Peasantry and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Part 2: War and Peace)
“The liberated Russian nation will… run for the tavern to drink liquor, smash glasses, and hang the nobility, whose only guilt is to shave their beards and wear a frock-coat instead of a peasant tunic” — Vissarion Belinsky
Look at any typical map of the Russian Civil and the story seems relatively simple. No matter the detail or the number of players involved (and they are innumerable), there remains a small red core centred around Moscow and Petrograd which fends off a litany of forces, slowly turns the tides and expands outwards across Eurasia. Colouring Denikin’s armies separate to Kolchak’s and Wrangel’s, or Makhno‘s forces distinct from Grigoriev’s, including the Czech Legion or Kaledin’s Cossacks; all will add detail and nuance around the edges, but the story remains: the expansion of the red blob, until all of Russia falls under Bolshevik rule in 1923.
This story, while accurately depicting the ebb and flow of armed forces, doesn’t accurately capture the reality of control. A sea of red, representing Bolshevik control, was quite literally the map, not the territory, throughout the civil war into the 1920s.
In many ways, the story of the Russian Civil War was not one of Reds vs Whites or grand armies battling on pitched battlefields, but the story of an assortment of centralising, top-down powers, against a plethora of localities fighting for autonomy. While the majority of the anti-Bolshevik White forces were routed by the end of 1920, the Civil War (mostly over by 1923) did not end with victory for socialism over capitalism but a tepid ceasefire.
“All vile acts are done to satisfy hunger”
The Russian Civil War was one of the most brutal conflicts of the twentieth century, and there is no shortage of competition in that field. Upwards of twelve million people died, with the vast majority being civilians to famine and disease. For years, the rule of the land descended into tortures, massacres, pogroms, rapes, hostage-taking, enslavement, banditry, looting and all manner of atrocities, on all sides, and it would be impossible (and unnecessary) to outline all the gruesome details here.
Following the October Revolution, the peasantry continued the appropriations of gentry land discussed in Part 1. With opportunity in the villages and hunger in the city, a mass exodus of workers moved back to the countryside. Between 1917 and 1920, Petrograd lost two-thirds of its population, and Moscow half. The industrial labour force collapsed by 60%. With such high levels of flight, the Bolsheviks (and other participants in the Civil War) turned to conscription for both military and labour purposes.
In this chaos, class distinctions became meaningless. Industrial proletariat once again became peasantry, soldiers deserted the military, the peasants enlisted or were conscripted, desperate people became bandits, and poor peasants could become rich trying to sell grain as “bagmen” on the railways or by seizing property (248 million acres of land were seized through independent initiative). With rampant hyperinflation and a collapse in manufactured goods, food became a key strategic resource and the driving incentive for many ordinary people. On the pogroms, which became a common occurrence through the civil war, one Tambov peasant said:
I want to ask you to explain to us, the dark people, the peasants, who is responsible for the pogroms? You think that this is done by hooligans and vagrants and drunk ragamuffins, but you are a little mistaken. This is not vagrants and ragamuffins, but people drunk from hunger.
Conversely to the scarcity of food, alcohol production and consumption exploded in the early part of the revolution and civil war. Government documents in October 1917 report the powerlessness of officials to “end the anarchy” and subdue this “greatest threat to order” as peasants and returned-peasants turned en masse to alcohol — distilling and bootlegging as a form of employment, or consumption as a way to deal with the anxiety of societal breakdown. The deterioration of order and creeping barbarity is captured evocatively in this account of Orel peasants:
The cisterns and casks were ablaze and the mob, regardless of the flames, ladled out the spirit, drank it and got drunk. Men, women and children, even old women, all wanted to have their share of the fete… They climbed on the cisterns, and pressing their breasts to it — drank. Some fell into the burning alcohol: human fat floated on the surface, but they continued to drink.
