5
The Elemental Whirlpool

The state authority . . . must direct all its strength to avert the final phase of the rapidly approaching famine. Otherwise no authority will be able to exist in the country, and the country itself will toss like a chip of wood in the elemental whirlpool.
N. Dolinsky, fall 1917

In fall 1917 the chain reaction of social disintegration led to a series of explosions—in the countryside, on the front lines, and in the capital cities. In the area of food supply the event that lit the fuse was the doubling of fixed prices at the end of August. Generally overlooked amid the high political drama of those days, the decision to double the prices paid to grain producers was not only a signal of the imminent collapse of food supply; it destroyed the morale of the existing political class while confirming the political formula of the Bolshevik contenders.

The Fixed Prices Come Unstuck

The level of fixed prices had already created difficulties for the Provisional Government. In March it raised the fixed prices decreed by the tsarist government in September 1916 by 60 percent. This decision led to a falling-out with Groman. Though admitting that the earlier prices were now out of line with prices for industrial items, Groman wanted to lower the industrial prices, not raise grain prices. Since this could not be done immediately, Groman proposed to give grain producers temporary certificates. When the Provisional Government rejected this proposal as impractical, he decided that Shingarev was just another tsarist official like Bobrinskii and Rittikh.^[1]

The decision of the Provisional Government was not a complete victory for peasant producers. In 1916 Rittikh had surreptitiously raised prices by paying them at the producer's storehouse rather than at the railroad station or wharf, so that transport costs were borne by the government instead of

[1] Sukhanov, Zapiski , 2:271-75; Jasny, Soviet Economists , 29-32.

the producer. This move had infuriated opposition activists, and when the Provisional Government raised prices, it went back to the old system. Accordingly the further away a producer was from transportation points, the less benefit he received from the new prices. Sigov quotes the commissioner of Viatka as saying that, on average, prices were lowered ten kopecks a pood in his province.^[2] Thus one of the first acts of the new revolutionary government was to lower the prices paid to many producers.

The Provisional Government assured the peasants that it was useless to hold out for better prices since the March prices would not be raised under any circumstances. Despite the growing urgency of the food-supply situation, Peshekhonov ruled out the possibility of a change in prices. He therefore sent a telegram on 20 August telling the local committees not to shrink from the use of force. Speed was essential: if grain were not shipped north by the middle of September, many northern provinces would have no way of getting food, and all consumer regions would be threatened, given the wretched state of the railroads and the coming end of navigation on the river system. Grain was to be taken first of all from large firms and from producers who were closest to transportation points since the next two or three weeks would decide everything. The telegram went on to say that "extreme measures are dictated by a state necessity that is the equivalent of military service."^[3]

Meanwhile other forces within the Provisional Government sought another way out of the crisis. On 23 August a meeting of the Special Council of Defense observed that the food-supply crisis was now threatening the entire economy and the war effort. Lack of flour and grain in the Donets and Baku regions was causing a mass exodus of workers from the mines and oil fields, which in turn meant no fuel, no railroads, and no defense production. The council also felt that the "existing organization of the general food-supply system does not correspond to present circumstances": despite the availability of adequate grain supplies as well as transport capacity, producers had no motivation to part with their grain. And since this motivation had been destroyed by the lack of correspondence between the fixed grain prices and the price of everything else, the solution seemed obvious.^[4]

This pressure from the right wing of the government coalition came at the very time that Kerensky (the closest person the Provisional Government had to a head of state) was accusing his own commander in chief, Kornilov, of a counterrevolutionary plot. The urgency of the situation, the small likelihood that Peshekhonov's use of force would be successful, and

[2] Sigov, Arakcheevskii sotsializm , 9-12.

[3] Izv. po prod. delu 3 (34), ofitsial'nyi otdel (O.O.), p. 38.

[4] TsGVIA, 369-13-62/7; Ek. pol. , pt. 2, doc. 491.

the precariousness of his own political position all pushed Kerensky to what Bukshpan called the "complete capitulation of the Provisional Government before the peasantry of the producing provinces."^[5]

The price-doubling decree was issued 27 August when Kornilov's troops were still approaching Petrograd. The official excuse was that doubling the fixed price restored a town-country equilibrium that had been destroyed "by the uncontrollable (stikhiinyi ) course of events." In an attempt to save face a warning was also issued: "The government will show firmness both in resisting any unfounded pressure to increase the income of the nonagricultural population and in using force against grain producers [to ensure] timely and exact fulfillment of their responsibilities in the delivery of grain needed to prevent starvation by the Army and the population."^[6]

It is difficult to assess the impact of the new prices. The center pointed to increased deliveries, but skeptics claimed that the increase was due to the harvest. The skeptics are borne out by figures showing the increase starting before the announcement of the new prices (see Table 1).^[7]

By heightening the atmosphere of uncertainty, the sudden doubling of prices provided an incentive not for delivering grain but for holding on to it. The new prices even upset many of the grain producers and dealers, who had called for higher prices but had not expected a clumsy across-the-board doubling.^[8] When the peasants themselves were ready to sell the grain, the food-supply apparatus often ran out of paper money (or "money tokens"

[5] Bukshpan, Politika , 516; see also Ek. pol. , pt. 2, p. 356.

[6] Prod . (Poltava), no. 2, 9 September 1917. The price doubling was made retroactive to 1 August. The decree also made more generous allowances for transport costs. Ek. pol. , pt. 2, doc. 522; Browder and Kerensky, Provisional Government , 2:641-43.

[7] See also Lozinskii, Ekonomicheskaia politika , 139.

[8] Izv. po prod. delu 3 (34): 56-59.

[denznaki ], in the professional jargon). Other bottlenecks developed—in carts, bags, storage space, and rail space.^[9]

Whether because of the new prices, the harvest, or the growing effectiveness of local committees, grain deliveries did in fact increase. But this change brought little consolation to the starving cities because river navigation had come to an end and rail transport was in terrible shape. Little more than one half of the September grain procurement had left the area of procurement by the middle of October.^[10]

In Petrograd, officials felt that difficulties within the city—unloading the congested railroad warehouses, setting up a tolerable distribution system—were at least as severe as the problem of getting grain delivered to the city in the first place. At a meeting of the Petrograd City Duma in October speakers declared the situation "very close to catastrophe": there was a real possibility that the city would soon be without flour. It was an open secret that the northern front had no reserves, and that soldiers in the Petrograd garrison were upset by a lowering of their ration. The situation in the army constituted a direct threat to civilian order since soldiers had physically threatened city officials to ensure that military needs were met first of all.^[11] The garrison proved a key supporter of the Bolshevik takeover.

If the sudden doubling of prices did not avert the collapse of food supply, it actively hastened the collapse of political authority. It was a heavy blow to the morale of the food-supply officials. Having vociferously assured everybody that there was absolutely no chance of any price rise, they were "stunned" by the announcement and deeply humiliated. The first issue of the Poltava food-supply publication contained a strong assurance to the peasant producers that the fixed price was stable. In the very next issue the chairman had to eat his words: "In the life of the state there are moments when the most firm of governmental intentions must be modified by the force of events. To our great and general sorrow, such a moment has come."^[12]

The life of a food-supply worker was not enviable: it was hard work for which the reward was hatred, baseless accusations, and physical danger. Food-supply workers felt more and more threatened by pogrom violence

[9] Prod . (Tobolsk), no. 9, 12 October 1917; Prod. delo (Moscow city), no. 21, 17 September 1917.

[10] Ek. pol. , pt. 2, pp. 356-58; Frenkin, Russkaia armiia , 479-80; Prod. delo (Moscow), 22 October 1917.

[11] Prod. delo (Moscow), 15 October 1917, 13; Ek. pol. , pt. 9, doc. 535. This situation may have contributed to the decision to move the garrison that touched off the chain of events leading to the Bolshevik takeover.

