The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  As the government pressed its campaign, the countryside rose in revolt. This was an event unprecedented in Russian history, for previous uprisings, such as Razin’s or Pugachev’s, had been regional affairs, usually confined to the eastern and southeastern borderlands. Nothing like it had ever occurred in the heartland of Russia. Rural resistance to the Bolsheviks that erupted in the summer of 1918 represented, in both extent and numbers involved, far and away the greatest peasant rebellion that the country had ever experienced.* Its course, however, is still imperfectly known, because of the refusal of the authorities in charge of Soviet archives to release the relevant documents and the inexplicable lack of interest in the subject by Western historians.* The Cheka reported that in 1918 there occurred 245 rural “uprisings” (vosstaniia) which cost the lives of 875 Bolsheviks and 1,821 rebels. In addition, 2,431 rebels were executed.91 This figure, however, can reflect only a fraction of the casualties, perhaps only those suffered by Cheka’s own personnel. A recent work by a Communist historian states that, judging by incomplete data, between July and September 1918 alone, in twenty-two provinces, some 15,000 Soviet “supporters” (storonniki) had been killed, by which are meant Red Army troops, members of supply detachments, and Communist officials.92 A history of the Communist Party in Cheliabinsk shows a photograph of a Red Army detachment of 300 men posing around a machine gun. According to the caption, the entire unit, save for a single survivor, perished in the course of a “kulak uprising.”93 Obviously, comparable casualties must have been incurred in other regions and provinces, on both sides.94

  The anti-Communist peasant rising of 1918–19, whose course is not even approximately known, was ultimately suppressed. Although the peasant rebels exceeded government forces manifold, they were handicapped by lack of firepower and, above all, lack of organization: each rising was spontaneous and localized.95 The SRs, despite their dominant role in the village, refused to organize the peasants, almost certainly out of fear of playing into the hands of the Whites.

  Notwithstanding the brutality of the supply detachments, only negligible food supplies reached the cities: the little food that they managed to extract was appropriated by their members. On July 24, 1918, two months after the food detachments had been instituted, Lenin informed Stalin that as yet no food had reached either Petrograd or Moscow.96 This fiasco of the most brutal policy conceivable drove Lenin into paroxysms of fury. As the time for the harvest approached and dispatches from the rural “front” indicated continued lack of success, he berated Bolshevik commanders for their irresolution and ordered ever more savage reprisals. On August 10, he cabled Tsiurupa:

  1. It is an arch-scandal, an insane scandal, that Saratov has bread and we are unable to collect it.…

  2. A decree project: in every bread-producing district, 25–30

  hostages

  from among the

  rich

  , who answer with their

  lives

  for the collection and delivery of

  all

  the surplus.

  97

  When Tsiurupa responded: “One can take hostages when one has real power. Does it exist? This is doubtful.” Lenin wrote back: “I propose not to take the ‘hostages’ but to designate them.”98 This was the earliest mention of the practice of hostage-taking, which four weeks later, under the “Red Terror,” would be carried out on a mass scale. That Lenin was earnest about this barbarian policy is evident from an instruction that he sent to Penza province, where a peasant revolt was in progress:

  While suppressing the uprising in the five districts, apply all efforts and adopt all measures in order to remove all the grain surpluses from their owners, accomplishing this concurrently with the suppression of the uprising. For this purpose designate in every district (designate, do not seize) hostages, by name, from among kulaks, rich men, and exploiters, whom you are to charge with responsibility for the collection and delivery to assigned stations or grain-collecting points and for turning over to the authorities of all the surplus grain without exception.

  The hostages are answerable with their lives for the accurate and prompt payment of the contribution …

  l99

  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 peas
ants” with a scattering of “rich.” The Bolsheviks thus lacked a realistic social base from which to instigate a class war in the village.

