7
Retreat to the Razverstka

I am surprised by the absence of news. Inform me immediately how much grain has been collected, how many carloads have been sent, how many speculators and kulaks have been arrested.
Lenin, to officials in Tula, June 1918

At the end of May 1918 the Council of People's Commissars issued a long appeal to the population on the subject of food-supply policy. It ended with these ringing words, which set forth the foundations of the food-supply dictatorship: "Not one step away from the grain monopoly! Not the slightest increase in fixed prices for grain! No independent procurement! All that is steadfast, disciplined, and conscious in a single organized foodsupply order! Unhesitating fulfillment of all directives of the central authority! No separate actions! War on the kulaks !"^[1]

But by September these brave slogans could not have been repeated. The fixed price had been tripled. The grain monopoly had been officially relaxed to the extent that workers in Moscow were temporarily allowed to go to the countryside to buy one and a half poods of grain per person—a measure that disgusted food-supply officials referred to as legalized sackmanism. On a more permanent basis, the worker detachments were allowed to give half of the food they obtained directly to the organization that sent them: this was in reality heavily taxed independent procurement rather than state-monopoly purchases. And although the kulaks were still treated as deadly enemies of the people, the emphasis of peasant policy had been switched to "neutralization" of the peasant producer, that is, the middle peasant who was not so much as mentioned in the May appeal. Attempts had been made to restrain the blockade detachments and the requisition detachments, and the Committees of the Poor were on the verge of being disbanded. The only plank that remained of the food-supply dictatorship was the insistence on a centralized apparatus.

A new system of food supply was built up starting from that one

[1] Dekrety , 2:353-54.

remaining plank. This system—which I shall call the razverstka system—was the one actually used by the Bolsheviks during the civil war. It was constructed in the period between August 1918, when a spate of new decrees were issued to undo the damage already caused by the food-supply dictatorship, and January 1919, when a national food-supply congress declared that the razverstka would be the basis of future food-supply work.

The turning point can be conveniently dated 2 August 1918, when Lenin wrote a series of "food-supply theses" that guided the drafting of the August decrees on food-supply policy. The Bolsheviks could not afford to call general attention to what they were doing because of the potential political embarrassment caused by the retreat from the food-supply dictatorship, announced with so much fireworks in the spring, and Lenin prefaced his August theses with the remark that "part of these measures should be in decrees, part in enactments without publication."

Most of the features of the new system are at least foreshadowed in Lenin's August theses. His basic goal is in sharp contrast to the crusade of the spring—"to neutralize the greatest possible number of peasants during the civil war." Lenin went on to advocate higher fixed prices for grain; a greater use of cooperatives and a greater reliance on commodity exchange; a tax in kind (naturnalog ); temporary permission for workers to get a personal supply of one and a half poods; greater discipline in blockade and food-supply detachments; and concessions to railroad workers in view of their economic importance. His reluctance is revealed in the many ways these concessions were hedged: a concession was to be only temporary, or only for certain groups, or under careful monitoring, or taken back in some other way.^[2]

The new political orientation was thus declared at the top levels of government, but the practical methods used to build up the razverstka system came out of local experience in food-supply work. Shlikhter's efforts in Viatka province in the summer of 1918, written up two years later by N. Orlov, reveal the problems that faced the early pioneers of the razverstka method.^[3] Orlov begins by describing the collapse of the foodsupply mechanism during the chaotic summer of 1918. Local food-supply organs were hardly working, and the city population strongly resented any interference with local trade, saying of the Bolsheviks that "they themselves give nothing, while interfering with private deliveries." In the city

[2] Lenin, PSS , 37:31-33. In Baku the failure of the Bolsheviks to carry out an effective retreat from the food-supply dictatorship was one reason for their political isolation and defeat. Suny, Baku Commune , 297ff.

[3] N. Orlov, Sistema prodovol'stvennoi zagotovki (Tambov, 1920). Further details can be found in Iu. K. Strizhkov, "Iz istorii vvedeniia prodovol'stvennoi razverstki," Istoricheskie zapiski 71 (1961).

there were strikes, and in the village there were riots. One main reason for the riots was the worker detachments, which were sent out barely prepared and which abused the authority given to them. These abuses created fertile ground for anti-Bolshevik agitation against "those Jews and Germans sitting in Moscow," agitation that found willing listeners among those who "easily confused the soviet authority with some drunken vagabond, accidentally occupying the post of commander of a requisition detachment." Prices had skyrocketed; in the first half of 1918 the price of rye went up 178 percent and oats 161 percent. But the peasants quickly learned that money was depreciating in value and grain appreciating; it was best to hold on to the latter.

Viatka province was an especially clear example of disintegration. The main brake on procurement was the food-supply organs themselves, which completely ignored directives from above and set their own prices. Two provincial soviet congresses called for the removal of fixed prices altogether. Sackmanism took on vast proportions and even found official protection: when Viatka tried to set up border patrols, the soviet of neighboring Kazan province protested and even sent troops to make sure the sackmen were not hindered. (Kazan was already notorious for declaring free trade within its borders.)

In late June Shlikhter arrived on the scene with special powers as an agent of the center. Few forces were available for him, and he quickly decided that the worker detachments were not an appropriate procurement apparatus. The detachments could serve as a "real force" (coercive backup) but not as procurement agents themselves. The most experienced available force was the seventeen agents of the Moscow Region Food-Supply Committee, an organization dominated by anti-Bolshevik socialist food-supply professionals from the Provisional Government period. They advocated a centralized apparatus but saw themselves playing a leadership role that Shlikhter (who called them ideologues of sackmanism) was reluctant to grant them. There was also an inefficient delegation of the food-supply organization of the railroad workers, Prodput'. Finally, there were ten to fifteen "instructors" sent out to the detachments by the Food-Supply Commissariat. Orlov pays them a rather cool compliment by saying they were interested in an honorable career, and Shlikhter in a footnote took even that back, saying that with only one exception they were "worthless trash." Shlikhter's conclusion: "Without the assistance of the peasantry it would be impossible to accomplish anything, and the practice of simple raids on the village and of armed requisition was a bad one."

Perhaps overdramatically, Orlov traces the idea of the razverstka to a meeting of representatives of all these forces held in Sarapul'skii county on 22 July 1918. (Shlikhter himself was not present.) Local officials gave

various excuses for the hopeless food-supply situation. Work on registration had started late. A commodity-exchange policy was required, except that there were no commodities to exchange, and besides, as one of Shlikhter's men said, "We as socialists cannot practice individual commodity exchange."

Then stepped forth a "food-supply Columbus"—S. A. Sukhikh, chairman of the county peasant soviet. Sukhikh started off with a declaration characteristic of the early soviet period but soon to go out of style: he would recognize the decrees of the central soviet authority only insofar as they coincided with the interests of the peasantry. He went on to criticize the detachments who took grain without distinguishing between rich and poor and thereby discredited soviet sovereignty. He noted that the local soviets had been successful in obtaining grain at the uncontrolled market prices until this practice was forbidden by higher officials.

Sukhikh then made the following suggestion. The revolutionary government should retreat from its principles a bit for the sake of the revolutionary cause. It should assign a grand total to each district soviet and tell them that if this amount is not turned in by a certain date, everyone on the executive committee will suffer. Both money and goods would be given in exchange for the grain, and the district soviet would control their distribution. A small force would be sent around to inspire respect (dlia ostrastki ). The logic of the new method was to deliver an ultimatum but also to show a willingness to meet the peasant halfway: force would only be used if no corresponding willingness was shown on the other side. Sukhikh's suggestion was accepted on an experimental basis.

Orlov goes on to describe the negotiation between the food-supply officials and the peasant representatives about the total amount of the razverstka and the distribution of this amount to lower levels. Shlikhter agreed to leave a considerable percentage of the razverstka for local needs. Shlikhter's basic principles were "a razverstka based on approximate data and the razverstka's reliance on the assistance of local revolutionary forces." These local forces did not include the Committees of the Poor. A Shlikhter memorandum noted that in one county "there are few poor peasants and almost no village Committees of the Poor." Orlov felt that this description could be generalized to all the southern grain-surplus counties of Viatka so that the food-supply authorities had to do without an "internal tax screw [nalogovyi press ]."

Results were good, and promised to be better, but the whole process was cut short by a peasant uprising. Orlov is frank about the reasons for this uprising. Viatka province had never had many landlords, thus removing one motive for loyalty to the soviet authority. Then the food-supply dictatorship sent in the requisition detachments. Orlov's language in crit-

icizing the detachments is strong but shows as well the ambivalent attitude of even a sympathetic townsman toward the peasantry: the detachments "did not even explain what was going on or ask the advice of his majesty, the peasant with grain [khlebnyi muzhichok ]." The detachments also caused scandal by drunkenness and disrespectful behavior. The peasants were especially infuriated at being forced to make deliveries at the height of the harvest season.

