The Partisan Challenge

The Bolsheviks' rhetorical presentation of the food-supply crisis cannot be separated from the partisan challenge from the other socialist parties in the spring of 1918.^[33] After the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty,

[28] Lenin, PSS , 36:405.

[29] Lenin, PSS , 36:362.

[30] In Western writings this tradition goes back at least to Maurice Dobb, Russian Economic Development Since the Revolution (New York, 1928).

[31] Lenin, PSS , 36:235-36. See also 35:311-13 (January 1918).

[32] Lenin, PSS , 36:316 (first published in 1931).

[33] For a study of the partisan conflict in this period, see Vladimir Brovkin, The Mensheviks After October: Socialist Opposition and the Rise of the Bolshevik Dictatorship (Ithaca, 1987), esp. chap. 3.

that challenge concentrated its fire on the food-supply crisis. In March and April the Bolsheviks had been inclined to be self-critical and stress the problems arising from indiscipline on the part of their own constituency. But this stopped when Mensheviks in the Central Executive Committee debates began to use these Bolshevik statements as proof of the Bolsheviks' complete helplessness before the food-supply crisis. The Bolsheviks also became more defensive as the food-supply crisis began to chip away at their central base of support, the urban soviets. The interaction between partisan considerations and food-supply matters was intensified by the fact that two of the obstacles to centralized unification of the food-supply apparatus—the regional food-supply committees and the village soviets—were political strongholds of the Mensheviks and Left SRs respectively. Thus the Bolsheviks needed a rhetorical definition of the food-supply crisis that shifted blame away from themselves and as much as possible onto the shoulders of the other parties; accounted for the wavering and defections in the Bolshevik constituency; and promised a short-term solution to the crisis that would provide outlets for hungry workers other than sackmanism, speculation, and political protest.

These needs were met by the class-war definition of the food-supply crisis, which ran as follows. The Bolsheviks were not to blame for the foodsupply crisis. Rather, it was caused by the bourgeois war and was being further intensified by kulak hostility to the revolution. The only reasons anyone would be reluctant to hand over his grain was speculative greed and a desire to choke the revolution with the bony hand of hunger. The socialist parties who weakened soviet authority by criticizing the grain monopoly were objectively part of the counterrevolutionary front that also included foreign and Russian capitalists and the petty-bourgeois kulaks. Some workers indeed had lost their revolutionary good sense because of the famine and because of the infection from the old system's rotting corpse. But the truly conscious workers would continue to rally round the Bolsheviks and in particular join the worker detachments that would serve the revolution by confiscating the grain of the kulaks. Such action was not an attack on the village but participation in a class war within the village. The creation of the Committees of the Poor as the lowest rung of the centralized apparatus of the People's Commissariat of Food Supply represented not bureaucratism and old-regime police methods but the armed people.

These themes appear again and again in speeches by Lenin, Trotsky, Grigorii Zinoviev, Iakov Sverdlov, and others in the spring of 1918. (Not all the Bolshevik leaders agreed with the analysis of Lenin and Tsiurupa; Aleksei Rykov and Lev Kamenev in particular advocated a softer line.) A few citations will give the flavor of them. In late May Lenin offered an incisive one-sentence analysis of the food-supply crisis: "The famine does

not come from the fact that there is no grain in Russia, but from the fact that the bourgeois and all rich people are making a last decisive battle against the rule of the toilers, the workers' state, the soviet political authority."^[34] Zinoviev, always the most straightforward and crude of the Bolshevik orators, elaborated further on the problems of bourgeois sabotage: "There is no doubt that this is a definite plan, worked out in the quiet of bourgeois offices a long time ago." And this, he continued, should not be news to anyone, for recall what Riabushinskii had said: "Gentlemen workers and sailors, you think to wear us out with bayonets and your majority, but remember, we have a way of controlling you: the bony hand of hunger, and it will smother your revolution." Zinoviev's speech is littered with references to "Riabushinskii's agents" and "Riabushinskii's program"—for example, in speaking of the necessity of "holy violence on those kulaks who fulfilled Riabushinskii's program." More important were the references to Riabushinskii's parties —that is to say, the SRs and Mensheviks, who opposed such holy violence.^[35]

