The Russian Revolution полностью

The picture of rural life in the first half of 1918 provided by the contemporary press is one of unrelieved horror. An account published in Riazanskaia zhizn’ in early March may not be quite representative, because Riazan suffered extreme food shortages, but it gives some idea how rapidly the Russian village deteriorated under Bolshevik rule, plunging into primeval anarchy. Having looted state liquor stores, the peasants of this province were in a state of perpetual drunkenness. They fought each other in wild orgies, assisted by old men and young girls. To keep them quiet, children were plied with vodka. Afraid of losing their savings through confiscation or inflation, peasants gambled frantically, usually at blackjack; it was not uncommon for an ordinary muzhik to lose one thousand rubles in an evening.

The old men … buy pictures of the Last Judgment. Deep in their hearts the peasants believe that the “end of the world” is near.… And before hell comes, everything that exists on earth and that has been built so recently with such effort is being demolished. They so smash everything that the noise reverberates throughout the district.⁴²

In areas where the food situation was especially desperate, the peasants staged “hunger rebellions,” destroying everything in sight. After one such uprising in a district of Novgorod province, the local Communist authorities imposed on the 12,000 inhabitants a “contribution” of 4.5 million rubles, as if they were rebellious natives of a conquered colony.⁴³

Hunger posed dangers, but from the Bolshevik point of view it also had a positive side. For one, the state monopoly on the food trade, even though detrimental to the supply of food, enabled the regime to maintain a rationing system that served to control the urban population and discriminate in favor of its supporters. Second, hunger depressed the spirit of the population, robbing it of the will to resist. The psychology of hunger is not well known, but Russian observers noted that it made people more willing to submit to authority. “Hunger is a poor companion of creativity,” one Bolshevik observed, “it inspires blind destructiveness, dark fear, a desire to surrender, to hand over one’s destiny to the will of someone who will take it and organize it.”⁴⁴ Starving people, if capable of putting up a fight, dissipate their energies battling each other for food. Such political apathy, being self-induced, does more to promote submissiveness than even police repression.

That the Bolsheviks were aware of the political benefits of hunger is attested to by their refusal to relieve it in the only feasible way, the one they would adopt in 1921 when confident of their control over Russia: reinstating the free market in grain. As soon as this was done, production soared and before long attained prewar levels. That this would happen is known not only by hindsight. In May 1918, a grain specialist, S. D. Rozenkrants, explained to Zinoviev that the food shortages were due not to “speculation” but to the absence of production incentives. Under the grain monopoly the peasant had no inducement to grow grain beyond his own immediate needs. By planting the surplus acreage with root vegetables (potatoes, carrots, beets) for sale on the open market, as the authorities permitted him to do, he earned more money than he knew what to do with: at the free market rate of 100 rubles for a pud of such produce, one desiatina earned him 50,000–60,000 rubles. Why should he bother with grain only to have the state confiscate it at its ridiculous “fixed prices”? Rozenkrants expressed confidence that if the government adopted a more businesslike approach it would resolve the food problem in two months.⁴⁵