  To make matters worse, even that 4 percent would not cooperate. Much as the peasants bickered among themselves, when threatened from the outside, whether by the authorities or by peasants from other areas, they closed ranks. On such occasions, rich, middle, and poor became as one family. In the words of a Left SR: “When the food detachments show up in a village, they obtain no food, of course. What do they accomplish? They create a united front from the kulaks to your landless peasants who fight the virtual war which the city has declared on the village.”106 A peasant foolhardy enough to turn informer against his fellow villagers, in the hope of securing the rewards promised him by the regime, signed his social and even physical death warrant: the moment the supply detachment withdrew, he would be chased out of the commune, if not killed. Under these conditions, the whole concept of pitting the “poor” against the “rich” in a “merciless” class war proved utterly unrealistic.

  Lenin either did not know these facts or chose to ignore them because of overriding political considerations. As Sverdlov had conceded in May, the Bolshevik Government was weak in the countryside and it could insinuate itself there only by “inflaming civil war.” The soviets, which had originated in the cities, were not popular among the peasants because they duplicated the village assembly, the traditional rural form of self-government. In the summer of 1918, most rural localities had no soviets; where they existed, they functioned rather perfunctorily under the leadership of the more outspoken peasants or the village intelligentsia, adherents of the SR Party. This situation Lenin was determined to change.

  The ostensible purpose of the Committees of the Poor was to help the supply detachments and Red Army units uncover hoards of grain. But their true mission was to serve as nuclei of new rural soviets directed by reliable urban Communists and acting in strict conformity with the directives of Moscow.

  The Ispolkom discussed the creation of these committees, or kombedy, on May 20 and decreed their establishment throughout Russia on June 11.107 When it came up for discussion at the Ispolkom, there was vigorous criticism from the Mensheviks and the Left SRs,108 which the Bolshevik majority overruled. The regime issued a “Decree concerning the organization and provisioning” of the village poor, which provided for the establishment in every volost’ and large village (selo), alongside existing soviets and under their supervision, of Committees of the Poor made up of both local peasants and new settlers, with the exclusion of “notorious kulaks and rich men,” heads of households disposing of a surplus of grain and other produce, those who owned commercial and industrial establishments, and those who employed hired labor. The task of the committees was to help Red Army units and supply detachments locate and confiscate food hoards. To secure their cooperation, members of kombedy were promised a share of the confiscated hoard, free of charge until June 15 and at a token cost after that date. To make membership in the kombedy still more attractive, the committees were also authorized to confiscate from the “village bourgeoisie” and divide among themselves its equipment and inventory. Thus, one part of the rural population was encouraged to denounce and despoil the other.

  Although the consequences for those to whom it applied were certain to be immense, the provisions of the decree were vague. Who were the “notorious kulaks and rich men” and how were they to be distinguished from other peasants who had surplus grain? In what sense were the kombedy subordinated to the local soviets, which had charge of local government and responsibility for food distribution?

  As it turned out, the poor peasants were as unwilling to enroll in the kombedy as the industrial workers were to join the supply detachments. Despite immense pressure, as of September 1918, three months after they had been decreed, only one village in six was reported to have a Committee of the Poor. Many provinces, among them Moscow, Pskov, Samara, and Simbirsk—major agricultural regions—had none.109 The government kept on allocating large sums of money for this purpose, without much success. Where rural soviets did not exist, the order was ignored. Where they did exist, they usually declared kombedy to be redundant, and instead created their own “supply commissions,” which defeated the whole purpose of the undertaking.

  Undaunted, the Bolsheviks pressed the campaign. Thousands of Bolsheviks and Bolshevik sympathizers were sent to the countryside to agitate, organize, and overcome the resistance of rural soviets. The following incident illustrates how such methods worked:

  From the protocols of the Saransk district conference of

  volost’

  and village soviets and the representatives of the Committees of the Poor held on July 26, 1918:

  Resolved:

  that the functions of the Committees of the Poor are to be entrusted to the

  volost’

  and village soviets.

  After the vote had been taken, Comrade Kaplev [the deputy chairman] informed the conference in the name of the local committee of Communists-Bolsheviks that apparently the majority of those attending the conference had voted against the decision of the central authority due to a misunderstanding. For this reason, on the basis of the decree and instructions concerning the matter, the party will send to the localities its representatives, who will explain to the population the significance of the Committees of the Poor and proceed to organize them, in accordance with the [government’s] decree.

