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donald j. raleigh

but mostly ill-disposed toward a marketplace in culture, played the leading role

in promoting proletarian culture, and for this reason had limited success.

In its hurried drive to reconstitute society, the Soviet government abolished

titles, private property and ranks. It fashioned a new language, social hierar-

chies (and divisions), rituals and festivals, myths, revolutionary morality and

revolutionary justice. It emancipated women by promulgating a radical fam-

ily code in 1918. It separated Church and state. It modernised the alphabet,

introduced calendar reform, and sought to make revolution itself a tradition.

Revolutionary songs, party newspapers, slogans, pamphlets, brochures, elec-

tions and festivals acquired new meaning. For instance, Bolshevik festivals left

little room for spontaneity and popular initiative. Revolutionaries also sought

to obscure the past by making it difﬁcult to observe traditional holidays, espe-

cially religious ones.

The Communists likewise fashioned a new public ideological language

that, in erasing the difference between ideas and reality, liberated them from

the need to provide any logical proof for their claims.

Communism’s public

language emphasised distrust of the class other; a hierarchy of class, sovi-

ets, privileges, even of countries; coercion as the necessary means that justi-

ﬁed the hoped-for ends; and a national ideology as opposed to a parochial

one. The speciﬁcs of the ever-changing narrative are less important than

how it underscored the battle of the new world against the old, the need

to sacriﬁce, and the despicable nature of the opposition. By the time the

civil war drew to a close, the Bolsheviks were proclaiming that the Commu-

nist victory and survival of the Soviet state were inevitable, that capitalism

was doomed, and that it would trigger a new war and world revolution.

This conveyed the message that resistance was not only improper, but also

futile. In promising a glorious future, the Bolsheviks thus inscribed histori-

cally delayed gratiﬁcation into their narrative of revolution, which they pre-

sented to the population through newspapers, propaganda efforts, visual arts

and other forms.

During periods of vulnerability the party took additional

measures to propagate its views; however, these frenzied efforts only under-

scored how little cultural capital the Communists had at this point. Indeed, to

make their ideology the ruling one, the Bolsheviks took over the state educa-

tional system, giving literacy and the spread of ‘enlightenment’ a top priority

30 James R. Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1920 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univer-

sity of California Press, 1993), p. 72.

31 Mikhail N. Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism (Amherst: University

of Massachusetts Press, 1995), pp. 102–3, 118, 154–5, 161.

32 Raleigh, Experiencing, ch. 7.

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in order to facilitate the reception of their propaganda, but met with stiff

opposition.

As party leaders and intellectuals quarrelled among themselves over how

best to effect cultural change, practices immersed in everyday life continued to

direct people’s perceptions along more familiar, less revolutionary pathways,

preventing a complete destruction of past culture. Ultimately, the Bolsheviks

sacralised a new world that privileged workers and at times peasants not only

through class-based policies but also through the construction of a heroic

narrative of the revolution that reﬂected new social hierarchies. While this

narrative of integration – and exclusion – made it possible for later generations

of Soviet leaders to co-opt and mobilise individuals and groups, the ready

employment of the despotic power of the state to effect cultural change helped

obscure the fact that the party had failed to establish cultural domination, while

its ideology continued to invite argument.

War Communism and Russia’s peasant majority

The economic formation that prevailed between 1918 and March 1921 has sub-

sequently come to be known as War Communism. A term lacking analytical

precision, it was originally popularised by L. Kritsman, its leading spokesper-

son, and used by Lenin to discredit the opposition. In elucidating the term,

the partisan and scholarly literatures either emphasise the role of ideology in

implementing ‘communist’ economic principles during civil-war conditions,

or downplay it, underscoring instead the emergency nature of the measures

enacted.

Yet the lessons learned are less about the new economic order itself

than about the signiﬁcance of how the Bolsheviks attempted to put it into

practice.

Civil war in industry started immediately after October 1917, when the

Bolsheviks limited private property and the market, encouraging workers’

control and nationalising banks.

