Decriminalizing Free Trade: Overcoming the Fear of Chaos
The Russian time of troubles meant an increase in state interference in daily life, not only because of the material burden of state obligations but even more because of demands to help the new bureaucracy and make its life easier by providing registration information, filling out forms, and obeying regulations. The peasant saw these requirements as a nuisance and as a reflection of a profoundly distasteful worldview.
In Leonid Leonov's novel The Badgers a peasant rebel entertains his comrades with a fable on this subject, set in an "olden time when there was more elbow room everywhere, and the air was purer and clearer." When Kalafat was nine years old, he told his father, the king, Your kingdom has no order. Do you know how many blades of grass there are in the field? How many trees in the wood? Fishes in the river? Stars in the sky? And he set about numbering each one: "He branded the fish, issued passports to the birds, and wrote down every blade of grass in a book. . . . The bear pined away, not knowing whether he was man nor beast, now that he'd been given a passport." But Kalafat went too far when he tried to label the stars, for when he climbed the tower he had ordered prisoners of war to build, it sank beneath his own weight, and he never got any nearer the stars. Yet although Kalafat was in despair, "the fields were sweet with the smell of flowers, and the birds sang over them. Nature had thrown off Kalafat's passport and was herself again."[62]
The food-supply officials were aware of this attitude. But they could not seem to help themselves: even when they set out to give something to the peasantry, they imposed further bureaucratization. The commodityexchange system is a good example. In his pamphlet of 1918 Maliutin promised the peasants that the new state authority would "not allow the middleman-merchant to get big money in any way for any reason." To replace this wasteful middleman, the following system was instituted. The peasant delivers his grain for which he gets a receipt, and he turns his receipt in to the village Committee of the Poor. When that institution has gathered a sufficient number of receipts, an overall account is made and sent to the district Committee of the Poor. After the district committee gets enough of these, they draw up a list to send to the county food-supply committee. The county committee, armed with all these receipts, obtains the release of a certain amount of consumer goods. These are sent back to
[62] Leonid Leonov, The Badgers (1923-1924), trans. Hilda Kazanina, (New York, 1947), 234-41. Kalafat's parable can also be found in The Fatal Eggs , 2d. ed., trans. Mirra Ginsburg (New York, 1987), 135-41. A similar point is made in Panteleimon Romanov's "Inventory" ("Opis '") in Fatal Eggs , 6-11.
the district Committee of the Poor, which distributes them among the village committees in proportion to the amount of grain delivered and the number of residents. (How these two factors are combined is not explained.) The village committee hands out the goods not only to the peasants who delivered the grain but also to those without any grain surpluses. By that time the peasant must surely be blessing the day the Bolsheviks got rid of the middlemen—all those "parasites and spiders, merchants, dealers, and kulaks."[63]
There was only one way the state could substantially reduce this kind of interference: decriminalize free trade in grain and allow the private market to take on the major burden of collecting and distributing it. A tax system did not necessarily imply decriminalization. The essence of the tax system was to assure the peasant by giving him an individual assignment before the harvest. This policy implied individual control over any grain that remained, but it was still compatible with continued prohibition of free trade. When the food-supply tax decision was made at the Tenth Party Congress in the spring of 1921, Frumkin made exactly this point in supporting the tax but rejecting decriminalization.[64]
Yet for all their willingness to accommodate the peasants in other ways, food-supply officials refused even to consider decriminalization. Various explanations have been given for this refusal: devotion to socialist principle, complacent habituation to the use of force, or simple lack of imagination.[65] An examination of the debates over food-supply policy in 1920 does not support any of these but shows rather that the main motive was the fear of losing control and allowing the centrifugal forces of chaos to sweep over the fragile barriers the food-supply officials had erected at such cost.
The greatest source of scholarly confusion on this topic has been the failure to make a careful distinction between three issues: exchange versus coercion, monopoly versus free trade, and razverstka versus tax. In each case the reasoning of the food-supply officials was tied closely to the realities of the time of troubles.
It would hardly seem to be worth documenting the commitment of the Bolsheviks to the use of material incentives and the justice of equivalent exchange, except that the opposite impression is often left both by Western and Soviet historiography.[66] In the summer of 1918 Orlov wrote that along
[63] Maliutin et al., Knizhka , 1st ed., 23-26.
[64] Tenth Party Congress, 431-34.
[65] See Malle, Economic Organization , esp. 488, and Vasilii Seliunin, "Istoki," Novyi mir , 1988, no. 5:162-89.
[66] For examples, see Carr, Bolshevik Revolution , 2:169; Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (London, 1969), 66; Poliakov, Perekhod , 223. Davydov comments on the neglect of material incentives by Soviet historians in "Tovaroobmen," 51-52.
with its demands for grain, the revolutionary state authority "strives to implement the principle, long put forward by the working masses and continually developed on the pages of the journal [of the Food-Supply Commissariat], of the equivalent exchange of economic goods between town and country, industry and agriculture."[67] The Bolsheviks were serious about the metaphorical description of the razverstka as a loan. In 1920 Evgenii Preobrazhenskii described "peasant weeks"—campaigns in which workers came to the village to help with the harvest and with repairs—as the "beginning of the payment for grain and for labor obligations. . . . We must show the village that soviet authority takes the peasant's surplus, while giving him almost nothing in return, only because of its poverty."[68]
The food-supply apparatus did not scorn the use of money, the sign and symbol of material value. If the razverstka was a loan, the IOUs were given in the form of money. By late 1920 inflation had reached such aweinspiring heights that municipal authorities disposed of the formality of payment for certain services. This action did not signify a plunge into a moneyless economy, for the state still needed money to give to the peasants. The state also paid the workers in money so that they in turn could give it to the peasants via the black market.[69] In 1920 fears arose that the peasants would finally shed their money illusion, with unfortunate consequences for grain procurement. To prevent this, any agitation among the peasants to demand goods instead of money was deemed counterrevolutionary.[70]
According to food-supply officials, it was the economic breakdown of the time of troubles that made coercion necessary. In Tsiurupa's words, "We say to the peasant, 'Give us all you owe according to the razverstka. Then you will receive from us all that we are able to give you.' [But] we do not fool ourselves nor hide the fact that what we give is not an equivalent of what we receive. The means for the extraction of agricultural products is the force of state coercion."[71]
[67] Izv. NKP (August 1918): 2; see also Izv. NKP (January 1919): 15-18 (Briukhanov and Shlikhter); Gol'man, cited in Strizhkov, Otriady , 106 and in Lars T. Lih, "Bolshevik Razverstka and War Communism," Slavic Review 44 (1986): 681; Potapenko, Zapiski , 47.
[68] Pravda , 28 April 1920. Order of passages reversed.
[69] Kritsman, Geroicheskii period , 138; A. Terne, V tsartsve Lenina (Berlin, 1922), 333-57.
[70] Orlov, Delo , 28-30; Zubareva, Khleb Prikam'ia , 45-46; Lenin, PSS, 41:146-47 (June 1920); E. Preobrazhenskii, Bumazhnye den'gi v epokhu proletarskoi revoliutsii (Moscow, 1920), 48-58, 78-84; Kritsman, Geroicheskii period , 138.
[71] Frumkin, Tovaroobmen , 7; Prod. politika , 195-96.
The frank reliance on coercion was in its way a tribute to the primacy of material incentive: once the means of material incentive were absent, there was no alternative but to rely on force—certainly the weak reed of revolutionary enthusiasm and loyalty would be almost useless. If anything, food-supply officials were somewhat naive about the ease of getting grain by economic methods once the emergency had passed. After noting that "everybody understands that there is no way to destroy Sukharevka [the Moscow bazaar that became a symbol of the illegal market] simply by decrees," Iurii Larin went on confidently to assert that "when the state has more products [under its control,] the need for Sukharevkas will disappear and all you will see at the Food Supply Commissariat will be happy faces."[72]
The changeover to a tax system in 1921 did not alter the realities that made coercion necessary. As Tsiurupa observed at the Tenth Party Congress, "Whether it is a tax, a razverstka, a monopoly, or perhaps some other procurement method, the procurement can still come only from the peasant's consumption norm, [and] nobody allows food to be ripped out of his mouth without resistance, either active or passive." In August 1921 Lenin echoed his demands of August 1918 by calling for the exemplary punishment of a few rich peasants in each district.[73]
If in fact less coercion was necessary in 1921 than earlier, it was not just because of the abandonment of the razverstka but also because of its achievements. The evidence points to a drop in the use of coercion taking place already by late 1920, especially in areas with long-standing foodsupply institutions. Many food-supply officials commented on this drop in 1920, and their assertions are confirmed by the size of the Food-Supply Army, which began to decrease in December 1920. By January 1921 the Food-Supply Army was less than two-thirds of its size in September 1920.[74] This reduction seems difficult to square with the widespread peasant revolts of 1920-1921. But the presence of peasant rebels did not necessarily mean that day-to-day food-supply operations required the use of force. In the summer of 1920 Potapenko's worker detachment closed up shop in Voronezh despite troubles in the spring from agitators sent by the peasant rebel Antonov in neighboring Tambov. According to Potapenko, the peasants said to these agitators, "If the White generals Krasnov and Denikin couldn't handle the Reds, you surely won't succeed. And the
[72] Pravda , 4 May 1920 and 17 October 1920.
