Gorky turned his enormous flat on the Kronversky Prospekt into a
refuge for the penniless and the persecuted victims of the civil war. Compared with the cold and the dampness in which most of the population lived, it was something of a paradise. Viktor Serge described it as 'warm as a greenhouse'. Gorky accumulated various 'wives' and 'sisters', 'daughters' and 'brothers', all of them in some way victims of the terror, whom he allowed to shelter in his home. So many people came to Gorky's flat — at first simply to drink tea and chat but they somehow ended up by staying several years — that the wall between it and the neighbouring flat had to be knocked through and the two apartments made into one. Gorky's mistress, Moura Budberg (then still Baroness Benckendorff), lived in one room, and cooked most of the meals with a girlfriend of the artist Tatlin, who lived in another. There was always an interesting and motley collection of people around the lunch and dinner tables. Famous writers and artists would rub shoulders with the workers and the sailors whom Gorky had picked up on the streets. H. G. Wells stayed when he came to Russia in 1920. Shaliapin was a frequent visitor, and always cursed the Bolsheviks; yet so too were the Bolshevik leaders, Lunacharsky and Krasin, and the deputy head of the Petrograd Cheka, Gleb Bokii, who must have met many of his victims there. There was even a former Grand Duke, Gavril Konstantinovich Romanov, together with the former Grand Duchess and their dog. Gorky had taken pity on them and rescued them from the Cheka jails after Gavril had fallen ill. The couple lived on the top floor, in a room filled with antique furniture and Buddhist statues, and hardly ever left the house for fear of arrest. At meals they would sit in haughty silence. For, as the former Grand Duke later wrote, there were the sort of people at Gorky's table 'that rejoiced at our misery', and 'it was distasteful for us to have to mix in such society'.32
It did not take long before the rumour spread that Gorky could help anyone, and he was besieged by begging letters. A certain professor wanted Gorky to procure a special pair of spectacles for him. A poetess begged for a ration of milk for her baby. A provincial doctor needed a new set of premises since the old ones had been requisitioned by the Soviet. A widow wanted a railway ticket to return to her family in the countryside. One old man even wrote with a request for false teeth. Many people wanted Gorky to help them get their relatives released from the Cheka jails — and he did try to intervene on behalf of many (see pages 648—9). But others asked for the impossible. One man, for example, wrote to ask what Gorky was going to do about the fact that he had been robbed. And a prisoner wrote to ask if there would be an amnesty to celebrate the occasion of Gorky's fiftieth birthday — and, if so, if he could be released.33 Like Rasputin, Gorky had become a sort of maitre de requites for all those who were too powerless to penetrate the offices of the state.
* * * The urban food crisis was, in the main, a problem of distribution and exchange
rather than production. The railway system had virtually collapsed, largely as a result of the economic crisis and the chronic shortages of fuel, and could not cope with the transportation of foodstuffs to the cities. The railway depots were graveyards of broken-down locomotives. More than half the rolling stock was in need of repair, yet the railway workshops were totally run down. The main problem was lack of parts. In one repair shop, for example, the workers were found to be stripping the parts from one engine in order to repair another, so that for every engine that was repaired several others would be even further disrepaired. The railways were thrown into further chaos by the vast crowds of hungry townsmen, soldiers and refugees from the war zones, who stormed every train bound for the countryside, where they hoped to settle or buy up cheap food. Railway officials were easily bribed, and many goods trains were pilfered or diverted. Food wagons which left the countryside full would arrive empty in Petrograd or Moscow.34
But the real root of the urban crisis was the peasantry's reluctance to sell foodstuffs for paper money. With the wartime collapse of consumer production and the huge inflation of prices, peasants could buy less and less with the rouble fortunes they were being offered for their produce. Government efforts to buy the food at fixed prices, going back to 1916, had only encouraged the peasants to withdraw from the market. They reduced their production, shifted to crops not subject to state control, or hid their surpluses from the governments procurement agents. Many peasants used their grain to fatten up the cattle, or sold it to black-market traders from the towns, while many others turned it into vodka.
