7
Majority of the People
Historically, there had been a decades-long controversy among Russian revolutionaries over how the overthrow of tsarism and how the movement toward socialism might be accomplished. From the late 1880s down to 1917 and beyond, the two basic positions to emerge were that of the “populists” and that of the Marxists—the first positing a revolution based on the vast peasantry (in some cases assuming that capitalism could be bypassed altogether), the second positing a revolution based on the rising working class (in all cases insisting that capitalism was already and inevitably triumphing in Russia).1
In what follows, I will try to do justice to different lines of argument (each of which grasps aspects of the complex reality), but for the sake of clarity, I will state here that my own view tilts in the direction of Marxists who embrace Socialist Revolutionary insights.
Among Russia’s revolutionary Marxists, Lenin arguably developed the most insightful and the shrewdest approach to “the peasant question.” Russian Marxists—guided by the central thrust of Marx’s own analysis—focused on the modern proletariat that arose within the dynamic development of industrial capitalism. Lenin was no exception, and until 1917 he shared the general conviction that industrially backward, overwhelmingly agricultural Russia would first have to experience a thoroughgoing bourgeois-democratic revolution that would sweep away the authoritarian tsarist system of semi-feudalism/semi-capitalism—allowing for the full development of industrial capitalism and a bourgeois-democratic polity within which a dramatically expanding proletariat could both become the majority of the people and wage the ultimately triumphant struggle to “win the battle of democracy” (as the Communist Manifesto had put it).
Yet Lenin seems to have had a keener sense than many of the limitations and unreliability of the Russian bourgeoisie. More important, he had a keener appreciation of the combined oppression and revolutionary potential of the Russian peasantry. In contrast to his mentor George Plekhanov and other comrades who became Mensheviks, Lenin and (largely thanks to him) his Bolshevik comrades were able to develop a more radical, consistent, and uncompromising approach to the bourgeois-democratic revolution that was based on the central strategic conception of a worker-peasant alliance.
It can be argued that as a consistent Marxist, Lenin also had a decisive edge over the revolutionary populists of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, who were influenced by Marxism, to be sure, but maintained a critical distance from the Marxist mainstream that traditionally gave short shrift to the peasants. The nature of the working class was in important ways qualitatively different from that of the peasantry. The working class was concentrated more compactly than the peasants in a collective labor process, often within an industrial capitalist workplace, and these new proletarian layers were stimulated to think critically of their often new and dynamically changing surroundings. Increasing numbers of workers were becoming literate and in many cases were experiencing a growing scientific awareness, at the same time enduring what was increasingly and obviously the oppressive exploitation of their labor-power from which actual labor was squeezed in order to enrich their employers. All of this generated study circles, discussion groups, trade unions, reform struggles, and political organizations—and the consequent labor movement and class struggles gave the edge to the revolutionary struggle that could not be found so easily within the vast peasantry. A discussion of the difference between the worker and the peasant by one of Lenin’s protégés, Nikolai Bukharin, is suggestive of how Bolsheviks saw the matter:
Every worker becomes accustomed to working back to back with other workers in the same position. Concentrated in enormous masses, the workers live and work in gigantic factories and plants, in the mines and pits. Not only do they learn to hate and mistrust the bourgeoisie, to unmask every betrayal, but they also learn to strike back in unison. They grow steadily more accustomed to the belief that they can defeat the enemy only through joint action, and that once the enemy has been defeated, only jointly can they reconstruct the entire economy and administer the country they have taken from the bourgeoisie. Urban culture places at their disposal the means with which the workers can build their ranks into a structured army, do battle against the domination of the landlords and the capitalists, and unravel all the guile of the enemy. With the peasant, matters are quite different. The peasant works by himself, on his own farm, with his family and his household. With few exceptions (for instance, mowing, etc.) he is unaccustomed to working in common along with his fellow villagers. He has his own separate, private farm; and he is concerned, first and foremost, with the interests of his own petty undertaking. The conditions of rural life are such that he is seldom beyond the outskirts of the village. Even today there are still peasants who have never been so far as the district capital, and others have never traveled on a railroad.2
The contrast perhaps contains overstatement and distortion, but few would argue that it has no correspondence to social realities in early twentieth-
century Russia. Either because of this proletarian edge, or coinciding with it, Lenin’s vision and political instincts certainly proved to be sharper than those of the Socialist Revolutionaries. And the practical-political results of Lenin’s approach—grounded as it was in the labor movement—ultimately proved to be far more effective than what the SRs were able to accomplish. At the same time, it can also be argued, Lenin’s Marxist insights tended to tilt in the direction of applying a schematic approach to rural Russia’s complex actualities to which the Socialist Revolutionaries were actually more sensitive. On some level, Lenin perceived this, adapting at decisive moments (but not, as we shall see, at all moments) to their perspectives.
The day after their 1917 seizure of power, the Bolsheviks submitted two decrees for consideration to the All-Russia Congress of Soviets, and both were unanimously approved. One was a decree for peace, declaring Russia’s withdrawal from the First World War. The other was a decree for land—essentially giving Russia’s agricultural lands to the peasants. Specifically, it declared the abolition of private property, with all lands held by landlords, the state, and the Russian Orthodox Church to be placed “at the disposal of rural district land committees and of county Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies pending the Constituent Assembly.” Wording on the detailed execution of this measure (which also exempted from confiscation the smallholdings of working peasants) was taken directly from the program of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which Lenin now termed “the expression of the unconditional will of the vast majority of the conscious peasants of the whole of Russia.”3 To the assertion that the Bolsheviks were simply advancing the position of the SRs, thereby abandoning their own long-held position favoring nationalization of the land and the development of collective farming, Lenin responded:
Does it matter whose work it is? We, as a democratic government, cannot evade the decision of the rank and file of the people, even if we do not agree with it. In the fire of life, by applying it in practice, by carrying it out on the spot, the peasants themselves will come to understand what is right. . . . Life is the best teacher and will prove who is right; let the peasants starting from one end, and us starting from the other, settle this question.4
Of course, the new regime was simply legalizing an established fact. “Decree or no decree the land was destined to pass into the hands of the peasant,” Maurice Hindus points out. “The peasant was seizing it by force of arms.” The Bolshevik triumph had been rooted, in part, in the powerful reality (noted by Lenin in September 1917) that “peasant revolt is flowing everywhere in a broad stream,” and—initially—Lenin and his comrades derived their orientation from this dynamic, which was also grounded in their historic commitment to a worker-peasant alliance. “In order to prove to the peasants that the proletarians want not to order them about, not to dictate to them, but to help them and be their friends, the victorious Bolsheviks did not put a single word of their own into the decree on the land, but copied it word for word from the peasant ordinances (the most revolutionary, it is true) which had been published by the SRs in the SR newspaper.”5
There were sound reasons for this initial adaptation to the SR approach. We have already noted that the peasantry, roughly 80 percent of the entire population, constituted by far the largest chunk of “the people.” Failure to involve them in the decisive decisions affecting their lives would prove to be highly problematical for any government claiming to represent and advance the interests of the toiling masses—not to mention a government claiming to be more democratic than the constitutional republics of the bourgeois world. In addition, it can be argued, the SR Party—through many years of experience, analytical study, and struggle in close contact with the Russian peasants—had a far better understanding of “the peasant question” than did the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, not only Mensheviks but Bolsheviks as well.
An alternative analysis to pro-SR interpretations indicates that, on the contrary, it was the Bolsheviks who had the superior understanding, realizing that the term peasantry itself masked decisive class divisions. “The poor and landless peasants were more likely to engage in the violent and revolutionary break-up of the landlords’ estates than the more prosperous peasants whose own small possessions might suffer,” writes historian E. H. Carr. “In this sense the SRs—especially the Right SRs—were a less revolutionary party than the Bolsheviks, and had an analogy with the Mensheviks who represented the skilled groups of workers in the towns.”6 As will be suggested, however, this Bolshevik view of things may itself have failed to comprehend important complexities.
The fact that the initial radical-democratic approach of the Bolsheviks was not sustained highlights what became a problematical aspect of that regime—that its perspectives and policies quickly diverged from the outlooks and desires of the majority of the people. We have so far explored a number of reasons why this was so, and in this chapter we will add to our understanding of how that came to be. One problem was that the Bolshevik understanding of “the peasant question” oversimplified realities better grasped by the SRs and Left SRs, their sometime allies. We will also consider perspectives of others who struggled to develop a different Marxist analysis and socialist policy than that projected by Lenin and his co-thinkers.
