Peasants paid for their new allotments in still another way. When speaking of privately owned land in Russia one tends to think of the properties of landlords (pomeshchiki), the Crown, merchants, and clergy which the Land Decree specified as subject to confiscation and distribution. But a great deal—over one-third—of private agricultural land (arable, forest, and meadow) in Russia before the Revolution was the property of peasants, held individually or, more usually, in associations. In fact, on the eve of the Revolution peasants and Cossacks owned nearly as much land as “landlords.” Of the 97.7 million desiatiny of land (arable, woodland, and pasture) in private ownership in European Russia in January 1915, 39 million, or 39.5 percent, was held by landlords (gentry, officials, and officers) and 34.4 million (34.8 percent) by peasants and Cossacks.23
Lenin’s Land Decree exempted from expropriation the holdings of “ordinary peasants and ordinary Cossacks.” But in many localities in central Russia communal peasants ignored this provision and proceeded to seize the land belonging to their fellow peasants along with that of the landlords, placing it in the communal pool for distribution. Included in these seizures were both khutora and otruba, including onetime communal land whose cultivators, taking advantage of the Stolypin legislation, had withdrawn from the commune.* As a result, in no time at all, the peasants wiped out much of the achievement of Stolypin’s agrarian reform: the communal principle swept everything before it. Communal peasants treated the landed property which members of the commune had purchased outside the commune the same way: this land too was added to the communal reserve. Here and there, communes left peasants their properties on condition that they reduce them to the size of communal allotments: in January 1927, on the eve of collectivization, of the 233 million desiatiny of peasant land in the Russian Republic (RSFSR), 222 million, or 95.3 percent, were held communally and only 8 million, or 3.4 percent, as otruba or khutora—that is, in private property.24
In view of these facts, it is misleading to say that the Russian peasantry gained from the Revolution, free of charge, large quantities of agricultural land. Its gains were neither generous nor free. The Russian peasantry cannot be treated as homogeneous: the term “Russian peasantry” is an abstraction covering millions of individuals, some of whom had succeeded, by dint of industry, thrift, and business sense, to accumulate capital, which they held in cash or invested in land. All this cash and nearly all this land they now lost. Once such factors are taken into account, it is clear that the muzhik greatly overpaid for the properties which he had seized under the Communist-sponsored duvan.
The agrarian revolution made peasant holdings more equal. In the repartitions which took place across Russia in 1917–18, the communes reduced holdings that were larger than the norm, their principal criterion for redistributing allotments being the number of edoki, or “eaters,” per household. This procedure resulted in the number of households with large allotments (four desiatiny or more) being reduced by almost one-third (from 30.9 to 21.2 percent of the total), while the number of those holdings less than four desiatiny significantly increased (from 57.6 to 72.2 percent).* These figures indicate that there occurred a sizable rise in the number of “middle peasants,” whose ranks were swollen both by the decrease in the number of land-rich peasants and by the granting of allotments to some peasants who previously had had no land: the number of the latter was cut almost in half.25 In consequence of this leveling, Russia became more than ever a country of small, self-sufficient farmers. One contemporary compared post-revolutionary Russia to a “honeycomb in which small commodity producers … have succeeded in equalizing control over the partitioned land, creating a network of parcels, approximately equal in size.”26 The “middle peasant” of Marxist jargon—one who neither hired labor nor sold his own—emerged as the greatest beneficiary of the agrarian revolution: a fact which it took some time for the Bolsheviks to acknowledge.
Not everyone, of course, profited from the Black Repartition: its main beneficiaries were those who already had held communal allotments in 1917 and dominated the communal assemblies. Many of the peasants who in 1917 and 1918 had streamed back to the village from the cities to claim allotments found themselves either excluded from the redistribution or forced to accept substandard lots. The same applied to that one-half of the landless peasants (batraki) who ended up empty-handed. Better-off peasants ignored the wishes of the Bolshevik authorities who in the Land Socialization Decree had instructed village soviets to show particular solicitude for the landless and land-poor peasants.27 Russia simply lacked sufficient agrarian land to give his norm to everyone who demanded it in the name of “socialization.” As a result, the landless and land-poor communal peasants received only small allotments at best.28
The Russian Revolution carried the rural commune to its historic apogee: paradoxically, it was the Bolsheviks who brought about its golden age, even though they despised it. “The commune that had been whittled back in the course of the preceding decade blossomed over virtually all of the agricultural land in the country.”29 This was a spontaneous process that the Bolsheviks did not immediately oppose because the commune for them performed the same functions that it had under tsarism—namely, guaranteeing fulfillment of obligations to the state.
The economic and social consequences of the Revolution thus aggravated the problem which the Bolsheviks had faced from the beginning: not only had they declared the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in a country that was already overwhelmingly “petty bourgeois” but their policies made it even more so. It is against this background that in the early summer of 1918 Moscow took the decision to storm the village. The exact circumstances under which this decision was taken are not known, but enough information is available to make it possible to provide a general account of its antecedents and intent.