THESIS

AN STATE UNlVERSITY Ll

Ilililull l I I ll llllill

3 1293 00881 1600

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I".

This is to certify that the
thesis entitled
SOCIAL DISJUNCTION:
RUSSIAN PEASANT-STATE RELATIONS
1860- 1921

presented by

Christine Anderson-Rast

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

M.A. degree in History

 

 

 

 

 

ajor essor

Date May 25L199L

0-7639 MS U is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution

 

 

 

LIBRARY
1 Mlchlgan State
Unlverslty

a?

 

 

 

PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record.
TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due.

DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE i

49!? '1 6 “‘

 

 

 

 

..
H . . l
m

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

will I i .150? l

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MSU Is An Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution
encircW.MS-o.1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SOCIAL DISJUNCTION:
RUSSIAN PBASANT-STATB RELATIONS
1860-1921

by

Christine Anderson-East

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of History

1993

ABSTRACT

Social Disjunction:
Russian Peasant State Relations 1860—1922

by

Christine Anderson—Rast

This thesis will examine the development of the
institutions and traditions of the Russian state and peasant
society to illustrate the abiding presence of nineteenth
century Russia in the twentieth century. By analyzing
contemporary works of social, military, and institutional
history, it will look at the First World War as the cauldron
within which the legal-administrative structure of the state
and the military authority hierarchy finally dissolved. It
will show the degree to which systemic disruptions affeCted
the structure of society. This thesis will demonstrate how
the efforts of all three administrations--tsarist, liberal,
Soviet--were conditioned by exigencies of war and the decline
of political authority. It will conceptualize peasant/state
relations within the context of this decline and highlight the
inexorable logic of peasant] state cooperation and conflict for

the 1890-1922 period.

List of

Chapter
A.

Chapter

Chapter
A.
B.
C.

Chapter
A.
B.

Chapter
A.

Endnotes

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Tables . . . . . .

1: Introduction . .
Methodology . . .

2: The Legal-Administrative Systems . .

3: The Nature of Rural Economics . . . .
The Pre-War Rural Economy . . . . . . .
Major Changes in Economic Production .

The Structure of Food Supply:

4. The Tsarsit Army

A Village in Uniform . . . . . . . . . .
Radicalization in the Army: Second Fissure .

5. Conclusion . .
The Peasant and th

Bibliography . . . . . . .

Soviet State 1917-22

First Fissure

ii

23
23
31
32

46
46
54

61
61

67

80

LIST OF TABLES

Table 3.1 Arable land, Meadows/Pastures, Forest by
Region O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 2 4

Table 3.2 Distribution of land among various categories of
ownerShip O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 2 5

Table 3.3 Selected economic and social indicators, Russia and
other countries, 1861 and 1913 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Table 4.1 Ordinary Defense-Expenditure, 1909-1913 and
Approved Extraordinary (Capital Grants) Defense
Allocations O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 53

ii

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

By 1921 a fundamental change in the nature and function
of power defining relations between the state and rural
society had occurred. No longer did obshchestvo (official
society) or pravovoe gosudarstvo (legitimate government) mean
legitimate authority to the narod (common people). The
reordering of rural-state power relations, however, was not a
simple function of the twentieth century but had antecedents
imbedded in Russian history. This thesis will examine those
antecedents. It will identify the existence and historical
development of two legal-administrative systems in Russia, one
representing official-central-urban society and the other
representing customary-peripheral-rural society.

The Russian state was never able to devise a legal-
administrative system that incorporated the peasant population
with its peculiar institutions into state and civil society.
Peasant society was isolated and remained generally outside
official Russia. In only two important areas--mi1itary and
agrarian policy--official Russia was forced to interact with
peasant society. Peasant conscripts were needed to fill the
ranks of the largest army in the world, and rural agriculture
remained the lifeblood of the Russian state. This thesis will
examine and evaluate the nature of peasant-state interaction.

The administration of the Russian state fell with the

2
autocracy in 1917, but the disintegration of the official
legal-administrative system was neither an abrupt nor a simple
process. Massive disorganization and bureaucratic confusion
co-existed with industrial growth and with sincere attempts at
agrarian and military reform. This thesis will look at how

both confusion and reform played out in the countryside.

B. Methodology

The last two decades have seen a surge in Russian
peasant studies. Teodor Shanin’s The Awkward Class presented
Russian peasant society as particular, complex, and more
defined and diversethanpreviously'thought.l Peasant studies
since Shanin have illuminated many facets of rural Russia's
cultural and institutional life. Roger Bartlett, Barbara
Clements, Ben Eklof, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Esther Kingston-Mann,
and Diane Koenker have edited some of the newest volumes
devoted either exclusively or in part to peasant economics,
institutions and culture.2

Other works focus on a particular institution of peasant
society or deal with peasant society reacting to events in a
larger national context. Dorothy Atkinson's book on the
Russian peasant commune unwraps the object of tremendous
debate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.3 George
Yaney scrutinizes the development of the Russian ‘system' by

examining the evolution of domestic administration and the

3

expansion of bureaucracy. He describes how peasant society
interacted with the official administration. His frame of
reference is institutional, however, he deals with peasants
only peripherally.‘ David Macey, Francis Wcislo, and George
Yaney write on the major efforts of the Russian government to
‘reform' their backward rural society.’ Robert Johnson, John
Bushnell, David Goodman, and Allen Wildman study peasant
society through the lens of a particular institution, either
the military or the industrial urban nexus.6 Orlando Figes
examines the interaction between peasants from the Volga
valley and the Bolsheviks during the years surrounding the
Civil War.7

A new book written by Lars Lih has been particularly
important for this thesis. In his work Bread and Authority,
Lih examines the breakdown of the central political authority
of Russia in 1914 and illuminates what he calls "the
reconstitution of a stable successor regime in 1921."8 He
spans 1917 with the traditional Russian concept, ‘time of
troubles, ’ and shows that all three regimes acting during the
years of war and revolution were equally unsuccessful in
stopping political anarchy and social chaos. Lih attempts to
conceptualize group reaction to breakdown by using the dilemma
of Hobbes's choice to predict participant response, i.e.,
"support the central authority if it has a chance of being
effective, but sabotage the central authority and look out for

yourself if it appears to be ineffective."9 Lih's focus is

4
not Russian rural society and he includes all social units as
participants, but I think his Hobbesian analysis is
particularly apropos in characterizing peasant reaction to the
state during the years of official disintegration.

This thesis will examine the development of the
institutions and traditions of the Russian state and peasant
society to illustrate the abiding presence of nineteenth
century Russia in the twentieth century. It will look at the
First World War as the cauldron within which the legal-
administrative structure of the state and the military
authority hierarchy finally dissolved. It will show the
degree to which systemic disruptions affected the structure of
society. It will demonstrate how the efforts of all three
administrations--tsarist, liberal, Soviet--were conditioned by
exigencies of war and the decline of political authority.

Chapter Two will examine the peculiar Russian legal-
administrative system(s) noting the dual nature of official
and unofficial structures--the differences between the state
administration and institutions of peasant self-government.
This chapter will indicate that the autonomy of the peasantry
was not only'historical but officially sanctioned.and.remained
a key element in the survival of the peasantry through the
years of war and revolution.

Chapter Three will look at the nature of the rural
economy-~agricultural production, land tenure patterns,

productivity, and cottage industry--and will show that the

5
peasant's resilience and adaptability enabled the rural
economy to survive the market disruptions at the national and
international level, particularly during World War One. This
chapter' also examines the Ibreakdown. of the relationship
between the Russian state and peasant society as ‘things fell
apart' over the issue of food supply.

The peasant soldier was a critical factor in the
dissolution of the tsarist.government and in the revolt in the
countryside. Chapter Four will examine the pre-war tsarist
army, an institution that. harbored the :most arcane and
conservative traditions. The government made several attempts
to reform the military as Russia prepared for the inevitable
European war. This chapter will look at the reform process
and examine the factors effecting changes in peasant soldiers’
perceptions and attitudes. It will also show how politics fed
anarchy and dissolved the hierarchial authority structure in
the military.

In October 1917 a new legal-administrative system
germinated in urban Russia. Informed by Bolshevik political
ideology and driven by a new social order, this system formed
the administrative structure of the Soviet state. Chapter
Five examines how this change in official Russia affected
rural society and the degree to which the Bolsheviks succeeded
in incorporating peasant populations into the new Soviet

state.

CHAPTER 2. THE LEGAL-ADMINISTRATIVE SYSTEMS

...the peasant’s conception of the state is
exceedingly vague. Under the old regime he knew
there was a tsar, he knew he had to go to the army
and perform a host of other disagreeable and
dangerous duties. But he did not understand the
function and purpose of the state, for the state in
which he lived was not an outgrowth of his needs,
and coltolld never, therefore, become a part of his
life.

The reasons why the Russian peasantry was excluded from
participation in the legal administrativeiorder'of'the‘Russian
state and kept enserfed longer than peasants in Western
Europe, are part of a larger discussion on the comparative
"paths" of social development. Suffice it to say that the
tendency in Russia was to maintain the historical separation
between peasant and the rest of society, to block the
liberties beginning to define human social organization by the
end of the eighteenth century in Western Europe, and to
reinforce the traditional social and legal framework
supporting the peasantry. The Russian state had for centuries
attempted to define by legislation a social and legal
organization for the peasantry, but peasants remained

inexorable.

"Kaluga dough," wrote Konstantin Kavelin in the
middle of the nineteenth century, [is like the
Russian peasant,] malleable enough in form but
possessing its own weight, texture, mass and
resistance--above all resistance. Composed of
elements that do not change readily under pressure
alone, Kaluga dough can be shaped and molded but it
also seeps through cracks or spills over edges or
simply bursts out of confining partitions. No
society is a water tight container, least of all
one spread out over the "thinly settled Russian
plain.""

During the nineteenth and into the early years of the
twentieth century, peasant society was viewed by Russian
liberals and conservatives, ‘Westernizers’ and ‘Slavophiles,’
as one elusive, essentially homogeneous, and powerful mass,
incredibly primitive in its understanding of the ‘modern'
world and existing within a tradition bound by powerful,
indigenous peasant institutions. The peasant soslovie
(estate) was huge, making up the bulk of the population in
Russia at all times. No political discussion in Russia could
ignore such a major portion of the population. As a group,
however, the peasantry was inarticulate in any measurable
sense, and its mentalite’ frustrated and baffled government
officials and intellectuals alike.

Peasant culture (cultures) preceded the peasant estate
(soslovie) and developed autonomously. It was highly diverse,
depending on geography, ethnicity, belief system, and the
like. Although there would be common characteristics among

Russia's village--some uniformity of social behavior and

norms--particularism, characteristic of pre-modern societies,

8
would prevail, making village society resistant to the
homogenization process demanded by modern states and cultures.
The peasants’ concept of the monarchy, their religion, and
their law, was.ajproduct.of their own self-awareness and self-
interest, which were regionally and ethnically determined.
But there were some historic continuities, particularly when
it came to the peasant and his/her relation to the world
outside the village.
[The peasant] has no part in making the laws that
govern him. He seldom knew when laws were made,
until he was told of them by officials, or until he
violated them and was punished for the
violation....Law in the eyes of the mouzhik is
something terrible, mysterious, incomprehensible,
that in the name of which the government
terrorizes, abuses, mutilates, whips out arrears in
taxes, exiles to Siberia, disembowels corpses,
pulls down houses, kills stock, drafts into the
army, drives children to school, compels
vaccination, etc., ad infinitum.12
Russian peasants were compelled by the state to function
under the aegis of a legal system that they didn’t understand
and that was outside the law that structured peasant life and
government within the village. This structure was unique and
shaped all inter-governmental (and intra-governmental)
relations involving the village and the state.13 The ‘upper-
level’ or official Russia was not only separate from ‘lower-
level’ or village Russia in culture and custom, but the two
strata in Russian society were held to different legal systems
and their business was adjudicated in different courts. This

difference was not one system of laws imposing itself on

another system but evidence of two distinct legal orders

existing side by side.

Consistently and consciously Russia forced itself into
development postures that were intolerable to its
institutions. The sanctity of system translated itself into
aspirations that would not wait for the gradual adjustment of
habits. The development of ‘official’ law in Russia can be
seen as an escape from reality: what became official law in
Russia was not sanctified by the bulk of the population. The
policies of modernization created during the latter half of
the nineteenth century might have granted legitimate self-
government to the peasantry or might have served to bring the
village under the direct authority of the center. Instead,
the Russian government tried to do both and ended doing
neither. This would haunt the central government and inspire
many attempts to explain, codify, and absorb within a central
legal system the customary law of the villages.14

Obychnoe pravo (customary law) and zakon (official law)
served separate constituencies, the village and the state. As
manifestations of separate mythologies, each group found its
law binding; they acted in concert and obeyed the dictates of
their law even when it went against their self-interest.
There was of course some legal interpenetration. Peasants
responded to official tax regulations by paying taxes.
Village law also required collective responsibility for these
taxes. Peasants went into the army because according to

"official" law they were obliged to be conscripted. Even so,

10
the village selected the inductees according to traditional
values incorporated into their customary law.”

