The Russian Revolution полностью

Armed bands, sometimes formed into Red Guards, had been raiding villages in search of food since the preceding winter. They usually ran into fierce resistance from the peasants, reinforced by soldiers who had come home from the front with their weapons; they usually returned to town empty-handed.⁷⁵ Lenin had proposed in January 1918 the formation of “several thousand supply detachments,” with ten to fifteen workers each, empowered to shoot recalcitrant peasants, but the idea failed to gain support.⁷⁶ It was only in the spring of 1918 that the Bolsheviks proceeded systematically to organize rural terror units. The earliest measure was an appeal to the workers of Petrograd, issued on May 21 over the signature of Lenin.⁷⁷ Other appeals and instructions followed. The notion of extracting food by force was clearly modeled on the armée révolutionnaire created, as one of its first acts, by the French Committee of Public Safety in June 1793, and accompanied by laws prohibiting the hoarding of produce.

Russian workers had no taste for such methods. They could be mobilized against the burzhui or the landlord, from whom they were separated by an unbridgeable cultural gulf, but not against the village, where many of them had been born and still had relatives. They felt none of the class animus against the peasant, even the relatively well-to-do peasant, which Lenin and his followers attributed to them. The Left SRs, who enjoyed considerable support among Petrograd workers, protested against Bolshevik measures kindling class hatred between workers and peasants. The Left SR Central Committee actually forbade its party members to enroll in the food detachments. Zinoviev ran into considerable difficulties when he tried to implement the May decrees, even though he offered the volunteers generous inducements. On May 24 he announced that detachments would depart in search of food in two days, but hardly anyone turned up. Meetings at Petrograd factories, organized by workers’ plenipotentiaries, passed resolutions opposing this measure.⁷⁸ Five days later, Zinoviev repeated the appeal, coupling it with a threat to the “bourgeoisie”: “We shall give them 1/16th of a pound a day so they won’t forget the smell of bread. But if we must go over to milled straw, then we shall put the bourgeoisie on it first of all.”⁷⁹ The workers remained unmoved, preferring, with a common sense sorely lacking among the Bolshevik intelligentsia, to solve the food shortage by freeing the trade in cereals. In time, however, by a combination of threats and inducements, Zinoviev managed to form some food detachments, the first of which, a unit of 400 men, departed for the countryside on June 1.⁸⁰

The food detachments proved disappointing. Since bona fide workers stayed away, the majority of those who joined up were urban riffraff that went to the village to loot. Lenin soon received complaints to this effect.⁸¹ Shortly after the first supply detachments had made their appearance in the villages, he sent the following message to the workers of one industrial establishment:

I very much hope that the comrade workers of Vyksa will carry out their admirable plan of launching a mass movement for bread with machine guns as genuine revolutionaries—that is, that they will staff the detachments with picked individuals, reliable men, not looters, who will work according to instructions in full agreement with Tsiurupa for the common task of saving from hunger all those who go hungry and not only for themselves.⁸²

Judging by peasant complaints, it was common practice for the armed bands from the cities to load up on stolen produce and get drunk on requisitioned moonshine.⁸³ Despite threats of severe punishment, such activities persisted and in the end the government had to allow members of food detachments to retain for their personal use up to 20 pounds of foodstuffs, including a maximum of 2 pounds of butter, 10 pounds of bread, and 5 pounds of meat.⁸⁴

But neither threats of punishment nor concessions to self-interest worked and before long the regime had to turn to the newly formed Red Army. It was no coincidence that the decree introducing compulsory military service into Soviet Russia, issued on May 29, 1918, coincided with the establishment of food detachments. There was a revealing directive from Lenin’s hand, drafted on May 26 and approved by the Central Committee the following day, which indicates that the earliest mission of the newly constituted Red Army was to wage war against the Russian peasant:

1. The Commissariat of War is to be transformed into a Military-Supply Commissariat—that is, nine-tenths of the work of the Commissariat of War is to concentrate on adapting the army for the war for bread and the conduct of such a war for three months: June–August.

2. During the same period, place the entire country under martial law.