The Russian Revolution полностью

The trouble was that whereas Hitler would be able to produce genealogical (“racial”) criteria for determining who was a Jew, Lenin had no standards to define a kulak. This term never had a precise social or economic content: in fact, one observer, who spent the Revolution in the countryside, found that the peasants themselves did not use it.⁶⁰ It had entered the Russian vocabulary in the 1860s, at which time it referred not to an economic category but to a type of peasant who, by virtue of his personality, stood out from the mass of the communal peasantry: it was used to describe what in American slang would be called a “go-getter.” Such peasants tended to dominate village assemblies and the volost’ courts; sometimes they also acted as moneylenders, but this was not their defining quality. Radical publicists and novelists of the late nineteenth century, enamored of an ideal, perfectly egalitarian commune, gave kulaks a bad name as village exploiters, but there is no evidence that their fellow peasants regarded with hostility those to whom the term applied.⁶¹ In fact, radical agitators who in the 1870s went “to the people” discovered that deep in his heart every peasant aspired to becoming a kulak. Not surprisingly, therefore, neither before nor after 1917 was it possible to distinguish a middle peasant from a kulak by any objective criteria—a fact that even Lenin, in a moment of candor, was forced to admit.⁶²

How difficult it was to assign the term “kulak” a precise, operative meaning became apparent when the Bolsheviks attempted to unleash a class war in the countryside. To the commissars charged with organizing the “poor” peasants against the kulaks, this was a next-to-impossible task because they found nothing corresponding to these concepts in the communes with which they came in contact. In the province of Samara, one such official concluded that 40 percent of the peasants were kulaks,⁶³ while Bolshevik officials in the province of Voronezh informed Moscow that “it is impossible to wage the struggle against kulaks and the rich, because they constitute the majority of the population.”⁶⁴

But Lenin had to have a rural class enemy: as long as the village remained outside their political control and under SR influence, the Bolshevik bastions in the cities remained highly vulnerable. The refusal of the peasants to surrender food at fixed prices offered Lenin an opportunity to rally the urban population against the peasantry, ostensibly for the sake of extracting food but, in fact, as a device to bring it to heel.

It was Engels who had said that the poor and landless rural proletariat could, under certain conditions, become an ally of the industrial working class. Lenin adopted this point of view.⁶⁵ This premise he now put to use. In August 1918, he loosely bandied about statistics on the class structure of the Russian village which were to have deadly consequences. “Let us allow,” he said,

that we have in Russia some 15 million agricultural peasant families, taking into account previous Russia, before the robbers had detached from us the Ukraine, etc. Of this 15 million, certainly about 10 million are the poor, who live from the sale of their labor or enslave themselves to the rich, or who lack surplus grain and have been especially ruined by the burdens of the war. About 3 million must be counted as middle peasants, and hardly over 2 million are kulaks, rich men, bread speculators.⁶⁶

These figures bore not the slightest relationship to reality: they merely repeated in rounded numbers the kind of calculations that Lenin used to make before the Revolution on the “class differentiation” of the Russian village. Thus, in 1899 he had calculated that the proportion of rich to middle to poor peasant households was 2 to 4 to 4. In 1907, he concluded that 80.8 percent of the peasant households were “poor,” 7.7 percent “middle,” and 11.5 percent well-to-do.⁶⁷ Lenin’s most recent figures ignored the fact that, as a result of the agrarian revolution, the number of poor and rich peasants had declined. Half a year after declaring the “poor” to be two-thirds of the peasantry, he described the middle peasantry as the “most powerful force.”⁶⁸ Clearly, his figures were not statistical data, but political slogans, drawn from Engels, who had laid it down in 1870, in regard to Germany, that “agricultural laborers form the most numerous class in the countryside.”⁶⁹ Whatever validity this generalization may have had for late-nineteenth-century Germany, it had none for post-1917 Russia, where the “most numerous class in the countryside” consisted of self-employed middle peasants.