4
The Crisis of 1917: Authority

The first state matter in which Russia will face a test on its economic maturity and organizing ability will be our foodsupply question.
Aleksandr Chaianov, April 1917

As 1917 wore on, more and more people shared a feeling expressed by Martovskii in Nizhegorod: the Provisional Government was not a new order but a formless transition period—the continuation of the "disintegration of the state organism" that had already begun before February.^[1] The political disintegration can be expressed in numbers: the Provisional Government lasted 237 days, of which 65—more than one-fourth—were spent in search of a cabinet. The total amount of time spent without a government was longer than any one of the four cabinets during the months between February and October.

The grain-monopoly legislation of March 1917 was as much a response to the crisis of political authority as it was a response to the food-supply crisis. The legislation itself may not be a good guide to actual food-supply policy, but the arguments used to attack and defend the monopoly do reveal the outlook of the enlistment advocates as they strove to reconstitute the unity of the political class and the economy in the face of powerful centrifugal forces.

The monopoly legislation was the result of a liberal-socialist consensus that had been achieved under the old government. This consensus is symbolized by the merger in the first days of the February revolution of the food-supply commissions created by the ad hoc committee set up by the Duma Committee and the newly formed Petrograd Soviet. This merger—a harbinger of eventual coalition—was eased by the experience of the two chairmen, Shingarev and Groman, in working together on the tsarist Special Conference.^[2]

[1] Prod. (Nizhegorod), 15 October 1917.

[2] Peshekhonov, "Pervye nedeli," 261; Hasegawa, February Revolution , 334-35; Burdzhalov, Vtoraia revoliutsiia , 1:219; Shliapnikov, Semnadtsatyi god , 3:26-29.

The consensus that gave rise to the monopoly is already evident in a document that predates the revolution. In December 1916 Groman had prepared a report for a conference scheduled by the Union of Towns. Although the tsarist government then prohibited any conference on the food-supply question, the main theses of Groman's report were accepted by the executive board of the union. The Union of Towns was a liberal organization, and Groman soon became the chief spokesman of the Petrograd Soviet on food-supply matters. His report of late 1916 thus shows the starting point from which the two sides later diverged.^[3]

Groman began by reducing all economic difficulties to one fundamental flaw, the lack of "conscious adaptation of all of national economic life and the state economy to the demands of the war." Since the food-supply question was only one manifestation of this general crisis, "both the system of measures aimed at easing the crisis and the organizational apparatus must be parts of a general system of measures and an integrated organizational apparatus." This reform required overcoming the disunity caused by the existence of four separate special conferences. A single Ministry of Provisionment (snabzhenie ) would eliminate dualism by supplying both army and population as well as regulating all aspects of the economy.

The job of this regulatory structure was to "coordinate the activities" of all the vital forces of the country by means of enlistment: "the regime of free trade must be abandoned and replaced by a system of state-public organizations, constructed on principles of the predominance of representatives from public institutions and from cooperative, industrial, trade, and worker organizations. These organizations would enlist to the task of provisionment public institutions, cooperatives, and trade organizations—either on the basis of commission payments or as a publicly responsible task." This enlistment would have two guiding principles: the subordination of private interest to the demands of the national whole, and the reliance on the spontaneous initiative (samodeiatel'nost' ) of all sections of the population. In Groman's thinking these two principles were not contradictory but mutually reinforcing.

In the realm of food-supply policy the right of the government to requisition grain not voluntarily delivered by the producer was to be applied in a systematic and all-embracing manner. Although grain delivery would be compulsory, every effort would be made to provide material incentives for voluntary delivery, and industry was to be mobilized to

[3] Vserossiiskii Soiuz Gorodov, Organizatsiia narodnogo khoziaistva (Moscow, 1916), 5-10.

provide industrial items for the agricultural population. The food-supply apparatus in the localities would still be based on commissioners working with advisory organs; but the advisory organs would include wide representation of public organizations, and the commissioners had to work through them, not through their own agents. The presence of appointed commissioners in Groman's 1916 program is the only major difference between it and the actual grain-monopoly legislation, but the thrust of Groman's proposals is clearly toward full democratization.

Groman's report to the Union of Towns reveals that the grain monopoly was not simply a response to the food-supply crisis but also an attempt to reconstitute the economy and the political system. All-embracing state economic regulation would overcome the dualism of army versus civilian population and restore unity to an economy shattered by insistent state demands. In the case of the political system Groman felt that the war had greatly exacerbated the disunity that had existed previously but that the food-supply crisis presented an opportunity to create a new unity by means of enlistment of social forces.

It is sometimes said that the monopoly was adopted by the liberal majority of the Provisional Government only under pressure from the Petrograd Soviet. Nikolai Sukhanov asserted this in his memoirs and at the Menshevik trial in 1930: "Groman was the author of war communism. When did he proclaim it? He proclaimed it soon after the February revolution. . . . He took the Kadet Shingarev by the throat and squeezed out of him the basic element of war communism, namely, the grain monopoly."^[4] In reality Shingarev had long been an advocate of the enlistment solution. In September 1916 he had called for a grain monopoly, and in February 1917 he had called for a more direct partnership with the peasants. In May 1917 he commented on the unanimity of the monopoly decision and predicted that state monopolies would become increasingly common as a means of fighting the disintegrating influence of "individual self-protection." A temporary improvement in grain deliveries allowed him to argue that the "country understands the voice of its leaders and civic feeling is growing"—all that was needed was for the government to meet the peasants halfway with an "organized answer."^[5] Even after disillusionment set in, Shingarev fought the good fight for state regulation of industry and agriculture in an increasingly hostile Kadet environment.^[6]

[4] Jasny, Soviet Economists , 100; N. Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii (Berlin, 1922-1923), 2:271-75; Z. Lozinskii, Ekonomicheskaia politika vremennogo pravitel'stva , (Leningrad, 1929), 128, 131-32. Liberals also blamed Groman; see Alexis N. Antsiferov et al., Russian Agriculture During the War (New Haven, 1930), 284-86.

[5] Izv. po prod. delu , 1 (32): 64-66.

[6] Antsiferov et al., Russian Agriculture , 284-86; William Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution (Princeton, 1974), 203; Yaney, Urge to Mobilize , 457; Ek. pol. , pt. 2, doc. 515; Kitanina, Voina , 130; Sukhanov, Zapiski , 3:428-29; Browder and Kerensky, Provisional Government , 3:1270. On Shingarev's disillusionment, see V. N. Nabokov, "Vremennoe pravitel'stvo," Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii 1 (1922): 50-52; S. 1. Shidlovskii, Vospominaniia (Berlin, 1923), 2:114-15; Ernest Poole, The Village: Russian Impressions (New York, 1918), 58-63.

