The Bolshevik Government treated the peasant population as a class enemy and waged on it a regular war by means of Red Army units and detachments of armed thugs. The program of 1918—to choke off all private trade in agricultural produce—had to be modified in view of fierce peasant resistance. In 1919 and 1920, the government extracted food from the peasantry by a variety of means: forced deliveries, barter of food for manufactured goods, and purchases at somewhat more realistic prices. In 1919, it allowed limited quantities of food to be sold on the open market. Dairy products, meats, fruits, most vegetables, and all foodstuffs growing wild were initially exempt from state control but later regulated as well.
Through a combination of coercion and inducement, the government managed somehow to feed the cities and industrial centers, not to speak of the Red Army. But the prospects for the future looked bleak because the peasant, having no incentives to grow more than he needed for himself, kept on reducing the cultivated acreage. In the grain-growing provinces, between 1913 and 1920, the area under cultivation diminished by 12.5 percent.97 The decline in sown acreage, however, does not fully reveal the fall in cereal production. First of all, since the peasants either consumed or set aside for seed three-quarters of the harvest, a decline of 12.5 percent in sown acreage meant that the arable land available to produce a grain surplus for the non-agrarian population dropped by one-half. Second, yields kept on declining at the same time that the sown area shrank, due largely to the shortage of draft horses, one-quarter of which had been requisitioned by the armed forces. The yields per acre in 1920 were only 70 percent what they had been before the war.98 A 12.5 decline in acreage accompanied by a 30 percent decline in yields meant that the grain output was only 60 percent of the prewar figure. A Communist economist provides statistics which show that this, indeed, is what happened:
PRODUCTION OF CEREAL GRAINS IN CENTRAL RUSSIA99 (in millions of tons) 1913 78.2 1917 69.1 1920 48.2
It required only a spell of bad weather for the harvest to fall to the level of starvation. Under Communist management, there was no surplus and hence no capacity to absorb the consequences of a poor harvest. That such a calamity was in the offing became a near-certainty in the fall of 1920, when Communist papers began to carry warnings of a new “enemy”—
True famine, Asiatic famine such as neither Russia nor the rest of Europe had ever experienced and in which millions were to perish, still lay in the future. For the time being, there was hunger, a permanent state of undernourishment that drained energy, the ability to work, the very will to live. A leading Bolshevik economist, analyzing in 1920 the decline in industrial productivity, ascribed it principally to food shortages. According to his calculations, between 1908 and 1916 the average Russian worker had consumed 3,820 calories a day, whereas by 1919 his intake was reduced to 2,680 calories, not enough for heavy manual labor.101 This 30 percent drop in caloric intake, in his opinion, was the main cause of the 40 percent decline in worker productivity in the large cities. This, of course, was a great oversimplification, but it pointed to a very real problem. Another Communist expert estimated that using pre-revolutionary criteria, according to which an annual bread consumption of 180–200 kilograms meant hunger, the Soviet worker in the northern regions in 1919–20, with a consumption of 134 kilograms, was starving.102 If Russian cities at this point did not collapse from hunger, it was due to the fortuitous coincidence that just as this was about to happen, the Bolsheviks won the Civil War and reconquered Siberia as well as the North Caucasus and the Ukraine, which under non-Communist rule had managed to accumulate rich stores of grain.
In the words of Trotsky, “the socialist organization of the economy begins with the liquidation of the market.” Indeed, to the Marxist, the market, the arena for the exchange of commodities, is the heart of the capitalist economy, just as money is its lifeblood. Without it, capitalism cannot function. The choking off of the free exchange of products and services, therefore, constituted a central objective of Bolshevik economic policy. Nationalization of the market and centralization of distribution were not, as is often erroneously argued, responses to shortages caused by the Revolution and the Civil War, but positive initiatives directed against the capitalist enemy, which caused shortages.
The Bolsheviks went to extreme lengths to eliminate the free exchange of commodities. They spelled out their intention in the 1919 party program:
