Role of the Razverstka

The razverstka was designed as a response to both economic and political breakdown, but it is not easy to decide whether it really contributed to

[51] Dekrety , 9:241; 10:238-40.

[52] Na bor'bu , 28-31 (Sviderskii), 25-28 (Kalinin).

reconstitution or rather led to continued breakdown. Judgment is possible only after recognition of the dilemma posed by the time of troubles: economic breakdown increased the challenge faced by the government, whereas political breakdown diminished the resources needed to respond to it.

Economic breakdown—the lack of exchange items and the devaluation of paper money—meant that grain had to be collected in the form of a direct tax in kind (see Table 6). This necessity imposed a difficult task on the government—in fact, one far beyond that faced by the tsarist government before the war. Direct taxes were only a small part of the tsarist tax structure and were mostly collected to meet local needs (see Table 7).^[53] The central government mainly relied on indirect sales taxes on consumer items, which allowed it to increase its revenues without preventing a rising peasant standard of living.^[54] Although it is often maintained that the tsarist government used the tax mechanism for squeezing grain out of the peasant for export purposes, there was in fact no apparatus for doing so in the absence of economic incentives.

The razverstka, as well as being a direct tax, had to be collected in kind. Any tax in kind will have an inequitable distribution, falling most heavily on people who happen to have the required kind of goods. In the case of the

[53] Al'bert L. Vainshtein, Oblozhenie i platezhi krest'ianstva v dovoennoe i revoliutsionnoe vremia (Moscow, 1924), 47.

[54] Paul R. Gregory, Russian National Income, 1885-1913 (Cambridge, 1982), Appendix D; J. Y. Simms, "The Crisis in Russian Agriculture at the End of the Nineteenth Century: A Different View," Slavic Review 36 (1977): 377-98.

razverstka there could be no consistent principle for allocation of the burden among peasant farms of varying size (see Table 8). By 1921 there were some fifteen categories of foodstuffs being taxed; even when the rates were low, the taxation seemed irritatingly endless.^[55]

A tax in kind is the most inefficient variety of tax and requires the

[55] Bol'shakov, Derevnia , 92.

bulkiest apparatus to collect. This was a central reason for the expansion of the government apparatus in 1920. In January 1920 local employees of the Food Supply Commissariat numbered 147,500 people; by January 1921 the figure was 245,154. The food-supply tax in 1921 did not reverse this pattern, and a reduction in staff only occurred after the transition to a money tax.^[56]

The razverstka was only one part of the tax burden imposed by the government. Table 9 shows the importance of imposed labor obligations (trudguzhpovinnosti ): cartage for public purposes, aid to families of Red Army soldiers, the cutting and delivery of wood, road maintenance, removal of snow from railroads. The razverstka imposed by the center was

[56] Bychkov, "Organizatsionnoe stroitel'stvo," 192; Baburin, "Narkomprod," gives a figure of 300,000 central and local employees of the Food-Supply Commissariat in October 1921. See also Bol'shakov, Derevnia , 174; Danilov, "Nalogovaia politika."

probably equaled by local additions for military and other needs.^[57] Calculations made by A. L. Vainshtein show that in comparison with prewar taxes, there was a substantial increase in the absolute burden and an even larger increase in the relative burden. The relative burden increased even if we add to the prewar total an amount equal to rent and other payments abolished by the revolution (see Table 10).

The imperative of imposing a heavy, direct tax in kind was thus an unprecedented challenge, and political breakdown did not make it any

[57] Vainshtein, Oblozhenie , 63-66. Maile writes, "Vainshtein showed that the total sum extracted from peasants through the regime of razverstka was more than twice that of foodstuffs only." Economic Organization , 410. Vainshtein said no such nonsensical thing; this statement is unfortunately typical of the muddle that pervades Malle's discussion. On the burden of labor obligations, see Kabanov, Krest'ianskoe khoziaistvo , 190-202.

easier for the Bolsheviks. The necessarily inexperienced and insecure Bolsheviks had to build an apparatus out of almost nothing and impose a heavy tax on a population quickly losing the habit of unthinking obedience, after a period when the revolution had seemed to promise a much lighter tax burden.