[73] Tenth Party Congress, 415-25 (Tsiurupa); Lenin, PSS , 53:92-93; Na bor'bu , 50-52 (Sviderskii); Baburin, "Narkomprod," 366.
[74] Aleksentsev, "K voprosu," 163-64; Biulletin NKP , 9 September and 30 November 1920; Zubareva, Khleb Prikam'ia , 50; Chetvertaia godovshchina , 9-14.
razverstka—what can we say, it was also introduced because of the war. We have to stop making war right away."[75]
Other food-supply officials agreed that the key to peasant acceptance was the stability of Bolshevik authority.[76] The peasants realized that political reconstitution was the key to ending the time of troubles and that the Bolsheviks were the only viable candidate for a sovereign authority. Coercion could recede only when this basic uncertainty was removed.
The question of coercion versus exchange did not prejudge the question of the proper form of exchange—state grain monopoly or free trade. No one questioned that a state monopoly was better than free trade in the long run. The introduction of the food-supply tax did not mean any change in this proposition, which remained axiomatic throughout the 1920s. The real question was one of strategy: since the lack of exchange equivalents at the disposal of the state meant that a flourishing private market was unavoidable, should that market be prohibited and driven underground or should it be decriminalized?[77]
In 1920 everybody—including advocates of a food-supply tax—supported the prohibition strategy. The consensus was not confined to the Bolsheviks: the Menshevik David Dallin proposed a food-supply tax at the Eighth Congress of Soviets in December 1920 but vehemently denied that he wanted free trade.[78] On this subject the food-supply officials did not differ from accepted opinion.
The hostility of food-supply officials to the free market was based not only on a principled rejection of "speculation," which they shared with wide sections of Russian society, but also on their own experience with procurement efforts outside the framework of the monopoly. Sackmanism was stronger than ever in 1920. Starting from about the middle of 1919, the attempt to stamp out the illegal free market became progressively more pro forma, until by the middle of 1920 it had almost been abandoned in practical terms.[79] Despite this hostile tolerance, sackmanism was still a
[75] Potapenko, Zapiski , 142, 159. Tambov is presented as a success story by Briukhanov in Ekonomicheskaia zhizn ', 28-29 September 1920; see also Biulletin NKP , 14 December 1920.
[76] Vladimirov, Udarnye momenty , 17-20, 38-42; Tri goda , introduction by Sviderskii.
[77] Various opinions were expressed about the proper rate of trade nationalization outside the grain monopoly and about the role of the commodity exchange program. See Dekrety , 4:41 (November 1918), 6:12 (5 August 1919); Kaganovich, Kak dostaetsia khleb , 21-24; Orlov, Rabota , 68-75, 351-55; Frumkin, Tovaroobmen , 5-6; Prod. politika , 256-60; Dmitrenko, "Bor'ba."
[78] Eighth Congress of Soviets, 197-99. Trotsky advocated a food-supply tax in February 1920, but his proposal contains no hint of a legalized market. Lev Trotsky, Novy kurs (Moscow, 1924), 57-58. See also Lenin, PSS, 39:408 (July 1919).
