The prospect of a share in the communal land or of setting up in some rural trade was usually enough to lure semi-rural workers back to their native villages. According to a report from the Briansk metallurgical factory in 1920, ‘all the workers with a tie to the village want to leave the factory and settle there’. Generally, the peasants welcomed those workers who had relatives in the village or who had some useful trade to contribute (e.g. carpenters and blacksmiths); but they were very rarely willing to give either land or food to those who had neither. These immigrants were usually left to support themselves by casual labour, and their plight was often desperate. One memoirist from Tambov province recalls these workers and their families ‘walking across the fields after the rye harvest looking for any ears of grain that had been dropped’.40
It was not just the flight of the workers with which the Bolsheviks had to contend. Industry and transport were thrown into chaos by the endless travelling of city people to and from the countryside to buy up stocks of food. Millions of townspeople, from all classes, relied on this petty trade — or ‘bagging’, as it was called — to feed themselves. They would leave the cities with bags of clothes and household goods to sell or exchange in the rural markets, and return with bags of food. The railways were paralysed by the armies of ‘bagmen’. The Orel Station, a major junction en route to the south, had 3,000 bagmen pass through it every day. Many of them travelled in armed brigades which hijacked trains, leaving the local authorities powerless. The most popular destinations — Tambov, Kursk, Kazan, Simbirsk and Saratov provinces — were each invaded by something in the region of 100,000 bagmen every month.41
For the hungry cities of the north this primitive trade was a universal means of livelihood. Virtually everyone was forced to turn themselves into a part-time trader — workers, officials, even Communists. It was a natural and spontaneous response to the economic crisis and the breakdown of the market between town and country. But it brought chaos to industry. Nearly all the workers were engaged in the bag trade in some form. Many of them travelled into the countryside with tools, fuel and scrap-iron, which they had stolen from their factories. Others fabricated primitive goods in their factories to barter with the peasants. Primus stoves, penknives and cigarette lighters were the most common trade. But shoe soles were also made from conveyor belts; candlesticks from bits of piping; axes and ploughs from iron bars. The whole phenomenon became known as ‘cigarette lighterism’ (zazhigolochnichestvo), one of the longest and hardest words to pronounce in the Russian language. It was not uncommon for factory committees to sanction or at least to turn a blind eye to these spontaneous initiatives. Many of the committees gave their own anarchic gloss to the Decree on Workers’ Control, taking it to mean the right of the workers to divide between themselves the products of their labour — or, if there were none, the assets of their factory — just as the peasants had divided up the land. Industry was brought virtually to a halt as most of the workers spent most of their time fabricating these black-market goods and running off to the countryside to barter them for food. On the average day in the average factory 30 per cent of the workforce would be absent. In some metal factories the rate of absenteeism could be as high as 80 per cent.42
During their first precarious months in power the Bolsheviks could do very little to stop this ‘bagging’. Any restrictions they tried to impose were bound to be evaded by the workers who depended on the bag-trade to survive. The right to travel to the countryside for food was a major demand of the workers’ strikes and protests during the spring of 1918. Many of the factories and even some of the district and city Soviets organized this trade on a collective basis. Without recourse to some form of trade, industry would have to come to a complete halt. The factory or the Soviet would make an agreement with a village or a rural Soviet to exchange a certain number of factory goods for an equivalent amount of foodstuffs. A brigade of workers would then be sent to complete the exchange. Try though they did, the Bolsheviks were powerless to prevent this collective bartering. One commissar in Samara province claimed that it was useless trying to stop the bagmen ‘since they all travel with passports from their Soviet’. Local rates of natural exchange began to take the place of money. In Kaluga, for example, a yard of cloth was worth a pound of butter, or two pounds of peas; a pound of soap was worth two pounds of millet; and a pair of boots a pound of potatoes. Flour was the gold standard of this medieval system: a pound was worth thirty pounds of kerosene, or three pounds of tobacco, or a winter coat.43
