But Lenin had to have a rural class enemy: as long as the village remained outside their political control and under SR influence, the Bolshevik bastions in the cities remained highly vulnerable. The refusal of the peasants to surrender food at fixed prices offered Lenin an opportunity to rally the urban population against the peasantry, ostensibly for the sake of extracting food but, in fact, as a device to bring it to heel.
It was Engels who had said that the poor and landless rural proletariat could, under certain conditions, become an ally of the industrial working class. Lenin adopted this point of view.65 This premise he now put to use. In August 1918, he loosely bandied about statistics on the class structure of the Russian village which were to have deadly consequences. “Let us allow,” he said,
that we have in Russia some 15 million agricultural peasant families, taking into account previous Russia, before the robbers had detached from us the Ukraine, etc. Of this 15 million, certainly about 10 million are the poor, who live from the sale of their labor or enslave themselves to the rich, or who lack surplus grain and have been especially ruined by the burdens of the war. About 3 million must be counted as middle peasants, and hardly over 2 million are kulaks, rich men, bread speculators.66
These figures bore not the slightest relationship to reality: they merely repeated in rounded numbers the kind of calculations that Lenin used to make before the Revolution on the “class differentiation” of the Russian village. Thus, in 1899 he had calculated that the proportion of rich to middle to poor peasant households was 2 to 4 to 4. In 1907, he concluded that 80.8 percent of the peasant households were “poor,” 7.7 percent “middle,” and 11.5 percent well-to-do.67 Lenin’s most recent figures ignored the fact that, as a result of the agrarian revolution, the number of poor and rich peasants had declined. Half a year after declaring the “poor” to be two-thirds of the peasantry, he described the middle peasantry as the “most powerful force.”68 Clearly, his figures were not statistical data, but political slogans, drawn from Engels, who had laid it down in 1870, in regard to Germany, that “agricultural laborers form the most numerous class in the countryside.”69 Whatever validity this generalization may have had for late-nineteenth-century Germany, it had none for post-1917 Russia, where the “most numerous class in the countryside” consisted of self-employed middle peasants.
The vaunted “class differentiation” in the Russian village was also a figment of the imagination of urban intellectuals who drew their information from statistical abstracts. How did one define rural capitalism? According to Lenin, “the principal symptom and indicator of capitalism in agriculture is hired labor.”70 Now, according to the agrarian census of 1917, in the nineteen provinces for which information was available, only 103,000 rural households out of nearly 5 million employed hired labor, which would yield a proportion of rural “capitalists” equal to 2 percent. But even this figure loses significance when one takes into account that these 103,000 households employed a total of 129,000 laborers, or barely more than one per household.71 Such laborers may have been hired because someone in the household had fallen ill or been drafted into the army. In any event, with a mere 2 percent of the households employing on the average one hired hand, it would stretch this concept to its most extreme limits to speak of the penetration of “capitalism” into the Russian village, let alone to claim that 2 million kulaks were exploiting 10 million “poor” peasants. Using another criterion—namely, lack of access to communal land—Communist statisticians have determined that less than 4 percent of the rural population qualified as “poor.”72
Lenin ignored this empirical evidence: determined to unleash a “class war” between town and country, he drew a fantastic picture of socioeconomic conditions in the rural areas so as to have an excuse for invading them. His true criteria for determining who was “bourgeois” in the village were not economic but politicaclass="underline" in his eyes, every anti-Bolshevik peasant qualified as a kulak.
The agrarian decrees which the Bolsheviks issued in May and June 1918 had a fourfold purpose: (1) to destroy the politically active peasants, almost to a man loyal to the SRs, by labeling them “kulaks”; (2) to undermine communal landholding and lay the groundwork for state-run collective farming; (3) to revamp the rural soviets by ejecting the SRs and replacing them with urban Bolsheviks or non-party Bolshevik sympathizers; and (4) to extract food for the cities and industrial centers. Food collection was given the greatest prominence in government propaganda, but in Bolshevik plans it was assigned the lowest priority. When the smoke cleared, the quantity of food extracted from the villagers turned out to be piddling: the political results were another matter.
The campaign against the village was conducted with the precision and brutality of a military operation. The main strategic decisions received approval at meetings of the Sovnarkom on May 8 and 9, presumably after having been previously voted on by the Bolshevik Central Committee. The Sovnarkom reconfirmed the state monopoly on the grain trade. The Commissar of Supply, Tsiurupa, received extraordinary powers to enforce the provisions of the decree of May 13,73 which required every peasant to deliver his surplus grain to designated collection points in return for a payment at fixed prices. Peasants who failed to do so and hoarded their surplus or used it to make moonshine were declared “enemies of the people.” The masses were exhorted by Lenin to wage a “merciless and terroristic war against the peasant bourgeoisie.”74 This campaign was designed as a two-pronged offensive against the “kulak”: from within by means of a fifth column, composed of poor peasants organized into Committees of the Poor (kombedy), and from without by means of “food detachments” (prodovol’stvennye otriady) of armed workers who were to march on the village and force the “kulaks” at gunpoint to disgorge their hoard.
The preamble of the May 13 decree accused the “village bourgeoisie” of having waxed rich on the war and refusing to sell food to the government so as to be able to dispose of it on the black market at speculative prices. The alleged aim of the rich peasants was to force the government to give up its monopoly on commerce in grain. Should the government succumb to this blackmail, the decree went on, ignoring the relationship between supply and demand, bread prices would skyrocket and place food entirely beyond the reach of workers. The “stubbornness” of village “kulaks” had to be broken: “Not a single pud of grain should remain in the hands of peasants except for that needed to sow the fields and feed their families until the next harvest.” Detailed procedures were worked out concerning the manner in which food was to be extracted. Every peasant without exception was to deliver within one week of the decree all his surplus grain. Those who failed to do so were to be turned over to Revolutionary Tribunals, where they faced prison sentences of no less than ten years, confiscation of all property, and expulsion from the commune.*
Armed bands, sometimes formed into Red Guards, had been raiding villages in search of food since the preceding winter. They usually ran into fierce resistance from the peasants, reinforced by soldiers who had come home from the front with their weapons; they usually returned to town empty-handed.75 Lenin had proposed in January 1918 the formation of “several thousand supply detachments,” with ten to fifteen workers each, empowered to shoot recalcitrant peasants, but the idea failed to gain support.76 It was only in the spring of 1918 that the Bolsheviks proceeded systematically to organize rural terror units. The earliest measure was an appeal to the workers of Petrograd, issued on May 21 over the signature of Lenin.77 Other appeals and instructions followed. The notion of extracting food by force was clearly modeled on the armée révolutionnaire created, as one of its first acts, by the French Committee of Public Safety in June 1793, and accompanied by laws prohibiting the hoarding of produce.