The "petit bourgeois mentality" contaminating these insurgent workers was expressed in their opposition to living in hunger, to petty tyranny by "certain individual leaders," to the loss of rights they had enjoyed before the revolution, and in general to conditions that were worse than before the proletarian party took power.
The "petit bourgeois mentality" of the peasants was expressed in their desire to work the land freely, to dispose of the fruits of their labor as they pleased, and not to go back to war. The bloody conflict between the peasants and the Bolsheviks was not the result of grain requisitioning alone. The peasants believed that the revolution would bring them freedom. The ideal of liberty embodied in the ancient Russian word volya, implying total lack of constraints, stirred the vast peasant mass. The soviets were seen as a form of self-government for the countryside that would free it from the burdensome rule of city people. The countryside wanted to live without the cities. In response the cities declared war on the countryside. A "food army" was organized to requisition grain, and draconian measures were employed to suppress peasant unrest. 'To break the kulak resistance, the dictatorship of the proletariat used extraordinary measures: trials before revolutionary tribunals, imprisonment, confiscation of property, the taking of hostages, and even the shooting of people on the spot in cases of armed resistance."144
Any opposition to the Soviet government, any expression of discontent with Bolshevik policies among the peasants, was declared the work of "kulaks." But the term kulak had never been clearly defined. The purported number of kulak households in rural Russia at the time of the revolution and civil war varies depending on the date of the source. In 1924 a Soviet historian wrote: "Under existing conditions in our country, only by stretching the figures could one say that kulak households account for 2 or 3 percent, and for even these households it has not yet been demonstrated clearly enough that they function as kulak households."145 In 1964 a Soviet historian asserted, 'The kulaks represented 15 percent of all peasant households."146 In August 1918 Lenin placed the number of kulak families at 2 million, out of 15 million peasant families.147 But in April 1920, at the Ninth Party Congress, he spoke of only "1 million" rural families engaged in "exploiting the labor of others."148 This figure was insignificant in a country whose population in 1920 was 130.5 million, with 110.8 million living in the countryside.
"The kulak is the enemy" was a formula that made little sense, the definition of kulak being so unclear and the officially acknowledged number of kulaks being so insignificant. Therefore the phrase was turned around: "Any enemy must be a kulak." An initial wave of peasant revolts swept the country in 1918. According to the official figures of the Cheka, between July and November 108 "kulak rebellions" broke out in the Soviet Republic. For the entire year there were "245 major anti-Soviet uprisings in the twenty provinces of Central Russia alone."149
Mikhail Kalinin, president of the Central Executive Committee, who played the role of peasants' representative in the heart of the proletarian party, stated in May 1919: "I believe that unrest among the peasants can only be the result of a misunderstanding, because no better government could be imagined for the peasants than the Soviet government."150 But the peasants were able to imagine a better one quite easily—one without Communists. The peasant revolts rarely put forward explicit political programs, but there were three common demands: an end to grain requisitioning; removal of Communists from the soviets; and an end to Communist terror. One of the most moving documents of the period was a letter of July 31, 1919, to Lenin from Filipp Mironov, commander of a Cossack corps of the Red Army, expressing the grievances primarily of the Cossacks but also of the Russian peasantry as a whole. Mironov objected first of all, in the name of the peasantry, to any immediate leap into communism, the forcing of peasants into communes. "I think," he wrote, "that the Communist system is a lengthy process requiring much patience; it must come from the heart and not by force." Mironov sharply protested the monstrous cruelty that accompanied the establishment of Soviet power in the Don region: "Vladimir Ilyich, it is impossible—I don't have enough time and paper—to describe the horrors of 'Communist construction' on the Don. And in other rural areas it is no better." Mironov rejected what he called "the diabolical plan to exterminate the Cossacks, after which of course would come the turn of the middle peasants." He warned Lenin that if the bloodthirsty policy of the Communist party was not changed it would be necessary to stop fighting Krasnov and start fighting the Communists.151 A former lieutenant colonel in the tsarist army, Mironov had sided with the Bolsheviks immediately after the October revolution and became a celebrated commander of the Red Army. Nevertheless he was executed by the Cheka in Moscow's Butyrki prison in 1921.
The reason for the large number of peasant revolts in Central Russia was that it was within close reach of the urban power centers and was therefore exploited with particular intensity by the requisitioning units. But as the requisitions spread to other regions, the peasants rebelled there, too.
The Cossack regions rose up against the Communists, and so did the Ukraine. A Soviet historian notes, "In the Ukraine by mid-1919 the entire peasantry, all sections of it, were opposed to Soviet power."152 A party official admitted in 1920: "In the Makhno movement it is hard to tell where the poor peasant leaves off and where the kulak begins. It was a mass peasant movement."153
In March 1919 a Red Army brigade that had been sent to Byelorussia rebelled. The insurgents took Gomel and Rechitsa. The brigade consisted mainly of peasant soldiers from Tula, who made common cause with the local insurgent committee of Polesye, which represented the Byelorussian peasantry. In an appeal to the peasants the new commander of this "First Army of the People's Republic," an ensign named Strekopytov, announced the formation of a "new people's power," the abolition of grain requisitioning and emergency taxes, and an end to the war. The slogans of the insurrection were: (1) all power to the Constituent Assembly; (2) a mixture of private and governmental initiative in commerce and industry; (3) strict laws protecting the interests of labor; (4) respect for civil liberties in practice; (5) land to the people; and (6) entry into the League of Nations by the Russian Republic.154
In early 1919 a peasant revolt broke out in the middle Volga region— the so-called chapan revolt.155 Intensified grain requisitioning in the Volga region was accompanied by
a series of additional obligations: delivery of carts to the army; provision of firewood for the cities and the railroad; compulsory hauling of goods for the army; and commandeering of horses. ... At the same time the disrupted transport system and the priority given military shipments prevented manufactured goods and other supplies from being delivered in return for the grain sent to the cities.156
The insurgents captured several towns and nearly reached Syzran.
In the Fergana region of Central Asia in the summer of 1919 the Peasant Army, organized to protect the Russian population from armed units of Muslim peasants, reversed itself and reached an agreement with the anti- Bolshevik Muslims. The Peasant Army, under the command of К. I. Monstrov, agreed to joint operations with the Muslim peasants of Madamin- bek.157 As in other regions, the spark that set off the insurrection was requisitioning and the "grain monopoly," which came to Turkestan that summer.