Divergent Understandings of the Peasantry
“The Communist Party, being Marxist, was consequently hostile to the peasants,” was the bitter judgment of Socialist Revolutionary Olga Chernov. “It had proclaimed the nationalization of the land, but had disfigured the meaning of this law.” She then got to the heart of the matter: “It had always classed the peasants as petit-bourgeois and treated them as enemies of the proletariat. The Communists were town-dwellers, with no understanding of country life or the needs and struggles of the farmers.” She concluded: “They only excited the hatred of the country districts.”7
Lenin’s perceptions were far more complex and interesting than Chernov seems to allow.8 Alert, as were all Marxists, to the voraciously expansive globalization dynamics inherent in the capitalist mode of production, Lenin was able to document the permeation of the Russian economy by these dynamics and the persistent absorption of agriculture, including peasant life, into the vortex of a commodity economy. “Even in the central agricultural belt (which is the most backward in this respect compared with the south-eastern border regions or the industrial gubernias), the peasant is completely subordinated to the market on which he is dependent in regards both his personal consumption and his farming, not to mention the payment of taxes.” Throughout Russia, he argued, agricultural and village communities were being dramatically affected by capitalist dynamics—“competition, the struggle for economic independence, the grabbing of land (purchasable and rentable), the concentration of production in the hands of a minority, the forcing of the majority into the ranks of the proletariat.”9
Like many observers of the Russian scene at this point in time, but unlike many populists, Lenin believed that the traditional village commune (the mir or obschina) could no longer be seen as a barrier or alternative to such capitalist development. “The system of economic relations in the ‘community’ village,” he insisted, “does not at all constitute a special economic form (‘people’s production,’ etc.), but is an ordinary petty-bourgeois one,” he wrote, adding that “the Russian community peasantry are not antagonists of capitalism, but, on the contrary, are its deepest and most durable foundation.” Capitalist penetration and transformation of the countryside was generating “differentiation of the peasantry,” creating “two new types of rural inhabitants.” One, according to Lenin, was “the rural bourgeoisie or the well-to-do peasantry . . . [who] include the independent farmers who carry on commercial agriculture in all its forms,” plus “the owners of commercial and industrial establishments, the proprietors of commercial enterprises, etc.” On the other end of the rural social spectrum was “the rural proletariat, the class of allotment-holding wage-workers. This covers the poor peasants, including those that are completely landless.” While each of these new types reflect the increasingly “commodity, money character” of the rural economy, the intermediate layer, what Lenin terms the middle peasantry, “is distinguished by the least development of commodity production,” but in the new circumstances its position “is an extremely precarious one”—a process “specifically characteristic of capitalist economy takes place, the middle members are swept away and the extremes are reinforced—the process of ‘de-peasantizing.’”10 One could argue with Olga Chernov and her comrades that this analysis reflected aspects of reality in rural Russia, as Lenin contended, and that such an analysis is hardly one that makes peasants “enemies of the proletariat.” On the other hand, defenders of traditional peasant life would certainly take umbrage with such a conclusion as this one by Lenin:
One has only to picture to oneself the amazing fragmentation of the small producers, an inevitable consequence of patriarchal agriculture, to become convinced of this progressiveness of capitalism, which is shattering to the very foundations the ancient forms of economy and life, with their age-old immobility and routine, destroying the settled life of the peasants who vegetated behind their medieval partitions, creating new social classes striving of necessity towards contact, unification, and active participation in the whole of the economic (and not only economic) life of the country, and of the whole world.11
At the same time, however, Lenin seems to have grasped that it was just this devastating impact of capitalism on traditional peasant life that was radicalizing masses of peasants, causing them under certain circumstances to rail against the established order. This was the basis for the worker-peasant alliance that he began projecting at least as early as 1903. In To the Rural Poor, he extols the peasant struggles of previous centuries: “In the period of serfdom the entire mass of the peasants fought against their oppressors, the landlord class, which was protected, defended, and supported by the tsarist government.” After the 1861 abolition of serfdom, “the peasants remained without rights, remained an inferior, tax-paying, ‘black’ social-estate, remained in the clutches of serf bondage.” Lenin went on to extol the peasant uprisings of 1902, explaining “they rose against the landlords, broke open their barns, shared the contents among themselves, distributed among the starving the grain that had been sown and reaped by the peasants but expropriated by the landlord, and demanded a new division of the land. . . . The peasants decided—and quite rightly—that it was better to die fighting the oppressors than to die of starvation without struggle.” He continued that “the Russian working class will always honor the memory of the martyrs who were shot down and flogged to death by the tsar’s servants.”12 And he concluded:
The day will soon come when the urban workers will rise not merely to march shouting through the streets, but for the great and final struggle; when the workers will declare as one person: ‘We shall win freedom or die in the fight!’; when the places of the hundred who have been killed, fallen in the fight, will be taken by thousands of fresh and still more resolute fighters. And the peasants, too, will then rise all over Russia, will go to the aid of the urban workers, will fight to the end for the freedom of the workers and the peasants.13
But Lenin never seems to have discarded the basic schema that projected onto the complex peasant reality edifyingly clear conceptualizations of “well-to-do” peasants (later given the problematically expansive tag of kulaks), seen as up-and-coming peasant-capitalists, atop the very large but presumably shrinking segment of “middle peasants” (many of whom wished to become peasant-capitalists), and the presumably swelling number of poor and proletarianizing peasants. Insightful as Lenin’s analyses were, they missed important countervailing tendencies that helped make a different reality than what he perceived. More than this, the limitations of his own approach were replicated, made even simpler (more limited), and at times applied—with destructive insensitivity and brutality—by many who had rallied to the Bolshevik cause. This finds reflection in Olga Chernov’s harsh criticism.
Latter-day historians (including those who are not unsympathetic to the goals of the Bolshevik revolution) have been able to identify the problematical limitations of the Bolshevik approach to “the peasant question.” Teodor Shanin has offered a particularly effective critique, noting that aspects of Lenin’s analysis are well taken, but that he presents a “sharply over-polarized picture” of class divisions within the peasantry inconsistent with the findings of “contemporary rural specialists, Marxist and non-Marxist alike.” Particularly problematical was that “his bourgeois-capitalist stratum was a conjecture, and a strongly over-stated conjecture at that, as Lenin was to learn and to admit in the period of the revolution and the civil war in 1917–21.” Shanin notes recent scholarship regarding “the limited use of wage labor within agriculture and the consequent limited advance of capitalism within it,” which is consistent with Lenin’s own 1906 conclusion that his earlier estimate of capitalist development in agriculture had been “overstated.” Shanin also emphasizes that the accumulation of land in the hands of a few and the spread of large-scale units of production . . . confidently expected by the early liberal and Marxist analysis . . . did not happen.” In addition, “the ‘kulaks’ as understood by the Russian peasants and indeed by everybody with a sufficient knowledge of the Russian countryside . . . cannot be equated with capitalist entrepreneurship. Arguably, the opposite holds true, that is, the ‘kulaks’ hampered rather than advanced the development of capitalist farming.”14
In different ways, either directly or tangentially, sometimes implicitly and sometimes quite explicitly, a number of scholars in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century—such as Viktor Danilov, Moshe Lewin, Lars Lih, Wendy Goldman, and perhaps most pointedly John Marot—have put forward ways of understanding the Russian peasantry more or less consistent with Shanin’s approach. Some scholars, such as S. A. Smith, have challenged Shanin and others for envisioning some sort of “moral economy” of the peasantry—a controversy that need not divert us from endorsing Shanin’s criticism of the all-too-common Marxist inclination to overstate “class divisions” and “capitalist” consciousness within the peasantry.15
But even in Lenin’s time, there were people—adhering to, or influenced by, Marxist perspectives—who articulated a more balanced understanding that took up aspects of the reality missing from Lenin’s analysis. Most famous was Rosa Luxemburg, who in a substantial note in The Accumulation of Capital (1913) attached to a rich discussion of the debates on capitalist development in Russia, wrote:
Obviously, it is an empty abstraction to divide the peasantry among all the categories of capitalist production, and to conceive of the peasant as entrepreneur, wage laborer, and landlord all in one person. The economic particularity of the peasantry—if it is to be treated as an undifferentiated category . . . consists precisely in the fact that it belongs neither to the class of capitalist entrepreneurs nor to that of the waged proletariat; it does not represent capitalist production at all, but rather simple commodity production.16
Of course, Luxemburg’s comments were made in passing, embedded in a complex work taking up many issues in Marxist theory and global capitalist development. And a scant five years later, in her posthumously published critique The Russian Revolution, she seems to have reversed herself—sharply criticizing Lenin for opportunistically taking slogans from “the much condemned Socialist-
Revolutionaries, or rather, from the spontaneous peasant movement,” rather than sticking to the original Bolshevik program of a nationalized and centralized program of agricultural production. Now, she warned, “it was the rich peasants and usurers who made up the village bourgeoisie possessing the actual power in their hands in every Russian village, that surely became the chief beneficiaries of the agrarian revolution.” Beginning her next sentence with the revealing words “without being there to see,” she nonetheless confidently asserted that “anyone can figure out for himself that in the course of the distribution of the land, social and economic inequality among the peasants was not eliminated but rather increased, and that class antagonisms were further sharpened.” Her 1918 conclusion: “The Leninist agrarian program has created a new and powerful layer of popular enemies of socialism on the countryside, enemies whose resistance will be much more dangerous and stubborn than that of the noble large landowners.”17 This flies in the face of her 1913 characterization of the peasantry—and corresponds instead to problematical underlying notions common among Marxists (certainly among the Bolsheviks as well as the Mensheviks) at the time.
There were others, however, who did provide more detailed and sustained interpretations. Of course, some Bolsheviks sought to develop nuanced and complex analyses of peasant life—for example, Nikolai Bukharin, who emphasized that “the peasantry is far from homogeneous,” explaining:
The well-to-do tavern-keeper, the village moneylender, and the kulak are all referred to as peasants. The large-scale proprietor, who keeps several agricultural workers in harness in order to profit from their labor, is also called a peasant. The toiling proprietor, who works for himself along with his family and does not live at the expense of other people’s labor, is similarly a peasant. There are also poor peasants, who do not even own a horse and are scarcely able to make ends meet by taking odd jobs on the side. And finally, there are peasants who are farm laborers for part of the time, urban workers for the balance, and whose farms are but a secondary source of income. In the capitalist system the vast majority of the peasants are condemned to a type of existence in which they barely make ends meet.18
But Bukharin is, in fact, offering a sophisticated restatement of Lenin’s early schema. Others went well beyond it.
