A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

Dispossessed and degraded, the life of these 'former people' soon became an arduous daily struggle. Hours were spent queuing for bread and fuel along with the rest of the urban poor. As inflation rocketed, they were forced to sell their last precious possessions just to feed themselves. Baroness Meyendorff sold a diamond brooch for 5,000 roubles — enough to buy a bag of flour. Mighty scions of the aristocracy were reduced to petty street vendors: Princess Golitsyn sold home-made pies, Baroness Wrangel knitwear, Countess Witte cakes and sweets, while Brusilov's wife sold matches, just like hundreds of wounded veterans from the army her husband had once commanded. A former

Gentleman of the Chamber to the Tsar became the concierge of a museum, where strange creatures were kept in jars of alcoholic spirit; he exchanged this for water and sold the gruesome alcohol on the streets. The flea-markets of Petrograd and Moscow were filled with the former belongings of fallen plutocrats: icons, paintings, carpets, pianos, gramophones, samovars, morning coats and ball dresses — all could be picked up for the price of a meal or two. The more precious items were snapped up by the nouveaux riches of the Soviet regime — commissars and officials, looting soldiers and sailors, petty traders and bandits — as they sought to acquire the status symbols of a ruling class. The new masters of Russia were easily distinguishable by the way they wore their long and dirty hair greased back, by their gold-toothed smiles and their eau-de-cologne smells, and by the way they went around the shops and hotels with dolled-up girls of easy virtue on their arm.

Baron Wrangel recalls one of these arrivistes rouges, a Bolshevik soldier 'straight from the plough', purchasing a pearl necklace for his mistress in one of the top jewellers on Nevsky Prospekt. His mistress was a former kitchen-maid, now dressed in sumptuous furs and diamonds, though her face was covered with the scars of smallpox. The country boy was obviously proud to be seen with such a 'fine lady' and demanded to be shown 'the most expensive pearls, shining ones like the baryni* wear'. He was not satisfied with those the jeweller brought out because, at 75,000 roubles, they were still not expensive enough. He and his mistress were due that evening at a reception in the Winter Palace and had to have the best. The kitchen- maid announced that they would go to the Gostiny Dvor, where 'we are sure to find what I want'. This produced a fit of contemptuous laughter from the other customers, a group of former society ladies who had come to sell their diamonds, because the shops there were known to sell cheap imitation jewellery. Realizing that she had made a blunder, the poor girl blushed and tried to recover herself by saying that they would take 'the wretched pearls' after all and come back when the jeweller had found something better.⁷³

Many of Russia's fallen rich and mighty sold up everything and either went abroad, though this was very hard, or fled south to the Ukraine and Kuban, or else east to Siberia, where the White Guards had their main bases of power. Others sought refuge on their landed estates in the countryside, hoping that the peasants, whom they had always seen as humble and respectful, would be kinder to them than the Bolshevized workers in the towns. But here too the war against the rich was in full swing, as the peasants, sanctioned by the October Decree on Land, carried out their own seizures of the gentry's land and property.

The equal distribution of all the means of production, the land, the tools and the livestock, had long been the basic ideal of the peasant revolution.

* The ladies of the nobility.

They looked upon this 'Black Repartition' as the Will of God, and believed that the rest of the revolution had also been organized on the same general principles. The All- Russian Soviet was conceived of by the peasants as a kind of giant village commune redistributing all the property in the country. Many peasants were convinced, in the words of one of their more literate representatives, that socialism, of which they had only vaguely heard, 'was some sort of mystical means — mystical because we could not imagine how this would be done — of dividing all the property and the money of the rich; according to our village tailor, this would mean that every peasant household would be given 200,000 roubles. This, it seems, was the biggest number he could think of.'⁷⁴

The peasants themselves had no mystical means of dividing up the land. They did not even have the basic technical means, such as maps and rulers. The land was divided as it always had been, by pacing out the width of the strips, or judging the overall size of the plots by eye, and then allocating them to the peasant households according to the local egalitarian norm. This usually meant the number of eaters, or more rarely the number of adult workers, in each household. Without accurate land-surveying methods, these divisions were inevitably accompanied by arguments, sometimes ending in fist-fights, over who should get what piece of land. But in general terms, given its crucial importance for a peasant community, the land repartition was remarkable for its peaceful-ness — a tribute to the self-organization of the village communes which carried it through.

The confiscated lands of the gentry and the Church were usually divided separately because it was feared that if the revolution was reversed the peasants would be forced to return this land to its former owners. Many communes stipulated that all their household members had to receive a strip of this land in order to share the burden of risk. The gentry themselves, including those who returned to their estates from the cities, were usually left a generous portion of land and tools, enough to turn their estates into a sizeable family farm on a par with the rest of the peasant households. While the peasants were in no doubt that the gentry had to be destroyed as a superordinate class, they also believed that the squires should be allowed to turn themselves into 'peasants' and farm a share of 'God's land', as they put it, with their own family labour. The rights of land and labour, which lay at the heart of the peasant commune, were understood as basic human rights. Indeed, in so far as the 'peasantization' of the squires was in line with the basic peasant ideal of creating a society made up entirely of smallholding family farmers, it was even something to be welcomed. Many landowners, especially the smaller ones, remained on the land after 1917; and they were joined by those, normally resident in the cities, who now sought refuge from the Bolshevik Terror on their estates. As late as the mid-1920s there were still some 10,000 former landlords living on their manors alongside

the peasants, a figure equivalent to 10 per cent of the total number of landowners in Russia before 1917.

The Rudnevs, a medium-sized landowning family in Simbirsk province, were a typical example. They had decided to stay on their family estate because, as Semen Rudnev put it, they thought that 'the disturbances of the revolution would be less harsh in the countryside than in the towns [and because] the economic conditions of the village, with its almost natural economy, would also be better'. The turmoil of 1917 largely passed their village by. The Rudnevs spent the summer and autumn in the leisurely manner to which they were accustomed: 'The men went drinking and hunting, guests from Simbirsk came to stay, and we went off to Nazhim and the milk-farm for picnics and mushroom picking.' During the following winter they agreed to the demand of the neighbouring village commune to turn their land and property over to the peasants. They kept a small farm of 20 desyatiny (54 acres) near the manor house, where they continued to live. The livestock and tools were auctioned off at bargain prices, though most of the peasants could not afford to feed their new pedigree horses, which kept running back to their former owners for hay. The peasants came to work in the Rudnevs' fields during the spring and were paid in vodka and fruit liqueurs. The harvest was bigger than the peasants' and so the commune ordered the Rudnevs to sell their surplus grain at fixed prices to the village poor. But well before the harvest could be gathered the manor house was ransacked, and the Rudnevs forced to flee, by a local detachment of the Red Guards.⁷⁵

This was a common pattern. Though peasant acts of violence, pillage and arson were not uncommon, it was usually the young demobilized soldiers who took the lead in instigating them. The slogan 'Loot the Looters!' was brought home to the villages by those who returned from the Front and the garrisons, where they had developed a strong sense of militant brotherhood and where they had been exposed to the propaganda of the Bolsheviks. They often formed a paramilitary faction inside the village, not unlike the fascisti in rural Italy at this time. They had their own regional organizations, such as the Union of Front-Line Soldiers, or the Union of Wounded Veterans, as well as their own Red Guard detachments, attached to the local Soviet, which could exert a powerful influence on the village and steer it towards more violent forms of action against the gentry. In one