[12] Prod . (Poltava), no. 1, 26 August 1917; no. 2, 9 September 1917.

from below and more and more abandoned by the center. Peshekhonov had resigned in protest and the new minister, Sergei Prokopovich, was perforce preoccupied with forming a cabinet. Paralysis at the top was matched from below by a wave of resignations of local officials or by actions such as that of the Tobolsk committee, which refused "moral responsibility for implementation of the grain monopoly" under the new prices.^[13] In October one food-supply official asserted that none of the proposals for reform of the monopoly would work: "With complete clarity I affirm this, and I feel that the one way out of the food-supply problem from the side of the population will be for them to come to me, beat up the whole board—and then hang me."^[14]

The demoralization of one political class was matched by the growth of support for another. The dramatic political events of the capital city could not match the societywide impact of the doubling of prices, which communicated its antigovernment message, day in and day out, better than any press campaign. In an article written in late October one writer stated that "the price doubling for grain continues to disturb all Russia" and that the question had only grown sharper. He asserted on the basis of a questionnaire sent out by the newspaper Narodnaia vlast ' that in all social classes the reaction was unanimous condemnation. A common formulation was that the doubling of grain prices had undermined the foundations of everyday life.^[15]

The doubling of prices seemed to confirm the Bolshevik diagnosis of sabotage. It was more than the closeness of dates that indicated a connection between Riabushinskii's outburst about the "bony hand of hunger," Kornilov's attempted coup, and the price-doubling decree. Both Riabushinskii and Kornilov were horrified at the disintegration of the country and put the blame squarely on the soviets. Riabushinskii supported higher grain prices, and he had been among those who gave Kornilov a ringing public endorsement in early August. When the Menshevik minister Matvei Skobelev moved against the factory committees, the picture seemed complete. A worker resolution stated, "We are forced to conclude that in the present context [of the Kornilov mutiny] the ministry for the 'protection of labor' has been converted into the ministry for the protection of capitalist interests and acts hand in hand with Riabushinskii to reduce the country to famine, so that the 'bony hand' may strangle the revolution."^[16]

When a predominantly socialist government suddenly doubled the price

[13] Prod . (Tobolsk), no. 2, 12 October 1917 (resolution of 27 September 1917).

[14] TsGVIA, 12593-36-69/45-47, 54-56, 52-54, 59-62.

[15] Prod. delo (Tver), 22 October 1917.

[16] S. Smith, Red Petrograd , 180-81; Ek. pol. , pt. 2, doc. 486; Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks , 105-6.

of a basic staple, it seemed to indicate either criminal weakness or actual connivance with counterrevolutionary sabotage. For years to come, the necessity of a firm state authority based on the soviets was most easily proved by pointing to Riabushinskii and Kornilov.

Rethinking the Monopoly

The collapse of the monopoly forced food-supply officials to rethink their basic assumptions. Their painful disillusionment can be seen in the pages of the Ministry of Food Supply's short-lived official publication, Izvestiia po prodovol'stvennomu delu .

Spring 1917 . In the first issue editor Ia. M. Bukshpan contemplated the new grain monopoly with confidence. The monopoly would be only the "first step on the path of the statization (ogosudarstvlenie ) of the immense field of provisionment" since "the food-supply question must be tightly tied to a single plan of the whole national economy." The new apparatus would be coordinated in the following manner: "To fill up this scheme with living day-to-day work, to elect practical people enjoying wide confidence, to subordinate local interests to general state ones, and to enlist in the service of these interests all creative forces—all this depends not so much on the center as on organized democratic work in the localities." The economic key to obtaining grain was to provide the peasants with the goods they needed; this task undoubtedly presented "uncommon difficulties under present conditions," but precisely these difficulties confirmed the need for a state takeover.^[17]

Summer 1917 . Bukshpan's editorial in the second issue was entitled "On Vacillations in Food-Supply Policy." The tone had become defensive: Bukshpan complained that in food supply, as in no other economic area, people blamed the whole situation on the state authority and its policies without taking objective difficulties into consideration. He tried to show that without the monopoly the situation would be even worse: prices would skyrocket, and there would be even less grain. Even as it was, "the village is cutting itself off from the city as if to bottle itself up in a subsistence economy." The village would not hand over grain without manufactured goods, but these could not be manufactured unless the workers got grain immediately. "The indubitable weakness of the local committees must [also] be admitted, [for they are] motley in their makeup, not rarely arbitrary in local food-supply policy, and often simply do not exist as agents of the central state authority"; in particular "the district

[17] Izv. po prod. delu 1 (32): 1-2.

committees have failed, so that producers and holders of grain remain as before, almost without monitoring or compulsion." Bukshpan ended by warning his readers that under present circumstances even the best foodsupply policy would not lead to satiation.^[18]

Fall 1917 . Ministry official N. Dolinsky summed up the situation in the third and final issue of the journal:

We are used to the tragic background of our life; tragedy has become our everyday reality. Nevertheless, even on this general background a small group of phenomena stand out from the framework of daily life, and our consciousness, although dulled to the perception of catastrophe, experiences sometimes the approach of something frightful, fateful, unconquerable.

To this group of phenomena belongs first of all the food supply of the population. One only has to read the provincial and metropolitan press for a short period to feel that ordinary labels, such as crisis, catastrophe , and so on, by themselves sufficiently specific and decisive, pale before the frightful hue of reality. Famine, genuine famine, has seized a series of towns and provinces—famine vividly expressed by an absolute insufficiency of objects of nutrition already leading to death from exhaustion and malnutrition. . . .

From the frightful experience of every day, it is clear that the satisfaction of the population's food requirement is determined by an aggregate of chance circumstances and causes outside the control of authority, [so] that there is no support for even the most elementary assurance of receiving the minimum amount of products necessary to sustain oneself. Losing the assurance of being able to eat tomorrow, the hungry crowd searches for guilty parties. A primitive and excited psychology is convinced that food products are available [but that] greedy merchants, speculators, and dealers have hidden them. Searches are made, almost always without result.^[19]

These words, taken not from opposition elements but from the pages of an official journal, express the inner abdication of the Provisional Government. It speaks well for the resilience of many food-supply officials that they did not simply give up but continued to search for a way to overcome what Dolinsky called the elemental whirlpool of social and political breakdown. Within the ministry and generally among those professionally concerned with food supply there were intense discussions in the fall of

[18] Izv. po prod. delu 2 (33): 1-2.

[19] Izv. po prod. delu 3 (34): 9-12.

1917 aimed at reversing the slide to disaster. The final collapse of the Provisional Government meant that these discussions did not result in practical measures, and for this reason they have largely escaped the eye of the historian. But they hold great interest for this study because they mark a definite move away from the enlistment solution and toward the gubernatorial solution.

The greatest source of frustration was the failure of the local committees to enforce the monopoly. Throughout 1917 various central agents—emissaries, instructors, inspectors, delegates, commissioners—had been sent out to strengthen central influence over local activity. Central control was further tightened with a decree of 24 August that gave the center the right to rescind any directive issued by lower authorities or even to remove a specific task from the sphere of a committee's responsibilities. Shortly before the Bolshevik coup the ministry sent out a circular to local committees outlining two possible deviations (to use a word applied later to these situations): lacking energy in fulfilling directives from higher officials, on the one hand, and exceeding their authority with local embargoes, fixed prices, and the like, on the other. The circular reminded the committees that although they were not technically on state service, they were still officials (dolzhnostnye litsa ) and as such they were responsible for the correct execution of food-supply policy. It followed that the two deviations just mentioned would be punished as dereliction of duty. Thus the Ministry of Food Supply was driven to adopt the argument made by the Minister of Internal Affairs a year earlier: it was dangerous to have policy carried out by local activists who were not directly responsible to the center.^[20]

Reformers at the center were also contemplating a more radical rehaul of the committee structure: "We must realize that the wager on the autonomous activity of wide strata of democratic circles and on their state feeling has been lost. . . . The closer the food-supply organs are to the population, the less they are concerned with general state considerations." To do their job, the procurement organs would need to apply "great pressure [nazhim ] on the population, [but] there have been no psychological stimuli [to produce] this pressure." Therefore the center would have to create its own procurement apparatus.^[21] Distribution could be left in the hands of local authorities since it required less independence to give than to take.

[20] Izv. po prod. delu 3 (34), O.O. 26-27; 1276-14-483/200-201 (23 October 1917); Kondratiev, Rynok khlebov , 91-92; Bukshpan, Politika , 510-11.

[21] 1276-14-483/67, 148-51 (speech of Anisimov to the Congress of Inspectors and Instructors, 24 September 1917). The effort of the Provisional Government to overcome the previous weakness of its food-supply apparatus was noted by N. Orlov, Prodovol'stvennoe delo v Rossii (Moscow, 1919), 20-21.