Economic localism soon clashed with cen-

tralising impulses against a background of various ideological legacies. These

included the tsarist wartime economic model in place since 1915 in which state

intervention and control played a major role, and utopian Marxist visions of a

socialist economy, which presumed an inherent hostility in class relations and

33 See Silvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918–1921 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 1–28; and S. A. Pavliuchenkov, Voennyi kommunizm

v Rossii: Vlast’ i massy (Moscow: RKT-Istoriia, 1997), pp. 16–44.

34 Pavliuchenkov, Voennyi kommunizm, 23–4; and E. G. Gimpel’son, Formirovanie Sovetskoi

politicheskoi sistemy, 1917–1923 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1995), p. 96.

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the superiority of socialist principles.

Although previous state policies shaped

economic practices during the civil war, Bolshevik ideology transformed prac-

tices of state intervention by justifying coercion. This point is manifested in

the implementation of the food dictatorship and nationalisation of industry in

1918; in the obligatory grain quota assessment or razverstka and co-optation

of the consumer co-operatives in 1919; and in the militarisation of labour and

greater use of violence in the countryside in 1920.

The Soviet government created an organ responsible for economic life, the

Supreme Economic Council (Sovnarkhoz), and urged local soviets to estab-

lish provincial councils. Industrial breakdown in 1918 posed the most press-

ing problem for local economic councils, which likewise navigated the rocky

transition from workers’ control to centralisation, and resolved which indus-

tries to nationalise and how to improve transportation, becoming embroiled

in inter-agency squabbles in the process, particularly with the Food Supply

Commissariat (Narkomprod). But pragmatism as well as conﬂict coloured the

relationship between local councils and Moscow, especially since industries

managed by the Centre had a greater chance of securing fuel to keep operat-

ing. The military threat also deﬁned local councils’ activities as some of their

departments worked exclusively for the Red Army and eventually all of them

did so to some degree. Their main problem, however, remained lack of clearly

deﬁned jurisdiction between the councils and local agencies of Moscow’s chief

industrial branch administrations (glavki).

Growing food shortages accompanied the collapse of industrial production.

The problem had begun already during the war and gained momentum in 1917,

when local agencies proved reluctant to release resources, fearing the desta-

bilising consequences of the scarcity of food. As civil war unfolded, provincial

agencies struggled to satisfy both local and larger demands on food supplies. To

cope with the crisis, the Soviet government set up the Food Supply Commis-

sariat on 27 May 1918. Local agencies soon registered the population in order

to issue rations cards according to a class principle that privileged workers and

discriminated against the bourgeoisie. The class principle of doling out food

proved to be largely symbolic, however, owing to a constant reclassiﬁcation of

professions and to the fact that members of the bourgeoisie often took jobs in

the bureaucracy to obtain rations.

The Bolsheviks’ co-opting of the consumer

co-operatives, responsible for distributing food and other items, further exac-

erbated the distribution of food and other essentials. Oppositional socialists

35 Jacques Sapir, ‘La Guerre civile et l’

economie de guerre: Origines du syst

eme sovi

etique’,

Cahiers du Monde russe 38, 1–2 (1997): 9–28.

36 McAuley, Bread and Justice,pp.286–94.

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fought to retain the co-operatives’ independence, adding to the difﬁculty the

Bolsheviks had in taking them over.

Centring on procurement, Bolshevik economic practices alienated the peas-

antry and contributed to the famine of 1921–3. The party launched its ﬁrst

annual grain procurement programme in August 1918; however, the break-

down of the state infrastructure made procurement highly problematic. Short-

ages of employees in the procurement bodies, the parallelism of government

organisations, destruction caused by the Whites, transportation difﬁculties

and sundry decrees issued by local executive committees undermined cam-

paigns. Moreover, the peasants’ reluctance to hand over grain convinced the

Bolsheviks to foment class war in the countryside by introducing committees

of the village poor (kombedy). In the summer and autumn of 1918 brigades of

Narkomprod’s Food Army (prodarmiia), comprising workers from the capi-

tals and other industrial cities, participated in the government’s procurement

programme. Most of them ended up speculating in grain, thereby sabotaging

the Soviet government’s system of ﬁxed prices.

The exchange of manufactured goods for agricultural products (tovaroob-

men) served as the linchpin of procurement. Established by a decree of

2 April 1918, tovaroobmen became mandatory for thirteen ‘grain producing’

provinces.

