Who was a kulak and who was not was clear to no one, and there were neither customary understandings nor legal definitions that enjoyed authority, either before the revolution or after. When the Soviet government sought to levy an 'Extraordinary Tax' on the rural population in late 1918, to be assessed on the village kulaks, communities that complied tended to distribute the financial burden evenly among the households, or protested to state authorities that there were no kulaks among them. Collection rates were disappointing, and local officials admitted that acceptable rates of collection could only truly be achieved at gunpoint.9
Waves ofviolence occurred in early 1919, with entire regions overrun by rural rebels who tried to form organised insurgencies, but these proved to be spectacular but short-lived flares of protest. Denounced by Soviet officials as evidence of the strength of kulak influence, such violent protests struggled to carve a space within the polarised context of revolution and civil war. In the Middle Volga region that encompassed the provinces of Samara and Simbirsk, a rebellion lasting just over two weeks rapidly dismantled rural state administration and sent Communist Party members into hiding as angry communities tried to exact revenge for what were viewed as unjust requisitions and confiscations of grain and livestock, and for the conduct of state agents in the countryside, popularly understood to be brutal and arbitrary.10 With estimates placing the number of villagers to take up weapons as anywhere between fifty and one hundred and fifty thousand, it was the largest such rebellion in this region of Russia since the time of Emelian Pugachev in the 1770s. In attempting to clarify the situation on the ground near the epicentre of the rebellion, the Communist Party secretary for Simbirsk province, I. M. Vareikis, found himself speaking with the chairman of the district soviet in the village of Novodevich'e, a man by the name of Poruchikov. Assuming that Poruchikov was a loyal servant of the regime, Vareikis asked for information about the 'counter-revolutionary uprising', and about the number of 'kulaks and deserters' that were behind it. Unexpectedly, Poruchikov revealed himself to be unapologetically on the side of the rebels:
These are no kulak uprisings, nor have there ever been, and we have no counterrevolutionaries, [the people] are against the improper requisitioning of grain and livestock[;] we welcome the Bolshevik party and are not fighting against them, we are against the communists, but in general there are no counterrevolutionaries, we are opposed to the improper requisitioning of grain and livestock, there are no kulak uprisings, all the peasants are honest toilers. The number of rebels taking part - all the villages and hamlets. We would like it if you would come here yourself, and see who is rebelling... You see, comrade Vareikis, we are not saboteurs, we only want to have a chance to talk with you; you will see for yourself that we are right, and that the people here will listen to you.11
If anything, the violent protests against requisitioning only forced state officials to dig in, spurred on by the (valid) reports of hardship in the cities and 'grain-deficit' regions, and by the conviction that sufficient grain was out there, and that the only way to get it was by overcoming 'kulak' resistance.12
What was becoming clear, however, to some outside of the food supply bureaucracy of the Soviet state (Narkomprod), and particularly to those who witnessed the collection of grain by armed requisition squads, was that the razverstka was unsustainable. While the razverstka declared that the basic consumption needs of the household would be respected (in accordance with defined 'norms' of consumption), the achievement of collection targets always took priority. As one Narkom- prod official in a central Russian province told his colleagues at the local Congress of Soviets: 'the kulak peasantry has learned to hide its grain much more effectively than we have learned to find it. That is why the razverstka must be pursued without regard for "norms".'13 The image of the kulak justified many of the shortcomings of the razverstka system. While possessing a veneer of data-driven credibility, with its projections on harvests and its delineation of consumptions norms, the system was driven in practice by the desperate need to control as much of the available food in the country as was possible.14
Despite the fact that the logic of the razverstka policy held that produce not required by the state under its targets could be retained by farming households, without any legal means of disposing with this surplus, and precious few products available to exchange for grain, there was no incentive to produce above the basic needs of the household itself.15 Official statistics and anecdotal reports strongly indicated that farming households were reducing their sown acreage, with yields similarly falling, in some areas by over one third.16 There were many factors at play in creating this outcome. The number of households had increased since 1917, with the average size of those households going down. This made them less productive, both because of military mobilisation and because the productive capacity of those households was declining, with horses requisitioned for military purposes and agricultural implements falling into disrepair without available replacements.17 For many of the most significant grain-growing regions, the shifting fronts of the Civil War itself was profound enough to significantly disrupt the agricultural cycle.
These circumstances were significant, but the voluntary factor - the lack of incentives to produce above subsistence - was much more controversial within Communist Party circles, unless it was expressed with reference to 'kulak sabotage'. The flourishing black market was obvious for all to see, and later studies would confirm that it was absolutely vital to the survival of the urban population in Soviet Russia, for whom the dwindling state rations could not cover their needs.18 While the state procurement campaign in 1919 had been a success, close observers recognised that this was not the result ofsome sort oftransformation (what the optimists in the Communist Party frequently called a perelom) in the relations between the farming peasantry and the Soviet regime. It was instead the result of procurement being conducted on an ever-larger scale, in territories 'liberated' by the Red Army (whose own fortunes had experienced a decisive perelom). Yet anxieties among the rural and town populations alike were quick to appear in those newly liberated territories, as the prospect of sweeps by armed requisition squads and by militia policing illegal trade activities acquired greater salience.19
In the days that followed the production of Trotsky's open letter to Ivan Sigunov, the Commissar for War spent time travelling through parts of the Urals region near Ekaterinburg. Simply put, little is known about Trotsky's movements during this time. (Unlike Stalin's trip later in the decade, Trotsky's journey to the Urals was not the subject of countless official reminiscences, and has not attracted the same level of detailed historical examination.) However, his observations of this region - one of those recently 'liberated', which had yet to feel the full weight of Soviet demands, but which had nevertheless suffered considerably under Kolchak - did produce a proposal that Trotsky submitted for consideration by the Communist Party's Central Committee when he returned to Moscow in March. In it, he provided an assessment of the current situation with food collection, in concise terms describing the critical importance of the state's policy to the overall economic prospects of the republic.