From Class War to State Obligation
The Bolsheviks' class outlook did not sit well with the peasants, who strongly resented what they felt was the politically, ideologically, and materially privileged position of the workers. One "nonparty conference" held for peasants in Tamboy wanted to change the wording of a telegram of greeting to Lenin, from "Long live worker-peasant sovereignty" to "Long live peasant-worker sovereignty."[2] "Help the workers" was thus bound to be a much weaker appeal than "Help the Army" (as Rittikh had discovered earlier). Cases were reported of peasants who wanted to take their grain back when they learned that it was not going to the Red Army but to nearby workers.[3]
There was also great dislike of Bolshevik attempts to set "muzhik against muzhik." Many peasants, not just those out of favor with the government, felt it unseemly. They also resented what they felt was persecution of the industrious and encouragement of the shiftless. When addressing a conference of "nonparty peasants" in the spring of 1920, Zinoviev could not understand why anyone in his audience would take offense at his violent attack on the kulaks. "If a kulak takes offense, that's understandable—his turn is coming. But among you there are no kulaks." Zinoviev complained that "the worker is not offended when we unmask the town kulak [the factory owner]. At peasant meetings as well, an attitude must be created toward the village kulak as an enemy, a spider, an oppressor."[4] In response peasants posed questions that the Bolsheviks found difficult to answer: "All right, you place [the burden of] the razverstka on the kulak. But you see, the kulak isn't a source that will never dry up. Over three years many have dried up. . . . What are you going to do when there are no more kulaks?"[5]
Food-supply officials found many reasons in their day-to-day experi-
[2] Lev Trotsky, The Trotsky Papers, 1917-1922 , ed. J. M. Meijer (The Hague, 1971), 2:518-24 (report of Antonov-Ovseenko).
[3] A. Khvoles, "Voenno-prodovol'stvennoe delo za period revoliutsii," Prod. i rev. , no. 1 (1923): 56-57.
[4] G. Zinoviev, Krest'iane i sovetskaia vlast' (Petrograd, 1920), 38-39, 42. See also Okninskii, Dva goda , 188-92.
[5] Pravda , 27 November 1920 (account of a mass meeting in the Moscow region). Ellipsis in original.
ence to respond to the peasants' dissatisfaction with the class outlook. They discovered that the kulak was not the key to the food-supply problem; Potapenko explicitly states that in Voronezh in 1919 the difficulties arose not from the kulaks, who mostly fulfilled their obligations, but from the passive resistance of many of the middle peasants. Shlikhter observed in 1920 that in Tamboy the "kulak element" did not think of refusing the orders of the food-supply committees "even when, it would seem, from the point of view of common sense, it might have to be recognized that these kulaks as citizens have to a certain extent a right to discuss these orders."[6] The comically careful language shows how difficult it was for a Bolshevik to say in public that a kulak might have genuine grievances. Still, as with any tax-collecting bureaucracy, there were strong pressures to see the kulak as a sort of milk cow to be protected.[7]
Officials also found that the poor peasants and semiproletarians were more a nuisance than a staunch ally. One official from Tambov observed that the poor peasants in his province would rather help the kulak hide his grain than tell the government where it was located. Other officials treated them as importunate consumers and a drain on the city's resources. The poor peasants who had benefited from the revolution were likely to be the ones most irritated by civil-war pressures that prevented them from consolidating their new position.[8]
It was indeed a revelation for many food-supply officials from the city to find themselves putting pressure on the middle peasant rather than serving as lieutenants in the class war. Potapenko describes such a case:
I once noticed that one food-supply worker, Ignat Kiselev, was in a gloomy mood and asked him, "Why are you so glum, Ignat? Are you ill?" "No, I'm fine," he answered unwillingly and added after a short silence, "It's not good, you know." "What's not good?" "Our work's not good." "In what way?"
Ignat started to explain. "We go today into one hut. We say hello—the old owner mumbles something in response. We get suspicious glances from the women. I turn to the old man and ask him how much grain he's delivered. He answers gruffly that he's given only ten poods, and he hasn't got any more. He's supposed to give fifteen poods. We look through the storehouse. Yes, there's grain and flour and so on, but just barely enough to last to the next harvest. We return to the hut
[6] Shlikhter, Agrarnyi vopros , 398-402.