Awareness of the law, however, can structure a framework
of dependence. Russian peasants believed the "myth of the
tsar" but only within the context of what they perceived as
justice. Officials could not manipulate the myth of the tear
against what the Russian people (narod) perceived to be its
interests. Indeed, the great insurrections of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, and Pugachev’s first of all, showed
that this myth could be manipulated against the regime.“
What will be shown rising out of the era of the Great.Reforms-
-from the emancipation of 1861 through the agrarian reforms of
the twentieth century and culminating in the confusion
generated by the First World War--was a social matrix of
groups responding to separate and sometimes contradictory
legal frameworks. What will be sustained through the years of
War, revolution, and civil war will be the customary law of
the village.

During the latter part of the nineteenth century, a
series of reforms were undertaken by the central government.
These reforms, however, did not transform either the customary
legal traditions or the value system of the villages.
Essentially the reform process which began in the nineteenth
century and continued into the twentieth century was an
invasion, an attempt by the government(s) to meet economic,

diplomatic, and military challenges posed by European powers

11
by transforming rural productive capabilities and
expropriating the increased revenues to pay the cost of
economic progress.17

By 1861 the Russian government had unwittingly assumed
responsibility for the peasants by "emancipating" them.18 ‘The
liberation of the serfs was neither the concerted product of
a single man or group of men. The dominant characteristic of
the reform decrees, beginning with the Liberation Statute of
February 19, 1861, was continuous vacillation, a series of
reluctant disorderly gestures by men who knew that they had to
go somewhere but were unsure of the direction.

Prior to the Liberation Statute, unofficial peasant
courts existed among the serfs.l9 Unregulated by the central
authorities, peasant courts traditionally dealt with domestic
and economic disputes within the villages. The post-
emancipation attitude of the government ministers was that
peasant society should be allowed to develop on its own but
with the help of the zemstvos (elected district councils) and
volost (smallest administrative unit in tsarist Russia) law
courts established in 1864. These new courts did not replace
the unofficial peasant courts but in many cases acted as the
‘court of last resort’ or ‘court of appeals.’ The official
juridical values of these volost courts were to be based on
the juridical customs of the peasantry.20 At the same time,
however, while maintaining customary law in the villages the

ministry also felt the need to impose 9_n_ village society

12

certain reforms based on juridical principles emanating from
‘official’ sources. Most of these reforms had to do with
economics--more taxes, more efficient use of land--or military
service. Included were unofficial obligations of the
peasantry to become more ‘moral,’ more ‘loyal’ and ‘better’
(i.e. sober and orthodox) citizens of the Russian Empire. No
one in the government, however, knew how to enforce these
unofficial responsibilities as heretofore moral guidance (as
well as economic obligation) had been the responsibility of
the landowners. Emancipation removed the peasantry from the
personal rule of the gentry, allowing the peasants to look.out
for themselves without direct interference from the landowners
while at the same time placing them under new obligations to
the state.

How was the state to regulate the activities of the
peasantry? A police organization had come into being in the
18305 under Nicholas I. Policemen were the first salaried
officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs based in the
villages. These stanovye (policemen) were charged with
preserving village order according to official lawn .After the
Statute of Liberation the authority of the policeman was
reduced and.his authority (but not.his person) was replaced.by
the mirovye posredniki (arbitrators) , who were to preside over
the changes in rural society. The dismal failure of both of
these positions to function inspired the Statute on Land

Captains of 1889. This new patriarchal guardian was designed

13

to be explicitly independent from the restraints of peasant
custom and explicitly invulnerable to interference by the
central bureaucracy. These land captains (zemski nachalnik),
as the police and the arbitrators before them, were unable to
avoid becoming essentially bureaucratic clerks, but they did
represent to the village a new kind of invader.21

The only thing these various officials had was power;
they had no real control over village affairs. Due to the
tremendous number of rules emanating from the central
government and the small number of officials hired to go out
into the rural areas to enforce them, most of the regulations
were ignored. However, the police, the arbitrators, and/or
the land.captains technically had.the authority'toienforce the
rules any time they wished, and the peasants, of course, knew
it.

What effective limit could there be to the

authority of an official who ‘was legally

responsible for the moral condition of the peasants

under his jurisdiction, especially if the peasant

way of life, including its customary legal order,

was largely' immoral. in 'the light. of 'the

government’s regulations? n

The more the government tried to impose its sense of
conformity on peasant society, the more imbedded non-
conformity became. Partly this was the government’s own
fault. Even when the volost court system was linked to the
general system of courts within Imperial Russia by the Polnoe

sobranie zakon a (Complete legal code-revised 1912) and rural

Russia saw the creation of a rural supreme court to which

l4
volost court decisions could be appealed, the reform
arbitrarily permitted the use of either local custom or the
general criminal and civil code as the bases of law.23
Because the estate character (soslovnost’) of the
peasants’ administrative structure has been so
extended, the peasants, 80% of the empire’s
population, are entirely segregated from other
strata of society and in many ways constitute a
distinct, vast state within the state. This
segregation...could not but have produced a series
of consequences that at present constitute
unconquerable impediments both to the successful
development of the peasants themselves and to the
structuring of a local administration that can aid
the government in satisfying local public-state
needs (mestnye obshchestvenno-gosudarstvennye
nuzhdy).24
During the latter half of the eighteenth century,
Russia’s domestic administrative boundaries were firmly
established as the defining territorial units until the Soviet
period. Overall, the contiguous Russian Empire was divided
into fifty gubernias. These gubernias, in turn, were
subdivided into approximately 360 uezds. At the gubernia
level the central authority resided in the governor, and,
progressively more important by the twentieth century, in a
collective of uezd administrative figures and bureaucrats from
the tsar’s ministries.

The smallest unit of peasant self-administration in
some areas of European Russia was the commune or agricultural
community.” Due to the historical development of land tenure
and the way even hereditary property was transmitted, peasants

tended to work a series of small intermixed strips of arable

land that had been divided up among the members of the

15

commune. The quality of the land (rocky, swampy, etc.) was
proportioned equally among the peasant households. The
quantity of land was distributed according to the number of
workers in the peasant household.26 Peasant populations
living in central European Russia and in the North, whether on
gentry estates, state-owned properties, or on land held in
‘household’ tenure, generally lived in communes. Peasants
living in the western part of Russia were generally not part
of any communal organization.” Peasant communes (and their
members) on gentry land were considered the property of the
landowners. These landlords had total control over activities
within the boundaries of their estates. Seignorial authority
provided the peasants with the list of their fiscal and
military responsibilities, and was certainly capable of
coordinating their farming activities, but the commune
leadership played a critical role in the collective management
of peasant affairs.28

After emancipation, the central government attempted to
provide the villages with new institutions that would help
them conform to new post-reform legal and fiscal standards.
The smallest administrative unit was to be called a "rural
society.” The selskoe obshchestvo (peasant/village/rural
society) was to consist.of peasants that had lived together on
the same estate, an entire village, or even an amalgamation of
villages. Selskoe obshchestvo was an urban government

epithet.29

16

The duties and functions of the rural societies were
within the traditional purview of the commune}o Generally
the pre-emancipation communes and the post-emancipation rural
societies were identical. The use of the term ‘rural
societies’ seems to have caused administrative confusion.more
than anything else, although there was some attempt made to
distinguish rural agriculturalists from non-landowning
residents. Legally, it seems, even when old communes fell
within the jurisdiction of the new rural societies, the
communes retained legal responsibility and control of their
old members.31

Male heads of the village households made up the skhod or
village assembly and elected a starosta, who performed the
tasks of everyday governing for a term of three years. The
village assembly elected a sborshchik podatei (tax collector)
and desiatskie and sotskie (policemen) , who, serving under the
stan police or the land captains, acted independent of the
village government. The skhody also selected a number of
delegates who would serve on the township or volost assembly.

The volost historically’ had been the smallest
administrative unit of the central authorities. It linked
self-governing, independently owned, non-redistributional
communes. The post-emancipation volost would now include one
or more neighboring villages within an uezd and have between
300 and 2,000 revision souls under its authority. The volost

assembly itself normally performed no explicit function, but

17

it did meet annually to elect the volost government. This
government consisted of a starshina (volost elder) and a sud
(court) , which consisted of four member judges. Volost
government officials served three year terms. The starshina
had a pravlenie or regular administrative board that was
supposed to act as a consultative body. The makeup of the
pravlenie included all the starosta and sborshchik podatei of
the villages within the particular volost. Needless to say,
all this was sufficiently complicated to necessitate the
hiring of a pisar or clerk.

The authority of all 'these peasant officials (and
restraints on this authority) lay in nothing' more than
customary practice. The laws shaping peasant society were not
only patriarchal, varied from volost to volost as well. In
his area of authority, the volost starshina could be a tyrant
over the weak. Yet he was helpless before influential
families, tavern keepers, money lenders, and horse thieves, or
anyone who was perceived by the village as having more vlast
or power.

For the overwhelming majority of the narod, the

zemstvo is only one part of a towering structure

known as nachal’stvo--less important, surely than

the ispravnik, and not as stubborn as the stanovoi,

but that is all.32 N.A.Shishkov

The creation of the zemstvo was designed to create an
administrative structure integrating all levels of society

within the Russian state. Whether the zemstvo was created as

an expression of the state or of the state theory of self-

18
government represented a continuing controversy. In any
event, the zemstvo largely felt itself isolated from both
governmental institutions and local society and steadfastly
continued to represent the "old dualism of societal interests
and state interests." ”

The zemstvo assembly was the representative body at the
uezd level. Initially thirty to fifty delegates were to be
elected every three years from groups defined not by their
class, but by the kinds of property they held: (1) rural
property owned privately--congress of landowners, (2) urban
property owned privately-—congress of town voters, or (3)
communal property held by rural societies--congresses of
electors from the village communities. The new election
agreement of 1890 grouped the voters not only by property
qualifications but also by soslovie (estate). These changes
meant that a number of categories formally having
representation were eliminated.34 For the peasants this meant
that they no longer participated in the electoral process as
private landowners but only as members of village communities.
Additionally, their choice of delegates had to be confirmed by
the governor of the gubernia. Thus, even while the government
said it was trying to enlist and enfranchise the peasantry, it
was doing its utmost to make peasant influence in
representative bodies negligible.

By including peasants in the zemstvo assembly, the

state was expressing a reservation about the wisdom of peasant

19

self-government" The zemstvo*was to stand above the volost in
the administrative hierarchy and was to theoretically serve as
a critical link between state and society. Once the grip of
the landlord had been released from the village, peasant
participation in the zemstvo, in the formation of social
policies and the development of tax structures, would
legitimize zemstvo policies. The problem the central
government faced in legislating this participation was how to
come up with a formula, which, while eschewing the mention of
social estates, would bring peasants into the zemstvo
assemblies but would also guarantee the predominance of the
nobility. In fact, the imperial government was never able to
come to terms with peasant representation in the zemstvo, and
peasants were equally unable to identify their interests
within this institution.”

Zemstvos would symbolize the democratic ideals of the
Russian liberal. Liberals envisioned that the peasantry,
given the proper institutional setting, would develop
organically into a civil society with participatory local
government" The state, these same liberals imagined, would be
transformed into a modern liberal Rechsstaat or pravovoe
gosudarstvo, a state unified around one central legal system.
This expectation epitomized the worst fears of the central
government--both because the central authorities were afraid
of allowing’ the jpeasantry' a larger enfranchisement, and

because the highest levels of government were afraid of the

20
same liberal tendencies replicating themselves in a national
zemstvo. In actuality, though, these fears proved unfounded,
for the zemstvos represented a symbiotic bond between the
autocracy and the gentry.36
Some :ministers in 'the ‘tsarist. government tried. to
inculcate within a rationalized administrative structure a
system that they reluctantly perceived as archaic--namely the
autocracy, but the regime proved unwilling to sacrifice
control and.authority in order to stimulate:a truly integrated
society. Arbitrary use of authority and power, irrational
institutions, and legal and administrative duality resulted in
anarchy' and increasingly' weakened. the legitimacy’ of the
state.37
On February 26, 1903, a manifesto proclaimed Nicholas
II’s intention to take positive action to contend with what
the government considered were the inadequacies of peasant
institutions. Initially the promised reforms were not
intended to destroy communal ownership. The reforms would
enable peasants to migrate to new lands or simply to enclose
their allotments. The disposition of the peasant commune had
been central to discussions within the government on land
reform and. the 'modernization. of agriculture. Years of
investigation and a myriad of commission reports, however, had
produced no clear agenda. The only consensus was that the
commune and its system of land tenure represented everything

‘backward’ and wrong about Russian agriculture.

21

Between 1903 and 1905 a major shift in government
thinking took. place.38 'The "undesirable aspects of the
commune" had eradicated any thought of its preservation as an
institution. Peasants working land under communal tenure
"neglected the soil." Communal tenure was unprofitable, both
for the peasant and for the nation. "Ascribing the desire of
the peasantry for a quantitative rather than a qualitative
economy to the impermanence of communal land use" government
officials stated that if the peasants actually owned the land
as their private and permanent property the problem of "too
little land would cease to exist for the majority of peasants
now complaining of it." Facing the same conundrum it had
battled in the emancipation legislation--how to transform
society without losing control--the government was unsure how
to proceed.39

It.would be impossible in any short order to wade through
the morass of laws and.decrees to illustrate the confusion.and
incoherence of the land reform acts begun March 4, 1906, and
lasting until the onset of the First World War. The
fundamental problem was that two separate legal languages were
being spoken.40 The reform process also suffered from the
ongoing disputes within the bureaucracy between those who
advocated the preservation of the existing social order, by
force if necessary, and those who attempted to change it.
Those :ministers wanting legitimate reform. could see the

growing social and political instability and knew maintaining

22
nineteenth century reality with twentieth century rhetoric
would be ineffective. The struggle perverted real reform.
Philosophical schism and bureaucratic obfuscation was evident
throughout the emancipation and land reform processes. These
tendencies toward ministerial confusion and official
schizophrenia would become magnified during the First World

War .

