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]