[7] Vladimirov, Udarnye momenty , 39; Potapenko, Zapiski , 77.
[8] Biulletin NKP , 2 July 1920; Vladimirov, Udarnye momenty , 39-40; Kaganovich, Kak dostaetsia khleb , 15-16, 19-21.
and appeal to the conscience of the owner: 'After all, you're not a kulak and you should help the soviet authority in its difficult moment.' We try to persuade him for about an hour, and he looks away and says nothing. As I go, I tell him that if he doesn't give those five poods in three days, we'll come and take it. Both women raise a cry and start to wail. We leave the hut accompanied by their weeping. Okay, I can give the orders, but my heart aches for pity. . . . No, I didn't think our work would turn out to be so difficult!"[9]
The middle peasant was the key not only to grain collection but also to political stability. Under these circumstances many officials began to feel that the fixation on the kulak could be dangerous. Representatives of the center such as Kaganovich argued that local officials, paralyzed by fear of kulak uprisings, at the same time increased the potential for uprisings by treating the middle peasant as a kulak. He was shocked when Simbirsk officials in 1919 told him that a recent visit by Mikhail Kalinin to popularize the new line on the middle peasant was bad for food-supply work. Kaganovich refused to see the kulak as an inveterate enemy; he argued that kulaks were "not so much as an economic force as a psychological phenomenon" and should be dealt with as such. The "kulak mood" in Simbirsk was therefore the result of a "mutual misunderstanding" caused in large part by the apparatus itself.[10] In 1920 Lenin went further and announced in the name of the entire Central Committee that "we got carried away with the fight against the kulaks and lost all sense of measure."[11]
Neither central nor local officials were prepared to abandon the class outlook completely. The well-off peasant did have more grain; he was visible and isolated, and attempts to take grain from the rest of the peasantry would not be credible until it was shown that the apparatus could deal with him. At the same time as Lenin made the comment just cited, he was asked the following question by a local activist: "Holy Cross county of Stavropol province, where I work, was supposed to pay 10 million poods of grain before 1 December 1920. The fulfillment was 3.2 million poods. In connection with this poor fulfillment, we intensified property confiscation from kulak elements. Therefore I would like to ask once more: how to proceed? Carry out confiscation, or do this only in extreme cases so as not to destroy the [peasant] economy?" Lenin's reply was evasive: "In strict correspondence with the decree of the soviet authority and your commu-
[9] Potapenko, Zapiski , 83-84 (ellipsis in original).
[10] Kaganovich, Kak dostaetsia khleb , 15-16, 19-21. For continued suspicion of so-called kulak soviets, see Pravda , 24 October 1920.
[11] Lenin, PSS , 42:195.
nist conscience, continue to act freely in the future as you have acted up until now."[12]
The rhetoric of the class war prevented local officials like Potapenko from completely assimilating the lessons of experience. If the kulak failed to cooperate, it was sabotage, and if he cooperated, it was only from fear of repression. When the middle peasant failed to cooperate, Potapenko was more sympathetic and saw it as understandable wavering.[13] Despite all the changes in policy, the sabotage outlook remained embedded in the Leninist class vocabulary like a dormant virus, ready to spring to life when conditions were right.