Despite this consensus, the grain monopoly soon became a symbol of opposition to the Provisional Government on the part of both socialists and liberals. For Groman, the halfhearted implementation of the monopoly was proof of the "icy indifference and practical sabotage" not only of the Provisional Government but the Petrograd Soviet as well.^[7] Groman's definition of the situation remained the same as it had been in 1916, although he dropped terms such as interdependence and equilibrium and indulged in some low-level rabble-rousing by arguing that regulation was needed to eliminate superprofits and improve working conditions.^[8]

What was new in Groman's outlook in 1917 was a great enthusiasm that led him to downplay practical problems. He now felt that his schemes for all-embracing economic regulation had a chance of practical realization, and for this very reason he became a more bitter critic of the Provisional Government than he had been of the tsarist government. When Naum Jasny expressed skepticism over Groman's bold plans, Groman would complain, "No revolution happened to Jasny." And in response to Jasny's query "Who will work out the plan? I do not see the competent people," Groman blithely answered, "You and others." In 1925 Nikolai Kondratiev looked back and quoted Groman as saying, "I shall not distribute a single pair of shoes until the national economy as a whole has been regulated." Many of Groman's actions reveal a man ill-adapted to the daily improvisations of a revolutionary government. Later in the year, as head of the Petrograd Food-Supply Board, Groman refused to obtain grain by paying more than the fixed price on the grounds that doing so would further disrupt the economy and the grain monopoly, thus severely handicapping the Petrograd board in the competition for grain.^[9]

From his base as a Menshevik member of the Petrograd Soviet, Groman had created around himself a "compact and harmonious group of soviet

[7] Sukhanov, Zapiski , 2:69-77.

[8] Compare the presentation to a soviet audience in Vserossiiskoe soveshchanie sovetov rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov. Stenograficheskii otchet , ed. M. N. Tsapenko (Moscow, 1927), 202-4, 257-60, with Groman's article in Izv. po prod. delu 1 (32): 2-5.

[9] Jasny, To Live , 301; Jasny, Soviet Economists , 99; Izv. po prod. delu , 3 (34): 60-63. Soviet historians have interpreted Groman's leadership of the Petrograd board in different ways: compare Kitanina, Voina , 368, to Volubuev, Ekonomicheskaia politika , 418-19. Groman's own account is in Protsess kontrrevoliutsionnoi organizatsii men'shevikov (Moscow, 1931), 377-78.

economists." Ernest Poole had a conversation with one of these Groman followers at the headquarters of the Moscow Food-Supply Committee:

I found him in a building whose long dark halls were filled with soldiers and civilians, men and boys and student girls. Some carried trays with glasses of tea, and all were talking rapidly and with the greatest good humor. The man whom we had come to see was a thin, ungainly chap, red haired, freckled and washed out, a thoroughly uninspiring sort, until he got into his subject. But then I forgot his unpleasant voice, and saw only his eager friendly smile.

"All this work of ours," he said, "is under one great national plan, which reaches through committees to every village in the land." And he displayed a Russian map all speckled with committees—and committees by the thousands, specks of every color and size. It really was a beautiful plan. . . .

"We need only to have patience," he said. "Here in Moscow you go out on the streets and find that prices are still way up; you see long lines of people in front of the stores; and when they get in they find little there. But when our whole plan has gone into effect and our government controls our life, these troubles will all be remedied. At such a job you cannot expect speed, for we have to implant in men's old minds new ideas, and that takes time. Then, too, the mails and railroads are so slow it makes it hard for us. In short, you must get the whole system going before you can make a real success of any one of its separate parts . Things here may seem bad enough, but without the work that we have done you would find things infinitely worse. We have at least made a start."^[10]

The power of Groman's definition of the situation appears in the foodsupply congress of late May, although Groman himself was already seen even within socialist circles as part of the opposition from the left. This congress, held in Moscow, had heavy representation from soviets around the country.^[11] The congress saw the grain monopoly as a step toward socialism: "The time has come to move from anarchic production and distribution, from trusts and syndicates, from free trade, to the work of a productive organism according to state tasks, under the monitoring of the state and even its immediate direction." As the editor of the Moscow foodsupply journal remarked, "genuine state socialism" was being created not

[10] Poole, "Dark People ," 108-11 (emphasis added).

[11] Prod. delo (Moscow), 28 May-4 June 1917, 40. Of 740 voting delegates, 311 were sent by soviets, 129 by food-supply committees, 135 by cooperatives.

because of revolutionary abstractions but because of the practicalities of a pressing crisis.

Accordingly the concerns of the congress went far beyond food-supply policy in the strict sense. There was a transportation section, a section devoted to agricultural production, an industrial section that called for rationing on all consumer items as a step toward replacing trade with direct exchange, and a social section that took up such matters as the regulation of profits and wages. Later in the year socialist critics identified the failure of the Provisional Government and its supporters in the Petrograd Soviet to carry out this ambitious program as the cause of food-supply difficulties: the monopoly would only succeed if industrial items were made available to the peasantry, and this could only be done through all-embracing state regulation.^[12]

It was these ambitious claims rather than actual food-supply policy that provoked the most opposition. One fierce critic, I. Sigov, condemned the attempt "to put on register and under the bureaucratic monitoring of the state the everyday economic life of each and all." Sigov went on to argue that "history does not know a law that has been less thought-out. . . . Almost two months have already passed, and perhaps no small number of months will pass, before the activists of the monopoly finally admit, with shame and despair, to their impotence in scrambling out of the chaos and omnipresent all-Russian confusion that is just now becoming implanted."^[13]

Despite the heated rhetoric, even Sigov did not advocate a return to an unregulated grain trade. Criticism of the grain trade monopoly from the right in fact almost never meant a defense of free trade. Ideological attitudes toward property did not play the same centrally divisive role in foodsupply matters that they did elsewhere. Notions of property determined access to basic resources in agriculture and the nature of authority relations in industry. By contrast, no one much cared about the property rights of the middleman. The state's demands on the grain producer were seen either as a tax or as an enforced exchange transaction, both traditionally accepted limitations on property especially in time of war. The dispute over food-supply policy was much more about the expediency and fairness of the state's methods than its right to mobilize grain.

Many liberal activists did feel that socialism was a doctrine destructive of civic discipline since it encouraged class selfishness, exorbitant demands

[12] Prod. delo (Moscow), 20 August 1917, 3-4 (Shefler); Ek. pol. , pt. 3, p. 414 (peasant nakaz ); Sukhanov, Zapiski , 2:271-75, 4:48, 106-28.

