The Russian Revolution полностью

Russia was not immediately afflicted by inflation because the suspension of exports at the beginning of the war meant that for a while the quantity of goods on the market matched and even exceeded demand. Inflation made itself felt only toward the end of 1915, rising dramatically the following year. It fed on itself as owners of commodities, especially foodstuffs, withheld them from the market in anticipation of still higher prices. The following table depicts the relationship between the emissions of paper money and the movement of prices in wartime Russia:*

Inflation not only did not hurt but positively benefited the rural population, for the peasants commanded the most valuable commodity of all, food. Descriptions of the countryside in 1915–16 concur that the village basked in unaccustomed prosperity. The military draft had claimed millions of men, easing pressures on the land and, at the same time, raising wages for farm laborers. The conscripted millions were now on the governmental payroll. True, the same draft caused seasonal labor shortages, which the employment of prisoners of war and refugees from the combat zone only partly alleviated. But the muzhik managed to cope with these difficulties, in part by curtailing the area under cultivation. He was swimming in money. It came from a variety of sources: higher prices fetched by farm produce, payments made by the government for requisitioned livestock and horses, and allowances sent to the families of soldiers. The closing of taverns also left large sums at the peasants’ disposal. The peasant saved some of this “mad money,” as it came to be known, by depositing it in government savings accounts or hoarding it at home. The rest he spent on such luxuries as “cocofee” (kakava), “shchocolate” (shchokolat), and phonographs. The more industrious used excess cash to buy land and livestock: statistics compiled in 1916 indicate that peasants owned 89.2 percent of the cultivated (arable) land in European Russia.¹⁰ Contemporary observers were struck by the prosperity of the Russian village in the second year of the war: the war was said to have put an end to its “Chinese-like” immobility.¹¹ Perhaps the best authority of all, the Department of Police, while growing increasingly alarmed over the situation in the cities, reported in the fall of 1916 that the village was “contented and calm.”¹² Such sporadic violence as occasionally erupted in the countryside was directed against neither the government nor landlords, but against the owners of the detested otruba and khutora, fellow peasants who had taken advantage of the Stolypin legislation to withdraw from the commune.¹³

Inflation and shortages bore exclusively on the urban population, which had expanded considerably from the influx of industrial workers and war refugees and the billeting of troops. The urban population is estimated to have grown from 22 to 28 million between 1914 and 1916.¹⁴ The 6 million newcomers from the rural areas swelled the ranks of peasants who had moved into the cities before the war. Like them, they were not urban inhabitants in any meaningful sense, but rather peasants who happened to live in the cities: peasants in uniform waiting to be shipped to the front, peasants employed in war industries to replace workers inducted into the armed forces, peasant peddlers. Their roots remained in the village, to which they were prepared to return at a moment’s notice, and to which, indeed, most of them would return after the Bolshevik coup.