CHAPTER 3. NATURE OP RURAL ECONOMICS

A. Pre-War Rural Economy

In pre-industrial societies land is usually the vehicle
whereby wealth and status is accumulated.“1 There was no
active land market in Russia prior to 1861, but with
emancipation. came the jprivilege of engaging in. economic
transactions--such as buying land--without the permission of
the landowning gentry. Newly freed peasants were given a
portion of the former estate in the form of an allotment which
they were to ‘redeem’ or buy over time from the noble.
Peasants were to farm the land to feed themselves and their
families. The surplus produce went to pay their redemption
fees and their taxes.“2 However, with the exception of the
south-western region of European Russia--land annexed from
Poland in the eighteenth.century--land in the Lower Volga, and
land near the Urals, ex-serfs were not given enough allotment
land to allow for a minimum of subsistence even according to
the official standards of the time.43

Solutions to the problem of land shortage could take any
number of forms. Peasants could rent or buy more land with
money from their production surplus. ZPeasants in high.density
areas could settle in areas of lower density or they could

move to urban areas where they would perform non-agricultural

23

24
work. Land yields could be improved so that peasants could
subsist on the smaller plot. Peasants participated legally
and illegally in all three solutions when they could, with or
without the support of the government. The government dealt
with the problem of land shortage in a variety of ways,
culminating in the land reforms discussed above.

But just.how'much.arable land was there, who owned it and
how did ownership change after emancipation in 1861 and the
reforms in 1906?‘ The availability of land by type was roughly
as follows:

Table 3.1 Arable land, MeadowszPasture, Forest by Region44
(based on the land census of 1905)

 

Categories European Caucasus Asiatic Total
of land

(in millions of acres)

Arable land 558.9 33.5 810.0 1,042.38
Meadows/pasture 62.4 4.6 27.8 94.8
Forest 445.8 0.0 853.5 1,319.2;

 

Tot. productive 1,067.1 8.1 1,691.3 2,456.4

It is readily apparent that Russia had a tremendous
amount of arable land, but certain parts of it were becoming
highly overpopulated. What confounded settlement outside of
high density areas were government internal passport policies,
which restricted the freedom of colonization. Moreover, when
government ministers first enacted a resettlement policy in

the 18908, the bureaucratiijrocess was so complicated.that it

25
is a wonder that any peasant migrated at all.“
The statistics for changes in landownership after 1905
are unreliable, but the. distribution of land by social

category is roughly as follows:

Table 3.2.
9': "'o-t'- -_ .1- amon- - §--: -te-o 5-: . 041‘ s; . “
(millions of acres)

 

Categories of land 1861 1877 1905 1917
State and public 449.01 417.69 397.44
institutions

Non-peasant private 240.30 221.40 170.10
ownership

Peasant allotment 301.32 315.09 316.26

Private Peasant owned land 13.50 66.69 499.5

In 1878 the land census registered 1,017.5 million acres
suited for agricultural production (including forests) and in
1905 and again just before the war the land census gives the
area as 1,066.9 million acres. Therefore, peasants cultivated
thirty-two percent of the arable land in 1878, thirty-five
percent in 1905, and forty-six percent in 1917.

Of course, these figures do not take into account the
population growth in the empire, which increased from seventy
one million in 1861 to one hundred seventy one million by
1913.47 Population growth became a problem not simply because
there were too many Russian peasants, but because they seemed

to live in the wrong places. Population density was a problem

26

in St. Petersburg/Petrograd and in Moscow, where the nascent
industries were unable to absorb the increase both from
population growth and immigration, and in those agricultural
regions that were already sated in terms of grain yield per
person.“ i

The quantity of land per peasant also does not take into
consideration traditional land cultivation practices, where
one third of peasant land remained fallow as a result of three
field crop rotation practices. Land ownership figures also do
not show the amount of land rented by peasants. These
transactions may or may not have been recorded but, in any
event, consolidation of gentry farms in the late nineteenth
century would have made less land available for peasant

rental.49

The vast majority of the peasants adhere to and
uphold their traditional conceptions of the rights
of labor...because of the historical conditions
which molded their ideas of right and.wrong. These
conditions and conceptions, the absence of trading
in land, landlessness and land poverty, the
attitude toward property in land and toward the
rights of labor, account for the peasant’s
conviction that he has an inalienable right to the
land. My washi, a semlia nasha. [We are yours, but
the land is ours.]50

The essential issue remained. Whether fact or fancy,
the peasant felt that the land rightfully belonged to the
peasant cultivator. This thought fueled peasant desire for a
general land redistribution and inspired acts of protest--

trespassing on private estates and destroying property,

27
seizing fodder and pasture land, and cutting down trees in
private or state forests. These protests varied in intensity
and form depending on the region (for instance agricultural
workers on the large estates in the Baltic, in Little Russia,
and in the South-West primarily went on strike), but
importantly, land became symbolic of the divisions in tsarist
society and the backwardness of Russia’s economic base.
Statistics on the productivity of land during the tsarist
period are speculative and not particularly critical to the
discussion here. Russian agricultural productivity has
frequently been interpreted as being in crisis for a series of
reasons. Many pointed to the redistributional peasant
commune, which attempted to equalize yield potential among its
members by continually redistributing land among its members.
Others blamed the three field system for poor yields.
However, there is evidence that peasants were applying
improved techniques to fallow land, that many peasants lived
in.communes where land allotments were stable, and.that by the
turn of the century agriculture as commodity production had
changed the focus of production. In these settings, whatever
the quality or type of yield, agriculture was responding to
the growth of the market.
Commercial agriculture in Russia was primarily the
marketing of grain, primarily wheat. Grain, had been marketed
since the eighteenth century, but high prices in the 1880s saw

the development not only of the grain export business but a

28

push for increased.rolling stock to transport.these exports to
market. Russian intellectuals debated over whether it was
advisable to ‘squeeze’ agriculture to promote industry through
export earnings. Research by Paul Gregory, however, shows
that the growth of agricultural productively was low relative
to most of Western Europe (see Table 3.3) . Nevertheless,
retained cereal crops (that is grain kept by the peasant
household for survival) seemed.to»be growing; In other words,
Russian exports by themselves may not have provided a
significant surplus for the development of industry, but
Russian peasants, while poor, did not seem to be getting any
poorer until the First World War, when the export market
collapsed.

Table:3.3 Selected economic and social indicators Russia and

other countries, 1861 and 191351

 

population National income Per capita
(millions) 1913 rubles(mil.) national income

Panel A. 1861

 

Russia 74 5,269 71
United Kingdom 20 6,469 323
France 37 5 , 554 150
Germany 36 6, 313 175
United States 32 14,405 450
Italy 25 4,570 183

Panel B. 1913

 

Russia 171 20,266 119
United Kingdom 36 20,869 580
France 39 11,816 303
Germany 65 24,280 374
United States 93 96,030 1,033
Italy 35 9,140 261

Austria/Hungaryso 9,500 190

29

The most striking fact regarding productivity trends in
agriculture is that up until. the First World War peasants
produced eighty-six percent of the total cereal production (on
forty-six percent of the land) and controlled seventy-five
percent of the grain marketings.’2 Even allowing for regional
differentiation, peasant control of grain production was
extraordinary.

Kustarnichestvo--work done by primitive methods;
amateurish, inefficient work.3

Come autumn or summer early in the morning on a
market day. On the roads that lead from the
countryside to Moscow you will see a strange
spectacle. You will see row upon row of wagons
loaded down with grass, hay, wood, potatoes, and
other vegetables, and driving or walking beside
them women talking loudly among themselves as their
hands move and their fingers flash. They are
knitting stockings. You will see women carrying
sacks with jugs full of milk and cream, knitting as
they walks"4
Estimates for the number of rural craftsmen range from
four to fifteen million persons in the 1880s.” Both kustar
and remeslo were terms applied to crafts (kustar) such as
knitting or trades (remeslo--usually applied to men’s
handiwork) such as blacksmithing.“ These peasants lived and
farmed in the villages. The production of crafts usually
developed out of surplus production for household use or to
fulfill a community need. The surplus was usually sold in the
local markets. Kustar production also included craftwork
(sometimes with materials provided by the merchant) and either
sold directly to merchants or collected by middlemen who in

turn brought the work to the cities for sale. It also

30
described the rural extension of the urban factories that
found it cheaper to give peasant women work to "put out" than
pay for the identical work to be done within the factories.

Kustar work tended to be done in rural regions where
farming was poor and outside earnings represented an economic
necessary. It also developed in regions that were relatively
close to urban markets. Kustar development responded to
economic crises as well as household differentiation. It
acted.as a barometer for the natural economy; If peasants had
surplus to sell or trade for manufactured goods, they did so.
When needed commodities were unavailable or there was no
surplus from agricultural production, kustar production
increased. According to census data, by the turn of the
century the four to fifteen million peasants involved in some
kind of kustar production had dropped drastically. One can
assume that the demand for peasant handcrafts had disappeared,
that peasants did not need to provide kustar labor, or that
kustar’ production simply' went. undetected. by census
officials.”

By 1913 over fifty percent of Russia’s national income
was derived from agriculture.‘8 Although the growth of
agricultural productivity did not keep up with industrial
growth or the growth of the economy as a whole, its per
capita values were no lower than those of Germany, Canada and
the United Kingdom.

What this investigation shows, therefore, is that up to

31
the First World War the Russian peasantry as a group was not
caught in a spiral of decreasing economic returns. This does
not mean to say there were not regional problems and specific
regional hardships. However, in tracing the causes of the
"revolution" beginning in 1915, one needs to qualify long-term
economic depression and focus instead on the immediate
antecedent of the war and a deeply rooted sense of peasant

injustice.

B. Major Changes in Economic Production due to the War

The First World War had a tremendous effect on the
Russian economy. The Western frontier, the Baltic, and Black
Sea routes were closed to export trade. Only the seasonally
frozen routes of the White Sea (Archangel) and Vladivostok
allowed export cartage to Western Europe. Furthermore, an
export embargo imposed by the Russian government January 26,
1914, diminished grain exports by almost half. By 1915-1916
only five percent of the 1909-1913 export average was reached,
and by 1917 cereal exports became insignificant.”

The war also restricted private trading in land. The
Ministry of Agriculture ordered the completion of land reform
projects already approved, but budgetary restraints and a
shortage of specialists in the field (presumably some of them

were conscripted) inhibited the jprocessu ‘With so :many

32
villagers away in the army, the government was reluctant to
initiate the consolidation of new peasant strips.

However, several major changes in the way grain and been
grown and marketed at first concerned and then panicked the
Russian government. The Russian landed gentry, which owned
the large estates and produced primarily for the market, lost
peasant labor and draft animals to the army, and after the
first three years of the war was cultivating 40.5 million
acres less. Though peasants were cultivating 35 million acres
more, less of their produce was available to the government.60

Although internal grain markets were disrupted, grain
productivity generally was not. Even though peasants also
lost labor and livestock to war requisition, they proved
better able to adapt to changing conditions. Russian grain
reserves amounted to 8 million tons at the start of the War.
They' would rise to 16.4 million tons by' mid-1916, and
eventually fall to 12.7 million tons by mid-1917.61 There was
enough grain in the Russian countryside to fulfil the demands
of the army for the entire war. However, the Russian

government would have to procure it effectively.
C. The Structure of Food Supply--The First Fissure
The Tsar issued full instructions for mobilization of the

Russian army and navy on July 18, 1914. On August 1.

Nicholas II gave total responsibility for supplying the armed

33

forces to the Ministry of Agriculture (MZ) headed by A. V.
Krivoshein.”' This was initially a paper arrangement, for the
Russian army traditionally acted as its own requisitioning
agent. Officers bought or commandeered at will buildings,
supplies, horses, and civilian laborers often without
consulting any ‘official’ administrative body or even checking
with their superiors.

The procurement hierarchy was relatively simple:
military districts would provide the Ministry of War with a
list of their needs. The Ministry of War would order whatever
supplies it might require for a definite period and would
receive and distribute the supplies it got. The M2 was to
purchase and collect the supplies and deliver them where
directed. The problem in all of this was that the federation
of military districts tended to exaggerate local needs and to
overemphasize the importance of the front, ignoring the rear.
Front-line units had no compunction in redirecting the
movement of supplies for their own use.63

Within a few months, however, to establish better and
more reliable communication networks, Krivoshein appointed a
purchasing commissioner for each gubernia. These individuals
were not.new agents but were regular officials within the MZ’s
reform organization and experienced rural officials. They were
to be unofficially supported in the supply work by local bank
inspectors, officials of the Ministry of Finance, the food

supply section of the Ministry of the Interior, managers of

34
state bank granaries, and of course, the zemstvo institutions.