This move away from the enlistment solution was challenged by many liberal reformers at a conference of the Union of Towns held in October. Centralized procurement threatened a long-standing reform that was just being completed—the transference of authority over food supply to the new democratically elected zemstvo organ of local self-government. In the original monopoly legislation the food-supply committees had been seen as no more than provisional organs that would remain independent only until the new zemstvo structure was set up. The zemstvo ended up playing the same role on the local level as the Constituent Assembly did on the national level—an excuse for delaying both social reform and the imposition of order. Food-supply officials let themselves assume that the stability and authority so lacking in local food-supply committees would be created by the new, all-class democratic structures. In reality the new zemstvo inspired almost no loyalty from the population. By the fall the central authorities had a new view of the helpfulness of local influence and began to drag their feet on the actual transfer of food-supply matters to the new zemstvo.^[22]

The Union of Towns conference resented this lack of confidence by the center in the new self-government organs and felt that the gains of the revolution were being lost. If the local zemstvo could not get all the available grain, the bureaucrat from the center could get even less. One speaker acidly remarked that it was not usually the first-raters who were sent out by the center to the provinces.^[23] The final resolution of the conference stated that the new local organs should continue to have responsibility for both procurement and distribution and expressed confidence in their ability to do the job. The conference was forced to admit, however, that too often in the past "the most democratic organs could not raise themselves higher than their parish"; hence the central authority still had to be ready to guarantee that procurement tasks were really carried out.^[24]

The move to tighten discipline over the committees had its counterpart in efforts to provide material incentives in a more controlled and expedient way. The original plan of ensuring the availability of industrial items at low fixed prices was abandoned as food-supply officials realized that they could not expect to increase the limited supply to any great extent. But the Provisional Government moved only slowly toward a coherent policy of

[22] Prod. delo (Moscow), 30 August 1917; Gerasimenko, Nizovye organizatsii , 176-99; William Rosenberg, "The Zemstvo in 1917 and Its Fate Under Bolshevik Rule," in T. Emmons and W. S. Vucinich, eds., The Zemstvo in Russia (Cambridge, 1982), 383-421.

[23] TsGVIA, 12593-36-69/38-41, 51-52.

[24] Izv. po prod. delu 3 (34): 59-60.

commodity exchange (tovaroobmen ). In a speech in October ministry official A. A. Titov noted that direct exchange would not work because of the extremely short supply. The real motivation for cooperation would continue to be "state awareness" and the organized application of force.^[25] But industrial items would remain useful as a psychological stimulus for selling grain at a reasonable price and as a measure of justice to attain equality of sacrifice between village and town.

Thus these efforts are still in the realm of the enlistment solution: the distribution of scarce industrial items was a gesture that would help the government receive the confidence of the population. But the actual principles of distribution policy show that the Provisional Government was feeling its way beyond the enlistment solution. Cloth goods were to be assigned to provinces on the basis of population, but the first shipments were to go to those provinces that had delivered grain. Within the province the cloth goods would not be given to any district that had not registered grain supplies or delivered any grain. Individual distribution would be on the basis of need. Under these principles provision of cloth goods would be used as a direct incentive to deliver the grain. The policy was still quite relaxed: distribution was still according to population and need, and a laggard province was only penalized by a delay in receiving the cloth.

Another aim of distribution policy was to avoid speculation, that is, the resale of government-issued goods at a great markup. The only way to avoid this problem was to make the original distribution so close to actual consumer desires that there would be no cause for further redistribution. Titov did not shrink before this task: a table was to be prepared showing the requirements for the next half year for every man, woman, and child, and goods would be distributed according to certificates based on this table. "To those who one way or the other are able to manage without the purchase of cloth, no cloth will be given." This pronouncement was a fantastic overestimation of administrative capacities: Titov admitted that the district committees simply passed the goods around.^[26]

A more sober view of the need to economize scarce administrative resources was expressed by Nikolai Kondratiev, a high ministry official who later became one of the stellar Soviet economists of the 1920s. The Ministry of Food Supply controlled only 60 percent of the output of cloth goods. Kondratiev agreed with the general feeling that splitting the cloth supply between the government and the private commercial apparatus was unsatisfactory. There were two ways to unify distribution: transfer it com-

[25] TsGVIA, 12593-36-69/37-38.

[26] TsGVIA, 12593-36-69/31-38.

pletely to private trade, which would be supervised by the state much more closely than heretofore, or give it over into the hands of the state. Kondratiev contended that the ministry had an open mind on the question, but he himself was clearly in favor of transferring distribution to private trade. He stressed the disadvantages of giving the job to an "all-embracing" governmental body and argued that the combination of capitalist trade and strict state monitoring was appropriate for Russia's bourgeois revolution. The basic monitoring method would be mutual responsibility (krugovaia poruka ), a method of organizing trade in the national interest that Kondratiev felt would still be useful after the war.^[27]

Both of the solutions had a vision of the proper role of commodity exchange. Advocates of the enlistment solution saw it as part of the monopoly strategy and perhaps even as a step toward socialist distribution. For gubernatorial advocates the idea of a commodity-exchange policy was not to provide a full exchange equivalent of grain delivery; it was rather to withhold extremely scarce industrial items as a penalty for nonpayment of a tax obligation. The commodity-exchange policy of the Provisional Government was still at an embryonic stage and had strong elements of both solutions. But on the whole it represented a move away from the idea of exchange toward the idea of a tax.

Since food-supply officials were no longer sanguine about either state consciousness or material incentives, the role of coercive incentives began to take on greater importance. The possibility of using force against the grain producers had never been completely denied in 1917, although there had been hope in the beginning that the new solidarity and civic maturity of the Russian population would make it unnecessary. Especially after the price doubling, food-supply officials felt that (as one remarked in November) "all means [of moral influence] have been exhausted": having gone the extra mile to respond to the producers' interests, they now claimed the right to use force.^[28] All in all, however, the attempts of the Provisional Government to use force were not impressive. Most were like the incident in Samara that took place in September, when peasants collected themselves together by means of the alarm bell and announced to the authorities, "You'll get our bread only over our dead bodies." So the local foodsupply officials and a military detachment left without getting any bread.^[29]

The inability of the Provisional Government to use force effectively was due not only to inner inhibition but to lack of a reliable armed unit suitable

[27] 1276-14-483/12 (speech of 12 October 1917).

[28] Prod . (Tobolsk) no. 4, 1 December 1917 (meeting of 17 November 1917).

[29] TsGVIA, 13251-2-40/25-33. For attempts of the Provisional Government to use force, see Volubuev, Ekonomicheskaia politika , 452-55.

for domestic purposes.^[30] Food-supply officials were already beginning to feel the necessity of a central militia on the grounds that it would be "expedient to transfer [procurement] to a special organ of the militia tied not so much to the population as to the central apparatus of the central state authority since it is necessary [in this area] to carry out one general line and to carry it out especially insistently."^[31]

The most urgent of proposals in this direction was made by military supply officials. In September the chief supply officer, General Bogatko, argued that the ministry should send out inspectors with the power to force local committees to follow central directives. But he felt these inspectors needed to be backed up in each province by a governor-general, who should be someone who enjoyed the full confidence of the popular organizations so that he could not be accused of any counterrevolutionary intentions. He also should be given full authority, including the right to impose the death penalty for failure to carry out directives essential to the existence of the republic: "If such a governor-general is not present in the localities, we cannot even speak of the possibility that the proposed inspector—authorized to compel a provincial food-supply board to immediately implement this or that measure—will be able to compel anybody to do anything at all."^[32] In this argument we see an old-line military official who wants to obtain the confidence of the "democratic organizations," but only because that confidence seemed to be indispensable for establishing a vigorous central authority. His appreciation of the need to revitalize the gubernatorial solution harks back to Khvostov and also provides an intimation of the future.

The lack of an available armed force was not the only obstacle. In an article written in December, Martovskii analyzed in Nizhegorod the difficulties of using force against the peasants. He noted that for the Bolshevikdominated soviets (and to some extent for the earlier soviets of the SRs and Mensheviks) the problem seemed simple: take from the kulaks, the welloff minority, and give to the worse-off majority: "If that's the way it's going to be, there's no point in being shy about it." But if the application of force was easy enough in a village that consisted mainly of net consumers, it would get harder and harder until it was next to impossible in a village consisting mainly of net producers. Unfortunately it was precisely the latter type of village that had general state significance since grain requisitioned in consumer villages would mostly stay in the area. The application

[30] Wade, Red Guards , 69; Startsev, Vnutrenniaia politika , 167-93.

[31] TsGVIA, 12593-36-69/1-25 (Iurovskii, Union of Towns Conference, 15 October 1917).

[32] TsGVIA, 499-3-1726/2 (18 September 1917).

of force was in the best of cases a tricky business. A mere show of force was inadequate: soldiers were reluctant to obey orders, and peasants were experts in concealing grain. It was also dangerous to apply these policies through undisciplined local organs. Martovskii's analysis was later borne out by events.^[33]

Despite the explosion of discontent that surrounded them, many foodsupply officials continued to search for a way out. A painful rethinking of the basic assumptions of the enlistment solution led to the realization that the monopoly strategy could not work with available resources of exchange items, administrative capacity, and "state consciousness." But time had run out for the Provisional Government, and the effort to work out a policy that took account of these scarcities had to wait until the new rulers of the country went through their own painful learning process.

