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The peasant revolution

The political awareness of the peasantry was low, but historians often exaggerate the cultural and political isolation of the village. In the last decades of tsarism, the expanding market for agricultural goods, large-scale migration, the impact of urban consumer culture, rising rates of literacy, mass conscription, and the arrival of refugees, had brought new ideas and values to the village.[97] In 1917 soldiers returning from the front played a vital role in bringing politics into the village, as did agitators sent by urban soviets and labour organisations. The Petrograd Soviet of Peasant Deputies, for example, sent about 3,000 agitators into the countryside, armed with agitational literature produced at a cost of 65,000 roubles.[98] Educated folk were full of tales about the political ignorance of the peasantry, but peasants latched on to elements in the discourse of revolution - such as those of self-government, citizenship and socialism - reinterpreting them according to their lights.[99] Dissatisfaction over the state grain monopoly and the slow progress on land reform caused peasants gradually to become disillusioned with the Provisional Government. This, together with a desperate desire to see peace, a growing attraction to soviet power and an idealised vision of socialism, strengthened peasant support in autumn 1917 for the Left SRs and, to a lesser extent, the Bolsheviks.

The first issue that brought peasants into conflict with the government was that of the state grain monopoly. The war had seen a small decline in the amount of grain grown but, more worryingly, a more substantial fall in the amount of grain marketed, from one quarter of the harvest in 1913 to one sixth in i9i7. Peasants had little incentive to sell grain given galloping inflation and the shortage of consumer goods. The Provisional Government's efforts to force peasants to sell grain at fixed prices provoked them into concealing grain or turning it into alcohol.[100] The second issue that brought peasants into conflict with the government was that of land redistribution. Peasants believed that the revolution would redress the historic wrong done to them at the time of the emancipation of the serfs by transferring gentry, Church and state lands into the hands of those who worked them. The new government, however, had no stomach for carrying out a massive land reform at a time of war. Moreover, it was split between Kadets, who insisted that landlords be fully compensated for land taken from them, and Chernov, who wished to see the orderly transfer of land via the land committees to those who worked it. With a view to allowing the Constituent Assembly to decide the question, the government set up a somewhat bureaucratic structure ofland committees to prepare a detailed land settlement, region by region. This only served to heighten peasant expectations.

From late spring, a struggle began between peasants and landlords. Initially, peasants were cautious, testing the capacity of local authorities to curb their encroachments on landlord property. They unilaterally reduced or failed to pay rent, grazed cattle illegally on the landowners' estates, stole wood from their forests and took over uncultivated tracts of gentry land on the pretext that it would otherwise remain unsown. In the non-Black Earth zone, where dairy and livestock farming were critical, they tried to get their hands on meadows and pasture. Seeing the inability of local commissars to respond, illegal acts multiplied, levelling off during harvest from mid-July to mid-August, but climbing sharply from September. Generally, the village gathering authorised these actions, returning soldiers often spurring it on. By autumn the agrarian movement was in full swing, with peasants increasingly seizing gentry land, equipment and livestock and distributing them outright. The movement was fiercest in the overcrowded central Black Earth and middle Volga provinces and in Ukraine. The government introduced martial law in Tambov, Orel, Tula, Riazan', Penza and Saratov provinces, but soldiers in rear garrisons could not be relied upon to put down peasant rebels. The Union of Landowners and Farmers castigated the government for failing to defend the rights of private property.[101]

Political polarisation

By summer the economy was buckling under the strain of war.[102] In the first half of 1917 production of fuel and raw materials fell by over a third and gross factory output over the year fell by 36 per cent compared with 1916. As a result, enterprises closed and by October nearly half a million workers had been laid off. The crisis was aggravated by mounting chaos in the transport system, which meant that grain and industrial supplies failed to get through to the towns. The government debt rose to an astronomical 49 billion roubles, of which 11.2 billion was owed on foreign loans, and the government reacted by printing money, further fuelling inflation. Between July and October prices rose fourfold and in Moscow and Petrograd the real value of wages halved in the second half of the year.

As the economic crisis deepened, class conflict intensified. Between February and October, 2.5 million workers went on strike, stoppages increasing in scale as the year wore on, but becoming ever harder to win.[103] The trade unions, which by October had over two million members, were organised mainly along industry-wide lines. They endeavoured to negotiate collective wage agreements with employers' organisations, but negotiations were protracted and served to exacerbate class antagonism.[104] For their part, the factory committees implemented workers' control of production to prevent what they believed to be widespread 'sabotage' by employers. Workers' control signified the close monitoring of the activities of management, rather than its displacement, but it was fed by deep-seated aspirations for workplace democracy. The idea of workers' control, though not emanating from any political party, was taken up by Bolsheviks, anarchists and some Left SRs; it proved to be a key reason why worker support shifted in their favour. By contrast, the insistence of the moderate socialists that only state regulation could restore order to the economy - and that 'control' by individual factory committees only exacerbated the crisis - was another cause of their undoing.[105] Industrialists, resenting any infringement of their right to manage, resorted to ever more extreme measures, including lockouts and the closure of mines and factories in the Urals and Donbass.[106] Having failed to form a single national organisation to represent their interests, they, too, became alienated from the 'socialist' government.

By summer a discourse ofclass was in the ascendant, symbolised in the substitution of the word 'comrade' for 'citizen' as the favoured form of address.[107]Given the underdevelopment of class relations in Russia, and the key role played in the revolution by non-class groups such as soldiers and nationalist movements, this was a remarkable development. After all, the language of class, at least in its Marxist guise, had entered politics only since 1905. Yet it proved easily assimilable since it played on a binary opposition that ran deep in popular culture between 'them', the verkhi, that is those at the top, and 'us', the nizy, that is those at the bottom. People's identities, of course, were multiple - one was not only a worker, but a Russian, a woman, a young person - yet 'class' came to reconfigure identities of nation, gender and youth in its own terms. 'We' could signify the working class, 'proletarian youth', 'working women', the 'toilingpeople' (i.e. peasants as well as workers) or 'revolutionary democracy'. 'They' could signify capitalists, landlords, army generals or, at its most visceral, the burzhui, anyone with an overbearing manner, an education, soft hands or spectacles.[108] Faced by what they perceived to be an elemental conflict tearing the heart out of the Russian nation, the Kadets struggled to uphold a conception of 'state-mindedness', appealing to Russians to set aside all class and sectional strife.[109] In 1918 the liberal P. V Struve characterised the Russian Revolution as 'the first case in world history of the triumph of internationalism and the class idea over nationalism and the national idea'.[110] But this was only partly true. For if exponents of class politics rejected the Kadet vision of the nation under siege - as well as the moderate socialist vision of 'unity of all the vital forces of the nation' - the exponents of class politics never entirely rejected the appeal to the nation: rather they engaged in a struggle to redefine the 'nation' in terms of its toiling people, playing on the ambivalence that inheres in the Russian word narod, which can mean both 'nation' and 'common people'.[111]