Until then, in Lenin’s view, it was necessary to (1) assert state control over the food supply by means of a strictly enforced monopoly on the grain trade and (2) introduce Communist power bases in the countryside. These objectives required nothing less than declaring civil war on the village. Such a war the Bolsheviks launched in the summer of 1918. The campaign against the peasantry, virtually ignored in Western historiography, constituted a critical phase in the Bolshevik conquest of Russia. Lenin himself believed that it prevented a rural counterrevolution and ensured that the Russian Revolution, unlike its Western precursors, would not stop halfway and then slide backward into “reaction.”
To understand the successes as well as the failures of the Bolshevik assault on the village it is necessary to form an idea of the effects of the Revolution on Russia’s rural economy. As previously noted, in October 1917 the Bolsheviks had set aside their own agrarian program, centered on the nationalization of land, in favor of the SR land program, much more popular among the peasantry, which called for the expropriation, without compensation, and distribution among the communes of all privately held lands, except those belonging to small peasant proprietors.
There is no dispute that the peasants of central Russia welcomed the Land Decree, which realized their old dream of a “Black Repartition.” Even peasants who stood to lose from it because their private holdings were likely to be taken away from them bowed to the inevitable.
But it is a different question altogether whether these essentially demagogic and tactical measures either significantly improved the economic status of the Russian peasant or benefited the country at large.
Land, being an immovable object, can, of course, be distributed only there where it happens to lie. In pre-revolutionary Russia, the bulk of private (non-communal) land subject to expropriation under the Land Decree had been located not in the central, Great Russian provinces, which the Bolsheviks controlled and which had the greatest incidence of rural overpopulation, but on the periphery of the Empire—the Baltic areas, the western provinces, the Ukraine, and the North Caucasus, all of which after October 1917 were outside Bolshevik control. As a consequence, the pool of land available for distribution in Bolshevik-held areas fell considerably short of peasant expectations.
But even in these areas it proved difficult to achieve an equitable land distribution because the peasant refused to share his loot with both outsiders (
The agrarian question is solved in a simple manner. The entire land of the landlord has become the property of the commune. Every rural community receives its land from its previous landlord, and does not yield one inch of it to any outsider, even if it has too much and the neighboring communities are short.… It prefers to leave the [surplus] land in the landlord’s hands, as long as none of it falls into the hands of peasants from another community. The peasants say that as long as the landlord uses the land, they will still be able to earn something, and when it becomes necessary, they will take it away.9
It is not easy to determine how much arable land the Russian peasantry actually obtained in 1917–18: estimates vary widely from as little as 20 to as much as 150 million