If officials were reluctant to completely abandon the class outlook in their own thinking, they were less inhibited in the appeals they made to the peasants. The key Bolshevik message to the middle peasant was based on the gubernatorial solution: we are trying to limit what we demand of you, but we intend to get what we demand. A party circular in late 1919 listed the benefits to the middle peasant: "liquidation of private landowning estates, periodic raising of the fixed price for grain of the new harvest, provision of the village with industrial items, and struggles with the arbitrariness of [our own] local authorities." The circular stated that the peasant's reproach about the lack of industrial items was accurate but also unjust, since the shortages were not the fault of the Bolsheviks. It admitted that the razverstka was indeed a heavy obligation (povinnost '), but like any obligation in time of war, refusal to meet it would be treated like desertion. This Bolshevik circular used the same logic as Prokopovich two years earlier, when he argued that the doubling of fixed prices gave the Provisional Government the moral right to use force.[14]
Bolshevik posters did not ignore the desperate economic situation: "Peasant, you are dissatisfied: you have no iron, salt, cloth—no medicine if you are sick—no way of buying boots. You work well, your children help, and yet your life is poor and squalid." But, they warned, the peasant should not see the razverstka as a cause of these difficulties: "Success in the struggle against economic breakdown—the tragedy of the people—depends on the success of the republic's food-supply organs."[15]
[12] Lenin, PSS , 42:192; see also Potapenko, Zapiski , 89-93.
[13] Potapenko, Zapiski , 52-55, 125.
[14] Biulletin NKP , 3 October 1919.
[15] B. S. Butnik-Siverskii, Sovetskii plakat epokhi grazhdanskoi voiny, 1918-1921 (Moscow, 1960), 452; Zubareva, Khleb Prikam'ia , 46-47. A Bolshevik journal in 1920, Vestnik agitatsii i propagandy , criticized posters that did not try to convince peasants that grain deliveries were in their own direct economic self-interest. Stephen White, The Bolshevik Poster (New Haven, 1988), 115-16.
The supporting argument relied less and less on class-war rhetoric, as shown by this 1920 list of suggested agitational themes:
1. The razverstka has great significance for the existence and development of the Republic.
2. "The provisionment of the Red Army is a question of victory, peace, and security for the Republic." Why is victory important for the peasant? Because "if [Wrangell is not quickly liquidated, his forces could advance, and he could cut Soviet Russia off from the grain of the Kuban, the coal of the Donets region, and the oil of Baku, and this threatens great losses for our still damaged economy."
3. The village relies on town industry, which cannot work without bread.
4. The old regime actually took more out of the village "with the help of vodka, taxes, and various other methods."
5. Grain exports previously paid for goods for the bourgeoisie, whereas the first thing the Bolsheviks will buy is agricultural machinery.
6. If the peasant thinks about it, he will realize that the Bolsheviks are giving the village an equivalent for what they take.
7. The larger part of the razverstka goes to the Red Army, in other words, to fellow peasants. The grain also goes to peasants working outside their villages and to regions suffering from harvest failure.
8. Every peasant has a stake in this system of insurance in case of harvest failure.
9. The razverstka is part of the soviet authority's general program, and the socialist character of food-supply policy means that all toilers have an interest in it.[16]
Bolshevik propagandists also tried to convince the peasants that the workers were not a privileged class and that wartime burdens were not imposed in a discriminatory way. A textbook for food-supply propagandists recommended the following arguments: the government had a "whole system of repressions in relation to self-seekers [shkurniki ] and saboteurs" among the workers. The recent law against absenteeism was an example. Factory disciplinary courts could impose a series of sanctions: deprivation of bonuses, then deprivation of food rations, and finally arrest. The guilty party either worked off his penalty at the factory or was sent to a concentration camp for compulsory labor: "It is obvious that the soviet au-
[16] Krasnyi put ', no. 2, 1 November 1920, 10-12, 42-43. For propaganda aimed at the workers, see L. Sosnovskii in Pravda , 22 March and 14 July 1920; Pravda , 10 June and 24 June 1920.
thority is not particularly gentle with lazy louts [lodyri ] found among the workers."[17]
In much of their propaganda the Bolsheviks had moved away from class struggle to the idea of a state obligation imposed in the name of the common interest. In the words of a Pravda editorial of November 1920, "Hunger is the common enemy. It does not distinguish between parties and convictions. It tortures in similar fashion the worker, the intellectual, the communist, the Menshevik, and the nonparty people. . . . Let all citizens of Russia close ranks behind the soviet authority, and it will be able to defeat hunger."[18] Some Bolsheviks even began to believe that they were in truth what they claimed to be, not so much revolutionaries as national leaders working to prevent a common disaster.[19]