The party's decision to employ force in the villages also contributed to the famine of 1921-3, which provided the Bolsheviks with an opportunity they exploited to fortify their position. Although climatic conditions played a role in the famine's origins, the major cause was Bolshevik agricultural policies.[175]Moscow did not knowingly allow the famine to develop, but it ignored local reports until late spring 1921, when mass discontent and chilling news on the magnitude of the potential human suffering put an end to any doubts about the gravity of the crisis.
If the civil war was a process whereby a fractious society renegotiated its values, then the government's rapacious policies in the villages, the rupture of market relations and the increase in savagery strengthened the internal mechanisms of cohesion in the countryside and the appeal of landownership at the expense of whatever collectivist principles might have existed. Largely alienated from power, the peasant withdrew into the local economy and everyday life. In order to survive, the peasant had to become more self-sufficient by the winter of 1918-19. The famine furthered this trend. Ironically, by the end of the civil war many peasants rejected communal land tenure even though during the revolution they had clamoured for egalitarian distribution.[176]
Workers against Bolsheviks
Although the Bolsheviks understood and depicted the events of October 1917 as a workers' revolution, many workers became alienated from the new party- state. Their world-view shaped by ideology, Bolsheviks interpreted workers' estrangement as the consequence of de-urbanisation during the civil war, and not as a change in workers' attitudes, maintaining that the number of'real' proletarians (in effect, a metaphysical concept tautologically defined as a worker who supported the party) simply had declined. The social turmoil at this time did reduce the size ofRussia's working class and reconfigure its gender and age composition. Many workers perished; most who enrolled in the Communist Party left their factory benches to serve in the burgeoning state bureaucracy. Others entered the Red Army, returned to the villages or joined the ranks of the unemployed. Yet a substantial core of urban workers remained in the factories, and their attitudes towards the Bolsheviks were indeed transformed. Working-class consciousness did not disappear during the civil war, but found expression in resistance to and circumvention of Bolshevik practices, both in the implicit language of symbolic activity such as labour absenteeism and foot-dragging, and in more antagonistic ways. A consciousness based on their experience of dealing with the Bolsheviks gave some workers their own collective identities outside those the Bolsheviks created for them. While economic hardship certainly galvanised workers during the civil war, they also blamed the Bolsheviks for the rift within the democracy, political repression and the betrayal of the promises of 1917.
Debate over issues of labour policy already rocked the party in the weeks following October 1917, when the Bolsheviks reconsidered the role factory committees and trade unions would play under the new regime. As factory committees began to run rather than supervise factory administrations, the Bolsheviks realised that spontaneous industrial democracy could become a political handicap. As a result, they reorganised unions by industry, thereby undermining the factory committees, and then made the unions extensions of party organs. This transformation proved to be highly contested, especially since Mensheviks backed independent trade unions. Workers, in the meantime, enrolled in them to obtain larger rations. The union leadership's support in 1920 of centralisation, discipline and labour conscription further alienated them from workers. Tensions within the Communist Party over labour conscription and other controversial policies resulted in angry debate over what role unions should play in the post-war environment, involving the so-called Workers' Opposition associated with A. G. Shliapnikov, the Democratic Centralists, as well as Lenin and Trotsky. Strictly a party affair, the debate did not appeal to workers.[177]
The further deterioration of the economy - as well as discontent over broken political promises - drove many workers into the opposition. The collapse of the economy resulted in factory closures and unemployment. Wages did not keep up with prices, despite a chaotic system of bonus pay. To survive, workers were forced to rely on the black market and on other survival strategies such as pilfering, absenteeism and shirking responsibilities. The economic experience of civil war thus left an indelible imprint on their individual and mass consciousness by shaping a culture of mutual dependence in conditions of utmost want. Growing indifference towards work and a drop in labour discipline had manifested themselves already in 1918. The situation deteriorated in 1919, when fuel shortages shut down factories.
Needing working-class support in order to justify and rationalise the dictatorship of the proletariat they claimed to have established, the Bolsheviks endowed workers with a symbolic capital that the party manipulated through its control over the language used to give meaning to the term 'worker'. Invoking class as a weapon of exclusion and inclusion in their efforts to reconfigure Russian culture, the Bolsheviks reconstructed a working-class identity. Given the claims the party made about the working class, the new identity the party formulated for workers became something one attained through correct behaviour. Class had become a social-psychological and political projection in which any act of opposition brought symbolic expulsion from the ranks of the true proletariat and confinement to the ranks of an inferior class 'other'. As one Communist put it, 'given his class position a worker can be nothing but a Communist'.[178]
The party viewed workers hierarchically, casting highly skilled members of the industrial proletariat as the conscious revolutionary vanguard that supported Soviet power. But it was precisely these workers who challenged the Bolsheviks the most.49 Denying workers agency, the party depicted dissatisfaction among skilled workers as temporary wavering caused by the deceptive propaganda practices of rival socialist parties, and opposition among unskilled and female workers as the result of their lack of consciousness. As the civil war deepened, the Bolsheviks blamed the physical disappearance of the working class for labour conflicts, representing opposition as the work of counterrevolutionaries, saboteurs and misguided peasant workers.
Although economic issues provided the venue for voicing dissatisfaction, workers' actions indicate that they understood economic life as contested political ground. Workers expressed their consciousness in routine acts of resistance and circumvention: voting against Communist candidates and resolutions, abstaining from voting when elections lacked real choices, foot-dragging, inertia, absenteeism, pilfering, dissimulation, co-opting Soviet public language and practices and using them to their advantage, spreading rumours and so on. They opposed one-party rule, the silencing of the opposition press, attempts to co-opt labour organs and other repressive measures. Such opposition often amounted to demands for secret ballots during elections to factory committees and soviets. For their part, the Bolsheviks alternated between repression and solicitousness, depending upon how vulnerable they felt, but remained determined to control, manipulate and repress the workers' movement so as not to encourage the opposition.50
175
James W. Long, 'The Volga Germans and the Famine of 1921',
177
See Larry E. Holmes, 'For the Revolution Redeemed: The Workers Opposition in the Bolshevik Party 1919-1921',