[79] Bychkov, "Organizatsionnoe stroitel'stvo"; Ekonomicheskaia zhizn ', 23 September 1920.
potent source of demoralization and corruption; all citizens, no matter what their attitude was toward the Bolsheviks, were forced to act according to the maxim "He who does not speculate, neither shall he eat."[80]
Food-supply officials had reason to doubt that the horde of small-time sackmen increased the amount of grain available. The sackman system did not itself bring new goods into circulation: it mainly relied on items embezzled from state stores so that, as Vladimirov expressed it, goods put on state register ended up on the register of the speculators. Inefficient in themselves, the sackmen were the cause of inefficiency in the state system: they broke the discipline of the state fixed price and undermined the commodity-exchange program by giving the peasant an alternate source of supply. Furthermore, the flourishing urban markets proved to the visiting peasant that the soviet authority was lying when it asserted that the city had nothing to give to the peasant.[81]
Food-supply officials were also exasperated with the "legal sackmanism" of workers who were allowed at various times to go into the countryside and make individual purchases of one or two poods of grain. Besides all the problems caused by regular sackmen, the otpuskniki (workers making purchases while on leave from their factories) caused political confusion by presenting the spectacle of workers making friends with kulaks and agitating against the monopoly. Sometimes opposition went beyond agitation: after observing a group of sailors on leave disarm a food-supply worker detachment, peasants in one Simbirsk village observed, "Now here is the real sovereign."[82]
Even official state procurement efforts helped solidify the loyalty of food-supply officials to the monopoly when they were conducted outside the monopoly framework. Kaganovich argued that the competition among agencies caused officials to lose the state point of view; he was appalled to see chains of middlemen form up within the government procurement agencies. The state purchase of honey in Simbirsk in 1919 illustrated his point. The Food-Supply Commissariat signed a contract with the Chief Confectionary Committee (Glavkonditer) for honey. Since the committee did not have its own procurement apparatus, it made a deal with Tsentrosoiuz, the central cooperative organization, which in turn made a deal with an organization called Petserkop. This body contracted with a local organization, the Alatyr county union of consumer societies. The county
[80] Terne, V tsarstve , 333-57. The authorities often connived at the workers' involvement in sackmanism by giving them items produced at their factories as part of their pay-a sort of workers' equivalent of the private plot.
[81] M. K. Vladimirov, Meshochnichestvo i ego sotsial'no-politicheskoe otrazhenie (Kharkov, 1920); Kaganovich, Kak dostaetsia khleb , 12; Simon Zagorsky, La republique[république] des soviets (Paris 1921), 147-48.
[82] Kaganovich, Kak dostaetsia khleb , 12-15; Biulletin NKP , 9 October 1920.
union gave the job to district and village cooperatives, which hired private purchasing agents. These last were the only ones to make contact with the beekeepers. This intricate arrangement did not lead Kaganovich to reflect that perhaps the existence of middlemen had all along been due to objective economic circumstances rather than private greed; he concluded instead that the poor results of this system of honey purchases demonstrated that state procurement should be directed by a single will.[83]
Popular attitudes toward free trade were complicated. There is evidence that at least the workers in the capitals supported the prohibition of free trade. Yet at the same time that these workers insisted that Sukharevka be closed down, they expressed their hatred of the blockade detachments. The main complaint against these detachments was the corruption that caused the poor to starve while the speculators waxed rich. But the workers demanded impartial enforcement, not decriminalization: by 1920 many had been priced out of the black market, and they now saw it as a "source of depravity and embezzlement."[84] An editorial in Pravda summed up the popular attitude as follows: "Yes, the masses are for the razverstka—but only one that can really be paid and is carried out without scandalous abuse. Yes, the masses are for the monopoly—but a complete one that does not leave room for Sukharevkas."[85] When the Moscow Sukharevka was finally closed down in late 1920, there was no complaint from the workers.[86]
The loyalty of food-supply officials to the monopoly was thus based on a perception, grounded in their own experience, that "unity of will" was a necessary bulwark against centrifugal forces.[87] This perception determined their attitude on the separate question of the best method of collecting the state grain obligation: tax or razverstka. As Frumkin argued, taxes were "unacceptable methods in principle since they exclude the monopoly."[88] Their feelings on this point, however, were not based on any love of state regulation in and of itself. Contrary to stereotype, a hostility to bureau-
[83] Kaganovich, Kak dostaetsia khleb , 35-38; Izv. NKP , 1920, no. 3-5:2. Relying on purchasing was criticized as drift (samotek ); see Ekonomicheskaia zhizn ', 15 June 1920; Prod. i snab. (Kostroma), no. 8, 15 October 1918, 2-3; Prod. politika , 256-60, 173-79; Prod. biulletin (Siberia), no. 2-3, 1 October 1920, 5.
[84] Pravda , 27 November 1920; Sergei Semenov, Golod , in Izbrannoe (Leningrad, 1970), 76. According to Okninskii, the main customers of the bazaars were railwaymen (rich from bribes) and professionals such as doctors. Dva goda , 278-86.