The Bolsheviks were not initially preoccupied with stemming this orgy of revolutionary violence, and in many ways encouraged it. They were however, like everyone else, concerned with food. The Bolsheviks had inherited a bureaucratic infrastructure for food requisition — the Food-Supply Commissariat — from the Provisional Government, who had in turn, inherited it from the Tsar. Bureaucracy, of course, was not sufficient: it was the grain requisitions during WW1 that led to the peasants so easily parting ways with Tsarist rule, and the Provisional Government didn’t even dare try to impose themselves against the peasantry.
As Civil War broke out, the tepidness of the Provisional Government was replaced by the iron will and drive of the Bolsheviks, the Whites, and others, to fight for their survival: and survival meant food. In February 1918, grain deports were nationalised by the Bolsheviks and detachments were sent to requisition food. Anyone not sanctioned by the state caught transporting food was to be arrested, and if they resisted, shot on the spot. In June, Lenin launched a “crusade for bread” enlisting the most impoverished and landless peasants (and a mix of former soldiers, desperate workers, and anyone desperately looking for food) into “committees of the poor” — the kombedy — who were encouraged to essentially loot grain from their wealthy neighbours and deliver this to the Food-Supply Commissariat for various discounts on manufactured goods.
The kombedy did not last long. Within two months the Food-Supply Commissariat was blaming the kombedy for abusing their power and the “middle peasant” — another mostly arbitrary classification. In January 1919, the kombedy was replaced with the razverstka — a quota system with fixed prices, rather than outright forced requestions. In an inversion of the kombedy’s attempt to turn neighbour-against-neighbour, the razverstka had a policy of collective responsibility, with quotas levied against villages as a whole. These quotas were enforced by the Food-Supply Army, conscripts who were too malnourished and sickly to fight with the regular Red Army. This, unsurprisingly, did little to placate the peasantry who continued to agitate, resist, and sabotage.
“Down with the Communists! Long live the Bolsheviks!”
The peasant communes resisted the kombedy and the razverstka violently. Cheka reports tell of groups of hundreds of peasants murdering Soviet officials and grain detachments. In Smolensk province, a band of four thousand peasants armed with machine guns would resist the Red Army. Labelled kulaks and bandits, these acts of peasant resistance would appear all over Russia.
These acts of peasant (and worker) resistance would become the main pre-occupation of the Bolsheviks. Although Vladivostok would remain in Whites’ hands until 1922, in reality the majority of the Whites were routed in 1919 (including Yudenich’s Northwestern Army and Kolchak’s Siberian forces) and 1920 (including Semyonov’s Transbaikal forces and Denikin and Wrangel’s army in the South).
The Pitchfork Uprising (so-named due to the peasants involved being mostly armed with farm implements) saw forty thousand peasants rally against the Bolsheviks in early 1920. As the Red Army was claiming victory in Crimea, local authorities in supposedly-secured Tambov reported “Bands now cover practically the entire district. Soviet authority has ceased to exist”. In December, the Partisan Army of the Tambov Region was formed as part of the Tambov Rebellion, one of the largest peasant uprisings. This uprising was ended only after 100,000 arrests and the use of chemical weapons by the Bolsheviks to clear the forests of insurgents.
In Ukraine, the Bolsheviks fought Nestor Makhno’s peasant anarchists. In Central Asia, they fought the basmachi movement. An estimated 60,000 peasants took up arms in West Siberia. Even stalwarts of the revolution became enemies of the Bolsheviks. The Petrograd railway workers, who had foiled Kornilov’s coup in August 1917, became the centre of the infamous trade union debate due to their increasing tendency to strike or resist Bolshevik orders. The Kronstadt Uprising was carried out by the very sailors who had brought the Bolsheviks to power, and their suppression led to many a lamentation by the Bolsheviks’ initial supporters.
Peasant resistance was not, as I’ve repeated, limited to resistance against the Reds, and the Whites were equally resisted wherever they took hold. When the traditional representatives of the peasantry, the Socialist Revolutionaries, formed an army in opposition to the Bolsheviks, they too were resisted and opposed by the peasants. Anyone from outside the mir was suspect.
