The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  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.67Lenin’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