In February 1915, the government introduced a food
embargo. Under this decree, military commanders had the power
to prevent the removal of any supplies needed by the army from
being marketed outside a given gubernia. The embargo also
allowed the army to fix prices for food and fodder and gave it
the authorization to fbrce the sale of supplies (at a 15%
price reduction) if the owner refused to sell them
voluntarily: ‘With. guaranteed. military’ markets, MZ
commissioners had unlimited power to buy at fixed prices or
requisition at even lower rates if necessary.

Although initially successful in securing visible stocks
of foodstuffs, these practices eventually disrupted the whole
economic exchange base of the country. Productive gubernias
withheld supplies while waiting for higher prices. Consuming
gubernias.had.to pay the increasingly higher prices or go into
prohibited markets to get the supplies they needed. By Spring
1915, it.became obvious that some kind.of central coordination
of the supply problem was desperately needed and that the
civilian population, producers and consumers of grain, would
have to be included in the process of military procurement.
This meant, of course, demilitarizing the procurement
process.“

In June 1915, the Duma created a series of Special
Councils: the Special Council on National Defense under the

Ministry of War, the Special Council on Transport under the

35

Ministry of Transport, the Special Council on Fuel under the
Ministry of Commerce and Industry, and the Special Council of
Food Supply under the Department of AgricultureJ” All the
Special Councils were organized under the same principles:
they were chaired by their respective Ministers; they included
representatives from all government departments, the Duma, the
State Council, and any public organizations-~such as the Union
of Zemstvos and of Towns and the War Industries Committees--
devoted to the work of supplying the needs of the army. The
designated objective of each Special Council was the
‘discussion and coordination’ of all matters concerning
supply. The chairman of each Special Council was given a
variety of plenipotentiary powers in dealing with the military
and the local authorities. The responsibilities of the Special
Councils were similar to ‘those enjoyed. under the jprior
purchasing arrangement. Now, not only were the armed forces to
be provisioned but the entire Russian population as well.
Since the Russian army had the veto power over any decisions
by the Special Councils, however, attempts to demilitarize the
procurement process were unsuccessful.

Interdepartmental coordination was non-existent.
Special Councils failed to hold joint sessions or form joint
committees. By December 1915, the job of coordinating the
entire supply operation was given to a special ‘mini’ Council
of Ministers called ‘Conference on the Supply of Foodstuffs

and Fuel to Needy Localities.’ This Conference stipulated

36

that all the Special Council commissioners at the gubernia
level were to meet with their respective provincial governors
and to resolve the food supply issue. Soon this ‘mini’
council structure reproduced itself in much smaller
territorial units down to the uezd and district zemstvo.
Bureaucratic chaos became endemic. After the February
Revolution looking back on the situation in 1916 the new
Minister of Agriculture, Andrei Shingarev, stated:

I do not know who is in charge of the food supply,

for I do not know to whom to turn with this

question. I do not know the condition of the food

supply, for no one can make sense of the problem, I

do not know who will solve it, for no one knows to

whom the matter has been entrusted.“

The army had always attempted to feed itself through
district commanders and military purchasing agents. In August
1914, the M2 was given the responsibility of feeding the army.
In June 1915, the Special Council of the Food Supply (under
the auspices of and chaired by the M2) was made responsible
for coordinating the feeding of the army. By December 1915,
the Duma created the Special Conferences on the Supply of
Foodstuffs and gave them the authorization to organize
foodstocks and feed the army. The Union of Zemstvos including
the representative uezd zemstvos cooperated and competed.with
the bureaucracies and bought and stockpiled food with the
intention of feeding the army. All of these organs had
varying degrees of arbitrary authority which they exercised

simultaneously; Despite all these efforts, by the end of 1916

food shortages were apparent.

37

The troops must be provided with food, no matter

where the main attack is planned for. The stocks

of supplies in the base and food depots, which are

not exhausted, must be made good again. Instead of

having a monthly reserve we are depending on daily

deliveries. We are not getting what we should get,

and we are living on short rations.67

In response the government established procedures to
transport grain from producing to deficit areas. With the
inexorable logic of a wartime economy, the government was
moving towards a policy of state regulation. The division of
the grain market--fixed prices for the government and
competitive prices for civilians--proved unworkable and
provided the impetus for a grain monopoly.68

The passive role played by the Conference under the M2
had changed by late 1916. Ungovernable inflation and
uncontrollable local agencies pushed the new Minister of
Finance, Aleksandr A. Rittikh, into imposing emergency
measures by fixing prices and establishing quotas. Problems
appeared almost immediately. Prices were fixed, but prices
for the same item varied from region to region, and some
regions had no price ceilings on an item that was fixed
elsewhere. Embargoes did little more than isolate a region
and destroy all vestiges of markets. The local commissioners
had wanted a unified price structure which would take account
of local needs. Instead.a grain levy (razverstka) was imposed
on the villages, and local commissioners were ordered to

devote their full attention to collecting it.

The system of grain requisitioning illuminates the

38

essential features of the tsarist government’s rural policy--
the complete lack of coherent planning, the proliferation of
a multiplicity of ill defined institutions with conflicting
charters, and the lack of any sustained consideration for
peasant needs. Food supply policy produced a rupture between
the peasant and the government. Peasants (or some of them)
had grain, and the government had to find a way to buy,
coerce, or steal it so that its war effort and its industry
would not starve.69

Food supply policy under the Provisional Government
placed all food and fodder grains under the direct control of
the state. Grain was to be surrendered at fixed prices. If
grain was not surrendered, it was to be confiscated. The
‘liberal’ government attempted to exercise state control over
articles manufactured in the cities and needed by the grain
producer. The government also attempted to increase
production and reduce food consumption by instituting grain
rationing in the countryside. All these programs were equally
unsuccessful.”

A food-supply dictatorship was inaugurated in the spring
of 1918, six months after the Bolshevik takeover in October.
The new government did not rely on the voluntary field
organization of zemstvo officials. Instead it built a strict
centrally controlled organization supplemented by a detachment
of urban workers. Initially the Bolsheviks intended to

extract grain from the villages in exchange for providing the

39

peasants with needed industrial items at low fixed prices.
The People’s Commissar of Food Supply, A.D. Tsiurupa, was
confident that the peasant was coming to a realization that in
order to get important industrial items from the cities he
first had to give up agricultural produce. Tsiurupa was
hopeful that the peasant was beginning to be aware of the need
of a smychka, a worker-peasant alliance. However, ultimately
the Bolshevik government was forced to rely on extortion and
other non-voluntary methods of grain extraction. Tsiurupa
knew that "there are only two possibilities: either we perish
from hunger, or we weaken the [peasant] economy to some
extent, but , [manage to] get out of our temporary
difficulties."71

No government from 1915 until 1921 had been able to
manage food supply successfully. No government could convince
producing peasants that loyalty to the state was reason enough
to donate their surplus to feed the nation. Food supply
policies initiated in the First World War had been aggravated
by deteriorating political, social, and economic conditions.
Government officials knew the peasant was only reluctantly
going to cooperate against his interests.

Were there any political or cultural reasons why food-
supply problems were so recalcitrant, so resistant to solution
now? Russians had dealt with peasants and famine for
centuries. However, unlike the ecologically caused famines of

the early nineteenth century or the economically generated

4O

famines of the 18908, the famine hysteria from 1915 occurred
at a time when sufficient grain was on hand to feed everyone
in the Empire. There was a problem of transporting the grain
from where it was grown to where it was needed, but this was
not so much the cause of the shortages after 1915 as an effect
of the general evaporation of markets. Ironically, the food
shortage was induced by some of the very factors which were
supposed to have prevented it--price fixing, embargoes,
quotas. Individuals, regiments, and towns held on to any
grain in their possession in order to make a profit from it or
to protect themselves from a possible shortage. By the end of
1915, grain disappeared from the market reinforcing general
food anxiety.

Russia had difficulty with any chain of command system.
Authority could be delegated to a minister or a peasant
council; authority could just as quickly be un-delegated by
someone higher up the hierarchical ladder. There was no legal
appeal available. The Russian government would occasionally
attempt to follow an enlistment method based on democratic
models that provided peasant councils with benefits offsetting
participation in government. In Aleksander Chayanov’s
language, the government would encourage "ants collecting for
a common good." Russia, however, had no experience with
horizontal links connecting social elements traditionally
independent of each other. No civil society was able t0

provide a sense of community or loyalty past the village

41

volost. The tsarist government--capricious, imperious, and
fundamentally impotent--feared hunger, but it feared public
organization even more. Before he was finally removed,
Minister' of Internal .Affairs, .A. IProtopopov, arbitrarily
closed down many local food supply commissions. Rittikh had
gambled that the war would end soon and that peasants would
cooperate. The war didn’t end soon and the peasants had
nothing invested in state cooperation. The tsarist government
by February of 1917 had finally forfeited its right to rule.

The Provisional Government made no changes in local
administration that might have won the support of the
peasantry because it was too cautious and too unsure of its
agendan It also feared. the ‘vote of so large body’ of
enfranchised citizens. Mentally it was always counting rural
ballots. As a result, the peasantry initially greeted the
fall of the tsar with enthusiasm, donating grain to the
officials of the Provisional Government and attempting to be
react. positively’ to ‘these new local administrative
authorities."2 Peasants hoped that these new officials (or
old officials with new names) would act in the peasant
interest. When they realized that both tsarist policies and
institutions remained intact in the countryside, support for
‘the liberal experiment’ was short lived. Of course, the
problem of ‘using former tsarist officials in. the rural
administrative network was recognized by the Provisional

Government, but due to a shortage of experienced bureaucrats

42
the authorities felt that they had no choice. By the time
elections were held in August-September 1917 to form new
democratic organizations in the countryside, peasant
disillusionment with the government was profound.73

The Bolshevik party supported peasant aspirations for
land by official decree and sought in the process the
destruction of feudal relationships, which it saw as
characteristic of rural society in Russia. Bolshevik policy,
however, also required the destruction of capitalistic
development, which was a long-held aspiration for most
peasants. Though the Bolsheviks knew their constituency was
a radicalized working class and that their policies had
traditionally been uninspiring to peasants, they did recognize
the need to operate "in accordance with the fundamental
aspirations of the broad masses."74 Nevertheless, Bolshevik
policy failed to achieve organic links between the working
class and the peasantry, and the relationship that the party
encouraged between the producers and the consumers was not
based on mutuality (the productive needs and identified
aspirations of the different levels of society), but on the
coercive policies of the state.”

The problem of food supply is illustrative of a unique
process developing in the countryside. ‘While the constituent
groups in urban Russia were politically heading for the
"painful evolution" from a "society of sosloviia to one of

classes,"76 the peasantry would develop no sense of itself as

43

a class. Karl Marx addressed the ambiguity of the peasantry
with their localized interests:

Inasmuch as millions of families live in economic

conditions which distinguish their way of life,

interests and culture from those of other classes,

rendering them antagonistic to the latter, they

constitute a class. But inasmuch as their

connections are merely local and their identity of

interests hasn’t found expression in a community, a

national association or a political organization,

they don’t constitute a class."
The food supply crisis would magnify the localized nature of
the peasants. Peasants, their market structures destroyed and
their village institutions isolated and attacked.by the larger
administrative system, would retreat to collective
individualism, economic subsistence, and community solidarity.
"The peasants had little notion of belonging to any wider
grouping than their own volost’."78

Grain requisition under all three governments did much to
expand the rupture between the peasants and the state. The
grain monopoly imposed by the tsarist government not only
imposed economic hardship on the producer peasant, it eroded
the moral authority it held in the village community and
heightened the sense of the siege mentality already building
in the countryside. The levy system initiated by the tsarist
government was in place by winter 1916.79 The government was
unable to withstand the demoralization that the razverstka
policy produced. The entire quota stipulated in the 1916

order was to be delivered to holding stations within six

months. The autocracy fell four months before this quota was

44
met.

The Provisional Government made few changes in the
organizational structure of food supply organization, but it
tried to inspire local committees to take control of all grain
from its sowing to its sale to the army. Physically and
psychologically isolated from the village, however, these
committees were unable either to persuade or force peasants to
comply with government directives. The Provisional Government
was unable to reconcile the demands of the grain producer with
the rest of Russia. Peasants wanted a steady and affordable
supply of articles of prime necessity and high prices for the
grains they produced. The government wanted to keep grain
prices low and ‘was unable to ‘meet consumer demand for
manufactured goods. Spiraling inflation, underproduction, a
transportation and distribution system in shambles: all
created a situation that forced producer peasants to pay more
for the goods they needed. As a result, peasants again
withheld grain from the government and rejected its efforts to
control rural areas.80 Throughout the Summer and Fall of 1917
peasants seized privately owned estates and khutor farms.

The Bolshevik party created rural soviets shortly after
seizing power. Volost’ zemstva became volost’ soviets;
village assemblies became village soviets. Due to a paucity
of personnel, tsarist technical officials and specialists were
transformed into political cadres, providing guidance to the

peasants on the new land law.81 Up until the advent of the

45

civil war in May-June 1918 and.the initiation of a food-supply
dictatorship, there had been sporadic forays into the
countryside to confiscate grain. Essentially, however,
peasants were left alone and sold.their goods through whatever
market structures could be re-initiated. The Bolsheviks had
neither the resources nor the personnel to impose vigorous
collection on the peasant. Requisitioning and coercion
gradually' became policy' only after’ other’ methods jproved
unsuccessful.