The independent-minded left-wing Menshevik Nikolai N. Gimmer—commonly known by his revolutionary nom de plume N. N. Sukhanov—in the early 1900s had been an articulate SR theorist, and in the 1920s sought to integrate earlier insights into a nuanced Marxist approach to Soviet Russia’s agricultural development. Even more substantial were the research and analyses provided by Alexander Chayanov, primarily a scholar who devoted his life to the integration of sociology, economics, and agricultural policy, with special reference to rural realities in tsarist and early Soviet Russia. Neither man was an uncritical supporter of the Bolshevik revolution, but both stayed in Soviet Russia and sought to assist the regime in considering and developing policies that might be beneficial to the workers and peasants, and to the socialist cause generally.19
Sukhanov approached matters in an independent and critical-minded manner that took issue with various elements on the left. In his 1909 study On the Problem of the Evolution of Agriculture, revised in 1924, he challenged, on the one hand, revisionist-Marxist and reformist trends in the international socialist movement favoring small peasant farms (he held that large mechanized farms were superior if organized along cooperative lines), and, on the other hand, the more “orthodox” Marxists—both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks—seeing the triumph of capitalism in Russian agriculture as inevitable. In his massively documented study, he contrasted the “vitality and stability” of noncapitalist Russian peasant farms (which should be supported, in his opinion) with problematical capitalist agriculture. On the other hand, he increasingly differentiated himself from the mainstream populism of the SRs (eventually going over to the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party), arguing that in contrast to the workers, peasants had greater potential for opposing socialism (although they continued to manifest “communal psychology, customs, and practices,” and—he insisted—correct policies could pull them in a socialist direction). Consequently, he urged the SRs to stop self-identifying as a “peasant party” and to merge with the Marxists. He also began to question whether the traditional obschina was durable in the face of aggressive tsarist policies to undermine them in order to advance capitalist development—for which SR leader Victor Chernov severely criticized him, insisting that once tsarist anti-obschina policies were ended, “you will be surprised how quickly many of the wounds inflicted will be healed.”20
In the early 1920s, Sukhanov moved away from his pessimistic doubts as the obschina did indeed experience a remarkable revitalization in post-tsarist Russia—a matter to be taken up later in this chapter. From an explicitly and aggressively Marxist perspective, he polemicized against Leonid Kritsman and other influential Communist theorists who were “shell shocked by one sentence in the second chapter of Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia which read, ‘The peasantry ceases to exist, it is transformed on the one hand into a proletariat and on the other hand into a bourgeoisie.’” Sukhanov went on to scoff that “ever since, Kritsman has been knocking himself out in the search for capitalism in the peasant economy, determined to find it wherever it does and does not exist.” Instead, this peasant economy operated according to quite different principles. A revolutionary workers’ party in Russia moving forward to build a socialist society, would not find “proletarian cadres” among the lower strata of the peasantry with whom to ally in a struggle to vanquish the “kulaks”—instead it would find, if it moved forward in that manner, “vast masses of dispersed and reactionary petty [peasant] proprietors who are hostile to socialism.” In contrast to this barren approach, “the agrarian program of a workers’ party must always be a peasant program.” This would include providing for the economic and cultural needs of all, supporting peasant smallholders with a supply of land—though collectively owned, rather than private property—and encouraging voluntary, large-scale production with strategic offerings of agricultural technology.21
From a more scholarly, less activist vantage point, Alexander Chayanov influentially worked amid an important, somewhat diverse current of other scholars and policy-advocates focused on agrarian realities. He developed a theorization of the peasant economy shortly before the 1917 revolution, and further developed it in the succeeding years. In contrast to Sukhanov, he does not appear to have been critical of the Bolsheviks taking power, and although his analyses were controversially (though nonpolemically) in opposition to the perspective of Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia, Lenin intervened to enable Chayanov to work and publish without interference, “because we need wise heads, we are left with too few of them.” Chayanov insisted that into the first quarter of the twentieth century, 90 percent or more of the farms in Russia still had no hired labor (which is the key qualifier, in his opinion, that would make them “capitalist”). Instead, they were distinctive “family farms,” a key element in his own conceptualization of peasant economy.22
Not all families were the same, and the specifics of each were important: the number of children and other household members, their ages, the amount of work each could do, the amount of food each would need. These essentials had to do with labor and consumption—“the family labor force and consumption units,” as Chayanov put it—which meant that “every family, depending on its age, is in its different phases of development a completely distinct labor machine as regards labor force, intensity of demand, consumer-worker ration and the possibility of applying the principles of complex cooperation.” Such governing dynamics (that is, “the peculiar features of their economic behavior”) counterposed “the family to the capitalist farm” (a counterposition that he also tagged “the labor farm” in opposition to “the farm based on hired labor”). Even if both existed within the context of a capitalist economy—which Chayanov was prepared to acknowledge was increasingly the case in tsarist Russia—he saw “a difference between the phase of capitalist development in which the number of family undertakings comprise a substantial part of production and the phase in which they have lost any significance.”23
Chayanov—in contrast to many populists—was not inclined to argue against the Marxist insistence that capitalist development was becoming the dominant factor in the Russian as well as the global economy. In fact, he acknowledged, “the peasant farm almost everywhere has been drawn into the system of the capitalist commodity market; in many countries it is influenced by finance capital, which has made loans to it and coexists with capitalistically organized industry and, in some places, agriculture also.” Capitalist relations had become hegemonic in the Russian economy, and “the world’s agriculture, ours included, is being more and more drawn into the general circulation of the world economy, and the centers of capitalism are more and more subordinating it to their leadership.” Yet the fact remained that in Russian agriculture the head of production most generally “does not sit in the entrepreneur’s chair, but is the organizer of family production.” To construct a theory of Russian agricultural economics as essentially capitalist “is clearly one-sided and is inadequate for learning about economic reality in all its actual complexity.”24
Chayanov’s moderately but firmly stated conclusions were based on careful research (which seems to have coincided, more or less, with that of Sukhanov):
Simple, everyday observation in the countryside shows us elements of “capitalist exploitation.” We suppose that, on the one hand, proletarianization of the countryside and, on the other, a certain development of capitalist production forms undoubtedly take place there. However, in our opinion, these social processes should be sought out, not by means of classifying sown areas, and so on [that is, on the basis of what are the more prosperous farms], but on direct analysis of capitalist factors in the organization of production, i.e., hired labor on farm, not brought in to help their own, but as the basis on which to obtain unearned income, and oppressive rents and usurers’ credit. . . .
On the basis of agricultural statistics, we might establish the proportion of labor and capitalist agriculture in different countries, and almost everywhere we would observe, together with purely labor farms, capitalist forms. In Russia, this type of farm has not become very widespread among the peasants. . . .
Within the Russian peasantry, social differentiation is still in its initial stages, and we will not undertake to judge how far the semi-labor, semi-capitalist “farmer” type unit will be able to improve its position with the present tendency of the Russian peasantry for enclosed farms. We must hope that the labor farm, strengthened by cooperative bodies, will be able to defend its positions against large-scale, capitalist type farms as it did in former times.25
Chayanov added an interesting and important observation to his account of what had been happening in rural Russia: “While the elements of capitalist organization of production did not develop much among Russian peasants, the proletarianization of part of the peasantry in densely populated areas proceeded very rapidly before the Revolution.” What he is referring to is the reality that we noted earlier in this study regarding the dramatic growth of the Russian proletariat: “It was of a clearly industrial character and took the form of a completely regular stream of rural population porting into industrial and urban centers.”26
Along with insisting that agriculture of tsarist Russia and the early Soviet period could not be understood by theoretically mutilating peasant realities to make them fit the Procrustean bed of “bourgeois/proletarian relations” in the countryside, Chayanov offered an insightful and prescient description of how the global capitalist economy was powerfully bringing about its own mutilation of peasant life throughout the world. “In a production sense concentration in agriculture is scarcely reflected in the formation of a new large-scale undertakings, in an economic sense capitalism as a general economic system makes great headway in agriculture,” he commented in 1924, elaborating: “The dynamic processes of agricultural proletarianization and concentration of production, leading to large-scale agricultural production units based on hired labor, are developing throughout the world, and in the USSR in particular, at a much slower rate than was expected at the end of the nineteenth century.” In fact, “the area swept by agrarian revolutions has even, as it were, strengthened the position of the small farm.” He then noted an aspect of capitalist penetration:
Repeating the stages in the development of industrial capitalism, agriculture comes out of a semi-natural existence and becomes subject to trading capitalism that sometimes in the form of very large-scale trading undertakings draws masses of scattered peasant farms into its sphere of influence and, having bound these small-scale commodity producers to the market, economically subordinates them to its influence. By developing oppressive credit conditions, it converts the organization of agricultural production almost into a special form of distributive office based on a “sweatshop system.” In this connection, it is enough to recall the examples of capitalist exploitation which Knop, the Moscow cotton firm, applied to the Sart cotton growers, buying up their harvest in the spring, giving out advances for food, and giving them credits for seed and means of production.
These trading links that convert the natural, isolated family farm into one of a small commodity producer are always the first means of organizing scattered peasant farms and of opening the first path for the penetration of capitalist relations into the countryside.27
The fact that Chayanov’s analyses, far from being widely considered, were marginalized in preference to Lenin’s early conceptualizations would have profound implications for practical policy, and for people’s lives, in the early Soviet Republic.
Agrarian Tragedy
It is impossible to make sense of the early agricultural policies of the Soviet regime simply by referring to Lenin’s and the Bolsheviks’ theoretical perspectives on the peasantry. According to Lars Lih, “one of the central features of this whole period of war, revolution, and civil war was a food-supply crisis that was both symptom and intensifier of the overall dislocation and then breakdown of national economic and social life.” 28 Even before the Bolsheviks took power, Lenin was pointing to the crisis that was overtaking the country—a crisis facing the Provisional Government, and one that had been developing under tsarism as well. It was a crisis of hunger, and the solution was (in his opinion) the rapid application of the Bolshevik program:
Dire necessity is knocking at the door of the entire Russian people. This dire necessity consists in the fact that it is impossible to continue farming in the old way. If we continue as of old on our small farms, even as free citizens on free land, we shall still be faced with inevitable ruin. . . . Individual husbandry on individual plots, even though it be “free labor on free land,” offers no way out of the terrible crisis. . . . It is essential to go over to joint cultivation on large model farms.29
“In fall 1917 the chain reaction of social disintegration led to a series of explosions—in the countryside, on the front lines, and in the capital cities,” Lih has emphasized, pointing to unmistakable signs “of the immanent collapse of food supply,” which “destroyed the morale of the existing political class while confirming the political formula of the Bolshevik contenders.”30 E. H. Carr has placed this crisis in larger context:
What came to be called “war communism” was, as its chief contemporary historian wrote, “an experiment in the first steps of the transition to socialism.” The period from 1918 to 1920 was in every way a testing time for the new regime; and while it defeated with impressive ease enemies whose only program was to restore the old order, the exigencies of the civil war threw into relief the fundamental dilemma confronting it. The economic backwardness of Russia had smoothed the path for the political triumph of the revolutionaries, since they had been opposed only by the survivals of an obsolete feudalism and by an undeveloped and still inefficient capitalism. But the same fact made the subsequent socialist construction infinitely difficult, since they were called on to build a socialist order without the solid democratic and capitalist foundation which Marxist theory had treated as indispensable.31
We have seen that the Bolsheviks’ vision was ultimately to consolidate the peasant smallholdings into larger enterprises that would be worked collectively with all the most modern techniques. Thus, in 1917 the land was not simply declared the property of the individual peasants. Rather, it was nationalized but then distributed more equitably to peasant households (by the peasants themselves) for their use. Or this is how it was officially, legally rationalized largely after the fact—“the fact” being that the peasants, with Bolshevik blessing and encouragement, simply took the land and carried on their own redistribution. For all practical purposes, the peasants reasoned, the land was theirs—with the support of the new government. Lenin’s notion was that the peasants were vital allies that must be won over gradually to collectivized agriculture. As with much else, however, harsh realities generated far more brutal policies than had been anticipated in theory.