This involved setting up a food monopoly, abolishing private trade

and establishing ﬁxed prices, creating central supply organs and combating

‘speculation’. Despite unfavourable sowing conditions in the spring of 1919

and the disruption of civil war, the government’s assessment in 1919 repre-

sented a signiﬁcant increase over the previous year. Acknowledging that a

black market in just about everything undermined state procurement efforts,

the party justiﬁed the use of force to carry out requisitioning. Although repres-

sion sparked disturbances throughout the countryside, the Bolsheviks needed

to rely on the measures to hold onto power while they tried to effect the

changes that they believed would make coercion unnecessary in the long run.

To be sure, the peasantry designed their own strategies to ward off domina-

tion. The result was famine. The introduction of NEP was made possible only

after a massive social and political rejection of War Communism on the part

not only of the peasantry, but also of workers and elements in the party and

state apparatus.

But it did not have to be that way. Until mid-1918 village autonomy ﬂourished

as the peasants ﬁnished the social revolution in the villages, liquidating gentry

37 See M. I. Davydov, ‘Gosudarstvennyi tovaroobmen mezhdu gorodom i derevnei v 1918–

1921 gg.’, Istoricheskie zapiski 108 (1982): 33–59.

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donald j. raleigh

landholding and promoting a levelling process. In fact, the Right SRs’ bid for

power failed in part because the peasantry, satisﬁed with the land settlement,

remained neutral before that summer. However, the Communist Party’s deci-

sion on 11 June 1918 to establish kombedy to promote social revolution in the

villages, facilitate grain collection and curb free trade marked a tragic turn

in the party’s course in the countryside. Combined with the introduction of

the grain monopoly and food dictatorship in May and the ﬁrst mobilisations

into the Red Army, the party’s resolve to manufacture class war in the villages

represented the beginning of the end of the ﬂeeting period of peasant self-

rule.

These measures also exacerbated the rift between town and country,

strained relations between the Bolsheviks and Left SRs, and eventually forced

the Bolsheviks to reject their own policies.

Although the Red Army served as an institution of socialisation, mandatory

service also turned the countryside against the Communists, as is evinced in

the colossal rate of desertion. Soldiers deserted because they wanted to be left

alone, because they were concerned about the fate of their loved ones, because

of the terrible conditions in the ranks and because of their opposition to speciﬁc

policies such as requisitioning and the imposition of an extraordinary tax. The

failure of rural soviets to work the ﬁelds of Red Army men contributed to

the problem, as did the vile conditions in military hospitals. The party applied

carrot and stick measures to deserters, including execution, the taking of

hostages and amnesties, yet between 1918 and 1920 probably over half of all of

those drafted deserted.

Ultimately, the ideology of Bolshevism, as well as a strain in Russian intel-

lectual life that viewed the countryside in a negative light, drove the Bolsheviks

to force unfavourable rates of exchange on the peasants. In fact, the language

the party used in describing the peasantry – ‘ disorganised’, ‘poor and ignorant

know-nothings’, who lacked ‘consciousness’ because they were‘politically illit-

erate’ and had a ‘low cultural level’ – bears some striking similarities to the

language of colonialism.

Communists blamed the ‘darkness’ of the village for

the peasants’ antipathy towards Soviet power, susceptibility to rumours and

failure to understand the imminence of world revolution. They understood

38 Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution (1917–1921)

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 71.

39 Raleigh, Experiencing,pp.332–7; and Mark Von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian

Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell

University Press, 1990), pp. 69–79.

40 Alvin W. Gouldner, ‘Stalinism: A Study of Internal Colonialism’, in Political Power and

Social Theory: A Research Annual (Greenwich, Conn., 1978): 209–59; 212, 216, 238;S.V.

Leonov, RozhdenieSovetskoiimperii:Gosudarstvoi ideologiia, 1917–1922gg. (Moscow:Dialog

MGU, 1997), p. 183.

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that the peasantry demonstrated little interest in Communism, seeking solace

in the argument that economic ruin caused the peasantry’s lack of enthusiasm.

That is, if Communism had worked, the peasantry would have been all for it.