The Bolsheviks’ agrarian policy had the effect of
strengthening rural communes and providing the basis for
opposition to later coercive policies. Although the
Bolsheviks wanted to avoid confrontation with the peasantry,
they ended by galvanizing peasant determination to separate
from the rest of Russia and seek refuge in their own rural
economic enclaves.82

By 1917 peasants were negotiating local exchanges on
their own. Vblost soviets had no communication with other
volost soviets during the early soviet period. Ignoring the
‘official center’, they sought to provision only their own
territory. The peasantry had become alienated from the volost
zemstva during the extracting years of the grain monopoly.
The activities of the volost soviet simply reinforced peasant

suspicion.

CHAPTER 4. THE TSARIST ARMY

A. A Village in Uniform

The reforms initiated by the Minister of War, Dmitri
Miliutin the 18608 were only partially successful in
overcoming the efforts of traditionalists in the military
establishment to maintain the status quo. The discussion
surrounding this reform reflected to a large extent the debate
surrounding emancipation legislation. Before emancipation, it
seemed appropriate that a serf society should have a serf army
as well. However, while serfdom was no longer considered
relevant for rural society, the military would support the
existence of soldier ‘serfs’ for a much longer period--in some
ways up until the creation of the Red Army. Reform attempts
were, thus, constantly perverted. Miliutin attempted to
institute a mandatory program of education within all units of
the army. However, even before he retired in 1881, he had
acquiesced to pressure and allowed literacy instruction to
become only optional. The new Minister of War, Petr
Vannovskii, believed that education was actually harmful for
soldiers. After 1902 when mandatory literacy courses were
reinstated, staff officers routinely created fictional reports
recounting bogus classes offered to the soldiers.83

Military reform during the Duma period was even more

46

47

complex. The War Ministers from 1905-1914, A. F. Rediger and
V. A. Sukhomlinov, both revered military tradition along the
lines of the nineteenth century chief of the General Staff
Academy, M. I. Dragomirov. Both opposed reform for reform’s
sake and defended the vested interests of the establishment.
Both also supported policies aimed at modernizing Russia’ 8
support structures and encouraged the country ’ 8
industrialization. In the pre-World War I reform phase,
ironically, the ‘young Turks’ of the military generally
opposed reform, particularly as applied to the army’s internal
social policies. Leading Russian Army officers positioned
themselves to sustain their personal power and opposed all
military reforms which might challenge it.84

The Russian peacetime army was unlike any other major
European army. Up until the end of the tsarist period, it was
still a village in uniform. While, it was understood by some
that a restructured military policy was the only way to create
a modern army and that a rationalized and efficient military
was needed before a comprehensive defense plan could be
implemented, most consistently resisted attempts to change the
internal social construction of the army.”

Probably the most enduring legacy given to the soldier
was the army mentality-~the language of military obedience.
This language was not far from the peasants’ own understanding
of subordination. The two cultures of serfdom, the world of

the pomeshchik (landowner) and the world of the muzhik

48

(peasant) were slowly becoming obsolete everywhere but in the
military. The army replicated serf society, but in a rather
unique way; .After the 18808 soldiers were no longer quartered
in peasants’ huts scattered about the countryside but housed
in cities in times of peace or in proper barracks during war.
Soldiers also were no longer responsible for producing all
their own food. By 1914, many of the outward trappings of a
modern army had been drilled (or beaten) into the recruit and
he looked the part of the modern soldier.

However, one cannot extend the case of ‘modernization by
way of military service’ any further, for life in the Tsar’s
army was still a most un-modern experience. The Russian
soldiers’ duties were still primarily of an economic nature
and had little to do with the military life of his unit. Even
though.soldiers.no longer farmed regimental plotsior cared for
regimental cattle, they were still hired out in the villages
during harvest. What the regiment could not produce on its
own it had to pay for in cash, and soldiers earned the money
working in the civilian economy, a practice known as vol’nye
raboty. Work-life in the military was thus cyclical, moving
through the seasons with rhythms well-known to the men from
their former village lives.

Soldier8*were not only employed on farms, but also*within
the expanding non-agricultural labor markets. Railroad
construction and road building, for example, would have

soldier labor detachments within the work force. Up to forty

49

percent of the soldiers in a given company were often engaged
in such activities including service to the officer corps and
general corp entertainment. The soldier was viewed as an
economic unit, a critical part of the regimental economy,
whose soldierly functions were generally little utilized.
Between economic obligations, private service, and guard duty,
men available for training exercises were few, generally ten
out of a hundred at the most. Though a reform process was
ostensibly pushed up to the First World War, the focus of
these reforms were primarily strategic. Little money went to
training the Russian soldier or to relieving him from his
extra-regimental economic duties.

If the Russian regiment functioned much as an old feudal
estate, it was because after providing it with some initial
working capital the central government expected the military
unit to be self sufficient. The regiment exemplified the old
landed estate not only economically but socially. Officers
looked upon their men as barely human and extorted from them
money and services beyond even the general regimental
economics.86 IHowever, while economic exploitation was one way
of defining the relations between officers and men, social
distance was an even more striking characteristic of those
relations within a military noted for its institutionally
sanctioned segregation.

This relationship between officers and men had a crude

caste mentality about it. Social divisions did not exist

50

because the officers came from the upper-levels of society and
were simply replicating their civilian life. The army had
always been a vehicle for social mobility in Russia and since
the state could not afford to pay its officers very much, it
was generally unable to recruit any but the poorest nobility
to its service. Social attitudes were thus defined even more
starkly. If the soldier acted the part of the ‘serf’ in the
feudal relationship, the officer, no matter what his original
status in civilian life (even were he a peasant), acted the
role of ‘master’.

The tsarist officer corps was thus notorious for
everything but leadership and efficiency. Socially isolated
from civilian life, given to widespread habitual drinking,
prone toiaihighly inflated sense of his own.position, no doubt
bred and nurtured by his military education, officers,
particularly those who did not have an outside income, often
engaged in petty theft and graft. Western memoir literature
details the dissolute life of the Russian officer. The
relationship between the officer and the soldier, therefore,
proved not a representation of a civilian reality but a
distortion of what an ambitious officer and a generally
fearful and passive peasant perceived to be their roles.

The Duma period of 1905-1914 saw a number of attempts to
change the social structure of thetmilitaryu ‘Russia’s loss in
the Russo-Japanese War raised the issue of military reform.

General Alexei N. Kuropatkin, commander in chief of the

51

Russian armed forces, who was initially made scapegoat for the
defeat, blamed everything from lack of patriotism to technical
shortcomings. The government tended to support his position
that nothing was fundamentally wrong with the internal
structure of the army, and thus there emerged no clear
consensus on reform. Distracted by the domestic revolution of
1905-06, the Russian government was no position to engage in
a massive critique of the army. Even among supporters of
internal military reform, no consensus emerged about what was
wrong with the army and how best to. repair it. Subsequent
reform efforts were equally ambiguous and inconclusive.

In 1906 the Minister of War, General Rediger, introduced
a comprehensive scheme for the reorganization of the army.
One facet of this program provided a reduced term of ‘active’
service for all recruits. Theoretically this would produce a
larger pool of trained soldiers. The actual length of
military service was dependent on the particular unit to which
a soldier was consigned, but generally a newly conscripted
soldier would spend three to four years in active service and
then ten to twelve years in the auxiliary reserves. These
reserve units were further divided up into two ranks according
to age and terms of previous service. The first group were
young and theoretically well-trained and would gather annually
for maneuvers to maintain their value as support or
replacement troops during war. The second rank of reserves

were generally men exempted from service due to physical

52

disabilities or because of their family situation or social
status in the village.87

In 1908, Rediger also set forth hi8 Malaia programme
(little reform plan) which specified an improved
classification system for recruits, revised regulations for
general mobilization, ands a reduction in ‘the number of
officer’s servants (presumably in to free:up:more soldiers for
front-line training). In March, 1909, Vladimir A. Sukhomlinov
replaced Rediger as war minister and reform energies turned to
rewriting the plans for mobilization and.the creation of a new
defense plan in light of the expected eventuality of a war
with Germany and Austria-Hungary.88

Much has been made of the Bolshaia programma, or Great
Reform of the Russian military, and in money expended it did
provide the army an increase in recurrent expenditure and a
large capital grant. The Reform also provided a large sum to
the navy to be expended mainly in modernizing its Black Sea
Fleet” The year between 1913 and 1914 saw further significant
increase in capital expenditures. By 1914 the Russian army

was receiving more money than the German army.89

53

Table 3.4

0 d n r e ense-E d t e 9 - 9 3
(mil. rubles, rounded)90

 

1909-10 1910-11 1911-12 1912-13 1913-14

Army: 473 484 498 528 581
Navy: 92 113 121 176 245
ove ord' a Ca 't 1 Grants Defe 8 ocati 8

(mil. rubles, rounded)

 

1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914

Tot. 80.6 50.4 30.5 28.4 87.6 85.8

One of the most crucial changes promised by the Bolshaia
programma was an increase in the number of peacetime soldiers
and an increase in the number of back-up units for front-line
divisions to be used in case of war.91 These support units,
however, were poorly trained or, having served in the past,
had forgotten most of their training and had no experience
with modern equipment. Officers in the field were hardly
interested in expending time working with these divisions or
wasting needed supplies to equip them.92

The mythology surrounding Russian participation in World
War'I was created.by the British.pre88 and exemplified wishful
thinking on the part of the Allies, who saw hope for a quick
resolution to the war in Russia’s enormous population.
Millions of peasant soldiers, the ‘Russian steam roller,’

would mass on the eastern front, and Germany would be overrun

54
by Russia’s inexhaustible supply of soldiers.93 The reality,
however, proved different. The initial units greeting the
Germans often out performed the enemy, but, inexperienced,
were being killed at a faster rate than they could be
replaced. As the war dragged on, replacements came from the
last major resource of Russian manpower--the poorly trained
reserve units and new draftees from the villages. By fall of
1916, Russia drafted half a million men, the bulk of whom were
disgruntled family men, "who rioted at induction centers,
jumped off troop trains, balked at training exercises, and
were universally regarded by military men as more a liability
than an asset."“ Despite years of reform effort and the
expenditure of billions of rubles, the internal economic and
social characteristics of the regimental units proved a
fundamental liability. Despite initial enthusiasm and
expectations, the Russian steam roller was beginning once

again to resemble a rickety bus.

B. Radicalization in the Army: The Second Fissure.

The Russian soldier held views on the state, the army,
and the tsar that derived from his village of origin.
Patriotic feelings towards the state or the army were non-
existent. Russian peasants and their soldier counterparts
venerated the Tsar-Batiushka (‘little’ father) because he

sanctioned their way of life. The hierarchial authority

55
structure in the army was as unimportant to the peasant
drafted in the military as the rural police and the
pomeschchick (landowner) was to the peasant in the village.
Years of abuse by superiors had not instilled in the soldier
respect for officers nor a sense of duty to defend his
fatherland.

The Russian fatherland, of course, consisted of many
nationalities and most were represented in the ranks.
Variations in nationality, education, regional affiliation
were relatively consistent throughout most army units.
Several notable military unit8--one Polish division, several
Latvian brigades, and the Cossack8--contained a single ethnic
group, but the tsarist government generally followed a policy
of ethnic dispersal throughout the army.

Even within military units made up of disparate elements,
soldiers responded to the stress of mobilization by finding
identification with a peer group, usually a military unit,
regiment, or division. The powerful bond of loyalty
constructed in these units left members little inclination to
dissent from the group once a consensus was reached. Even
under the threat of severe punishment, soldiers hid their
guilty compatriots or covered up offenses.

Although there was little variation in attitude within
these closely bound military units, the units themselves could
vary considerably. Collectively, soldiers responded to a wide

variety of influence8--the peculiarities of their officers,

56
the proximity of the German army, the availability of food and
other supplies, the amount of time they had been mobilized
without relief, their exposure to propaganda (of either the
left or right variant), and, of course, the frequency and
tenor of the letters from the villages. Regiments were
considered ‘old regime’ or ‘radicalized’ depending on these
reactions, and typically they could reverse their opinions
radically when confronted with new situations or even rumors.

Two issues, however, would provide a sense of solidarity
among the lower ranks. One of the most important was the
availability of food. Like the peasant in the village, the
soldier feared hunger even before it occurred, and as fear
became reality during the course of the war, the soldier
connected his own hunger with the potential hunger of his
village and the family he left behind. This fear led soldiers
to desert or to refuse to return to their units after a leave.
It even produced instances in which soldiers led their
villages in insurrections against local landowners.

Another issue producing solidarity in the ranks was a
growing sense of empowerment in opposition to the authority
structure of the military, a structure that would be
dismantled by the February Revolution. Without necessarily
espousing any political ideology, soldiers were aware that the
revolution meant an unqualified overturn of officer authority
and the creation of a new government sympathetic to their

aspirations for peace and land. Petrograd and those urban and

57

naval centers within striking distance of the capital were the
first to understand the implications of the revolution. The
‘rotten triangle,’ areas--the naval base of Kronstadt, the
military suburbs of Tsarskoe selo, Oranienbaum, Vyborg,
Helsingfors, Reval Pskov, Dvinsk and Riga--initiated the most
complete usurpation of military authority. Also, because of
their proximity to the capital, these military units exhibited
'the political influence of ‘radicalized’ workers and antiwar
socialists. An important manifestation of this politicization
was the creation of the Soldiers’ Section of the Petrograd
Soviet and revolutionary ‘Order (prikaz) Number One.’”

