By the beginning of May the Bolsheviks no longer could play at solving the food shortages, for the supply situation in the cities and industrial areas had reached alarming dimensions: telegrams poured into the Kremlin reporting that the workers, the recipients of the most generous rations, were going hungry.55 In Petrograd, a pound loaf of bread on the open market, which in January had fetched 3 rubles, now cost between 6 and 12.56 Something had to be done. Since opening the grain trade to the free play of the market forces, which the experts urged and the factory workers demanded, was unacceptable on political grounds, another solution had to be found. That solution was invading and conquering the village by force of arms.
Sverdlov announced the new policy on May 20, 1918:
If we can say that revolutionary Soviet authority is sufficiently strong in the cities … then the same cannot be said in regard to the village.… For that reason we must most seriously confront the question of the differentiation of the village, the question of creating in the village two contrasting and hostile forces.… Only if we succeed in splitting the village into two irreconcilably hostile camps, if we are able to inflame there the same civil war that had occurred not so long ago in the cities … only then will we be in a position to say that we will do that in relation to the village that we were able to do for the city.57
This extraordinary pronouncement meant that the Bolsheviks had decided to incite one part of the rural population against another, unleashing a civil war among citizens who were living peacefully side by side, in order to gain in the village the power base which had so far eluded them. The assault troops designated for this campaign were to consist of urban workers as well as poor and landless peasants: the “enemy” were the rich peasants, or kulaks, the rural “bourgeoisie.”
Lenin hated what he perceived to be the “bourgeoisie” with a destructive passion that fully equalled Hitler’s hatred of the Jews: nothing short of its physical annihilation would satisfy him. The urban middle class—the professionals, financiers, merchants, industrialists, rentiers—gave him little trouble, for they submitted at once, corroborating the thesis of the founding manifesto of Russian Social-Democracy of 1898 that the further east one moved, the more supine the bourgeoisie. When told to shovel snow, they shoveled snow, and even posed for photographs, smiling wanly. When subjected to “contributions,” they dutifully paid up. They studiously avoided contacts with anti-Bolshevik armies or underground organizations. Most of them hoped for some miracle, perhaps German intervention, or perhaps the evolution of Bolshevik policies toward greater “realism.” In the meantime, their instincts told them to lie low. When in the spring of 1918 the Bolsheviks, in an effort to raise productivity, began to reemploy them in industrial enterprises, their hopes rose. As
The situation was different in the countryside. By Western standards, Russia, of course, had no “rural bourgeoisie,” only a class of peasants who were marginally better off by virtue of a few hectares of additional land, an extra horse or cow, some cash, and the occasional services of a hired hand. But Lenin was obsessed with the image of “class differentiation” in the Russian village. As a young man, he had scrutinized
94. A typical peasant “bourgeois-capitalist.”
