On August 6, Lenin decreed an “intensification of the merciless mass terror” against the “counterrevolutionary” part of the “bourgeoisie” and the “merciless extermination of the traitors” who used hunger as a “weapon.” All who resisted seizures of surplus grain, including “bagmen,” were to be turned over to Revolutionary Tribunals, and if caught armed, to be shot on the spot.100 In a spell of mindless wrath, Lenin ordered that the “kulaks” be deprived not only of their surplus grain but also of that required to sow the next crop.101 His speeches and written instructions of this period indicate that his frustration at the peasantry’s resistance robbed him of the ability to think rationally. This is evident from his appeal to industrial workers in August 1918, in which he exhorted them to “the last, decisive battle”:
The kulak insanely detests Soviet authority and is ready to suffocate, to carve up hundreds of thousands of workers.… Either the kulaks will cut up a boundless number of workers, or the workers will mercilessly crush the uprisings of the thievish minority of the people against the power of toilers. There can be no middle ground here.… The kulaks are the most beastly, the coarsest, the most savage exploiters.… These bloodsuckers have waxed rich during the war on the people’s want, they have amassed thousands and hundreds of thousands.… These spiders have grown fat at the expense of peasants, impoverished by the war, of hungry workers. These leeches have drunk the blood of toilers, growing the richer the more the worker starved in the cities and factories. These vampires have gathered and continue to gather in their hands the lands of landlords, enslaving, time and again, the poor peasants. Merciless war against these kulaks! Death to them.*
As one historian has aptly observed, “this was probably the first occasion when the leader of a modern state incited the populace to the social equivalent of genocide.”102 It was characteristic of Lenin to disguise an offensive action as self-defense, in this case defense against a completely imaginary threat on the part of the “kulaks” physically to annihilate the working class. His fanaticism on the subject knew no limits: in December 1919 he said that “we”—a pronoun he did not further define but which was unlikely to include himself and his associates—“will sooner all perish” than allow free trade in grain.103
To overcome peasant resistance, the Sovnarkom on August 19 placed the Commissar of War, Trotsky, in charge of all units involved in this action, including the civilian supply detachments, which had until then been subordinate to the Commissariat of Supply.104 The following day Tsiurupa issued instructions militarizing the food-requisitioning operation. Supply detachments came under the command of the provincial and military authorities and were subject to military discipline. Each detachment was to have a minimum of 75 men and two or three machine guns. They were to maintain links with nearby cavalry units and arrange for combining several detachments into one should the strength of peasant resistance require it. Assigned to each detachment, as to regular Red Army units, was a political commissar, whose responsibility it was to organize the Committees of the Poor.105
As previously noted, these Committees of the Poor were intended to function as a “fifth column” inside the enemy camp that would assist the Red Army and the supply detachments. By playing on the economic resentments of the most indigent rural elements, Lenin hoped to rally them against the richer ones and, in the ensuing clash, gain political entry into the village.
His expectation was disappointed for two reasons. The actual social structure of the Russian village bore no resemblance to the one that he took as his point of departure: Lenin’s notion that three-quarters of the peasants were “poor” was sheer fantasy. The “landless proletariat,” the core of the village poor, constituted in central Russia at most 4 percent of the rural population: the remaining 96 percent were “middle peasants” with a scattering of “rich.” The Bolsheviks thus lacked a realistic social base from which to instigate a class war in the village.
