In January 1919, Izvestiia carried a report of a government investigation of a “White Guard kulak” uprising in a village in the province of Kostroma which illustrates what the assault on the village “bourgeoisie” really involved. The investigation revealed that the chairman of the village Executive Committee regularly beat peasant petitioners, sometimes with canes. Some of his victims were stripped of their shoes and forced to sit in the snow. So-called food requisitions were really ordinary robberies, in the course of which peasants were pummeled with Cossack nagaiki. As it approached a village, the food detachment would open machine gun fire to frighten the peasants. Then the beatings would begin. “The peasants had to put on five or more shirts to ward off the blows, but that did not do much good because the whips were laced with wire: after a beating the shirts stuck to the flesh and dried, so they had to be loosened by soaking in warm water.” Members of the detachment urged the soldiers to beat the peasants with whatever they could lay their hands on, “so that they would remember Soviet authority.”90
As the government pressed its campaign, the countryside rose in revolt. This was an event unprecedented in Russian history, for previous uprisings, such as Razin’s or Pugachev’s, had been regional affairs, usually confined to the eastern and southeastern borderlands. Nothing like it had ever occurred in the heartland of Russia. Rural resistance to the Bolsheviks that erupted in the summer of 1918 represented, in both extent and numbers involved, far and away the greatest peasant rebellion that the country had ever experienced.* Its course, however, is still imperfectly known, because of the refusal of the authorities in charge of Soviet archives to release the relevant documents and the inexplicable lack of interest in the subject by Western historians.* The Cheka reported that in 1918 there occurred 245 rural “uprisings” (vosstaniia) which cost the lives of 875 Bolsheviks and 1,821 rebels. In addition, 2,431 rebels were executed.91 This figure, however, can reflect only a fraction of the casualties, perhaps only those suffered by Cheka’s own personnel. A recent work by a Communist historian states that, judging by incomplete data, between July and September 1918 alone, in twenty-two provinces, some 15,000 Soviet “supporters” (storonniki) had been killed, by which are meant Red Army troops, members of supply detachments, and Communist officials.92 A history of the Communist Party in Cheliabinsk shows a photograph of a Red Army detachment of 300 men posing around a machine gun. According to the caption, the entire unit, save for a single survivor, perished in the course of a “kulak uprising.”93 Obviously, comparable casualties must have been incurred in other regions and provinces, on both sides.94
The anti-Communist peasant rising of 1918–19, whose course is not even approximately known, was ultimately suppressed. Although the peasant rebels exceeded government forces manifold, they were handicapped by lack of firepower and, above all, lack of organization: each rising was spontaneous and localized.95 The SRs, despite their dominant role in the village, refused to organize the peasants, almost certainly out of fear of playing into the hands of the Whites.
Notwithstanding the brutality of the supply detachments, only negligible food supplies reached the cities: the little food that they managed to extract was appropriated by their members. On July 24, 1918, two months after the food detachments had been instituted, Lenin informed Stalin that as yet no food had reached either Petrograd or Moscow.96 This fiasco of the most brutal policy conceivable drove Lenin into paroxysms of fury. As the time for the harvest approached and dispatches from the rural “front” indicated continued lack of success, he berated Bolshevik commanders for their irresolution and ordered ever more savage reprisals. On August 10, he cabled Tsiurupa:
1. It is an arch-scandal, an insane scandal, that Saratov has bread and we are unable to collect it.…
2. A decree project: in every bread-producing district, 25–30 hostages from among the rich, who answer with their lives for the collection and delivery of all the surplus.97
When Tsiurupa responded: “One can take hostages when one has real power. Does it exist? This is doubtful.” Lenin wrote back: “I propose not to take the ‘hostages’ but to designate them.”98 This was the earliest mention of the practice of hostage-taking, which four weeks later, under the “Red Terror,” would be carried out on a mass scale. That Lenin was earnest about this barbarian policy is evident from an instruction that he sent to Penza province, where a peasant revolt was in progress:
While suppressing the uprising in the five districts, apply all efforts and adopt all measures in order to remove all the grain surpluses from their owners, accomplishing this concurrently with the suppression of the uprising. For this purpose designate in every district (designate, do not seize) hostages, by name, from among kulaks, rich men, and exploiters, whom you are to charge with responsibility for the collection and delivery to assigned stations or grain-collecting points and for turning over to the authorities of all the surplus grain without exception.
The hostages are answerable with their lives for the accurate and prompt payment of the contribution …l99
On August 6, Lenin decreed an “intensification of the merciless mass terror” against the “counterrevolutionary” part of the “bourgeoisie” and the “merciless extermination of the traitors” who used hunger as a “weapon.” All who resisted seizures of surplus grain, including “bagmen,” were to be turned over to Revolutionary Tribunals, and if caught armed, to be shot on the spot.100 In a spell of mindless wrath, Lenin ordered that the “kulaks” be deprived not only of their surplus grain but also of that required to sow the next crop.101 His speeches and written instructions of this period indicate that his frustration at the peasantry’s resistance robbed him of the ability to think rationally. This is evident from his appeal to industrial workers in August 1918, in which he exhorted them to “the last, decisive battle”:
The kulak insanely detests Soviet authority and is ready to suffocate, to carve up hundreds of thousands of workers.… Either the kulaks will cut up a boundless number of workers, or the workers will mercilessly crush the uprisings of the thievish minority of the people against the power of toilers. There can be no middle ground here.… The kulaks are the most beastly, the coarsest, the most savage exploiters.… These bloodsuckers have waxed rich during the war on the people’s want, they have amassed thousands and hundreds of thousands.… These spiders have grown fat at the expense of peasants, impoverished by the war, of hungry workers. These leeches have drunk the blood of toilers, growing the richer the more the worker starved in the cities and factories. These vampires have gathered and continue to gather in their hands the lands of landlords, enslaving, time and again, the poor peasants. Merciless war against these kulaks! Death to them.*
As one historian has aptly observed, “this was probably the first occasion when the leader of a modern state incited the populace to the social equivalent of genocide.”102 It was characteristic of Lenin to disguise an offensive action as self-defense, in this case defense against a completely imaginary threat on the part of the “kulaks” physically to annihilate the working class. His fanaticism on the subject knew no limits: in December 1919 he said that “we”—a pronoun he did not further define but which was unlikely to include himself and his associates—“will sooner all perish” than allow free trade in grain.103