War Communism, 1918-20
They [the Bolsheviks] didn't understand peasants very well.
(Moshe Lewin, The Making of Soviet Society)
The policy of War Communism emerged in response to a series of material disasters, each one sufficient to overwhelm and destroy a stable political order, much less a fragile hierarchy of soviets controlled at the top by a few hundred revolutionaries wholly without administrative experience. Between 1918 and 1921, the Soviet Union was invaded and dismembered by Imperial Germany, torn apart by civil war, weakened by Allied military intervention and deprived of its major grain and fuel-producing territories. The destruction of gentry privilege and the relative powerlessness of the central government provided peasants with the opportunity - for perhaps the first time in their history - to construct their lives free of the constraints traditionally imposed by various social and political elites. In what has been described as a post-October 'anti- Stolypin revolution',[32] 96 per cent of the rural population in thirty-nine out of forty-seven provinces had become commune members by 1920.17 Attempting to foster traditional labour principles and social equality (poravnenie) in the countryside, peasants were on occasion even willing to allot land to former squires as commune members on condition that the squires were themselves willing to labour on it.[33]
Unsurprisingly, peasants placed a low priority on meeting the needs of urban proletarians who provided them with little in exchange for the grain they produced. Terrified at the prospect of urban workers fleeing to the countryside in search of food, the Soviet government organised 'Committees of the Poor' (kombedy) to incite a rural class war between proletarians and kulaks, and confiscate the latter's ill-gotten gains. But since peasants were in 1918 more materially and socially equal than everbefore in their history, they chose instead to close ranks against the kombedy and rejected Soviet efforts to divide them.
While the economist Preobrazhenskii contended that War Communism embodied the highest socialist principle of taking from each according to ability and giving to each according to need, Lenin was more honest: 'we actually took from the peasants all their surpluses, and sometimes even what was not surplus but part of what was necessary to the peasant. We took it to cover the costs of the army and to maintain the workers . . . Otherwise we could not have beaten the landowners and the capitalists.'[34] By the end of 1918, the kombedy were dissolved, but the food crisis continued. Alongside the legal channels of distribution, peasants constructed a black market and devised systems of barter that rendered the formal organs of state control irrelevant to the process of exchange.
Although government statistics indicated that most peasants produced no merchandise, sold a fraction of their produce and reserved most of it for internal family consumption,20 it is significant that they remained - from the Soviet standpoint - an eternally petty bourgeois element, mired in the 'idiocy of rural life'. Urban-educated party enthusiasts confidently assumed that peasants understood nothing about farming, and inundated them with exhortations and prescriptions for what, how much and even where they should sow their crops. Although the Soviet government made use of peasant communes to collect taxes, the Land Statute of i9i9 oddly categorised communes as 'individual' holders of land. Trusting only their own institutions, Lenin and his supporters constructed a network of rural soviets, and vainly encouraged peasants to join collective and state farms. To obscure the commune's dominant presence in the countryside, official documents referred to it as a rural society (sel'skoe obshchestvo); but peasants themselves generally used the word mir.
From an economic and political standpoint, the policies of War Communism were disastrous. By 1920, grain production stood at 60 per cent of its pre-war level, and Soviet leaders were powerless either to constrain or to mobilise the peasantry. For their part, the peasantry's 1917 support for the Bolsheviks, subsequent action to minimise economic inequalities and support for labour rights in the countryside did not win them acceptance as a core political constituency for the Soviet Marxist leadership. It was extremely fortunate for the latter that their enemies in the civil war were frequently even more brutal and repressive in their treatment of the peasant population.21
NEP, 1921-8
Peasants are satisfied with their situation... We consider this more important than any sort of statistical evidence. No one can doubt that the peasantry is the decisive factor with us. (Lenin, 1922)
By March 1921, the civil war and the US/Allied intervention were over, and forcible repression of the Kronstadt uprising was under way. The Red Army's brutal show of force against dissenters coincided with the abandonment of War Communism. In its place, a New Economic Policy (NEP) attempted to defuse peasant discontent and foster economic recovery by restoring a more freely functioning market and more flexible approaches to economic and non- economic issues. An infinitely cynical Stalin - expertly capturing the party's new and more tolerant stance towards the peasantry - derided the carelessness with which the term 'kulak' was frequently used. 'If a peasant puts on a new roof,' he joked, 'they call him a kulak.'22
Described by Lenin as a 'retreat' in the direction of capitalism, NEP revealed in full measure the improvisatory political skills that originally propelled the Bolsheviks to victory in October 1917. Replacing forced grain requisitions with fixed taxes on individual households, the state left peasants free to trade with the remainder, and granted freedom of choice in forms of landholding. The Land Code of 1922 permitted individuals to farm the land with their own labour, and hire labour on condition that employers worked alongside employees. In a 'balancing act' typical of the NEP era, the Soviet state reverted to pre- 1905 peasant customary law by abrogating Stolypin's transfer of household
21 P. Kenez, Civil War in South Russia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 8-9; 316.
22 Stalin, quoted in Atkinson, End, p. 281.
property to the bol'shak, but challenged peasant tradition by declaring women to be equal members of the household, with equal rights to participate in the commune assembly alongside males.
Hopeful that state-created rural soviets could persuade 'middle' and poorer peasants to join collective and state farms, NEP reformers celebrated the economic achievements of the so-called 'Red khutors' of Nizhnii Novgorod. At the same time, the economic successes unexpectedly manifest in commune districts briefly inspired M. I. Kalinin to hope for 'the transformation of the mir from an organisation of darkness, illiteracy and traditionalism into, as it were, a productive cooperative organisation'.23 In the words ofK. Ia. Bauman, socialisation of the individual production process of the whole village (cultivation, threshing and so on) was proceeding 'like an avalanche (sploshnoi lavinoi)'. In a single district in Moscow province, 5,204 out of 6,458 commune villages introduced new systems of crop rotation during the year 1926 alone.24
32
See S. Maksudov,
33
O. Figes, 'Peasant Farmers and the Minority Groups of Rural Society: Peasant Egal- itarianism and Village Social Relations during the Russian Revolution (1917-1921)', in Kingston-Mann and Mixter,