Russian workers had no taste for such methods. They could be mobilized against the burzhui or the landlord, from whom they were separated by an unbridgeable cultural gulf, but not against the village, where many of them had been born and still had relatives. They felt none of the class animus against the peasant, even the relatively well-to-do peasant, which Lenin and his followers attributed to them. The Left SRs, who enjoyed considerable support among Petrograd workers, protested against Bolshevik measures kindling class hatred between workers and peasants. The Left SR Central Committee actually forbade its party members to enroll in the food detachments. Zinoviev ran into considerable difficulties when he tried to implement the May decrees, even though he offered the volunteers generous inducements. On May 24 he announced that detachments would depart in search of food in two days, but hardly anyone turned up. Meetings at Petrograd factories, organized by workers’ plenipotentiaries, passed resolutions opposing this measure.78 Five days later, Zinoviev repeated the appeal, coupling it with a threat to the “bourgeoisie”: “We shall give them 1/16th of a pound a day so they won’t forget the smell of bread. But if we must go over to milled straw, then we shall put the bourgeoisie on it first of all.”79 The workers remained unmoved, preferring, with a common sense sorely lacking among the Bolshevik intelligentsia, to solve the food shortage by freeing the trade in cereals. In time, however, by a combination of threats and inducements, Zinoviev managed to form some food detachments, the first of which, a unit of 400 men, departed for the countryside on June 1.80
The food detachments proved disappointing. Since bona fide workers stayed away, the majority of those who joined up were urban riffraff that went to the village to loot. Lenin soon received complaints to this effect.81 Shortly after the first supply detachments had made their appearance in the villages, he sent the following message to the workers of one industrial establishment:
I very much hope that the comrade workers of Vyksa will carry out their admirable plan of launching a mass movement for bread with machine guns as genuine revolutionaries—that is, that they will staff the detachments with picked individuals, reliable men, not looters, who will work according to instructions in full agreement with Tsiurupa for the common task of saving from hunger all those who go hungry and not only for themselves.82
Judging by peasant complaints, it was common practice for the armed bands from the cities to load up on stolen produce and get drunk on requisitioned moonshine.83 Despite threats of severe punishment, such activities persisted and in the end the government had to allow members of food detachments to retain for their personal use up to 20 pounds of foodstuffs, including a maximum of 2 pounds of butter, 10 pounds of bread, and 5 pounds of meat.84
But neither threats of punishment nor concessions to self-interest worked and before long the regime had to turn to the newly formed Red Army. It was no coincidence that the decree introducing compulsory military service into Soviet Russia, issued on May 29, 1918, coincided with the establishment of food detachments. There was a revealing directive from Lenin’s hand, drafted on May 26 and approved by the Central Committee the following day, which indicates that the earliest mission of the newly constituted Red Army was to wage war against the Russian peasant:
1. The Commissariat of War is to be transformed into a Military-Supply Commissariat—that is, nine-tenths of the work of the Commissariat of War is to concentrate on adapting the army for the war for bread and the conduct of such a war for three months: June–August.
2. During the same period, place the entire country under martial law.
3. Mobilize the army, separating its healthy units, and induct nineteen-year-olds, at least in some regions, for systematic operations to conquer the harvest and to gather food and fuel.
4. Introduce the death penalty for lack of discipline …
. . . . .
9. Introduce collective responsibility for entire [supply] detachments, the threat of execution of every tenth for each incident of looting.85
Only the outbreak of the Czech rebellion prevented the entire Red Army from being assigned to fight the peasantry; even so, it played a considerable role in this campaign. As the Red Army was forming, Trotsky announced that its mission in the next two or three months would be “fighting hunger,”86 which was a delicate way of saying “fighting the peasant.” Although no medals were issued for this campaign, the war against the muzhik provided the Red Army with its first combat experience. Ultimately, 75,000 regular soldiers joined 50,000 armed civilians in battling the nation’s food producers.87
The peasants responded to force with force. Contemporary newspapers are filled with accounts of pitched engagements between government units and peasants. The commanders of military and civilian units marching on the villages reported routinely on “kulak uprisings,” but the evidence makes it clear that the resistance they encountered was spontaneous defense by the peasants of their property, involving not only the “rich” but the entire rural population. “When more carefully examined, the so-called kulak rebellions seem nearly always to have been general peasant uprisings, in which no class distinctions can be traced.”88 The peasants cared not a whit about the needs of the city and knew nothing of “class differentiation.” All they saw was armed bands from the cities, often ex-peasants in leather jackets or army uniforms, come to rob them of their grain. They had never been made to surrender their harvest even under serfdom and they were not about to do so now.
The following contemporary newspaper account of incidents in the second half of 1918 in scattered rural areas is representative of the genre:
When the supply detachment arrived in the Gorodishchenskaia volost’ of Orel province, the women, instead of turning the produce over, dumped it into the water, and fished it out after the unexpected visitors had departed. In the Lavrov volost’ of the same province, the peasants disarmed a “Red detachment.” In Orel province requisitions are carried out on the broadest scale. Preparations are made as if for a regular war. “In some districts … during the requisitioning of bread, all private automobiles, saddle horses, and carriages have been mobilized.” In the Nikolskaia volost’ and its neighborhood regular battles take place: there are wounded and killed on both sides. The detachment requested by wire to have Orel send ammunition and machine guns.… It is reported from Saratov province …: “The village has become alerted and is ready for battle. In some villages of the Volskii district, the peasants met Red Army troops with pitchforks and compelled them to disperse.” In Tver province, “the partisan detachments sent to the village in search of food meet everywhere with resistance; there are reports of encounters from various localities; to save the grain from requisition, the peasants hide it in the forests [and] bury it in the ground.” At the bazaar in Korsun, in the province of Simbirsk, peasants came to blows with Red Army troops attempting to requisition grain; one Red Army soldier was killed, several were wounded.89