Russian revolution. A very short introduction

Supreme Economic Council orforformer merchants to work for the supply organs. Those with some education

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found jobs in the soviet and party apparatus - as clerks, secretaries, minor functionaries - which entitled them to the second-grade food ration ('responsible' soviet officials qualified for the first). For the far more numerous lower-middle strata who lacked saleable skills the principal means of survival was through petty trade and artisanal production.

The intelligentsia was the only elite group to survive the revolution

intact, though its self-image was badly shaken. Most were moderate

socialists in sympathy, but the war and revolution had killed any naive

belief in the innate goodness of the people. Their sense of them selves as

the conscience of society, called upon to oppose tyranny, led most to

oppose the Bolshevik seizure of power. They deplored the strident

demagogy of the new rulers, the violence, the closure of the press, the

lawlessness on the streets. Most had had enough of politics and took a

neutral stance in the civil war. Most were not well paid and few had-

reserves to fall back on. The composer A. T. Crechaninov recalled: 'my д

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health was undermined to such an extent that I could hardly drag my | feet. My hands suffered from frost bite and I could not touch the piano.' = Morale, however, was not necessarily as low as one might assume. N. Berdiaev, elected to a professorship of philosophy at Moscow University in 1920 - where 'I gave lectures in which I openly and without hindrance criticized Marxism' - did not mind labour conscription:

I did not feel at all depressed and unhappy despite the unaccustomed strain of the pick and shovel on my sedentary muscles... I could not help realizing the justice of my predicament.

The Bolsheviks came to power bent on disestablishing and dispossessing the Orthodox Church, which had been a key pillar of the old order. Church and state were separated, church lands were nationalized, state subsidies were withdrawn, religious education was outlawed in schools, and religion was made a 'private matter'. The response of the new patriarch of the Church, Tikhon, was crushing: in

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January 1918 he pronounced an anathema on the Bolsheviks, warning that they would 'burn in hell in the life hereafter and be cursed for generations'. The ending of financial subventions hit the central and diocesan administrations hard, but made little difference to parish clergy, who were generally provided with an allotment of land and some financial support by parishioners. By late 1920, 673 monasteries -'powerful screws in the exploiting machine of the old ruling classes' -had been liquidated and their land confiscated. Violent clashes between supporters of the Church and of soviet power were a constant of the civil war. Bolshevik propaganda portrayed priests as drunkards and gluttons, and monks and nuns as sinister 'black crows'. For their part, most of hierarchy portrayed the Bolsheviks as Christ-haters, German hirelings, 'Jewish-Masonic slave-masters'. Tikhon urged the faithful to resist the Bolsheviks only by spiritual means, but many clergy sided openly with the Whites. Bolshevik supporters, particularly sailors and soldiers, meted out horrible repression: in 1918-19, 28 bishops and several hundred clergy were killed.

The class structure of tsarist Russia buckled under the blows of war, economic collapse, and revolutionary attack. Yet having overturned Russia's somewhat fragile class structure, the Bolsheviks chose to use the discourse of class to define and organize the new social world, backing it up with the panoply of material and symbolic resources at the disposal of the state. They projected the civil war as a life-and-death struggle between international capital and the workers and toiling peasants of the world. The speeches of activists were studded with images of revolutionary conflagrations, of counter-revolutionary hydras and capitalist jackals. Though much propaganda was couched in language that ordinary folk could barely understand, the discourse played upon demotic understandings of class that had been so visible in 1917, mobilizing deep-seated animosity between 'us' and 'them'.

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Popular rebellion

Peasant unrest was a persistent thorn in the side of the regime. Most uprisings were small-scale, sparked by food requisitioning, conscription, the abuses of soviet officials or kombedy, or by labour obligations. In 1919 most of the hundreds of uprisings were spontaneous, uniting peasants of all strata, with little inthe way of a political goal. By far the largest was the 'kaftan' (chapanny) rebellion, which welled up in Samara and Simbirsk after the imposition of an emergency revolutionary tax in March. At its peak it involved over 100,000, some of whom established links with Kolchak. The largest of the uprisings of 1920, the 'pitchfork' (vilochnoe) uprising, was centred on the Tatars of Ufa but spread into the Volga region, where requisitioning was concentrated. In Samara the 'black eagle uprising', which formed a part of the'pitchfork' insurgency, revealed a degree of politicization: 'We are the peasant millions. Our enemies are the communists. They drink our blood and oppress us like slaves.' Peasant insurgents frequently behaved in bestial fashion. In Penza in March 1920 the local commissar had his nose cut off, then his ears, then his head. A report concluded: 'Now everything is peaceful and quiet. The peasants were calmed with the help of the lash.' As this suggests, the Bolsheviks retaliated ruthlessly against what they saw as the work of 'kulaks', 'counter-revolutionaries', and 'Black Hundreds'. The kaftan rebels killed about 200 officials, but the punitive detachments sent to quell them killed 1,000 rebels in combat and executed a further 600. Some historians lump all forms of peasant resistance into a single 'Green movement'; but this elides important distinctions. When the Soviet authorities talked of 'Greens' they referred to the roving bands of deserters who lived in the fields and forests, surviving through banditry and attacks on requisition squads. These bands were more structured and politicized than most peasant rebels. Generally, they could rely on the sympathy of villagers, but whenever they tried to organize the latter into more permanent formations or to involve them into compulsory labour duties, they risked provoking their animosity.

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With the elimination of the White threat, peasant protest escalated to dramatically new levels. In 1921 there were over 50 large-scale peasant uprisings in regions as far-flung as Ukraine and Belorussia, the north Caucasus and Karelia. In Tambov A. S. Antonov, a former Left SR who had served the soviet cause with distinction until summer 1918, built an army of 40,000 partisans that controlled practically the entire territory of the Volga by February 1921. The army had territorial divisions and hierarchies of command, supply lines based on the villages, and 'unions of toiling peasantry' as its political back-up. The latter demanded the overthrow of 'Communist- Bolshevik power, which has brought the country to poverty, destruction, and disgrace'; political equality for all citizens; the calling of a Constituent Assembly; socialization of land; and partial denationalization of factories under workers' control. In western Siberia partisans overthrew Bolshevik power across 1 million square kilometres and severed railway contact with European Russia. On ? 21 February 1921 they seized the city of Tobolsk and formed a soviet g which proclaimed civil liberties, free trade, equal rations,

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e denationalization of industry, and the restoration of the old courts. jg There were at least 100,000 fighting men, but the different divisions 1 were never subject to a unified command. Not until autumn did the Red Army regain control. In a loose way the different peasant movements saw themselves united in a common cause. The Antonov partisans, for example, fought in expectation that the supporters of Makhno would