[13] Sigov, Arakcheevskii sotsializm , 12.

by workers, and utopian expectations of state planning. Some, like V. A. Stepanov, the Kadet minister of trade and industry, felt that an official rejection of socialism would therefore strengthen "state consciousness." But even while insisting on the principle of private property, Stepanov argued that existing circumstances "would turn the free play of private interests (permissable under normal conditions) into economic chaos."^[14] Stepanov's condemnation of socialism did not imply a defense of laissezfaire or a rejection of extensive state regulation; it was more an expression of frustration than a positive program.

An Unreconstituted Political Class

The original liberal-socialist consensus on the grain monopoly seemed to have split wide apart since one side was calling for movement toward socialism and the other for a rejection of socialism. Yet it is difficult to pinpoint what this dispute actually meant for practical food-supply policy. On two key controversies in food-supply policy—the use of the private trade apparatus under state monitoring and the refusal to raise the grain prices announced in March—the liberal-socialist consensus held through the summer, at least in the statements of spokesmen in the center.^[15]

The original policy consensus might have provided the basis for unity of the food-supply question, but the two sides chose to emphasize the most divisive themes. In April 1917 Chaianov argued that political questions were easier to solve than economic ones since "in the area of political construction . . . almost everything is within our power and the power of human laws." By the end of May he felt differently: "We need not only a single plan but also a single will to carry out that plan."^[16] Chaianov had come to realize that the unity of the political class was a more basic challenge than consensus on the details of any particular policy.

A debate in the State Duma on the eve of the February revolution revealed some of the roots of political class disunity. When the Petrograd crowds demanded bread, the instinctive response of both liberals and socialists was to call for enlistment of the vital forces of society—specifically for the transfer of control over Petrograd food supply to the elected city authorities. This action would not only ensure better monitoring of

[14] Browder and Kerensky, Provisional Government , 2:672-77 (8 June 1917). Background can be found in Bukshpan, Politika , 460-66; Rosenberg, Liberals, 140-42.

[15] See Chkheidze in Browder and Kerensky, Provisional Government , 3:1483, and Shingarev in Ek. pol. , pt. 2, doc. 517.

[16] Chaianov, Vopros; Prod. delo (Moscow), 28 May-4 June 1917, 10-12. Chaianov praised Groman in April but was rather critical of him in May.

distribution but also give those authorities the right to ask the population to go hungry in a disciplined manner (soznatel'no golodat' ).^[17]

The unanimous support for this policy measure concealed profound differences in political outlook. An optimistic liberal such as the left Kadet Nikolai Nekrasov felt that the local elite could handle the job; he stressed the "creative and organizing role of the very idea of self-administration" as well as the confidence given by the local population to the city administration. Nekrasov's fellow Kadet Shingarev was more pessimistic about the liberal elite's ability to function under conditions of chaos and warned that given the general breakdown, the transfer to the city might merely be a way of shifting the blame for inevitable food-supply difficulties.^[18]

An optimistic socialist politician such as Aleksandr Kerensky could express confidence that self-organization by the people would overcome the elemental force (stikhiia ) created by hunger: "Organize yourselves; without waiting for permission, create public and worker organizations; demand that the question of your very existence, the organization of your nourishment, be given over to you." Nikolai Chkheidze, soon to be chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, injected a pessimistic note: "Gentlemen, we are not great admirers of the city self-administration that functions at the present time, but even this city self-administration will be forced to act in accord with the interests of the masses when they exert pressure, through their own organized cells." The strategy of distrust that soon gave rise to divided sovereignty (dvoevlastie ) was thus in evidence even before the Petrograd Soviet was considered a possibility.^[19]

Even after the February revolution efforts continued to be made to give at least a working unity to the political class. "One of the most tragic documents of that epoch," wrote Bukshpan, "is the minutes of the Economic Council and the Economic Committee [which had been given the responsibility for general economic regulation. The minutes show] members of the government, economists, experienced bureaucrats from the old regime, and representatives of the [mutually hostile] revolutionary forces trying to find some kind of common ground for living together and making effective policy."^[20] But these efforts seemed feeble in the face of powerful centrifugal forces.

The underlying consensus on the enlistment solution may paradoxically have strengthened centrifugal forces within the political class. When

[17] Duma session of 23 February 1917, 1649-53 (Kerensky speech).

[18] Duma session of 25 February 1917, 1748-52; Shliapnikov, Semnadtsatyi god , 1:254-59.

[19] Duma session of 24 February 1917, 1728, 1719-24.

[20] Bukshpan, Politika , 461.

the enlistment solution failed to work, neither side really examined the assumptions behind it; instead they complained about the lack of "conscious" cooperation with state policy, and this lack in turn was blamed on the moral and intellectual failures of their opponents. The liberals blamed class selfishness, intelligentsia demagoguery, and socialist utopias; the socialists blamed capitalist sabotage, bureaucratic timidity, and free-trade utopias. It was easier to cast blame than to acknowledge that the enlistment solution was unlikely to overcome the centrifugal forces of rational self-protection.

Distrust within the political class was compounded by disagreement on the key question of how to contain the pressures of the population. Socialists felt that reform was a necessary precondition for political reconstitution; liberals felt that a reconstituted political authority must precede reform. On this crucial question the socialists remained loyal to the enlistment solution, whereas the liberals showed a preference for the gubernatorial solution.^[21]

By the time of the food-supply conference in late May the effect on food-supply policy of this disagreement was out in the open. Despite his belief in state regulation, Shingarev argued that it was unwise to rely on popular gratitude: "Regardless of how deep was the confidence expressed by the masses, regardless of the endless number of welcoming telegrams they sent to the Provisional Government, these are nothing but words." He was pessimistic about political class unity: "In the localities there are either no [qualified] people, or they busy themselves with quarrels and arrest each other, bringing confusion and disintegration into the common cause." Russia would be lucky to emerge from the crisis "without fratricidal war, without anarchy, without social breakdown, bankruptcy, and blood."^[22]

Shingarev's analysis was supported by Sergei Prokopovich, who told the food-supply congress that Groman's program of extensive state regulation was too ambitious, given the shakiness of the state's authority. (Although Prokopovich was technically a socialist, he was regarded as being to the right of the consensus of the congress.) Prokopovich's views were supported by V. I. Anisimov, who rejected fashionable terms of both left and right such as anarchy and revolutionary democracy but still felt that disorganization and multiple sovereignty (mnogovlastie ) were the key problems. These arguments were unavailing: the congress overwhelm-

[21] Rosenberg, Liberals , 11-20.

[22] Prod. delo (Moscow), 28 May-4 June 1917, 1-5; Browder and Kerensky, Provisional Government , 2:632-33.

ingly supported Groman's view that the only way for the state to obtain authority was through successful economic regulation.^[23]

This dispute over the priority of effective state regulation versus firm political authority may have been tragically beside the point. Economic breakdown prevented satisfaction of popular demands, and political breakdown prevented reconstitution of authority. The chain reaction of disintegration seemed unstoppable.