The harassment of the sackmen also angered the peasants. Unlike most Bolshevik accounts, Orlov did not explain this reaction merely as a lament for losing a chance to speculate—the peasants saw many of the sackmen as hungry individuals trying to survive. It was not only greed that caused protests but "the just indignation of an honest man." The peasants could not understand how the food-supply authorities could profess to be taking the grain for the hungry when they were persecuting these obviously hungry people. Thus (in the words of a local observer) "as soon as it became known that a detachment had appeared in one county, in another county the organization of resistance began."

Peasant dissatisfaction meant that a minor case of insubordination in a military unit turned into an uprising that swept across the province and made contact with a major SR uprising in Ufa. The search was on for Shlikhter and his friends, who had to leave the province in a hurry. Orlov concluded that it was too bad Shlikhter and his razverstka methods could not have come earlier, for the government might have avoided both drunken commissars and wild, aimless uprisings.^[4]

In Shlikhter's Viatka experiment we see already the central features of the razverstka system and its contrasts with the food-supply dictatorship. Instead of a strategy based on class struggle and overcoming sabotage, the razverstka system aimed at neutralization of the peasantry and possibly even a partnership with it. Instead of registration of each producer's grain supplies, it started with an approximation of the total amount needed by the state, which was divided up and assigned to lower levels until it reached the individual peasant. Instead of relying on enlistment of popular forces, it resorted to methods of collective responsibility and put its main effort into building up a professional, centralized apparatus.

Relations with the Peasantry

Because of the chaos of revolution and then the pressures of civil war, the Bolsheviks had to take much from the peasants and give little in return.

[4] Sukhikh was himself killed in the fall. L. A. Zubareva, Khleb Prikam'ia (Izhevsk, 1967).

For this reason they were anxious not to irritate the peasants any more than was absolutely necessary. In the rhetoric of class relations this caution was signified by the return of the middle peasant, a figure conspicuous by his absence during the phase of the food-supply dictatorship. The theory of the wavering middle peasant allowed the Bolsheviks to come to grips with the real peasant who was not particularly interested in a socialist revolution but was willing enough to fulfill his obligations to the state if they seemed at all reasonable or (perhaps more important) if the state promised not to harass him after they were fulfilled.

The middle peasant also allowed the Bolsheviks to switch to a longerterm orientation toward the peasant as producer. The food-supply dictatorship had been based on the assumption that a small minority of semipeasants had for commercial purposes collected huge reserves of grain from previous harvests. As the horizons of the Bolsheviks expanded beyond survival until the next harvest, they realized that it would take "whole decades" to get beyond single-owner farming, and therefore they had to increase productivity on single-owner farms now, in order to "mitigate the food-supply crisis . . . that cursed question."^[5]

This new line on the middle peasant was ratified in general political terms by the Eighth Party Congress in 1919, but concrete measures to conciliate grain producers had been taken since August 1918, when the fixed price for grain was tripled. Because the Bolsheviks had strongly criticized the Mensheviks in May for suggesting an increase in the fixed price, this move was potentially embarrassing. But in general no one noticed, and the price tripling did not become a political issue. This lack of response shows the acceleration of the economic breakdown. In 1916 a major political battle had been fought among the elite over price raises of 10 to 20 percent. In 1917 the price doubling caused a political convulsion and provided a powerful argument for the overthrow of the Provisional Government. In 1918 the price was tripled; not only was there no protest, but when Zinoviev referred to the issue in a speech before Petrograd workers—hard-pressed consumers—he apologized for the delay in raising the price.^[6]

The Bolsheviks also relied more heavily on the cooperatives and went out of their way to advertise this reliance as a concession to the middle peasant. It was an attempt to get extra political mileage out of a policy that would have been adopted anyway for technical reasons. The state food-supply apparatus simply could not take on the entire task of the collection

[5] Eighth Party Congress, 227-42 (Kuraev).

[6] G. Zinoviev, O khlebe nasushchnom (Petrograd, 1918).

and, especially, distribution of a whole range of foodstuffs and industrial consumer items. Relations between local food-supply committees and the cooperatives duplicated the relations under earlier governments between local officials and private dealers—much suspicion and hostility, despite the urgings of central authorities. Even before the Bolshevik revolution the breakdown of the market had made the cooperatives economically dependent on the state; their absorption into the Bolshevik food-supply apparatus completed the process.^[7]

Within the limits of their power the Bolsheviks tried to cut through their own red tape and mobilize available industrial items to exchange for grain. In a December speech Lenin demanded that the amount of goods available for the peasants be increased tenfold and advocated a characteristic solution to the problem of red tape: put one person in charge (instead of a collegium) and make that person responsible to the point of being shot in the event of failure.^[8]

As late as May 1919 an appeal to the peasants of Kostroma declared that a full equivalent for peasant grain was being provided. After asking the peasants to fulfill their "moral duty to the socialist fatherland and the Red Army," the appeal told the peasants not to worry about who got more, the worker or the peasant: "the state demands from the peasant and for the worker only that amount that the worker can give [in return] to the peasant." This appeal shows the Bolsheviks' effort to allay the peasants' suspicion that a state authority based on the workers was cheating them. A local activist (evidently of peasant origin) described at the Eighth Party Congress how he closed all the shops in his home town, called the peasants in, and showed them the empty shelves to prove to them that the town was not deliberately withholding items from the countryside. Afterward grain deliveries picked up.^[9]

The new policy certainly did not imply any letup on the hard line toward the kulak; but now kulak was defined even more exclusively in political terms, as someone who resisted the authorities and only for that reason would be mercilessly crushed. The shift can be seen in some dialogue from a story by Mikhail Sholokhov entitled "The Food-Supply

[7] Kheisin, Istoriia , 226, 260-64; Kabanov, Kooperatsiia , 227-57. E. H. Cart exaggerates the importance of the cooperatives to the success of Bolshevik policy in The Bolshevik Revolution (New York, 1950-53), 2:227-28, 235ff. On this, see Claus, Kriegswirtschaft , 147-49; Chambre, Wronski, and Lasserre, Les cooperatives[coopératives] de consommation en URSS , 28-32.

[8] Lenin, PSS , 37:394-401 (speech of 25 December 1918).

[9] Prod. i snab. (Kostroma), no. 8-10, 15 April and 15 May 1918, 16-17; Eighth Party Congress, 263-64. The possibility of a full equivalent was denied in Pravda , 22 June 1919, by a Food-Supply Commissariat official.

Commissar." The scene is a confrontation between the commissar and his kulak father. The father has been arrested for speaking out in the village meeting against giving grain to the Bolsheviks and for beating up two Red Army soldiers. Father and son meet in the courtroom, and the father says bitterly, "Go ahead and loot—you've got the power." The argument heats up as the son replies:

"We don't loot the poor peasant but we rake away from those who live off other's sweat. You more than anybody squeezed the peasant laborer all your life!"

"I myself worked day and night. I didn't knock around the wide world like you."

"Those who work sympathize with the workers' and peasants' sovereignty, but you meet it with a pitchfork."^[10]

At first the Bolsheviks tried to combine conciliation of the middle peasant with even further repression of the kulak. Although the Bolshevik leaders were aware that the peasant uprisings of the summer had been provoked by Bolshevik policy and although they were taking steps to change that policy, they were also deeply scared by the conjunction of these uprisings with the civil war that had just broken out. In an appeal of 6 August Lenin and Tsiurupa compared the peasant uprisings inside Russia to the onslaught of the international bourgeoisie outside Russia and concluded, "The answer to the treason and betrayal of 'our' bourgeoisie should be the intensification of merciless mass terror against the counterrevolutionary part of it." Kulaks and rich peasants (bogatei ) with undelivered surpluses were declared enemies of the people.^[11]

In a speech on 11 August before the Petrograd Soviet Zinoviev gave the following admiring account of a detachment in Viatka. The leader of the detachment called the peasants together and said that the Petrograd workers had sent them because the workers had no bread and the peasants did. The workers would take the bread from the kulaks, leave some in the area, and give the peasants town items for the rest. The Committees of the Poor, not the kulak shopkeepers, would distribute these items. "If anyone wants to give peacefully, fine; if not—a bullet between the eyes." The detachment leader then told everybody for the Committees of the Poor to move to the left, and everybody against to the right. What resulted from this sort of thing in Viatka we have seen already.^[12]

[10] The father is shot. The son is killed shortly thereafter in a peasant uprising, partly because his escape is slowed down by his efforts to help a freezing child. The story was written in 1925. Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1965-), 1:57-62.

[11] Dekrety , 3:178-80.

[12] Zinoviev, O khlebe .