[85] Pravda , 27 November 1920.
[86] Badaev, Desiat' let bor'by i stroitel'stva (Leningrad, 1927), 87-90. Vladimirov, Udarnye momenty , 31-33, gives a different picture of worker outlook in the Ukraine. See also Lih, "Bolshevik Razverstka ," 679-80; Dmitrenko, "Bor'ba," 327-30.
[87] Kaganovich, Kak dostaetsia khleb , 35-38.
[88] Biulletin NKP , 2 July 1920.
cratic overregulation was part of Bolshevik political culture during the civil-war years. A 1919 resolution on the subject of local handicrafts stated, "Given that a break in the whole structure of handicraft, [or] its restructuring [by] excessively inhibiting regulation, would hold up the flow of craft items for commodity exchange, [the food-supply conference] considers it necessary to liberate handicraft production [from such regulation]."[89] The food-supply officials' fear of the tax system stemmed rather from the feeling that the food-supply apparatus was already barely holding its own against the illegal market; it would not stand a chance if the market was further strengthened by surpluses remaining under producer control.
The main reason for this feeling of weakness was the state's own poverty. The state had never been able to rely on exchange equivalents; as Frumkin stated flatly in late 1921, "commodity exchange never existed and still does not."[90] Yet food-supply officials were unanimous that, in Sviderskii's words, "no matter how chaotically commodity exchange was set up, it was undoubtedly one of the most powerful factors in the state's grain procurement operation."[91] At the very least it showed that the state was making a good-faith effort to supply the village.
By early 1921, the growing crisis in the availability of exchange items meant that any kind of commodity exchange was becoming impossible. Tsiurupa gave the following statistics at the Tenth Party Congress: the amount of nails being received by the village (forty thousand poods) was less than the amount of castor oil received before the war (sixty thousand poods). When this remark got a laugh, Tsiurupa commented that although it was perhaps funny, it was tragic at the same time.[92] Indeed the situation began to take on the air of tragicomedy, as the Bolsheviks reached beyond basic items such as cloth and nails to whatever they could lay their hands on to give to the peasants. The list of items to be exchanged included the following:[93]
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[89] Izv. NKP , no. 1-2 (January 1919): 27.
[90] Frumkin, Tovaroobmen , 4; Iu. K. Strizhkov, "Priniatie dekreta o prodovol'stvennoi razverstke i ego osushchestvlenie v pervoi polovine 1919 g.," in Oktiabr' i sovetskoe krest'ianstvo (Moscow, 1977), 154-56; Prod. politika , 195-96; Orlov, Rabota , 362-66; Mashkovich, Deiatel'nost ', 35-36, 48-51; Kaganovich, Kak dostaetsia khleb , 12-15.
[91] Prod. politika , 253-56, 166-73.
[92] Tenth Party Congress, 415-25.
[93] Terne, V tsarstve , 258.
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Lenin was a little apologetic about the church bells and noted that some comrades hoped that the bells would soon be melted down and used for electrical wiring. But at least, he continued, the state was not relying on harmful items such as vodka. Lenin tried to make the best of it by asserting that "if we are able to run our affairs properly, we can build up heavy industry on the basis of pomade." For if nothing else was available, he concluded, even pomade could be traded with the peasant for grain.[94]
Lenin's speech provoked a revealing parody. It was now clear how to save Russia, people said. Declare a mandatory pomade obligation. Start a crash campaign by announcing a Communist Pomade Week. Set up head offices such as Glavpomade. (Glavkizm , or chief-committeeism, was the popular name for bureaucratic overcentralization.) Insert articles in Pravda about the "antipomade policies of the counterrevolution." Then use the three thousand church bells to announce the onset of a new prosperous life and wait for the perfumed, powdered, and rouged peasants to bring grain to the starving cities in glazed crockery.[95]
The food-supply officials might have responded that it was indeed the poverty of the state that forced it to resort to the methods satirized here. As Osinskii declared in December 1920:
People say: establish a definite rate per desiatin. And what is hidden behind these words? [The expectation is that] a surplus will remain, and this free surplus will be used as pleases the producer, that is, he can trade freely with it. . . . We do not have any goods fund [and therefore] no state procurement—tax or razverstka, call it what you like—will produce anything if a free grain trade begins alongside it. In that case, all products will flow into that channel. . . . He who opens that little door to free trade will lead us to the collapse of our food-supply policy and to the destruction of the national economy.[96]
In the context of 1920, when decriminalization was not an option, the food-supply officials clearly had the stronger case. Giving the peasant an
[94] Lenin, PSS , 43:326 (speech of 27 May 1921).
