Russian revolution. A very short introduction
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ownership and state regulation with communism all served to determine the policy choices taken. Lenin may have concluded that War Communism was an error, but the command-administrative system and militarized ideology that it engendered proved to be lasting elements of the Soviet system.
Looting the looters
The collapse of industry and the grave food shortages led to the breakdown of urban life. Between 1917 and 1920, the percentage of the population living in towns fell from 18% to 15%, but the population of Petrograd fell by almost 70% and that of Moscow by half. The desperate search for food forced people to truck and barter and to pillage furniture, wooden fences, any available tree to stay warm. The literary critic V. Shklovsky wrote: 'People who lived in housing with central heating died in droves. They froze to death - whole apartments of them.' It was against this background of extraordinary crisis that the centuries-old division between propertied Russia and the toiling masses was wiped out in a matter of months. Seldom has history seen so precipitate and so total a destruction of a ruling class. In its editorial to mark New Year 1919, Pravda proclaimed:
Where are the wealthy, the fashionable ladies, the expensive restaurants and private mansions, the beautiful entrances, the lying newspapers, all the corrupted 'golden life? All swept away.
The nationalization of industry and the banks constituted the principal mechanism through which the assets of the capitalists were expropriated. In the countryside, of course, the peasants turfed the landowners off their estates although not infrequently they allowed them to stay in their ancestral homes. In addition, Soviets and Chekas, strapped for cash and obsessed with putting 'all power into the hands of the localities', exacted 'contributions' and 'confiscations' from those they considered burzhui. In Tver' the soviet demanded sums ranging
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from 20,000 to 100,000 rubles from local traders and industrialists, threatening to send them to Kronstadt if they did notcomply. Given the weakness of the local authorities, such expropriations were often barely distinguishable from banditry, as the leading Chekist M. I. Latsis conceded:
Our Russian figures: 'Don't I really deserve those pants and boots that the bourgeoisie have been wearing until now! That's a reward for my work, right? So, I'll take what's mine.'
Hit by'requisitions', forced to share their apartments with poor families and to do humiliating work assignments, landowners, capitalists, and tsarist officials sold what they could, packed their belongings, and headed for White areas or abroad. Between 1917 and 1921,1.8 million to 2 million emigrated, overwhelmingly from the educated and propertied groups. A surprising number, however, chose to hang on: A. A. Golovin, scion of an ancient family, worked in the garage of the Malyi Theatre in 1921 and his son went on to become famous for his film portrayals of Stalin. These 'former people' - a term once applied to criminals -struggled to conceal their origins and to steer clear of politics. Yet despite their severe reduction in circumstance, they continued to be viewed with mistrust by the regime, seen as the potential fifth column for a White-Guard restoration.
For the multifarious middle classes, opportunities to adapt to the new order were more plentiful, although the revolution also brought a sharp diminution in their privileges. While Lenin despised the intelligentsia, he was quick to understand that the revolution could not survive without 'knowledgeable, experienced, businesslike people'. As well as paying engineers relatively high salaries, doctors, dentists, architects, and other professionals were allowed to practise privately. Nor was it unusual for former factory owners to sit on the industrial-branch boards of the Supreme Economic Council orforformer merchants to work for the supply organs. Those with some education
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found jobs in the soviet and party apparatus - as clerks, secretaries, minor functionaries - which entitled them to the second-grade food ration ('responsible' soviet officials qualified for the first). For the far more numerous lower-middle strata who lacked saleable skills the principal means of survival was through petty trade and artisanal production.
The intelligentsia was the only elite group to survive the revolution
intact, though its self-image was badly shaken. Most were moderate
socialists in sympathy, but the war and revolution had killed any naive
belief in the innate goodness of the people. Their sense of them selves as
the conscience of society, called upon to oppose tyranny, led most to
oppose the Bolshevik seizure of power. They deplored the strident
demagogy of the new rulers, the violence, the closure of the press, the
lawlessness on the streets. Most had had enough of politics and took a
neutral stance in the civil war. Most were not well paid and few had-
reserves to fall back on. The composer A. T. Crechaninov recalled: 'my д
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health was undermined to such an extent that I could hardly drag my | feet. My hands suffered from frost bite and I could not touch the piano.' = Morale, however, was not necessarily as low as one might assume. N. Berdiaev, elected to a professorship of philosophy at Moscow University in 1920 - where 'I gave lectures in which I openly and without hindrance criticized Marxism' - did not mind labour conscription:
I did not feel at all depressed and unhappy despite the unaccustomed strain of the pick and shovel on my sedentary muscles... I could not help realizing the justice of my predicament.