Cottage industries boomed, largely undetected by statisticians, as the peasants sought to manufacture all those household products they had once bought from the towns but which were now either unavailable or too expensive for them to buy. Rural craftsmen fashioned simple ploughs and sickles out of old scrap iron. Flax and hemp were grown for clothes and rope; timber was cut to make wheels and furniture; reeds were gathered to make baskets; clay was dug for pottery; and oil-producing seeds were grown for fuel. Old rural handicrafts that had gone to the wall in the age of steam were now resurrected. Rural Russia was slowly returning to the methods of the Middle Ages, when, in the words of one official:
Rus' had neither railways nor steamboats, nor steam-mills, nor factories, nor any other 'European invention', when handicraftsmen fed, clothed, and heated the whole of Russia and made all its footwear, when everything was done by them on a tiny scale and very coarsely — with a hand chisel instead of a lathe, with an axe instead of a saw.35
The countryside, in short, was becoming more archaic and more autarkic. It was learning to live without the towns and, on the whole, was doing very well without them. True, there were places where the peasants themselves went hungry during the spring of 1918, especially in the northern regions, which had always been dependent upon importing grain. It was nonsense for the Bolsheviks to claim that any peasant hoarding food was a 'kulak', or capitalist, since many did so to avoid starvation in the winter months. The harvest of 1917 had been small and, with the gentry's extra land now to sow, many of the peasants had no surplus. In Tver, for example, they were said to be eating 'cakes made of linseed oil and straw'. Even Semenov, a model peasant farmer, wrote to a friend in April 1918 that he did 'not have nearly enough grain to eat or feed my cattle'. Like thousands of other peasant communities, Semenov and his fellow villagers of Andreevskoe were forced to mount an expedition to buy up and import grain from the fertile south.36
Which is just what the townspeople did as well. Millions fled from the hungry cities and tried to settle in the countryside to be closer to the sources of food. The great industrial cities of the north lost half their populations as Russia returned to its rural past. 'The city is in danger!' declared Viktor Serge. Petrograd lost nearly three-quarters of its population between 1918 and 1920. Moscow's population was more than halved. Railway stations were thrown into chaos as crowds battled to get on to trains bound for the countryside. People travelled on the roofs of the carriages, and hung on to the windows and the brake-pads, risking life and limb. One train left Petrograd so overcrowded that it overbalanced on a bridge and fell into the Neva River, drowning hundreds of passengers.37
The nobility fled to what remained of their landed estates. Tanya Kuzminsky, Tolstoy's sister-in-law, travelled from Petrograd to Yasnaya Polyana. Her niece helped her on the way, pleading with the porters to find her a seat on the train: 'She was Natasha Rostova in War and Peace! But this meant nothing to the guards. It was only thanks to a group of commissars that the frail old woman, dressed in her furs, was finally given a wooden box to sit on in one of the goods wagons. Other nobles, without estates, tried their luck in the countryside in any case. The Brusilovs went to stay in a village north of Moscow on the invitation of the peasants. Marina Tsvetaeva, the poetess, went to live in the rural backwaters of Tambov province, where she could trade her last possessions for pork fat, pumpkins and potatoes. Countess Meshcherskaya, a scion of the Russian aristocracy, went with her daughter to the sleepy rural town of Rublev, where they worked in the kitchens of a water-mill and
lived in the workers' dormitory. All that she had left of her inheritance — which had once included three huge estates, two palaces and a famous Botticelli — was a china teapot in the rococo style which she donated to the workers' tea-room.38
But it was the workers who made up the bulk of those who fled the starving cities. Many of them had been laid off by their factories as a result of the industrial crisis of 1917—18. Although no one knows the precise figure, something like a million workers were unemployed by the spring of 1918. The war industries were the hardest hit, particularly munitions and chemicals, losing in all some half a million workers. The metal industries of Petrograd, in particular, were devastated by fuel shortages, demobilization and the evacuation of the capital. The workforce of these factories declined from a quarter of a million to barely 50,000 during the first six months of 1918. It was a catastrophe for the Bolsheviks. Their once mighty strongholds, the New Lessner and the Erickson plants, each of which had had more than 7,000 workers during the autumn of 1917, were reduced to a skeleton workforce with only 200 workers between them by the following spring. During the first six months of the Bolshevik regime, the number of Bolsheviks in Petrograd fell from 50,000 to a mere 13,000. The Bolshevik Party, in the words of Shliapnikov, was becoming 'the vanguard of a non-existent class'.J9