[95] Terne, V tsarstve , 259. This is an early example of a new postrevolutionary folk art form, the political anecdote.
[96] Eighth Congress of Soviets, 146-47. See also Potapenko, Zapiski , 133ff.
individual assignment before the harvest would bring few advantages and make enforcement of the monopoly impossible. Even in the context of 1921 and a decriminalized market the gloomy predictions of the food-supply officials were more justified than has been thought. Economic breakdown did negate many of the benefits of a tax. The state was just scraping by as it was, so the promise of lower grain-collection targets could not be met. Already under the razverstka the amounts given to the Ukraine and Siberia in 1920 were significantly below the estimated surpluses for those regions, and owing to the drought, the razverstka had been lifted from many of the central provinces.[97] The party commission that worked out details of the food-supply tax after the Tenth Party Congress first decided (with an estimated available surplus of 500 million poods) to set the tax at 300-350 million poods—that is, above the 1920-1921 razverstka figure of 285 million poods. At the insistence of the Central Committee the tax was lowered to 240 million poods. But the tax represented only the amount to be taken without compensation. For a true comparison with the razverstka we should add the amount the state hoped to obtain through commodity exchange, 160 million poods. This addition makes a total target figure of 400 million poods to be obtained by the state in 1921-1922.[98] Furthermore, individual tax assignments still remained dependent on the size of the harvest: a schedule with eleven categories was announced, and the tax rate per desiatin was calculated on the basis of the category that matched the local harvest.[99]
In the short term the tax system ran into other problems predicted by the food-supply officials: grain procurement did collapse, and the free market was uncontrollable. The hope of using permission to trade as an incentive for razverstka fulfillment proved groundless since the peasants interpreted the decision of the Tenth Party Congress as an immediate authorization of free trade everywhere. The state barely scraped by with grain procurement for the rest of the 1920-1921 agricultural year. Both this remnant of the razverstka and the collection of the new tax in 1921-1922 required the liberal application of coercion. The state's attempt to procure grain through voluntary commodity exchange was, as predicted, a
[97] Strizhkov, Otriady , 218; Davydov, Bor'ba za khleb , 137-38, 144-63.
[98] In some localities the tax alone was higher in 1921 than in 1920 because hay and straw were added to grain deliveries. Bol'shakov, Derevnia , 456-57. In the event, commodity exchange gave almost nothing, and the tax figure was reduced in December 1921 because of the drought. The lowered tax-133 million poods-was almost entirely obtained by March 1922. Genkina, Gosudarstvennaia deiatel'nost ', 111, 296; Lenin, PSS , 44:9.
[99] Na bor'bu , 54-59. For objections to a tax independent of harvest size, see Eighth Congress of Soviets, 146-47 (Osinskii).
failure: the creaky apparatus of food-supply committees and cooperatives proved no match for the legalized sackmen, and barter at state-determined ratios could not compete with the demand for money-mediated exchange. If it had not been for the unexpected intervention of Herbert Hoover's American Relief Agency in the second half of the year, it is doubtful whether the new food-supply policy would have sustained the challenge of the famine in the Volga region.[100]
In the long term, contrary to their experience during the time of troubles, the food-supply officials found that the decriminalized market was a force not for disintegration but for reconstitution. The main benefit of decriminalization was an end to the unavoidable costs of repressing the market. Speculation was a victimless crime, and the consequences of its prohibition are strikingly similar to those of the prohibition of drugs, liquor, or prostitution. Two present-day criminologists have summarized the effects of the "overreach" of the law when it prohibits victimless crimes: "The criminal law operates as a 'crime tariff' which makes the supply . . . profitable for the criminal by driving up prices and at the same time discourages competition by those who might enter the market were it legal." They argue that these high prices in turn have a "criminogenic" effect because of the need for users to obtain cash, which helps create a much wider criminal subculture with a romantic aura of rebellion. Police resources become enormously overstrained and pressing priorities are neglected. The prohibitions are hard to enforce because of the lack of complainants; arbitrary enforcement and bribery flourish.[101]
The attempt to outlaw private grain transactions had exactly the same range of effects. Without decriminalization the Bolsheviks were faced with a no-win choice between the political costs of tolerating corruption and the costs of attempting to crack down on the illegal market. Massive corruption throughout Russian society, political disaffection resulting from the ineffective harassment by the universally hated blockade detachments, scandalously inefficient methods of individual grain provisionment—most of these heavy costs could be avoided at a stroke.
