The Workshop Of The Revolution. I. N. Steinberg 1953
The Russian peasantry came to the revolution not as an auxiliary or junior associate of the proletariat, but as an independent social and cultural force. This cardinal fact explains both the triumph of the revolution in its early stages and the tremendous obstacles and hazards the Bolsheviks faced in subsequent years. The Marxist theory of socialism has never been able to define the role and future of the working peasant in the revolutionary scheme. For Marxism in all its shadings maintained that the only truly productive and historically effective class was the proletariat. All others, and especially the peasantry, were objective human material, rather than active architects of history. Peasants supplied only the raw material for modern industrial production, and they were themselves considered as raw material in the realization of the human goals.
But the Russian peasantry emerged almost as the decisive force in the revolution, not only by virtue of its numbers, but also because of its peculiar social and cultural impact. More than a mere category in the economy of the country, the peasants formed a specific socio-psychological group with its own views on life, work, politics, morals. And when, in a nation, the peasants number one hundred million souls, they inevitably place their stamp on the culture of the people as a whole.
The Russian peasants brought to the revolution their deep- rooted traditions of the land commune called either Obschtchina, or Mir. As much as four-fifths of the peasant population worked the land within the framework and according to the principles of the Obschtchina. What were the main principles of this order? First, common ownership of land. Second, the right of every peasant to land. Third, communal administration in the Obschtchina.
These principles had once been the rule in many European countries. But in Russia they had survived until the outbreak of the revolution. To the Russian peasant land was, in Alexander Herzen’s words, his “very own nature.” Even when they were serfs, the peasants would say with conviction, “We are the landlord’s, but the land is ours.” They belonged to the Obschtchina, and that meant that all decisions were made by the peasant Skhod, the village assembly, a kind of direct democracy. The Obschtchina determined the distribution of the various categories of land among members. Each peasant had the right to a strip of land to be worked by himself and his family. In this sense equality of rights prevailed. But to ensure that this right be guaranteed to all as well as to the new generation, periodical redistributions of land took place. And that custom intensified the peasant’s belief that land is not “mine” but belongs to all. This right to land thus created a social and ethical climate and a system of social relations different from those countries where the agrarian economy was based only on “sale, purchase and inheritance.”
True, the Obschtchina had been under strong pressure of the Czar’s Government and its taxation policy. But pressure from above had not succeeded in changing its internal pattern. In 1906, the czarist minister Stolypin issued the famous law granting peasants the “freedom” to leave the Obschtchina and become private owners of their land strips. The purpose had been to extinguish the smoldering fires of revolution by creating a new class of millions of small-bourgeois peasants. But few availed themselves of the chance to destroy the Obschtchina and, immediately at the outbreak of the revolution in 1917, many voluntarily returned to it.
This was the social and moral capital of communal living experience which the Russian peasants contributed to the great upheaval. It prevailed not only in the village and in the widespread Russian co-operative movement. Russian artisans, too, before groups of them became industrial workers in the cities, had largely been organized in Artels, labor associations. At every opportunity, in good times and bad, they had been attracted by the Artel principle which, to them, was an urban version of the village Obschtchina.
The scope of the Russian Revolution was so immense because it actually combined three revolutions in one. The peasants proffered dreams and aspirations that were reminiscent of the great peasant revolts at the time of the Reformation in Europe. Their craving was not only for the soil that had sustained them for generations, but also for social justice. In the liberation of “God’s earth” from the hands of human oppressors, their religious faith saw the promise of a righteous, chaste life pattern everywhere-in city and village, in Russia and the world.
This peasant revolt coincided in time with the modern socialist movement of workers in the factories, and with socialist ideas and forms of struggle that had been evolved by some of the best minds in Europe and Russia. Furthermore, Russian capitalism was still in its infancy and the Russian worker was still organically bound to his peasant origin. In the “worker-peasant,” therefore, was the dual force from which revolutionary protest, inspiration and readiness for battle originated.
And the third partner was the Russian intelligentsia, which gave articulation, political clarity and deepened vision to this spontaneous peasant and proletarian movement. Whether the intelligentsia did this indirectly (through the moderates) or directly (through the radicals), they all helped the people formulate their own moral and cultural ideals. (We must leave aside here a fourth revolution-the rebellions of the many nationalities in Russia which added their aspirations to the political and social movements of Russia as a whole.)
