Until then, in Lenin’s view, it was necessary to (1) assert state control over the food supply by means of a strictly enforced monopoly on the grain trade and (2) introduce Communist power bases in the countryside. These objectives required nothing less than declaring civil war on the village. Such a war the Bolsheviks launched in the summer of 1918. The campaign against the peasantry, virtually ignored in Western historiography, constituted a critical phase in the Bolshevik conquest of Russia. Lenin himself believed that it prevented a rural counterrevolution and ensured that the Russian Revolution, unlike its Western precursors, would not stop halfway and then slide backward into “reaction.”
To understand the successes as well as the failures of the Bolshevik assault on the village it is necessary to form an idea of the effects of the Revolution on Russia’s rural economy. As previously noted, in October 1917 the Bolsheviks had set aside their own agrarian program, centered on the nationalization of land, in favor of the SR land program, much more popular among the peasantry, which called for the expropriation, without compensation, and distribution among the communes of all privately held lands, except those belonging to small peasant proprietors.
There is no dispute that the peasants of central Russia welcomed the Land Decree, which realized their old dream of a “Black Repartition.” Even peasants who stood to lose from it because their private holdings were likely to be taken away from them bowed to the inevitable.
But it is a different question altogether whether these essentially demagogic and tactical measures either significantly improved the economic status of the Russian peasant or benefited the country at large.
Land, being an immovable object, can, of course, be distributed only there where it happens to lie. In pre-revolutionary Russia, the bulk of private (non-communal) land subject to expropriation under the Land Decree had been located not in the central, Great Russian provinces, which the Bolsheviks controlled and which had the greatest incidence of rural overpopulation, but on the periphery of the Empire—the Baltic areas, the western provinces, the Ukraine, and the North Caucasus, all of which after October 1917 were outside Bolshevik control. As a consequence, the pool of land available for distribution in Bolshevik-held areas fell considerably short of peasant expectations.
But even in these areas it proved difficult to achieve an equitable land distribution because the peasant refused to share his loot with both outsiders (inogorodnye) and peasants from adjacent communes. Here is a contemporary description of land distribution as it worked in practice:
The agrarian question is solved in a simple manner. The entire land of the landlord has become the property of the commune. Every rural community receives its land from its previous landlord, and does not yield one inch of it to any outsider, even if it has too much and the neighboring communities are short.… It prefers to leave the [surplus] land in the landlord’s hands, as long as none of it falls into the hands of peasants from another community. The peasants say that as long as the landlord uses the land, they will still be able to earn something, and when it becomes necessary, they will take it away.9
It is not easy to determine how much arable land the Russian peasantry actually obtained in 1917–18: estimates vary widely from as little as 20 to as much as 150 million desiatiny.10 A major obstacle lies in the imprecise use of the term “land” (zemlia). As employed in the various statistical surveys conducted after the Revolution, it applies to very different things: arable land (pashnia), its most valuable form, but also meadow, forest, and land of no economic use (desert, marsh, tundra). It is only by lumping these diverse objects under the meaningless rubric of “land” that one can arrive at the fantastic figure of 150 million desiatiny—first introduced by Stalin in 1936 and for long mandatory in Communist literature—allegedly acquired by Russian peasants in consequence of the Revolution.11
Reliable statistics indicate a much more modest result. Figures compiled by the Commissariat of Agriculture in 1919–20 showed that peasants received a total of 21.15 million desiatiny (23.27 million hectares).12 This land was very unevenly distributed. Fifty-three percent of Russian communes gained no land from the Revolution.13 This nearly corresponds to the number of villages (54 percent) that, according to the same source, said they felt “unhappy” over the results of land redistribution.14 The remaining 47 percent of the villages acquired arable land in very unequal shares. Of the thirty-four provinces for which figures exist, the communes in six received less than one-tenth of one desiatina per member; those in twelve gained between one-tenth and one-quarter desiatina; in nine they obtained between one-quarter and one-half; peasants of four acquired from one-half to a full desiatina; and only in three provinces did the peasants secure between one and two desiatiny.15 Nationwide, the average communal allotment of arable land per peasant, which before the Revolution had been 1.87 desiatiny, rose to 2.26.16 This would represent an increment of 0.4 desiatina of arable land per communal adult (edok) or 23.7 percent. This figure, first cited in 1921, has been confirmed by recent studies, the most authoritative of which somewhat vaguely says that the land which the average peasant received “did not exceed” 0.4 desiatina, or approximately one acre*—far below what the peasant had expected from the Black Repartition.
But even this modest figure overstates the economic benefits of the repartition, for a good part (two-thirds) of the land which the peasants seized in 1917–18 they had previously leased. The “socialization” of that land, therefore, did not so much increase the arable land available to them as absolve them from the payment of rent.17 In addition to being freed from such rents, estimated at 700 million rubles a year, the peasants also benefited from the cancellation by the Communist regime of their debts to the Peasants’ Land Bank, amounting to 1.4 billion rubles.18
The peasants viewed their title to the new land skeptically, for they heard that the new government intended someday to introduce collectives: the Decree on the Socialization of Land issued in April 1918 stated that the transfer of land to the communes was “provisional” or “temporary” (vremennoe). They wondered for how long they would be allowed to keep it and decided to act as if it were only until the next harvest was over. Hence, rather than incorporate the acquired land into communal holdings, they kept it separate, so that if required to surrender the new land, they could still hold on to their old allotments. 19 † As a result, the much-lamented strip farming (cherespolositsa) intensified. Many peasants had to travel fifteen, thirty, and even sixty kilometers to reach their new allotments: if the distance was too great, they simply abandoned them.20
So much for the economic benefits which the Russian peasant derived from the Revolution. They were by no means free. Historians usually ignore the costs of the agrarian revolution to the peasant, although they can be shown to have been considerable. These costs were of a twofold nature: the loss of savings due to inflation and the loss of land held by peasants in private (non-communal) ownership.
Before the Revolution, Russian peasants had accumulated considerable savings, some of which they kept at home and the rest of which they deposited in government savings banks (sberegatel’nye kassy). These savings grew considerably during the prosperous war years and the first year of the Revolution when peasants benefited from rising food prices. It is impossible to calculate precisely the amount of peasant savings at the time of the October coup, but some idea may be obtained from official figures as supplemented by informed estimates. At the beginning of 1914, the government savings banks had on deposit 1.55 billion rubles.21 Between July 1914 and October 1917, they are estimated to have taken in an additional 5 billion, of which 60–75 percent is believed to have come from rural depositors.22 If the same ratio had held for pre-1914 depositors, the peasants may be estimated to have had on deposit in savings banks at the time of the October coup some 5 billion rubles, to which must be added the moneys they kept at home. The Bolsheviks exempted government savings banks from the decree nationalizing private banks, so that in theory peasants and other small depositors retained access to their money. But it was not long before inflation rendered these deposits as worthless as if they had been confiscated outright. As shown in the preceding chapter, the Bolsheviks proceeded deliberately and systematically to devalue money: during their first five years, the purchasing power of the ruble depreciated millions of times, which had the effect of turning it into colored paper. As a consequence Russian peasants, far from receiving the landlord’s land free of charge, paid for it dearly. For the 21 million desiatiny which they had been allowed to appropriate, they lost in bank savings alone an estimated 5 billion rubles.* If one accepts the contemporary estimate that they kept in mattresses and buried in the ground an additional 7 to 8 billion, then it follows that for his average allotment of one acre of arable land (0.4 desiatina) the peasant paid 600 pre-1918 rubles. Before the Revolution, the average price for this land would have been 64.4 rubles.†