The Problem of Authority

Food-supply officials realized that efforts to reform food-supply policy in isolation always led back to the same problem: "We have to be able to order the grain-holder to hand the grain over, and to back up that order if it is not fulfilled. This is the general problem of a political authority [vlast ']."^[34] How far the Provisional Government was from solving the problem of authority is evident from the testimony of Prokopovich, who had been appointed the new minister of food supply. Prokopovich's guarded optimism about grain deliveries was undermined by his unrelieved pessimism on the political side. In his description of centrifugal forces Prokopovich made a distinction between civil war (the regional and class separatism of the peasant producer) and anarchy (individual lawlessness), even though both represented a similar logic of rational self-protection. In speaking of separatism in the Kuban area, Prokopovich asked, "What do they want? They want to remain intact in that sea of anarchy that is flooding the country; they want to save themselves, like an island."^[35]

What was needed was a central political authority capable of showing peasant separatists, by force if necessary, that "yes, [the peasants] are brothers of the workers [and] of the town dweller." But the Provisional Government was helpless to provide this forcible demonstration of brotherhood. In the center the political class was hopelessly divided, making

[33] Prod . (Nizhegorod), 10 December 1917. Peshekhonov was already complaining in June 1917 that local committees were acting only in deficit areas.

[34] TsGVIA, 12593-36-69/1-25 (Iurovskii, Union of Towns Conference, 15 October 1917).

[35] Ek. pol. , pt. 2, p. 365.

formation of a cabinet almost impossible. Prokopovich complained that instead of dealing with pressing matters, the government was forced to respond "now to pressures from the right, now to pressures from the left. It is impossible to work this way."^[36] In the localities the Provisional Government could not even protect its own agents. During a trip around Russia Prokopovich met a stationmaster who had barely escaped being lynched just two hours before. He had been saved only by members of the local committee surrounding him and forming a human shield, for the local militia had been run off by the lynch mob. The stationmaster had incurred the wrath of the mob by telling peasant and soldier sackmen that they could not take any grain out of the area by train; the sackmen had told their story to soldiers being transported on the train, and these soldiers, bored with sitting in train cars, ran out and started a riot.

Prokopovich told his audience in the capital of the shame he felt when a faithful executor of his orders had to take such risks and he, the minister, was unable to provide any protection. His only response to the stationmaster was to suggest a compromise: allow people to carry five poods as personal baggage. At this the stationmaster brightened up and said, yes, maybe that would help. Prokopovich concluded, "We have to stop being wheedlers in chief or subwheedlers because as long as we are wheedlers, we will burn with shame just as I burned with shame before the stationmaster."^[37]

Prokopovich knew that the Provisional Government had little chance of becoming the boss (khoziain ) that he felt was necessary. He even declared that he would support the Bolsheviks if he thought that they could really create a strong political authority without risking civil war by alienating the peasant producer. But Prokopovich's alternative of a firm political authority based on coalition seemed just as unrealistic; when he spoke of the necessity of coercion, a voice from the floor asked sensibly enough, "What will the comrades say?"^[38] The choice seemed to be between a nonexistent state authority and one obtained at a terrible price.

In late October 1917 the Bolsheviks made their bid to tame the elemen-

[36] Prokopovich, Narodnoe khoziaistvo , 68, 29.

[37] Prokopovich, Narodnoe khoziaistvo , 62-69. This speech to the Council of the Republic, given on 16 October 1917, is reprinted in Ek. pol. , pt. 2, doc. 536. Glavnougovoriaiushchii , the sarcastic name given by army officers to Kerensky, is more neutrally translated as "persuader in chief," but "wheedler" captures the spirit better. Prokopovich's later discussion of Bolshevik food-supply policy fails to bring out this desperate situation to which he himself gives such eloquent testimony. See Prokopovich, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR , (New York, 1952), 1:145-60; Prokopovich, The Economic Condition of Soviet Russia (London, 1924), 101.

[38] Ek. pol. , pt. 2, p. 365.

tal whirlpool. Food-supply officials were immediately faced with a dilemma. Disgusted as they were with the Provisional Government, they felt the Bolshevik coup could only make things worse. Yet the food-supply situation limited their freedom of action, and they could not imitate the many civil servants who greeted the new authority with strikes.^[39] Support for the Bolsheviks and struggle against them seemed to strengthen centrifugal forces.

As much as the food-supply officials insisted on the need for a generally recognized state authority, they felt it was dangerously unrealistic to try to build one on the basis of the soviets. As Anisimov said in November, "We cannot speak of a dictatorship of a class [in the sense of an] organized part of society. The dictatorship of a class is turning into the dictatorship of each proletarian separately or of several handfuls or of chance assemblies." Anisimov went on to say that a strong authority with organized coercion was a necessity, but although Russia now had plenty of coercion, little of it was organized.^[40]

The new authority also lacked any sensible or practical program in food supply. Officials lamented the "obvious ignorance of the Bolsheviks, their obvious illiteracy" in food-supply matters. There were solid grounds for this impression, for the Bolsheviks presented no coherent food-supply program until the spring. Before then, Bolshevik policy was mainly determined by the political imperative of providing for "the proletarian centers" to the detriment of everyone else. But this attitude of the food-supply officials also reflected a general feeling among the trained experts and bureaucrats (the so-called bourgeois specialists) that they were indispensable and that any viable revolutionary authority must recognize this. Indeed, many Bolsheviks secretly agreed, and Lenin had found that one of the greatest difficulties he faced in persuading the party to overthrow the Provisional Government was Bolshevik timidity on this score.

The food-supply officials therefore had to decide the tactical question of how best to ward off the menace of Bolshevik disorganization. One possibility was for the food-supply workers to see themselves purely as a technical apparatus and to bow to the Bolsheviks' brute force as an unavoidable part of getting the job done. Groman put this point of view at a conference of food-supply officials in November:

If the factual situation of a country in a state of civil war pushes me up against the representative of some commissar,

[39] For Bolshevik accusations of sabotage, see John Keep, ed., The Debate on Soviet Power (Oxford, 1979), 110-12, 235, 249; A. S. Iziumov, ed., Khleb i revoliutsiia (Moscow, 1972), 53-57.

[40] 32-1-394/12-14.

calling himself the commissar of a military revolutionary committee and demanding to talk with me so that he will not interfere with the job of food supply, then I will not disdain to talk with him. If some commissar comes to me, and I am not in a position to eject him by physical force, and if I am unable to carry on the business of food supply without his presence, I will say to him, "Sit. I will do what the business at hand demands, and if you want to endorse it, endorse away."^[41]

Those at the conference who opposed this position argued that there was no alternative to a walkout. A speaker told the conference that this was no longer the autocracy, when responsible workers could be treated like pawns; that working conditions were intolerable—ministry officials were forced to work in the stairways—and that the conference had no right to ask them to be indifferent while their civil liberties were trampled under soldiers' boots.^[42]

The final decision of the conference was to select a middle course. On the one hand, to go on strike not only would be almost criminal in itself but would play into the hands of the Bolsheviks by allowing them to blame the growing chaos on sabotage.^[43] On the other hand, the food-supply workers could not bring themselves simply to recognize the Bolsheviks, especially if the Bolsheviks were to interfere with the elections to the Constituent Assembly. Since the Constituent Assembly and a "generally recognized authority" were technical necessities for food supply, anyone who continued to work after the Constituent Assembly had been aborted would be drawing his pay but doing nothing to avert famine.^[44] Therefore to continue work but maintain independence from the Bolsheviks, a proposal of Groman's was adopted: create an All-Russian Food-Supply Council of Ten that would direct the food-supply policy of the country and maintain political neutrality. The idea was to preserve "the authority of the state food-supply apparatus" so that food-supply workers could continue to work without flagging until such time as the Constituent Assembly made its will known.^[45]

[41] 32-1-394/3-4.

[42] 32-1-394/9-11.

[43] 32-1-394/6-7, 18-19. The second speaker (Shub) added that the real danger was not the Bolshevik Council of People's Commissars, who had no interest in destroying the food-supply apparatus, but ignorant local commissars.

[44] 32-1-394/13.

[45] The text of the resolution is in Prod . (Tobolsk), no. 5, 31 December 1917. The resolution passed by officials in the localities shows greater enthusiasm about continuing to work until the Constituent Assembly than does the resolution passed by the central branch of the Employees Union. 32-1-394/20.

This strategy of neutrality was doomed to failure, for the Bolsheviks had no intention of letting something as vital as food supply out of their hands, and the food-supply officials did not have the political resources to resist encroachment, especially since they rejected the strike weapon. The result of complicated maneuvering between November and late January was the dominance at the center of the Bolshevik People's Commissariat of Food Supply.^[46]

The food-supply officials were completely helpless by themselves in the face of the elemental whirlpool of social breakdown. Their attempts to reform food-supply policy amid the collapse of the Provisional Government and remain above it all in the power struggle that followed came to nothing. The "general problem of a political authority" had to be solved first.

