The Russian Revolution полностью

The regime also failed to unleash a class war in the village. The small minority of “rich” peasants and the equally small minority of “poor” ones drowned in the sea of “middle” peasants, all three of whom refused to wage fratricidal war. In the words of one historian, “the kulak stood for the village and the village for the kulak.”¹²⁵

In two months, the Bolsheviks realized their mistake. On August 17, 1918, Lenin and Tsiurupa issued a special directive ordering a drive to win over the middle peasantry and unite it with the poor against the rich.¹²⁶ Lenin repeatedly asserted afterward that his regime was not an enemy of the middle peasant.¹²⁷ But such verbal concessions meant little, given that the middle peasant had the food and hence was the main victim of Bolshevik food-extraction policies.

Peasants were utterly confounded by Bolshevik agrarian policies. They had understood the “Revolution” to mean volia, or anarchy, which to them meant relief from all obligations to the state. Peasants were heard to complain: “They promised to turn over all the land, not to collect taxes, not to take into the army, and now what …?”¹²⁸ Indeed, their obligations to the Communist state were much heavier than under tsarism: by calculations of Communist scholars at the very least twice as heavy, since they now consisted not only of taxes but also of forced labor and other obligations, of which the duty to cut and cart lumber was the most onerous.¹²⁹ The vocabulary of sutsilism, as they called it, which urban agitators tried to foist on them, struck the peasants as gibberish, and they reacted as they had always done under similar circumstances, retranslating foreign words into language familiar to them. They began to suspect they had been had, but they were determined to hold out, believing themselves to be indispensable and, therefore, invincible. In the meantime, common sense told them that as long as they could not dispose of it on the open market, there was no profit in producing a surplus. This led to a steady decline of food production that in 1921 would contribute greatly to the famine.

The Bolsheviks could claim to their credit that they had at last penetrated the village by inserting there a network of soviets under their control. But this was to some extent an illusion. Studies carried out in the early 1920s revealed that the villages ignored the Communist soviets, set up at such cost and effort. Authority by then had reverted to communal organizations, run by heads of households, just as if there had been no Revolution. The village soviets had to obtain approval of their resolutions from the commune; many did not even have their own budget.¹³⁰

In the light of these facts, it is astonishing to have Lenin claim that the campaign against the village had not only been a complete success but transcended in historic importance the October coup. In December 1918 he boasted that during the past year the regime had solved problems that “in previous revolutions had been the greatest impediment to the work of socialism.” In the initial stage of the Revolution, he said, the Bolsheviks had joined with the poor, middle, and rich peasants in the fight against the landlords. This alliance left the rural “bourgeoisie” intact. If that situation were allowed to become permanent, the Revolution would have stopped halfway and then inevitably receded. Such a danger was now averted because the “proletariat” had awakened the rural poor and together with them attacked the village bourgeoisie. The Russian Revolution thus had already progressed beyond the Western European bourgeois-democratic revolutions, creating the basis for a merger of the urban and rural proletariats and laying the groundwork for the introduction in Russia of collective farming. “Such is the significance,” Lenin exulted,

of the revolution which occurred during the current summer and fall in the most out-of-the-way corners of rural Russia. It was not noisy, it was not clearly visible, and it did not strike everyone’s eyes as much as did the October Revolution of last year, but it had an incomparably deeper and greater significance. ¹³¹

Of course, this was wild exaggeration. The Bolshevization of the village of which Lenin boasted would be accomplished only ten years later by Stalin. But, as in so many other respects, Stalin’s course had been charted by Lenin.