According to the Bolsheviks and their historians, it was the skilled and 'class conscious' workers who mainly fled the cities. The depopulation of the cities thus paralleled their 'declassing', to adopt the rather ugly Marxist phrase, meaning the breakdown of the working class. It was important for the Soviet establishment to argue this because it allowed them to depict the growing wave of workers' strikes and protests from the spring of 1918 as the work of 'backward' or 'petty-bourgeois' types stirred up by the Mensheviks and the SRs. How embarrassing it would have been for them to have to admit that the very workers who had helped to bring them to power in October were calling for their downfall six months later. Yet that was more or less what happened. Those most likely to flee to the countryside were those workers who had arrived in the cities last — especially the women who had come during the industrial boom of the First World War — and who thus had retained the closest ties with their native villages. These were the unskilled and semi-rural workers — invariably the first to be laid off by the factory employers — so that the workers who were left in the cities tended to be the most skilled and proletarian (i.e. those who had been born in the cities and who had no real links with the countryside). It was these workers who led the strikes and protests against the Bolsheviks in 1918 (see pages 624-6).
The prospect of a share in the communal land or of setting up in some rural trade was usually enough to lure semi-rural workers back to their native villages. According to a report from the Briansk metallurgical factory in 1920, 'all the workers with a tie to the village want to leave the factory and settle there'. Generally, the peasants welcomed those workers who had relatives in the village or who had some useful trade to contribute (e.g. carpenters and
blacksmiths); but they were very rarely willing to give either land or food to those who had neither. These immigrants were usually left to support themselves by casual labour, and their plight was often desperate. One memoirist from Tambov province recalls these workers and their families 'walking across the fields after the rye harvest looking for any ears of grain that had been dropped'.40
It was not just the flight of the workers with which the Bolsheviks had to contend. Industry and transport were thrown into chaos by the endless travelling of city people to and from the countryside to buy up stocks of food. Millions of townspeople, from all classes, relied on this petty trade — or 'bagging', as it was called — to feed themselves. They would leave the cities with bags of clothes and household goods to sell or exchange in the rural markets, and return with bags of food. The railways were paralysed by the armies of 'bagmen'. The Orel Station, a major junction en route to the south, had 3,000 bagmen pass through it every day. Many of them travelled in armed brigades which hijacked trains, leaving the local authorities powerless. The most popular destinations — Tambov, Kursk, Kazan, Simbirsk and Saratov provinces — were each invaded by something in the region of 100,000 bagmen every month.41
For the hungry cities of the north this primitive trade was a universal means of livelihood. Virtually everyone was forced to turn themselves into a part-time trader — workers, officials, even Communists. It was a natural and spontaneous response to the economic crisis and the breakdown of the market between town and country. But it brought chaos to industry. Nearly all the workers were engaged in the bag trade in some form. Many of them travelled into the countryside with tools, fuel and scrap-iron, which they had stolen from their factories. Others fabricated primitive goods in their factories to barter with the peasants. Primus stoves, penknives and cigarette lighters were the most common trade. But shoe soles were also made from conveyor belts; candlesticks from bits of piping; axes and ploughs from iron bars. The whole phenomenon became known as 'cigarette lighterism' (zazhigolochnichestvo), one of the longest and hardest words to pronounce in the Russian language. It was not uncommon for factory committees to sanction or at least to turn a blind eye to these spontaneous initiatives. Many of the committees gave their own anarchic gloss to the Decree on Workers' Control, taking it to mean the right of the workers to divide between themselves the products of their labour — or, if there were none, the assets of their factory — just as the peasants had divided up the land. Industry was brought virtually to a halt as most of the workers spent most of their time fabricating these black-market goods and running off to the countryside to barter them for food. On the average day in the average factory 30 per cent of the workforce would be absent. In some metal factories the rate of absenteeism could be as high as 80 per cent.42