Frustration over the failure to enlist the poor peasants led to an exaggeration of kulak power. The official journal of the Food-Supply Commissariat proclaimed:

On the one side, [the kulaks'] organizational ability, solidarity, and clear understanding of their own interests; on the other, extreme fragmentation, helplessness, and lack of awareness. The kulaks know precisely what they want, have a definite program of action, and clearly perceive who is friend and who is enemy. In contrast, the peasant masses will smash the landowner's estate today and tomorrow will go to the kulak to give him the authority in the masses' own soviet. "Trofim Semyonich best knows all the rules and can understand best." The kulaks act according to plan, carefully, and with organization, using all the circumstances that life presents. That is their method of struggle.^[13]

This fear of the kulak as an alternative leadership for the peasantry led to violent anti-kulak rhetoric, which was used to cover up the loss of independence by the soviets and their transformation into the base of a centralized apparatus. As Zinoviev put it in the fall of 1918, "We are very well aware that we cannot carry through the proletarian revolution without crushing the village kulaks and without annihilating them psychically and, if necessary, physically. . . . The revolution in the village should take the kulak by the throat and strangle him according to all the rules of soviet art; it is precisely for this that we need a genuine, operative worker-peasant machine for strangling kulaks."^[14]

This style of rhetoric was hardly compatible with the move toward partnership with the middle peasant. In December 1918 Lenin went out of his way to emphasize that the kulaks would not be completely expropriated in the same way the landowners had been but that any resistance by the kulaks to "necessary measures such as the grain monopoly" would be crushed.^[15] The word kulak also tended to drop out of official decrees (although top officials still thought in these terms, as can be seen from various early drafts and marginal comments). Bolshevik rhetoric preserved the theory that resistance to the government was caused by inveterate class-based hostility toward the socialist revolution, but in practice the concern of the regime was simply to repress any open opposition that interfered with collecting the razverstka and prevent the formation of any alternative leadership for the peasants. The kulak remained an enemy, but he was no longer the key to resolving the food-supply crisis.

[13] Izv. NKP , no. 20-21 (October 1918): 52-53.

[14] Sixth Congress of Soviets, 89-92.

[15] Lenin, PSS , 37:360-61 (speech of 11 December 1918).

The new strategy for dealing with the peasantry led to new methods for providing the food-supply apparatus with a secure base in the village. In the chaotic summer of 1918 the Committees of the Poor were found wanting: instead of splitting the village, they united it—in rage and fury against the Bolsheviks. The disillusionment that set in was so rapid that it can be seen happening within the pages of Orlov's 1918 book on foodsupply policy. At first Orlov talked proudly of the new revolutionary force called forth by the decree on the Committees of the Poor and denied that the decree entailed any great political cost to the revolution. But by the end of the book enough reports from the localities had come in to show him the extent of the disaster. He now referred to the Committees of the Poor as

pitifully small, self-seeking and benighted groups of poor peasants, making claims to all the grain of their area and conquering the resistance of the entire peasant mass only by help of detachments from the cities and the north. . . . In the grain regions, where there is a special need for them, they will be weak, or the idea behind them will be distorted. In the hungry regions, where they will be strong and active, there will be no need for them in the fulfillment of the tasks that the legislation had in view.^[16]

According to Orlov, the Committees of the Poor often kept the grain for themselves, for purposes of speculation, so that "in the place of each largescale kulak would appear ten petty swindlers." Things came to such a pass that the Committees of the Poor would prevent the owners of grain from delivering it to the state. This is an expressive image of the topsy-turvy world of the Russian time of troubles: kulaks stealing away in the dead of night so that they could give their grain to the state rather than to their hated fellow villagers.

In August 1918 the Bolsheviks sent out instructions ordering the Committees of the Poor to end the harassment of middle peasants. In a survey based on local reports and published in December, however, the most serious charges against the Committees of the Poor seemed to be timidity and sloth.^[17] Looking through the pages of the local food-supply publications in a province such as Kostroma, we find many more complaints about lack of initiative than about an excess of militance. The provincial foodsupply committee noted that the only time it heard from a Committee of the Poor was when it wanted money; even then so little supplementary

[16] Orlov, Rabota , 68-75, 366-80.

[17] Izv. NKP , no. 24-25 (December 1918): 26-30. See also V. N. Aver'ev, Komitety bednoty (Moscow, 1933), 2:70-204.

information was given that the provincial committee felt unable to provide financial support. Indeed, the food-supply authorities had only the vaguest idea of how many Committees of the Poor had even been organized, especially on the village level.^[18] The authorities were frustrated because even the Committees of the Poor continued to be "kulak-dominated"—in other words, they had failed to break down the solidarity of the village. The situation in Vetchuzhskii county was described as follows:

It would seem that the Committees of the Poor would play an extremely significant role. At first, however, they were completely disorganized. Even when the detachments applied pressure and the Committees of the Poor were elected, they were new organizations, often consisting of rich peasants, [and as such] they were completely useless for the goals put before them.

In the villages—especially the small ones—practically all peasants are connected by family ties. In one village in Khmelevitskoe district the chairman, members, and secretary of the Committee of the Poor all signed themselves as "Galochkin"; it turned out that the whole village consisted solely of Galochkins, and all were related. Under these conditions there is no chance that Chairman Galochkin will tell us that his close relation the rich Galochkin really has a fifty-pood surplus—no, he will try to cut the figure in half.

And then I would hear conversations like this: "If I show that Sidor Petrov has a hundred-pood surplus, then it will all be taken away, but maybe in the spring Sidor Petrov will help me out and loan me some bread since I can't get by on my half-pood norm." Literally everywhere the unenlightened poor peasant covers up for the rich peasant simply for fear of losing someone who will give loans.

In such cases one must resort to repressive measures such as arresting the Committees of the Poor.^[19]

In December 1918 the food-supply commissar in Kazan, D. P. Maliutin, issued a booklet of instructions criticizing the many committees that remained "stillborn." To remedy the situation, committees that showed no sign of life or disobeyed orders on grain delivery would get no money and no city goods. They were reminded that kulaks could not be members and

[18] Prod. i snab. (Kostroma), no. 11, 1 December 1918; no. 12, 15 December 1918, 14, 27.

[19] Prod. i snab. (Kostroma), no. 3-4, 1 and 15 February 1919, 35-37. For an example of similar extended families on the Bolshevik side, see V. A. Potapenko, Zapiski prodotriadnika, 1918-1920 gg. (Voronezh, 1973), 47.

that making deals with the sackmen or agitating against fixed prices were not activities appropriate to a Committee of the Poor. In cases of stubborn insubordination a "food-supply detachment on special assignment" would be sent out.^[20] The exasperated Sverdlov asked in a speech on 14 October: "Only one question arises for us: the necessity of evaluating the performance of the Committees of the Poor as a food-supply organ. In this or that grain collection point the delivery of grain is halted, [and] it turns out that it is the Committee of the Poor that is preventing delivery. If they are not food-supply organs, then what exactly are they needed for?"^[21]

Since the Bolshevik leaders naturally did not want to say that the Committees of the Poor had simply been a mistake, they stressed other tasks besides food supply. One of these tasks was leading the village to collective forms of agricultural production, a way of shunting the Committees of the Poor off into a less vital line of activity than food supply. In a speech to a congress of Committees of the Poor at the time of their demise in late 1918, Lenin defined their task as the creation of a new socialist agriculture, but he stressed that it would require a long period of detailed work encompassing many transitional steps and that it could only proceed by raising the consciousness of the rest of the peasantry. This call was as far as possible from the crusade against the kulak of the original food-supply dictatorship.^[22]

Another task was more real: providing the Bolsheviks with a wedge in the village. They of course still referred to it as class war in the villages, but little effort was made to hide the facts. As Zinoviev stated, the Committees of the Poor were a small group of unelected people often created by some traveling agitator. Nothing wrong with that, he added: "You can't start a revolution with elections. First you have to deal with the scoundrels." What was important was to have a group of people who knew what they wanted and who pursued a single goal: to give a hitherto urban political authority a secure point of support in the village.^[23]

In October 1918 the Bolsheviks announced that the Committees of the Poor would be absorbed by the local soviets. From the Bolsheviks' point of view, nothing in the life of the Committees of the Poor became them like the leaving of it, since the absorption of the committees into the soviet system helped the Bolsheviks change the soviets themselves into some-

[20] D. P. Maliutin, Knizhka v pomoshch krest'ianinu-truzheniku (o komitetakh bednoty) , 2d. ed. (Kazan, 1918), 26-27.

[21] Sverdlov, Izbrannye proizvedeniia , 222-26.

[22] Lenin, PSS , 37:352-54 (speech of 11 December 1918).

