The Penguin History of Modern Russia

Not every region experienced this commotion. In central Asia the old social structure was preserved and property was left with its owners. In Ukraine the proximity of the Eastern front had discouraged peasants from a hasty movement against landowners in case the Central Powers broke through and restored the old social order — and this fear was realized with the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. But elsewhere the peasantry sensed that their historic opportunity had arrived. There was solidarity among established households of each village. Where the peasant land commune existed, as in most parts of Russia and Ukraine, its practices were reinforced. In thirty-nine Russian provinces only four per cent of households stayed outside the communal framework. Kulaks were pulled back into it; many of them needed little persuasion since they, too, wanted a share of the land of the dispossessed gentry. The peasants in Russia’s central agricultural region gained control over an area a quarter larger than before 1917; and in Ukraine the area was bigger by three quarters.¹¹

Many a household divided itself into several households so as to increase its members’ claim to land. The unintended consequence was that sons had a say in communal affairs whereas previously the father would have spoken on their behalf. As young men were conscripted, furthermore, women began to thrust themselves forward when decisions were taken: gradually the revolutions in the villages were affecting rural relationships.¹² But the main feature was the peasantry’s wish to arrange its life without outside interference. Liberated from indebtedness to the landlord and from oppression by the land captains, peasants savoured their chance to realize their ancient aspirations.

Among the other beneficiaries of this transformation were the soldiers and sailors of Russian armed forces. Sovnarkom had authorized their demobilization in the winter of 1917–18. This gave post factum sanction to a mass flight from the trenches and garrisons that had been occurring since midsummer. Most of the conscripts were peasants who, with rifles slung over their shoulders, jumped on trains and horse-carts and returned to their native villages. Their arrival gave urgency to the process of land reform, especially in places where little had hitherto been known about the Bolsheviks and their Land Decree. Those military units which were not demobilized had much internal democracy. Election of officers was commonplace and soldiers’ committees supervised the activities of the structure of higher command. Many such units were supporters of the Bolsheviks in the Constituent Assembly elections and fought in the early campaigns to consolidate the October Revolution in Moscow and Ukraine.

They demanded and received good rations, disdaining discipline as a relic of the tsarist regime. Several units were little better than a rabble of boozy ne’er-do-wells who had no homes to return to. Those which were well led and had high morale were treasured by the Bolshevik party. The outstanding ones were typically non-Russian. Without the Latvian Riflemen the regime might well have collapsed; and Lenin was in no position to quibble when the Latvians insisted on consulting with each other before deciding whether to comply with his orders.

Workers, too, relished their new status. Palaces, mansions and large town houses were seized from the rich and turned into flats for indigent working-class families.¹³ The expropriations took place at the instigation of the local soviets or even the factory-workshop committees and trade union branches. The authorities also gave priority to their industrial labour-force in food supplies. A class-based rationing system was introduced. Furthermore, truculent behaviour by foremen vanished after the October Revolution. The chief concern of the working class was to avoid any closure of their enterprise. Most remaining owners of enterprises fled south determined to take their financial assets with them before Sovnarkom’s economic measures brought ruin upon them. But factory-workshop committees unlocked closed premises and sent telegrams informing Sovnarkom that they had ‘nationalized’ their factories and mines. The state was gaining enterprises at a faster rate than that approved by official policy.

The movement for ‘workers’ control’ continued. Factory-workshop committees in central and south-eastern Russia followed their counterparts in Petrograd in instituting a tight supervision of the management.¹⁴ Most committees contented themselves with the supervising of existing managers; but in some places the committees contravened the code on workers’ control, sacked the managers and took full charge. There was also a movement called Proletarian Culture (Proletkult) which sought to facilitate educational and cultural self-development by workers. Lenin often worried that both ‘workers’ control’ and Proletkult might prove difficult for the party to regulate. Already in 1918 he was seeking to limit the rights of the workers in their factories and in the 1920s he moved against Proletkult. Even so, the working class kept many gains made by it before and during the October Revolution.