Unsown Land: a Case Study

Thus far I have examined separately the intertwining strands of the crisis of 1917. In reality the difficulties of food supply, the self-protection actions of the population, and the failure to create effective unity for the political class all interacted with one another to intensify the crisis. This interaction can be seen at work in the case of policy toward unsown land.

At the beginning of the year food-supply officials felt that the crucial question was whether all available land would be utilized. As Chaianov declared in April 1917, "One may say with confidence that the most basic question in Russian life now consists in this: will the Russian democracy and its local organs cope or not with the spring sowing? . . . Our success now is being decided not so much on the front, not so much in our political life, as in the fields being sown."^[24] One result of this concern was a desire to avoid disruptive trouble in the countryside, and under the circumstances this meant protecting the landowners. But even stronger was a desire to ensure the unsown land was utilized by somebody , which meant empowering peasant committees to take over private property. This double concern found expression in the legislation of 11 April 1917 entitled "On the Protection of Crops," which explicitly tied its promise of protection of landowner property to an insistence on the full use of available land. Unsown land was subject to compulsory transfer to local committees.^[25]

Commentary on this legislation has traditionally stressed its solicitude

[23] Prod. delo (Moscow), 28 May-4 June 1917. Prokopovich and Anisimov represented cooperative organizations. See also Prokopovich's speech to the congress of cooperatives in September 1917, S. N. Prokopovich, Narodnoe khoziaistvo v dni revoliutsii: tri rechi (Moscow, 1918), 24-35.

[24] Chaianov, Vopros , 16-17. See Groman's remarks at the all-Russian conference of soviets in April 1917 (Stenographic report, 259-60); Struve's remarks in Samuel Hoare, The Fourth Seal (London, 1930), 193; Ek. pol. , pt. 3, doc. 77.

[25] Ek. pol. , pt. 3, doc. 118; Browder and Kerensky, Provisional Government , 2:621-25. Some Soviet historians have recognized the break with property rights inherent in the crop-protection legislation; see Kitanina, Voina , 306; Startsev, Vnutrenniaia politika , 229-30.

for the landowner, but the mandate to take over unsown land made sense to the peasants, who used it to justify their actions. In turn the central ministries did not feel they could retreat from the imperative of full utilization even after they became worried about land seizures. In July the three socialist ministers Viktor Chernov (agriculture), Iraklii Tseretelli (interior), and Aleksei Peshekhonov (food supply), sent out circulars warning against illegal land seizures—but all three felt compelled to reiterate that "nonutilization by landowners of free lands and fields is impermissible."^[26] At the end of the month Peshekhonov issued a further decree on the "compulsory maximum utilization" of agricultural equipment as well as land. Landowner organizations protested against this decree as a violation of property rights.^[27] So it was, but although the mobilizing bureaucrats might on occasion protect a landowner's property, they were not particularly interested in his property rights.

In the case of unsown lands, actions taken to fend off the bread crisis intensified the authority crisis. A further paradox reveals itself on examination of the rhetoric surrounding unsown lands: the government bureaucrats and the peasants seemed to be talking in one language, and the socialists and the landowners in another.

A distinction can be made between a rhetoric based on property and one based on utilization of resources. A property perspective looks primarily at human subjects and inquiries about the proper relationship between them: should it be based on some principle of distributional equality or rather on contract and the rule of law? A utilization perspective looks primarily at the available economic resources and asks how they can be used to the fullest extent.

Both the peasants and the bureaucrats felt more at home with the rhetoric of utilization. The peasant commune had always been more interested in maximum utilization of available resources than in any rights of the individual because the central imperative of survival in a harsh environment so determined.^[28] Full communal membership was granted only to those who fulfilled the duty to utilize one's own capacity for physical labor. The representatives of the Russian state had also always been inter-

[26] Ek. pol. , pt. 3, docs. 137, 138, 139 (the cited remark is by Tseretelli). For a retreat from this position by the Main Land Committee in September 1917, see Ek. pol. , pt. 3, p. 503 (footnote to doc. 269).

[27] Browder and Kerensky, Provisional Government , 2:638-39; Chaadaeva, Pomeshchiki , 128-29. This decree was actually aimed at the peasants; see Ek. pol. , pt. 3, p. 314; Golovine, Russian Army , 175.

[28] Edward Keenan, "Muscovite Political Folkways," Russian Review 45 (1986): 115-81. See also Yaney, Urge to Mobilize , 161ff., esp. 178-84.

ested primarily in the mobilization of resources, and this outlook was strengthened by the pressures of total war.

By contrast, both landowners and socialist intellectuals spoke in the more alien rhetoric of property. There were some surprising points of resemblance between Bolshevik and landowner views on agricultural development since both saw the natural next step in the countryside as a division between a productive bourgeoisie controlling large productive units and a propertyless agricultural laboring class. The Bolshevik slogan of land nationalization was intended not to prevent this development but instead to accelerate it.^[29] The only difference—not a minor one, to be sure—was that the Bolsheviks assigned the role of the bourgeois not to the landowners but to the peasants after the revolutionary expropriation of the landowners.

The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) seemed closer to the utilization perspective since in their rhetoric the language of property seemed to selfdestruct: land became the property of no one (nich'ia zemlia ). But nevertheless the SRs still thought in terms of egalitarian distribution and the creation of fraternal relations rather than full utilization of resources, leaving them with curiously little to say about the realities of 1917.^[30] The peasant activists willingly accepted the SR shibboleths as the preamble to their statements but then went on to speak in the more natural accents of communal localism and full utilization.

The rhetorical clash over unsown lands shows some of the constraints and opportunities created by the crisis of 1917. Peasant rhetoric kept the question of unsown lands in the forefront, both at the local level, when peasants justified their claims against particular landowners, and at the national level, in programmatic statements such as the "Peasant Instructions" that became the basis of the original Bolshevik land legislation. In these statements the radical demand for transfer of all land to the land committees was based squarely on the imperative of full utilization of all lands.^[31] In the peasant customary law that governed internal communal relations, he who sowed the land of another had as much, or more, claim to the eventual product as the owner of land, contrary to the principles of

[29] Lenin, PSS , 16:413 (1917), 34:35; P. N. Pershin, Agrarnaia revoliutsiia v Rossii (Moscow, 1966), 1:339. For acceptance by a landowner of the nationalization slogan, see Chaadaeva, Pomeshchiki , 61.

