*Litvinov in Pravda, No. 262 (November 21, 1920), 1. Professor Scheibert (Lenin, 210) mistakenly deciphers the acronym Glavanil to mean “Vanilla Trust.”
*Kritsman, Geroicheskii period, p. 162. Figures in Narodnoe Khoziaistvo SSSR v 1958 godu (Moscow, 1959), 52–53, show a 69 percent decline in overall industrial production in 1921 compared with 1913, and a 79 percent decline in heavy industrial production.
†A. Aluf, cited in S. Volin, DeiateVnosf menshevikov v profsoiuzakh pri sovetskoi vlasti, Inter-University Project on the History of the Menshevik Movement, Paper No. 13 (New York, 1962), 87. By 1918, of course, which is here taken as the base year, the number of employed workers had declined considerably compared with 1913–14.
*Buryshkin in EV, No. 2 (1923), 141. The figures for the Supreme Economic Council are 318 employees in March 1918 and 30,000 in 1921.
*Possession of a card entitling one to the lowest ration (paëk) served the Cheka as a means of identifying members of the “bourgeoisie.” The holders of such cards were natural victims of terror and extortion.
*The notion that man works only to avoid starvation Trotsky took from Marx, who had found it in the writings of the Reverend J. Townsend on the Poor Laws: Das Kapital, I, Chap. 25, Sect. 4.
*N. Bukharin, Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda, Pt. 1 (Moscow, 1920), 5–6, 48. The second part, which was to have provided empirical data (p. 6), never appeared.
16
War on the Village
By the spring of 1918, the communes had distributed to their members the properties they had seized since the February Revolution. There was little subsequent distribution: the demobilized soldiers and industrial workers who arrived late rarely managed to secure allotments. But the peasant who expected to be able to enjoy his loot in peace would soon be disabused. To the Bolsheviks, the “Grand Repartition” of 1917–18 was only a detour on the road to collectivization. They laid claim to the harvest of 1918 by virtue of edicts which appropriated for the state all the grain over and above what the peasant required for his consumption and seed. The free market in grain was abolished. The peasant, bewildered by the unexpected turn of events, fought back ferociously in defense of his property, rising in rebellion that in numbers and territory involved exceeded anything seen in tsarist Russia. It was to little avail. He was about to learn that “to rob” and “to be robbed” are merely different modes of the same verb.
Perhaps the greatest paradox of the October coup d’état was that it sought to establish the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in a country in which workers (including self-employed artisans) constituted at best 10 percent of those gainfully employed, while fully 80 percent were peasants. And, in the view of Social-Democrats, the peasants—except for the minority of landless agricultural laborers—formed part of the “bourgeoisie” and, as such, were a class enemy of the “proletariat.”
This perception of the class nature of the self-employed (or “middle”) peasant was at the heart of the disagreement between the Social-Democrats and Socialists-Revolutionaries, the latter of whom classified peasants along with industrial workers as “toilers.” Marx, however, had defined the peasant as a class enemy of the worker and a “bulwark of the old society.”1 Karl Kautsky asserted that the objectives of the peasantry were contrary to those of socialism.2 In a statement on the agrarian question which it submitted in 1896 to the Congress of the Socialist International, the Russian Social-Democratic delegation referred to peasants as a backward class, closed to socialist ideas and best left alone.3
Lenin shared this assessment. “The class of small producers and small cultivators …,” he wrote in 1902, “is a reactionary class.”4 However, in line with his general policy of drawing into the revolutionary process every group and class that for one reason or another had a quarrel with the status quo, he made allowance for the “petty bourgeois” peasantry helping the “proletarian” cause. In this respect—and it was a question of tactics only—he differed from the other Social-Democrats. Lenin assumed that rural Russia was still in the grip of predominantly “feudal” relations. To the extent that the peasantry struggled against this order, it performed a progressive function:
We demand the complete and unconditional, not reformatory but revolutionary abolition and destruction of the survivals of serfdom; we acknowledge as the peasants’ those lands which the gentry government had cut off from them and which to this day continue to keep them under de facto slavery. In this manner we become—by way of exception and by virtue of special historic circumstances—defenders of small property. But we defend it only in its struggle against that which has survived of the “old regime” …5
It was from such purely tactical considerations that in 1917 Lenin took over the SR land program and encouraged Russia’s peasants to seize privately owned landed property.
But once the objective of this tactic—the collapse of the “old regime” and its “bourgeois” successor—had been attained, the peasant, in Lenin’s eyes, reverted to his traditional role as a “petty bourgeois” counterrevolutionary. The danger of the “proletarian revolution” in Russia drowning in a sea of peasant reaction obsessed Russian Social-Democrats, conscious as they were of the role which the French peasantry had played in helping suppress urban radicalism, especially in 1871. Bolshevik insistence on spreading their revolution to the industrial countries of the West as rapidly as possible was in good measure inspired by the desire to avoid this fate. To leave the peasants in permanent possession of the land was tantamount to giving them a stranglehold on the food supply to the cities, the bastions of the Revolution. Lenin noted that European revolutions had failed because they had not dislodged the “rural bourgeoisie.”6 For some of Lenin’s more fanatical followers, even the landless rural proletarian, whom Lenin, following Engels, was willing to see as an ally, could not be relied upon because he, too, was “after all, a peasant—that is, potentially a kulak.”7
Lenin was determined not to let history repeat itself. Much as he counted on the outbreak of revolutions in the West, he would not allow the fate of the Russian Revolution to depend on developments abroad over which he had no control. In contemplating the peasant problem in Soviet Russia, he thought in terms of a two-phase solution. Over the long run, the only satisfactory outcome was collectivization—that is, the expropriation of all the land and its product by the state and the transformation of peasants into wage earners. This measure alone would resolve the contradiction between the objectives of communism and the social realities of the country in which it first came to power. Lenin regarded the 1917 Land Decree and the other agrarian measures which the Bolsheviks had introduced during and after October as temporary expedients. As soon as the situation permitted, the communes would be dispossessed and turned into state-run collectives.* No secret was made of this long-term objective. In 1918 and 1919 the Soviet authorities on numerous occasions confirmed that collectivization was inevitable: an article in Pravda in November 1918 predicted that the “middle peasantry” would be dragged into collective farming “screaming and kicking” (vorcha i ogryzaias’) as soon as the regime was able to do so.8