*For instance, on December 11, 1918, at a Congress of Committees of the Poor, Lenin moved a resolution calling for the collectivization of land at the earliest possible time: Lenin, PSS, XXXVII, 356, and Lenin, Sochineniia, XXIII, 587–88. The Law on the Socialization of Land, issued on January 27/February 9, 1918, committed the government to “developing collective agriculture as more convenient in terms of economizing labor and products, at the expense of individual fanning, for the purpose of a transition to a socialist economy”: Dekrety, I, 408.
*V. R. Gerasimiuk in ISSSR, No. 1 (1965), 100. V. P. Danilov, Pereraspredelenie zemel’nogo fonda Rossii (Moscow, 1979), 283–87 (cited in V. V. Kabanov, Krest’ianskoe khoziaistvo v usloviiakh “Voennogo Kommunizma,” Moscow, 1988, 49), says that as a result of the Revolution peasant holdings increased 29.8 percent, but from this figure one must deduct the land taken over by collective and other Soviet farms. Radical intellectuals in the late nineteenth century gathered from peasants that they had hoped the Black Repartition would bring them from 5 to 15 desiatiny: V. L. Debagorii-Mokrievich, Vospominaniia (St. Petersburg, 1906), 137, and G. I. Uspenskii, Sobranie Sochinenii, V (Moscow, 1956), 130.
†According to one intellectual who lived from October 1918 until November 1920 in a village in the Tambov province, the peasants doubted that the land they had acquired was really theirs because it was not given them by the Tsar: A. L. Okninskii, Dva goda sredi krest’ian (Riga, [1936]), 27. It is the land they allotted to poor peasants, if forced to share the loot with them.
*With the prewar ruble worth 0.78 gram of gold, these savings would have purchased 3,900 tons of gold.
†Properties bought by the Land Bank from landlords between 1906 and 1915 cost, on the average, 161 rubles per desiatina: P. I. Liashchenko, Istoriia narodnogo khoziaistva SSSR, II, 3rd ed. (Leningrad, 1952), 270. The estimate of peasants’ home savings comes from NZh, No. 56/271 (March 31, 1918), 2.
*Otruba were land allotments intermingled with communal strips, while khutora formed separate farmsteads. Both were held in private property.
*Gerasimiuk in ISSSR, No. 1 (1965), 100; O zemle: sbornik statei, I (1921), 25, gives slightly different figures. The reduction in larger holdings was in some measure due to the acceleration of the breakup of joint families in favor of nuclear ones, which had already begun in the late nineteenth century but which the land policies of the Bolsheviks encouraged, because farmers wanted to share in the distribution of confiscated properties, which they could do best as heads of households.
*About one-third of what used to be privately owned agricultural land—3.2 percent of the acreage under cultivation—mainly large estates devoted to “technical” cultures, was taken over by state-run collective farms. In theory, they could have helped alleviate the food shortage in the cities. But their inventory having been looted by local peasants, they were of little, if any, help: L. N. Kritsman, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia i derevnia (Moscow-Leningrad, 1929), 86–87.
*Kabanov, Krest’ianskoe khoziaistvo, 159. The peasant who received such unrealistic prices for his product had to buy manufactured goods (e.g., matches, nails, and kerosene), which were becoming scarcer each day, at free market prices.
*One well-informed visitor to Soviet Russia in 1920 reported even more staggering reductions. Petrograd’s population is said to have declined from 3 million in 1917 to 500,000: Alexander Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth (Diary 1920–1022), (London, 1925), 33.
*Dekrety, I, 227–28. In the final, published version of this decree, Lenin’s spurious rationale for these fiscal measures was omitted (p. 230): apparently its absurdity struck even Lenin.
*Tsiurupa defined as “surplus” all grain in excess of 12 puds of grain or flour (196 kilograms) per person and 1 pud (16.3 kilograms) of groats; he also established norms of feed for horses and livestock: Izvestiia, No. 185/440 (August 28, 1918), 5.
*One student of the subject makes the convincing case that in terms of numbers involved and the threat posed “the magnitude of the Bolshevik war with peasants on the internal front eclipsed by far the front-line civil war with the Whites”: Vladimir Brovkin, “On the Internal Front: The Bolsheviks and the Greens,” paper delivered at the 20th National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, November 1988, 1.