[30] Oliver Radkey, The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism (New York, 1958). Radkey notes that the main SR theorist, V. Chernov, was not fully committed to the commune and did not completely reject the Stolypin reforms (26ff., 84).

[31] Ek. pol. , pt. 3, docs. 185, 195, 210, 220, 232, 237, 254, 257, 269. See also 412 (peasant nakaz ); I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1946-1953), 3:34-36; Lenin, PSS , 32:44.

common jurisprudence.^[32] In 1917 the peasants applied this standard to the landowner as well—at the invitation of the government.

Government bureaucrats could not sound too convincing defending property rights in a rhetoric so heavily weighted toward the utilization perspective. The political bind was even worse for Kadet officials such as Shingarev and Stepanov, who adhered in essence to the utilization perspective: in industry, as in agriculture, the liberals' natural constituency adopted the property perspective, whereas the utilization perspective was adopted by constituencies that the liberals had little hope of reaching.

The landowners' vulnerable position was exposed by their rhetoric: the defensive insistence on private property could not help sounding rather feeble. The Western bourgeois rhetoric of property sounded strange on the lips of Russian noblemen; the term pomeshchik (landowner) itself bespoke the time when estates had been autocratic grants in return for political loyalty and services.^[33] Landowner organizations wanted the Provisional Government to declare the right of private property "holy and inviolable" just when all belligerent governments were making unparalleled inroads into private property.^[34]

The standard of full utilization imposed by the food-supply crisis hurt the landowners. The breakdown of the market reduced their incentive to produce and left them without needed resources such as migrant labor or artificial fertilizer. They themselves had never owned the machinery to make full use of their own land resources but had relied on leasing peasant machinery.^[35] During the war landowners became dependent on stateprovided sources of labor such as prisoners of war; this dependency certainly did not fit in with an ideology of private property, and it aroused peasant resentment because of unfair distribution of the available prisoners. As a result, the percentage decline in their sown acreage during the war years was twice that in the peasants'. Landowners thus exercised their property rights in the negative form of preventing use of their land until satisfactory terms were offered. The peasants regarded refusal to cultivate as the equivalent of a workers' strike in wartime; they strongly rejected the legitimacy of both the one and the other.^[36]

[32] Maurice Hindus, The Russian Peasant and the Revolution (New York, 1920), 166-67; Ek. pol. , pt. 3, doc. 235.

[33] Lenin noted the evasiveness of the term landowner (chastnovladelets) in PSS , 34:430; see also Chaadaeva, Pomeshchiki , 98.

[34] Chaadaeva, Pomeshchiki , 99; Ek. pol. , pt. 3, docs. 125, 144, 196, 248.

[35] Kitanina, Voina , 22; Chaadaeva, Pomeshchiki , 54-55; Ek. pol. , pt. 3, doc. 190.

[36] In 1980 I heard a talk in the Soviet Union that justified the absence of strikes by using the analogy of a peasant harvest.

Bolshevik loyalty to the property perspective also proved a stumbling block to their plans. Lenin insisted on seeing the peasant world in terms of class and property rather than in terms of the commune or full utilization. He argued that the objective content of the peasant revolution, despite the peasants' own view of the matter, was land nationalization, a bourgeois measure that admittedly would bring no benefit to the vast majority of peasants since it implied distribution of land to those who controlled other means of agricultural production such as livestock or machines. The only way poor peasants could derive any benefit from such a policy would be to preserve each landlord estate intact and work there under the direction of agronomists. In this way they would have the option of being wageworkers for the state rather than for other peasants. Intrapeasant conflict was a matter for the future, and it would be based on class: Lenin makes no mention of the conflict between the commune and the separators.^[37]

Although the peasants willingly listened to Bolshevik encouragement of immediate action, they continued to rely on institutions and worldviews far removed from Bolshevik prescriptions. In the second half of 1917 Lenin dropped most of his scheme of intrapeasant dynamics and simply used the term poorest peasantry without further analysis; this "timely shift of accent" allowed Lenin to use the peasant revolution as a support for the Bolshevik insurrection.^[38] His newly simplified scheme was sufficient as long as he required no more from the peasants than what they wanted to do anyway.

Underneath the rhetoric lies a crucial dilemma for the government: it had to rely on peasant cooperation in food-supply matters while at the same time denying long-standing peasant desires on the land question. It

[37] Lenin, PSS , 31:115, 271, 416-28; 32:163-89, 376-80; 34:108-16; Esther Kingston-Mann, Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution (Oxford, 1983), 150. Although Kingston-Mann shows the limitations of Lenin's sociological analysis of the peasantry, she believes him "unequalled in his political insight" (175). I cannot agree: (1) Kingston-Mann does not bring out the political nonsense of Lenin's idea that the "center of gravity" in the countryside should be the rural proletarians (whom Lenin did not see as peasants); (2) she exaggerates Lenin's belief in the socialist potential of the peasantry, sometimes relying on inaccurate quotation (143 n. 40); (3) she misrepresents Lenin's argument with other Bolsheviks, who needed no urging to support peasant demands for land (144); (4) she seems to absolve Lenin from the errors of Bolshevik peasant policies after 1917 despite the fact that they were deeply influenced by Lenin's 1917 political analysis (193-94). One of the few places Lenin's vision of independent organization of rural proletarians acquired some reality was Latvia; see Pershin, Agrarnaia revoliutsiia , 1:333-34; Stanley W. Page, "Lenin's April Theses and the Latvian PeasantSoldiery," in R. C. Elwood, ed., Reconsiderations on the Russian Revolution (Columbus, Ohio, 1976).

[38] P. V. Volubuev, in Kommunist , 1987, no. 5:66.

had to empower and repress at the same time. The government would not have escaped its dilemma even it if had taken the plunge and carried out a radical land reform. Gratitude is a notoriously weak force in politics: when the Bolsheviks gave the land to the peasants, they were still faced with the task of creating an effective political authority to mobilize needed peasant resources.^[39] To reconstitute the economy and political authority, the Provisional Government needed incentives, either material or coercive, but none was available: the government could not provide the peasants with exchange items nor punish their land seizures.^[40] It had to rely on exhortation, and even its mobilizational rhetoric proved double-edged and easily turned against it.

But the rhetoric of utilization also confirmed the existence of values held in common by the peasants and the government. Observers both in 1917 and later have often felt that the language of utilization was hypocritical on both sides: the Provisional Government used it to protect the landowners, and the peasants used it to expropriate the landowners.^[41] No doubt the peasants themselves often prevented landowner utilization and then used landowner inactivity as an excuse for expropriation. But hypocritical manipulation of a rhetoric need not detract from its importance. Although the peasants and the bureaucrats argued with each other, they did so in a language they both understood, and together they accomplished something—the drop in sown acreage was almost halted in the most important food crops.^[42] This positive achievement should be remembered in a year otherwise marked by economic disintegration and political conflict.