In all companies, battalions, regiments, parks,
batteries, squadrons, in the special services of
the various military administrations, and on the
vessels of the Navy, committees from the elected
representatives of the lower ranks of the above-
mentioned military units shall be chosen
immediately. (The first resolution for Order #1,
prikaz from the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’
Deputies, March 1, 1917)96

Although a product of political radicalization, the Order’s
social implications would prove far more significant as
indicated by the following reactions.

Order Number One was disseminated rapidly and
everywhere along the whole front and in the rear,
because the ideas which it embodied had developed
for many years, in the slums of Petrograd as well
as in the remote corners of the Empire, such as
Vladivostok. They had been preached by all local
army demagogues and were being repeated by all the
delegates who visited the front in vast numbers and
were provided certificates of immunity by the
Soviet. (General A.I. Denikin)"7

58

It was clear to me that this order. . .smashed at

one blow the machinery with the aid of which we,

generals and officers of the Army, had succeeded.in

maintaining subordination and imposing our will on

millions of resentful armed men deeply

disillusioned by the war. (future Red Army

Commander Bonch-Bruevich)98

The news of the February revolution reached the trenches
through reluctant communicators. The euphoria of the front
soldier was dampened only by his suspicion of those passing on
the information. The abdication caused rejoicing, but the
change in government hardly inspired the reaction that Order
Number One roused. Soldiers were particularly angered by the
sense that officers were using their authority unjustly. Now
soldiers were given official permission to challenge the
structure of authority and to have an elected committee of
peers to lay down rules for officers and men alike. Order
Number One and the changes it implied signaled the
disintegration of the old command structure of the army.

Disintegration in the official command structure did not
create overnight a disciplined politicized organization. Only
gradually did Russia’s soldiers and sailors evolve from a
confused, disorganized, mutineering mass, into an
institutionalized force. Disobedience to orders, desertion,
and fraternization with the enemy headed the list of problems
confronting military commanders in early spring 1917, and
nearly all the unrest was quite traceable to the breakdown in

orderly patterns of authority.

Originally inspired by the liberal aims of the

59

Provisional government, by August 1917 soldiers at the front
eventually showed a marked distrust of all politics, even
revolutionary politics. The war and the food shortages
remained. Promises made by the liberal revolutionary
government such as land. reform and. the calling of the
Constituent Assembly were being put off. Soldiers were
beginning to realize that if they wanted to influence politics
at the rear they would have to become organized.

Soldiers had only limited identification with the
educated and propertied representatives running the
Provisional government. They did not understand the objective
of democratic government to invest power in institutions nor
did they have the patience to wait for leaders to create the
necessary legal pre-institutional framework. On the other
hand, the soviet representational structure appeared simple,
direct, and expedient. However limited their understanding of
center politics, soldiers heartily approved soviet power’s
ability simply to decree peace, land, and bread. Soldiers
wanted the war to end and the Bolsheviks were willing to
oblige.

When we talk about the narod, we mean the nation;

when they talk about it, they understand it as

meaning only the democratic lower classes. In

their eyes, what has occurred is not a political

but a social revolution, which in their opinion

they have won and we have lost. (written by a

dejected Pavlovskii officer 1917)99

The revolution, however, had for the soldier as for the

peasant primarily a social agenda. Of course the war had to

60
end, but once over demobilized soldiers and their peasant
families had the same desire to own additional land, the same
wish for a smallholding that they had before the war. Peasant
social agenda was not part of Bolshevik ideology.

The soldiers’ attachment to the land and to their village
culture was expressed in many ways during the years of the
war. They participated in or led agrarian revolts against
landlords. They left their military units and returned to the
villages during harvests and when rumors circulated about a
potential land distribution. Upon demobilization, they
settled back into village life, took up positions as heads of
households, and. obtained. positions. of leadership in 'the
village skhod. A wedge that had divided the peasant and the
soldier from the state had been destroyed with the signing of

Brest-Litovsk in March 1918; by May a new wedge was forming.

CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSION

A. The Peasants and the Soviet State 1917-22

With the Decree on Land issued in October 1917, Soviet
power provided peasants with legal sanction for the
confiscation of gentry property by the village commune. Some
rural communities even dated the ‘revolution’ by the seizure
of the local gentry estatefiloo The Bolsheviks initially chose
to view these confiscations as the activities of the
‘equalizing poor,’ and they generally disapproved of letting
villages divide up land on their own. However, the government
did not interfere with either the act of distribution or with
the justification that peasants gave for it.

By Summer 1918, the new Bolshevik government initiated
what was to be the first in a series of food procurement
campaigns. .Although the characteristics were different, each
campaign had two things in common. They were designed to take
food products from producing peasants and distribute them to
non-producing consumers.

Peasants viewed Bolshevik.procurement.policies as simple
expropriation, and one of their weapons for fighting back was
economic subterfuge. They reduced their productivity to
subsistence levels, hid grain, fed cereals to their livestock,

and sold surplus produce on the black market. The Bolsheviks

61

62

had hoped that villages would be sympathetic toward a
genuinely revolutionary government. Peasants’ support of
Soviet power, however, stopped abruptly after land and peace.

With the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, the Bolshevik
government made peace with Germany and ended Russia’s
involvement in World War One. By Summer 1918 Russia was
embroiled.in civil war» Peasants were inclined.to support Red
Army ‘guerrilla’ units and defend the revolution locally
against the White Army. However, they did not understand the
need for a civil war in distant regions, and refused to
cooperate with military conscription. Once the White‘Armies
had.beenfidefeated and peasants no longer feared.the.resurgence
of the landlord, they took up arms against Bolshevik attempts
to subrogate village autonomy with Bolshevik authority.

‘Peasant. Wars’ broke. out against. the Bolsheviks in
response to an increase in the tax burden, the growth of the
trade deficit between the rural grain producer and the urban
worker, and the intrusion of Bolshevik kombedy (poor peasant
committees) into village politics. Most importantly, peasants
fought the Bolsheviks for volia (freedom), for their right to
be left alone. Peasant support of the Bolsheviks had never
extended to an understanding of any new authority
relationship; nor did it include recognition of a new social
order.

In the early 19208 the Soviet government passed a series

of laws changing its previous rural policies and providing

63

guidance for a ‘new’ course of land settlement.101 The
important ideals incorporated within this ‘basic law’ were
village autonomy, individual freedom, and household
solidarity. In some ways the new land code harkened back to
the language and form of the tsarist reforms of the nineteenth
century. In other ways the code seemed to be simply restating
the customary law of the villages. It postponed, however,
Bolshevik fantasies on the possibility of collective labor in
the countryside.

By February 1921 the Politburo had retreated from the
food procurement campaigns, replacing them with a food tax
only on the surplus.102 The Bolshevik government also put
aside its fundamental dislike for ‘free markets’ and allowed
‘local economic circulation’ of surplus peasant production.103
Black markets, a constant feature of economic life during the
civil war, had reluctantly been decriminalized.

The relations between the Bolshevik state and the
peasantry were unresolved by the 19208, but the two were no
longer actively warring. Bolsheviks no longer tried to
reorganize village government and were content with a less
provocative role in rural life. Although some villages still
contained kombedy, kombedy played no leadership role. Village
administration was the responsibility of the household elders.

Party affiliation in the local administrative bodies
remained complicated.“ The volost or regional soviets now

included more Bolsheviks, but whether these new delegates were

64

elected. because of 'their socio-economic standing in ‘the
village community or simply because no one else wanted the
job--it would be hard to say.”’ Even so, Bolshevik
political attitudes rarely entered village life. Peasants
generally viewed volost soviets as agencies of government
taxation and organs of Communist rule, and did their best to
ignore them.106

By 1922 tradition and the rhythm of the agricultural
cycle again measured time in the countryside. Work and
leisure depended on needs and tasks and were indivisible from
each other. Holy days and feast days were the only
interruption in the usual village routine. The Bolsheviks
tried to replace the old holidays of the Orthodox Church with
new ones: International Labor Day on May 1, and, of course,
the anniversary of the October Revolution on November 7.
These new holidays, however, held little for peasants. They
did not replace existing church days and were noticed only if
they provided a new opportunity for eating and drinking.107

The head of the household remained the oldest male,
though cracks were beginning to show in the patriarchal armor,
and the power and authority of the elder was not quite as
autocratic and absolute as it had been in tsarist days.108
Women. had legal redress for their’ grievances, but. this
movement was not new to 1917. It was part of a continuum
dating back to the 18608.109

Peasants were permitted to market their produce legally,

65
but this did not change their dependence on a relatively
primitive technology. The main unit of production remained
household labor, and although more progressive farming methods
would eventually be adopted, the new Soviet regime would not
see major increases in grain yields in the 19208.“°

The Soviet government was committed to a conception of
the rural landscape as a hostile sea of capitalist market
relations. Socialist doctrines had consistently been unable
to transform the mentalité of the peasant community. However,
the government needed rural products, so it set aside its
ideological concerns. It backed down from its coercive rural
policies and suspended its use of administrative force. The
Bolshevik government was unable to challenge the communes’
rural authority and so that rural authority remained.

The civil war had proved the peasants politically
impotent, but political helplessness on a national level was
not new. The weapons with which peasants fought in 1921 were
also not new. The burning of manors and rebellion against
authority had been a factor in peasant life for centuries.
Economic subterfuge as a revolutionary weapon had been
refined, however, since the first attempts at government grain
requisition in 1915, and it was not a response peasants
restricted for Bolsheviks. Peasants had fought for the right
to work the land and for freedom from interference by others.
By the end of the civil war, which culminated six years of

sometimes violent activity, it looked momentarily like they

66
had succeeded in obtaining both.

The countryside was as difficult to govern after 1921 as
it had been before 1917. War and revolution had strengthened
the village commune; the ‘gains’ made during the years of the
Stolypin reforms had all but been rescinded. The economic
power of village grain had challenged the Soviet economic
policies as it had challenged the policies of the tsarist
ministers; the power of grain had forced the legalization of
markets. State administrators in regional and village soviets
were peasants, many of them ex-military. Unlike bureaucrats
under the tsar, most were illiterate, untrained in government,
poorly'disciplined, and.inclined.towards localism, but.for the
time being they belonged to the village and not to the state.
For a time the state under the Bolshevik party struggled with
its misconceptions of rural society and consolidated its power
at the center. For a time rural society was left to its own
resources.

Though the peasantry was extensively weakened physically
and.morally by the privations of war and revolution, the sense
of peasant separateness and a belief in the autonomy of the
peasant community vis-a-vis the state survived. The collapse
of the Russian state did not extend to the villages. The
logic and functionality of peasant action and practices,

customs and institutions stubbornly persisted.

67

ENDNOTES

1. Teodor Shanin, The Awkward Class, (Oxford, 1972).

2. Roger Bartlett, editor, Land Commune and Peasant Community
in.Russia (New York, 1990); Barbara.Clements, editor, Russia’s
WOmen (Berkeley, 1991); Ben Eklof, editor, The World of the
Russian Peasant (Boston, 1990); Sheila Fitzpatrick, editor,
Russia in the.Era.of NEP (Bloomington, 1991); Esther Kingston-
Mann, Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European
Russia (New York, 1990); Diane P. Koenker, editor, Party State
and Society in the Russian Civil War (Bloomington, 1989).

3. Dorothy Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune
(Stanford, 1983).

4. George Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government:
Social evolution in the Domestic Administration of Imperial
Russia, 1711-1905 (Urbana, 1973).

5. David A.J. Macey, GOvernment and Peasant in Russia 1861-
1906 (Dekalb 1987); Francis Wcislo, Reforming RMral Russia
(Princeton, 1990); George Yaney, urge to MObilize: Agrarian
Reform in Russia, 1861-1930 (Urbana, 1982).

6. John Bushnell, Mutiny amid Repression (Bloomington, 1985);
David Goodman, From Peasant to Proletarian (New York, 1982);
Robert Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian (New Brunswick, 1979) ;
Allan Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army
(Princeton, 1987).

7. Orlando Figes, Peasant .Russia, Civil war: The ‘Volga
Countryside in Revolution (1912-1921) (Oxford, 1989).

8. Lars Lih, .Bread and .Authority' in .Russia 1914-1921
(Berkeley, 1990).

9. Ibid., 232.

10. Marius Hindus, The Russian Peasant and the.Revolution (New
York, 1920), 145.

11. Concept credited to S. M. Solov’ev. Alfred J. Rieber,
"The Sedimentary Society," in ed. Edith W. Clowes, Between
Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public
Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, 1991) 345.

68

12. Marius Hindus contributes these thoughts to A. Nastyrev,
who he says made a special study of peasant attitudes toward
law. Hindus, Russian Peasant and the Revolution, 147.

13. Yaney, Systemization of the Russian Government.

14. Peter Czap, Jr., "Peasant Class Courts and Customary
Justice in Russia, 1861-1912,” JOurnal of Social History:
149.

15. Rodney D. Bohac, "The Mir and the Military Draft," Slavic
Review 47 (Winter 1988): 653-666.

16. Daniel Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (Boston,
1976), 23.

17. The.characterization of the reform movement.as an invasion
by the.government is found in.George Yaney, Urge to.Mobilize.

18. Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 1861-1906;
Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia; and Yaney, Urge to Mobilize.

