As had been the case with the October coup, in launching the invasion of the countryside, the Bolsheviks acted in the name of spurious objectives. Their true purpose was to consummate the October coup by imposing control over the peasantry. But since this would not have been a popular slogan, they carried out the campaign against the peasantry for the ostensible purpose of extracting from the “kulaks” food for the hungry cities. Food shortages, of course, were a very real problem, but as will be shown below, there existed easier and more effective ways of drawing supplies from the countryside. In their internal communications, the authorities frankly admitted that food extraction was a subsidiary task. Thus, a secret Bolshevik report, referring to the decree ordering the creation in every village of Committees of the Poor, explained the measure as follows:
The decree of July 11, concerning the organization of the village poor, defined the nature of the organization and assigned it supply functions. But its true purpose was purely politicaclass="underline" to carry out a class stratification in the village, to arouse to active political life those strata that were capable of assimilating and realizing the tasks of the proletarian socialist revolution and even leading onto this path the middle toiling peasantry by freeing it from the economic and social influence of the kulaks and rich peasants who had seized control of the rural soviets and transformed them into organs of opposition to Soviet socialist construction.30
In other words, the extraction of foodstuffs (“supply functions”) for the cities was camouflage for a political operation designed to bring Bolshevism to the village by inflaming social animosities.
In pre-revolutionary Russia, the bulk of the food reaching the market came either from large private estates or from farms of well-to-do peasants, both of which employed hired labor: middle and poor peasants consumed nearly all the food they produced. The confiscation and distribution to the communes of all the gentry land and much of the land held by peasants in private ownership, aggravated by the government’s prohibition on the employment of hired labor (even though it was widely ignored), removed the main source of food supply for the non-agrarian population. With rural Russia reverting to the self-sufficiency of the pre-capitalist era, the non-agricultural population faced starvation. This fact alone contributed to the severe food shortages that occurred after the Bolshevik coup.*
Even under such adverse conditions the peasant might have been able to feed the townspeople if the Bolsheviks, for what appear to have been mainly political reasons, did not deprive him of incentives to part with the surplus.
One of the few measures passed by the Provisional Government that the Bolsheviks retained was the law of March 25, 1917, establishing a state monopoly on commerce in grain. The law provided that all the grain that the producer had left over after satisfying his personal needs and providing for seed belonged to the state and had to be sold to its agencies at fixed prices. Surplus grain that was not turned over was subject to being requisitioned at half price. The Provisional Government obtained in this manner 14.5 percent of the harvest,31 but even so, as long as it was in power, the grain trade went on as before. The Bolsheviks, however, enforced this rule with increasing brutality, treating all sales of grain and its products to the consumer as “speculation” subject to severe penalties. In its first months the Cheka expended most of its energy pursuing peasant “bagmen” (meshochniki) and confiscating their merchandise: sometimes it sent peasant peddlers to jail and even executed them. Undeterred, the peasants kept on coming, feeding millions.
The Bolshevik Government insisted that the peasants sell the grain surplus to state agencies at prices that inflation made increasingly absurd: on August 8, 1918, the official tariff was set (depending on the region) at between 14 and 18 rubles per pud (16.3 kilograms) of rye grain, which on the free market was fetching in Moscow 290 and in Petrograd 420 rubles a pud.* There was a similar disparity between fixed and free market prices on other staples, such as meat and potatoes which became controlled in January 1919. The peasant responded to this pricing policy both by hoarding and by curtailing his acreage. The decline in the grain harvest followed inexorably.32
If one further allows that, as a result of the Brest Treaty, Russia lost the Ukraine, which previously had supplied the country with more than one-third of its cereals, and that in June 1918 the Czechoslovak rebellion cut off access to Siberia, the tragic situation confronting the urban inhabitants of central and northern Russia in mid-1918 becomes apparent. All the cities and industrial centers, and an increasing number of villages located in the less productive regions or with developed cottage industries, suffered hunger and faced the almost certain prospect of a devastating famine should the weather take a turn for the worse.
For the Bolsheviks this situation held dangers as well as opportunities. Hunger in the cities and industrial regions stimulated discontent and eroded their political base. In 1918, Russian cities were in constant turmoil from food shortages. The situation was especially explosive in Petrograd, where in late January 1918 the daily ration consisted of 4 ounces of bread adulterated with milled straw.33 Since this ration was not adequate to sustain life, the inhabitants had to resort to the open market, where prices were driven artificially high by the Cheka’s harassment of food peddlers. Here, the price of bread fluctuated between 2 and 5 or more rubles a pound, which placed it out of the reach of workers, who, if fortunate enough to find employment, earned at best between 300 and 400 rubles a month.34 During 1918, the food ration in Petrograd was adjusted every few days either upward or downward, depending on the ability of supply trains to run the gauntlet of armed deserters and peasants who lay in ambush: if they succeeded in overpowering the guards they stripped the train in no time, and it reached Petrograd empty. In March, the bread ration in Petrograd rose slightly to 6 ounces, only to drop toward the end of April to 2 ounces. The situation was no better in the provincial cities. In Kaluga, for instance, the daily bread allotment in early 1918 was set at 5 ounces.35
To escape the hunger, urban inhabitants fled the cities in droves: among the refugees were many peasants who had come during the war to work in the defense industries and demobilized garrison troops. Contemporary statistics indicate a drastic fall in the population of Petrograd: by April 1918, 60 percent of the industrial workers employed there in January 1917 (221,000 out of 365,000) had fled to the countryside.36 An exodus of nearly equal proportions occurred in Moscow. During the Revolution and the Civil War, Moscow would lose one-half of its population and Petrograd two-thirds,37 a process which dramatically reversed the urbanization of Russia and enhanced her rural character.* Russian statisticians estimate that between 1917 and 1920, 884,000 families, or some 5 million people, abandoned the cities for the countryside.38 This nearly corresponds to the number of peasants who had moved into the urban areas during the war (6 million).
Those who stayed behind grumbled, demonstrated, and sometimes rioted over food shortages. Lower-class men and women, crazed by hunger, looted food warehouses and stores. Newspapers carried reports of housewives running in the streets screaming “Give us bread!” Peddlers who demanded exorbitant prices risked lynching. Many cities issued ordinances excluding outsiders. Petrograd was tightly sealed off: in February 1918 Lenin signed a decree forbidding nonresidents to enter the capital and certain areas in northern Russia. Other cities passed similar laws.39