It is usually assumed that the razverstka contributed to economic breakdown: since the Bolsheviks took the entire surplus, the peasants had no incentive to sow more than was necessary for their own consumption. But even if the Bolsheviks had not taken a single pood, the peasants would have had no reason to produce anything above personal needs, given the impossibility of using the grain to obtain needed items. Conversely, if the Bolsheviks had taken even more grain but at the same time provided an equivalent in industrial items, the peasants would have much more willingly parted with their surplus. Indeed, under the conditions of a goods famine it was only Bolshevik demands that provided any incentive to produce a surplus because the Bolsheviks began to threaten to cut into the already low consumption norm to force the peasant to sow. An appeal in late 1920 warned the peasants not to lower sowing to the level of their own consumption: "Since this is a matter of the common interest, the state will in any case take just as much as it needs for the satisfaction of everybody, but the difference will only be that the person who suffers will be the one who purposely thinks to sow only for himself, or the person who is lazy, in the hope of living off the labor of others."^[58]

One might indeed argue that razverstka collections were insufficient since the absolute amount taken by the Bolshevik razverstka even at its height was less than the grain procurements of either the tsarist government or the Provisional Government (see Tables 11 and 12). Bolshevik grain collections fell woefully short of even the Bolsheviks' somewhat arbitrary targets. But both the actual collection of previous governments and the Bolshevik's own targets impose irrelevant standards. Indeed, no statistical calculation can tell us what a reasonable standard of performance would have been under the circumstances of the time of troubles.

The fall in agricultural production is not an irrelevant standard, but I. A. Iurkov has shown that it is better explained by shortages in the means of production than by a lack of incentive created by the razverstka. In the major agricultural regions the amount of sown acreage per plow or per unit of livestock hardly decreased (see Tables 13 and 14). The peasantry evidently did not lack incentive to use the available equipment to the fullest extent possible.^[59]

[58] Prod. politika , 192-95.

[59] Iurkov, Ekonomicheskaia politika , chap. 1.

The difficulties under the razverstka were caused not so much by what was taken out of the countryside as by the failure to put anything back in. The reasons for this failure lie in the war and the de facto blockade: the great drop in the production and import of items needed by the peasant occurred in 1916 (see Table 15).^[60] Both the Provisional Government and the Bolsheviks had to struggle with the heritage of this collapse, which led first to a lack of incentives to market grain and later to a lack of capacity to produce it.

The usual assertion that the razverstka policy was responsible for the fall in agricultural production thus overlooks the terrible dilemmas of the time of troubles. Without a revival of industry, agriculture was doomed as well—and without burdensome and uncompensated grain collections, industry could not revive. As much as peasant agriculture suffered in these years, it suffered less than the town economy, as shown by population movement—people migrated in large numbers from the towns back to the countryside^[61] —and food consumption (see Table 16). Under these circum-

[60] Demosthenov, "Food Prices," 426-27; Ek. pol. , pt. 2, doc. 75, 78, 82.

[61] V. Z. Drobizhev, "Demograficheskoe razvitie strany sovetov (1917 g.-seredina 1920-kh godov)," Voprosy istorii , 1986, no. 7:15-25.

stances the enforced loan of the razverstka was a force for economic reconstitution.

The razverstka should be judged not only by the size of the burden it imposed but also by its success as a method of collection. The necessity of direct taxation meant an unprecedented intrusion of the central govern-

ment into daily life; payments in kind were inefficient and inequitably distributed; labor obligations were a reminder of serf status and an invitation to local arbitrariness; the central provinces had to be taxed beyond their strength; the lack of industrial items meant a degradation of daily life and productive activity; the benefits stemming from the black market were illegal and demoralizing. Under these trying conditions the razverstka method sought to economize on administrative resources, maximize the impact of the extremely limited goods fund, and reduce the politically costly side effects of coercion.

Like previous governments, the Bolsheviks found that they had to cut their coat to their cloth, as Tsiurupa put it; they had to put aside dreams not only of socialism but even of state capitalism in its original meaning of effective centralization of the economy. The razverstka, which started out as a compromise improvisation, proved to be the basis of a relatively serviceable tax-collecting apparatus. Like any set of middlemen, the food-supply apparatus was cursed by those from whom it took and those to whom it gave, and the resulting bad press still dominates our view of it. Nevertheless, it should on balance be accounted a force for reconstitution that successfully, if crudely, carried out the task of a middleman apparatus, to move goods from low-priority uses to high-priority uses—or, in the words of one Bolshevik official, to take from the hungry to give to the hungrier.^[62]