revolutionary state of torpor and decay to become the main organizing force of the peasant revolution on the land. All the main political organs of the revolution in the countryside — the village committees, the peasant unions and the Soviets — were really no more than the peasant commune in a more revolutionary form. The village commune stood for the ideals of land and freedom which had always inspired the peasants to revolt. It defined a circle of 'insiders' and defended their interests against 'outsiders' — landowners, townsmen, merchants, state officials, even peasants from the neighbouring communes — at a time of great insecurity.
Since the days of serfdom, the land commune had served as a link between its peasant household members (usually within a single village) and a particular landlord's estate. In 1917 it thus provided these villagers with a historical and a moral right to that estate on the often-stated peasant principle: 'Ours was the lord, ours is the land.' During the seizure of the gentry's estates
the members of the commune displayed a remarkable degree of solidarity and organization. It was common for the village assembly to pass a resolution compelling all the members of the commune to take part in the march on the manor, or in other forms of peasant resistance, such as rent strikes and boycotts, on the threat of expulsion from the commune. It was a matter of safety in numbers. Contrary to the old Soviet myth, there were very few conflicts within the village between the richer and poorer peasants. But there were a great many conflicts between neighbouring communes, sometimes ending in little village wars, over the control of the estates.14
This is how the revolution on the land took place. At a pre-selected time the church bells rang and the peasants assembled with their carts in the middle of the village. Then they moved off towards the manor, like a peasant army, armed with guns, pitchforks, axes, scythes and spades. The squire and his stewards, if they had not already fled, were arrested or at least forced to sign a resolution conceding all the peasant demands. During the spring these were usually quite moderate: a lowering of land rents; the redistribution of prisoner-of-war labour; or the compulsory sale of grain, tools and livestock to the commune at prices deemed 'fair' by the peasants. The mass confiscation of the gentry's land did not occur until the summer. Most of the peasants were still prepared to wait for the Provisional Government to pass a new land law transferring the estates to them, just as they had once waited for the Tsar to pass a 'Golden Manifesto'. They were afraid to attack the estates before it was clear that the old regime would not be restored, as it had been in 1906—7, with the mass executions of the peasants which had followed. It was really only at the start of May, with the appointment of the SR Chernov as Minister for Agriculture, that the peasants had such a guarantee; and it was from this time that the outright confiscation of the gentry's estates became a nationwide phenomenon. Early May was also the start of the summer agricultural season. If the peasants were to harvest the squire's fields in the autumn, they would need to plough and sow them now.* So there was an obvious motive for the peasants to seize the land from about this time. The nuns of the Panovka Convent in Serdobsk were some of the more unusual victims of this increasing peasant aggression:
A resolution of the Davydovka volost executive committee on 10 April ordered our convent to rent to the peasants 15
* Not surprisingly, many of the squires had left their fields unsown.
village. Now [in mid-June] the peasants are requisitioning grain from our convent: 600
The return of soldiers on Easter leave, and indeed of deserters from the army, also had a lot to do with this increased peasant militancy. The peasant soldiers often took the lead in the march on the manors. Sometimes they encouraged the peasantry to indulge in wanton acts of vandalism. They burned the manor houses to drive the squires out; smashed the agricultural machinery (which in recent years had removed much of the need for hired peasant labour); carried away the contents of the barns on their carts; and destroyed or vandalized anything, like paintings, books or sculptures, that smacked of excessive wealth. It was also not uncommon for these soldiers to incite the peasants to attack the squires. In the village of Bor-Polianshchina, in Saratov province, for example, a band of peasants, led by some soldiers, forced their way into the manor house of Prince V V Saburov, and hacked him to death with axes and knives. It was a bloody retribution for the role his son had played as the local land captain in 1906, when twelve peasant rebels had been hanged in the village before their screaming wives and children. For three days after the murder the villagers ran riot on the Saburov estate. The manor house, which contained one of the finest private libraries in Russia, was burned to the ground.16
The terrified squires bombarded Prince Lvov with pleas for the restoration of law and order. Isolated in their manors, with nothing to protect them from the surrounding sea of hostile peasants, they were quick to accuse his government of doing nothing to stop the growing tide of anarchy that came ever closer to their gates. 'The countryside is falling into chaos, with robberies and arson every day, while you sit doing nothing in your comfortable Petersburg office,' one Tambov squire wrote to him in April. 'Your local committees are powerless to do anything, and even encourage the theft of property. The police are asleep while the peasants rob and burn. The old government knew better how to deal with this peasant scum which you call 'the people'.'17
With letters such as these to deal with, one could hardly blame Lvov for viewing the plight of the squires as a punishment for their 'boorish and brutal behaviour during the centuries of serfdom'. The revolution was the 'revenge of the serfs', he explained one day in June over lunch to some of his ministers. It was the 'result of our — and I speak now as a landowner — of our original sin. If only Russia had been blessed with a real landed aristocracy, like that in England, which had the human decency to treat the peasants as people rather than dogs. Then perhaps things might have been different.'18 It was a quite remarkable thing for someone of his class and background to say —
a wistful admission, if you like, that the whole of the civilization of the gentry, of which the Prince himself was a scion, had never been more than a thin veneer laid over the top of the brutal exploitation of the peasants, from which the revolution had emerged.
Whatever Lvov might have said in private, it was the policy of his government to defend the property rights of the squires. The land question, as it saw it, had to be resolved by legal means, and this meant preserving the status quo in property relations until a new land law was decided by the Constituent Assembly. Yet the government had no real means to prevent the peasants from taking the law — and the gentry's land — into their own hands. The old police had been dismantled, while the army units in the countryside — even if their peasant recruits agreed to be used for such repressive purposes — were not nearly enough to protect more than a tiny proportion of the gentry's estates. The temporary volost committees, established by the government on 20 March and designed to uphold the existing order, were soon transformed into revolutionary organs which passed their own 'laws' to legitimize the peasant seizures of the gentry's property. The same thing happened with the volost land committees. The Provisional Government had intended these to protect the gentry's legal rights, while regulating agrarian relations until the Constituent Assembly. But they were taken over by the local peasants and soon transformed into revolutionary organs on the land, helping to impose fixed rents on the gentry, to account for their land and property, and to distribute it among the peasantry. In an attempt to prevent this subversion of the land committees, the government cut its grants to them; but the peasant communes merely filled the gap, financing the committees through self-taxation, and the committees continued to grow.
This revolution on the land was given a pseudo-legal endorsement by the peasant assemblies which convened in the spring in most of the central black-soil provinces, as well as the First All-Russian Peasant Assembly on 4—25 May. Nothing did more to undermine the government's authority in the countryside. The SR party activists, who dominated the executives of these assemblies, appealed for the peasants to show patience over the resolution of the land question. But they were soon obliged by the radical mood of the delegates on the floor to sanction the actions of the local communes, and even the seizures of the gentry's land, as an interim solution. The Kazan
