If one were to assess the results of the Bolshevik campaign against the village in the military terms in which it was conceived, one would have to declare the village the winner. While the Bolsheviks did gain some of their political objectives, they failed both to divide the peasantry against itself and to extract from it significant quantities of food. Even its political gains were soon erased: for as the Red Army units were recalled in 1919 to meet the threat from the White armies, the village reverted to its old ways.
The extraction of foodstuffs also gave the regime little cause for satisfaction. Communist sources are uncharacteristically reticent about the quantities of food obtained by means of forceful seizures, but such evidence as they do provide suggests they were minuscule. It is said that during the 1918 harvest (lasting from mid-August to early November) the supply detachments, assisted by the Red Army, and the Committees of the Poor extracted from the twelve provinces with surpluses 35 million puds, or 570,000 tons, of grain.* Since the 1918 harvest yielded 3 billion puds, or 49 million tons,123 it appears that all that effort and all that brutality—troops firing machine guns, pitched battles, hostages with death sentences hanging over their heads—brought in only one-hundredth of the harvest. The authorities acknowledged the failure of the policy of raiding the countryside when they introduced on January 11, 1919, taxation in kind (prodovol’stvennaia razvërstka or prodrazvërstka), which replaced confiscations of all surplus with strict norms specifying the quantities the peasant had to turn over. These were established on the basis of the state’s needs, without regard to the producers’ ability to deliver. To ensure delivery, the government reverted to the Chinese-Mongol system of imposing quotas on districts and subdistricts, which then distributed the load among their villages and communes. The latter were bound, as in earlier tsarist days, by collective responsibility (krugovaia poruka) for meeting their obligations. This system, which at least introduced some order, originally covered grain and feed, but was later extended to include virtually all foodstuffs. For the goods which he was compelled to turn over the peasant received money which bought nothing: in 1920 Lenin described to the visiting Bertrand Russell with a chuckle how his government forced the muzhik to take worthless paper for his grain.* 124 And even so, barely two years later, in the spring of 1921, yielding to stubborn reality, Lenin, who had said that he would rather have everyone die of hunger than allow free trade in grain, had to back down and give up the grain monopoly.
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.
*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.
*Information on “disturbances,” whether by workers or peasants, was censored and newspapers which published it were often fined and even suspended. By early 1919, all such information had to be cleared by military censors, who routinely removed it from the handful of non-Bolshevik papers still allowed to appear: DN, No. 2 (March 21, 1919), 1. The only scholarly monograph on the subject is Mikhail Frenkin’s Tragediia krest’ianskikh vosstanii v Rossii 1918–1921 gg. (Jerusalem, 1988). The 1918–19 uprisings are treated here in Chap. 4, pp. 73–111.
*Lenin, PSS, XXXVII, 39–41. Cf. Robespierre: “If the rich farmers persist in sucking the people’s blood, we will turn them over to the people themselves. If we find too many obstacles in dealing out justice to these traitors, the conspirators, the profiteers, then we will have the people deal with them.” Ralph Korngold, Robespierre and the Fourth Estate (New York, 1941), 251.
*This resembled the authority vested in the 1880s in tsarist governors, by virtue of which they were empowered to remove elected zemstvo officials unable to satisfy the monarchy’s criteria of “reliability.”
†E. H. Carr, (The Bolshevik Revolution, II, London, 1952,159) errs, therefore, when he says that the dissolution order proved the failure of kombedy, inasmuch as they had been intended from the outset as transitional institutions.
* LS, XVIII, 158n. But Lenin, (PSS, XXXVII, 419) claimed that the regime obtained 67 million puds.
*“When I put a question to [Lenin] about socialism in agriculture, he explained with glee how he had incited the poorer peasants against the richer ones, ‘and they soon hanged them from the nearest tree—ha! ha! ha!’ His guifaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold.” Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays (New York, 1950), 171.