The food-supply officials regarded the grain market as a mighty competitor to state procurement—which it was, in the context of market
[100] Bolshevik reactions to the famine are discussed in two articles by Charles M. Edmundson: "The Politics of Hunger: The Soviet Response to Famine, 1921," Soviet Studies 29 (October 1977), and "An Inquiry into the Termination of Soviet Famine Relief Programmes and the Renewal of Grain Export, 1922-1923," Soviet Studies 33 (July 1981).
[101] Norval Morris and Gordon Hawkins, The Honest Politician's Guide to Crime Control (Chicago, 1969), 5-6.
prohibition. But a decriminalized market could also be a partner for the state. It strengthened the incentive for fulfillment of state tasks by making the reward of fulfillment more enticing, in the manner of a private plot on a collective farm: the peasant could trade openly and without harassment only after paying his tax. The market could also take over portions of the major task of food collection and distribution, leaving the state free to concentrate its attention on its own priorities.
Even before 1921 there had been a movement in distribution policy toward a reduction of the number of people for whom the state guaranteed a ration. Instead of distributing available food more or less equally to everybody at amounts no one could live on, it was decided to guarantee ("armor") a livable ration for workers in the most important industries. This policy of purposive provisionment (tselevoe snabzhenie ) meant that the state was already relying on the existence of a market for all other consumers. Decriminalization made it official. Andrei Vyshinskii, working at the time in the distribution section of the Food-Supply Commissariat, used class rhetoric to describe the result:
So you see that when the state removed the prohibition on fending for oneself from the disorganizing spontaneity that surrounded it, it received both the right and the possibility of concerning itself with those in whose name the struggle went on, for whom mortal sacrifices were made, and for whom the future is being constructed.
So you see that the state has the right to say to the mass of bourgeois parasites entangling it and draining away its blood and vital fluids: "Begone! Fend for yourselves! Use your freedom for the sake of your stomach. I have nothing to do with you—my strength, cares and thoughts belong to another."[102]
Given the Bolshevik consensus in 1920 against free trade, the food-supply officials could only discover these advantages after the market had been decriminalized. And indeed, when we inquire into the decision to decriminalize the grain trade, we find that it was not really made by the Bolsheviks.
Since any advocacy of decriminalization was taboo, there was only one place where such proposals could emanate, and that was the very top: Lenin and the Politburo. Kalinin observed in the spring of 1921 that if he
[102] A. Ia. Vyshinskii, Voprosy raspredeleniia i revoliutsiia (Moscow, 1922), 20. In 1918-1919, 12 million people were maintained by the state; this number grew to 35 million in 1920-1921 and fell to 5 million by 1921-1922. Prokopovich, Economic Condition , 133.
had suggested a legalized market four months earlier, Tsiurupa would have sent him to a lunatic asylum.[103] But Tsiurupa could not send Lenin to a lunatic asylum, and so he had to go along with the Politburo on 8 February 1921 when it made the decision both to impose a tax and to allow "local economic circulation" (Tsiurupa's own grudging euphemism for local markets).[104]
Lenin's decision was a response to a sudden burst of strength in the centrifugal forces of disintegration. The harvest failure of 1920 meant that by December the razverstka figure for European Russia was lowered from 224.5 million poods to 193 million (it had been set at 327 million the previous year). Even so, food-supply officials grimly realized that diminished peasant resources meant more resistance from both peasants and local officials. Increased pressure on well-off peasants meant more room for administrative abuse. Since the amount of exchange items was less than ever before, the use of force was again the only guarantee of the razverstka. At the same time officials realized that greater reliance on peasant recruits would make the Food-Supply Army a shaky instrument for putting the necessary pressure on the peasantry.[105]
At best the Bolsheviks could offer the workers only the same wretched conditions of 1920. More likely, even the grain acquired with so much difficulty would be of little benefit, given transport difficulties (both cartage and rail) about which food-supply officials could do little. Urban rations were prematurely increased in late 1920, and as a result reserves became exhausted, and the plight of city dwellers seemed desperate. By February 1921 the conditional support observed in the summer and fall of 1920 was melting away. Peasants in Siberia cutting railroad lines, sailors mutinying in Kronstadt, workers striking in Petrograd—the centrifugal forces could no longer be contained.[106]
Lenin's label for the forces of disintegration was "petty-bourgeois disorganizing spontaneity [stikhiia ]." The petty-bourgeois nature of the peasant, it seemed, craved the security of a food-supply tax. But as the food-
[103] Genkina, Gosudarstvennaia deiatel'nost ', 105.