Bread and Authority in the Localities

Neither the Bolsheviks nor the food-supply apparatus were in a position to exercise national leadership in the fall of 1917, and the localities were left to fend for themselves. The challenge they faced can by gauged from a survey by the Ministry of Food Supply for the period of 2 September through 20 September:

The process of running down all foodstuff reserves goes forward, and as a result hunger is advancing on the cities (Penza, Simbirsk, Mogilev, Smolensk, Astrakhan, Novgorod, Nizhegorod, Orel, Vladimirov, Turkestan).

The system of compulsory alienation of grain as a temporary intervention continues to be the most practical way of realizing the grain monopoly (Viatka, Chernigov, Saratov, Samara).

Speculation, finding for itself ever-new possibilities, disorganizes the market (Moscow, Kharkov, Turgaiskaia, Kuban).

Liquor distilling is growing and is a serious reason for the destruction of all plans for supplying the population with grain (Mogilev, Voronezh, Tula, Taurides, Viatka, Riazan, Tambov, Kherson).

Mass destruction and violence determine the course of local

[46] Z. Serebrianskii, "Sabotazh i sozdanie novogo gosudarstvennogo apparata," Proletarskaia revoliutsiia , no. 10 (57), 1926: 5-17; Iu. K. Strizhkov, "V. I. Lenin-organizator i rukovoditel' bor'by za sozdanie sovetskogo prodovol'stvennogo apparata," in Bor'ba za pobedu i ukreplenie sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow, 1966), 236-85; Keep, Russian Revolution , 422-26; T. H. Rigby, Lenin's Government (Cambridge, 1979), 44-50.

life and pose questions that cannot be decided by the forces of local food-supply organs (Kiev, Kazan, Baku, Kostroma, Orel, Moscow, Vladimirov, Simbirsk, Voronezh, Turkestan, Astrakhan, Viatka, Smolensk, Saratov, Ekaterinoslav, Amur, Samara).

Every sort of public group applies efforts to restore the regular course of life: food-supply committees, worker and peasant soviets, town and zemstvo self-government, army soviets, medical societies.

Measures [indicative of] breakdown are practiced: rations are lowered, emissaries are sent out, appeals, exchange of bread for other products, formation of flying detachments with the participation of the military command.

A clear expression of a negative attitude toward the new measure of doubling the prices (Don region, Saratov, Ekaterinoslav, Tula, Kherson, Tambov, Samara, Astrakhan, Taurides, Poltava, Yenisei, Omsk, Kursk).^[47]

Events in the northern deficit province of Tver illustrate the struggle that took place after the Bolshevik coup between the forces of selfprotection—the sackmen swarming across the land and the local organizations grabbing what they could—and the forces working for a strong central authority. In its first session after the coup (5-7 November) the food-supply committee in Tver had to find its bearings in circumstances of complete breakdown. The food-supply apparatus at lower levels was completely demoralized; deliveries from the southern surplus provinces had stopped; the situation at the center was so uncertain that the committee decided it was not time to send the delegation that they had earlier selected. The comments by representatives of the county committees were uniformly grim:

Krasnokholm county: It is no longer possible for the board to function properly. "Yesterday a whole village appeared at the board, and under pressure from the crowd we were forced to change the distribution [razverstka ] of grain. In the county and in the city there are in all around 150,000 people going hungry. There is no bread, and how we will exist tomorrow—we do not know."

Zubtsov county: the board is closed. Members of the board are afraid to show themselves on the street. "We await the destruction [razgrom ] of the board."

[47] TsGVIA, 13251-2-40/32-33. A similar survey can be found in Ek. pol. , pt. 2, doc. 506, pp. 315-22.

Rzhev county: A little boy shot a little girl because she took an extra piece of bread.^[48]

Already refugees from the turmoil in the capitals, Petrograd and Moscow, were exacerbating difficulties in the provincial towns. The committee discussion was also marked by the usual hostility between workers and peasants.

The first reaction of the committee was to declare itself above politics. This was not the anti-Bolshevik neutrality of the center but one that stemmed from the desire to keep working even though the outcome of the political struggle was uncertain. The committee next decided that Tver province had to work out its own relations with the surplus provinces. This had to be done on the basis of commodity exchange since money could no longer be obtained from the center owing to the Finance Ministry strike. One factory offered to contribute goods to the committee so that they could be exchanged for grain; all that the factory requested in return was to have its own representative in the purchasing organization. This offer was gratefully accepted. It was decided to organize a delegate bureau that would operate collection points in the south; one half of what was collected would go to the specific organizations contributing to the bureau, and the other half would go to the provincial food-supply committee.

By December a number of modifications in this plan had been made. The delegates had discovered that the southern provinces were not ready for commodity exchange; the peasants there still wanted money. The only source of money was now the population of Tver province itself, and accordingly an appeal was published explaining the situation and urging the population (especially the peasants) not to take their money out of the banks. However, peasant suspicion in Tver was easily aroused and hard to overcome, and (it was asserted) if food supply were transferred to the county zemstvo as planned, the peasants would take back their money, saying, "We trusted you, but on the zemstvo board are Bolsheviks, and them we don't trust."^[49]

The desire for a central authority that could deal with the southern provinces was strengthened by the threat of Ukrainian separatism, which seemed to leave Tver in a "bitter position of helplessness and isolation." Kudriashev (the chairman of the provincial food-supply committee) felt that the northern provinces must band together to form a unified state authority: "We must go to this future authority and say to it: we are unable to receive grain by peaceful methods—help us take it by force."

[48] Prod. delo (Tver), no. 13-14, 15 December 1917.

[49] Prod. delo (Tver), no. 15, 1 January 1918 (appeal of 18 December 1917).

Later in the debate someone objected that it would hardly be possible to take food from the south by force, and Kudriashev rather weakly replied that he meant the force of organization. The hope of creating an effective central authority by a voluntary coalition of provinces did not seem promising.

The committee also realized that preparations had to be made for surviving on the provinces' own resources. To mobilize internal resources, a second registration (pereuchet ) was proposed. An appeal to the peasants contained a threat that it would be better for them to share now, before hunger "darkened the minds" of grain consumers.

During the December meeting of the provincial food-supply committee (7-8 December) an arrangement was worked out with the provincial soviet. Chairman Kudriashev had declared that they must decide who was the master in the business of food supply. There were three choices: the soviets, the sackmen, and the food-supply apparatus, seen as a nonpolitical organization. Kudriashev admitted that politics was hard to avoid—like a fly waved out the door that returns through the window—but still suggested that a regional organization of deficit-province food-supply committees could perhaps deal with the Ukraine as an equal.

The result of negotiations between the soviet and the food-supply committee was far from the clear-cut choice asked for by Kudriashev. Tver did decide to join the proposed regional organization of deficit-province food-supply committees. Attempts were also made to organize the sackmen: as a representative of a county peasant soviet said, "Sackmanism is a good thing, if only it is done well." The food-supply organization also agreed to work in close contact with the provincial soviet. This cooperation was possible because both the soviet and the food-supply committee shared the same "faith": the grain monopoly, fixed prices, and struggle with the sackmen. (There were different nuances in the formulations of this common faith: the food-supply spokesman emphasized the struggle with sackmanism, and the soviet spokesman referred to the merciless struggle with speculation.) The food-supply apparatus wanted the soviet to share responsibility for food supply and not just to criticize. The food-supply workers were also worried about the situation of multiple authority (mnogovlastie ) at the local level: a representative of Rzhev county reported that there were at least seven bosses in Rzhev besides the food-supply organization and that carrying out food-supply policy was comparable to tacking between seven sharp rocks.

What the soviet from its side wanted from the agreement was for the committee to declare that soviet sovereignty meant the sovereignty of the people's authority and that only the soviets could deal with the economic

breakdown. The provincial food-supply committee did pass a resolution to this effect but could not refrain from adding the phrase (over the objection of the soviet representative) "up to the creation by the Constituent Assembly of a generally recognized state authority." Although the food-supply committee—whose dominant orientation seems to have been moderate socialist—had to deal with local power realities, it still was not reconciled to the idea of a Bolshevik-led state authority based on the soviets.^[50]

The January meeting of the committee (9-11 January) took place days after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, and the committee, eager not to get involved in larger political questions, agreed by a large majority not even to discuss the political situation. But before debate was cut off, two opposed points of view found expression. Both sides agreed that the worst evil as far as food supply was concerned was the civil war and anarchy that resulted from the struggle for sovereignty. But one side drew the conclusion that "we must firmly and specifically demand the end of civil war" by getting the Bolshevik Council of People's Commissars to come to an agreement with the other socialist parties. The other side argued that the only way to avoid civil war was to line up behind the present government: "Two tendencies cannot live together; the political quarrel can only be decided the same way it began. Salvation . . . rests only in a strong state authority that has mastery over the entire territory of the country." Since the only realistic candidate for this authority was the soviets, the Bolshevik presenting this argument told his audaudience to forget about the Constituent Assembly and declare "sovereignty to the soviets." This is an unusually frank exposition of a Hobbesian calculation that must have influenced the thinking and actions of a great many people at that time.^[51]

The meeting went on to discuss new ways of getting the information necessary for an effective registration of grain. A proposal was made to use the poorer half of the village to get information and possibly even use force against the richer half of the village. Local representatives discussed their experience with so-called registration-requisition commissions and cited the following advantages: a voluntary registration was absurd, and searches by soldiers gave only "pitiful results," so the only effective source of information was hungry fellow villagers. These registration-requisition commissions were a forerunner of the Committees of the Poor introduced by the Bolsheviks, but the justification was on strictly practical grounds and not yet in terms of class war.