The paradoxes created by the crises of 1917 came together in Aleksei Peshekhonov, the socialist minister of food supply who defended the liberal viewpoint and later supported the Bolsheviks. A central reason for the creation of the Ministry of Food Supply in May 1917 was to put a socialist in charge of food supply. The ministry was the old Special Conference on

[39] The dilemma is presented in general terms by Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass., 1965); for the specific case of war, see Arthur Stein, The Nation at War (Baltimore, 1978), and for the even more specific case of civil war in Russia, see Gerasimenko, Nizovye organizatsii , chap. 5. A similar argument is made by N. Orlov in Izvestiia Narodnogo Komissariata po Prodovol'stvennomu Delu , August 1918, 4 (hereafter cited as Izv. NKP ).

[40] Kondratiev, Rynok khlebov , 112-20; Zaitsev and Dolinsky, "Organization and Policy," 106-8.

[41] Sukhanov, Zapiski , 2:69-77; Ek. pol. , pt. 3, docs. 261, 186 (p. 314); Pershin, Agrarnaia , 1:363; Chaadaeva, Pomeshchiki , 66-67; Keep, Russian Revolution , 166.

[42] Browder and Kerensky, Provisional Government , 2:634, 644-45; Kitanina, Voina , 21. Sown acreage went up slightly for food crops and down slightly for fodder crops. According to Antsiferov et al., Russian Agriculture , 278-79, sown acreage went down mainly in export crops such as wheat or barley.

Food Supply and its secretariat, henceforth to be independent of the Ministry of Agriculture. The new arrangement was due in part to the size of the food-supply apparatus but also to coalition politics. Liberal politicians would not have tolerated Agriculture Minister Chernov's control of food supply as well as agriculture, and socialist politicians insisted that the new post be given to a socialist.^[43]

Peshekhonov was the leader of the Popular Socialists (narodnye sotsialisty ), an offshoot of the SRs usually regarded as the most moderate of the socialist groups.^[44] Peshekhonov at first saw his task as carrying out the original Groman-Shingarev consensus on the grain monopoly, but as time went on, he tilted more and more toward the liberal view that popular indiscipline, rather than elite sabotage, was the main obstacle to success. But although Peshekhonov agreed on the priority of reestablishing an effective state authority, he was still disillusioned with the Provisional Government: it did not show the "systematic persistence that does not stop before repression, [nor] the stern decisiveness [needed] for taking on this 'dirty business.'" To his disgust, the government seemed to content itself with admonitions and excuses for delay. Such was his frustration that he resigned from the cabinet in August 1917. In later years, even though Lenin's government exiled him in 1922, Peshekhonov felt compelled to defend the Bolsheviks—he felt that despite the cruelty and absurdity of their methods, they at least succeeded in restoring the state authority (gosudarstvennost' ) that Russia had lacked since February 1917.^[45]

A Reconstituted Political Class?

All political parties (except of course the anarchists) agreed on the need to reconstitute a firm political authority (tverdaia vlast' ). The Bolsheviks were no exception. Their distinctiveness lay in their political formula, which outlined a strategy for reconstitution that made sense to the population while providing a basis for unity of the political class. A central element in this political formula was sabotage.

[43] Zaitsev and Dolinsky, "Organization and Policy," 24-25. The organizational continuity is overlooked by Keep, Russian Revolution , 498 n. 12.

[44] Radkey, Agrarian Foes , 65; Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga , 111.

[45] A. V. Peshekhonov, Pochemu ia ne emigriroval (Berlin, 1922), 51-60. Material on Peshekhonov's outlook can be found in Rex Wade, The Russian Search for Peace (Stanford, 1969), 24; Rosenberg, Liberals , 229; Browder and Kerensky, Provisional Government , 2:633-36, 3:1640-41; Kitanina, Voina , 328; Roger Pethybridge, The Spread of the Russian Revolution (London, 1972), 98-99; Sukhanov, Zapiski , 4:236-37, 5:70-75; Prod. delo (Moscow), 28 May-4 June 1917, 10; 11 June 1917, 7-8; 25 June 1917, 7; 20 August 1917; Agurskii, Ideologiia , 21.

When coordinating institutions that are usually taken for granted no longer perform properly, theories based on conspiracies, stabs in the back, and other forms of conscious wrongdoing are apt to flourish. Sabotage theories were no monopoly of the Bolsheviks. Since the beginning of the war conservative circles had worried about German control of the economy (nemetskoe zasil'e ). Jews were another popular target not only of the Black Hundreds but also of tsarist generals who thought it politic to uproot the Jewish population of the front regions and intensify chaos in the rear zones by sending a wave of refugees eastward.^[46] The liberal opposition had also been willing to believe halfheartedly, and utilize wholeheartedly, suspicions of German sympathizers in high court circles; these suspicions were inflamed by speeches such as Miliukov's in late 1916 asking whether government policy was stupidity or treason.

Food-supply difficulties strengthened the attractiveness of sabotage theories. Even before the revolution Peter Struve observed that the foodsupply problem made the political stubbornness of the tsar seem like a "consciously designed policy directed towards creating insuperable internal difficulties."^[47] After the revolution both liberals and socialists tended to explain the failure of the grain monopoly by speaking of the agitation of "dark forces," although socialists were more apt to use the word sabotage . If the nonelite classes made heavy use of sabotage theories, they did not do it without the instructive example of their educated leaders.

Sabotage was the popular explanation for food-supply difficulties, and the party that gave this explanation its most vigorous and coherent expression was the Bolsheviks: only the Bolsheviks made sabotage a central theme in their political outlook and the crushing of sabotage a key plank in their political platform. The Bolsheviks' general outlook in 1917 was a radical version of the enlistment solution, stressing both popular participation and extensive regulation by the state.^[48] Lenin was aggressively unoriginal in his vision of state economic regulation, declaring that the Bolsheviks wanted no more than what even the tsarist or German governments had seen was necessary, or at most the economic program adopted by the moderate majority of the soviets in spring 1917.^[49]

Economic analysis was secondary in the Bolshevik response to the food-

[46] Cherniavsky, ed., Prologue to Revolution .

[47] Hoare, Fourth Seal , 194-95.

[48] Alfred B. Evans, "Rereading Lenin's State and Revolution," Slavic Review 46 (1987): 1-19; S. Smith, Red Petrograd , 153-56.

