3. Mobilize the army, separating its healthy units, and induct nineteen-year-olds, at least in some regions, for systematic operations to conquer the harvest and to gather food and fuel.
4. Introduce the death penalty for lack of discipline …
. . . . .
9. Introduce collective responsibility for entire [supply] detachments, the threat of execution of every tenth for each incident of looting.85
Only the outbreak of the Czech rebellion prevented the entire Red Army from being assigned to fight the peasantry; even so, it played a considerable role in this campaign. As the Red Army was forming, Trotsky announced that its mission in the next two or three months would be “fighting hunger,”86 which was a delicate way of saying “fighting the peasant.” Although no medals were issued for this campaign, the war against the muzhik provided the Red Army with its first combat experience. Ultimately, 75,000 regular soldiers joined 50,000 armed civilians in battling the nation’s food producers.87
The peasants responded to force with force. Contemporary newspapers are filled with accounts of pitched engagements between government units and peasants. The commanders of military and civilian units marching on the villages reported routinely on “kulak uprisings,” but the evidence makes it clear that the resistance they encountered was spontaneous defense by the peasants of their property, involving not only the “rich” but the entire rural population. “When more carefully examined, the so-called kulak rebellions seem nearly always to have been general peasant uprisings, in which no class distinctions can be traced.”88 The peasants cared not a whit about the needs of the city and knew nothing of “class differentiation.” All they saw was armed bands from the cities, often ex-peasants in leather jackets or army uniforms, come to rob them of their grain. They had never been made to surrender their harvest even under serfdom and they were not about to do so now.
The following contemporary newspaper account of incidents in the second half of 1918 in scattered rural areas is representative of the genre:
When the supply detachment arrived in the Gorodishchenskaia volost’ of Orel province, the women, instead of turning the produce over, dumped it into the water, and fished it out after the unexpected visitors had departed. In the Lavrov volost’ of the same province, the peasants disarmed a “Red detachment.” In Orel province requisitions are carried out on the broadest scale. Preparations are made as if for a regular war. “In some districts … during the requisitioning of bread, all private automobiles, saddle horses, and carriages have been mobilized.” In the Nikolskaia volost’ and its neighborhood regular battles take place: there are wounded and killed on both sides. The detachment requested by wire to have Orel send ammunition and machine guns.… It is reported from Saratov province …: “The village has become alerted and is ready for battle. In some villages of the Volskii district, the peasants met Red Army troops with pitchforks and compelled them to disperse.” In Tver province, “the partisan detachments sent to the village in search of food meet everywhere with resistance; there are reports of encounters from various localities; to save the grain from requisition, the peasants hide it in the forests [and] bury it in the ground.” At the bazaar in Korsun, in the province of Simbirsk, peasants came to blows with Red Army troops attempting to requisition grain; one Red Army soldier was killed, several were wounded.89
In January 1919, Izvestiia carried a report of a government investigation of a “White Guard kulak” uprising in a village in the province of Kostroma which illustrates what the assault on the village “bourgeoisie” really involved. The investigation revealed that the chairman of the village Executive Committee regularly beat peasant petitioners, sometimes with canes. Some of his victims were stripped of their shoes and forced to sit in the snow. So-called food requisitions were really ordinary robberies, in the course of which peasants were pummeled with Cossack nagaiki. As it approached a village, the food detachment would open machine gun fire to frighten the peasants. Then the beatings would begin. “The peasants had to put on five or more shirts to ward off the blows, but that did not do much good because the whips were laced with wire: after a beating the shirts stuck to the flesh and dried, so they had to be loosened by soaking in warm water.” Members of the detachment urged the soldiers to beat the peasants with whatever they could lay their hands on, “so that they would remember Soviet authority.”90
