Such were the words of the chairman of the Siberian Military Revolutionary Committee (I. N. Smirnov), the functioning Soviet authority in the extended region, although he was only echoing the language of the official Sovnarkom decree that announced the razverstka for Siberia in late July 1920. See Sibirskaia Vandeia, 2, pp. 6-7, 198, 241.
On the famine, see C. E. Bechhofer, Through Starving Russia: Being a Record of a Journey to Moscow and the Volga Provinces in August and September 1921 (London: Metheun & Co., 1921); Bertrand Patenaude, Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russian in the Famine of 1921 (Palo
Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002); Marcus Wehner, 'Golod 1921-1922 gg. v Samarskoi gubernii i reaktsiia sovetskogo pravitel'stva', Cahiers du Monde russe 38, nos. 1-2 (1997), pp. 223-42; Narskii, Zhizn v katastrofe, pp. 258-74.
Denis Borisov, Kolesnikovshchina. Antikommunisticheskoe vosstanie voronezhskogo krest'ianstva v 1920-1921 gg.(Moscow: Posev, 2012), p. 81; Narskii, Zhizn v katastrofe, pp. 254-55.
Lenin, PSS, vol. 43, pp. 18, 59.
Trotsky, My Life, p. 395.
This is described in E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, 3 vols (London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1952), vol. 2, pp. 331-44.
Trotsky did note in his autobiography, written in 1930, that Lenin came round to the idea of the tax-in-kind only after '[t]he uprisings at Kronstadt and in the province of Tambov broke into the discussion as the last warning' (My Life, p. 397). Larin was a bit less politic with his public comments at the Communist Party Conference in May 1921, when he explained that
his earlier proposals would have helped end the Civil War sooner. See Pavliuchenkov, Krest'ianskii Brest, p. 142; Protokoly desiatoi vserossiiskoi konferentsii RKP (bol'shevikov). Mai 1921 g. (Moscow: Partiinoe izd., 1933), p. 63.
Quoted in W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 90.
Joseph Stalin, Sochineniia, 13 vols (Moscow: Gos. izd. politliteratury, 194653), vol. 6, pp. 86-87.
The best recent literature on the NEP period is found in the fields of social and, particularly, cultural history. See Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Anne Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
Stalin's trip to the Urals and abandonment of the NEP is most recently discussed in Stephen Kotkin, Stalin. Volume 1: The Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 (New York: Penguin, 2014), pp. 662-76. On collectivisation and 'de-kulakisation', see Lynne Viola et al., eds, The War Against the Peasantry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
chapter 13. the 'bolshevik reformation'
The decree was published in the central Soviet press only on 23 Februarys- sources often give this date rather than the date when it was signed into law.
The parallels between Soviet religious iconoclasm and those in the Reformation of the Christian Church during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are in some ways striking (see e.g. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping
of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-c. 1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). However, the Soviet case involved a far more extreme rebellion against the architectural and artistic canons of the past, since the reformers hoped to negate religious belief in its entirety, not specific doctrines, social structures and practices within the Roman tradition of Christianity.
See e.g. the coverage in Petrogradskayapravda (henceforth PP), 26 January 1922. While recent historical research has confirmed this picture of inadequate aid efforts, it has also challenged the Soviet-era causality: V A. Polyakov's massive study, Golod na Povolzh'e, 1919-1925 (Volgograd: Volgogradskoe nauchnoe izdatel'stvo, 2007), underlines that the famine began early in 1921, well before the drought itself, and that its devastating effects were attributable to the Bolsheviks' agricultural and food distribution policies rather than natural disaster. Indeed, the American Relief Administration began aid negotiations as early as 1919 (Harold H. Fisher, The Famine in Soviet Russia, 1919-1923: The Operations of the American Relief Administration (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927)). At the same time, recent claims that agitation about the famine was simply an instrument of repression distort reality. The Scottish-Canadian journalist F. A. Mackenzie, a resolutely anti-Soviet observer who visited Buzuluk in 1921, recorded that 'thousands were flocking in from the country and people were dying in the streets', and that the cemetery warden 'took me to the further end of the cemetery and showed me the great pits full to the top with the naked bodies of the newly dead'. (The Russian Crucifixion: The Full Story of the Persecution of Religion Under Bolshevism (London: Jarrolds, 1927), p. 23; cf. Fisher, pp. 71-72).
PP, 18 February 1922, p. 2. Vvedensky was a figure both colourful and murky. As late as 1923, he was, according to a Finnish-Swedish visitor and qualified observer of the Soviet scene, swanking about Petrograd in a carriage drawn by two 'beautiful greys', accompanied by society ladies, while himself was elegantly dressed in white silk (Boris [Leonidovich] Cederholm, In the Clutches of the Tcheka, trans. F. H. Lyon (London: George Allen and Unwin
Ltd, 1929)). An informant of Cederholm's claimed that Vvedensky was 'a cynical, unprincipled voluptary, who believes neither in God nor the devil', ibid.
See e.g. PP, 30 March 1922, p. 2.
L. D. Trotsky, letter to the Politburo, 17 March 1922, Arkhivy Kremlya, vol. 1, Politburo i tserkov', 1922-1925 gg. (Moscow and Novosibirsk: ROSSPEN/ Sibirskii poligraf, 1997) (http://krotov.info/acts/20/1920/1922_0.htm), document no. 23: 14 (henceforth AK and by document no.) On high- level planning of the confiscations, see the archive-based discussion in Jonathan Daly, '"Storming the Last Citadel": The Bolshevik Assault on the Church, 1922', in Vladimir N. Brovkin, ed., The Bolsheviks in Russian Society: The Revolution and Civil Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997),
pp. 236-59.
See e.g. the text of the law published in Krasnayagazeta (henceforth KG), 23 February 1922, p. 3.
The history of the so-called 'Renovationist' movement went back to the 1900s, and particularly to the debates preceding the Orthodox Church's Local Council, eventually held in 1917-18, but widely discussed from 1905-6. 'Renovation' attained new energy under the Bolshevik regime, since the political context encouraged clergy's own hopes of reform, and there was support among some political agents for using the reformists as a 'Trojan horse' to weaken the official church. The complicated history of all this has been the subject of several book-length studies: see e.g. Edward Roslof, Red Priests: Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905-1946 (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2002).
160 poods, according to the traditional Russian system of weights and measures. AK, no. 23-42. That said, the Soviet government was under pressure from the US side to demonstrate willingness to expend its own gold resources on famine relief before external aid was provided. On 2 September 1921, President Hoover wrote to Colonel Haskell of the ARA.: 'As you are aware, it is reported here that Soviet Government has still some resources in gold and metals, and it does seem to me fundamental that they should expend these sums at once in the purchase of breadstuff's from abroad. While even this will be insufficient to cover their necessities, they can scarcely expect the rest of the world to make sacrifices until they have exhausted their own resources' (Fisher, p. 155). The US administration certainly did not anticipate the confiscations from churches, but the frantic search for precious metal supplies in the autumn-winter of 1921-22 was