[104] Genkina, Gosudarstvennaia deiatel'nost ', 91.
[105] Biulletin NKP , 7 December and 28 December 1920; Ekonomicheskaia zhizn ', 28-29 September 1920; Pravda , 9 September 1920. On the decline in worker participation and the growth in peasant recruits, see Aleksentsev, "K voprosu," 165; Chistikov, "Prodovol'stvennaia politika."
[106] Lenin, PSS, 42:216-27, 306-9, 333, 348-50, 353-66; Genkina, Gosudarstvennaia deiatel'nost ', 79-80; Oliver Radkey, The Unknown Civil War in Soviet Russia , (Stanford, 1976), esp. 229; Bertrand Mark Patenaude, "Bolshevism in Retreat: The Transition to the New Economic Policy," Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1987. The Provisional Government on the eve of its downfall faced the same problem of grain that was unavailable because of transport problems.
supply officials themselves argued, "free disposal" of the surplus meant that prohibition of free trade would be utterly ineffective. Lenin saw the validity of this argument, and so when he decided "to satisfy the desire of the nonparty peasant" for the tax, he felt it only made sense to take the next step of decriminalizing local markets.[107]
Up to this point the decision to introduce the food-supply tax was similar to earlier temporary concessions to the weary masses, such as allowing individual workers to purchase two poods of grain. The food-supply officials had always argued that these concessions only strengthened the centrifugal forces of disintegration. But they had built better than they knew, and to their surprise they now found themselves able not only to withstand these forces but also to use them to make reconstitution more secure.
The food-supply officials were thus in a better position than many other Bolsheviks to appreciate these various benefits once they became evident. Many of them became staunch supporters of NEP and even members of the right opposition. The list includes Tsiurupa and Vladimirov (who both died in the mid-1920s) as well as Osinskii and possibly Sviderskii.[108] Special mention should be made of Frumkin, whose brave defense of NEP is enshrined in Stalin's speeches.[109] These men showed no nostalgia for the razverstka of the civil-war years.
It remains true that at the time of the changeover to the food-supply tax in the spring of 1921, the Bolsheviks still hoped to decriminalize markets only on a local basis. The Bolshevik publicist R. Arskii assigned the market a modest place in his description of the new policy: "The tax consists of this: having handed over a certain amount of grain for the needs of the soviet authority, the rest may be disposed according to whim [po proizvolu ]. You can use it for minor consumption, or for sowing, or feed it to livestock, or exchange it for state products, or even sell it at the market or bazaar."110 The Bolsheviks quickly found they could not hold the line and
[107] Lenin, PSS , 43:29, 57-73.
[108] Vladimirov is treated as a model "right communist" by N. Valentinov in The New Economic Policy and the Party Crisis After the Death of Lenin (Stanford, 1971), chap. 7. My speculation concerning Sviderskii is based on his sudden switch of jobs in early 1929 from a high post at the People's Commissariat of Agriculture to diplomatic representative in Latvia. An exception is Kaganovich, who joined the Trotskyist opposition.
[109] Stalin, Sochineniia , 11:116-26, 270-77. According to Terne, Frumkin (who had responsibility for the razverstka campaign in the Cossack regions) was particularly notorious for fierce repression, and Frumkin himself says in his speech at the party congress that he was known as a "fairly tough food-supply official [prodovol'stvennik ]." Teme, V tsarstve , 219-24; Tenth Party Congress, 431-34.
[110] Arskii, Nalog vmesto razverstki (Novocherkassk, n.d.).
that they had to accept the existence of a national free market. The real decision that brought the time of troubles to an end was thus made not by them but by the Russian people, when they refused to accept the half loaf of local markets. In truth, the Bolsheviks discovered the New Economic Policy just as Columbus discovered the New World—by hoping it was something else.