[50] Prod. delo (Tver), no. 15, 1 January 1918.

[51] Prod. delo (Tver), no. 16-17, 1 February 1918.

After February the committee publication no longer contained the minutes of monthly meetings. A note in a later issue reports that actual absorption of the food-supply organization into the soviets took place at the county level in February and at the provincial level in early March. We are also told that all the old employees stayed and there were new workers from the soviets, so work continued without a halt.^[52] It is likely that this last assertion was more pious hope than fact.

Local activists made brave efforts, and many of their improvisations foreshadowed future policy. But they were in no position to cope with accelerating breakdown or produce a coherent nationwide response. A national response had to come from a national authority. If the Bolsheviks wanted to make good their claim to such authority, they could no longer delay in presenting a full-scale response to the food-supply crisis.

The Food-Supply Dictatorship

The response unveiled by the Bolsheviks in the spring of 1918 was called the food-supply dictatorship. The legislative underpinnings of the food-supply dictatorship were set forth in a series of dramatic decrees passed in late May and early June, and this timing has led many people to see it as a response to the loss of the Ukraine and the outbreak of civil war. In reality the outlines of the food-supply dictatorship were evident from the beginning of the year. Its aim was to reconstitute authority in the face of the spiraling growth in intensity of centrifugal forces that had continued since the fall of 1917.

Bolsheviks gave these centrifugal forces the general label separatism . The most flagrant case was the rural soviets. The center had worked for the incorporation of local food-supply committees into the soviet system as food-supply sections of the local soviets, but this policy strengthened rather than reduced separatism. The local soviets were determined to protect their own locality: they refused to export grain outside their region, interfered with grain transports, and raised fixed prices or rejected the grain monopoly altogether. The efforts of local authorities often degenerated into armed struggle over a carload of grain.

If the local soviets did try to represent state authority, they encountered the same violent hostility faced by food-supply committees in 1917. In the words of an observer reporting to the central Bolshevik authorities about the situation in Tver, "An intensified bitterness against the soviets can be observed. At the district level, soviet executive committees are reelected

[52] Prod. delo (Tver), no. 20, 15 March 1918, 1-3. The true situation in Tver is discussed below.

just about every week. The best workers are thrown out or leave themselves. In their place are former peasant elders, merchants, well-off peasants. . . . Even party workers are removed, and they are often threatened by the rioting of the hungry and incited masses."^[53]

The plague of separatism was carried not only by rural soviets but by urban consumers. Local factories would use their products to conduct direct exchange with the peasants, either by distributing items to individual employees so that they could conduct barter on their own or by sending factory delegations to the grain surplus regions. This group sackmanism deprived the Food-Supply Commissariat of the goods needed to carry out a centralized policy of commodity exchange, and the flood of factory representatives bartering on their own led to further disorganization of local grain procurement. The revolutionary takeover of the factories by the worker committees only accelerated what the center saw as insubordination. For the Bolsheviks, it demonstrated a general "falling apart of authority. . . . Many organs of authority, not sufficiently imbued with a consciousness of state unity and the necessity of acting according to a general state plan have come forward now with a narrow, local, and amateurish point of view."^[54]

Separatism was not confined to the population. The Food Supply Commissariat applied the same label to central government institutions, especially the industrial committees loosely grouped under the Supreme Economic Council. These committees, each in charge of a separate industry, existed in uneasy interdependence with the food-supply authorities. The industrial committees needed agricultural raw materials and food for their workers, and the food-supply officials needed industrial products to exchange for grain.

The relations between the Supreme Economic Council and the Food Supply Commissariat never got beyond suspicion and mutual recrimination, and food-supply officials tended to blame much of their difficulties in dealing with the village on the "departmentalism" of the industrial committees.^[55] To a large extent it was the Food Supply Commissariat that set

[53] T. V. Osipova, "Razvitie sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii v derevne v pervyi god diktatury proletariata," in Oktiabr'i sovetskoe krest'ianstvo (Moscow, 1977), 58-59. Detailed figures on the dimensions of the economic breakdown in the spring of 1918 can be found in Silvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism 1918-1921 , (Cambridge, 1985), chap. 7, and Keep, Russian Revolution , chap. 31.

[54] Central Executive Committee, 4th sozyv , 1 April 1918, 75-84 (report by Briukhanov).

[55] Iziumov, ed., Khleb , 58-61; Tri goda borby s golodom: kratkii otchet o deiatel'nosti NKP za 1919-1920 gg. (Moscow, 1920), 58-59.

the tasks for the industrial committees. Its mission was to keep town and village from falling apart; its dominance over the industrial committees reflected the priorities of the time of troubles.^[56]

If the crisis of political authority intensified the food-supply crisis, the reverse was also true. In the cities there was a strong anti-Bolshevik backlash; in the villages there were not only constant reelections but also armed resistance. One Soviet historian has counted more than thirty cases of armed resistance to food-supply policy in March and April alone, concentrated in the central surplus provinces.^[57]

The Bolshevik response was the food-supply dictatorship. Although the word dictatorship has many overtones, its central meaning in this case was not depriving the population of its rights so much as unifying and disciplining all state agencies dealing with food supply. Ever since 1916 there had been persistent calls to imitate the food-supply dictatorship set up by the Germans in May of that year. In the Bolsheviks' case the target was not only the food-supply apparatus but also separatism of all kinds. This double target was announced in January 1918 by the All-Russian Food Supply Congress, which resolved that the only way to enforce the grain monopoly was through uncompromising centralization and war with separatism.

The central goal of this dictatorship was to build up a food-supply apparatus that was under the control of a secure political authority in the center. The greatest difficulty was at the lowest rung of the apparatus: creation of a permanent and reliable base (opora ) in the peasant population itself. This base was needed to give the apparatus a continuing presence in the village so that food-supply officials did not simply descend out of the blue at irregular intervals. In addition the apparatus wanted a source of valuable information that would act both as the alert eyes of grain registration and as a source of real force independent of village grain-holders. To sum up these tasks in a single formula, the apparatus wanted a base in the village that would be more loyal to the apparatus than to the village.

A candidate for this base immediately suggested itself: the "village poor," that is, everybody except the people to whom pressure would be applied. This use of poor peasants was enveloped in a cloud of rhetoric about "class war in the villages," but (as Tsiurupa said explicitly in July) the food-supply officials themselves were not so much interested in the

[56] Lev Kritsman, Geroicheskii period velikoi russkoi revoliutsii (Moscow, [1924]), 208.

[57] T. V. Osipova, Klassovaia bor'ba v derevne v period podgotovki i provedeniia oktiabr'skoi revoliutsii (Moscow, 1974), 315, 317, 321. Osipova reports a total of 120 antisoviet risings in the first half of the year.

political side of committees of the village poor as in the "purely technical" need for them.^[58]

Material incentives would be needed to enlist a reliable base for the apparatus. The Bolsheviks saw the importance of combining force and material incentive. One Bolshevik publicist, R. Arskii, declared:

We will only be able to conduct the struggle against the withholding of agricultural products by the kulaks if we succeed in giving the village something useful, something necessary. And when we do this, then we will be able to present revolutionary demands to the village. Only in that case will it be possible to apply coercion and force in relation to the village. . . . If we do not give [anything], it is unthinkable for us to collect grain from the village. The rich [peasants] will find some tricky way of hiding grain.^[59]

This task required centralized control over commodity exchange: the village must not be able to obtain exchange items through other channels. But "in order for commodity-exchange to have organized forms instead of an elemental and separatist character—which at present can be observed among individual factories and enterprises—what is needed is a regulating principle such as state intervention."^[60] In short, the Bolsheviks returned to the slogan of organizing the sackmen: "There is only one way of stopping this elemental process: organizing it on a state scale and changing it from a means of disorganizing food supply into a mighty tool for [ensuring] its success."^[61]

Urban consumers could also be used to create a force independent of the village and, just as important, independent of the local food-supply apparatus. From the point of view of the food-supply officials, enlistment of the urban workers was not attractive because the workers were by nature the progressive revolutionary class. Rather, the idea was (as one food-supply official put it) to let two parochial interests—consumer and producer—cancel themselves out to the benefit of the general state interest.^[62]

[58] 9 July 1918, Fifth Congress of Soviets, 135-45. The phrase alert eyes comes from this speech.