19. Discussions of peasant class courts can be found in
Michael Confino, "Russian Customary Law and the Study of
Peasant Mentalities,"The.Russian.Review 44 (1985); Peter Czap
Jr.,"Peasant-Class Courts and Peasant Customary Justice in
Russia," Journal of Social History; C.A. Frierson, "Rural
Justice in Public Opinion: The Volost’ Court Debate 1861-
1912," The Slavonic and East European Review 64 (October
1986).

20. Peter Czap, Jr. "Peasant Class Courts," 151-158.

21. Land captains were given two charters: they were to»govern
their territory in explicitly formal independence from all
other government agents except the governors, and they were
given broad executive and legislative powers over all who were
attached to their volost. Yaney, urge to Mobilize, 49-143.

22. Korkunov, Russkoe gosudarstvennoe pravo, vol. I,479. in
Yaney Systemization, 233.

23. Cathy Frierson discussed the problems inherent in
inculcating or absorbing rural legal institutions and laws
within the greater Russian legal system. The debate among the
ministers in government centered around two themes. One theme
established the need to eliminate the ‘guardianship’ of the
peasantry and bring them fully into the legal structure. The
other theme felt that the peasantry formed a distinct class
and as such their culture should remain distinct from the
urban areas. Their laws, therefore, should reflect the
traditions of the village. C.A. Frierson, "The Volost’ Court

69

Debate,"The Slavonic and East European Review 64 (October
1986): 526-545.

24. Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia, 74-75.

25. The Obshchina (commune) should not be confused with the
derevnia (village). A commune could include several villages
or be part of a village. Most typically, however, the village
encompassed one commune. The village was the address (If you
asked a peasant where he was from he would answer with the
name of his village not his commune.) Also, land was under
the purview of the commune; village administration was
obviously under the purview of the village community. The
reason for this situation may lay in the pre-emancipation mode
of ownership by the landowners or in the way a main village
may have ‘colonialized’ and created a new village. The new
village could have its own local assembly but could stay
within the land use unit of the original commune. Moshe
Lewin, "The Obshchina and the Village," Roger Bartlett,
editor, Land Commune and Peasant Community in Russia (New
York, 1990), 20-35.

26. Communes’ existence and spread ‘were in response to
taxation practices of the tsars. Because it was easier, the
government levied the tax on the community as a whole; the
community decided what part.of the total burden each household
member was to share. The redistributive practice seems to be
in.response to taxes and to an increase in population. Dorothy
Atkinson, "Egalitarianism and the Commune," in ed. Roger
Bartlett, Land COmmune and the Peasant COmmunity in Russia
(New York, 1990), 7-19.

27. Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune, 1-19.

28. The manor and the commune were complementary, but not
interdependent. In the western part of Russia, serf holders
imposed their own schemes of organization on the land without
reference to communes. In central European Russia the commune
developed alongside serfdom, taking a broader or more limited
role according to the degree:of immediate control exercised.by
the estate owner. One could assume that these patterns of
leadership would be maintained after emancipation as much as
possible. Ibid.

29. In looking at the terms used by educated Russians to
describe peasant institutions, it is interesting to note how
some changed over time reflecting how peasants were viewed.
The classic example is the word.obshchestvo, which.was used in
Russia to describe ‘society’ as a binary opposite to narod
(people) even though the expression selskoe obshchestvo came
to be used by the government to describe the rural government
agency. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,

70

obshchestvo came to mean not just ne narod (or not of the
people) but ‘aristocratic’ society. By the end of the
nineteenth century, obshchestvo lost most of its connection
with the aristocracy and eventually evolved into
obshchestvennost. It had been expanded to include a less
elite social group and thus, indicated a change in political
attitudes and public consciousness. The word had become more
descriptive of the English ‘public’ or ‘civil society.’ This
evolution is particularly interesting because ‘rural society’
and civil society were very different entities in Russia.
Abbott Gleason, "The Terms of Russian Social History, " in Edith
W. Clowes, editor, Between Tsar and People (Princeton, 1991),
15-27.

30. Discussions of pre-emancipation and post-emancipation
village organization can be found in Atkinson, Russian Land
Commune; Sergei M. Kravchinskii (Stepniak), The Russian
Peasantry, New York: 1888); Macey, Government and Peasant in
Russia; Yaney, Systematization of Russian Government; Urge to
Mobilize. Specific discussions on the structure of the peasant
obshchina can be found in Alan Kimball, "The Russian Peasant
Obshchina in the Political Culture of the Era of Great
Reforms:" Russian History/Histore Russe 17 (Fall:1990).

31. Atkinson, Russian Land Commune, 26.

32. N.A.Shishkov, "Nashe zemstvo, ego trudy i nedochety,"
Vestnik Evropy, 1901, no.9, p. 322 in Terence Emmons and Wayne
S. Vucinich, editors, The Zemstvo in Russia (Cambridge, 1982) ,
229, n.10.

33. Kermit E. McKenzie, "Zemstvo Organization and Role within
the Administrative Structure," in Terence Emmons, editor, The
Zemstvo in Russia (Cambridge, 1982), 31-78.

34. Ibid., 41-44.

35. There‘were several "peasant" zemstvos, however, notably in
the four gubernia in. the north and northeast: Olonets,
Vologda, Viatka, and Perm. Analysis of these provinces
suggests that not only was there a shortage of local nobles to
fill "noble" posts, but that due to a scarcity of land
captains, peasants were relatively free to invest in ‘civic
spirit.’ These facts probably suggest that given freer and
more access to zemstvos, peasants may have been more
responsive to them. Dorothy Atkinson, "The Zemstvo and the
Peasantry," in Terence Emmons, editor, The Zemstvo in Russia
(Cambridge, 1982), 79-132.

71

36. Carsten Pape, "On the Margins of Utopia?: Zemstvo Liberals
and the Peasant Commune," Russian History/Histore Russe 11
(Summer-Fall-1984): 224; Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil.War, 36-
40, 168-9.

37. The incompatibility of the two concepts, a modern
industrial economy and autocracy, is exemplified by Russia’s
Finance Minister Sergei Witte, who believed state power could
accelerate the modernization (ie. industrialization) process
by acting as a catalyst of rational industrial development.
That Witte’s policies bore fruit can be seen in the increased
rate of domestic capital accumulation in the first decade of
the twentieth century. However, that no institutional or
legal foundation had been laid for dynamic modernization was
evident as the infrastructure sustaining that modernization
collapsed after three years of war.

38. The decree of March 12, 1903, freed the communal peasants
from the collective responsibility of paying taxes but
provided no legal means to assess (or collect) new taxes. It
did, however, leave the commune itself intact. A decree of
December 12, 1904, indicated.that peasant institutions were to
be integrated into the legal system of the Empire, but this
time no language was included to protect the commune.
Finally, in a note to Minister of the Interior, I.L. Goremykin
on March 30, 1905, the tsar indicated that "measures had.to be
taken to develop methods of land use for the peasants that
correspond to changing economic conditions." (italics mine)
Yaney, 230.

39. The quoted comments were taken from the committees of the
"Special Conference on the Needs of Agriculture," collected
and edited by Aleksandr Rittikh and published in 1903 under
the title Krest’ianskoe zemlepol ’zovanie (St. Petersburg,
1903), ed. Vernadsky, Source Book for RMssian History from
Early Times to 1917 (New Haven, 1972),?61.

40. For example, the law of November 9, 1906 stipulated that
a peasant head of household in a repartitional communal
village could claim his strips as personal property if he
wished. It also stated (since the peasant could not fence off
his "strips" from his neighbors) that this peasant could
demand from the skhod his strips in a consolidated plot if he
so wished. This would be fine, of course, if the village
called for a general redistribution. If not, and
redistributions were not frequently called, the best the
government could do was to support the would be consolidator
if the removal of the ‘plot’ did not create a hardship for the
village as a whole. This scenario is particularly interesting
because the whole image of the ‘separator’ was a major threat
to the economic and social stability of the village. After
years of studying the peasants, the central government still

72

had not come up with a way to separate the Russian peasant
from his village and make him a productive "English” farmer.

41. In Russia landholding was complicated somewhat in that
estates (land) was granted by the tsar to a noble for services
rendered. This land came with peasants/serfs attached to it--
serf labor was an essential part of the rural economy. The
land also came with the obligation to pay taxes and provide
peasants for the military. Even after 1801 when Alexander I
opened up landowning to non-nobles few others participated.
The land purchased had to be free of serfs but since serfs
were not free to move off the land without the nobles
permission there was very little available or free land to
buy. In other words in Russian society before emancipation,
land reflected Russian social organization more than its
economic possibilities.

42. Peasants did not become full owners of the land
apportioned to them; the land was given to the village
communities (these rural societies), which were expected to
distribute it among the members based on traditional
repartitional methods. The Russian state indemnified the
landowners in government bonds for the lands given to the
peasants. The peasants were required to pay the interest on
these bonds by their annual redemption payments. The peasants
could either accept the whole.grant of land (and.hereby accept
the redemption payment) or they could accept only one quarter
of the grant, in ‘which case no redemption payment ‘was
expected. Alexis N. Antsiferov, Russian Agriculture During the
War (New York, 1968),19.

43. In the 18408 the minimum allotment for subsistence was set
at 5 dessyatiny (1 dessyatiny=2.7 acres). Later during the
reform process the figure had risen to 10-15 dessyatiny per
’soul. ’ Peter Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy 1850-1917 (London,
1986), 110.

44. Figures adapted from Antsiferov, Russian Agriculture
During the War, 18.

45. In the 18808 Alexander III first initiated the legislation
to govern resettlement. The provisions that were set forth
are considered the precursors to the Stolypin reforms. The
legislation passed in 1889 stated that anpeasant.could settle
on state lands (and Siberia was considered such) without
permission from the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry
of Agriculture. The peasant could also not leave without the
permission of his village ‘which 'was complicated. by the
knowledge that the migrating peasants land and the taxes and
redemption debt that had been accumulated would be assumed by
the village. Once the necessary permissions had been acquired
the peasant.had only two months total to sell his property and

73

get on the road or the whole process was canceled.
Additionally the migrating peasant had no choice in land he
was to settle on or farm when he got to the end of his
government prescribed travel route; he had to accept the land
that was given to him. Needless to say most peasants who were
determined to make it in Siberia went illegally and settled
wherever they wanted. They knew that it would cost the
government far more to catch them in Siberia and sent them
back to their villages than to just leave them alone. Yaney,
Urge to Mobilize, 124-129.

46. Antisferov, Russian Agriculture During the war, 20-21.

47. Paul R. Gregory, Russian National Income 1885-1913
(Cambridge, 1982), 155-156.

48. The most densely populated provinces outside of Petrograd
and Moscow were Podolia, Kiev, Poltava, Kharkov, Kursk, and
Riga, with 136 to 157 persons per square mile. The provinces
of Volhynia, Bessarabia, Ekaterinoslav, Chernigov, Orel, and
Voronezh. had from 113 to 134 persons per square ‘mile.
Antsiferov, Russian Agriculture, 12, n.4. The discussion of
the ’vector’ of peasant immiseration is long and unresolved.
Scholars such as Teodor Shanin believe that the peasant was
impoverished by the end of the nineteenth century and fortunes
declined thereon. Other scholars, most notably Paul Gregory,
indicate that the values pointing to immiseration are more
complex.

49. Gatrell, Tsarist Economy, 113.
50. Hindus, Russian Peasant, 168.
51. Gregory, National Income, 155-156.
52. Gatrell, Tsarist Economy, 139.

53. B. O. Unbegaun, gen ed. The Oxford .Russian-English
Dictionary (Oxford, 1984).

54. Rose Glickman, "Peasant Women and Their Work," ed. Ben
Eklof, The World of the Russian Peasant (Boston, 1990), 50.

55. Gatrell, Economy, 154.
56. Glickman, "Peasant Women," 50-60

57. Kustarnichestvo filled in for the manufactured goods
becoming increasingly unavailable from the cities after the
Bolshevik revolution. If peasants resorted to kustarnichestvo
when economic conditions were tough one can assume that they
resumed many of their handicraft traditions during the

74
shortages caused by the First World War as well.
58. Gregory, National Income, 73.
59. Antsiferov, Russian Agriculture During the War, 201-203.
60. Antsiferov, Russian Agriculture During the War, 144.
61. Yaney, Urge to MObilize, 409.

62. There seems to have been no good reason why the ministry
of agriculture was assigned this job other than it (and
Krivoshein as well) had been the primary administrative body
involved in the "Stolypin" agricultural reforms. Presumably
the M2 had been working with the peasants during the reforms
and it was assumed that the M2 and its "agencies and
specialists" would not only want to be involved in grain
distribution, but by having a better relationship with the
peasants, be more successful in acquiring peasant cooperation.

63. The problem of military interference in the supply process
is discussed in K. I. Zaitsev, "Food Supply in Russia During
the World War," ed. Struve, Food Supply in Russia During the
World War (New Haven, 1930), 3-37; Yaney, Mobilize, 400-462.

64. The blame for this economic disruption cannot be dumped
solely at the feet of the army, of course. Civilian
authorities were extremely willing to facilitate the army’s
arbitrary actions. With the elimination of grain exports to
Germany and the prohibition of vodka manufacturing in force,
the grain producing regions were looking at the demands of the
army with relief. Patriotism and profit became easy partners.
SeeaGolovine, Army, 154; Yaney, Mobilize, 414-417; Lih, Bread,
12n14; Zaitsev, "Organization," 8.