[49] Lenin, PSS , 32:247-49, 195-97, 292-94, 443-44; 34:155-61. This continuity between Groman and the Bolsheviks was pointed out by Sukhanov in Protsess , 386-87.

supply crisis and required no more than vague phrases lifted from elsewhere. At the May food-supply congress the Bolshevik contingent did not offer any alternative economic program. Its spokesman Vladimir Miliutin associated himself with the resolution proposed by Groman, and Bolshevik representatives abstained in the final vote on the congress resolution only because they felt that the measures called for could only be realized by a proletarian state authority.^[50]

It was political analysis that was primary in the Bolshevik answer to the question, "Why are there no goods in the village or bread in the towns?"^[51] Lenin's stress on consensus in regard to the content of state regulation was meant to suggest the following question: if the way out of the economic crisis was straightforward and obvious to all concerned, why was the situation getting worse, not better? His answer was sabotage by people whose interests were threatened since any effective regulation meant limitation of profits and an end to commercial secrecy. Therefore it was not experts in the required economic measures who were needed to solve the crisis but experts in political will and decisiveness.

This analysis was elaborated in a pamphlet by Emelian Iaroslavskii. After admitting that the war was part of the answer, Iaroslavskii went on to assert:

The reason lies in the intentional derangement of all of economic life by the messieurs capitalists, factory owners, plant owners, landowners, bankers, and their hangers-on; the reason for the high cost of living, lack of goods, and lack of bread lies in the intentional hiding of bread and goods in warehouses and storage points, in the intentional closing of mines and factories [and in the intentional breakdown of transport]. All this is done intentionally so that the bony hand of hunger and poverty will grab the working class by the throat [as Riabushinskii said at the Moscow congress—see below].^[52]

In explaining this intentional sabotage, the Bolsheviks projected their own intense political focus onto their opponents: Iaroslavskii argued that the main reason that landowners demanded high prices, for example, was not just to receive twice or three times as much money, eager as they were to enrich themselves—no, their main calculation was to create disunity between workers and peasants.

[50] Prod. delo (Moscow), 28 May-4 June 1917 (Nogin).

[51] E. Iaroslavskii, Otchego net tovarov v derevne, khleba v gorodakh (Moscow, 1917). The work was written in the fall of 1917.

[52] Iaroslavskii, Otchego , 17-19.

Sabotage was the cause of the shortages, and therefore vigorous political action was the solution: "If we carry out a thorough search and registration of all warehouses, goods storehouses, basements, cellars, and grain-dealer depots, then it will be seen that [hidden] reserves are much greater than the amount put into circulation. But this search and registration must be carried out everywhere. Sooner or later the food-supply committees and the soviets will have to do it; better to do it now than later."^[53]

The sabotage theory also made the task of reconstituting society along noncapitalist lines entirely unproblematic: "We must tear the matter of exchange out of the hands of the parasites and speculators and turn over the whole matter of distribution to democratic consumer and producer societies and cooperatives. The peasants and workers themselves must [create the framework of] exchange between town and village. Then there will be cheap bread; then there will be cheap goods."^[54]

Iaroslavskii's rhetoric gives an indication of why many observers in 1917 dismissed the Bolsheviks as irresponsible demagogues. Yet events seemed to confirm the Bolshevik analysis. One strong piece of evidence was a speech given by the prominent Moscow industrialist Pavel Riabushinskii. Riabushinskii had long been a leader of the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie in its opposition to tsarism; he was a founder of the War Industries Committees, one of the public organizations interested half in cooperation, half in opposition. The speech included a phrase that became one of the most notorious of the revolutionary era, "the bony hand of hunger"; it appeared in the context of a violent attack on the soviets:

Our commercial and industrial class will do its job to the end without expecting anything for itself. But at the same time it

[53] Iaroslavskii, Otchego , 13-14. For examples of such searches, see Prod. delo (Moscow), 24 September 1917, 6-8; Koenker, Moscow Workers , 129-30; Ek. pol. , pt. 3, doc. 110.

[54] Iaroslavskii, Otchego , 17-19. Continued food shipments to the Allies also strengthened the sabotage outlook; see Ek. pol. , pt. 2, doc. 475; Kitanina, Voina , 350-54. For other examples of the sabotage outlook, see Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution (Bloomington, Ind., 1968), 118; Ek. pol. , pt. 2, doc. 535 (M. Vladimirov); Stalin, Sochineniia , 3:210-12, 251-52. The workers' suspicion of sabotage is a major theme in David Mandel's two-volume study of the Petrograd workers; see especially The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime (New York, 1983), 137-48, and The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power (New York, 1984), 211-12. The sabotage outlook has dominated much of Soviet historiography. See Lozinskii, Ekonomicheskaia politika , chap. 4, esp. 143-44; Volubuev, Ekonomicheskaia politika , esp. 410-11, 429-30. Kitanina and Laverychev are less constrained by the sabotage outlook; see also A. I. Suslov, "Sovremennaia anglo-amerikanskaia burzhuaznaia istoriografiia o prodovol'stvennoi politike v pervye gody sovetskoi vlasti," Istoriia SSSR , 1978, 3:188-95. Marc Ferro is one of the few Western historians to give credence to accusations of sabotage. Ferro, La revolution[révolution] de 1917 (Paris, 1967-1976), 2:242-43

feels that at present it is unable to convince anybody or influence people in leading positions.

Therefore our task is very difficult. We must wait—we know that the natural course of life will go on its way and unfortunately it will severely punish those who destroy economic laws. But it is bad when we have to sacrifice state interests to convince a small group of people. This is unforgivable. It is just like the sacrifices we have had to bear at the front. It was necessary that several armies be destroyed and that our valiant officers suffer before the soviets of workers' deputies changed their convictions in time. Therefore, gentlemen, we are forced against our will to wait; a catastrophe, an economic and financial defeat, will be inevitable for Russia, if we are not already in the midst of a catastrophe, and only when it becomes evident to everybody, only then will people feel they have gone down the wrong path. Toward that time we have to ready ourselves in a practical manner so that our organizations will be up to the situation.

We feel that what I have said is inevitable. But unfortunately it is necessary for the bony hand of hunger and the people's poverty to grab by the throat the false friends of the people, the members of various committees and soviets, before they come to their senses. The Russian land groans in their comradely embrace. The people at present do not understand this, but they soon will, and they will say: "Away, deceivers of the people." (Stormy applause) . . .

