Before the Revolution, Russian peasants had accumulated considerable savings, some of which they kept at home and the rest of which they deposited in government savings banks (sberegatel’nye kassy). These savings grew considerably during the prosperous war years and the first year of the Revolution when peasants benefited from rising food prices. It is impossible to calculate precisely the amount of peasant savings at the time of the October coup, but some idea may be obtained from official figures as supplemented by informed estimates. At the beginning of 1914, the government savings banks had on deposit 1.55 billion rubles.21 Between July 1914 and October 1917, they are estimated to have taken in an additional 5 billion, of which 60–75 percent is believed to have come from rural depositors.22 If the same ratio had held for pre-1914 depositors, the peasants may be estimated to have had on deposit in savings banks at the time of the October coup some 5 billion rubles, to which must be added the moneys they kept at home. The Bolsheviks exempted government savings banks from the decree nationalizing private banks, so that in theory peasants and other small depositors retained access to their money. But it was not long before inflation rendered these deposits as worthless as if they had been confiscated outright. As shown in the preceding chapter, the Bolsheviks proceeded deliberately and systematically to devalue money: during their first five years, the purchasing power of the ruble depreciated millions of times, which had the effect of turning it into colored paper. As a consequence Russian peasants, far from receiving the landlord’s land free of charge, paid for it dearly. For the 21 million desiatiny which they had been allowed to appropriate, they lost in bank savings alone an estimated 5 billion rubles.* If one accepts the contemporary estimate that they kept in mattresses and buried in the ground an additional 7 to 8 billion, then it follows that for his average allotment of one acre of arable land (0.4 desiatina) the peasant paid 600 pre-1918 rubles. Before the Revolution, the average price for this land would have been 64.4 rubles.†
Peasants paid for their new allotments in still another way. When speaking of privately owned land in Russia one tends to think of the properties of landlords (pomeshchiki), the Crown, merchants, and clergy which the Land Decree specified as subject to confiscation and distribution. But a great deal—over one-third—of private agricultural land (arable, forest, and meadow) in Russia before the Revolution was the property of peasants, held individually or, more usually, in associations. In fact, on the eve of the Revolution peasants and Cossacks owned nearly as much land as “landlords.” Of the 97.7 million desiatiny of land (arable, woodland, and pasture) in private ownership in European Russia in January 1915, 39 million, or 39.5 percent, was held by landlords (gentry, officials, and officers) and 34.4 million (34.8 percent) by peasants and Cossacks.23
Lenin’s Land Decree exempted from expropriation the holdings of “ordinary peasants and ordinary Cossacks.” But in many localities in central Russia communal peasants ignored this provision and proceeded to seize the land belonging to their fellow peasants along with that of the landlords, placing it in the communal pool for distribution. Included in these seizures were both khutora and otruba, including onetime communal land whose cultivators, taking advantage of the Stolypin legislation, had withdrawn from the commune.* As a result, in no time at all, the peasants wiped out much of the achievement of Stolypin’s agrarian reform: the communal principle swept everything before it. Communal peasants treated the landed property which members of the commune had purchased outside the commune the same way: this land too was added to the communal reserve. Here and there, communes left peasants their properties on condition that they reduce them to the size of communal allotments: in January 1927, on the eve of collectivization, of the 233 million desiatiny of peasant land in the Russian Republic (RSFSR), 222 million, or 95.3 percent, were held communally and only 8 million, or 3.4 percent, as otruba or khutora—that is, in private property.24