[23] Zinoviev, Chto delat' v derevne (Petrograd, 1919), 3-16; Sixth Congress of Soviets, 86-89.

thing resembling the lowest echelon of a centralized hierarchy. The new soviet could be represented as a meld of the two previous institutions, soviet and Committee of the Poor. Orlov put it this way: "Instead of the old soviet of the peasantry as a whole into which kulaks managed to penetrate 'owing to muzhik darkness,' and instead of the Committees of the Poor, which owing to the same darkness often became a nest of genuine lazy louts—[we see a] unified soviet of deputies elected by the toiling [but not kulak] peasantry."^[24]

I agree with Orlov, but I would phrase it differently: from the old soviet came the idea of an institution that would represent the peasant population. From the old Committees of the Poor came both the idea of a taskoriented organ that was the lowest rung of a central hierarchy and the idea of class purity. Under the banner of class purity the central authority gave itself the right to purge local soviets of any voice of opposition—for what better sign of class essence could there be than one's attitude toward the decrees of the workers' and peasants' authority?

A basic aim of the razverstka system was to involve these new soviets in food-supply work. The attitude of the central authorities was the same as that of the tsarist government toward the zemstvos. As the tsarist legal scholar N. M. Korkunov explained: "Local self-government does not imply an opposition between local society and the state nor does it imply their isolation, but rather it is the means for organizing local society in the service of the state."^[25] The food-supply official P. K. Kaganovich set forth the same logic: "In essence [the razverstka] was the first attempt at enlisting the district and village soviets in the fulfilling of state tasks. They had previously somewhat considered themselves to be representatives of local interests before the state central authority—it was necessary to compel them to become representatives of state interests before the local population."^[26]

Under the razverstka system the local officials were handed a quota and told to fulfill it or else lose their jobs and possibly go to prison. This directive prevented the foot-dragging that was possible under the registration system, when local officials would inform the higher levels that their investigation showed that there was no surplus in their district; indeed,

[24] Prodovol'stvennaia politika v svete obshchego khoziaistvennogo stroitel'stva sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow, 1920), 144-49 (hereafter cited as Prod. politika ). There is some indication that the Committees of the Poor turned into the food-supply section of local soviets. Potapenko, Zapiski , 77.

[25] Quoted in George Yaney, "The Imperial Russian Government and the Stolypin Land Reform," Ph.D. diss. (Princeton University, 1961), 274.

[26] Prod. biulletin (Siberia), no. 2-3, 1 October 1920, 3-6.

they would plead a deficit and ask that extra grain be sent. Members of the local soviet were also supposed to fulfill their obligation before anybody else. This not only refuted any claim that the razverstka was unfulfillable but also gave the soviet members an extra incentive to put pressure on their fellow villagers.

If a local soviet executive committee refused to accept the razverstka quota, pressure could be applied to this small and exposed group of people in their capacity of "bearers of soviet sovereignty." Wider forms of enlistment made it more difficult to do so, and for this reason food-supply officials rejected proposals to convene a special district congress to decide on razverstka distribution. Indeed, it was best to avoid direct contact between the central authorities and the population. If the local soviet carried out the razverstka, all complaints about irregularities would be addressed to them and not to the central food-supply apparatus. A whole village united in protest against the razverstka quota would be more difficult to deal with than individual villagers protesting only against their own particular assignment. These somewhat Machiavellian considerations led the Bolsheviks to adopt traditional tsarist methods of dealing with the peasants through collective responsibility and through a peasant leadership that could be easily pressured.^[27]

Somewhat to his surprise Kaganovich found that villages in Simbirsk in 1919 would fulfill their razverstka assignment in order to get their soviet executive committee out of jail. In the summer of 1918 Lenin had been demanding that the rich peasants in a district be taken hostage to ensure full grain deliveries. The Bolsheviks now discovered that more grain could be taken under the razverstka system, when it was the members of elected soviets who were taken hostage.^[28]

From Monopoly to Razverstka

One central pillar of the grain monopoly was registration of the grain surplus. The limited supply of grain made registration seem a practical necessity, and the commitment to equality and socialist principles made it seem a moral necessity. Regulation justified the drive of the food-supply dictatorship to split the village and centralize the apparatus: the Committees of the Poor would obtain the necessary information, and the centralized apparatus would then be able to shuffle grain resources on a national scale.

[27] P. K. Kaganovich, Kak dostaetsia khleb (Moscow, 1920), 16-21; reprinted in Prod. politika , 181-85, 242-44.

[28] Lenin, PSS , 50:144-45; M. Vladimirov, Udarnye momenty prodovol'stvennoi raboty na Ukraine (Kharkov, 1921), 9.

The food-supply workers felt that the new political situation had made registration not only necessary but also possible. A food-supply worker in Kostroma writing in the summer of 1918 listed the reasons for the earlier failure of registration in 1917: the best statistical workers were in the army; the continual reorganization of local organs hindered work; the population was hostile to the incessant demand for information (not only by food-supply committees but also by land committees, electoral committees, and the like); hostility was further fanned by the "dark forces"; finally, of course, the peasants were afraid of losing their reserves. But now these reasons had lost their force. The statisticians had returned, and local organs were acquiring experience. Most important, the population was no longer hostile to a government that belonged to the people; it would cooperate now that it saw the necessity of registration.^[29]

Various appeals tried to convince the peasants that it was in their interest to continue the revolutionary movement toward putting the whole country on register: "THE CITY HAS ALREADY BEEN PUT ON REGISTER, but without a correct registration of the village, work on commodity exchange is impossible. Citizens, do not hinder registration—with your cooperation, help put in order the provisionment of the Socialist Army, the village, and the town with all that is necessary."^[30]

The urgency of registration was intensified for those deficit provinces that were thrown back on their own resources in the summer of 1918. The Food-Supply Commissariat announced that it would not undertake to transport grain to these provinces since it was not satisfied with their efforts to mobilize grain already existing within each province. These provinces were among the first to discover the dilemma expressed by Shlikhter: "Either registration, or grain."^[31]

Registration imposed extensive tasks on local officials. Local Committees of the Poor were lucky if they had one literate member, and yet they were asked to carry out a complete enumeration of the population and of each household's harvest, equipment, and items of mass consumption. Special attention was to be given to "known kulaks and those having surpluses from earlier years."^[32] These demands were made at a time when official statistical bureaus had only the vaguest idea of the population of a given province.

[29] Prod. i snab. (Kostroma), no. 3, 1 June 1918, 14-17.

[30] Maliutin et al., Knizhka , 1st ed. (Kazan, 1918), 29.

[31] A. G. Shlikhter, Agrarnyi vopros i prodovol'stvennaia politika v pervye gody sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow, 1975), 411-14. These words were written in 1920. On the origins of the razverstka in the deficit provinces, see Prod. i snab. (Kostroma), no. 6-7, 15 March and 1 April 1919, 11-13.

[32] Maliutin, Knizhka , 1st ed. (Kazan, 1918), 12-13.

The problem was not just the lack of trained personnel: local officials did not want to cause trouble, and outsiders were easily fooled. The Kostroma food-supply committee held a county food-supply committee up to scorn because in one district the agent responsible for registration was a priest's son. Chosen because he was "powerful learned" (silen v gramote ), this young seminarian stuck his head into the peasant's hut, asked what surplus the peasant had, and duly recorded the answer even when he himself knew it was completely absurd. Outsiders to the county were also helpless because of their ignorance of peasant life, agricultural terms, and local conditions. The following example was given of peasant doubletalk: a peasant showed his rye to the food-supply official and said, "Well, I harvested twelve barns worth; for my family I need sixty poods; for sowing, forty poods; to pay my spring debts, ten poods. For the reapers, sixteen of rye for their work, by contract. And for the provision of the carpenters who work here, we have to keep six poods." By the end the food-supply official, his head spinning, agreed that the peasant really had a deficit, not a surplus. The resulting registration was "so fantastic that even the provincial food-supply committees who carried it out and are responsible for its correctness did not dare to rely on it."^[33]

It was no wonder that food-supply officials let themselves dream of a "food-supply passport" system: each person would carry a little book with a record of the "entire economic food-supply life" of the bearer.^[34] But in reality various attempts were made to simplify registration, all of which failed, as Bolshevik food-supply commissar Kaganovich found in Simbirsk in 1919. At first a complete household-by-household (podvornyi ) registration was tried but quickly abandoned. It was useless to rely on voluntary declarations: the only truthful ones were made by poor peasants who had something to gain by them. To verify each of these declarations would be an extremely arduous and perhaps impossible task, for the peasants were better at hiding than the Bolsheviks at finding. Besides, why go to all the trouble of getting a figure for a peasant's total supply when most of it would still have to be left with him under the consumption norm?