65. This information.and.the.data relating to the organization
of food supply is provided by K. I. Zaitsev, who was formerly
the Assistant Administrator of the Special Council on Food
Supply and head of the Department of Municipal Economy in the
Ministry of the Interior under the Provisional Government.
K.I. Zaitsev, "Organization."

66. Izvestiia Glavnovo Komiteta, no.50.118. cited in Thomas
Fallows "Politics and the War Effort in Russia: The Union of
Zemstvos and the Organization of the Food Supply, 1914-1916,”
Slavic Review 37 (March:1978): 87.

67. Nicholas N. Golovine, The Russian Army in the World War
(New Haven, 1931), 171-172.

75

68. Millers, as private individuals, were able to buy their
grain at competitive prices, but were required to sell their
flour to the government at the fixed price. The flour left
over, therefore, had to be sold at increasingly higher prices
in order to compensate them for their losses. It is easy to
see that the moderate prices available to the army existed at
the expense of the civilian population.

69. Up until the period of the First World War, famine had
been predominantly a rural or urban poor phenomenon. Famine
or fear of famine would know no ideological or class
boundaries during and after the war. All three governments--
the reactionary monarchy of Nicholas II, the ‘liberal’
administration of the Provisional Government, and the
revolutionary social democratic dictatorship--had to deal with
the hunger of some portion of the Russian population. All
three attempted similar strategies. Under the tsar, the
razverstka was a way of simply ensuring that the surplus
regions would provide the army with grain. The language of the
grain levy tried to arouse patriotism by indicating that the
sacrifice of the producers was for the army and called for by
the exigencies of the War. No mention was made of providing
for the needs of the cities. The ministry had already taken
into account the manifest hostility of the peasantry toward
the urban elements of the population. Zaitsev, "Organization,"
89.

70. Graeme J. Gill, "The Failure of Rural Policy in Russia,
February-October 1917, " Slavic Review 37 (June: 1978) : 241-258.

71. Lars Lih, "Bolshevik Razverstka.and War Communism," Slavic
Review 44 (1986): 672-688.

72. Graeme Gill, "The Failure of Rural Policy," 241-242.
73. Ibid.

74. John.Channon, "The Bolsheviks.and.theiPeasantry," Slavonic
and East European Review 66 (October:1988): 596.

75. Both Lenin and Bukharin saw the need to establish direct
links between town and.countryx These ideas were developed.by
Bukharin in the middle 19208 but died a political death. At
any rate, Bukharin saw the need for the development of a new
Soviet village ‘culture’ based in new civil institutions
within the village and replacing the old traditional
‘bureaucratic culture or serf culture.’ "Bukharin saw the
organizers of this struggle not as armed men in jackboots but
as ‘cultural invaders’ (kulturtregery)--educators bearing
practical theory--working with the peasantry to construct a
culture capable of meeting the productive and social needs of
the whole peasantry, not just of the richer sections, and

76

capable of developing the civil community to a point where it
could bring under control the coercive, centralizing and
bureaucratic forces within the Soviet state." Mark Harrison,
"Chayanov and the Marxist,” JOurnal of Peasant Studies 7: 96.

76. Leopold H. Haimson, ed. The Politics of Rural Russia
(Bloomington, 1979), 10.

77. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
(Moscow, 1962), 334.

78. Roger Pethybridge, "Social and Political Attitudes of the
Peasantry in Kursk guberniya at the Start of NEP," Slavonic
and East European Review 63 (July 1983): 375.

79. The entire quota, as stipulated in the order of December
17, 1916, was to be delivered to holding stations for the use
of the nation within six months. The new decree had used the
same vague and indefinite language that had characterized the
food supply system as a whole. Since the districts had the
option of either attempting to enforce the levy Q; to procure
the necessary grain on the free market, there was little
incentive to adhere to the levy timetable until the last
minute (if at all). Also since there was no confidence in the
provincial centers that the levy scheme was either fair or
possible, there was tendency to dilute the quotas all the way
down the hierarchial line. In other words the provincial
conferences (if they didn’t reject the levy altogether and 9
out of 30 provinces did) reduced the quota to 89% of the
stipulated amount. The district conferences reduced this
amount to 63%, etc. By the time the levy quota had come down
to the producer, 75%-80% of the grain required by the M2 had
blown away. Zaitsev, "Organization," 95-96.

80. Gill, "Failure of Rural Policy," 252.
81. Channon, "The Bolsheviks and the Peasantry," 597.

82. From early September 1917 through 1918 the peasantry in
the Kursk Guberniya took matters very much into their own
hands. iNot only did they aggressively seize land, killing and
sacking the gentry estates and ignoring the influence of the
newly established Kursk Soviet, but they created their own
export networks forche r grai , terrorizing the local railway
administrators into collaborating and stealing grain from
outside localities to add to their export quantities. This
kind of rural anarchy was the excuse used to justified
Bolshevik intrusion into the villages. Pethybridge, "Peasantry
in Kursk."

83. John Bushnell, Mutiny Amid Repression, 7-11.

77

84. Thomas Wilfong, "Rebuilding the Russian Army, 1905-1914:
The Question of a Comprehensive Plan for National Defense,"
(unpublished PhD dissertation), 170-175. It is not only
important to illuminate the rather unique alliances made
during this particular reform process but to point out the
misrepresentations, deliberately extended in memoir
literature, written by emigre officers after the Revolutions
and Civil War. Most of these works picture Rediger and
Sukhomlinov as ineffectual and conservative bureaucrats, who
enriched themselves but did little for the army. These
accusations, Wilfong asserts, were mostly self-serving
apologies.

85. John Bushnell, "Peasants in Uniform: The Tsarist Army as
a Peasant Society," ed. Ben Eklof, The WOrld of the Russian
Peasant (Boston, 1990), 101-114.

86. John Bushnell, "The Tsarist Officer Corps, 1881-1914:
Customs, Duties, Inefficiency, " The American Historical Review
86 (February-December:1981): 753-780.

87. Wilfong, "Rebuilding," 69-72.

88. The development of the defense plans known respectively as
Numbers 19 and 20. The first plan was coordinated by the War
ministry and General Ir. N. Danilov (chief of staff under
Sukhomlinov) . The second--a revision forced on Sukhomlinov by
critics in the Duma, the State Council, and the Council of
Ministers--was a fascinating and an ultimately fatal decision

for Russia. Plan 19 prepared for war against Germany,
responding to an accurate assessment of the German Schlieffen
Plan. Plan 20 largely provided for two alternate

mobilizations. One responded to a German attack against
Russia with a holding action sending two smaller armies
against Austria-Hungary, and another mobilization plan
responded to a German attack against France, which specified
a main attack on Austria-Hungary and a holding action against
Germany. Plan 20 was a political compromise and a military
disaster. There was never any intention to use both these
mobilizations schemes simultaneously; doing so was an
ultimately fateful decision for Russia. Ibid.

89. Norman Stone, The Eastern Front (New York, 1975), 29.
90. Ibid., 28.

91. Wilfong, "Rebuilding," 162.

92. Stone, Eastern Front, 30.

93. Golovine, The Russian Army in the WOrld War, 53-55.

78

94. Allen Wildman, The End of the Tsarist Army (Princeton,
1987), 98.

95. Wildman, End of Russian Imperial Army, Vol.1, 182-201.
96. Ibid. , 187.

97. Ibid., 230.

98. Ibid., 231.

99. Ibid., 245.

100. Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War, 62.

101. Ibid., 94.

102. Lars Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia 1914-1921, 228.
103 . Ibid.

104. Bolshevik support for the rural poor who were to wage
‘class war’ against the ‘kulak grain hoarders’ had found
bitter opposition in the villages. At the Workers’ and
Peasants’ Non-Party Conference in Alekseev, February 1920,
Kadantsev, one of the peasant delegates expressed his views
regarding party affiliation this way:

"Not everyone calling himself a communist can be one, the
Bolsheviks say; for example, a man with two horses cannot be
a Communist. That sort of reasoning explains why the people
cannot get on with the Bolsheviks." Figes, Peasant Russia,
Civil War, 241.

105. Ibid., 223.

106. Regional soviets would attract many of the dislocated,
marginal, and landless elements of rural society who were
seeking to break away from 'the confines of traditional
patriarchal organization. These elements would form the bulk
of the ‘new’ communists driven by bureaucratic careers and not
Bolshevik ideology.

107. Helmut Altrichter, "Insoluble Conflicts, Village Life
Between Revolution.and Collectivization," Sheila Fitzpatrick,
editor, Russia in the Era of NEP (Bloomington, 1991) , 192-209.

108. V. P. Danilov, Rural Russia Under the Nemeegime, Orlando
Figes, translator (Bloomington, 1988), 230.

109. Beatrice Farnsworth "The Soldatka: Folklore and Court
Record," Slavic Review 49 (Spring: 1990): 58-73.

79

110. Only once in the 19208 did the yields reach pre-war
levels. Danilov, Rural Russia, 276.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Select Bibliography

Books

Antsiferov, Alexis N. Ruseiah Agriculture Quring the War. New

York:Greenwood Press, 1968.

Atkinson, Dorothy, The End of the Russian Land Commune, 1905-
1930. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983.

Bartlett, Roger, Editor. Land.Commune:and.Pea8ant.Community in

Russie: Cemmunal Forms in Imperial and Early Soviet Society,
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.

Bushnell, John, Mutiny Amid Repression: Russian Soldieps ih
the Revolution of 1905-1906, Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1985.

Clements, Barbara Evans, and Barbara Alpern Engel, and
Christine D. Worobec, editors, Russia’s Women, Accommodation,

Reeietahce, Transformation , Berkeley: University of
California Press. 1991.

Chayanov, A. V., The Theopy pf Peasant Ecohomy, Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.

Clowes, Edith W., Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West,

editors, Eetween Tsar and People.Educated Society and the
Quee; f9; Public Identipy in Late Imperial Russia, Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1991.

Danilov, V.P., Rural Russia Unde; the New Regime, translated
by Orlando Figes, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University
Press, 1988.

Eklof, Ben, and Stephen Frank, editors, The World of the
Bussiah Eeasanp, Boston: Unwin Hyman Inc., 1990.

Emmons, Terence, and Wayne S. Vucinich, editors, The Zemstvo
in Russia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Field, Daniel, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar, Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976.

Figes, Orlando, Peasaht Russia. Civil War. The Volga

Copntryside in Revolution (1917-1921), Oxford: Clarendon
Press,.1989.

80

81

Fitzpatrick, Sheila and Alexander Rabinowitch and Richard

Stites, Russia in the Era 0: EEE, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1991.

Gatrell, Peter, The Tsarist Ecenemy T850-19T7, New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1986.

Gill, Graeme J ., Peasants and Government in the Russian
Revolution, New York: Harper and Row Publishers, Inc., 1979.

Golder, Frank Alfred, Documents of Russian history, 1914-1917,
translated by Emanuel Aronsgerg, New York: The Century

Company, 1927.

Golovine, Nicholas N., The Russian Army in the World War, New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1931.

Goodman, David, and Michael Redclift, From Peasant to
2:0;etapian, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982. -

Gregory, Paul R., Russian National Income 1885-1913,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Haimson, Leopold H., The Politics of Bural Russial 1905-1914,

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979.

Hindus, Maurice G. The Russian Eeasant and the Revolution,
New York: Henry Hold and Company, 1920.

Johnson, Robert E. Peasent and Proletarian: the working class
of Moscow in late T9th Cehpury, New Brunswick N.J.: Rutgers

University Press, 1979.

Kingston-Mann, Esther, Lenin and the Problem of Marxist
Peeseht RevoTution, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

----- Peasant Econom Culture and Po itics of Euro ean Russia,

Princeton University Press, 1990.

Koenker, Diane P., William G. Rosenberg, and Ronald Grigor

Suny, eds., Barty §ta§e ehd Society in the Rpssian Civil War,

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Kravchinskii, Sergei M., (Stepniak), The Russian Peasantry,
New York: Harper and Brothers, 1888.

Kuropatkin, A. N., The Russian Army and the Japanese War,
translated by A. B. Lindsay, New York: E.P. Dutton and

Company, 1909.

82

Lewin, Moshe, The Making of the Soviet System, New York:
Pantheon Books, 1985.

Lih, Lars. T., Eread. and. huhhority in IRussia 1914-19gT,

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Macey, David A.J., Government and Peasant in Russia, 1861-
1996, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1987.

Male, D.J., Russian ZPeasant. Orgenization before
CoTlectivisation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.

Polner, Tikhon J., and Vladimir A. Obolensky, and Sergius P.

Turin, Russian Local Government During the War and the Union
of zehetvos, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930.

Shanin, Teodor The Awkward Class, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1972.

Stone, Norman, The Eastern Front 1914-1917, New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1975.

Struve, P. B., Food Supply in Russia During the‘World.War, New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1930.

Vernadsky, George, editor, A Source Book for Russian History
from Early Times to 1917, Vol. 1,2,3, New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1972

Vucinich, Wayne S., editor, The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century
Russia, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968.

Wildman, Allan K., The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol.
II, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Wcislo, Francis William, Reforming Rural Russia, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990.

Yaney, George, The Systematization of Russian Government:
Soeiel Evolution in the Domestic Adminietration of Imperial
Buseia, 1711-1905, Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
1973.

----- Urge To Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861-1930,
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

"illlllllllllllll“ill“