In this manner the striking power of the revolution sprang from three-even four-different, yet basically inseparable, sources. If revolution is the “engine of history,” then three powerful engines were at work in Russia in the Revolution of 1917. But the supreme slogan that carried the revolution as a whole was the peasant call, sanctified back in Populist days: Zemlya i Volya, (“Land and Freedom”). Not only land, but also freedom. And, just like freedom, land must be made available to all. The party of the Social-Revolutionaries gave these concepts their modern and Maximalist expression.
About one hundred years ago, in 1851, Alexander Herzen wrote:
“A heavy storm is gathering in the soul of the peasant. He knows nothing of the text of Constitutions and the division of powers; he looks with somber gaze at the wealthy squire and he knows that, however hard he works, the fruits of his labor are gathered in by others. And so he begins to listen to the worker in the city; and when he will have heard enough and, with peasant thoroughness, will have assessed his forces, he will wipe the old order from the face of the earth. And that will be the true people’s revolution. Russia’s man of the future is the peasant, as in France it is the worker.”
Alexander Herzen was thinking not only of the peasant’s extreme poverty, but also of his capacity to live co-operatively and assume social responsibility in the Obschtchina. In its system of periodical equal re-distribution of land among those who worked it and according to their needs, he saw the beginnings of a new, just social order. But Marxist teachings, which began developing in that period of the nineteenth century, did not concede the man and fighter in the peasant but only in the industrial worker. The difference was well formulated by David Mitrany in his recent book, Marx Against the Peasant: [26]
“The Marxists were interested in production, the eastern reformers (Populists) were interested in the producers. It is significant that what in the West is commonly known as the Land question, in the East has always been spoken of as the Peasant question. For the sake of scientific production the Marxist accepted with equanimity, if not actually with eagerness, the destruction of the peasantry as a class. But in Eastern Europe the whole social problem centered on the peasants, who had the greatest needs and numbers; a revolutionary movement which left them out of account would have neither hope nor scope.”
The Bolsheviks could not leave the Russian peasant out of their calculations. At first, in full contradiction to the Marxist viewpoint, they sought to win him over. That is why Lenin was so eager to name the Soviets a “government of workers and peasants,” even though his true goal was only a proletarian dictatorship. That is why he accepted without any amendments- and for the time being-the program of land socialization as formulated by the Social-Revolutionaries and the Peasant Congresses. This acceptance established a common plank for Bolsheviks and Left Social-Revolutionaries. For the first time in modern history, the working village emerged with its ideas, characteristics and aspirations as a colossal, self-assured force.
Let us look more closely into the law of land socialization which ushered in Russia’s agrarian revolution. In outline the law had been formulated as early as the first Peasant Congress in Petrograd in May, 1917. At the Second Soviet Congress, which proclaimed the Soviet Republic, the first revolutionary statute to be enacted after the decree on peace was that on land socialization. But to become an instrument of practical action, the law had to be elaborated, its details needed to be hammered out by peasant hands.
This work was accomplished in January, 1918, during the Third Peasant Congress (also held in Petrograd), which was the first to merge with the Third Soviet Congress of Workers and Soldiers. Nine hundred proletarian and six hundred peasant deputies established a unity of the Russian working people, a unity symbolized by the “handshake of Lenin and Spiridonova.” In her welcoming address, Spiridonova articulated the innermost hopes of those men and women for whom she had staked her life twelve years before:
“Our Peasant Congress, which is now joining with you, makes one request, one demand and one condition. Let not this Congress of Workers, Soldiers and Peasant Deputies disband without passing the law of land socialization. Let that be your first law!”
Soon after, and almost unanimously, the Soviet Congress passed the basic “law of the land.” Solemnly it confirmed the law’s main principles and called on the peasant deputies to formulate each paragraph themselves. It happens but rarely in history that a great, complex law is thus fashioned by the collective effort of a people, but it did occur in Petrograd in 1918. The entire Peasant Congress remained in the city for two weeks, while keeping in constant touch with the land committees throughout the country. Approximately one thousand delegates split into twenty-six commissions, each numbering from thirty to forty persons. There were simply not enough leaders or technical experts for this undertaking. Peasants from all parts of Russia, therefore, worked with intense concentration day and night, revising the projected law prepared by Ilya Mayorov, a peasant from the province of Kazan and the agrarian theoretician of the Left Social-Revolutionary Party.