Bolshevik rhetoric on the food-supply crisis took place in a growing atmosphere of invective and threats against the other socialist parties. The tone can be sensed in Lenin's reaction to Right SR and Menshevik criticism of Bolshevik implementation of the grain monopoly: the only distinction between them and the openly capitalist Kadets is that the Kadets were straightforward Black Hundreds.^[36] According to Lenin, the conclusion was obvious: only fools could dream of any kind of united front of all soviet parties.

But the Bolsheviks did not content themselves with rejecting the possibility of sharing power. They moved on to open threats against the other parties—threats that were soon carried out. In a speech in early June Trotsky warned that unless the parties stopped making trouble on the foodsupply issue, a terror would be unleashed against them. Up until then terror had been avoided, but "now the soviet political authority will act more decisively and radically. . . . Don't poison the worker masses with lies and slander, for this whole game might end in a way that is to the highest degree tragic." In another speech, after the inevitable reference to

[34] Lenin, PSS , 36:357 (O golode , 22 May 1918). The words last decisive battle are in Russian a clear allusion to the apocalyptic vision of the Internationale.

[35] G. Zinoviev, Khleb, mir i partiia (Petrograd, 1918), 22-30 (speech of 29 May in Petrograd). According to Trotsky, the kulaks were the "advance detachment of the counterrevolution . . . the support and hope of the counterrevolution." Lev Trotsky, Kak vooruzhalis' revoliutsiia (Moscow, 1923-25), 1:81-83, (speech of 9 June 1918) (hereafter cited as KVR ).

[36] Lenin, PSS , 36:402 (speech of 4 June 1918). I regard this statement as a masterpiece of invective even for Lenin.

Riabushinskii, Trotsky asked if there was any line that divided counterrevolutionaries, monarchists, exploiters, and kulaks from the Right SRs and Mensheviks. "No, there is no such line: they are united in one black camp of counterrevolutionaries against the exhausted worker and peasant masses." He then went on to wonder at the patience of the Moscow workers, who allowed, in what was supposed to be a workers' soviet, five to ten Right SR representatives.^[37]

In this way the food-supply crisis, caused by a Riabushinskian conspiracy that included the other socialist parties, justified the repression of all political opposition. Class-war rhetoric also transferred any faults of the workers to the other classes. Thus Lenin explained away the cases where worker detachments got drunk and looted the peasants by stating that "when the old society perishes, you can't nail up its corpse in a coffin and bury it. It disintegrates in our midst; this corpse rots and infects us."^[38] If the workers showed their dissatisfaction with Bolshevik performance on food supply by going out on strikes, Zinoviev could argue that "it could not be otherwise: in our petty-bourgeois country there would be groups that decide that the revolution means 'give, give, give' and to whom the revolution means two pounds of bread, complete provisionment, and so on." Zinoviev combined his condemnation of petty-bourgeois influence with a certain flattery of the conscious worker who was free from these influences and should be able to rise above desperate women workers and the average member of the mass (srednyi massovik ) and see the deeper causes of the food-supply crisis.^[39]

The Bolshevik rhetoricians saw the food-supply dictatorship as an excellent example of the organizational task that the revolutionary movement had to solve, whether that task was called state capitalism or a specifically communist task. As Lenin said:

Our revolution has now come straight up against the task of implementing socialism in a concrete practical way—and in this lies its inestimable service. It is precisely now, and particularly in relation to the most important question—the question of bread—that the necessity [of these things becomes] clearer than clear: an iron revolutionary political authority; the dictatorship of the proletariat; the organization of the collection, transport, and distribution of products on a

[37] Trotsky, KVR , 1:68-72 (speech of 4 June 1918), 90-91 (speech of 9 June 1918). The Bolsheviks' attitude toward the Left SRs was more lenient: they were generally seen as sincere but stupid.