The Bolsheviks’ lack of close ties with the countryside had an impact on government policy in the Civil War period. Especially serious in this regard was the tragic break between the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, whose base was especially strong among the working peasantry (i.e., those who worked their own land without significant help from hired labor). In April 1918, Spiridonova had argued for a reversal of her party’s decision to break with the Bolsheviks. “Our chief duty is to bring about the socialization of the land,” she said. “The mentality and principles of the Bolsheviks are alien to this task. It is we who must carry it out. How can we do it unless we take part in the business of government?”32 Unfortunately, she was not able to win a majority of her party to this perspective. Despite their pragmatic adoption of the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s call for redistribution of the landed estates to the peasantry, the Bolsheviks were theoretically opposed to the “petit bourgeois” smallholdings as anything more than a temporary expedient. This in itself created potential for a collision between the Bolshevik regime and much of the Russian peasantry, a collision that the Left SRs might have helped to avert. On the other hand, it would be wrong to see “Bolshevik dogmatism” as the only cause for the clash with the peasants. The new regime faced a complex reality that lent some credence to the Bolsheviks’ long-standing preference for centrally coordinated collectivization of land and rural labor, which was anathema to the Left SRs and to their peasant constituents.
With famine threatening the country, the Bolshevik leaders took desperate measures. Historian Roy Medvedev, sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, has put it bluntly: “They chose to take grain from the peasants by force in order to feed the starving industrial and office workers in Russia’s urban regions.” A “Food Army,” largely composed of enthusiastic young worker-Bolsheviks, was sent to obtain food by any means necessary. A national network of poor peasants’ committees was also organized to pit those with little or no land against the “rich peasants” (many of whom were poor by Western standards) but also against middle peasants, or working peasants, who were perceived as “hoarding surpluses.” Although this was a positive development in that it created a ramshackle rural support base for the Bolshevik crusade and was hailed by Lenin and others as bringing “socialist revolution” to the countryside, it actually created a new layer of smallholders (with holdings too small to produce a surplus) and had a devastating impact on village life. One Bolshevik proclamation declared: “Workers and starving peasants, comrades, you know where the grain is. Almost all the surplus grain is in the hands of the village kulaks. . . . The detachments you form, together with the disciplined units of the Red Army, led by experienced and tested revolutionaries and specialists in food procurement, will march out to win the grain from the village bourgeoisie.” As Gregory Zinoviev expressed it: “We are very well aware that we cannot carry through the proletarian revolution without crushing the village kulaks and without annihilating them psychically and, if necessary, physically.” He added, with “revolutionary” swagger, that “the revolution in the village should take the kulak by the throat and strangle him by all the rules of soviet art; it is precisely for this that we need a genuine, operative worker-peasant machine for strangling kulaks.”33
Yet this so-called “village bourgeoisie” turned out to comprise majority sectors of the rural population that had largely supported the Bolshevik revolution but that did not want to simply turn over the fruits of their labor to these outsiders in exchange for well-meaning promises and practically worthless paper money. According to historian Taisia Osipova:
In fact, this definition of kulak was nothing but a rhetorical abstraction. Despite their social differentiation, the wealthier peasants in central Russia had not broken with the traditional peasant commune. They still followed the same patriarchal laws as the rest of the peasants. . . . Although there were too few of the better-off peasants to pose a danger to the government, their affinity with peasants at large and their leadership role in the countryside gave them strength. What united them with the middle-income peasants and some of the poor peasants was their resistance to the Bolsheviks’ policy of coercion. For three years rebellions shook Russia, on the periphery and in the central provinces, as peasants fought against this state coercion.34
Moshe Lewin also argues that “the kulak was a hard-working peasant, who sometimes (though not always) employed one or, more rarely, two paid workers, and owned a few agricultural machines which he would hire out to his neighbors. He cannot therefore be defined as either a ‘capitalist’ or a ‘semi-capitalist.’”35
Journalist Maurice Hindus, visiting his old village after living nineteen years in America, offered a memorable description of one such “kulak” (at least, he had that distinction in the eyes of Soviet officials): “His manner of living varied but little from that of the average muzhik. Hens strutted about the house. In the corner under the sleeping platform lay a little brown pig, stretched out at full length and snoring hoarsely. The rough board floor was crusted with mud and littered with potato skins and bits of manure tracked in from outdoors. The little windows were dim with dust and fly-specks, and cobwebs hung in the corner directly over the icon.”36
All too often, the “surplus grain” targeted by Soviet requisition detachments was a normal cushion for hard times. Sometimes it was grain for future planting, the confiscation of which would mean hunger for all in the future. After such policies were abandoned, Lenin described what had happened in precisely these terms, while offering what Carr has called “the only possible excuse for such measures,” namely that such policies were wartime measures necessary “to cover the costs of the army and to maintain the workers” in the life-and-death struggle against the armies of the landlords and capitalists.37
Mikhail Baitalsky, an enthusiastic Komsomol activist at the time, still recalled years later one of the outcomes, remembering “the burial of several boys and girls—seventeen-and-eighteen-year-old Young Communists killed by peasants for demanding that they turn over grain requisitioned by the state. In response, the peasants killed these boys and girls, slit open their stomachs, and filled them with grain.” Baitalsky wrote:
The cruelty of the peasants—who did not want to turn over their grain to the state—made a deep impression on me. I have not been able to forget it—these tormented boys and girls, these Communist youth. In the years that followed, I witnessed a great deal; but this impression has stayed with me forever because it was my first such experience.
The cruelty of the peasants, whose grain was being forcibly confiscated, was the cruelty of despair, the impotent vengeance of the embittered. It cannot be justified, but it must be distinguished from the cruelty exhibited by the machinery of the state.38
“One-fifth of the workers in the food-supply detachments were killed between May and December” of 1918, writes Lars Lih, who adds that “in the months of July through September the conflict with the peasants led to more than ten thousand state and party casualties.”39 But it was the Bolsheviks who had initiated this destructive struggle in the countryside, which generated fierce rebellions and considerable violence. Fortunately for the Bolsheviks, the bulk of the peasants feared the White armies (which symbolized a return of the big landlords) more than they feared the obviously anti-landlord Reds, who at least promised a better future for the peasants once the Civil War was won. Otherwise the conflict in the countryside might have overturned the revolution.
The Left SRs had attempted to persuade the Bolsheviks that the key “class” distinction among the peasantry must be based not on whether one had an ill-defined “surplus” or an extra cow or an “advanced” piece of farm equipment, but on whether or not one used hired labor. (It has been estimated that only 1 percent of all peasant households employed more than one laborer.) After an initial vacillation, the Bolsheviks rejected this argument, deciding to procure the “hoarded surpluses” by force while at the same time striking at the rural base of the Left SRs. “In late 1918,” notes Lih, “Zinoviev compared the middle peasant to the middle strata in the towns.” The petty bourgeois elements in the towns were soon made to realize that “we weren’t fooling around and that there was no other master [but us] nor could there be.” Lih follows Zinoviev’s analogy: “In the village this realization would soon occur when the kulaks were crushed and the middle peasant saw that the poor peasant was now ‘the true master of the Russian land.’” The Bolshevik struggle of “intensifying the class struggle in the countryside” to obtain food for the cities and to undermine the Left SRs combined with the Bolshevik vision of large-scale, centralized agricultural industry replacing “petty-bourgeois” peasant smallholdings. “The government is already running big estates with workers instead of peasants where conditions are favorable,” Lenin explained to H. G. Wells in 1920. “That can spread. It can be extended first to one province, then another.” His next comment speaks volumes: “The peasants of the other provinces, selfish and illiterate, will not know what is happening until their turn comes!” In fact, these experiments in collectivized agriculture remained relatively ineffective and miniscule in the period we are discussing.40
The Bolsheviks had been popular among the peasants in late 1917 because they supported the peasants taking the land. But the mood changed. “We are Bolsheviks, but not Communists,” peasants were reported as saying. “We are for the Bolsheviks because they drove out the landowners, but we are not for the Communists because they are against individual holdings.”41
Bolshevik-turned-Communist policy as it unfolded in 1918 generated hundreds of desperate uprisings among the peasantry, at various moments, throughout Russia. It has been estimated that between 1918 and 1921, peasant rebels killed at least 100,000 people, “mostly civilian Soviet functionaries, Communists, and other representatives of authority,” according to Taisia Osipova. Such rebellions were suppressed by the Red Army and the Cheka, which inflicted much higher casualties upon the recalcitrant peasantry. Among armed peasant detachments were fighters who were neither Red nor White but called themselves “Green” (such as followers of anarchist Nestor Makhno), disaffected deserters from the Red Army, and others. It is estimated that as many as a million rebels perished on the battlefield, through executions and through deaths in prisons and concentration camps, and undoubtedly there were additional casualties on the Communist side in the fighting. The famine of 1920–21—flowing from traumas of the First World War and the Red-White conflict, but also from the effects of Communist conflicts with the peasantry—swept away millions more.42
A lengthy Cheka report by high-level Bolshevik stalwart, V. A. Antonov-
Ovseenko, clearly explained the causes of the uprisings. A few sentences give a sense of the report’s perspective:
The peasant uprisings develop because of widespread dissatisfaction, on the part of small property-owners in the countryside with the dictatorship of the proletariat, which directs at them its cutting edge of implacable compulsion, which cares little for the economic peculiarities of the peasantry and does the countryside no service that is at all perceptible. . . . The peasantry, in their majority, have become accustomed to regarding the Soviet regime as something extraneous in relation to themselves, something that issues only commands, that gives orders most zealously but quite improvidently. . . . [The Soviet regime] is a force which issues instructions from the outside and not the acknowledged guide of the peasant farmer; in the eyes of the peasants it is tyrannical and not a system that, before all else, organizes and ministers to the countryside itself.43
Antonov-Ovseenko was not the only one drawing such conclusions. The Bolsheviks-turned-Communists on the ground were learning—some more quickly than others—from the bitter lessons they were being taught by the actual peasants who refused to conform to schematic “Marxist” conceptualizations.