All that is pure and clean is cursed, all cultured people are thrown out, mutual hate and fury reign, there is no feeling of national responsibility even for the state's existence, honor, and unity. When will arise, not yesterday's slave, but the free Russian citizen? Let him come soon. Russia awaits him. All around we hear the satanic laughter of those who scorn to pronounce the word homeland . In this difficult time, when a new time of troubles is approaching, all vital cultural forces of the country must become one harmonious family. Let the firm merchant's nature show itself. People of trade, the Russian land must be saved!^[55]

[55] Ek. pol. , pt. 1, doc. 80. For Riabushinskii's political activity before the February revolution, see Lewis H. Siegelbaum, The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia (New York, 1983). In 1921 Riabushinskii did approach the American Relief Agency to suggest that control of food distribution might allow the agency to become the actual governing body of Russia. Benjamin M. Weissman, Herbert Hoover and Famine Relief to Soviet Russia (Stanford, 1974), 49-50. Riabushinskii's ghost continued to vex the Soviet government. The defendants in the "industrial party" show trial of 1930 were accused of plotting with Riabushinskii in 1928, although he had been dead for some years.

Despite the violence of the rhetoric, Riabushinskii's speech is not good evidence of sabotage. According to Riabushinskii, the business classes saw that the country is going toward disaster, but their warning voice was unheeded—the people would have to learn through bitter experience that they had listened to false leaders. Obviously, there is no call here for any action to make food supply worse; indeed, the import of the speech is that the business classes must keep trying to help, despite the hostile attitude shown toward them. Nevertheless, Riabushinskii's intent to starve the revolution seemed clear enough to the Russian people. As a Soviet study of Bolshevik propaganda remarks, Riabushinskii's "bony hand of hunger" was "often cited in propagandistic literature and therefore well known to the masses; it demonstrated better than any other argument that the struggle with hunger was a class struggle."^[56]

The rhetoric of sabotage offered great advantages to the Bolsheviks, for it tied them to the common discourse of the other Russian political parties while emphasizing their distinctiveness. The Bolsheviks could argue that extensive economic regulation was clearly realistic and not overambitious—otherwise it would not have been endorsed by the vast majority of moderate socialists and many of the liberals. Groman and his friends themselves documented the refusal of the governing elite to take the steps that would resolve the crisis. The political implication was clear: the crisis could be overcome without undue difficulty by a party with the courage and commitment to make refusal impossible.^[57]

The sabotage outlook could easily be couched in the Marxist rhetoric of class, and this allowed the Bolsheviks to give expression to deep popular feelings of suspicion and outrage.^[58] In turn a sabotage theory was needed to support the position that class struggle was an adequate response to pressing practical problems. In the fall of 1917 Lenin asserted: "Which class holds sovereign authority [vlast' ]—that decides everything."^[59] These words make sense only if economic and administrative solutions are already available but are not being adopted solely for reasons of class interest.

[56] A. P. Kupaigorodskaia, Oruzhiem slova: listovki petrogradskikh bol'shevikov 1918-1920 gg . (Leningrad, 1981), 49. The Bolsheviks themselves were responsible for one documented case of sabotage. A. D. Tsiurupa, at this time a food-supply official in Siberia, kept back food shipments to Petrograd in October until after the Bolshevik takeover. M. I. Davydov, Aleksandr Dmitrievich Tsiurupa (Moscow, 1961), 38-39; V. Tsiurupa, Kolokola pamiati , 78.

[57] Lenin, PSS , 34:158; Sukhanov, Zapiski , 6:93-94. For the same argument in Bolshevik debates over the armed uprising, see Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks , 197-99.

[58] Ferro, La revolution[révolution] , 2:422-27; S. Smith, Red Petrograd , 167; Koenker, Moscow Workers , 132, 251-52; Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga , 272; Ek. pol. , pt. 3, docs. 219, 271.

[59] Lenin, PSS , 34:200.

Any version of the enlistment solution—perhaps like most democratic theories—contained a large component of distrust and suspicion.^[60] In the radical Bolshevik version the proposed scope of enlistment was much broader than the educated "vital forces" championed by the prerevolutionary opposition: "The miraculous means [of increasing the strength of the state apparatus] is the enlistment of the toilers, the enlistment of the poor to the everyday work of state administration."^[61] This step was necessary not only for the usual reasons (ending irresponsible government, obtaining social trust and cooperation) but also because the new state authority could act like proletarians (po-proletarski ) and show the saboteurs that it meant business.

Lenin's insistence on the necessity of an act of decisive violence has been shown to be an important theme in his campaign in the fall of 1917 for an armed uprising.^[62] The same insistence is found in the economic sphere. In a discussion of bread rationing, Lenin brought out the underlying motive: to point up the contrast between "reactionary bureaucratic methods of struggle with [economic] catastrophe—methods that try to limit transformations to a minimum—and revolutionary-democratic methods. To deserve the name, revolutionary-democratic methods must make their primary task a violent break with the old and outmoded and [by so doing] the quickest possible movement forward."^[63] Violence was the most visible form of decisiveness, and visible decisiveness could solve the crisis almost by itself by inspiring loyalty and confidence while ensuring the enforced cooperation of erstwhile saboteurs. This reasoning supported Lenin's contention that the soviets could form a solid foundation for a reconstituted political authority. The soviets gained prestige from this proposed role: the power of the term sovetskaia vlast ' (political authority based on the soviets) stemmed just as much, or more, from vlast ' as from sovetskaia .^[64]

For Peshekhonov, the paradox was that the Bolsheviks, a politically destructive force in the short run, was the only available force capable of reconstituting political authority. The sabotage outlook contributed to this paradox. Accusations of sabotage helped tear apart Russian society, and the

[60] Jane J. Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (New York, 1980).

[61] Lenin, PSS , 34:313.

[62] Sergei Mstislavskii, Five Days Which Transformed Russia (1922; Bloomington, Ill., 1988), 113; Ferro, La revolution[révolution] , 2:366-68; Robert Vincent Daniels, Red October: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (New York, 1967), 53, 75-77, 157-58.

[63] Lenin, PSS , 34:179. Lenin refers to an armed uprising as the "most decisive, most active policy" (34:395). A similar argument is made by Mao Zedong in "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan" (1927).

[64] Lenin, PSS , 34:200-207, 340; Koenker, Moscow Workers , 253, 267; Ferro, La revolution[révolution] , vol. 2, chap. 7; Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga , 202, 254; Ek. pol. , pt. 3, doc. 107; Chaadaeva, Pomeshchiki , 122-23.

belief that sabotage was the cause of economic difficulties led to some disastrous policy choices. But the sabotage outlook, since it viewed opposition or even simple lack of cooperation as a crime, gave the Bolsheviks the moral fervor and the popular support necessary to fulfill and overfulfill the task of imposing order and reconstituting political authority. Sabotage linked together the fight fight against enemies of Bolshevik political reconstitution (called counterrevolutionaries) and the fight fight against enemies of Bolshevik economic reconstitution (called speculators). To a greater extent than is realized, the popular meaning of the revolution is accurately summed up in the full title of the first Soviet secret police, the Cheka: the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Against Counterrevolution, Sabotage, and Speculation.