A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

of the 1918 harvest, the first carried out by Soviet power, had been nothing less than disastrous. Only a fifth of the levy had been collected by the end of the year. Of course the Bolsheviks blamed it on the 'kulaks'; but in fact the weakness of their own procurement infrastructure was to blame. The food brigades had no effective means of accounting for the harvest. The kombedy pursued their own local interests at the expense of the centre, sometimes even keeping the grain for themselves. The collection depots were unable to cope with the volume of grain because of fuel shortages. And the chaos on the railways often meant that grain did not reach the towns. The January reform, known as the Food Levy or prodrazverstka, had been intended to reinforce the system. It differed from the grain monopoly of May 1918 in two main respects. First, whereas the grain monopoly had been limited to cereals, all the major foodstuffs, including livestock and vegetables, were subjected to the food levy.* And second, whereas the quotas of the grain monopoly had been set by the local food organs in accordance with the harvest estimates, the quotas of the food levy were set from above, by the central state, in accordance with its general needs and then simply divided among the provincial authorities. Thus the principle, however loosely it may have been applied, that the quotas should match the actual harvest surplus was abandoned altogether. Increasingly, the levies bore no relation to the peasantry's ability to pay. The requisitioning brigades were simply instructed to extract the necessary amounts of food by force, even if this meant taking the peasants' last vital stocks of food and seed. It was assumed, in this terrifyingly ignorant calculus, that an empty barn was a sign that its owner was a 'kulak' hiding food.⁵⁸

And so as the civil war moved towards its climax, during the spring of 1919, the 'battle for grain', that other civil war behind the Red Front, also reached its own insane heights. It became a life-and-death struggle between the Bolsheviks and the peasantry.

* * * Stamping out the bagmen was the final element of the Bolshevik 'battle for grain'. Flying brigades (zagraditel'nye otriady) were set up to police the roads and railways. They were ordered to confiscate all foodstuffs from the passengers coming into town, leaving them only their legal allowance of one-and-a-half puds (hence the bagmen became known as the 'one-and-a-half puders'). Trains were stopped and searched, their passengers forced to disembark and open up their luggage. The brigades behaved more like bandits than government officials. They confiscated money, clothes and drink from the passengers. The Cheka

* One exception was onions — no doubt the result of a bureaucratic slip. A boom in onion production soon followed, as the peasants sought to exploit this last remaining legal area of free trade.

carried out similar raids on the urban markets, hunting out bagmen from the countryside.

All this of course was a futile exercise. It was impossible to stamp out the market, just as King Canute could not force back the sea. Throughout the period of War Communism the trains continued to be filled by bagmen (it was easy for them to bribe the railway officials). Lenin himself acknowledged that at least half the foodstuffs reaching the towns had been brought in by the bagmen; and at times the figure was much higher. The Bolsheviks had little choice but to tolerate this private trade, without which the workers would have starved. Their policy towards the bagmen vacillated in fact: at critical moments of the civil war, when they needed to keep the railways free for the military, they would clamp down on them and try to ban all passenger transport; but at other times the bagmen were allowed to continue more or less without hindrance. Bolshevik policy on the urban markets was equally fitful. The Cheka would occasionally carry out a raid, seizing goods and arresting vendors, after which business would slow down for a few days, but then the markets would return to normal. The enormous Sukharevka market in Moscow flourished throughout the civil war years, despite constant Cheka raids. Most of the state's own textile factories in the capital purchased their cloth from private salesmen there. The Sukharevka came to symbolize the old world of free trade which the Reds could not conquer. Lenin himself once lamented that in the soul of every Russian there was a 'little Sukharevka'.⁵⁹