[38] Lenin, PSS , 36:409 (speech of 4 June 1918).

[39] Zinoviev, Khleb, mir i partiia , 12-13, 18-20 (speech of 18 May 1918).

mass, national scale with a registration of the consumption needs of tens and hundreds of millions of people and with a calculation of the condition and results of production for this year and for many years ahead.^[40]

The class-war definition of the food-supply crisis not only gave the "conscious workers" and other supporters of the soviet authority a visible enemy in the form of kulak saboteurs; it also gave the central authority a rod of discipline to apply to these same supporters since indiscipline in time of war is unforgivable. Thus Lenin, in the same paragraph as that of the passage just quoted, used the necessity of a grain monopoly to refute those who did not see the necessity of a state power in the transition from capitalism to communism—a state power that would be mercilessly severe not only to the bourgeoisie but also (perhaps more important) to all the "disorganizers of authority."

All these themes were combined in an appeal issued by the Council of People's Commissars on 29 May. After noting how the bourgeoisie was trying to use the famine to enslave the workers even further, the appeal went on to explain that the grain monopoly was needed to resolve the crisis. And if the monopoly was necessary, a further conclusion was inescapable: "Only the state in the person of the central authority can cope with this most difficult task." And the state could only do its job if independent purchases were not allowed, for this would merely represent one group of starving people tearing food away from another. "Sensible centralization" required discipline: "The grain monopoly will give positive results only when all directions coming from the center are unquestioningly fulfilled in the localities [and] when local organs of the authority carry out, not an independent food-supply policy, but the policy of the central authority in the interests of the whole starving population."

By way of compensation for this renunciation of independent purchases, the appeal opened the possibility of actively joining in a crusade against the kulak:

The kulaks do not want to give grain to the starving, and will not give any, no matter what concessions are made by the state.

Grain must be taken from the kulaks by force.

There must be a crusade against the village bourgeoisie. . . .

Merciless war against the kulaks!

In this slogan—salvation from starvation in the immediate

[40] Lenin, PSS , 36:358-59 (O golode , 22 May 1918).

future; in this slogan—salvation and deepening of the conquests of the revolution!^[41]

The worker detachments were also seen as a means of building a new state organization. Lenin called on the "advanced worker" in the foodsupply detachments to be a "leader of the poor, chief (vozhd ') of the village laboring masses, builder of the state of labor."^[42] Trotsky exhorted the workers to emulate Western superiority in organization. Although all belligerents had been devastated by the war and were low on grain supplies, the Western countries had avoided famine by weighing available supplies to the last ounce and distributing them according to the directives of the state authority. As for Russia, "there is grain in the country, but to our shame, the working class and the village poor have not yet learned the art of administering state life."^[43]

This perspective was a wider reflection of the food-supply officials' goal of using the worker detachments as a means of disciplining the food-supply apparatus. In a similar way the food-supply officials' professional view of the Committees of the Poor as a continuing base for the food-supply apparatus was generalized by the Bolshevik leaders, who saw the committees, potentially at least, as "secure cadres of conscious communists."^[44]

The Committees of the Poor were an attempt to bypass or discipline the peasant village soviets, and class-war rhetoric performed its greatest service for the Bolsheviks in justifying this embarrassing attack on "soviet sovereignty." In practice the Bolsheviks were conceding the validity of the criticism of the whole idea of a soviet-based political order, namely, that local soviets were an entirely inadequate base for a centralizing "firm authority." By labeling the peasant soviets as kulak soviets, they could picture a retreat as a forward movement. A centralizing bureaucrat like Tsiurupa was happy to use revolutionary phrases about civil war to accomplish his own pressing purposes. In response to Left SR criticism of the attack on the local soviets, Tsiurupa said he would be happy to rely on the soviets, but "if the soviets call congresses that remove the grain monopoly and the fixed prices—if they refuse to carry out the state plan in the name of purely local interests—if they gather up grain in their own hands and continue to hold this grain in their hands—then it is clear that we must fight with such soviets, [and] we will struggle with such congresses right

[41] Dekrety , 2: 348-54.