The result was a series of policy shifts. “One common view of the later years of the time of troubles is as a period when the Bolsheviks and the peasants grew dangerously apart after their alliance in 1917,” writes Lars Lih. “Only after a series of peasant revolts in late 1920 and 1921 did the Bolsheviks come to their senses by making the long-overdue changes necessary to placate the peasants,” in the form of the New Economic Policy inaugurated in March 1921. But in a detailed examination of the period, Lih finds “a different story.” He concludes:
The Bolshevik-peasant alliance of 1917 was compatible with mutual incomprehension, and it was only in 1918 that the Bolsheviks and the peasant realized how little they understood each other. In the years that followed, this lack of knowledge began to be overcome, thus laying the groundwork for the introduction of the food-supply tax. The policy changes of 1921 [the New Economic Policy] were not a repudiation of the achievements of the civil war period but their continuation.44
Shifting Policies
In August 1917, almost three months before the Bolshevik revolution, Pavel Ryabushinsky arose at the second All-Russian Commercial and Industrial Congress to deliver a speech that was widely reported afterwards. A powerful, very wealthy Russian industrialist and banker, also a patron of the arts and a moderately liberal opponent of the tsarist autocracy, Ryabushinsky had played an influential role on the political scene leading up to and following the overthrow of the tsar. Feeling strongly that the insurgent workers’ movement was going too far in its radical demands, he said:
Our commercial and industrial class will do its job to the end [to assist crisis-ridden Russia] without expecting anything for itself. But at the same time it feels at present it is unable to convince anybody or influence people in leading positions.
Therefore our task is very difficult. We must wait—we know that the natural course of life will go on its way and unfortunately it will severely punish those who destroy economic laws. . . .
We feel that what I have said is inevitable. But unfortunately it is necessary for the bony hand of hunger and the people’s poverty to grab by the throat the false friends of the people, the members of the various committees and soviets, before they come to their senses. The Russian land groans in their comradely embrace. The people at present do not understand this, but soon they will, and they will say: “Away, deceivers of the people.” (Stormy applause)45
Some historians have seen these remarks as reasonable, others as vitriolic—but at the time, and for some time afterward, the threat of “the bony hand of hunger” was seen by revolutionaries as a threat from the upper classes to sabotage the economy and to blackmail the suffering masses of people in order to defeat the revolution. To a significant degree, this is the context within which many Bolsheviks were inclined to view the food crisis threatening the country in 1918. Ryabushinsky’s remarks “demonstrated better than any other argument that the struggle with hunger was a class struggle,” according to a later Soviet source. “There is no doubt that this is a definite plan, worked out in the quiet of bourgeois offices a long time ago,” proclaimed the prominent and popular Bolshevik orator Gregory Zinoviev, who projected the capitalists to be saying “we have a way of controlling you: the bony hand of hunger, and it will smother your revolution.” He called for “holy violence against those kulaks who fulfilled Ryabushinsky’s program.” This was by no means simply his own orientation—it reflected the official statement of the Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars), which declaimed in May 1918: “All that is steadfast, disciplined, and conscious in a single organized food-supply order! Unhesitating fulfillment of all directives of the central authority! No separate actions! War on the kulaks!”46
Such a mind-set contributed powerfully to generating the agrarian tragedy we have examined. In fact, the Bolsheviks were attempting to deal with a food crisis brought on by disruptions in food production and distribution resulting from civil war and foreign intervention. There were other, longer-term causes for the crisis that merit attention. The 1917 revolution had swept away the large landed estates as well as the modernization fostered by the Stolypin reforms under the tsar. The purpose of those reforms, it will be remembered, had been to facilitate the formation of a peasant stratum that would be more prosperous than the rest, more inclined to maintain (tsarist) law and order, more open to the modernization efforts being fostered by Prime Minister Stolypin.
With the Bolshevik revolution, the village communal institution, the obschina or mir, naturally came to the fore again. Land was distributed more equitably by the mir, through less efficient traditional strips located in widely separated fields. Modern crop rotations, although more productive than the old three-field system of rotation, didn’t fit in with mir arrangements and therefore weren’t used. There was a greater reliance than ever on the tried-and-true technology of the past, such as the wooden plow. This also made practical sense in the face of the decline of manufactured goods in this period, and also given the likelihood that if one produced more than the others the result might be dangerous accusations that one was a “rich peasant” or “kulak.”
The dynamic of the revolution thus strengthened the impulses toward the more tradition-bound and self-sufficient communities of subsistence farmers and weakened those of the ambitious and individualistic commercial farmers; the ranks of the latter were hard hit by assaults on “the greedy kulak,” while the ranks of the former were expanded by the demotion of the more well-to-do as well as the acquisition of small parcels of land by many of the landless or near-landless rural poor. Agricultural productivity was set back by the mighty waves of egalitarianism and social justice that swept the countryside. “Thus the effect of the revolution was, in a technical sense, reactionary,” notes Alec Nove.47
Before coming to power, the Bolsheviks had called for dealing with the collapse of both political authority and food supply with the most thoroughgoing revolutionary democracy. “Democratic soviets could overcome the food-supply crisis by crushing the sabotage that was its main cause,” is Lih’s summation of the initial strategy. “But events quickly revealed that the soviets and other local organizations would not make real sacrifices to support the new authority unless direct local benefit was obvious.” As a frustrated Bolshevik functionary complained: “They say that the voice of the people is the voice of God. We hearkened to the voice of the people, . . . but what came of it? The most pathetic results possible.” For many, “all power to the soviets” had meant all power to the localities—which was disastrous for the effort to ensure that people throughout the new Soviet Republic would have enough to eat.48 Lih recounts: “The response unveiled by the Bolsheviks in the spring of 1918 was called the food-supply dictatorship. The legislative underpinnings of the food-supply dictatorship were set forth in a series of dramatic decrees passed in late May and early June. . . . Its aim was to reconstitute authority in the face of the spiraling growth in intensity of centrifugal forces that had continued since the fall of 1917.”49
According to Lih, despite levying “well-aimed” criticisms at various aspects of Bolshevik policy, neither the Mensheviks nor the Left SRs proved able to articulate any “positive alternatives” that might prove more effective than the Bolsheviks’ “food-supply dictatorship” in supplying food throughout Russia in this moment of crisis.50 Yet this emergency measure dovetailed with other authoritarian developments. “Bolshevik rhetoric on the food-supply crisis took place in a growing atmosphere of invective and threats against the other socialist parties,” Lih points out. We can see this in an angry speech by Lenin following a critique offered by Left SR leader Maria Spiridonova. “A thousand times wrong is he who says (as do sometimes careless or thoughtless Left SRs) that this is a struggle with the peasantry,” Lenin argued. “No, this is a struggle with an insignificant minority of village kulaks—this is a struggle to save socialism and distribute bread in Russia.” He added ominously: “It is untrue that this is a struggle with peasants. Anyone who says this is the greatest of criminals, and the greatest of misfortunes will happen to the person who lets himself be hysterically carried away to the point of saying such things.” Trotsky spoke in a similar vein: “Don’t poison the worker masses with lies and slander, for this whole game might end in a way that is to the highest degree tragic,” warning that “the soviet political authority will act more decisively and radically” against such things. He commented on the evaporating lines of demarcation separating counterrevolutionaries, monarchists, exploiters, and kulaks from Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries: “No, there is no such line: they are united in one black camp of counter-revolutionaries against the exhausted worker and peasant masses.”51
In regard to moving beyond emergency measures to longer-term solutions, there was agreement among revolutionaries of different persuasions that larger production units and greater coordination among the peasants was needed to increase agricultural productivity and increase food production and distribution. Yet the most successful form of collectivism in the countryside had involved voluntary communes and cooperatives, of which the Left SRs were enthusiastic partisans. They argued for a reliance on these organizations, combined with incentives to grow more, incentives that had been obliterated by wholesale requisitioning. The most commonsense incentive would have been to allow the peasants to keep part of their surpluses, which could then be used to exchange for goods they needed through consumer cooperatives and through the market, which had been abolished (actually, driven underground) by the Bolsheviks.
Left SR leader Spiridonova complained: “While we were organizing peasant families in agrarian communes in a number of provinces, the Bolshevik commissars came out and upset the work of these communes.” Against her Bolshevik adversaries in the All-Russian Congress of Soviets in the summer of 1918, she thundered: “You may have a majority in this Congress, but you have not a majority in the country. You want to transform the property of the landlords into state-controlled economic units controlled by your commissars, but unfortunately the working peasants of Russia see in that nothing but a return to slavery.” Her comrade Isaac Steinberg later recalled: “The policy on which Lenin was now recklessly embarked showed Bolshevism in an entirely new light. The freedom of the peasants, their cooperation with the workers, the freedom of the Soviets, were all imperiled.” Speaking on behalf of the Left SRs at the Soviet Congress, Spiridonova insisted: “We declare that the peasantry also has an independent way of life and a right to a historical future.”52
Unfortunately, the Left SRs were in the process of removing themselves from all positions through which they might have positively influenced the situation—first by their withdrawal from the government after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, then by their suicidal campaign of terror and insurrection designed to renew war with Germany and challenge Bolshevik power. The role they might have played, one based on the insights and experience gained through their rural base, could have helped shape policies by which the Soviet regime would have avoided the devastating confrontation with the peasantry. As it was, the kind of approach championed by the Left SRs was finally embraced by Lenin and his comrades in the New Economic Policy of 1921.
As Lih points out, Lenin and his comrades, through successive approximations, gradually shifted in this direction in the course of a series of painful experiences from 1918 to 1920.