Working without interruption they amended, corrected and perfected the law point by point. They worked in the socialist spirit, criticizing freely and keeping the project clear of all private-capitalist vestiges. The first paragraph had proclaimed that “from now on every kind of private property in land is abolished forever within the borders of the Russian Federative Soviet Republic.”
This might have seemed like a clear-enough statement. But it failed to satisfy the delegates. They demanded-and their point was carried-that the word “private” be eliminated, because they wanted to abolish not private property alone, but also state, or communal property, in land; the earth, they held, can belong only to all. Their final text took the following form: “All manner of property (including state property!) in land, whether of minerals, waters, forests or other natural resources is forever abolished within the borders of the Russian Federative Soviet Republic.”
This opening enunciation was followed by a number of points which set all Russia up on new foundations and realized the age- old peasant dream of the Chernij Peredziel, the total redistribution of land. Quoted are points 2, 3 and 4: “The land passes, without compensation, to the use of the entire working people.”
“The right to the use of land belongs only to those who work it with their hands (to those, that is, who do not employ hired labor).”
“The right to the use of land cannot be restricted on the grounds of sex, religion, nationality or citizenship
This last point concerning citizenship was incorporated in the law not by its authors or by intellectual leaders, but by the peasant delegates themselves. The idea that the liberation of man and soil is not a purely Russian affair, but one which concerns toiling mankind as a whole, had cast its spell over them. The slogan Zemlya i Volya (“Land and Freedom”) no longer had a national character; it aspired to universality. In his commentary to the law, Ilya Mayorov wrote that, with socialization, “the peasants had turned the land over not to the Russian people, nor to the Russian state, but to the tillers of the soil everywhere, for there could be no possessors of the soil; like the air it must become the property of all who need it.”
And I recall a vivid scene which had occurred previously in the town of Ufa, in the Ural Mountains. At the end of 1917, as a member of the town’s Soviet, I participated in the first peasant conference there. Hundreds of delegates-both Russians and Tartars-were rejoicing in the honeymoon of their liberation. They were discussing the principles of land socialization. Impossible to describe the awesome, almost sacramental atmosphere in which the issue was debated. They had approached the question of who should have the right to work the local soil. The peasants of the province of Ufa only, or peasants from all Russia? At this point a delegate named Turetzky rose to take the floor.
“Why the peasants of Russia only?” he demanded. “What about the working people of other lands who suffer and languish in misery? Why not they too? . .
His words struck the hall like a thunderclap. Everywhere men jumped to their feet shouting, “That’s right! Of course! Everyone should have the right. Let them all come. Let them work with us together!” And the delegates looked at each other with shining eyes. They knew then that they were refashioning the world.
And it was in this spirit that the delegates of the Third Peasant Congress in Petrograd worked several months later as they drafted their basic law. Paragraph 8 of the new law stated: “All persons unable to work who lose their means of livelihood by reason of this law shall be entitled to a pension.” This meant that all men capable of work must find occupation on an equal basis with all others. In other words, the socialization of land abolished property, but it did not “settle accounts” with the former owners. They were simply included among the working people. Thus the law sought not only to secure the right to work for everyone who contributed his own and his family’s labor to the soil. It also provided that the land be distributed in such manner as to assure each family of an honorable, ample and secure existence. The law frankly expressed preference for those villages and farms which desired to live co-operatively in the tradition of the Russian Obschtchina. But it did not force co-operatives on the peasants of the country, recognizing existent differences between the provinces and their ways of life.
The deputies did not leave Petrograd until their law was officially ratified by the Central Soviet Executive. On January 27, 1918, this ratification took place in a solemn session. Spiridonova’s report on the work accomplished left those present shouting with enthusiasm. “No debates! Vote! Vote!” A forest of hands shot up. And still the deputies refused to leave Petrograd until they could hold printed copies of the law in their hands. Two printing presses worked a day and a night, and then the delegates departed, spreading the glad tidings to the far corners of the land.
