The Russian Revolution полностью

Some Bolsheviks liked this solution. Rykov, the head of the State Planning Commission, advocated a combination of compulsory grain deliveries and collaboration with rural cooperatives and private enterprise.⁴⁶ Others suggested that the government purchase grain at close to market prices (60 rubles per pud minimum) and sell it to the population at a discount.⁴⁷ But all these proposals were rejected for political reasons. As the Menshevik Socialist Courier would explain,⁴⁸ the grain monopoly was essential to the survival of the Communist dictatorship: with the immense rural labor force outside its control, it had to resort to the control of the agrarian product. Indeed, according to this source, by early 1921 the Bolsheviks were discussing a proposal by Osinskii to transform peasants into state employees who would be permitted to cultivate the land only on condition of sowing an area predetermined by the authorities and turning over all the surplus—a proposal that had to be shelved with the outbreak of the Kronshtadt rebellion and the adoption of the New Economic Policy. If the food trade were set free, the peasant would soon accumulate wealth and gain even greater economic independence, presenting a serious “counterrevolutionary” threat. Such a risk could be taken only after the regime was indisputably master of Russia. Lenin’s government was prepared to subject the country to a famine claiming millions of lives if this was required to ensure its hold on state power.

Such being the political realities, all the economic measures with which the Bolsheviks sought to improve the food situation in the first half of 1918 proved of no avail. They kept on issuing decrees that either modified procedures for the collection and distribution of food or else threatened food “speculators,” whom they persisted in treating as the cause of the shortages rather than their consequence, with the most dire punishments. Among the most irrelevant of such decrees was one drafted by Lenin at the end of December 1917. “The critical situation of the food supply, the threat of famine caused by speculation,” Lenin wrote, “the sabotage of capitalists and bureaucrats, as well as the prevailing chaos, make it necessary to take extraordinary revolutionary measures to combat the evil.” These “measures,” however, turned out to have nothing to do with the food supply, but instead consisted of nationalizing Russia’s banks and declaring a default on the domestic and foreign debts of the Russian Government.* According to Alexander Tsiurupa, the strike of the 1,300 employees of the Commissariat of Supply protesting the Bolshevik dictatorship aggravated the situation, because they were replaced with officials who had no idea what to do.⁴⁹

Unwilling to give up the monopoly on grain, the Bolsheviks did nothing to forestall the famine predicted by the contemporary press. Like the tsarist regime when confronted with a domestic crisis, they resorted to bureaucratic reshufflings and procedural changes. Since this was not the manner which the Bolsheviks adopted when confronting problems that really concerned them, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that hunger was not in that category.

On February 13, Trotsky was appointed head of the Extraordinary Commission for Supply. His task as “Supply Dictator” was to organize the flow of foodstuffs to the cities with the help of “extraordinary revolutionary measures,” “revolutionary” in this instance being a euphemism for military force.⁵⁰ But he had hardly assumed this responsibility when he was appointed Commissar of War: there is no record of his having accomplished anything. The regime kept on flooding the country with appeals to help starving Petrograd and Moscow,⁵¹ appeals laced with invective against the domestic and foreign “bourgeoisie,” which was blamed for the shortages. In February 1918, the government ordered the death penalty for “bagmen.”⁵² On March 25, Moscow tried to draw out food from the countryside with resort to barter. It allocated 1.16 billion rubles—the two-week output of Soviet printing presses—for the purchase of consumer goods to be exchanged for 2 million tons of grain.⁵³ But because the consumer goods on which the whole scheme depended could not be found, the project fell through. In April, having run out of ideas that had any semblance of realism, the government conceived the plan of building a new railroad to carry grain from the surplus areas.⁵⁴ Not one foot of track was ever laid down, nor would it have made any difference if it had.