[59] Trudy pervogo vserossiiskogo s"ezda sovetov narodnogo khoziaistva (Moscow, 1918), 31 May 1918, 417-18.

[60] Central Executive Committee, 4th sozyv , 1 April 1918, 75-84 (report by Manuil'skii).

[61] A report of the People's Commissariat of Food Supply to the Council of People's Commissars prior to the goods exchange decree, in Orlov, Prodovol'stvennaia rabota sovetskoi vlasti: k godovshchine oktiabr'skoi revoliutsii (Moscow, 1918); 179-82.

[62] Central Executive Committee, 4th sozyv , 27 May 1918, 326-28 (Sviderskii).

Thus the Bolshevik food-supply commissar, Aleksandr Tsiurupa, was correct to argue that it was unfair for the opposition to maintain that the Bolsheviks relied solely on force: the food-supply dictatorship constituted a system none of whose parts could succeed in isolation. It included centralized control of the apparatus, material incentives, and the enlistment of urban consumers and poor peasants. Aleksandr Shlikhter, a senior Bolshevik food-supply official, announced in January that the foundation of food-supply work would be "organized revolutionary violence."^[63] Another way of putting it is that violence would be used in the service of organization.

The outlines of this strategy for reconstitution are already evident in the resolution of the food-supply congress in January. War on separatism meant no independent purchases outside the food-supply apparatus and no separate goods exchange between individual regions. To strengthen centralization, representatives from the soviets of the grain-deficit provinces were allowed to join the food-supply committees of the grain-surplus provinces. The resolution also foreshadowed the enlistment of the village poor: "The Congress finds it necessary to assign to local soviets of workers', soldiers', and peasants' deputies the task of taking the most decisive measures against large-scale sowers who hide grain or refuse to deliver it."

A proclamation issued to the peasants by the food-supply congress showed how a straightforward directive to take grain from those who had it became clothed in an elaborate class-war interpretation. The proclamation announced, "Struggle, brothers, with your village bourgeois just as we are struggling with them in the towns." What the official resolution called large-scale sowers now became "malicious kulaks" who hid grain. Opposition to the monopoly was declared a provocation by the bourgeoisie, which tried to blame the current food-supply crisis on the soviet political authority even though in actuality the crisis was caused by its own sabotage. Nor does Riabushinskii's "bony hand of hunger" fail to make an appearance. Even so, the class-war interpretation was not yet all-embracing. In the resolution the distilling of home vodka was not yet blamed on a kulak plot but on "ignorant citizens who have not risen to a correct understanding of the interests of the working people."^[64]

It was one thing to outline the strategy in resolutions and another to actually put the system in place. The first challenge to Tsiurupa and his

[63] Third Congress of Soviets, 71-72.

[64] Material on the food-supply congress comes from Orlov, Rabota , 36-37; Prod. delo (Tver), no. 18-19, 1 March 1918, 1-2, 13-20; Third Congress of Soviets, 71-72. Improvisation and unjustified optimism mark Shlikhter's presentation of food-supply policy in December in Keep, ed., Debate on Soviet Power , 252-55.

colleagues was to take over the old Ministry of Food Supply of the Provisional Government and install a unified Bolshevik leadership without sharing any authority with the previous food-supply officials. The drive to establish the personal authority of the people's commissar over the entire food-supply apparatus could hardly begin until his authority was recognized at least by the central ministry itself.

The next brick in the food-supply edifice was Lev Trotsky's appointment at the end of January as head of an extraordinary commission for expediting grain transport on the railroads. Despite the specific focus of this assignment, Trotsky was called a food-supply dictator because of the unlimited powers given to him. Since his involvement in food-supply matters was short-lived, it has been mostly forgotten that the term food-supply dictatorship was first used by the Bolsheviks at this point and not in May.

The immediate impetus to Trotsky's appointment was a drop in deliveries to Petrograd due to train seizures by local soviets and other less official armed bands. Trotsky's projected program contained the usual mixture of force and material blandishments: he wanted to crack down on unauthorized transport of grain on the railroads as well as mobilize all available industrial items for commodity exchange with the peasant. To protect the trains, "flying detachments" consisting of soldiers, sailors, and unemployed workers were formed. Trotsky's crackdown also included a gettough policy toward the sackmen. The army detachments who had been given the job of enforcing the antisackman policy had evidently been "indecisive," and special detachments were required. As a Kadet critic said, thus began "the first war of the [s]oviet power—the war with the railway passengers."^[65]

The Bolshevik food-supply system eventually relied on several different kinds of armed force. But the type most irritating to the population at large—the blockade detachments (zagraditel'nye otriady ) that harassed people carrying grain and other foodstuffs by rail—was created first, long before the May decrees. For the Bolsheviks (as well as for many other food-supply professionals), the war on the sackmen was a necessary implication of any real commitment to the grain monopoly.

The next important measure was a decree of 26 March on commodity exchange. A person looking at a list of Bolshevik food-supply measures might deduce that in late March the Bolsheviks were still relying on

[65] A. Tyrkova-Williams, Why Soviet Russia Is Starving (London, March 1919), 5-8; information from an article in Nash vek , cited in Prod. delo (Tver), no. 18-19, 1 March 1918; also Prod. delo (Kharkov), no. 5-6:8-10. Newspaper reports on the war against the sackmen can be found in James Bunyan and H. H. Fisher, eds., The Bolshevik Revolution (Stanford, 1934), 656-68.

peaceful measures of material incentive such as commodity exchange but that six weeks later, in May, they drastically changed course and resorted to class-war measures such as worker detachments and Committees of the Poor. That conclusion would be mistaken. The March decree was fully consistent with the strategy of the food-supply dictatorship. It was aimed mainly at the undisciplined (samochinnyi ) and separatist attempts at commodity exchange made by local authorities and factories. Those who indulged in unpermitted exchange of goods for grain were threatened with arrest.^[66] In a talk to the Kostroma province food-supply committee the Bolshevik food-supply official D. P. Maliutin traced the poor performance of the state food-supply system to a lax attitude toward the semiorganized sackmanism of individuals and groups: "They say that the voice of the people is the voice of God. We hearkened to the voice of the people, and for a period of time we allowed the population to make independent purchases, but what came of it all? The most pathetic results possible." Where monthly quotas had previously been fulfilled by 40-50 percent, fulfillment had plummeted in December and January to 10-15 percent, in places to 5 percent. Maliutin added, "This isn't a fairy tale, this isn't an invention or an empty phrase, but the plain truth." Thus for Maliutin the commodity-exchange decree was a continuation of Trotsky's fightfight against the sackmen.^[67]

The decree also showed the continuing interest in the use of poor peasants to force the grain-holding peasants to cooperate. The decree itself mentions the "enlistment of the village poor" only in passing, but the instructions sent out to the provincial committees insisted that industrial items should not be given to individuals on the basis of how much grain they delivered—rather, they should be given to groups of poor peasants to distribute as they saw fit. The idea was to give poor peasants both an incentive to put pressure on their well-off fellow villagers (since the village as a whole would get the goods only after deliveries were made) and a means of doing so (through control of distribution). The local food-supply committees were also urged to "create a cell from the poorest elements that can be relied on in [the committee's] work among the village masses."^[68] Thus material incentive was to be used not for encouraging individual exchange with the actual producer but for splitting the village.

Despite the chaos around them, the food-supply officials seemed to have

[66] Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow, 1957-), 2:23-24. This decree is usually dated 2 April 1918, when it was published in Izvestiia .

[67] Prodovol'stvie i snabzhenie (Kostroma), no. 2, 1 May 1918, 24-26 (talk given 3 April 1918) (hereafter cited as Prod. i snab .).

[68] Prod. i snab . (Kostroma), no. 2, 1 May 1918, 24-26 (Maliutin speech of 3 April 1918), 2-3 (telegram from Manuil'skii, 7 April 1918). Prod. delo (Tver), no. 22, 15 April 1918, 12-13.

been fairly optimistic in early April 1918—just as the Provisional Government had been for a fleeting moment in the spring of 1917. Centralization and commodity exchange were well begun, and the peace treaty and the opening of river navigation seemed to promise an easing of earlier pressures. As Maliutin declared in his talk in Kostroma, "I have to say that never has the soviet authority felt so strong and secure as at the present moment. The cause of the toiling masses is in reliable and strong hands." In line with the logic of the enlistment solution a strong political authority would be the consequence of the "full confidence" enjoyed by soviet organizations, allowing them to take the tough decisions that would be necessary.^[69] This sense of security—if in fact it was ever more than a brave front—was gone by May. Instead of a hopeful feeling that the worst was over, food-supply officials were possessed by an anxious concentration on being able to hold out until August and "the first soviet harvest." Although their basic strategy did not change, they now laid most emphasis on getting immediate results.

