The Penguin History of Modern Russia

and their commune; they desired to regulate their affairs without urban interference.

The peasantry already had grounds for resenting Sovnarkom on this score. The February 1918 Decree on the Separation of Church from State had disturbed the Russian Orthodox believers, and they and the various Christian sects were annoyed by the atheistic propaganda emitted from Moscow. At a more materialist level, peasants were also irritated at not being offered a good price for their agricultural produce. Their pleasure in the Decree on Land did not induce them to show gratitude by parting willingly with grain unless they received a decent payment. Each household’s pursuance of its narrow financial interests cast a blight over the working of the entire economy. The food-supplies crisis would become steadily more acute until the peasantry’s attitude could somehow be overcome.

Furthermore, the more or less egalitarian redistribution of land did not bring about an agrarian revolution that might have boosted production. The salient change was social rather than economic. This was the process known as ‘middle-peasantization’. As landholdings were equalized, so the number of peasant households classifiable as rich and poor was reduced. The middling category of peasants (serednyaki) — vaguely-defined though the category remains — constituted the vast bulk of the peasantry in the Russian provinces.¹⁹ This shift in land tenure, however, was not usually accompanied by a sharing of implements and livestock so that peasants who lacked either a plough or a cow were consequently reduced to renting out their additional patches of soil to a richer household which already had the wherewithal. There was little sign of rapid progress to a more sophisticated agriculture for Russia. Apart from the expropriation of the gentry, the rural sector of the economy survived substantially unaltered from before the Great War.

To most communists this appeared as a reason to redouble their revolutionary endeavour. Such problems as existed, they imagined, were outweighed by the solutions already being realized. Fervour had to be given further stimulation. Workers, soldiers and peasants needed to be mobilized by Russian Communist Party activists: the message of socialist reconstruction had to be relayed to all corners of the country so that Bolshevism might be understood by everyone.

One of the obstacles was technical. Communication by post and telegraph between cities was woeful; and even when metropolitan newspapers reached the provinces it was not unknown for people to use their pages not for their information but as cigarette-wrappers. Moreover, the villages were virtually cut off from the rest of the country save for the visits made by workers and soldiers (who anyway tended not to return to the cities). The structures of administration were falling apart. Policies enunciated by Sovnarkom were not enforced by the lower soviets if local Bolsheviks objected. Trade unions and factory-workshop committees in the localities snubbed their own supreme bodies. Inside the party the lack of respect for hierarchy was just as remarkable: the Central Committee was asked for assistance, but usually on the terms acceptable to the regional and city party committees.²⁰ The country lacked all system of order.

The problem was not merely administrative but also political: Bolsheviks were in dispute about the nature of their party’s project for revolutionary transformation. Disagreements erupted about matters that had received little attention before October 1917 when the party had been preoccupied with the seizing of power. It was chiefly the pace of change that was controversial. About basic objectives there was consensus; Bolsheviks agreed that the next epoch in politics and economics around the world would involve the following elements: the dictatorship of the proletariat; the state’s ownership and direction of the entire economy; the gathering together of society into large organizational units; and the dissemination of Marxism. At the centre Lenin urged a cautious pace of industrial nationalization and agricultural collectivization whereas Bukharin advocated the more or less immediate implementation of such objectives.²¹

The friction between Lenin and Bukharin seemed of little significance to most citizens. For although Lenin was a moderate in internal debates among Bolsheviks on the economy, he was an extremist by the standards of the other Russian political parties. Lenin, no less than Bukharin, preached class war against the bourgeoisie; and, for that matter, Lenin was the hard Old Man of Bolshevism on political questions: it was he who had invented the Cheka and destroyed the Constituent Assembly. Consequently it was the common immoderacy of the party that impressed most people.

The communist party therefore had to engage in a propaganda campaign to win supporters and to keep those it already had. Newspaper articles and speeches at factory gates had helped to prepare for the seizure of power. Something more substantial was needed to consolidate the regime. Plans were laid to establish a central party school, whose students would supplement the handful of thousands of activists who had belonged to the communist party before the February Revolution of 1917.²² Discussions were also held about the contents of the new party programme. Yet the communist leaders had not learned how to dispense with Marxist jargon. When the final version was settled in 1919, the language would have foxed all except intellectuals already acquainted with the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin.²³ Neither the school nor the programme solved the questions of mass communication.

The Bolshevik central leadership sought to improve the situation in various ways. Posters portraying the entire Central Committee were commissioned. Statues were erected to the heroes of Bolshevism, including Marx and Engels (and even rebels from ancient Rome such as Brutus and Spartacus).²⁴ Busts of Lenin started to be produced, and his colleague Zinoviev wrote the first biography of him in 1918.²⁵ The leadership appreciated, too, the potential of cinema. A short film was made of Lenin showing him shyly pottering around the grounds of the Kremlin with his personal assistant V. D. Bonch-Bruevich. Lenin also agreed to make a gramophone recording of some of his speeches. Few cinemas were in fact operating any longer; but propaganda was also conducted by so-called agit-trains and even agit-steamships. These were vehicles painted with rousing pictures and slogans and occupied by some of the party’s finest orators, who gave ‘agitational’ speeches to the crowds that gathered at each stop on the journey.

The party aimed to monopolize public debate and shut down all Kadet and many Menshevik and Socialist- Revolutionary newspapers; and the freedom of these parties to campaign openly for their policies was wrecked by the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly as well as by the overruling of elections to the soviets that did not yield a communist party majority.²⁶ Nevertheless the battle of ideas was not entirely ended. The Bolsheviks had secured privileged conditions to engage its adversaries in polemics, resorting to force whenever it wished, but the clandestine groups of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries continued to operate among the workers and agitate for the replacement of the communists in power.

The communist party had to compete, too, against its coalition partners in 1917–18. The Left Socialist- Revolutionaries largely succeeded in prohibiting the use of force to acquire peasant-owned grain stocks even though several towns were on the verge of famine; they also issued denunciations of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Unlike the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, moreover, they managed to keep their printing presses running even after the party formally withdrew from the governmental coalition in March 1918.²⁷ The Orthodox Church, too, confronted the communists. Tikhon, the Moscow bishop, had been elected Patriarch in November 1917. There had been no Patriarch since 1700; and when the Decree on the Separation of Church from State forbade the teaching of religion in schools and disbarred the Church from owning property, Tikhon anathematized those who propounded atheism.²⁸ The Church relayed this message through its priests to every parish in the country.

Force gave the communists an unrivalled advantage in countering the anti-Bolshevik current of opinion. But force by itself was not sufficient. The enlistment of help from the intelligentsia was an urgent objective for the Bolsheviks. The problem was that most poets, painters, musicians and educators were not sympathetic to Bolshevism. The People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, led by Anatoli Lunacharski, made efforts to attract them into its activities. It was axiomatic for the Bolsheviks that ‘modern communism’ was constructible only when the foundations of a highly educated and industrialized society had been laid. The ‘proletarian dictatorship’ and the ‘nationalization of the means of production’ were two vital means of achieving the party’s ends. A third was ‘cultural revolution’.

The teachers behaved more or less as the communists wanted. They had to co-operate with Sovnarkom if they wanted to be paid and obtain food rations; and in any case they shared the party’s zeal for universal literacy and numeracy. But artistic intellectuals were a matter of greater concern. They had caused perennial difficulties for the tsars by their commentaries upon political life and had acted as a collective conscience for the Russian nation; and the Bolshevik party worried lest they might start again to fulfil this role in the Soviet state. Official policy towards artists and writers was therefore double sided. On the one hand, intellectuals were subjected to the threat