17
Murder of the Imperial Family
On the night of July 16–17, 1918, at approximately 2:30 a.m. in the Ural city of Ekaterinburg, a squad of Chekists murdered, in the basement of a private home, the ex-Emperor, Nicholas II, his wife, their son and four daughters, the family physician, and three servants. This much is known with certainty. The steps that led to this tragedy, however, remain obscure, despite the immense literature, and will remain such until all the pertinent archives are thrown open to scholars.*
Two other European monarchs had lost their lives in consequence of revolutionary upheavals: Charles I in 1649 and Louis XVI in 1793. Yet, as is the case with so much that concerns the Russian Revolution, while the superficial features of events are familiar, all else is unique. Charles I was tried by a specially constituted High Court of Justice, which lodged formal charges and gave him an opportunity to defend himself. The trial was held in the open and its records were published while it was still in progress; the execution took place in public view. The same held true of Louis XVI. He was tried before the Convention, which sentenced him to death by a majority vote after a long debate, in the course of which a lawyer defended the king. The trial records, too, were published. The execution was carried out in broad daylight in the center of Paris.
Nicholas II was neither charged nor tried. The Soviet Government, which had condemned him to death, has never published the relevant documents: such facts as are known of the event are mainly the result of the efforts of one dedicated investigator. In the Russian case, the victims were not only the deposed monarch but also his wife, children, and staff. The deed, perpetrated in the dead of night, resembled more a gangster-type massacre than a formal execution.
The Bolshevik seizure of power at first brought no significant change to the ex-Tsar’s family and its retainers living in Tobolsk, where they had been exiled by Kerensky. In the winter of 1917–18, life in the Governor’s House and its annexes went on much as before. The family was allowed to take walks, to attend religious services in a nearby church, to receive newspapers and correspond with friends. In February 1918, their state subvention was cut off and their allowance reduced to 600 rubles a month, but even so they lived in reasonable comfort. The Bolsheviks, who had their hands full with more urgent matters, gave little thought to the Romanovs, all of whom had withdrawn from public affairs. They discussed what to do with the ex-Tsar as early as November 1917 but took no decision.1
The situation began to change in March, in connection with the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. The treaty brought terrible odium to the Bolshevik regime. In this atmosphere attempts at restoration could not have been precluded, the more so that the Bolsheviks were aware of pro-monarchist sentiments among German generals. To avoid trouble, precautions were taken to remove the Romanovs from the scene. On March 9, Lenin signed a decree ordering into exile Grand Duke Michael, the putative heir to the Russian throne. Michael had shown no interest in politics since rejecting the crown offered him by Nicholas in March 1917. He lived quietly on his estate at Gatchina, near Petrograd, shunning politics and keeping out of the public eye.2 How unconcerned he was with political events may be gathered from the fact that a few days after turning down the throne, he appeared before the astonished officials of the Petrograd Soviet with a request for permission to hunt on his estate.3 In the summer of 1917 he asked the British Ambassador for a visa to Englan
d, but was turned down with the explanation that “His Majesty’s Government do not wish members of the Imperial Family to come to England during the war.”* 4 At the end of 1917, Michael’s petition to Lenin for permission to change his royal name to that of his wife’s, Countess Brasova, received no response.5
Michael was now placed under arrest, first at Smolnyi and then at the Cheka headquarters. On March 12, following the departure of Lenin and the rest of the government for Moscow, he was sent under guard to Perm, not far from Tobolsk. Because the Bolsheviks feared that the Germans might occupy Petrograd and get hold of members of the Imperial family, they decided to remove them from this exposed area. On March 16, Uritskii, the head of the Petrograd Cheka, ordered all members of the family in Petrograd and vicinity to register.6 Later that month, he issued a further order that all these individuals were to be deported to the provinces of Perm, Vologda, or Viatka, at their choice. Once there, they were to report to the local soviet and receive from it residential permits.7 As it turned out, all the Romanovs, except those who were in prison or lived outside Bolshevik control, ended up in Perm. This region had the largest concentration of Bolshevik Party members after Petrograd and Moscow who could be relied upon to keep a sharp eye on the Imperial clan.
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