The reason usually given for this loss of security is the civil war, but a closer look shows this view to be incorrect. An outline of all the measures of May and June was given by Tsiurupa on 9 May in the legislature of the new state, the Central Executive Committee. In particular he mentioned that worker detachments would be used for getting immediate results by providing "physical incentives" for the kulaks to deliver grain. Although the hurriedly prepared decrees were presented and passed later, the full food-supply dictatorship system cannot therefore be dated later than 9 May. According to William Chamberlin, the soviet regime, although still unpopular and shaky, seemed free of actual military threat in early May; the Czech uprising in Siberia on 26 May changed the outlook "with dramatic suddenness."^[70] There is no reference to civil-war pressures in the decrees and debates in May (leaving aside the flamboyant rhetoric about "civil war in the villages"). Perhaps the best demonstration that it was not the threat of civil war that led to the food-supply dictatorship comes from a document written by Lenin on 26 May, the day of the Czech uprising, in which he proposes that the army itself be turned into a grain-collecting apparatus: "Change the War Commissariat into a War-Food-Supply Commissariat—that is, concentrate nine-tenths of the work of the War Commissariat on remaking the army for the war for grain and on conducting this war for three months."^[71] Thus Lenin assigns a nine-to-one ratio to the urgency of food supply and the urgency of all other military pressures.

[69] Maliutin speech of 3 April 1918; Central Executive Committee, 1 April 1918, 79-84 (report by Manuil'skii).

[70] W. H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution (New York, 1935), 2:1-2.

[71] Lenin, PSS , 36:374.

Another reason given for the changed atmosphere was the unavailability of grain from cut-off regions such as the Ukraine. There is no doubt that it was a blow, but it need not have crippled Bolshevik grain procurement. The Bolsheviks themselves did not lay heavy emphasis on it, partly because the German occupation of the Ukraine could plausibly be seen as the result of the Bolshevik capitulation at Brest-Litovsk: the Bolsheviks felt vulnerable here, and so they tried to show that other regions could make up the deficiency caused by the loss of the Ukraine. According to the figures of the People's Commissariat, even without the areas lost as a result of the peace treaty, there remained 330 million poods of grain available to cover a total of 321 million poods needed by the deficit provinces (not counting a substantial amount left over from previous harvests).^[72]

This relatively optimistic outlook was based on the expectation of obtaining large amounts of grain from Siberia and the northern Caucasus. Even after those regions were cut off by the outbreak of civil war in late May, the Bolshevik leaders tried to put up a brave front. As late as 9 July, in his speech to the Fifth Congress of Soviets, Tsiurupa stressed that there remained enough grain in regions controlled by the Bolsheviks. Combined with the grain that could be expected shortly from the Caucasus, it would be enough to last the short period to the new harvest, "even at a well-fed standard [po sytoi norme ]."^[73]

The main cause of the Bolsheviks' desperation was their failure to get grain from the population still under their control. The grain-surplus provinces of Russia proper—the central agricultural region and the Volga provinces—had traditionally been the ones to supply the northern grain-deficit region because the outlying regions had produced mainly for export. Furthermore, as the Bolsheviks themselves pointed out, the very poor performance of the food-supply apparatus over the past year or so meant that there was considerable grain from previous harvests still in the countryside. Yet the Bolsheviks failed to get even a small percentage of the available grain. Their failure here makes it more than doubtful that they could have obtained much grain from the outlying regions even if these regions had remained under nominal Bolshevik control.

The basic reasons for the Bolsheviks' miserable performance on their home ground were clear to all concerned. The Bolsheviks had not succeeded either in creating a reliable apparatus or in combatting separatism. Because of this failure, measures such as the massive shipment of goods to

[72] I. I. Mints, God 1918 (Moscow, 1982), 362-63.

[73] Fifth Congress of Soviets, 9 July 1918, 135-45. See also Lenin, PSS , 36:424, 452.

the villages in April 1918 may have even strengthened centrifugal forces. Local committees were unable to unload the goods, much less distribute them, and the goods often ended up in the hands of speculators masquerading as food-supply officials.^[74]

The use of force was no more successful in overcoming separatism. In early June a village in Orel province surrounded itself with trenches and barbed wire, and a requisition detachment sent against it narrowly avoided being massacred.^[75] Villages all over Russia were similarly trying to cut themselves off. The basis of the Bolsheviks' provisional optimism in April was gone: the soviet system had been unable to sustain a strong central authority.

The Bolshevik food-supply officials concluded there would have to be an emphasis on measures leading to quick results. Their thinking was based on the assumption that a small minority of kulaks had substantial reserves from previous harvests. Although the Bolsheviks maintained a studied ambiguity on the point, it seems that at this time the word kulak still connoted someone who was in the peasant estate but was not really part of village society. He was either a small landowner or a grain merchant, someone who might plausibly have not just a small excess over the consumption norm but an enormous reserve measured in thousands of poods. Both Tsiurupa and Shlikhter referred to their experience in western Siberia, where they had managed to uncover such reserves.^[76] It is possible that the Bolsheviks were sincere in hoping that large reserves held by a small and unpopular minority would be enough to get them through the crisis and that they did not fully realize what they were getting into when they applied a strategy based on Siberian experience to the central provinces and unleashed "class war in the villages."

Both urban workers and poor peasants would be enlisted to overcome the expected resistance of these large grain holders. Most of the poorpeasant organizations that had sprung up by that time were in fact armed detachments, although not used systematically against grain holders.^[77] A primary task of the new Committees of the Poor was to serve as a local base for the worker detachments, which would also be used for the central task of creating a disciplined apparatus. The detachments would not only re-

[74] Orlov, Delo , 22-23; M. Frumkin, Tovaroobmen, kooperatsiia i torgovlia (Moscow, 1921), 5; Medvedev, October Revolution (New York, 1979), 136-43.

[75] Osipova, Klassovaia bor'ba , 314-15.

[76] Central Executive Committee, 4th sozyv , 9 May 1918, 241-52, 258-59. Reserves had built up in Siberia during the war because of transport difficulties. Kitanina, Voina , 286.

[77] Osipova, Klassovaia bor'ba , 312-13.

move lax local officials but also provide reliable personnel for the technical tasks of the apparatus.^[78]

All the seemingly new measures of the decrees of 13 May, 27 May, and 11 June—the pressure on kulaks, the worker detachments, the Committees of the Poor—were implied in the original strategy outlined in January. The immediate crisis meant that force was needed to obtain quick results, but food-supply officials had known all along that it would be required to impose discipline on their own unruly apparatus. Centralization could also be defended because of the need for speed and unity of action: the keynote of all three decrees was ending the independence of local organs and subordinating them to a hierarchy controlled by the People's Commissar.^[79] The crisis was thus used to justify measures that food-supply officials had wanted all along.

In the fall of 1917, when both food supply and political authority had collapsed, the Bolsheviks had hoped, or at least had promised, that democratic soviets would provide a basis for a vigorous central authority that could overcome the food-supply crisis by crushing the sabotage that was its main cause. But events quickly revealed that the soviets and other local organizations would not make real sacrifices to support the new authority unless the direct local benefit was obvious.^[80] The Bolsheviks continued to account for this indiscipline by sabotage and lack of class awareness, but in reality it was caused by the dilemma of Hobbes's choice and the dictates of rational self-protection.

The central food-supply authorities saw the wave of separatism as a distortion of the real nature of soviet sovereignty, which did not mean "all power to the localities" but instead meant the disciplined implementation of the line established by the central soviet authorities—the Congress of Soviets and the Central Executive Committee elected by the congress. The paradoxes of this position were scornfully pointed out by the Mensheviks. The new soviet constitution gave the local soviets power over local affairs—certainly keeping the local population from starving should be considered as a local affair. And when the Bolsheviks labeled the majority of peasant soviets as kulak soviets that had to be purged, they were denying legitimacy to the Congress of Soviets, the very body from which the Bolsheviks claimed to derive their authority.

Although Bolshevik food-supply officials were disappointed by the lack of disciplined soviet support, they did not let that stop them: they would

[78] See especially Tsiurupa's remarks at the Central Executive Committee, 4th sozyv , 11 June 1918, 399-402.

[79] Central Executive Committee, 4th sozyv , 9 May 1918 (Tsiurupa).

[80] Gerasimenko, Nizovye organizatsii , chap. 5.

build with the soviets if possible, but against them if necessary. They felt that what Maliutin said about independent purchase could be applied to the whole idea of soviet sovereignty: "They say that the voice of the people is the voice of God. We hearkened to the voice of the people, . . . but what came of it all? The most pathetic results possible."