The Bolsheviks came to power bent on disestablishing and dispossessing the Orthodox Church, which had been a key pillar of the old order. Church and state were separated, church lands were nationalized, state subsidies were withdrawn, religious education was outlawed in schools, and religion was made a 'private matter'. The response of the new patriarch of the Church, Tikhon, was crushing: in
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January 1918 he pronounced an anathema on the Bolsheviks, warning that they would 'burn in hell in the life hereafter and be cursed for generations'. The ending of financial subventions hit the central and diocesan administrations hard, but made little difference to parish clergy, who were generally provided with an allotment of land and some financial support by parishioners. By late 1920, 673 monasteries -'powerful screws in the exploiting machine of the old ruling classes' -had been liquidated and their land confiscated. Violent clashes between supporters of the Church and of soviet power were a constant of the civil war. Bolshevik propaganda portrayed priests as drunkards and gluttons, and monks and nuns as sinister 'black crows'. For their part, most of hierarchy portrayed the Bolsheviks as Christ-haters, German hirelings, 'Jewish-Masonic slave-masters'. Tikhon urged the faithful to resist the Bolsheviks only by spiritual means, but many clergy sided openly with the Whites. Bolshevik supporters, particularly sailors and soldiers, meted out horrible repression: in 1918-19, 28 bishops and several hundred clergy were killed.
The class structure of tsarist Russia buckled under the blows of war, economic collapse, and revolutionary attack. Yet having overturned Russia's somewhat fragile class structure, the Bolsheviks chose to use the discourse of class to define and organize the new social world, backing it up with the panoply of material and symbolic resources at the disposal of the state. They projected the civil war as a life-and-death struggle between international capital and the workers and toiling peasants of the world. The speeches of activists were studded with images of revolutionary conflagrations, of counter-revolutionary hydras and capitalist jackals. Though much propaganda was couched in language that ordinary folk could barely understand, the discourse played upon demotic understandings of class that had been so visible in 1917, mobilizing deep-seated animosity between 'us' and 'them'.
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Popular rebellion
Peasant unrest was a persistent thorn in the side of the regime. Most uprisings were small-scale, sparked by food requisitioning, conscription, the abuses of soviet officials or kombedy, or by labour obligations. In 1919 most of the hundreds of uprisings were spontaneous, uniting peasants of
all strata, with little inthe way of a political goal. By far the largest was the 'kaftan' (chapanny) rebellion, which welled up in Samara and Simbirsk after the imposition of an emergency revolutionary tax in March. At its peak it involved over 100,000, some of whom established links with Kolchak. The largest of the uprisings of 1920, the 'pitchfork' (vilochnoe) uprising, was centred on the Tatars of Ufa but spread into the Volga region, where requisitioning was concentrated. In Samara the 'black eagle uprising', which formed a part of the'pitchfork' insurgency, revealed a degree of politicization: 'We are the peasant millions. Our enemies are the communists. They drink our blood and oppress us like slaves.' Peasant insurgents frequently behaved in bestial fashion. In Penza in March 1920 the local commissar had his nose cut off, then his ears, then his head. A report concluded: 'Now everything is peaceful and quiet. The peasants were calmed with the help of the lash.' As this suggests, the Bolsheviks retaliated ruthlessly against what they saw as the work of 'kulaks', 'counter-revolutionaries', and 'Black Hundreds'. The kaftan rebels killed about 200 officials, but the punitive detachments sent to quell them killed 1,000 rebels in combat and executed a further 600. Some historians lump all forms of peasant resistance into a single 'Green movement'; but this elides important distinctions. When the Soviet authorities talked of 'Greens' they referred to the roving bands of deserters who lived in the fields and forests, surviving through banditry and attacks on requisition squads. These bands were more structured and politicized than most peasant rebels. Generally, they could rely on the sympathy of villagers, but whenever they tried to organize the latter into more permanent formations or to involve them into compulsory labour duties, they risked provoking their animosity.
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With the elimination of the White threat, peasant protest escalated to dramatically new levels. In 1921 there were over 50 large-scale peasant uprisings in regions as far-flung as Ukraine and Belorussia, the north Caucasus and Karelia. In Tambov A. S. Antonov, a former Left SR who had served the soviet cause with distinction until summer 1918, built an army of 40,000 partisans that controlled practically the entire territory of the Volga by February 1921. The army had territorial divisions and hierarchies of command, supply lines based on the villages, and 'unions of toiling peasantry' as its political back-up. The latter demanded the overthrow of 'Communist-Bolshevik power, which has brought the country to poverty, destruction, and disgrace'; political equality for all citizens; the calling of a Constituent Assembly; socialization of land; and partial denationalization of factories under workers' control. In western Siberia partisans overthrew Bolshevik power across 1 million square kilometres and severed railway contact with European Russia. On £ 21 February 1921 they seized the city of Tobolsk and formed a soviet g which proclaimed civil liberties, free trade, equal rations,
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e denationalization of industry, and the restoration of the old courts. jg There were at least 100,000 fighting men, but the different divisions 1 were never subject to a unified command. Not until autumn did the Red Army regain control. In a loose way the different peasant movements saw themselves united in a common cause. The Antonov partisans, for example, fought in expectation that the supporters of Makhno would come to their aid from Ukraine, even though Makhno had by this stage fled to Romania. The political influence of the SRs was everywhere in evidence; but although there were a fair number of demands for the return of the Constituent Assembly, the most widespread slogan was for 'Soviets without communists'. Convinced that the 'toiler-and-peasant government has long since ceased to exist', rebels wished to see the communist regime overthrown; yet they remained powerfully drawn to the soviet idea, which they associated with the overthrow of the landlords and rule by the toilers.