In 1919 forced requisitioning replaced the hitherto haphazard approach

to obtaining grain deliveries. Discontent stemming from unfair quotas and

from conﬁscations surfaced immediately, as a result of which punitive mea-

sures proved necessary to realise the state’s objectives. One illustrative episode

from Saratov province involved an armed unit under the command of N. A.

Cheremukhin in the summer of 1919, which violently struck out against deser-

tion and the brewing of illicit spirits. Known in party circles for his ‘tact,

experience . . . and devotion to the interests of the Revolution’, Cheremukhin

torched 283 households in the village of Malinovka. Applying ‘revolutionary

justice’, he conﬁscated ‘kulak property’, levied contributions on entire villages

that participated in anti-Soviet uprisings and shot ‘active opponents of Soviet

power, deserters, kulaks, and chronic brewers of moonshine’. Between July

and September his forces executed 139 people in an attempt to break the spirit

of those opposed to Soviet decrees. Party members, non-Communists and Red

Army units protested against Cheremukhin’s repression.

But local party boss

V. A. Radus-Zen’kovich insisted that Cheremukhin’s detachment ‘did not use

force at all’.

Such episodes made it certain that peasants would later welcome

armed peasant bands bent on overthrowing Bolshevik power.

Beginning in mid-1918, peasant rebellions against Communist policies rep-

resented attempts to restore an earlier, partially mythical, time before Soviet

power, which had done plenty to drive the peasantry into the opposition. Soviet

power mobilised peasant youth. It brought in hungry urban workers from the

outside to wrench grain from the countryside. It created havoc when it set up

the kombedy. It levied an extraordinary tax. It attacked religion. It threatened

traditional power and gender relations. It subjected the peasantry to abuses

of power that exceeded anything rural inhabitants had experienced before.

As a result, peasant bands known as Greens composed of deserters and oth-

ers surfaced in 1918 and again in 1919 during the White offensive. Triggering

uprisings in Tambov, the Volga and Urals regions, Ukraine and Siberia, the

peasant revolt reached a crescendo in 1920 and 1921, when Lenin remarked

41 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Saratovskoi oblasti (GASO), f. 521,op.1,d.445, ll. 4–6, 19–21,

59, 76, 85, 102;f.521,op.1,d.445, ll. 60–61 ob, 63–63 ob, 67; and Tsentr Dokumentatsii

Noveishei Istorii Saratovskoi Oblasti (TsDNISO), f. 151/95,op.2,d.8,l.17.

42 See Pavliuchenkov, Voennyi kommunizm,pp.208–11; and V. A. Radus-Zen’kovich, Stran-

itsy geroicheskogo proshlogo. Vospominaniia i stat’i (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo

politicheskoi literatury, 1960), p. 39.

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that this ‘counter-revolution is without doubt more dangerous than Denikin,

Yudenich, and Kolchak taken together’.

Although the SR Party might not have orchestrated the peasant revolt, SR

values – including violence – provided the political frame for the peasant rebels’

programme.

Despite some differences in the demands of particular groups,

the Greens did not oppose Soviet power, but rather the speciﬁc policies of War

Communism and the arbitrary lording over them of ‘vampire-Communists,

Jews and commissar-usurpers’. Seeking to put an end to ‘Bolshevik tyranny’,

the Greens advocated restoration of the Constituent Assembly. The relative

isolation of local communities and the subaltern nature of the peasant world

made it unlikely that a peasant revolt triggered by one-time Red Army men

wouldsucceedwithout outside leadership and organisation, but the Bolsheviks

feared that the spate of uprisings could have tipped the scales against the party

because of the potent ferment in the cities. Interrupting grain requisitioning

and agricultural production, the Greens killed Communists whenever they

encountered them, destroyed collective farms, disbanded Soviet agencies and

seized seed, agricultural products and livestock, thereby exacerbating food

shortages in the cities.

The party’s decision to employ force in the villages also contributed to the

famine of 1921–3, which provided the Bolsheviks with an opportunity they

exploited to fortify their position. Although climatic conditions played a role

in the famine’s origins, the major cause was Bolshevik agricultural policies.

