For the year 1921-22 the tax in kind was set at 240 million poods (2.5 million centners) of grain, approximately one third of the amount previously set for requisitioning during that year. One might conclude that this was a substantial easing of the burden on the peasantry—except for the fact that about 240 million poods had actually been requisitioned during 1920-21. The "easing of the burden" can be judged more precisely if the tax in kind is compared to the direct taxes imposed before 1914: the tax in kind was 399 percent of the 1914 tax.9 The significance of the policy change was not that it eased the tax burden but that it limited arbitrary action by the state. On March 8, 1921, the peasants of Panfilov Township (volost), in the Gryazevetsk District of Vologda Province addressed a letter to "our beloved leader and great genius, Comrade Lenin." They informed him:
At the present time practically everything has been taken from the peasants of our township—bread, grain, livestock, hay, raw materials. ... In 1920 because of the drought the yield relative to seed grain was only four to one, but the agents of the food supply committee did their requisitioning on the basis of a six-to-one yield.
The Vologda peasants, begging not to be considered "pernicious elements" but on the contrary "citizens wishing to do fruitful work to strengthen the liberty of the workers and peasants," proposed that requisitioning be replaced by a tax in kind, so that the peasants "would know how much tax was owed and when it was due."10 The decree on the tax in kind regularized both matters.
The new policy could not be limited to the tax change. It implied that the peasants could increase agricultural production without fear of confiscation. But it made no sense to allow this surplus unless it could be sold legally. Up to the last Lenin did not wish to abandon his dream of an immediate leap into communism. At the Tenth Party Congress Trotsky recalled that a year earlier, in February 1920, he himself had suggested that a tax in kind be substituted for requisitioning. At the Eighth Congress of Soviets, in December 1920, the Mensheviks and SRs—the last time they were allowed to participate openly in a discussion—urged that grain requisitioning be abandoned. Lenin rejected all these proposals as constituting a return to capitalism. In his conception commerce and capitalism were the same thing; consequently, freedom to trade meant a step back toward capitalism. At the end of 1920 a decree was passed declaring that all food products held by the state would thenceforth be given out free of charge. Actually there was hardly any food, but the Bolshevik leaders still thought that communism was just around the corner.
In abandoning grain requisitioning, Lenin clung compulsively to the hope that he could avoid granting freedom of trade, that he would not have to allow the market to sully the purity of communist relations. Under his plan, exchange between peasant producers would remain strictly a local phenomenon (with products being transported by horsedrawn vehicles only, not over the rails). This trade would be more like barter than buying and selling. Utopianism died hard. But reality proved stronger. In the fall of 1921 the leader of the revolution was forced to admit: "[The] system of commodity exchange has broken down. ... Nothing has come of commodity exchange; the private market has proved too strong for us; and instead of the exchange of commodities we have gotten ordinary buying and selling, trade."11 The New Economic Policy likewise marked a 180-degree turn in industry. Small private businesses were authorized, individuals were allowed to rent large enterprises, and foreigners were allowed to lease some factories and mining operations as concessions. Even more important was the change in attitude toward labor. Workers had taken part in all protests against the Communist regime, but their discontent was most vividly expressed in the sharp decline of labor productivity. "In the years 1919- 1920 the average output annually of a worker was only 45 percent of the quantity of products that resulted from his labor before the war."12 The plan for a "great leap forward" into communism based itself on the need to force the workers to work. Just as Dzerzhinsky had proclaimed the concentration camps to be "schools of labor," Trotsky advocated the "militarization of labor" and the formation of "labor armies."13 The people's commissar of war questioned the notion that slave labor was unproductive. "Is it true that compulsory labor is always unproductive? We have to reply that is the most pitiful and worthless liberal prejudice."14 Human beings do not want to work, Trotsky argued, but social organization forces them to, driving them to it with a whip. If it were true that compulsory labor was unproductive, he argued, "our entire socialist economy would be doomed to failure. For we can have no way to socialism except by the authoritative regulation of the economic forces and resources of the country, and the centralized distribution of labor power in harmony with the general state plan."15 The NEP constituted an admission that forced labor was unproductive after all. It was an attempt to find "another road to socialism." The principle of concentration, the amalgamation of enterprises into "trusts," was introduced, along with that of khozraschet (the requirement that an enterprise be financially self-sustaining, rather than dependent on central state funds). On January 1, 1922, the principle of self-financing was extended to the forced labor camps. Pravda wrote on August 30, 1922: 'The experience of the first few months during which the compulsory labor camps have operated on the basis of self-financing have produced positive results."
In 1921, after all the horrors of world war, revolution, and civil war, one more calamity befell Russia: a famine of such severity as the country had never known.
The threat of famine became evident early in the summer of 1921. At first the government sought to minimize the extent of the disaster. On August 6, in an appeal to the world proletariat, Lenin announced that "several provinces" of Russia were affected by a famine no less terrible than the famine of 1891. The population of the famine-struck Volga region in 1891 was 964,627. In 1921 the count was in the millions: no less than 20 percent of the country's population and more than 25 percent of the rural population starved.16 The famine was grisly. The writer Mikhail Osorgin, editor of the newsletter Pomoshch (Relief), the organ of the All-Russia Famine Relief Committee, knew the situation in the areas of famine from the hundreds of letters the committee received. He wrote about the cannibalism that became an everyday occurrence: "People mainly ate members of their own families as they died, feeding on the older children, but not sparing newborn infants either, those who had hardly had the chance to live, despite the fact that there wasn't much to them. People ate off to themselves, not sitting together at a table, and no one talked about it."17 The famine was a test of the capabilities of the new system. For the first time it confronted a task that could not be solved by force. The success of the October revolution and the victory in the civil war had created a mentality of omnipotence among the Bolsheviks, the conviction that everything could be solved by a soldier's rifle or a Chekist's pistol. Ekaterina Kuskova recalled an account by Bonch-Bruevich of a visit to the Kremlin by Maxim Gorky in 1919.
We entered an office and found Lenin bent over some documents in deep concentration. "What are you doing?" Gorky asked. "I'm thinking about the best way to cut the throats of all the kulaks who won't give bread to the people." "Now that's an original occupation!" Gorky exclaimed. "Yes, we are taking them head on in the fight for bread, the most elementary question of human existence."18