  110

  In this fashion, party officials invalidated the vote of the peasants rejecting the creation of Committees of the Poor. Using such strong-arm methods, by December 1918 the Bolsheviks organized 123,000 kombedy, or slightly more than one per two villages.111 Whether these organizations actually functioned or even existed it is impossible to tell: one suspects that in many cases they existed only on paper. In the majority of cases, the chairmen of the kombedy either belonged to the Communist Party or declared themselves “sympathizers.”112 In the latter case they were under the thumb of outsiders, mainly urban apparatchiki, for at this time there were almost no peasants in the Communist Party: a statistical survey of twelve provinces of central Russia indicated in 1919 only 1,585 Communists in the rural areas.113

  Moscow saw the kombedy as a transitional institution: it was Lenin’s intention to have them transformed into soviets. In November 1918 he declared: “We shall fuse the kombedy with the soviets, we will arrange it so that the kombedy will become soviets.”114 The next day, Zinoviev addressed the Congress of Soviets on this subject. He declared that it was the task of the kombedy to reshape rural soviets so that they would resemble urban ones, that is, become organs of “socialist construction.” This required nationwide “re-elections” to the rural soviets on the basis of rules which the Central Executive Committee would lay down.115 These rules were announced on December 2.116 Here it was stated that because the rural soviets had been elected before the “socialist revolution” reached the countryside, they continued to be dominated by “kulaks.” It had now become necessary to bring rural soviets into “full harmony” with the urban ones. Nationwide réélections to soviets on the village and volost’ level were to take place under the supervision of the kombedy. To ensure that the new rural soviets acquired a proper “class” character, the executives of the provincial city soviets would supervise the elections and where necessary, remove from them undesirable elements.* Kulaks and other speculators and exploiters were to be disenfranchised. Ignoring the provisions of the 1918 Constitution that all power in the country belonged to the soviets, the decree defined the “main task” of the freshly elected rural soviets to be the “realization of all the decisions of the corresponding higher organs of the Soviet authority”—that is, the central government. Their own authority—closely modeled on that of the zemstva of tsarist Russia—was to be confined to raising the “cultural and economic standards” of their area by such means as gathering statistical data, promoting local industry, and helping the government to appropria
te grain. In other words, they were to be transformed primarily into conveyors of bureaucratic decisions and secondarily into institutions charged with improving the living conditions of the population. Once they had accomplished their mission, kombedy were to be dissolved.†

  The reelections to the volost’ and village soviets, which took place in the winter of 1918–19, followed closely the pattern previously established by the Bolsheviks in the cities.117 All executive posts were preassigned to members of the Communist Party as well as to “sympathizers” or “partyless.” Since the peasants stubbornly elected and reelected their own candidates, Moscow devised methods that ensured the results it wanted. In most localities, the voting was done in the open,118 which had an intimidating effect, since a peasant who did not vote as directed risked being labeled a “kulak.” No party other than the Communist was allowed to participate: this was ensured by a provision that only those parties and factions could put up candidates which “stood on the platform of Soviet authority.” Protests that the 1918 Constitution made no mention of parties taking part in soviet elections were brushed aside.119 In many localities, Communist Party cells insisted on approving every candidate who stood for the election. If, these precautions notwithstanding, “kulaks” or other undesirables still managed to win executive positions, as seems frequently to have happened, the Communists resorted to their favorite technique of declaring the election invalid and ordering it repeated. This could be done as often as necessary until the desired results were obtained. One Soviet historian says that it was not uncommon for three or four or more “elections” to be held in succession.120 And still, the peasants kept on electing “kulaks”—that is, non-Bolsheviks and anti-Bolsheviks. Thus, in Samara province in 1919 no fewer than 40 percent of the members of the new volost’ soviets turned out to be “kulaks.”121 To put an end to such insubordination, the party issued on December 27, 1919, a directive instructing party organizations in the Petrograd region to submit to the rural soviets a single list of “approved” candidates.122 This practice, in time extended to other areas, put an end to the rural soviets as organs of self-government.