Moscow did not knowingly allow the famine to develop, but it ignored local

reports until late spring 1921, when mass discontent and chilling news on the

magnitude of the potential human suffering put an end to any doubts about

the gravity of the crisis.

If the civil war was a process whereby a fractious society renegotiated its

values, then the government’s rapacious policies in the villages, the rupture of

market relations and the increase in savagery strengthened the internal mech-

anisms of cohesion in the countryside and the appeal of landownership at the

expense of whatever collectivist principles might have existed. Largely alien-

ated from power, the peasant withdrew into the local economy and everyday

43 V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. xliii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennœ izdatel’stvo

politicheskoi literatury, 1970), p. 24.

44 Seth Singleton, ‘The Tambov Revolt (1920–1921)’, Slavic Review 25, 3 (1966): 502. See also

Oliver Radkey, The Unknown Civil War in Soviet Russia: A Study of the Green Movement in

the Tambov Region, 1920–1921 (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1976).

45 James W. Long, ‘The Volga Germans and the Famine of 1921’, Russian Review 51, 4 (1992):

510; Markus Wehner, ‘Golod 1921–1922 gg. v Samarskoi gubernii i reaktsiia Sovetskogo

pravitel’stva’, Cahiers du Monde russe 38, 1–2 (1997): 223–42.

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The Russian civil war, 1917–1922

life. In order to survive, the peasant had to become more self-sufﬁcient by the

winter of 1918–19. The famine furthered this trend. Ironically, by the end of the

civil war many peasants rejected communal land tenure even though during

the revolution they had clamoured for egalitarian distribution.

Workers against Bolsheviks

Although the Bolsheviks understood and depicted the events of October 1917

as a workers’ revolution, many workers became alienated from the new party-

state. Their world-view shaped by ideology, Bolsheviks interpreted workers’

estrangement as the consequence of de-urbanisation during the civil war, and

not as a change in workers’ attitudes, maintaining that the number of ‘real’ pro-

letarians (in effect, a metaphysical concept tautologically deﬁned as a worker

who supported the party) simply had declined. The social turmoil at this time

did reduce the size of Russia’s working class and reconﬁgure its gender and age

composition. Many workers perished; most who enrolled in the Communist

Party left their factory benches to serve in the burgeoning state bureaucracy.

Others entered the Red Army, returned to the villages or joined the ranks

of the unemployed. Yet a substantial core of urban workers remained in the

factories, and their attitudes towards the Bolsheviks were indeed transformed.

Working-class consciousness did not disappear during the civil war, but found

expression in resistance to and circumvention of Bolshevik practices, both

in the implicit language of symbolic activity such as labour absenteeism and

foot-dragging, and in more antagonistic ways. A consciousness based on their

experience of dealing with the Bolsheviks gave some workers their own collec-

tive identities outside those the Bolsheviks created for them. While economic

hardship certainly galvanised workers during the civil war, they also blamed

the Bolsheviks for the rift within the democracy, political repression and the

betrayal of the promises of 1917.

Debate over issues of labour policy already rocked the party in the weeks

following October 1917, when the Bolsheviks reconsidered the role factory

committees and trade unions would play under the new regime. As factory

committees began to run rather than supervise factory administrations, the

Bolsheviks realised that spontaneous industrial democracy could become a

political handicap. As a result, they reorganised unions by industry, thereby

undermining the factory committees, and then made the unions extensions

of party organs. This transformation proved to be highly contested, especially

46 Figes, Peasant Russia,p.59.

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donald j. raleigh

since Mensheviks backed independent trade unions. Workers, in the mean-

time, enrolled in them to obtain larger rations. The union leadership’s support

in 1920 of centralisation, discipline and labour conscription further alienated

them from workers. Tensions within the Communist Party over labour con-

scription and other controversial policies resulted in angry debate over what

role unions should play in the post-war environment, involving the so-called

Workers’ Opposition associated with A. G. Shliapnikov, the Democratic Cen-

tralists, as well as Lenin and Trotsky. Strictly a party affair, the debate did not

appeal to workers.

The further deterioration of the economy – as well as discontent over

broken political promises – drove many workers into the opposition. The

collapse of the economy resulted in factory closures and unemployment.

