Russian revolution. A very short introduction

11. A country market in the 1920s

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be able to induce the peasants to sell their grain. But the persisting|

shortage of consumer goods, together with spiralling inflation, nullified н. the policy. In Siberia it is reckoned that in the first half of 1918,12 million puds of grain were requisitioned, but 25 million were converted into moonshine. Knowing that there was still plenty of grain available, on 14 May the Bolsheviks announced a food dictatorship'whereby all surpluses above a fixed consumption norm would be subject to confiscation. In minatory fashion the decree warned that 'enemies of the people'found to be concealing surpluses would be jailed for not less than ten years. In theory, peasants were still to be recompensed - 25% of the value of requisitions would be in the form of goods, the rest in money or credits - but according to the most generous estimate, only about half the grain requisitioned in 1919 was compensated for, and in 1920 only around 20%. Some indication of what the policy meant in practice can be gleaned from the fact that in 1918,7,309 members of food detachments, most of them workers, were murdered as they tried to seize surpluses.

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The Bolsheviks were convinced that it was 'kulaks', or wealthy peasants, who were sabotaging grain procurement, so the food dictatorship was linked to a 'war on the rural bourgeoisie'. Committees of the rural poor (kombedy) were created in the hope that poor peasants could be organized so as to provide the regime with a social base in the countryside. In reality there were relatively few peasants in the kombedy, which mainly consisted of members of the food detachments, military personnel, and party workers. This was hardly surprising given that they were closely associated with arbitrary confiscation of grain, fines, illegal arrests, and the use of force. This is not to say that there was no support at all for the kombedy. In Orel province peasants petitioned:

Send us help, even if it is only a small Red Army detachment, so that we shall be saved from an early death from hunger.... We will point out to you the well-fed grain kings who shelter by their treasure chests.

We are having to work in unbelievably difficult conditions. Every peasant hides grain, digging it into the earth. Our district was one of first to deliver only because we took repressive measures against those holding it back: namely, we sat peasants in cold barns until they eventually took us to the place where the grain was hidden. But for this they arrested our comrades, the commander of the squad, and three commissars. Now we are still working but less successfully. For hiding grain we confiscate the entire herd without payment, leaving only the 12- funt hunger ration, and we send those who hide their grain to detainment in Malmysh where they have only an eighth of a funt of bread per day. The peasants call us internal enemies and look upon the food officials as beasts and as their enemies. Report of a food-sup ply official, Viatka, March 1920

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12. A food requisition group, 1918

But even as the kombedy were multiplying in autumn 1918, the party leadership was beginning to doubt the wisdom of the policy. In November the Sixth Congress of Soviets, commenting on the 'bitter dashes between kombedy and peasant organs of power*, called for their abolition.

In January 1919 a 'turn to the middle peasantry* was accompanied by the institution of a quota assessment (raszverstka% whereby the food commissariat set a grain quota for each province on the basis of estimates of 'surpluses*. Formally, it introduced some predictability into requisitioning, since each county and village knew its quota; but in reality the food detachments continued to operate much as before. The amount requisitioned steadily increased, so that by the third procurement of 1920-1,237 million puds were raised in European Russia, about 23% of gross yield. This was no more than the procurement of 1916-17, yet it represented a huge burden of suffering for the peasantry, since output had almost halved in the intervening period. In March 1920 the chair of Novgorod provincial executive committee reported: 'The province is starving. A huge number of peasants are eating moss and other rubbish.* That the specific policies of requisitioning adopted made

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the food crisis worse is incontrovertible, particularly given that the Bolsheviks did nothing until late in 1920 to try to halt the reduction in sown area. A less rigid policy - perhaps including elements of a tax in kind and greater reliance on the cooperative network - might have helped forestall the disaster that was building up. Nevertheless, even if the Bolsheviks had not taken a single pud of grain, peasants would still have had no incentive to market surpluses. Under Kolchak in Siberia, where there was no requisitioning, lack of manufactures and inflation caused peasants to reduce their sown areas. So it is unlikely that requisitioning could have been avoided. Fundamentally, the Bolsheviks had no choice but 'to take from the hungry to give to the hungrier', for the poor in the towns and grain-deficit provinces simply could not afford to feed themselves at free-market prices.

That said, at least half the needs of the urban population were met ? through the illegal and semi-legal market. Hundreds of thousands of g 'baggers' scoured the countryside in search of food. The law prescribed e draconian penalties for 'speculation', and 'baggers' ran the risk of jg arrest by the Cheka or by the road-block detachments, whose 1 behaviour was described by the Soviet CEC as a 'shocking disgrace'. Yet the battle against private trade was never consistent, since the government knew that without it townsfolk would starve. Thus even as the nationalization of trade was being proclaimed, the authorities in the two capitals allowed peasants to sell one-and-a-half puds of food per family member on the open market. At the same time, rationing was extended in line with the long-term Bolshevik aspiration to substitute planned distribution of goods for the anarchy of the market. In July 1918 the so-called class ration was introduced in Petrograd, followed by other cities, which grouped the population into four categories. It was designed to discriminate in favour of workers and to al low t he burz/iu/, in Zinoviev's words, just enough bread so that they would not forget its smell. Yet shortages meant that it was frequently impossible to fulfil the rations even of those in category one. A joke went the rounds:

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13. A child's cartoon. The caption reads *A Bolshevik is a person who doesn't want there to be any more burzhui.*

A religious instruction teacher asked his secondary school: 'Our Lord fed 5,000 people with five loaves and two fishes. What is that called?' To which one wag replied: The ration system'.

Inability to meet rations fuelled pressure on groups to get themselves into a higher category. By April 1920 in Petrograd, 63% of the population was in category one and only 0.1% in the lowest category. Rationing also fed corruption: by 1920 there were 10 million more ration cards in circulation than members of the urban population.

A terrifying crisis was building up, yet the scent of victory caused the Bolsheviks by 1920 to believe that the draconian methods used to win the civil war could be turned to the construction of socialism. Trotsky

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