In two months, the Bolsheviks realized their mistake. On August 17, 1918, Lenin and Tsiurupa issued a special directive ordering a drive to win over the middle peasantry and unite it with the poor against the rich.126 Lenin repeatedly asserted afterward that his regime was not an enemy of the middle peasant.127 But such verbal concessions meant little, given that the middle peasant had the food and hence was the main victim of Bolshevik food-extraction policies.
Peasants were utterly confounded by Bolshevik agrarian policies. They had understood the “Revolution” to mean volia, or anarchy, which to them meant relief from all obligations to the state. Peasants were heard to complain: “They promised to turn over all the land, not to collect taxes, not to take into the army, and now what …?”128 Indeed, their obligations to the Communist state were much heavier than under tsarism: by calculations of Communist scholars at the very least twice as heavy, since they now consisted not only of taxes but also of forced labor and other obligations, of which the duty to cut and cart lumber was the most onerous.129 The vocabulary of sutsilism, as they called it, which urban agitators tried to foist on them, struck the peasants as gibberish, and they reacted as they had always done under similar circumstances, retranslating foreign words into language familiar to them. They began to suspect they had been had, but they were determined to hold out, believing themselves to be indispensable and, therefore, invincible. In the meantime, common sense told them that as long as they could not dispose of it on the open market, there was no profit in producing a surplus. This led to a steady decline of food production that in 1921 would contribute greatly to the famine.
The Bolsheviks could claim to their credit that they had at last penetrated the village by inserting there a network of soviets under their control. But this was to some extent an illusion. Studies carried out in the early 1920s revealed that the villages ignored the Communist soviets, set up at such cost and effort. Authority by then had reverted to communal organizations, run by heads of households, just as if there had been no Revolution. The village soviets had to obtain approval of their resolutions from the commune; many did not even have their own budget.130
In the light of these facts, it is astonishing to have Lenin claim that the campaign against the village had not only been a complete success but transcended in historic importance the October coup. In December 1918 he boasted that during the past year the regime had solved problems that “in previous revolutions had been the greatest impediment to the work of socialism.” In the initial stage of the Revolution, he said, the Bolsheviks had joined with the poor, middle, and rich peasants in the fight against the landlords. This alliance left the rural “bourgeoisie” intact. If that situation were allowed to become permanent, the Revolution would have stopped halfway and then inevitably receded. Such a danger was now averted because the “proletariat” had awakened the rural poor and together with them attacked the village bourgeoisie. The Russian Revolution thus had already progressed beyond the Western European bourgeois-democratic revolutions, creating the basis for a merger of the urban and rural proletariats and laying the groundwork for the introduction in Russia of collective farming. “Such is the significance,” Lenin exulted,
of the revolution which occurred during the current summer and fall in the most out-of-the-way corners of rural Russia. It was not noisy, it was not clearly visible, and it did not strike everyone’s eyes as much as did the October Revolution of last year, but it had an incomparably deeper and greater significance. 131
Of course, this was wild exaggeration. The Bolshevization of the village of which Lenin boasted would be accomplished only ten years later by Stalin. But, as in so many other respects, Stalin’s course had been charted by Lenin.
*For instance, on December 11, 1918, at a Congress of Committees of the Poor, Lenin moved a resolution calling for the collectivization of land at the earliest possible time: Lenin, PSS, XXXVII, 356, and Lenin, Sochineniia, XXIII, 587–88. The Law on the Socialization of Land, issued on January 27/February 9, 1918, committed the government to “developing collective agriculture as more convenient in terms of economizing labor and products, at the expense of individual fanning, for the purpose of a transition to a socialist economy”: Dekrety, I, 408.
*V. R. Gerasimiuk in ISSSR, No. 1 (1965), 100. V. P. Danilov, Pereraspredelenie zemel’nogo fonda Rossii (Moscow, 1979), 283–87 (cited in V. V. Kabanov, Krest’ianskoe khoziaistvo v usloviiakh “Voennogo Kommunizma,” Moscow, 1988, 49), says that as a result of the Revolution peasant holdings increased 29.8 percent, but from this figure one must deduct the land taken over by collective and other Soviet farms. Radical intellectuals in the late nineteenth century gathered from peasants that they had hoped the Black Repartition would bring them from 5 to 15 desiatiny: V. L. Debagorii-Mokrievich, Vospominaniia (St. Petersburg, 1906), 137, and G. I. Uspenskii, Sobranie Sochinenii, V (Moscow, 1956), 130.
†According to one intellectual who lived from October 1918 until November 1920 in a village in the Tambov province, the peasants doubted that the land they had acquired was really theirs because it was not given them by the Tsar: A. L. Okninskii, Dva goda sredi krest’ian (Riga, [1936]), 27. It is the land they allotted to poor peasants, if forced to share the loot with them.
*With the prewar ruble worth 0.78 gram of gold, these savings would have purchased 3,900 tons of gold.
†Properties bought by the Land Bank from landlords between 1906 and 1915 cost, on the average, 161 rubles per desiatina: P. I. Liashchenko, Istoriia narodnogo khoziaistva SSSR, II, 3rd ed. (Leningrad, 1952), 270. The estimate of peasants’ home savings comes from NZh, No. 56/271 (March 31, 1918), 2.
*Otruba were land allotments intermingled with communal strips, while khutora formed separate farmsteads. Both were held in private property.
*Gerasimiuk in ISSSR, No. 1 (1965), 100; O zemle: sbornik statei, I (1921), 25, gives slightly different figures. The reduction in larger holdings was in some measure due to the acceleration of the breakup of joint families in favor of nuclear ones, which had already begun in the late nineteenth century but which the land policies of the Bolsheviks encouraged, because farmers wanted to share in the distribution of confiscated properties, which they could do best as heads of households.
*About one-third of what used to be privately owned agricultural land—3.2 percent of the acreage under cultivation—mainly large estates devoted to “technical” cultures, was taken over by state-run collective farms. In theory, they could have helped alleviate the food shortage in the cities. But their inventory having been looted by local peasants, they were of little, if any, help: L. N. Kritsman, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia i derevnia (Moscow-Leningrad, 1929), 86–87.
*Kabanov, Krest’ianskoe khoziaistvo, 159. The peasant who received such unrealistic prices for his product had to buy manufactured goods (e.g., matches, nails, and kerosene), which were becoming scarcer each day, at free market prices.
*One well-informed visitor to Soviet Russia in 1920 reported even more staggering reductions. Petrograd’s population is said to have declined from 3 million in 1917 to 500,000: Alexander Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth (Diary 1920–1022), (London, 1925), 33.