But how did the agrarian revolution itself proceed? Was it a convulsive grab by millions of vengeful and land-hungry men? There are reports, not from revolutionary sources, but from men who themselves belonged to the landed gentry and whom the revolution had deprived of place and property. In their conservative, antirevolutionary magazines abroad they published their experiences. In 1923 one such expropriated landowner wrote in the magazine Russkaya Missl (“Russian Thought”), published in Belgrade, Yugoslavia:
“The whole land problem was settled in the period between October 1917 and May 1918, before the central Soviet authorities had penetrated the village. It was in the full sense of the word a spontaneous process, guided by deepest revolutionary passion. . . . Surely no social revolution in the world has been so profoundly peaceful and bloodless as the Russian, because it was aimed almost exclusively at property, not at individuals. One need not be an idealistic Populist to make this statement. One needs only to be acquainted with the Russian village up to the revolution. April 1918 was the month of a wonderful transformation.”
The author continues to describe the manner in which the distribution of land was effected and he paints a picture that should stand forever in the annals of Russian history:
“For five days-and this probably happened all over Russia-a persistent din of raised voices carried over the fields. There were no quarrels, just the usual peasant redistribution of land, but this time on a gigantic scale. To outsiders it all seemed obscure and incomprehensible.
“What was happening was that the villagers were distributing land among themselves. Small landowners and prosperous peasants were ruining themselves without a murmur ns they surrendered portions of their land to families with many children. A week later everybody was back in the fields to do the ploughing, and the redistribution was complete. ‘The impression was that of a miracle. The speed, painlessness and the relative justice with which it was accomplished has convinced me of much.
“I have no doubt whatsoever that the smoothness of the transformation was due not only to the impotence of the minority who suffered in the change, but to the general conviction that the new distribution was just. All peasants accepted it as an unshakable must: both those who gained and those who lost. Whenever afterward I consulted the losers, I got the same reply: ‘What can one do? My personal loss does not compromise the idea which is right and just.’
“The prediction that civil war would break out among the peasants and that they would be incapable of effecting the distribution of land without central authority was proven false. Left to themselves they accomplished this complicated process within a few days, peacefully, independently, without land surveyors-and immediately returned to the job of ploughing and sowing. Thus ended a tremendous social transformation, carried out by the people themselves without technical assistance, but with the social and moral experience of life lived in the Obschtchina.
The events were similarly judged by B. Brutzkus, Russian professor of agriculture, an outspoken foe of socialism in general. “The Russian agrarian revolution,” he wrote, “consisted not only in the distribution of large landed properties among the peasants. It went farther than that. The land strips that were the private property of the peasants themselves were also redistributed. In their own ‘Obschtchina-bred’ sense of justice, the people had found the main principles for this magnificent Chernij Peredziel.”
It might be said that Russia’s peasants and small-property owners had imitated the example of the French nobles during the revolutionary night of August 4, 1789. Then, too, aristocrats and dignitaries of the church had, in a moment of collective exaltation and self-sacrifice, relinquished their inherited estates to the welfare of the whole people. And thus in April, 1918, Russian peasants-property owners-flung their land properties into the common pool of social and spiritual liberation. In those days their sacrifice outweighed another, though no less important fact: the downfall of feudal landownership in Russia.[27]
And one more testimony from a conservative Russian land- owner of the period. “I know of no case,” he wrote, “in which the ‘former’ landowners were directly persecuted by the peasants, even though the latter had not been gently treated in the past. The fever of their revolutionary movement ran so high that old scores and grievances seemed to have burned away. The land distribution took on the character of an anmesty.” This was indeed a remarkable statement, and years later Victor Chernov wrote enthusiastically, “This amnesty was the most precious and most touching feature of the Russian peasantry during the critical period of the Chemij Peredziel, the total land distribution, in 1918.”
And, as we recall the name of Victor Chernov, who had had the rare distinction of heading the Ministry of Agriculture in the pre-October stage of the revolution, the question almost poses itself: Would not the agrarian revolution have proceeded in the same, or in even better, spirit in his day? What factors, political or social, had delayed its consummation to make inevitable the events of October? In 1923, writing from his exile abroad, Chernov frankly answered this question: “The delay of the Constituent Assembly and the thwarting of the organic, painless process of eliminating injustices in land ownership resulted in the fact that life, pulsating life, grew weary of waiting, tore off its chains and plunged violently forward into the unknown future.” [28]
As minister in the coalition, Chernov had indeed worked to prepare the ground for an early transformation of agrarian relations in the country. But he was frustrated within the Government itself. He had even been accused of wishing “to accomplish the land expropriation immediately so as to confront the Constituent Assembly with a fait accompli.” But he did not prevail, and that failure accounts largely for the October revolt. After that the agrarian revolution went its own way, yet even then Chernov acknowledged its humanitarian character.
