year, but it had an incomparably deeper and greater significance. ¹³¹

Of course, this was wild exaggeration. The Bolshevization of the village of which Lenin boasted would be accomplished only ten years later by Stalin. But, as in so many other respects, Stalin’s course had been charted by Lenin.

*For instance, on December 11, 1918, at a Congress of Committees of the Poor, Lenin moved a resolution calling for the collectivization of land at the earliest possible time: Lenin, PSS, XXXVII, 356, and Lenin, Sochineniia, XXIII, 587–88. The Law on the Socialization of Land, issued on January 27/February 9, 1918, committed the government to “developing collective agriculture as more convenient in terms of economizing labor and products, at the expense of individual fanning, for the purpose of a transition to a socialist economy”: Dekrety, I, 408.

*V. R. Gerasimiuk in ISSSR, No. 1 (1965), 100. V. P. Danilov, Pereraspredelenie zemel’nogo fonda Rossii (Moscow, 1979), 283–87 (cited in V. V. Kabanov, Krest’ianskoe khoziaistvo v usloviiakh “Voennogo Kommunizma,” Moscow, 1988, 49), says that as a result of the Revolution peasant holdings increased 29.8 percent, but from this figure one must deduct the land taken over by collective and other Soviet farms. Radical intellectuals in the late nineteenth century gathered from peasants that they had hoped the Black Repartition would bring them from 5 to 15 desiatiny: V. L. Debagorii-Mokrievich, Vospominaniia (St. Petersburg, 1906), 137, and G. I. Uspenskii, Sobranie Sochinenii, V (Moscow, 1956), 130.

†According to one intellectual who lived from October 1918 until November 1920 in a village in the Tambov province, the peasants doubted that the land they had acquired was really theirs because it was not given them by the Tsar: A. L. Okninskii, Dva goda sredi krest’ian (Riga, [1936]), 27. It is the land they allotted to poor peasants, if forced to share the loot with them.

*With the prewar ruble worth 0.78 gram of gold, these savings would have purchased 3,900 tons of gold.

†Properties bought by the Land Bank from landlords between 1906 and 1915 cost, on the average, 161 rubles per desiatina: P. I. Liashchenko, Istoriia narodnogo khoziaistva SSSR, II, 3rd ed. (Leningrad, 1952), 270. The estimate of peasants’ home savings comes from NZh, No. 56/271 (March 31, 1918), 2.

*Otruba were land allotments intermingled with communal strips, while khutora formed separate farmsteads. Both were held in private property.

*Gerasimiuk in ISSSR, No. 1 (1965), 100; O zemle: sbornik statei, I (1921), 25, gives slightly different figures. The reduction in larger holdings was in some measure due to the acceleration of the breakup of joint families in favor of nuclear ones, which had already begun in the late nineteenth century but which the land policies of the Bolsheviks encouraged, because farmers wanted to share in the distribution of confiscated properties, which they could do best as heads of households.

*About one-third of what used to be privately owned agricultural land—3.2 percent of the acreage under cultivation—mainly large estates devoted to “technical” cultures, was taken over by state-run collective farms. In theory, they could have helped alleviate the food shortage in the cities. But their inventory having been looted by local peasants, they were of little, if any, help: L. N. Kritsman, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia i derevnia (Moscow-Leningrad, 1929), 86–87.

*Kabanov, Krest’ianskoe khoziaistvo, 159. The peasant who received such unrealistic prices for his product had to buy manufactured goods (e.g., matches, nails, and kerosene), which were becoming scarcer each day, at free market prices.

*One well-informed visitor to Soviet Russia in 1920 reported even more staggering reductions. Petrograd’s population is said to have declined from 3 million in 1917 to 500,000: Alexander Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth (Diary 1920–1022), (London, 1925), 33.

*Dekrety, I, 227–28. In the final, published version of this decree, Lenin’s spurious rationale for these fiscal measures was omitted (p. 230): apparently its absurdity struck even Lenin.

*Tsiurupa defined as “surplus” all grain in excess of 12 puds of grain or flour (196 kilograms) per person and 1 pud (16.3 kilograms) of groats; he also established norms of feed for horses and livestock: Izvestiia, No. 185/440 (August 28, 1918), 5.

*One student of the subject makes the convincing case that in terms of numbers involved and the threat posed “the magnitude of the Bolshevik war with peasants on the internal front eclipsed by far the front-line civil war with the Whites”: Vladimir Brovkin, “On the Internal Front: The Bolsheviks and the Greens,” paper delivered at the 20th National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, November 1988, 1.

*Information on “disturbances,” whether by workers or peasants, was censored and newspapers which published it were often fined and even suspended. By early 1919, all such information had to be cleared by military censors, who routinely removed it from the handful of non-Bolshevik papers still allowed to appear: DN, No. 2 (March 21, 1919), 1. The only scholarly monograph on the subject is Mikhail Frenkin’s Tragediia krest’ianskikh vosstanii v Rossii 1918–1921 gg. (Jerusalem, 1988). The 1918–19 uprisings are treated here in Chap. 4, pp. 73–111.

*Lenin, PSS, XXXVII, 39–41. Cf. Robespierre: “If the rich farmers persist in sucking the people’s blood, we will turn them over to the people themselves. If we find too many obstacles in dealing out justice to these traitors, the conspirators, the profiteers, then we will have the people deal with them.” Ralph Korngold, Robespierre and the Fourth Estate (New York, 1941), 251.

*This resembled the authority vested in the 1880s in tsarist governors, by virtue of which they were empowered to remove elected zemstvo officials unable to satisfy the monarchy’s criteria of “reliability.”

†E. H. Carr, (The Bolshevik Revolution, II, London, 1952,159) errs, therefore, when he says that the dissolution order proved the failure of kombedy, inasmuch as they had been intended from the outset as transitional institutions.

*LS, XVIII, 158n. But Lenin, (PSS, XXXVII, 419) claimed that the regime obtained 67 million puds.

*“When I put a question to [Lenin] about socialism in agriculture, he explained with glee how he had incited the poorer peasants against the richer ones, ‘and they soon hanged them from the nearest tree—ha! ha! ha!’ His guifaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold.” Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays (New York, 1950), 171.