1. Hang (it must be hanging, so that the narod sees) no fewer than one hundred notorious kulaks, rich people, bloodsuckers.
2. Publish their names.
3. Extract all grain from them.
4. Designate hostages, in accordance with yesterday’s telegram.
Do this in such a way that for hundreds of miles around the narod sees, thrills, knows, cries out: they are strangling and will strangle the bloodsucker kulaks.
Telegraph receipt and implementation.
PS: Find people who are tougher.33
Why did Lenin insist that ‘the interest of the revolution as a whole’ demanded this grisly display of violence? His primary motivation was the food-supply crisis, that is, the need to feed people living in the cities, soldiers in the army and even those peasants who lived in the grain-deficit areas of Russia. From the outbreak of war in 1914 food-supply difficulties had been the motor that drove the unrelenting economic breakdown. Lack of exchange items, transportation problems and local embargoes had led to severe food shortages, and these in turn led to further economic, social and political dislocation. The Bolshevik’s two predecessor governments – the tsarist and Provisional Government – had both moved steadily toward compulsory delivery of surpluses as a solution to the crisis. Surpluses (izlishki) were defined as all grain above a certain amount that was reserved for the peasant’s own consumption and sowing.
All three regimes of the period – tsarist, Provisional Government and Bolshevik – strove to use material incentives to obtain grain, but all three were willing to use force to ensure delivery by grain producers. The tsarist and Provisional Government each collapsed, in large part due to their ineffective food-supply policies, and their collapse only further intensified the direness of Russia’s situation. The Bolsheviks had to come up with an effective response or they too would join their predecessors in the dustbin of history.
The sharpness of the crisis was intensified in summer 1918 by the consequences of the Brest-Litovsk treaty and the incipient civil war. Crucial grain-surplus regions – Ukraine, Volga, Siberia, North Caucasus – were cut off by German occupation and hostilities in the Volga region. Under these circumstances any grain-surplus region that remained under Bolshevik control became crucial, and so the Bolsheviks pinned their survival hopes on provinces like Penza. In August 1918 Lenin dashed off many telegrams on food-supply policy that show him desperately trying to get grain by any means. Providing bonuses for prompt delivery was the central strategy: ‘Give out bonuses to counties and villages in the form of equipment, money for schools and hospitals and, in general, predominantly for such aims.’ Lenin urged helping with the harvest, plus extensive agitation efforts to explain why the grain was needed. He hoped to get grain from former landowner estates that were now state farms run by poor peasants. He also demanded the taking of hostages ‘from among the rich’ and other applications of force to ensure compulsory deliveries. To cite only Lenin’s telegrams that mandate the use of bonuses as material incentives would of course be seriously misleading. To cite only his telegrams demanding the use of force is equally misleading.34
The repression that Lenin demanded in the telegram to Penza was occasioned by a peasant uprising in protest against compulsory food-supply deliveries that broke out on 5 August 1918. Peasants in the village of Kuchi killed five Red Army soldiers and three members of the local soviet. The rebellion spread to other villages close by. All this was happening 45 kilometres from the civil-war front, which partly explains Lenin’s panicky response. Despite Lenin’s demands for a hundred hangings, the rebellion was quelled by August 12 by shooting thirteen ringleaders in the village of Kuchi for being directly responsible for the deaths of state representatives.
Do we need to resort to Lenin’s individual personality or to his ideological scenario in order to explain his demand in the Penza telegram for grisly reprisals against violent rebellion? Neither explanation seems likely, as shown by similar actions taken by people who did not share Lenin’s personality or his ideology, but who did share his objective problem, namely, establishing a new political authority in conditions of social chaos and economic breakdown. One non-Bolshevik activist, A. V. Peshekhonov, later recalled waking up one morning in Rostov under one of the anti-Bolshevik White governments and finding corpses hanging from the lampposts all over town, by order of the government.35
Nevertheless, knowledge of Lenin’s heroic scenario is needed to make full sense of the Penza telegram. Lenin insists that the narod should see the hangings. Why? to terrorize them? Not in Lenin’s mind. Lenin was convinced that the narod hated the ‘blood sucker kulaks’ and would praise the worker vlast for taking them on. The executions were meant as a form of inspiring class leadership. As such, they played a part in a narrative that Lenin was telling himself and others in autumn 1918. According to Lenin, civil-war battles had provoked kulak uprisings such as the one in Penza and these in turn accelerated the workings of his heroic scenario. Lenin’s long-held scenario outlined, first, a political revolution against the tsar in alliance with the whole peasantry and, second, a socialist revolution made possible by the urban proletariat’s growing influence over the rural proletariat and semi-proletariat. The revolution of October 1917 had been in alliance with the whole peasantry and thus, by the logic of Lenin’s own scenario, it was essentially a political rather than a true socialist revolution. Lenin’s loyalty to his scenario is shown by his eagerness in late 1918 to announce that kulak rebellions had kick-started a new phase of the revolution, one in which the kulak exploiters were finally sloughed off from the revolutionary coalition, thus allowing the workers to fight alongside only the exploited labourers in the village.
Lenin seems to be actually encouraged by this loss of a class ally. The heart of Marxism is the claim that only those who themselves are exploited can build socialism. The Russian revolution could therefore truly be called a socialist one only when the workers were allied with the exploited labourers in the countryside, and with no one else. Thus Lenin insisted in late 1918 that the class conflict taking place during in the most remote villages of Russia portended a revolution whose significance was ‘incomparably deeper and greater’ than the Bolshevik October revolution of 1917:
This [new phase of] struggle has cut off the property-owning and exploiting classes from the revolution completely; it definitely puts our revolution on the socialist road, just as the urban working class had tried so hard and vigorously to do in October [1917]. The working class will not be able to direct the revolution successfully along this road unless it finds firm, deliberate and solid support in the countryside.36
In his polemic against Kautsky written in autumn 1918 during his convalescence from the attempt on his life – Renegade Kautsky and the Proletarian Revolution – Lenin argued that the proletariat’s proven ability to ‘rally the village poor around itself against the rich peasants’ was a sign that Russia was in fact ripe for socialist revolution, contrary to Kautsky’s claim. The pre-war Kautsky – ‘Kautsky when he was a Marxist’ – understood this. Why did the renegade Kautsky of 1918 deny it, just when ‘things have turned out just as we said they would’?37 This reasoning convinced Lenin that food-supply difficulties were sparking ‘the last, final struggle’ with kulakdom (to use the apocalyptic words of the Internationale, the socialist hymn quoted in the Penza telegram). In reality, these same difficulties were prodding food-supply officials to make a much more pragmatic response. The attempt to use ‘class war in the villages’ to obtain grain had clearly backfired, causing a definite retreat toward new food-supply policies that aimed at meeting the peasant halfway. Lenin’s rhetoric fully caught up with these shifts only in 1919.