[42] Lenin, PSS , 36:363 (22 May 1918).

[43] Trotsky, KVR , 1:76-77 (speech of 9 June 1918).

[44] Sverdlov, Izbrannye proizvedeniia , 181-84 (Central Executive Committee speech of 20 May 1918). This speech was given prior to the legislation on the Committees of the Poor, but its theme was the need for splitting the village.

up to imprisonment and the sending of troops, to the final and extreme forms of civil war."^[45]

Class-war rhetoric also covered up a profound suspicion of the political tendencies of the poor peasants and a fear that the kulaks could provide an alternative leadership for the peasants. Food Supply Commissariat official Aleksei Sviderskii justified the "material incentives" given to peasant informers in these terms:

The village poor, not understanding their own interests or the existing situation, and in general very often not realizing what is really happening, very often act at the behest of the kulaks. They help and defend the kulaks so that no grain is taken, since [otherwise] they themselves will have no bread. The kulaks seek to use this; they start selling grain at a low price in an attempt to give the poor peasant an interest in having grain surpluses remain with the kulaks.^[46]

So it seems that the only thing worse than a kulak selling at high prices is a kulak selling at low prices. The same analysis is given in more general terms in Sverdlov's speech: the reason, says Sverdlov, that we must hasten to split the village and integrate the peasants into our own organization is that otherwise the kulaks will get there first and unite the village against us. Perhaps because Sverdlov, an urban party organizer, was further removed from village realities than the food-supply officials, the incongruity in his speech between two images of the poor peasants is so pronounced as to be comic in effect. On the one hand, they were disciplined fighters for the revolution and worthy brothers in arms of the urban workers; on the other hand, they had to be kept by force of arms from turning into a drunken mob.^[47]

Bolshevik class-war rhetoric was ultimately based on the essentially political nature of the Leninist terms for the peasantry: the peasants were divided according to their attitude toward the revolution and toward those who spoke in its name. It is inexact to say that these terms were politicized: they had never been anything but political. Their sociological content simply offered clues on where to look for friends or enemies. The kulaks could almost be defined as the natural organizers of village solidarity against the outside world, and as the above citations show, the Bolsheviks not only accepted this view but made it the basis of their policy toward the village.

[45] Central Executive Committee, 4th sozyo , 9 May 1918, 259-61.

[46] Central Executive Committee, 4th sozyo , 11 June 1918, 406-7.

[47] Sverdlov, Izbrannye proizvedeniia , 181-84.

If there is one term that sums up the interconnection between the themes I have been discussing, it is registration . Starting as a technical term, registration came to symbolize many of the hopes of the Bolshevik movement, and it was a constant refrain in Bolshevik rhetoric in 1918. It was first of all an integral part of the grain monopoly: enforcing the obligation to sell to the state all surpluses required accurate knowledge of each person's supplies. Moreover, the loss of the Ukraine and the deepening food-supply crisis made "clearer than clear" the need for "the strictest possible registration." But registration also linked the grain crisis to the general state-capitalist task of a centralized organization of the economy since the content of state capitalism could be briefly summarized as "registration and monitoring." This formulation also showed why statecapitalist organization was the threshold of socialism: a proper registration of available supplies was needed for truly socialist distribution. Not only grain was to be put on register; industrial items were also to be mobilized in this way and made available for commodity exchange, and this required more centralization of control over these items. In addition, registration pointed toward the class struggle since the kulaks and other disorganizers were hostile to registration and likely to sabotage it. The main purpose of splitting the village was to gain "alert eyes" for registration: the class war was primarily a war for information.