A new device was then tried out: village (posel'nyi ) registration based on a test threshing. The idea was to establish the total amount for a village before the harvest was completed and the grain vanished into the peasants' hiding places. A sample field was selected and the amount of grain ex-

[33] Prod. i snab. (Kostroma), no. 3-4, 1 and 15 February 1919, 35-37; no. 8-10, 15 April and 15 May 1919, 5 (Vetchuzhskii county, circular of 10 April 1919).

[34] Prod. i snab. (Kostroma), no. 3, 1 June 1918, 14-17. See also Prod. delo (Tver), 15 August 1918, 29-30, where the Cheka is to be called in if anyone (especially district soviets) agitates against registration.

tracted from it served as the basis for an estimation of the village total. But the muzhiks simply led the food-supply officials by the nose when carrying out this test threshing. A poor field was chosen for the sample; the threshing was done inefficiently (by striking too hard); the sheaves were shaken on their way to the storehouse so as to lose grain; and of course there was a considerable amount of stealing. The result was that Simbirsk magically changed from a surplus province to a deficit province.

In some localities the officials tried a reregistration and threshed a sample field themselves. This approach was a disaster: less was obtained than during the original village registration. By that time registration had ceased to be a weapon of the authorities and had become a weapon of the peasants, who Kaganovich reported "beat us with our own figures."^[35]

Thus the technical difficulties paled before the political one, the absence of peasant cooperation. The October revolution had not altered this situation in the slightest. Various explanations were suggested: kulak agitation, a rational attempt to lay in emergency reserves, the predominance of single-owner agriculture, or simply an expression of maddening peasant contrariness.^[36] Whatever the reason and whomever to blame, it was clear that any attempt to proceed on the basis of the enlistment of the population in state tasks and its confidence in the new state authority was doomed to failure.

How then to proceed? Not by building up a statistical pyramid from the bottom but by making a global approximation of the available surplus and simply assigning it to a collectivity to fulfill. Registration gave the state the residual, after deducting a specific consumption norm; the razverstka gave it to the peasant, after deducting a specific state obligation. Harvest statistics came into play only during the bargaining by which this total was broken down and assigned to provinces and counties. In the words of the Food-Supply Commissariat, "the razverstka given to a district is already in and of itself a determination of the surplus."^[37]

Although the razverstka was sometimes portrayed as a shortcut to an approximate registration, it was in reality an abandonment of the whole registration strategy. The same can be said about equivalent exchange, another pillar of a proper grain monopoly. The razverstka was presented as a temporary adjustment to an extreme shortage of exchange items. Its motto was "with exchange equivalents if possible, without exchange equivalents if necessary."

[35] Kaganovich, Kak dostaetsia khleb , 16-18; reprinted in Prod. politika , 181-85. See also Prod. biulletin (Siberia), no. 2-3, 1 October 1920, 3-6.

[36] Prod. politika , 189-92 (N. Osinskii).

[37] M. I. Davydov, Bor'ba za khleb (Moscow, 1971), 136-37.

Since the razverstka was supposed to be based on exchange, there was no paradox in its coexistence with the tax in kind introduced in October 1918. In the minds of officials there was a clear distinction between grain collected under the razverstka and grain collected as a tax for which no compensation was promised. The tax was not supposed to be an exchange transaction but an equalizing measure based on progressive rates. The peasants had more trouble keeping the two distinct since the financial officials who administered the tax used the services of the food-supply apparatus for the physical collection of the grain. More important, the exchange equivalents promised under the razverstka were not forthcoming.^[38]

Food-supply officials were quick to acknowledge that the razverstka resembled a tax. N. P. Briukhanov, a top official of the Food-Supply Commissariat, called at the beginning of 1919 for a "wide, obligatory, taxlike razverstka." In a circular sent out to provincial food-supply committees in March 1920, Tsiurupa argued that food-supply organs were asking for the minimum necessary to feed the army and the towns. Therefore "for the peasant there is a direct interest to sow more, for then more will remain to him. With a good harvest and a large sown acreage it could happen that in actuality more than the [consumption] norm will be left to the peasant."^[39] The razverstka imposed on other foodstuffs was even more like a tax since in many cases the requested amounts were far below available surpluses.^[40] As a food-supply official argued in 1923, the razverstka meant that the "alienation from the population of products for the use of the state took on in factual terms the form of a tax [based on] a complicated [system of] collective responsibility."^[41]

Although a tax took grain without compensation, it included a promise from the authorities to stop harassing the peasant once the tax had been

[38] The best discussion is I. A. lurkov, Ekonomicheskaia politika partii v derevne (Moscow, 1980), 113-20. See also Kabanov, Krest'ianskoe khoziaistvo , 165-74. Malle, Economic Organization , 372-73, and Carr, Bolshevik Revolution , 2:249, incorrectly imply that the razverstka replaced the civil-war tax in kind.

[39] Prod. i snab . (Kostroma), no. 3-4, 1 and 15 February 1919; Iu. A. Poliakov, Perekhod k NEPu i sovetskoe krest'ianstvo (Moscow, 1967), 251. See also Shlikhter's remarks in Izv. NKP , no. 1-2 (January 1919), 19.

[40] Frumkin, Tovaroobmen , 16-17.

[41] S. Bychkov, "Organizatsionnoe stroitel'stvo prodorganov do NEPa," Prodovol'stvie i revoliutsiia , 1923, no. 5-6:183-95. A. L. Okninskii, who lived in a Tambov village during the civil war and left before NEP, usually refers to a prodnalog (food-supply tax), not a prodrazverstka . Although Okninskii wrote his memoirs years later, this is evidence of how the peasants themselves viewed the matter. Okninskii, Dva goda sredi krest'ian.' vidennoe, slyshannoe, perezhitoe v tambovskoi gubernii (Riga, 1936).

paid. The razverstka system moved in this direction as well. A decree dated 22 October 1919 promised that a village that fulfilled its quota would be freed from any supplementary demands and from the mill tax. (This promise shows that food-supply officials knew that it was impossible for the razverstka to get the entire surplus.) The village would also be given priority attention not only in the distribution of available industrial items but also in any other petition it might bring before the authorities. The village would be freed from searches: "Food-supply army members and food-supply detachment members should not even show themselves in such villages for whatever reason."^[42]

The central Bolshevik metaphor for the razverstka was a loan given by the peasants to the state and to industrial workers. The state would invest the loan in victory and in industrial reconstruction along socialist principles and thus be able to repay it at a high rate of interest. (The Bolsheviks themselves did not stress the commercial origins of the metaphor, avoiding words like invest and interest .) The loan metaphor was an application of the exchange imagery of the grain monopoly to the reality of a tax. Under the monopoly the state was supposed to buy the grain, not simply take it. Although the Bolsheviks had nothing to give in exchange for the grain and therefore took it without compensation, they did promise future benefits. In reality they were no different from any wartime government that taxed the population while pointing out the benefits of victory.

A third pillar of the monopoly strategy was prohibition of independent purchases. In this area, as well, rhetorical devotion to the monopoly accompanied practical compromises. Industrial workers, the most influential category of urban consumer, were impatient with restrictions on individual and collective purchase. They disliked the requirements imposed by the food-supply officials—to register themselves in various central offices, to accept the authority of local officials, and to leave part of the grain in the localities. They wanted to be able to deliver the grain directly to the factory that sent them without going through the food-supply apparatus. The workers also wanted the list of nonmonopolized products available for direct independent purchase to be as wide as possible. They strongly resented the blockade detachments that interfered with the workers' transport of food despite central directives prohibiting such harassment.^[43]

The food-supply officials were wary lest the workers become a centrifugal force of disorganization. Although accepting that the energy of the

[42] Dekrety , 6:222-23.

[43] Most of these aims can be inferred from Zinoviev's speech of 11 August 1918, in which he defended the provisions of the August decree on workers' detachments. Zinoviev, O khlebe .

consumers would add a necessary "corrective" to work in the surplus regions, the food-supply officials wanted to make sure that they were strictly monitored so that they did not destroy the fixed price by competitive bidding—the bane of food-supply officials since 1914. If that happened, the system of enlisting consumers would "change from a corrective of the grain monopoly (a primitive corrective, to be sure) . . . to a negation of the idea of the monopoly—the idea of the equitable distribution of food among all citizens."^[44]

The contours of food-supply policy during the civil-war years wavered as the political leadership adjusted to the relative strengths of centrifugal and centralizing forces. One struggle was over the division of foodstuffs into various purchasing categories. The highest category was fully monopolized basic foods such as grain products, sugar, meats, and salt. These were subject to a razverstka, and nonstate purchasers were excluded. The next category might be called a passive monopoly: only state purchasers were allowed, but sale by the producer was not mandatory. For the time being, this category, which included dairy products, vegetables, poultry, and mushrooms, relied on voluntary sale, although full monopolization was still the goal. Foodstuffs that were not distributed to consumers by state organizations were at least theoretically available to nonstate purchasers.