These fundamental changes in politics and economics demoralized the middle and upper social classes. Only a few diehards tried to form counter-revolutionary associations: the Main Council of the Landowners’ Union still operated and some Imperial Army officers banded together to form a ‘Right Centre’.¹⁵ General Kornilov escaped from house arrest outside Petrograd. After several weeks of travel in disguise, he reached southern Russia, where he joined General Alekseev in calling for the formation of a Volunteer Army to bring about the overthrow of the Soviet government. Yet such persons were exceptional. Most industrialists, landlords and officers tried to avoid trouble while hoping for a victory for counter-revolutionary forces. Many went into hiding; others were so desperate that they hurriedly emigrated. They took boats across the Black Sea, trains to Finland and haycarts into Poland. Panic was setting in. About three million people fled the country in the first years after the October Revolution.¹⁶

Their exodus caused no regret among the Bolsheviks. The Constitution of the RSFSR, introduced in July 1918, defined the state unequivocally as ‘a dictatorship of the urban and rural proletariat and the poorest’. The right to vote was withdrawn from all citizens who hired labour in pursuit of profit, who derived their income from financial investments or who were engaged in private business. Quickly they became known as ‘the deprived ones’ (lishentsy). In the main, the discrimination against them was based upon economic criteria. The Constitution stressed that this ‘republic of soviets of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies’ had been established so as to effect the ‘transition’ to a socialist society. There was a formal specification that ‘he who does not work shall not eat’. Other disenfranchised groups included any surviving members of the Romanov dynasty, former members of the Okhrana and the clergy of all denominations.¹⁷ Lenin wanted it to be clearly understood that the RSFSR was going to be a class dictatorship.

Nevertheless there was less of a transformation than at first met the eye; this revolutionary society remained a highly traditional one in many ways. Several workers who had helped to take the Winter Palace on 25 October 1917 had simultaneously helped themselves to the bottles of the Romanov cellars. (Their carousing gave new meaning to calls for a replenishment of the revolutionary spirit.) Vandalism and thuggishness were not uncommon in other places. Traditional working-class behaviour was prominent, warts and all. Sensing that the usual constraints on them had been removed, factory labourers, horsecab-drivers and domestic servants behaved everywhere in a fashion that had once been confined to the poor districts of the towns and cities. Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who had begun by admiring such displays of belligerence, began to understand the negative implications.

At any rate the fact that most workers had voted for socialist parties in elections to the soviets and the Constituent Assembly did not signify that they themselves were committed socialists. After the October Revolution they consulted their sectional interests to an even greater extent than before. Their collectivism was expressed in a factory work-force deciding how to improve its particular conditions without a thought for the ‘general proletarian cause’. Warehouse stocks were ransacked for items which could be put on sale by workers in groups or as individuals. A conscientious attitude to work in the factories and mines had never been a notable virtue of the unskilled and semi-skilled sections of the Russian working class, and the reports of slackness were plentiful. Such a phenomenon was understandable in circumstances of urban economic collapse. Workers were unable to rely on the state for their welfare and looked after themselves as best they could.

Many, too, fell back on to the safety net of the countryside. They were returning to their native villages to find food, to obtain a share of the expropriated land or to sell industrial products. Their customary connections with the rural life were being reinforced.

This same rural life was in vital ways resistant to the kind of revolution desired by the communists: the Russian village organized itself along centuries-old peasant precepts. Peasants were fair, or could be made to be fair, in their dealings with other peasants so long as they belonged to the same village. But rivalries between villages were often violent; and the elders of a given commune seldom agreed to any land passing into the hands of ‘outsiders’ or even of agricultural wage-labourers who had worked for years within the village.¹⁸ Furthermore, the peasantry maintained its own ancient order. There was no lightening of the harsh punishment of infringers of tradition. The peasants wanted a revolution that complied with their interests: they wanted their land