During their first precarious months in power the Bolsheviks could do
very little to stop this 'bagging'. Any restrictions they tried to impose were bound to be evaded by the workers who depended on the bag-trade to survive. The right to travel to the countryside for food was a major demand of the workers' strikes and protests during the spring of 1918. Many of the factories and even some of the district and city Soviets organized this trade on a collective basis. Without recourse to some form of trade, industry would have to come to a complete halt. The factory or the Soviet would make an agreement with a village or a rural Soviet to exchange a certain number of factory goods for an equivalent amount of foodstuffs. A brigade of workers would then be sent to complete the exchange. Try though they did, the Bolsheviks were powerless to prevent this collective bartering. One commissar in Samara province claimed that it was useless trying to stop the bagmen 'since they all travel with passports from their Soviet'. Local rates of natural exchange began to take the place of money. In Kaluga, for example, a yard of cloth was worth a pound of butter, or two pounds of peas; a pound of soap was worth two pounds of millet; and a pair of boots a pound of potatoes. Flour was the gold standard of this medieval system: a pound was worth thirty pounds of kerosene, or three pounds of tobacco, or a winter coat.43
The co-operatives played an important part in this local trade, often setting the terms of barter and exchange. The co-operatives had flourished during the war as one of the main means of trade between town and country. By 1918, they claimed to serve the needs of a hundred million consumers (70 per cent of the population).44 Factories, trade unions, professional groups and resident associations formed themselves into urban co-operatives for the procurement of goods. Peasants joined co-operatives to market their goods and obtain the manufactures they needed in exchange. The rural co-operatives also served as a conduit for agricultural improvements, offering the peasants advanced tools, fertilizers, credit and advice on the latest farming techniques. For Semenov, a pioneer of the co-operative movement in Volokolamsk, this was one of the revolutions main achievements.
* * * Had they not been so hostile to the market, the Bolsheviks might have used this collect
ive barter system to help feed the cities and supply industry. Primitive and chaotic though it was, it would still arguably have been more efficient than the state monopoly of food supply which they began to introduce from May 1918 as the foundation of their planned economy. War Communism, as this system became known, was in many ways a prototype of the Stalinist economy. It aimed to abolish all private trade, maximize the state's control of distribution and the labour market, nationalize all large-scale industry, collectivize agriculture, and at its height in 1920 replace the money system with a universal system of state rationing.
The origins of War Communism have long been a subject of intense debate between historians. To those on the Left it was essentially a pragmatic response to the military exigencies of the civil war; while to those on the Right it was derived directly from Leninist ideology. The argument has broader implications for the nature and development of the Soviet regime. According to the left-wing view, War Communism was no more than a temporary diversion from the mixed economy that Lenin had outlined during the spring of 1918 and to which he returned in the New Economic Policy of 1921. This implies that the 'soft' or pro-market socialism pursued by the Bolsheviks in these two periods was the real face of Leninism as opposed to the 'hard' or anti-market socialism of the War Communist and Stalinist eras. Hence the 'Leninism' proclaimed for Gorbachev's reforms. In the right-wing view, however, the 'hard socialism' of the civil war was directly inspired by the statist methods at the heart of Lenin's revolutionary ideology. The Bolsheviks, in this account, adopted War Communism as a means of introducing socialism by decree, and made concessions to the market only when they were forced to do so. There was thus a logical progression, a historical continuity, between Lenin's programme of 1902, War Communism and the Stalinist planned economy.
A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 Page 94