Particular food items shuttled between these categories according to pressure from consumers and the organizational ambitions of the food-supply apparatus. Potatoes, for example, started off in the middle category of passive monopoly. Halfway through the 1918-1919 procurement year they were moved down to the category of items available for independent purchase. This designation proved unsatisfactory and at the beginning of the 1919-1920 procurement year they achieved the status of an obligatory razverstka.

Another struggle was over the freedom of action granted to individual and collective purchasers. Individual purchase was furthest from the monopoly, yet several times worker pressure compelled the government to permit individual workers to go to the countryside to obtain a limited amount of grain for themselves and their families. The food-supply officials felt that these "one-and-a-half-pooders" were little better than sackmen, and they tried to restrict such concessions as much as possible. The political leadership did not dispute that this practice was an unfortunate derogation from the principles of the monopoly. Lenin said that permission to make individual purchases was a "rotten concession," although a politically necessary one.^[45]

[44] Orlov, Rabota , 83-88. See also Izv. NKP , no. 1-2 (January 1919), 27; Vladimirov, Udarnye momenty , 5-6.

[45] Lenin, PSS , 50:297 (April 1919). For the workers' joy at these concessions, see the contemporary novel Golod (1922) by Sergei Semenov, reprinted in Izbrannoe (Leningrad, 1970), 79.

There was more controversy over the rights of factories, cooperatives, and other collective units to make independent purchases. At the same time as the razverstka became official policy in early 1919, major legislative enactments reaffirmed the right of these collective purchasers to obtain foodstuffs in the nonmonopolized category without harassment from blockade detachments. Local officials protested even this limited concession, declaring that it made state provision of these products impossible.^[46] But a commission set up by the Central Executive Committee and headed by Kamenev argued that the food-supply question could not be solved before the war was over, that monopolization should therefore proceed only gradually, and that in the meantime worker organizations should be allowed to make purchases without harassment. The battle between the workers and the food-supply apparatus over this issue did not end here. The food-supply officials later managed to get six provinces declared off limits to collective purchasers, and other provinces simply went ahead and declared themselves off limits as well.

The general tendency of the razverstka system was to whittle away these concessions and to extend the range of monopolization. But the legal position did not reflect reality since the underground market was never effectively repressed—if anything, enforcement became more lax.^[47] Thus the razverstka system meant that the three pillars of the monopoly strategy—registration, exchange equivalents, and prohibition of independent purchases—were all honored more in the breach than in the observance.

Real Force

The food-supply dictatorship relied on hastily assembled requisition detachments to give the food-supply apparatus a source of real force (real'naia sila ) and desperate urban consumers an outlet for their dissatisfaction. The disastrous results of this policy led to more specialized institutions. Under the razverstka system the worker detachments, the Food-Supply Army, and the blockade detachments all played distinct roles.

In the chaotic summer of 1918 haste and lack of discipline resulted in a vindication of the Menshevik and Left SR critique: the village became united in resistance to the city. One-fifth of the workers in the food-supply

[46] Prod. i snab. (Kostroma), no. 3-4, 1 and 15 February 1919, 21. A discussion of this episode is in V. P. Dmitrenko, "Bor'ba sovetskogo gosudarstva protiv chasmoi torgovli," in Bor'ba za pobedu i ukreplenie sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow, 1966), 318-22.

[47] Discussion of the underground market during the civil war will be found in chapter 8.

detachments were killed between May and December; in the months of July through September the conflict with the peasants led to more than ten thousand state and party casualties.^[48]

The disillusionment of the center took place even as Orlov was writing his book on the Bolshevik food-supply system. Early in the book he asserted that reports coming in about the requisition detachments had refuted those who foresaw "fire and blood" as the inevitable outcome. He does mention that the detachments could have used more "exact and detailed instructions." By the end of the monograph he saw the detachments as a tragic necessity: "Going with a heavy heart to the 'grain war,' the central authority relied on the workers and hungry peasantry of the north and center." The resulting split between town and village, he said, made it possible for insignificant foreign forces to become a real threat.^[49]

The Bolsheviks tried to impose some order on the chaotic crusade they had conjured up. A Bolshevik pamphlet with instructions on how to form a worker detachment allows us to deduce the faults of the previous requisition detachments. Who should join the detachments? it asks. The emphasis should be on quality not quantity. Unreliable elements have crept in: people who are just going to have a vacation or to get something for themselves—the kind of people who ask questions about overtime pay instead of being filled with the spirit of communism.

What are the tasks of the detachments? The first is economic: to help in the harvest, assist in carrying out the registration of grain, and so on. The second is political: to join with the poor peasants and help them fight the kulaks. "The greatest possible restraint and skill" is required so that the village will not look on the detachment as "looters from the city."

How should the detachments behave in the localities? Here a series of thou-shalt-nots paints a vivid picture of what had previously been going on. Use restraint in carrying out registration: do not take the last pood of grain from a poor peasant, and do not leave a rich peasant without enough to feed his family. "You must not allow any elemental raids or undisciplined seizures of grain , for that simply raises people against you and even causes unneeded clashes." Do not use armed force at the slightest opportunity—the peasants have suffered enough as it is. Keep the peasants themselves from elemental outbursts such as destroying houses or burning the grain supplies of other peasants. Explain to them that instead the grain should be

[48] Total casualties on the Bolshevik side for 1918 equaled twenty thousand. Osipova, "Razvitie," 62; Mints, God 1918 , 390.

[49] Orlov, Rabota , 101-2, 179-82, 355-62. Orlov's remarks are the basis of Roy Medvedev's interpretation of the food-supply dictatorship in October Revolution .

put on register. And, of course, do not neglect to bring to them "spiritual bread"—that is, political propaganda.^[50]

A less destructive outlet had to be found for worker participation in the food-supply apparatus. The new outlet was the worker detachments, whose institutional history began in August 1918 with a decree entitled "On Enlisting Worker Organizations in the Procurement of Grain." This decree told the workers that their salvation lay not in crusading against the kulak but rather in helping the food-supply apparatus procure grain at fixed prices. Great attention was given to matters of legality, monitoring, and supervision; force was contemplated not against the peasantry but against the detachment commanders, who were threatened with being turned over to the Cheka if they did not follow regulations.^[51]

The new worker detachments fell under the direct control of a subsection of the central trade-union council, the Military Food-Supply Bureau (Voenprodbiuro). This title, an accident of administrative genealogy, is so misleading that I will henceforth refer to this organization simply as the trade-union bureau for food supply.^[52] More than thirty thousand workers had volunteered for the detachments by the end of 1918, but as the tradeunion bureau ruefully admitted, it had organizational control over no more than eight thousand.

The leader of one of these units, a Petrograd worker named Vasilii Potapenko, wrote later that his unit consisted mainly of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds who were the children of longtime Petrograd workers. One-fourth of his unit consisted of women. The unit was armed ad hoc: Potapenko himself used a Smith-Wesson that he obtained during the February revolution and kept during his time as a member of the Red Guard at the Westinghouse plant. Potapenko reveals a sense of humor about his ignorance of the countryside and tells a story about how he was misled by a local dialect and bought a pumpkin, thinking it was a watermelon. But he has less perspective about the way he was subjected to fierce rhetoric about class struggle during his two-week training period. He remembers looking through the train window on his way to the countryside and seeing shabby huts as well as occasional brick houses with iron roofs: "I wanted to bring down that sea of poverty onto those islands of wealth, to carry them away so that not a trace remained."^[53]

[50] K. Samuilova, Prodovol'stvennyi vopros i sovetskaia vlast ' (Petrograd, 1918), 44-52.

[51] Dekrety , 3:142-43; Orlov, Delo , 23-25.

[52] Iu. K. Strizhkov, Prodovol'stvennye otriady v gody grazhdanskoi voiny i inostrannoi interventsii, 1917-21 (Moscow, 1973), 114-16.

[53] Potapenko, Zapiski , 13-17. On participation of the Red Guards in foodsupply work after October, see Wade, Red Guards , 316-17.