Bolshevik propaganda typically portrays these peasant uprisings as the work of kulak machinations or due to the treacherous Socialist Revolutionaries working against the Revolution. Their resistance against the Whites, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and any others, show this is not the case. In fact, the peasants often made appeals to the revolution and its values, sometimes in a confused manner (such as in the quote that opens this section, “Down with the Communists! Long Live the Bolsheviks!”). “Peace, bread, land” was the same ask by the peasants, just this time levelled against the Bolsheviks.
What we see is the fundamental tension between organised, modernised forces requiring food, and the disparate, disorganised “sack of potatoes” of the peasants with the food. All armies formed during the Civil War, regardless of their political persuasion and including peasant armies, found themselves by necessity needing to impose themselves on the peasantry for food and manpower, or otherwise they would perish.
“Before we are completely routed, let us retreat”
Once the Whites were vanquished and the major revolts eliminated, Bolshevik power remained concentrated in key urban centres, surrounded by vast, almost-foreign countryside, populated not by loyal Bolshevik proletarians, but by these rebellious and intransigent peasants.
Orlando Figes, in his A People’s Tragedy, illustrates this with the anecdote of Sergei Semenov and Grigorii Maliutin. When Semenov — progressive, reformer, moderniser — tries to bring agricultural reform back to his home village, he clashes with Maliutin — peasant elder, Old Believer, and staunch patriarch. To cut the whole saga short (a saga full of intrigue, denunciations, exile, and even an illegitimate child), Maliutin has Semenov assassinated, and his body mutilated with the sign of the cross. The scene of this tragedy, the village of Andreevskoe, was little under one hundred miles from Moscow. While the Bolsheviks were the party of the urban, industrial, proletariat, informed by the science and ideas of Marx and Europe, the countryside remained steeped in superstition, tradition, and customs reaching back hundreds of years.
The pacification of the peasantry was not won through military means alone, but by an explicit retreat of aims and the temporary retraction of Bolshevism over the peasantry. “[T]here cannot be the slightest doubt in their minds that we have sustained a very severe defeat on the economic front,” Lenin would write in October 1921. This was the birth of the so-called “New Economic Policy” (NEP), which meant the removal of more coercive requisition policies, the allowance of free trade, and encouragement of peasants to get rich. It meant, explicitly, “restoring capitalism” in Russia.
“we need to say to the entire peasantry, to all its different strata: enrich yourselves, accumulate, develop your farms.” — Bukharin, 1925.
Migration patterns during the civil war had altered the traditional peasant village. Young men, armed with the worldly experience of fighting a World War and far-flung Civil War, did not return to their communes unchanged. The average peasant household size dropped in this period as these independent young men set out to create their own households, rather than returning to their traditional home and in defiance of patriarchal norms. These new households, though given land by the peasant communes, still often lacked livestock and tools compared to their neighbours.
The liberalisation of the peasant economy during this time would exacerbate these inequalities. Some peasant households were indeed able to enrich themselves, but others fell deeper into poverty. Some peasants were able to reimagine themselves as entrepreneurs, the infamous small traders known as “NEPmen” (named after the New Economic Policy). The important thing to note about all these transformations in the first decade following the revolution, is that they occurred independently and outside of Bolshevik control.
Marx’s, and Lenin’s, theories of the peasantry were in many ways vindicated. The peasantry were a revolutionary force, capable of tearing down the infrastructure of Tsarism, and they were similarly inadequate for producing something new, something socialistic. The Civil War did not end in clear success for the socialist-minded proletariat, but a “very severe defeat and retreat” and “extreme disorder”. This was not yet a totalitarian state, but rather quite the opposite: it was a state that, despite its desires, could not exert control over its population. As we will see in Part Three, this, however, would not remain the case for long.