Between 1917 and 1920 the number of factory and mine workers fell
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In the purely peasant and semi-proletarian provinces soviet power in general and the Communist Party in particular has no social base. You will not find there broad layers of the population who are committed to us, who share our programme, and are ready to act for us. I am not speaking about kulaks or the remnants of the bourgeoisie, of which hardly any remain. I am talking about the broad mass of workers, artisans, and, especially, peasants. We have contrived to frighten off the mass of middle and poor peasants. Voluntary mobilization has failed. We met with the refusal of entire trade unions to give up even one man. And matters with the peasantry were entirely antipathetic. I do not say that these are consciously counterrevolutionary forces, they are not. But the mass of the population is indifferent or hostile to our party. In many districts they are waiting for Kolchak. It's true that when he arrives the mood changes to our benefit, but not for long. The reasons for this are many. But the central fact - and this is true on a national level -is that we have actually given nothing to the peasants except hardship. Terror reigns. We hold on only through terror. Report of lu. M. Steklov, editor of Pravda, to the Central Committee,
June 1919
from 3.6 million to 1.5 million. Over a million workers returned to their villages, several hundred thousand departed for the Red Army, and tens of thousands left to take up administrative and managerial positions in the soviet, trade-union, and party organs. Workers suffered a huge drop in living standards. By 1920 the real value of the average 'wage' was reckoned to be 38% of the 1913 level, although this was made up largely of rations, free housing, transport, clothing, and other goods. At the same time, elements of coercion and hierarchy were being reintroduced into the workplace. Not surprisingly, therefore, worker discontent was rife. The Bolsheviks explained this as being the result of 'declassing', i.e.
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the strengthening of 'petty-bourgeois elements' in the working class. It is true that many of their most ardent supporters left the factories; but within a much depleted workforce the ratio between the core of skilled and experienced workers and the larger group of less skilled, less experienced women and recent recruits probably remained about the same as it had been in 1917.
As early as spring 1918, worker support for the government started rapidly to ebb, as unemployment, food shortages, and declining wages began to bite. Mounting bitterness manifested itself in a revival of support for Mensheviks and SRs. From early March in Tula, Petrograd, and elsewhere Mensheviks formed assemblies of factory plenipotentiaries to campaign for civil rights, independent trade unions, and free soviet elections, with the ultimate aim of reconvening the Constituent Assembly. In Petrograd, where the movement was £ strongest, the Assembly had 200 delegates, who claimed to represent g two-thirds of the city's workforce. The С heka foiled a plan by'this group e of pretenders and counter-revolutionaries' to call a general strike on jg 2 July; but it is clear that their support was by no means firm. As the 1 plenipotentiaries conceded, worker grievances were predominantly about unemployment, bread rations, and freedom to leave the city in order to search for food:'the masses have still not turned away from the Bolsheviks and are not completely disenchanted.'
The 'democratic counter-revolution' received the support of many workers. N. I. Podvoisky, chair of the Supreme Military Inspectorate, reported from the Volga provinces:
With rare exceptions workers are hostile to soviet power. Unemployed from the demobilized factories are the most hostile towards us and a certain number of workers at the Pipe and Cartridge factories in Samara have gone over to the Cossacks.
At Izhevsk in Viatka province SR Maximalists in the Red Guard so
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alienated the local populace with their requisitions, searches, and arrests that the Mensheviks and SRs triumphed in the soviet elections in May 1918, prompting the Bolsheviks to shut the soviet down. When the Czech Legion approached on 5 August the SR-dominated veterans' association, backed by workers from the huge munitions plant, seized control of the town. Thousands of workers, including those at the neighbouring Votkinsk works, joined the People's Army, which was defeated by the Reds in mid-November, some later joining Kolchak. The most violent confrontation b
etween Bolsheviks and workers, however, occurred in Astrakhan, a fishing town on the lower Volga in a strategically very sensitive area. On 10 March 1919 striking metallurgical workers, demanding free trade and an increase in food rations, clashed with sailors. A crowd, including deserters from the 45th regiment, then attacked the Communist headquarters, killing several officials. S. Kirov, chair of the military revolutionary committee, ordered 'the merciless extermination of the White Guard swine' and in several days' fighting a couple of thousand insurgents were slaughtered. Yet in general workers loathed the Whites, who were energetic in suppressing trade unions and restoring factory owners to power in the areas under their control. Following Kolchak's coup in November 1918, there was a spate of political strikes and disturbances in the cities and mining regions of Siberia. The strike by miners in Cheremkhovo in December 1919 signalled a turning-point in Red fortunes. In the Donbas, too, where General S. V. Denisov had hundreds of miners in luzivka hanged, the Whites were equally detested.