Early on, they recognized the absolute necessity of reigning in and replacing (as much as possible) abusive, incompetent, and corrupt “enforcers” of Bolshevik policy. One early Bolshevik chronicler, N. Orlov, commented on the abusive manner of initial worker-detachments sent to the countryside to secure grain—such as “some drunken vagabond, accidentally occupying the post of a requisition detachment.” Another Bolshevik organizer, Alexander Schlichter, referred to another detachment as “worthless trash” that failed to understand that “without the assistance of the peasantry it would be impossible to accomplish anything, and the practice of simple raids on the village and of armed requisition was a bad one.” A state monitoring report, responding to peasant complaints, found that “too many products and commodities spill over into the pockets of the soviet bureaucracy, their families, lovers, acquaintances, and relations,” and there was, as Lih indicates, a “drive to impose the discipline of the center on the food-supply apparatus as a whole.”53
It also did not take long to overcome illusions regarding the “poor peasants,” with Communist officials concluding, according to Lih, that “the poor peasants and semi-proletarians were more a nuisance than a staunch ally.” Orlov commented that the much-touted Committees of the Poor had proved “pitifully small, self-seeking and benighted groups of poor peasants, making clams to all the grain of their area and conquering the resistance of the entire peasant mass only by help of detachments from the cities and from the north.” Other objections accused them of “timidity and sloth,” and yet others complained “everywhere the unenlightened poor peasant covers up for the rich peasant simply for fear of losing someone who will give loans.” There was also a decided shift away from the “anti-kulak” ferocity, coupled with a new stress on the middle peasants’ central importance. By the end of 1918, Lenin was emphasizing that the kulaks were not a target for expropriation as the big landowners had been, and by 1920 he commented that “we got carried away with the fight against the kulaks”; the term kulak tended to disappear from official decrees, and smashing kulaks ceased to be projected as the solution to the food-supply crisis. Bolshevik food-supply official P. K. Kaganovich referred to kulaks “not so much as an economic force as a psychological phenomenon,” and references were made to a “kulak mood” flowing from “mutual misunderstanding.” It was the middle peasant who was increasingly seen, Lih tells us, as “the key not only to grain collection but also to political stability.” A Communist food-supply official in the Ukraine, Miron Vladimirov, explained in 1920 the need to help “the poor villagers and the loyal strata of the middle peasantry [to] rise up the social ladder” as a means for “asking them to help solve and carry out tasks” that would help the Soviet Republic while “strengthening their own position.” The three-tier schema superimposed on the peasantry (kulak/middle peasant/poor and proletarianized peasant) was never fully abandoned—but it was softened, blurred, minimized in practice and even in propaganda. Alexander Smirnov, a seasoned Bolshevik who headed the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture from 1923 to 1928, distinguished himself in challenging (as historian James Heinzen notes) “the accepted oversimplified categories into which peasants fell—poor, middle, and rich—and refusing to accept the vague and simplistic categories of rural class analysis commonly used in the party.” Smirnov sought to “minimize the number of peasants who could be labeled as kulaks.”54
Yet these “accepted categories” had already been eroding under the impact of stubborn realities. Increasingly, compromise and flexibility found their way into Bolshevik policy. As early as the summer of 1918, Lenin had shifted from uncompromising appeals for a crusade against kulaks in the villages to a call “to neutralize the greatest possible number of peasants in the civil war,” in part through paying peasants higher fixed prices for grain, encouraging greater use of cooperatives, and relying more heavily on commodity exchange, as well as applying greater discipline over food-supply detachments. All these steps represented on-the-ground efforts to precisely enact the regime’s new policy shifts. A new razverstka (quota assessment) system was established. “Instead of a strategy based on class struggle and overcoming sabotage,” Lih writes, “the razverstka system aimed at neutralization of the peasantry and possibly even a partnership with it.” In Soviet appeals issued in 1919 to the peasants regarding their “moral duty to the socialist fatherland and the Red Army,” the regime insisted that “the state demands from the peasant and for the worker only that amount that the worker can give [in return] to the peasant.” Worker-detachments to the villages now became “travelling squads of agitators,” which, in addition to securing grain, sought to assist peasants with the harvest and with repairs. A shift away from the “village-splitting tactics of class struggle,” razverstka “assigned a definite amount to the village” to be given in grain, with a promise “to leave the village alone once the amount was paid”—seeking to present a strong but reasonable image of a state “taking only the surplus and not anything that was really needed for consumption and farm needs.”55
In the 1920s, Maurice Hindus quoted the judgment of Communist theorist V. Karpinsky: “How soon the socialization of land will become universal all over Russia, depends first upon the sentiment of the people of the country with respect to socialization, and secondly on the possibility of the [Soviet-run] agricultural communes, which are in a minority, to convince the majority of private owners of the land, of the practicability and greater profitableness of communistic agricultural labor.”56 Such seemingly reasonable shifts were undermined by multiple factors, not least of which were, in the words of Lih, “all the hardships of the complete economic breakdown of 1920, when the economy was rapidly spiraling toward utter destruction,” making it impossible to keep all of the well-intentioned promises. For example, there was the tendency to confiscate from the middle peasant whatever the food detachment could find, “on the assumption that the peasant could subsist on what was hidden.” There was also the powerful temptation to collect the razverstka not just once, as promised, but two or three times. Despite the intention to exchange useful commodities for whatever grain was taken, the devastated condition of Soviet industry made this problematical. The regime attempted to offset this with “peasant weeks”—designated periods in which workers volunteered to help with farm work—which Eugen Preobrazhensky described as “the beginning of the payment for grain and for labor obligations,” although it is not clear that this was deemed a satisfactory trade by most the peasants. “We must show the village that soviet authority takes the peasant surplus, while giving almost nothing in return,” he continued, “only because of its poverty.” This too could be expected to bring scant comfort to rural areas. Also problematical was the fact that the moderate policies associated with razverstka were viewed as a temporary compromise, “forced by the urgency of military survival” but destined to be abandoned once the Civil War was over.57
On August 8, 1920, Alexander Schlichter—newly appointed chair of the provincial executive committee for food supply in Tambov Province—addressed a conference of comrades. A veteran revolutionary and longtime Bolshevik, Schlichter enjoyed a reputation for increasing grain procurements with an intelligence and sensitivity that had prevented peasant uprisings. In his remarks, he emphasized that those under his direction must “work like law-abiding revolutionaries” in order to overcome the “bitter memories of food supply workers, especially of what they were doing two or three months ago.” Only by interacting with the peasantry in a qualitatively better manner would it become possible for them in the future to “safely walk in the countryside.” But it was too late. Three weeks later, a food procurement team was massacred, which was only the initial moment of a massive peasant rebellion—precisely in Tambov Province. This was one of several uprisings taking place in this period.58
The peasants’ “loyalty to the Bolshevik regime and reluctant submission to the requisitions had been inspired mainly by fear of a ‘white’ restoration and the loss of their lands,” E. H. Carr tells us. “Once this fear was finally removed, the way was open for a revival of normal resentments at oppressive exactions.” As many peasant soldiers from the Red Army demobilized and returned to their villages, there was a proliferation of rural rebellion, with increasingly violent outbreaks from September 1920 to March 1921. Some of the more effective of the uprisings were led by Right SRs, carrying out the decision of their underground Central Committee, in some cases effectively utilizing well-thought-out tactics of guerrilla warfare. Their slogans were “Down With State Monopoly on Grain Trade” and “Soviets Without Communists.” Tens of thousands participated in the rebellions. The casualty rates were devastating, with noncombatants caught in the cross fire and horrific atrocities committed by both sides. Red Army forces led by Civil War heroes M. N. Tukhachevsky and I. P. Uborevich, utilizing sweepingly brutal tactics, finally won decisive victories. Delano DuGarm, a historian of the Tambov rebellion, writes that the impact of this popular rising on the regime was that “it forced a reassessment of the sources of peasant discontent, especially the forced grain procurement system.” His colleague Taisia Osipova offers the more sweeping judgment that “the peasants overturned [the policies of war communism] through armed struggle,” and that “in this sense the peasants won on the internal front of the civil war.”59
Under the New Economic Policy, the confiscation of agricultural “surpluses” was replaced by a “tax in kind,” a food tax that was far more modest than the previous requisitioning targets. Food that remained after payment of the tax was free to be used as the peasant saw fit—including being sold on the market, which was revived with the legalization of private trade, although consumer cooperatives were officially encouraged and enjoyed some success. “Everyone, once the first shock of surprise was over, accepted NEP as a necessity,” notes Carr, but “it was accepted by some willingly, by others with an uneasy conscience; and the justification of NEP was a theme reaching back to the beginnings of the regime and pointing forward to the economic controversies of the future.” To the extent that “war communism was building on a foundation of what had gone before” in the state-capitalism model, employing “centralized control and management,” its policies were retained, despite revisions in scope and detail. On the other hand, war communism’s “substitution of a ‘natural’ economy for a ‘market’ economy,” involving “an unprepared plunge into the unknown,” had proved problematical and was “decisively rejected by NEP.” David Rousset states the case with admirable clarity: “NEP was based on the necessity to resort to capitalism in order to save the economy from suffocation, to uproot agriculture from village autarchy, to put a broken down industry on its feet, to fill the holes made by the civil war, and to put basic goods back into circulation: in other words, to recreate a dynamic of production.”60
This shift in Bolshevik policy also contained problems (which will be touched on later), but it meant a new lease on life for the peasantry, as well as for the entire population, not to mention the Bolshevik regime. The destructive impact of the earlier war communism policies didn’t simply evaporate into thin air, however. In addition to being a nightmarish memory for the peasants who survived, it was to be a precursor of a far more devastating collectivization campaign launched by the Stalin regime in the early 1930s. And while the earlier aggressive policies under Lenin were largely a tragic product of civil war and economic crisis, they were also related to an analysis of—and attitude toward—the peasantry that, despite the historic Bolshevik tradition of the “worker-and-peasant alliance,” made the peasant a second-class citizen under the Bolshevik conception of “the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
It is conceivable that a different course could have been followed. Had the Bolshevik–Left SR coalition held together, perhaps policies would have been developed to give the rural population greater political rights and equality in this early period, sparing them victimization from government violence that was all too common in 1918–21. This could have helped lay the sociopolitical basis for greater nationwide democracy than the Bolsheviks by themselves provided.
