THE FATE OF THE SOVIET COUNTRYSIDE
March 1920 erik c. landis
O
f the many challenges that faced the Soviet government in the Russian Civil War, none was greater than overcoming the breakdown in the supply of food that had started before the February Revolution of 1917, and had itself been a significant factor in the fall of the Russian autocracy. Procuring food from the farmers to feed the Red Army and the civilian population in the Soviet heartland of the urban, industrial centres of northern European Russia forced the ruling party into a number of policy changes and attempted innovations between 1918 and 1921. However, in the conditions of civil conflict, the procurement of food from the farming peasantry nearly always boiled down in practice to a reliance upon 'administrative measures' and 'taking grain'.1 The challenge of securing food to meet the needs of the state generated almost continuous conflict in the Soviet countryside during the Civil War, pitting village farming communities against state procurement squads.
Throughout this period, agricultural production declined. On the eve of the harvest in the autumn of 1920, at a time when the outcome of the Civil War was all but settled, with the main forces of the White armies defeated and the Soviet government seeking a way out of its war with nationalist Poland, another round of grain requisitioning by armed procurement squads sparked a wave of unrest in the Soviet countryside that escalated to an unprecedented scale, with sustained anti-Soviet insurgencies occurring in a number of important regions of the Soviet Republic. Restoring control over the regions consumed by this violence required the deployment of hundreds of thousands of Red Army troops, and frequently this was only after hastily mobilised (and poorly armed) units of local Communist Party members had tried and failed, at great cost, to suppress the resistance in the provinces and regions they ostensibly 'controlled'. The Civil War, in effect, was extended by nearly a full year as the struggle for grain became an all-out war.
This 'second civil war', as one historian preferred to describe it,2 was ended only after tens of thousands were killed in the course of the rebellions. In the language of the regime, the rebellions were the product of the machinations of subversive, counter-revolutionary 'kulaks', or rich peasants who were the inveterate enemies of Soviet power, working with the regime's socialist rivals, the Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR), and the 'international bourgeoisie'. And it was amid this wave of violence that significant parts of the republic suffered extensive harvest failures, bringing famine to areas such as the Middle Volga and the Urals region of western Siberia, in which several millions lost their lives. Yet it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this was an avoidable coda to the era of revolution and civil war, and that it was the consequence of decisions taken by the Soviet leadership at the start of 1920.
The present essay concerns the end of the Russian Civil War, and describes the opportunities that were passed up to demobilise the Soviet state machinery that had been hothoused in the conditions of civil conflict over the previous two years. The year typically given for the conclusion of the Russian Civil War is 1921, and while armed clashes continued for several months across the former Russian Empire, the critical moment in this chronology is the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) by the Communist Party leadership, initiated with the decision in March 1921 to end the practice of forced grain requisitioning - of 'taking grain' - a measure soon followed by decrees that, among other measures, partially decriminalised the market. Permitting the peasants to dispense (relatively) freely with their produce after a tax ('in kind', or in the form of foodstuffs) was assessed and collected, was a radical reversal of Soviet policy. It was adopted as a means of defusing the anger and desperation that had given rise to the rural violence of the previous several months, and which had also become the focus of urban protests and mutiny in the armed forces. This was the first, and most important, step taken in the process of reconstruction for the Soviet state, itself desperate to put an end to the years of continuous war-related strife that began in 1914.
In March 1920, a full year before Lenin introduced the reforms that would lay the foundation for the NEP, proposals were advanced by Leon Trotsky to end grain requisitioning and to seek an alternative that appealed to the individual incentives of farmers. In the course of a trip to the Urals in January and February 1920, the Commissar for War emerged of the opinion that the current approach to food procurement was unsustainable, detrimental both to the health of the agricultural economy and to relations with the rural population. In the spirit of post-war reconstruction, which the Soviet leadership was openly discussing at the start of 1920, Trotsky suggested a number of possibilities, including a return of market-driven exchanges between agricultural producers and manufacturers, to help incentivise the farmers to produce more grain and other foodstuffs. In germ form, Trotsky's ideas strongly resembled what would be adopted by the party, but only after several months of further violence and suffering linked with an ill-fated continuation of the wartime food procurement policy. Trotsky's ideas, however, were dismissed by his colleagues in the Soviet government.
The ramifications of this decision extend beyond the human suffering of the final phase of the Civil War. Less than a decade later, another senior Soviet official would make a hastily arranged trip to the Urals region, and in familiarising himself with the situation there, and with a concern for resolving a crisis of grain supply and political control in the countryside, would publicly advocate a return to compulsory surplus grain deliveries and confronting the menace of 'kulak' sabotage once and for all. Joseph Stalin's speech in Novosibirsk in January 1928 would set the USSR on the path towards full-scale collectivisation of agriculture, activating a militant strain within the Communist Party that had never been reconciled with the ignominious 'retreat' of March 1921, when the party was forced to yield to 'kulak' pressure and adopt the New Economic Policy. The speech in Novosibirsk in 1928 was a vital moment in the formation of what became Soviet socialism and in the creation of the Stalin dictatorship, and it is linked in revealing ways with the Civil War and the party's earlier efforts to manage the challenges of building socialism in a peasant country.
In December 1919, even though the armies of the White forces had not yet been completely defeated, the outcome of the Civil War in Russia appeared clear. Russia's former allies in the First World War had withdrawn their troops from the north and far east of the former empire, and with that their financial and material support of the White armies had been significantly scaled back all along the periphery of the future Soviet Union, from Murmansk to Vladivostok. The White forces of Admiral Kolchak in Siberia, whose offensive in the spring of 1919 momentarily appeared to be the greatest threat to the Soviet regime in Moscow, were in the final stage of the longest military retreat in modern history, and Kolchak himself was only weeks away from arrest and execution just east of Lake Baikal. The forces of General Yudenich, which had threatened to take Petrograd in October 1919, were definitively routed by November, and the White armies under General Denikin had seen their 'drive to Moscow' reach its height in the early autumn of 1919, retreating back to the Don and Kuban territories of southern Russia in the final weeks of that year as rapidly as they had advanced earlier in the summer.