The humane and generous nature of the revolution in the village could have spread among the workers in the city. But the Russian revolution was not destined to proceed in this manner. It was the spring of 1918, shortly after the conclusion of the peace treaty in Brest-Litovsk. We already know that this so-called peace caused a deep shock in Russia, and primarily in the cities. It brought new misery, hunger, political insecurity. The Germans occupied large parts of the food-producing areas, leaving Central Russia cut off from her sources of supply. The Government decided to requisition bread from the peasants by force.
The Bolsheviks could not have called down a greater curse. The village had only just passed through its highest spiritual exultation. It had not only liberated itself from the landowners’ yoke, it had also laid the foundations for economic and social equality in its everyday life. Everybody had truly abandoned the old concepts of private property so as to enter into a new life of common welfare and solidarity. It seemed natural that the peasants, producers of the people’s vital goods, would soon forge bonds of friendship with the industrial workers in the cities. And then, suddenly, the Bolshevik state launched something like a class war against the peasants.
In the village itself the Bolsheviks-falling back once more on their outmoded theory-branded the working peasants as “small bourgeois,” as men imbued with the psychology of trade, private markets and the instinct for acquisition. They organized the few remaining “paupers” to oppose the overwhelming mass of peasants; they established Soviets of “peasant paupers.” They thus set themselves to demolish the foundations of the new revolutionary village. But even that was not enough: into the village they sent thousands of specially mobilized industrial workers for “bread requisitioning.” Other chapters of this book, particularly “Bolshevik Terror in Action,” recount how these bands, which frequently turned into punitive expeditions against protesting peasants, corrupted their proletarian participants and led to acts of unbelievable brutality.
To assure ever greater and speedier deliveries of bread for the city, the Government decreed a new system of economic organization in the village-the Kolkhoz (collective settlement) and the Sovkhoz (state farm). The Sovkhoz was really a “bread factory,” that is, a large estate turned into a centralized quasi- industrial undertaking, where peasants were to work as wage earners. The Kolkhoz claimed to establish communal agrarian units in the communist spirit. But that spirit differed, as heaven does from earth, from that Obschtchina spirit which had inspired the agrarian revolution. It was the difference between the free decision of the peasant and the coercion of the state; the difference between co-operatives arising from among the peasants, and statist-bureaucratic leveling imposed from above. In the Bolshevik forms of agriculture the specific tradition of the Russian peasant no longer played any role. From now on he was but a physical and economic instrument for supplying the city with bread and other raw materials (in addition to his military service). The old Marxist approach triumphed along the entire line, aided now by the power of an armed state.
The peasants quickly sensed that they were losing the human rights they had just won: the rights to personal liberty, to free, creative labor, to individual responsibility. They sensed that the one-time Barin and his knout were returning to the village in a new disguise. They resisted the new enslavement by the “proletarian state,” and history is witness that they resisted valiantly in numerous provinces of the country. Only grudgingly did the collectivized soil yield slave-produced bread, and for many years a rich, fertile Russia lived near the margin of starvation. But the peasants lost the fight. The Social-Revolutionary parties were no longer able to give them the needed support. The Bolshevik dictatorship proved itself a brutal and powerful antagonist. This dictatorship took over, wielding the fiendish weapon of terror.
One of the chief reasons for their use of terror was the Bolsheviks’ sense of isolation in that vast sea of the peasant population. The very fact that, as a small minority, they insisted on carrying out a policy directed against the mass of the people was bound to lead to a system of terror. Soon a vicious dialectic became manifest: the tighter the dictatorship, the greater the terror; and the greater the terror the more the Bolsheviks needed, for their protection and security, to tighten the dictatorship. Seen from the outside, bolshevism vanquished the peasants; but the years passed and the running conflict with the peasantry did not abate. For bolshevism the conflict remains a danger signal to this day.