The initial “pro-peasant” policy (and the return to it, as we shall see), while viewed by leading Bolsheviks as necessary and much preferable to policies antagonistic to peasant aspirations, appears to have been linked with the development of capitalist market mechanisms that necessarily generate socioeconomic inequality. This raises obvious questions about the socialist project in Russia and also about the possibilities of realizing the ideal of proletarian democracy. Such realities were inseparable from the unanticipated fact that the Soviet revolution remained isolated in a global capitalist economy.
Even before NEP, Maurice Hindus was asking, “In a country which is so overwhelmingly agricultural, can communism in industry exist side by side with individualism in agriculture?”61
Limitation or Expansion of Democracy?
The Bolsheviks saw the peasants as the most important allies of the workers, but they believed that it was the working class as such that must be the politically dominant class in Soviet Russia—a bold notion, considering the fact that 80 percent of the country’s population was peasant and less than 20 percent proletarian. “The industrial urban proletariat,” according to the 1919 program of the Russian Communist Party, “comprising that portion of the toiling masses which is highly concentrated, most united, most enlightened, and most perfectly tempered for the struggle, must be the leader in all revolutions.” Explaining this, Bukharin and Preobrazhensky argued that “the peasants (the middle peasants and even some of the poor peasants) were far from steadfast,” adding: “They were only successful when they joined forces with the proletariat. Conversely, whenever the peasants took a different line from the proletarians, they were inevitably enslaved by Denikin, Kolchak, or some other representative of the landlords, the capitalists, or the military caste.” Consequently, peasant electoral representation was given less weight than that of the urban working class. In the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, one rural delegate would represent every 125,000 inhabitants, while one urban delegate would represent every 25,000 electors. The party program spoke of “the temporary character of these privileges,” but they were to stay in place until the “historical conditions” that brought them into being had given way to “the socialist organization of the villages.” It is worth adding that the Mensheviks shared this non-peasant bias, and even when they were in opposition after the Bolsheviks took power, as Vladimir Brovkin notes, “the Mensheviks welcomed concessions to peasants but feared the one-man, one-vote principle,” being inclined to agree with the Bolsheviks that “a workers’ revolution in Russia could succeed by the resolute leadership of a revolutionary minority.”62
The Bolsheviks had traditionally seen themselves as a working-class party, not as some sort of workers-and-peasants party. While many of its working-
class members may have had peasant roots, at the end of 1917 there were only 4,122 members in its rural cells, out of a Bolshevik Party membership of 115,000 (and out of a rural population of 100 million).63
It is also crucial to recall that in pre-Bolshevik Russia there was no pretense of democracy. The tsar was absolute ruler. When some quasi-democratic reforms were forced through by the 1905 upsurge, the tsarist policy-makers made use of the Prussian model: different classes elected representatives to an electoral college, and these various electoral colleges were allowed to select a particular percentage of legislators; representation in the legislature was always skewed toward those chosen from the electoral colleges of the socioeconomic elite. In Russia, when the worker ascended to the throne of the tsar, it did not seem as odd for him to give his peasant ally a smaller voice in policy-making than numbers would seem to call for. Sociologist E. A. Ross, who made several visits to Russia in the wake of the October Revolution, elaborated:
It is obvious that in this system the industrial workers are a privileged class. . . . The Constitution speaks of “inhabitants” when referring to the rural population and of “voters” when referring to the urban population. If about two fifths of “inhabitants” are “voters,” then the townspeople would have double the political weight of an equal number of country people. Their advantage is further enhanced by their being represented on higher and lower bodies at the same time, i.e., on county soviets and provincial congresses, and on the national Congress. Probably the political weight of a town worker is about four times that of a peasant. The Communists justify this inequality of representation on the ground that the peasants are centuries behind the factory workers in civic consciousness and political ripeness.64
There are ways in which this circle can be squared, through reference to the argument of social scientists—cited in the “Defining Democracy” section of this study’s appendix—that an “economic threshold” and a “sociocultural” or “literacy threshold” must be reached before democracy becomes a practical possibility, at least in relation to large and complex enterprises and societies. If democracy is not always, everywhere, and under all circumstances possible because it requires certain cultural and social preconditions, the goal of a revolutionary government could be to help advance processes that facilitate the development of such necessary preconditions. One might add that such processes should be advanced not simply “from the top down,” but with increasing degrees of popular inputs and participation on the part of more and more people in society. If such processes, inputs, and participation increase quantitatively, the whole system could change qualitatively into a genuinely democratic polity.
Yet the contradiction, in regard to the peasantry, between democratic rhetoric and undemocratic practice stubbornly refused to evaporate—deeply grounded, as it was, in what N. N. Sukhanov had tagged “simplistic clichés and schemes invoked in the name of a falsely understood Marxism.”65 Bertram Wolfe—as he wrestled in the late 1940s with his own residual revolutionary socialist commitments—insightfully identified the problem (in retrospect, to be sure, and imparting to it a whiff of inevitability):
The Marxists in Russia, Bolsheviks as well as Mensheviks, tended to look upon the Russian peasantry with distrust and suspicion. Having set him down as a petty bourgeois, unconsciously the Marxist workingmen looked upon him as a potential enemy. Hence it became easy in Soviet Russia for the Bolshevik workingmen to sanction the use of force against the peasant majority and the use of police overseers over them: first to requisition grain and stop “profiteering” or private trading, then to police the planting and harvesting and the marketing of the crops, then to marshal them in droves into the collective farms. But this same peasantry was really the overwhelming majority of the Russian people, so that to sanction a police overseership over them would inevitably exclude the possibility of democracy—in the simple sense of government of, for and by the majority of the people. And a police apparatus huge enough to police the planting and harvesting all over vast, rural Russia, would it not tend to spill over into the very organizations of the advanced city workers who had sanctioned it: into their state, their unions and their party?66
The problem that Wolfe emphasizes here definitely posed itself with special violence during the Civil War between 1918 and 1920—and even more so with the “revolution from above” initiated by the Stalin regime beginning in the late 1920s, which carried out forced collectivization of the land, brandishing such slogans as “eliminate the kulaks as a class,” and which resulted in millions of deaths through pitiless repression and devastating famine. “Preserving a democratic workers’ state now meant, at the very least, preserving peasant support,” John Marot has aptly noted. “For the question of democracy in the very broadest, ‘popular’ sense of the term—support of the majority for the gains of the October Revolution—came down, in the final analysis, to retaining the support of the peasant-majority.”67
The period between 1920 and 1928 saw the consequent implementation of the New Economic Policy, advanced by Lenin in part for the purpose of “adapting” to actualities that did not conform to Bolshevik preconceptions regarding class dynamics and economic-developmental realities in Russian agriculture. New pathways toward increasing freedom and democracy, which are at the heart of the socialist promise, seemed to open up. Maurice Hindus has described it expansively but accurately:
The New Economic Policy, with its legalization of private enterprise, the removal of the ban on hired labor on the farm, the extension of greater political sovereignty to the village, the periodic slashings of prices of necessaries at a colossal loss of the government, the recent broadening of the New Economic policy with its further concessions to private enterprise, have been put into force primarily to placate this Russia, to meet the needs of the peasant. Certain it is that the fortunes of the Revolution are interwoven with the fortunes of the muzhik.68
“This, it will be said, is a concession to the muzhik. That is just what it is,” Trotsky approvingly commented in 1922. “If we had not made this concession, the Soviet Republic would have been overthrown. How many years will this phase of the economy last? We don’t know know—two years, three, five, or ten: until the Revolution comes in Europe.” Bolshevik economist Eugen Preobrazhensky made a similar point in the same year: “NEP is, assuredly, a slow flanking tactic on the part of the proletarian government of a country that has not been supported by proletarian revolution in other countries and that has been obliged to build socialism in isolation within a hostile capitalist encirclement.” But he added that “it is at the same time the economic policy of the proletariat of a peasant country that finds itself in this situation. In analyzing what NEP is today and what it promises for tomorrow, we must therefore take both of these aspects into account.” Noting that the Bolsheviks won the Civil War due to “the strong military alliance between the workers and the peasants of our country,” Bukharin emphasized in 1925 that “we will triumph fully and completely, we will really build a new society of labor only if we are able once more, in these new, peaceful, postwar conditions, to strengthen anew that alliance between the working class and the peasantry that was the guarantee of our victory throughout the entire revolution.”69
At the Fourth World Congress of the Communist International in 1922, Trotsky was tasked with explaining all of this to the assembled delegates. It is worth lingering over some of what he told them. Addressing the idea that the NEP constituted “a retreat from socialism,” he insisted: “We never had socialism, nor could we have had it.” He went on to describe the actualities of what had been tagged “war communism” in this way: “We nationalized the disorganized bourgeois economy, and during the most critical period of life-and-death struggle we established a régime of ‘Communism’ in the distribution of articles of consumption.” But this was hardly the goal for which the 1917 revolution had been made. He continued:
By vanquishing the bourgeoisie in the field of politics and war, we gained the possibility of coming to grips with economic life and we found ourselves constrained to reintroduce the market forms of relations between the city and the village, between the different branches of industry, and between the individual enterprises themselves.
Failing a free market, the peasant would be unable to find his place in economic life, losing the incentive to improve and expand his crops. Only a mighty upsurge of state industry, enabling it to provide the peasant and agriculture with all its requirements, will prepare the soil for integrating the peasant into the general system of socialist economy. Technically this task will be solved with the aid of electrification, which will deal a mortal blow to the backwardness of rural life, the muzhik’s barbaric isolation, and the idiocy of village life. But the road to all this is through improving the economic life of our peasant-proprietor as he is today. The workers’ state can achieve this only through the market, which stimulates the personal and selfish interests of the petty proprietor. The initial gains are already at hand.
