As had been the case with the October coup, in launching the invasion of the countryside, the Bolsheviks acted in the name of spurious objectives. Their true purpose was to consummate the October coup by imposing control over the peasantry. But since this would not have been a popular slogan, they carried out the campaign against the peasantry for the ostensible purpose of extracting from the “kulaks” food for the hungry cities. Food shortages, of course, were a very real problem, but as will be shown below, there existed easier and more effective ways of drawing supplies from the countryside. In their internal communications, the authorities frankly admitted that food extraction was a subsidiary task. Thus, a secret Bolshevik report, referring to the decree ordering the creation in every village of Committees of the Poor, explained the measure as follows:
The decree of July 11, concerning the organization of the village poor, defined the nature of the organization and assigned it supply functions. But its true purpose was
In other words, the extraction of foodstuffs (“supply functions”) for the cities was camouflage for a political operation designed to bring Bolshevism to the village by inflaming social animosities.
In pre-revolutionary Russia, the bulk of the food reaching the market came either from large private estates or from farms of well-to-do peasants, both of which employed hired labor: middle and poor peasants consumed nearly all the food they produced. The confiscation and distribution to the communes of all the gentry land and much of the land held by peasants in private ownership, aggravated by the government’s prohibition on the employment of hired labor (even though it was widely ignored), removed the main source of food supply for the non-agrarian population. With rural Russia reverting to the self-sufficiency of the pre-capitalist era, the non-agricultural population faced starvation. This fact alone contributed to the severe food shortages that occurred after the Bolshevik coup.*
Even under such adverse conditions the peasant might have been able to feed the townspeople if the Bolsheviks, for what appear to have been mainly political reasons, did not deprive him of incentives to part with the surplus.
One of the few measures passed by the Provisional Government that the Bolsheviks retained was the law of March 25, 1917, establishing a state monopoly on commerce in grain. The law provided that all the grain that the producer had left over after satisfying his personal needs and providing for seed belonged to the state and had to be sold to its agencies at fixed prices. Surplus grain that was not turned over was subject to being requisitioned at half price. The Provisional Government obtained in this manner 14.5 percent of the harvest,31 but even so, as long as it was in power, the grain trade went on as before. The Bolsheviks, however, enforced this rule with increasing brutality, treating all sales of grain and its products to the consumer as “speculation” subject to severe penalties. In its first months the Cheka expended most of its energy pursuing peasant “bagmen” (
The Bolshevik Government insisted that the peasants sell the grain surplus to state agencies at prices that inflation made increasingly absurd: on August 8, 1918, the official tariff was set (depending on the region) at between 14 and 18 rubles per pud (16.3 kilograms) of rye grain, which on the free market was fetching in Moscow 290 and in Petrograd 420 rubles a pud.* There was a similar disparity between fixed and free market prices on other staples, such as meat and potatoes which became controlled in January 1919. The peasant responded to this pricing policy both by hoarding and by curtailing his acreage. The decline in the grain harvest followed inexorably.32