Wages did not keep up with prices, despite a chaotic system of bonus pay.

To survive, workers were forced to rely on the black market and on other

survival strategies such as pilfering, absenteeism and shirking responsibilities.

The economic experience of civil war thus left an indelible imprint on their

individual and mass consciousness by shaping a culture of mutual dependence

in conditions of utmost want. Growing indifference towards work and a drop

in labour discipline had manifested themselves already in 1918. The situation

deteriorated in 1919, when fuel shortages shut down factories.

Needing working-class support in order to justify and rationalise the dic-

tatorship of the proletariat they claimed to have established, the Bolsheviks

endowed workers with a symbolic capital that the party manipulated through

its control over the language used to give meaning to the term ‘worker’.

Invoking class as a weapon of exclusion and inclusion in their efforts to recon-

ﬁgure Russian culture, the Bolsheviks reconstructed a working-class identity.

Given the claims the party made about the working class, the new identity the

party formulated for workers became something one attained through correct

behaviour. Class had become a social-psychological and political projection in

which any act of opposition brought symbolic expulsion from the ranks of the

true proletariat and conﬁnement to the ranks of an inferior class ‘other’. As

one Communist put it, ‘given his class position a worker can be nothing but

a Communist’.

The party viewed workers hierarchically, casting highly skilled members

of the industrial proletariat as the conscious revolutionary vanguard that

47 See Larry E. Holmes, ‘For the Revolution Redeemed: The Workers Opposition in the

Bolshevik Party 1919–1921’, Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies,no.802

(Pittsburgh: Center for Russian and East European Studies, 1990): 6–9.

48 TsDNISO, f. 136,op.1,d.9,l.7.

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The Russian civil war, 1917–1922

supported Soviet power. But it was precisely these workers who challenged the

Bolsheviks the most.

Denying workers agency, the party depicted dissatis-

faction among skilled workers as temporary wavering caused by the deceptive

propaganda practices of rival socialist parties, and opposition among unskilled

and female workers as the result of their lack of consciousness. As the civil war

deepened, the Bolsheviks blamed the physical disappearance of the working

class for labour conﬂicts, representing opposition as the work of counter-

revolutionaries, saboteurs and misguided peasant workers.

Although economic issues provided the venue for voicing dissatisfaction,

workers’actions indicate that theyunderstood economic life as contested polit-

ical ground. Workers expressed their consciousness in routine acts of resistance

and circumvention: voting against Communist candidates and resolutions,

abstaining from voting when elections lacked real choices, foot-dragging, iner-

tia, absenteeism, pilfering, dissimulation, co-opting Soviet public language and

practices and using them to their advantage, spreading rumours and so on.

They opposed one-party rule, the silencing of the opposition press, attempts

to co-opt labour organs and other repressive measures. Such opposition often

amounted to demands for secret ballots during elections to factory commit-

tees and soviets. For their part, the Bolsheviks alternated between repression

and solicitousness, depending upon how vulnerable they felt, but remained

determined to control, manipulate and repress the workers’ movement so as

not to encourage the opposition.

After thrashing the White armies in 1920, the Bolsheviks devoted all of

their energies to ‘peaceful construction’, to attempts to address industrial

collapse, transportation breakdown, shrinking rations and dying cities. The

party declared war on economic ruin, ﬁlth, disease and hunger, addressing

the need to restore industry, raise productivity and mobilise labour armies at

therear. It extended labour bonuses and introduced a labour rationbasedon the

type of workone did. It stepped up its campaign to involve citizens in unpopular

volunteer workdays (subbotniki). It set up labour disciplinary courts to deal with

absenteeism, instituted one-person management and restructured unions to

raise productivity. These measures, as well as use of bourgeois specialists, piece-

rate wages and labour books to control movement, provoked waves of unrest

in Russia, uniting workers who otherwise had little in common and once again

showing how they created themselves as workers. In turn, labour disturbances

ended a period of relaxation in the party’s tolerance of rival socialist parties,

just as it gave rise to opposition groups within the Communist Party.

49 Aves, Workers against Lenin, passim.

50 Raleigh, Experiencing,pp.367–77; and Narskii, Zhizn’,pp.461–8.

165