The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  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 rever
berates 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.

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  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.”