A bureaucratic battle began between the trade-union bureau and the Food-Supply Commissariat over control of these worker detachments. The dispute took on ideological overtones; the trade unionists (in the mode of the later "workers' opposition") attacked the bureaucratic nature of the food-supply apparatus and wanted to replace it from below with worker delegates. After a sharp intervention by Lenin this recrudescence of the enlistment solution was defeated, and in February 1919 operational control of the detachments was given to the Food-Supply Commissariat. The trade-union bureau received a new collegium after a member of the old collegium, M. M. Kostelovskaia, made a strong plea for the worker detachments at the Eighth Party Congress. The hostility of trade-union officials toward the food-supply apparatus did not lessen over the years: in late 1920 Lenin was forced to remove Aleksei Sviderskii and Moishe Frumkin from the collegium of the Food-Supply Commissariat because of tradeunion antipathy, and at the Tenth Party Congress the leader of the workers' opposition, Aleksandr Shliapnikov, accused Tsiurupa himself of criminal negligence.^[54]

It was still not clear in 1919 whether the worker detachments were an appendage of the food-supply apparatus or agents of the organization that sent them. Pressure from the workers resulted in an experiment in the summer of 1919. Factories could send their own detachments to Simbirsk province, and these detachments were allowed to send all of the grain they obtained directly to the parent organization. The food-supply officials waited until the failure of this experiment became manifest and then managed to reassert control. Grain obtained by the detachments was no longer sent to the parent organization but put into the "common cauldron" (obshchii kotel ) of food distributed centrally by the food-supply apparatus. Many of the detachments stayed on to help with the harvest under the direction of the food-supply committees. The inundation of outsiders that had threatened to destroy the food-supply apparatus in Simbirsk was now integrated into a more organized framework, and Simbirsk became a relative success story for the razverstka of 1919-1920.^[55]

It was often far from clear that the worker detachments really helped food-supply work. Many food-supply officials were irritated at the naivete of the detachments, who assumed that all they had to do was make an eloquent appeal and then transport the grain. The workers were skilled neither in the use of arms nor in technical food-supply work so that in

[54] Strizhkov, Otriady , 121, 154-58; Lenin, PSS , 52:31-32. For Kostelovskaia's views, see also Izv. NKP , no. 1-2 (January 1919), 23.

[55] Strizhkov, Otriady , 181-88; Kaganovich, Kak dostaetsia khleb .

these areas they could only be used as backup resources. Because they lived in the villages, the worker detachments made a small, but vital, contribution to the effective use of force. As Kaganovich's report from Simbirsk asserted, "several armed men at village meetings and in everyday life force the kulaks and open counterrevolutionaries to keep quiet while they quickly get in with the poor and middle peasants and have a significant effect on them."^[56]

For the most part the detachments turned into "travelling squads of agitators."^[57] Food-supply officials stressed that agitation was worthless unless the workers demonstrated that the city was willing to offer concrete help to the village; hence often the real contribution of the worker detachments was help with the harvest or repairs. The leading Soviet authority on this subject, Iurii Strizhkov, estimates that one hundred thousand persons served in the worker detachments.^[58]

The failure of the requisition detachments did not remove the need for real force. The direct descendant of the requisition detachments was the Food-Supply Army (Prodarmiia). As time went on, the Food-Supply Army was recruited increasingly from peasants in the deficit provinces who for one reason or another were unfit to serve in the Red Army. Indeed, the Food-Supply Army can almost be seen as the garrison force of the Red Army—or perhaps the Red Army should be seen as the expeditionary force of the Food-Supply Army. After reaching an enlistment of twenty-nine thousand in early November 1918, the Food-Supply Army was reduced within a month by more than half because of transfers to the Red Army—a graphic illustration of the priority of war demands over internal needs. The Food-Supply Commissariat fought to build up its forces again, and by the end of 1919 the Food-Supply Army had grown to around fortyfive thousand persons. After the civil war ended in 1920, lack of competition from the Red Army and the greatly expanded territory under Bolshevik control led to enlistment swelling to seventy-seven thousand. A 1986 Soviet study estimates that a total of somewhere between 152,000 and

[56] Kaganovich, Kak dostaetsia khleb , 26-29; reprinted in Prod. politika , 253-56.

[57] These words are taken from an interview by the English journalist W. T. Goode with A. I. Sviderskii. Goode notes that "this interview was for me one of the clearest and most convincing. Sviderski is a master of his subject in all its details, and the clearness of his replies, together with the sequential character of his statement, made him impressive." Bolshevism at Work (New York, 1920), 69-76. The transition to a greater emphasis on agitation is noted in A. N. Chistikov, "Prodovol'stvennaia politika sovetskoi vlasti v gody grazhdanskoi voiny (na materialakh Petrograda). Avtoreferat," diss. abstract (Leningrad, 1984).

[58] Strizhkov, Otriady , 299.

155,000 persons served in the Food-Supply Army during the time of troubles.^[59]

Between the summer of 1918 and the summer of 1920 there were few significant uprisings in the countryside under permanent Bolshevik control.^[60] Besides guarding grain depots and the like, the job of the Food-Supply Army was mainly to show itself at appropriate times and punish resistance on the part of individual villages in a suitably visible way.^[61] The Food-Supply Army was never held in high esteem, even by Bolshevik officials. The members of one detachment complained that they were not issued tobacco on the grounds that they were fighting peasant women while others were fighting at the front. Only when Tsiurupa himself interfered did they get something to smoke.^[62]

The Food-Supply Army, which collected the tax, was distinct from the blockade detachments, which enforced the monopoly by preventing illegal transport of grain. The blockade detachments were without a doubt the most hated institution of the civil-war period—more hated even than the Cheka. They predated the food-supply dictatorship, but the retreat to the razverstka system led to an effort to limit the damage they did. In his August theses Lenin insisted that the blockade detachments give receipts (with two or three copies) to any passenger whose goods were requisitioned: "For requisition without giving receipts—shooting." (This use of a violent threat to impose a bureaucratic formality is characteristic of both Lenin and the times.)

A decree issued on 4 August 1918 reveals that the blockade detachments often operated without clear authority; slowed down transportation (in cases of extreme necessity, the decree said, the detachments could delay the train for no more than an hour); were overbearing (the detachments "must preserve courtesy"); embezzled (strict records must be kept of confiscated goods); took excessive amounts (a definite norm for the amounts to be left to each passenger is given); used unnecessary force (the detachments "must avoid clashes not made necessary by the interests of the common cause"). Orlov reports that not much had been done about this decree by the end of the year. He was puzzled by the "strange slowness" of the government in coming to grips with this problem, but now he hoped the

[59] A. M. Aleksentsev, "K voprosu o chislennosti Prodarmii," Istoriia SSSR no. 3-4 (1986): 155-67.

[60] For discussion of peasant uprisings, see J. M. Meijer, "Town and Country in the Civil War," in Richard Pipes, ed., Revolutionary Russia , (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 259-77, esp. 276-77, and Peter Scheibert, Lenin an die Macht (Weinheim, 1984), 385-408.

[61] Prod. politika , 248-50; Izv. NKP , no. 1-2 (January 1919): 29-30.

[62] Tsiurupa, Kolokola pamiati , 129.

time had come to end the scandal of these detachments, which he considered to be composed of the dregs of the population and more often in business for themselves than operating with authorization from an identifiable official. At best they protected the purely local interest of keeping food in the area.^[63]

But with all their faults, the blockade detachments were necessary to enforce the monopoly.^[64] The roots of the "war against the railroad passengers" reached back beyond the food-supply dictatorship to the Provisional Government period. An English eyewitness describes this central institution of civil-war Russia:

At nine [the train] reached the straggling buildings of the Okhta Station [in Petrograd] . . . and there I saw a most extraordinary spectacle—the attempted prevention of sackmen from entering the city.

As we stood pushing in the corridor waiting for the crowd in front of us to get out, I heard Uncle Egor [a peasant] and his daughter conversing rapidly in low tones.

"I'll make a dash for it," whispered his daughter.

"Good," he replied in the same tone. "We'll meet at Nadya's."

The moment we stepped on to the platform Uncle Egor's daughter vanished under the railroad coach and that was the last I ever saw of her. At each end of the platform stood a string of armed guards, waiting for the onslaught of passengers, who flew in all directions as they surged from the train. How shall I describe the scene of unutterable pandemonium that ensued! The soldiers dashed at the fleeing crowds, brutally seized single individuals, generally women, who were least able to defend themselves, and tore the sacks off their back and out of their arms. Shrill cries, shrieks, and howls rent the air. Between the coaches and on the outskirts of the station you could see lucky ones who had escaped, gesticulating frantically to unlucky ones who were still dodging guards. "This way! This way!" they yelled wildly, "Sophia! Marusia! Akulina! Varvara! Quick! Haste!"

In futile efforts to subdue the mob the soldiers discharged their rifles into the air, only increasing the panic and intensifying the tumult. Curses and execration were hurled at them

[63] Izv. NKP , no. 24-25 (December 1918): 2-3; no. 1-2 (January 1919): 7-11. Throughout 1919 and 1920 central decrees continued to insist that only the Food-Supply Commissariat had the right to form blockade detachments.

[64] Prod. i snab. (Kostroma), no. 1-2, 1 and 15 January 1919, 5-6.

by the seething mass of fugitives. One woman I saw, frothing at the mouth, with blood streaming down her cheek, her frenzied eyes protruding from the sockets, clutching ferociously with her nails at the face of a huge sailor who held her pinned down on the platform, while his comrades detached her sack.

