On February 13, Trotsky was appointed head of the Extraordinary Commission for Supply. His task as “Supply Dictator” was to organize the flow of foodstuffs to the cities with the help of “extraordinary revolutionary measures,” “revolutionary” in this instance being a euphemism for military force.50 But he had hardly assumed this responsibility when he was appointed Commissar of War: there is no record of his having accomplished anything. The regime kept on flooding the country with appeals to help starving Petrograd and Moscow,51 appeals laced with invective against the domestic and foreign “bourgeoisie,” which was blamed for the shortages. In February 1918, the government ordered the death penalty for “bagmen.”52 On March 25, Moscow tried to draw out food from the countryside with resort to barter. It allocated 1.16 billion rubles—the two-week output of Soviet printing presses—for the purchase of consumer goods to be exchanged for 2 million tons of grain.53 But because the consumer goods on which the whole scheme depended could not be found, the project fell through. In April, having run out of ideas that had any semblance of realism, the government conceived the plan of building a new railroad to carry grain from the surplus areas.54 Not one foot of track was ever laid down, nor would it have made any difference if it had.
By the beginning of May the Bolsheviks no longer could play at solving the food shortages, for the supply situation in the cities and industrial areas had reached alarming dimensions: telegrams poured into the Kremlin reporting that the workers, the recipients of the most generous rations, were going hungry.55 In Petrograd, a pound loaf of bread on the open market, which in January had fetched 3 rubles, now cost between 6 and 12.56 Something had to be done. Since opening the grain trade to the free play of the market forces, which the experts urged and the factory workers demanded, was unacceptable on political grounds, another solution had to be found. That solution was invading and conquering the village by force of arms.
Sverdlov announced the new policy on May 20, 1918:
If we can say that revolutionary Soviet authority is sufficiently strong in the cities … then the same cannot be said in regard to the village.… For that reason we must most seriously confront the question of the differentiation of the village, the question of creating in the village two contrasting and hostile forces.… Only if we succeed in splitting the village into two irreconcilably hostile camps, if we are able to inflame there the same civil war that had occurred not so long ago in the cities … only then will we be in a position to say that we will do that in relation to the village that we were able to do for the city.57
This extraordinary pronouncement meant that the Bolsheviks had decided to incite one part of the rural population against another, unleashing a civil war among citizens who were living peacefully side by side, in order to gain in the village the power base which had so far eluded them. The assault troops designated for this campaign were to consist of urban workers as well as poor and landless peasants: the “enemy” were the rich peasants, or kulaks, the rural “bourgeoisie.”
Lenin hated what he perceived to be the “bourgeoisie” with a destructive passion that fully equalled Hitler’s hatred of the Jews: nothing short of its physical annihilation would satisfy him. The urban middle class—the professionals, financiers, merchants, industrialists, rentiers—gave him little trouble, for they submitted at once, corroborating the thesis of the founding manifesto of Russian Social-Democracy of 1898 that the further east one moved, the more supine the bourgeoisie. When told to shovel snow, they shoveled snow, and even posed for photographs, smiling wanly. When subjected to “contributions,” they dutifully paid up. They studiously avoided contacts with anti-Bolshevik armies or underground organizations. Most of them hoped for some miracle, perhaps German intervention, or perhaps the evolution of Bolshevik policies toward greater “realism.” In the meantime, their instincts told them to lie low. When in the spring of 1918 the Bolsheviks, in an effort to raise productivity, began to reemploy them in industrial enterprises, their hopes rose. As Pravda put it, from such a “bourgeoisie” there was nothing to fear.58 The same applied to the socialist intelligentsia whom the Bolsheviks dubbed “petty bourgeois”: they too, for their own reasons, refused to resist. They criticized the Bolsheviks, but whenever the opportunity presented itself to fight, they looked the other way.
The situation was different in the countryside. By Western standards, Russia, of course, had no “rural bourgeoisie,” only a class of peasants who were marginally better off by virtue of a few hectares of additional land, an extra horse or cow, some cash, and the occasional services of a hired hand. But Lenin was obsessed with the image of “class differentiation” in the Russian village. As a young man, he had scrutinized zemstvo statistics, noting the slightest shifts in the economic condition of the various rural strata: anything that indicated a growing divergence between rich and poor peasants, no matter how minute, spelled to him a potential for social conflict which the revolutionaries could exploit.59 To penetrate the village, he had to incite a civil war there, and to do that he required a class enemy. For this purpose he created the myth of a powerful, numerous, and counterrevolutionary class of kulaks bent on destroying the “proletariat.”
94. A typical peasant “bourgeois-capitalist.”
The trouble was that whereas Hitler would be able to produce genealogical (“racial”) criteria for determining who was a Jew, Lenin had no standards to define a kulak. This term never had a precise social or economic content: in fact, one observer, who spent the Revolution in the countryside, found that the peasants themselves did not use it.60 It had entered the Russian vocabulary in the 1860s, at which time it referred not to an economic category but to a type of peasant who, by virtue of his personality, stood out from the mass of the communal peasantry: it was used to describe what in American slang would be called a “go-getter.” Such peasants tended to dominate village assemblies and the volost’ courts; sometimes they also acted as moneylenders, but this was not their defining quality. Radical publicists and novelists of the late nineteenth century, enamored of an ideal, perfectly egalitarian commune, gave kulaks a bad name as village exploiters, but there is no evidence that their fellow peasants regarded with hostility those to whom the term applied.61 In fact, radical agitators who in the 1870s went “to the people” discovered that deep in his heart every peasant aspired to becoming a kulak. Not surprisingly, therefore, neither before nor after 1917 was it possible to distinguish a middle peasant from a kulak by any objective criteria—a fact that even Lenin, in a moment of candor, was forced to admit.62
How difficult it was to assign the term “kulak” a precise, operative meaning became apparent when the Bolsheviks attempted to unleash a class war in the countryside. To the commissars charged with organizing the “poor” peasants against the kulaks, this was a next-to-impossible task because they found nothing corresponding to these concepts in the communes with which they came in contact. In the province of Samara, one such official concluded that 40 percent of the peasants were kulaks,63 while Bolshevik officials in the province of Voronezh informed Moscow that “it is impossible to wage the struggle against kulaks and the rich, because they constitute the majority of the population.”64