In the atmosphere of hunger and lawlessness, urban crime soared. Police records indicate that in the third month of Bolshevik rule the inhabitants of Petrograd reported 15,600 burglaries, 9,370 incidents of store looting, 203,801 incidents of pickpocketing, and 125 murders.40 How many crimes went unreported there is no way of knowing, but there must have been very many, since it was common at the time for ordinary criminals to rob under the pretext of carrying out “expropriations,” which the victims were too terrorized to report.
The countryside was in the grip of similar lawlessness. In some provinces (such as Voronezh) food was abundant; in others (such as nearby Riazan) it was desperately short. It was not uncommon for one district to enjoy a comfortable surplus while its neighbors went starving. As a rule, those who had a surplus either disposed of it on the free market or hoarded it in expectation that the state grain monopoly would collapse. Charity was unknown: well-fed peasants refused to feed the hungry ones, and if they came begging, chased them away.41
The picture of rural life in the first half of 1918 provided by the contemporary press is one of unrelieved horror. An account published in Riazanskaia zhizn’ in early March may not be quite representative, because Riazan suffered extreme food shortages, but it gives some idea how rapidly the Russian village deteriorated under Bolshevik rule, plunging into primeval anarchy. Having looted state liquor stores, the peasants of this province were in a state of perpetual drunkenness. They fought each other in wild orgies, assisted by old men and young girls. To keep them quiet, children were plied with vodka. Afraid of losing their savings through confiscation or inflation, peasants gambled frantically, usually at blackjack; it was not uncommon for an ordinary muzhik to lose one thousand rubles in an evening.
The old men … buy pictures of the Last Judgment. Deep in their hearts the peasants believe that the “end of the world” is near.… And before hell comes, everything that exists on earth and that has been built so recently with such effort is being demolished. They so smash everything that the noise reverberates throughout the district.42
In areas where the food situation was especially desperate, the peasants staged “hunger rebellions,” destroying everything in sight. After one such uprising in a district of Novgorod province, the local Communist authorities imposed on the 12,000 inhabitants a “contribution” of 4.5 million rubles, as if they were rebellious natives of a conquered colony.43
Hunger posed dangers, but from the Bolshevik point of view it also had a positive side. For one, the state monopoly on the food trade, even though detrimental to the supply of food, enabled the regime to maintain a rationing system that served to control the urban population and discriminate in favor of its supporters. Second, hunger depressed the spirit of the population, robbing it of the will to resist. The psychology of hunger is not well known, but Russian observers noted that it made people more willing to submit to authority. “Hunger is a poor companion of creativity,” one Bolshevik observed, “it inspires blind destructiveness, dark fear, a desire to surrender, to hand over one’s destiny to the will of someone who will take it and organize it.”44 Starving people, if capable of putting up a fight, dissipate their energies battling each other for food. Such political apathy, being self-induced, does more to promote submissiveness than even police repression.
That the Bolsheviks were aware of the political benefits of hunger is attested to by their refusal to relieve it in the only feasible way, the one they would adopt in 1921 when confident of their control over Russia: reinstating the free market in grain. As soon as this was done, production soared and before long attained prewar levels. That this would happen is known not only by hindsight. In May 1918, a grain specialist, S. D. Rozenkrants, explained to Zinoviev that the food shortages were due not to “speculation” but to the absence of production incentives. Under the grain monopoly the peasant had no inducement to grow grain beyond his own immediate needs. By planting the surplus acreage with root vegetables (potatoes, carrots, beets) for sale on the open market, as the authorities permitted him to do, he earned more money than he knew what to do with: at the free market rate of 100 rubles for a pud of such produce, one desiatina earned him 50,000–60,000 rubles. Why should he bother with grain only to have the state confiscate it at its ridiculous “fixed prices”? Rozenkrants expressed confidence that if the government adopted a more businesslike approach it would resolve the food problem in two months.45
Some Bolsheviks liked this solution. Rykov, the head of the State Planning Commission, advocated a combination of compulsory grain deliveries and collaboration with rural cooperatives and private enterprise.46 Others suggested that the government purchase grain at close to market prices (60 rubles per pud minimum) and sell it to the population at a discount.47 But all these proposals were rejected for political reasons. As the Menshevik Socialist Courier would explain,48 the grain monopoly was essential to the survival of the Communist dictatorship: with the immense rural labor force outside its control, it had to resort to the control of the agrarian product. Indeed, according to this source, by early 1921 the Bolsheviks were discussing a proposal by Osinskii to transform peasants into state employees who would be permitted to cultivate the land only on condition of sowing an area predetermined by the authorities and turning over all the surplus—a proposal that had to be shelved with the outbreak of the Kronshtadt rebellion and the adoption of the New Economic Policy. If the food trade were set free, the peasant would soon accumulate wealth and gain even greater economic independence, presenting a serious “counterrevolutionary” threat. Such a risk could be taken only after the regime was indisputably master of Russia. Lenin’s government was prepared to subject the country to a famine claiming millions of lives if this was required to ensure its hold on state power.
Such being the political realities, all the economic measures with which the Bolsheviks sought to improve the food situation in the first half of 1918 proved of no avail. They kept on issuing decrees that either modified procedures for the collection and distribution of food or else threatened food “speculators,” whom they persisted in treating as the cause of the shortages rather than their consequence, with the most dire punishments. Among the most irrelevant of such decrees was one drafted by Lenin at the end of December 1917. “The critical situation of the food supply, the threat of famine caused by speculation,” Lenin wrote, “the sabotage of capitalists and bureaucrats, as well as the prevailing chaos, make it necessary to take extraordinary revolutionary measures to combat the evil.” These “measures,” however, turned out to have nothing to do with the food supply, but instead consisted of nationalizing Russia’s banks and declaring a default on the domestic and foreign debts of the Russian Government.* According to Alexander Tsiurupa, the strike of the 1,300 employees of the Commissariat of Supply protesting the Bolshevik dictatorship aggravated the situation, because they were replaced with officials who had no idea what to do.49
Unwilling to give up the monopoly on grain, the Bolsheviks did nothing to forestall the famine predicted by the contemporary press. Like the tsarist regime when confronted with a domestic crisis, they resorted to bureaucratic reshufflings and procedural changes. Since this was not the manner which the Bolsheviks adopted when confronting problems that really concerned them, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that hunger was not in that category.