Moscow saw the kombedy as a transitional institution: it was Lenin’s intention to have them transformed into soviets. In November 1918 he declared: “We shall fuse the kombedy with the soviets, we will arrange it so that the kombedy will become soviets.”114 The next day, Zinoviev addressed the Congress of Soviets on this subject. He declared that it was the task of the kombedy to reshape rural soviets so that they would resemble urban ones, that is, become organs of “socialist construction.” This required nationwide “re-elections” to the rural soviets on the basis of rules which the Central Executive Committee would lay down.115 These rules were announced on December 2.116 Here it was stated that because the rural soviets had been elected before the “socialist revolution” reached the countryside, they continued to be dominated by “kulaks.” It had now become necessary to bring rural soviets into “full harmony” with the urban ones. Nationwide réélections to soviets on the village and volost’ level were to take place under the supervision of the kombedy. To ensure that the new rural soviets acquired a proper “class” character, the executives of the provincial city soviets would supervise the elections and where necessary, remove from them undesirable elements.* Kulaks and other speculators and exploiters were to be disenfranchised. Ignoring the provisions of the 1918 Constitution that all power in the country belonged to the soviets, the decree defined the “main task” of the freshly elected rural soviets to be the “realization of all the decisions of the corresponding higher organs of the Soviet authority”—that is, the central government. Their own authority—closely modeled on that of the zemstva of tsarist Russia—was to be confined to raising the “cultural and economic standards” of their area by such means as gathering statistical data, promoting local industry, and helping the government to appropriate grain. In other words, they were to be transformed primarily into conveyors of bureaucratic decisions and secondarily into institutions charged with improving the living conditions of the population. Once they had accomplished their mission, kombedy were to be dissolved.†
The reelections to the volost’ and village soviets, which took place in the winter of 1918–19, followed closely the pattern previously established by the Bolsheviks in the cities.117 All executive posts were preassigned to members of the Communist Party as well as to “sympathizers” or “partyless.” Since the peasants stubbornly elected and reelected their own candidates, Moscow devised methods that ensured the results it wanted. In most localities, the voting was done in the open,118 which had an intimidating effect, since a peasant who did not vote as directed risked being labeled a “kulak.” No party other than the Communist was allowed to participate: this was ensured by a provision that only those parties and factions could put up candidates which “stood on the platform of Soviet authority.” Protests that the 1918 Constitution made no mention of parties taking part in soviet elections were brushed aside.119 In many localities, Communist Party cells insisted on approving every candidate who stood for the election. If, these precautions notwithstanding, “kulaks” or other undesirables still managed to win executive positions, as seems frequently to have happened, the Communists resorted to their favorite technique of declaring the election invalid and ordering it repeated. This could be done as often as necessary until the desired results were obtained. One Soviet historian says that it was not uncommon for three or four or more “elections” to be held in succession.120 And still, the peasants kept on electing “kulaks”—that is, non-Bolsheviks and anti-Bolsheviks. Thus, in Samara province in 1919 no fewer than 40 percent of the members of the new volost’ soviets turned out to be “kulaks.”121 To put an end to such insubordination, the party issued on December 27, 1919, a directive instructing party organizations in the Petrograd region to submit to the rural soviets a single list of “approved” candidates.122 This practice, in time extended to other areas, put an end to the rural soviets as organs of self-government.
If one were to assess the results of the Bolshevik campaign against the village in the military terms in which it was conceived, one would have to declare the village the winner. While the Bolsheviks did gain some of their political objectives, they failed both to divide the peasantry against itself and to extract from it significant quantities of food. Even its political gains were soon erased: for as the Red Army units were recalled in 1919 to meet the threat from the White armies, the village reverted to its old ways.
The extraction of foodstuffs also gave the regime little cause for satisfaction. Communist sources are uncharacteristically reticent about the quantities of food obtained by means of forceful seizures, but such evidence as they do provide suggests they were minuscule. It is said that during the 1918 harvest (lasting from mid-August to early November) the supply detachments, assisted by the Red Army, and the Committees of the Poor extracted from the twelve provinces with surpluses 35 million puds, or 570,000 tons, of grain.* Since the 1918 harvest yielded 3 billion puds, or 49 million tons,123 it appears that all that effort and all that brutality—troops firing machine guns, pitched battles, hostages with death sentences hanging over their heads—brought in only one-hundredth of the harvest. The authorities acknowledged the failure of the policy of raiding the countryside when they introduced on January 11, 1919, taxation in kind (prodovol’stvennaia razvërstka or prodrazvërstka), which replaced confiscations of all surplus with strict norms specifying the quantities the peasant had to turn over. These were established on the basis of the state’s needs, without regard to the producers’ ability to deliver. To ensure delivery, the government reverted to the Chinese-Mongol system of imposing quotas on districts and subdistricts, which then distributed the load among their villages and communes. The latter were bound, as in earlier tsarist days, by collective responsibility (krugovaia poruka) for meeting their obligations. This system, which at least introduced some order, originally covered grain and feed, but was later extended to include virtually all foodstuffs. For the goods which he was compelled to turn over the peasant received money which bought nothing: in 1920 Lenin described to the visiting Bertrand Russell with a chuckle how his government forced the muzhik to take worthless paper for his grain.* 124 And even so, barely two years later, in the spring of 1921, yielding to stubborn reality, Lenin, who had said that he would rather have everyone die of hunger than allow free trade in grain, had to back down and give up the grain monopoly.
The regime also failed to unleash a class war in the village. The small minority of “rich” peasants and the equally small minority of “poor” ones drowned in the sea of “middle” peasants, all three of whom refused to wage fratricidal war. In the words of one historian, “the kulak stood for the village and the village for the kulak.”125