This year the village will supply the workers’ state with more bread-grains as taxes in kind than were received by the state in the period of War Communism through confiscation of the grain surpluses. At the same time, agriculture is undoubtedly on its way up. The peasant is satisfied—and in the absence of normal relations between the proletariat and the peasantry, socialist development is impossible in our country.70
Of course, as Trotsky emphasized at the same World Congress, “it is perfectly self-evident that the tempo of our future [socialist] construction will in the highest measure depend upon the development of the revolution in Europe and in America.”71
It could be argued, however, that the seeming pause in the advance toward socialism, represented by the NEP, opened up more time and greater space within which there was an opportunity to further develop Communist theoretical and policy perspectives regarding rural policies. Such a deepening of Marxism might have helped transcend the contradictions afflicting Bolshevik policy. While there are indications that Lenin—had he lived long enough—may have been able to carry out such creative work (as he had done in the past), this was not to be.72 The leading theorists in the Russian Communist Party likewise failed to come up with a coherent breakthrough. Trotsky, for all his insight and innovative brilliance, never got past the traditionally restrictive categories that hampered so much of Marxist analyses on the peasantry. Bukharin’s boldly creative efforts became fatally entangled in his alliance with Stalin—who finally and brutally dispensed with the bright but imprudent factional partner, coming up with his own horrific “resolution” of the peasant question.
Yet this outcome need not have been the foregone conclusion that Bertram Wolfe seems to suggest. There were significant realities, along with the development of interesting theorizations within Soviet Russia beyond Bolshevik ranks, that indicated pathways for a new understanding of how “the peasant question” might fit into the forward movement of socialism. In the period leading up to 1917, populist “illusions about peasant socialism” had given way to liberal and Marxist analyses, and also to relentless capitalist economic development in Russia, and many agreed that what was supposed to have been (according to populist dogma) the bridge from tsarism to Russian socialism, the obschina or mir, seemed to be in irreversible decline, according to Moshe Lewin. “Oddly enough, however, there was a revival of the mir during and after the revolution. It was the mir which undertook the confiscation and redistribution of the estates of the landed gentry.” Compared with the mir, he adds, the rural soviets were “something of a Cinderella.” Soviet statistics indicated that in the mid-to-late 1920s, 90 to 95 percent of the peasantry belonged to these 380,000 village communes existing throughout Russia.73
This opened the possibility of a line of thought that Sukhanov developed with enthusiasm. (The former Menshevik found employment as a minor researcher for the Soviet regime and was active in the agrarian section of the Communist Academy.) He was able to cite manuscripts from Marx’s 1881 writings—newly published by Bolshevik scholar David Riazanov of the Marx-Engels Institute—to document that Marx himself had seen the obschina (in Marx’s own words) as “a natural basis for collective appropriation” that could (with infusions of technology) help to generate “a combined and mechanized form of farming.” Sukhanov argued that—contrary to his own earlier pessimism (and the accepted “wisdom” of most pre-1917 Marxists)—Marx’s 1881 notions still made sense and should be implemented, through a merger of the village soviets with the obschinas and the necessary infusions of technology. “In the context of Russia’s industrial development and of the Soviet revolution, the obschina could have played an important part in modernizing and socializing soviet agriculture,” argues Sukhanov’s biographer Israel Getzler. Yet the critical-minded Sukhanov, seeking to assist the Soviet regime while sporting two albatrosses around his neck—his ex-populist and ex-Menshevik credentials—had neither a following nor allies. As Sukhanov himself commented, “It is sufficient for me to put forward an idea to have it rejected out of hand.”74 Moshe Lewin has observed the irony of this: “And so we are left with a paradoxical situation, in which the village organization which stood for all the collectivist aspects of village life, and which had been rooted in the village for centuries, was given no part whatsoever to play in the collectivization of the peasantry. And this was done in the face of constant criticism and complaints from those in power about the individualism of the peasant who would not give up his strip of land.”75 Interestingly, not only was Sukhanov’s pro-obschina partisanship dismissed by Communist hard-liners, but it was ignored by Alexander Chayanov as well.
It may be that Chayanov was tactfully avoiding this specific conflict with the hard-liners, but there may have been other considerations, such as those put forward in a 1920 study by Maurice Hindus. Land improvement was impossible, according to Hindus, as long as the peasant producer was “a slave of the commune, its customs, traditions, institutions.” Regularly redistributing strips of land—with the unproductive, the mediocre, and the good being circulated among various peasants, with all being restricted at the same time to less productive agricultural practices—the obschina or mir “tended to promote inefficiency, extravagance and waste” on the part of the peasant, and “contributed substantially toward his economic ruin.” Hindus also argued that the form of “communism” represented by the village commune—“that is the equitable periodic redistribution of the land”—involved a system in which “the peasant could do what he pleased with his stock, implements and crops. The land belonged to the commune, but the muzhik worked it as his private property and gathered and disposed of his crops as he chose.” This generated individualistic impulses and practices cutting across general agricultural productivity and the well-being of the larger society.76
Chayanov’s skepticism about the viability or need of the obschina was offset by his insistence that the noncapitalist peasant family farm was the firmly rooted reality on which Russia agriculture was based, and on which it must continue to be based. Chayanov offered an additional duo of concepts—vertical concentration and horizontal concentration—to explain alternate lines of agricultural development. The first (as Viktor Danilov puts it) involves a “path of growing diversity and interaction between different forms and scales of the organization of production processes and economic ties, both of the co-operative and the non-co-operative varieties.” The second involves “a form of concentration under which a multitude of very small and geographically scattered enterprises were merged, not only in the economic but in the technical sense, into one gigantic whole.” Chayanov saw vertical concentration as preferable if it “assumes not capitalist, but cooperative or mixed forms.” In fact, “in its cooperative form this process goes much deeper than in its capitalist ones, since the peasant himself hands over to cooperative forms of concentration sectors of his farm that capitalism never succeeds in detaching from it in the course of their struggle.”77
In his 1924 studies, Chayanov utilized Lenin’s category of state capitalism to describe Russia’s current economic reality as a transitional phase between “normal” capitalism and socialism, asserting that “we ought to introduce elements into the future organization of agriculture, the further development of which would itself outgrow state capitalism and might be the basis for a future socialist economic system.” Horizontal concentration—forcing peasant smallholdings into nationalized enterprises that are “large and technically quite well-organized farms,” or a system of “grain and meat factories,” with a “further proletarianization of the peasantry”—was “completely inapplicable,” he insisted. Instead, “the course of cooperative collectivization” through vertical concentration (not obliteration) of peasant smallholdings “is the sole course possible in our conditions to introduce into peasant farming the elements of large-scale farm industrialization and the state plan.” Cooperatives had already been utilized by smaller farms “in their struggle for existence in capitalist society,” and with state support and the introduction of agricultural technologies, “the scheme is converted into one of the main components of the socialist production system.” Chayanov envisioned “that this process will last for a long while,” involving “a system of cooperative combines and unions to establish a direct link between each peasant farm and central bodies of state capitalism, thus bringing it into the general stream of the planned economy.”78
Technological inputs and supportive modernizing policies would be essential: “With a parallel development of electrification, technical installations of all kinds, systems of warehouses and public buildings, networks of improved roads, and cooperative credit, the elements of social capital and the social economy increase quantitatively so much that the whole system changes qualitatively.” Such a process would hardly need the kind of “police apparatus huge enough to police the planting and harvesting all over vast, rural Russia,” as Bertram Wolfe had put it. Instead, such a system—freely, democratically—could be, in Chayanov’s words, “converted from one of peasant farms that have formed cooperatives for some sectors of their economy to one of a social cooperative economy, founded on socialized capital, that leaves in the private farms of its members the technical fulfillment of certain processes almost on the basis of a technical commission.”79
This path, while consistent with the ideals and goals of the October Revolution, was the one not taken. The actual path that was ultimately blazed by the Stalin regime beginning in 1929, indicated in Wolfe’s comments, would contribute powerfully to the betrayal of the revolution’s ideals and goals.
In the years 1918–21, however, the realities were more fluid, soviet power was more fragile, and the ideals and dedication were fresh. Yet the revolutionaries were imperfect, they were human, and the difficulties they faced were overwhelming. “The inhuman energy of a handful of dreamers—the progressive proletarians and party workers—is sustaining the chain of state and class that as yet holds us together,” mused Bolshevik N. Orlov. “It seems that if this handful vanished tomorrow, we would be scattered and torn apart from each other like the atoms of a substance subjected to strong heat.”80 This is one facet of Communism’s tragedy in the period we are considering.
“If we could tomorrow give 100,000 first-class tractors, supply them with benzene, supply them with mechanics,” Lenin commented in 1919, “the middle peasant would say: ‘I am for the commune (i.e., for communism).’” He added: “But in order to do this, it is first necessary to conquer the international bourgeoisie, to compel it to give us these tractors.” He made the same point differently in 1922, in comments to the Communist International, when he described Russia as having still “a minority of workers in industry and a vast majority of small cultivators,” and then elaborated:
A socialist revolution in such a country can be finally successful only in two conditions. First, on the condition of its support at the right moment by a socialist revolution in one or several leading countries. As you know, we have done very much compared with what was done before to bring about this condition, but far from enough to make it a reality.
The other condition is a compromise between the proletariat which puts its dictatorship into practice or holds the state power in its hands and the majority of the peasant population.81
To place the tangled realities in perspective, we might conclude as follows.
Despite limitations in his 1890s analyses, Lenin’s pioneering insights on the peasantry (reflected, for example, in his 1903 pamphlet To the Rural Poor) became central to Bolshevism’s very definition after 1905. The Bolshevik political strategy of “hegemony” was based on the idea of the socialist proletariat providing leadership to the peasants. The peasants were seen as an ally principally because of the complete clash of interests between them and the gentry landowners (and Lenin’s problematical theories of class structure in the village played very little role in this political calculation).
An essential part of Lenin’s peasant program from the beginning was that local peasant committees should decide what to do with the land (although this was certainly distorted by the mistaken 1918 effort by the Bolsheviks to mobilize “poor peasants” against more fortunate neighbors). During the Civil War, terrible pressures were placed on the peasants in order to support the Red Army, keep industry going, and so forth. We have seen that such pressures generated a violent peasant backlash. On the other hand, the triumph of the Red Army over the Whites, and the ability to keep industry going and to expand it, were ultimately in the direct interest of the peasants themselves, preserving their possession of the land and ensuring their well-being by getting the overall economy up and running again. That a significant number of peasants recognized such realities ultimately ensured the salvation of Lenin’s worker-peasant alliance despite tragic lapses during the Civil War.
Yet the persistence of vulgar Marxist blind spots among Bolsheviks-
turned-Communists would, when the 1920s flowed into the 1930s, help generate murderously brutal policies toward the peasant majority as the Stalin regime launched its “revolution from above.”82