How I got out of the fray I do not know, but I found myself carried along with the running stream of sackmen over the Okhta Bridge and toward the Suvorov Prospect. Only here, a mile from the station, did they settle into a hurried walk, gradually dispersing down side streets to dispose of their precious goods to eager clients.

Completely bewildered, I limped along, my frost-bitten feet giving me considerable pain. I wondered in my mind if people at home had any idea at what a cost the population of Petrograd secured the first necessities of life in the teeth of the "communist" rulers.^[65]

A New Political Formula

There was only one element of continuity between the razverstka system and the food-supply dictatorship, but it was a central one: the drive to impose the discipline of the center on the food-supply apparatus as a whole. The assignment of razverstka quotas to local officials, the legalization of independent purchases by worker organizations, the conciliatory line toward the middle peasant—all required control over local officials who either lacked initiative or were too militant or felt more responsible to the local population than to the central state authority. In a speech to the Central Executive Committee on 17 January 1919 Lenin remarked that it was perhaps strange to speak of compelling local food-supply organs to carry out the will of the committee (whose will in this case was to allow independent purchase). But, he continued, "better to speak the truth: we must compel our local organs unswervingly and mercilessly." Lenin got applause only twice in this speech, for this remark and another one of similar import.^[66]

The drive to unify and discipline the administrative apparatus faced great difficulties, given the centrifugal pressures of the time. It should be seen in the wider context of a political formula that defined sources of recruitment, authority relations, and political mission for the new political class.

[65] Dukes, Red Dusk , 196-98.

[66] Lenin, PSS , 37: 421-24.

The enlistment strategy that had failed as a crusade against the class enemy could still be used to recruit cadres for the new political class. This was the advice of Miron Vladimirov, who was in charge of food-supply work in the Ukraine in 1920. Recognizing that the "iron logic of political development" meant that the position of peasant officials was more burdensome than advantageous, Vladimirov still felt that they were the most promising source of genuine support, on the basis of the following quid pro quo: "While helping the poor villagers and the loyal strata of the middle peasantry rise up on the social ladder, securing their political and social dominance in the village, providing them with a wide and genuine participation in overall soviet construction and turning them into conscious supporters of the Soviet Republic, it is necessary at the time to ask them to solve and carry out tasks that will lead to the strengthening of the soviet authority and ipso facto to the strengthening of their own position."^[67]

The political formula for the authority relations of the new political class was democratic centralism . To understand the power of this formula, it is perhaps less useful to read Lenin's What Is to Be Done , about the problems of underground revolutionaries, than to consider the connection between solidarity and survival during the time of troubles. Maliutin boasted that "to others we are strict but to ourselves we are cruel"—the message of the Bolshevik political class to its unworthy agents was "Up against the wall."^[68] The new political class accepted this discipline because, as another revolutionary had once put it, if they did not hang together they would assuredly hang separately. This dictum was especially true of the food-supply apparatus, which had continually to face a hostile and dissatisfied population of both consumers and producers. To break ranks was to invite the excesses from below that had destroyed the apparatus in the fall of 1917, so it is not surprising to hear of the gratitude with which "each food-supply worker feels upon himself the heavy but saving hand" of the food-supply dictatorship and its strict centralization.^[69]

A political formula gives a political class a sense of mission. The political class led by the Bolsheviks derived its sense of mission from many sources, but one that should not be overlooked was its origin in a time of troubles and its perception of itself as a thin dam holding back the flood of anarchy. Orlov expressed this feeling poignantly: "The inhuman energy of a handful of dreamers—the progressive proletarians and party workers—is sustaining the chain of state and class that as yet holds us together. It seems

[67] Vladimirov, Udarnye momenty , 8-10.

[68] Maliutin, Rech' (Kazan, 1918).

[69] Prod. i snab. (Kostroma), no. 8-10, 15 April and 15 May 1919, 12-14.

that if this handful vanished tomorrow, we would be scattered and torn apart from each other like the atoms of a substance subjected to strong heat."^[70]

The Two Solutions

The adoption of the razverstka method led to the rehabilitation of Rittikh. For the Provisional Government, Rittikh was a prime symbol of the incompetent desperation of the tsarist regime. In historical overviews written by Bolshevik food-supply officials during the civil war, he became instead the representative of the sound and healthy part of the tsarist bureaucracy who, however, arrived too late and was too isolated to save the regime.^[71] As this reevaluation suggests, the razverstka system was based on the gubernatorial solution—a strict definition of priority tasks to be accomplished by plenipotentiary agents of the center in complete subordination to the overall goal of efficient support for the war effort.

In the popular mind the razverstka was not one particular method of grain collection but a synonym for the state grain obligation itself. As a comparison, when we hear our neighbor say, "This damned income tax!" we assume he or she is referring not to the disadvantages of an income tax as opposed to a sales tax or a value-added tax but to the burdensome fact of being taxed at all. The food-supply razverstka became associated with—indeed became the prime symbol of—all the hardships of the complete economic breakdown of 1920, when the economy was rapidly spiraling toward utter destruction.

It is therefore something of a shock to realize that when the razverstka was introduced by the food-supply apparatus in 1918 and 1919, it was viewed as a concession to the peasantry and a move away from the village-splitting tactics of class struggle. The peasant population was also given greater control over distribution of the burden of the grain obligation. The razverstka assigned a definite amount to the village; the food-supply apparatus promised to leave the village alone once the amount was paid. Although the food-supply apparatus had guidelines on the proper principles of distribution, these had less and less relevance the further down one went in the hierarchy.^[72] Another aim of the razverstka method was to put the provision of exchange items on a more secure basis. These advantages may not have been apparent to the peasants since the food-supply officials

[70] Orlov, Rabota , 384-96.

[71] A. I. Sviderskii, Prodovol'stvennaia politika (Moscow, 1920), 141-43; Orlov, Delo , 13-14.

[72] Prod. politika , 189-92 (Osinskii).

could not keep their commitments. The officials admitted they could not, but they felt this failing was due more to troubled times than to the razverstka method itself.^[73]

The disillusionment with registration reflected a new realism about the scarcity of administrative resources and the small likelihood of popular cooperation. In Tsiurupa's words, the Bolsheviks realized they had to cut their coat to their cloth.^[74] The razverstka was still called an approximation of the surplus since the concept of registering the surplus made "excellent agitational material." Although the phrase taking the surplus is enshrined in later historiography as an expression of Bolshevik ruthlessness, it was used during the civil war to project a strong but reasonable image: the state was taking only the surplus and not anything that was really needed for consumption and farm needs.^[75]

The attention of the Bolsheviks had shifted from enlisting the population in a revolutionary crusade to building up an apparatus that would earn respect and compliance by its competence and staying power. The Bolsheviks would use whatever force was necessary to crush resistance but try to avoid any show of force that was wasteful and irritating and caused more political damage than benefit. In late 1918 Zinoviev compared the middle peasant to the middle strata in the towns. At first the petty-bourgeois (meshchanskii ) intelligentsia in the towns was hostile to the Bolsheviks and tempted to resort to sabotage, but soon it realized that "we weren't fooling around and that there was no other master [but us] nor could there be." In the village this realization would occur when the kulaks were crushed and the middle peasant saw that the poor peasant was now the "true master of the Russian land."^[76] The Bolsheviks realized that the confident use of force attracted support, even though they expressed the thought in class terms. As a speaker at the Eighth Party Congress put it, the peasants accepted Bolshevik leadership in October because, among other reasons, "we were strong—and this is important for the petty-bourgeois strata."^[77]

The civil war meant that the grain monopoly as a means of socialist transformation could not be a high priority: the Kamenev commission at the end of 1918 officially announced that the food-supply problem could

[73] Prod. i snab. (Kostroma), no. 6-7 (March-April 1919): 11-13. For a defensive discussion of the move away from village splitting, see Izv. NKP , no. 13-16 (July-August 1919): 2-3.

[74] Frumkin, Tovaroobmen , 7.

[75] Shlikhter, Agrarnyi vopros , 411-14; Izv. NKP , no. 6 (November 1920): 13-14.

[76] Sixth Congress of Soviets, 90; Zinoviev, Chto delat' v derevne , 3-16 (speech given in the fall of 1918).

[77] Eighth Party Congress 227-40 (V. V. Kuraev).

only be solved by winning the war and that all efforts should be bent toward that goal. But a full state grain monopoly based on accurate registration and equivalent exchange remained the ideal: the razverstka was a compromise forced by the urgency of military survival and the breakdown of the war-torn economy. It was assumed that after the end of hostilities the monopoly would resume its place as the basis of socialist distribution. But in the meantime the razverstka, regarded as a makeshift substitute, came to be the basis on which the Bolsheviks were able to construct a serviceable food-supply apparatus.