A People's Tragedy (156 page)

I have come to the unequivocal conclusion that we must now wage the most decisive and merciless war against the Black Hundred clergy and suppress its resistance with such cruelty that they will not forget it for decades to come . . . The more members of the reactionary bourgeoisie and clergy we manage to shoot the better.

It has recently been estimated that 8,000 people were executed during this brutal campaign in 1922 alone. Patriarch Tikhon claimed to know of 10,000 priests in prison or exile, including about 100 bishops. It was only after 1925, under pressure from Russia's Western trading partners, that the persecution came to a temporary halt.33

According to Gorky, the Bolsheviks deliberately used the Jews in their ranks to carry out confiscations of church property. He accused them of deliberately stirring up anti-Semitism to divert the anger of the Christian community away from themselves. In several towns, such as Smolensk and Viatka, there were indeed pogroms against the Jews following the confiscation of church property. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks were closing down synagogues as part of their campaign against religion. The first to be closed were in Chagall's home town of Vitebsk in April 1921. The Soviet authorities claimed that six of the

city's eighty synagogues were needed for conversion to Yiddish schools. The Jews quickly occupied those synagogues which had been targeted for closure and held prayer meetings in them. But the authorities removed them with troops, smashing windows, chanting 'Death to the Yids!' and killing several worshippers in the process. None of the synagogues was used as a school: one became a Communist university; several were turned into workers' clubs; one even became a shoe factory. More closures followed in Minsk, Gomel, Odessa and Kharkov. Overall, 800 synagogues were closed down by the Communists between 1921 and 1925. There was more than just a tinge of anti-Semitism in all this. The lower party ranks were filled, in Gorky's words, with 'old Russian nationalists, scoundrels, and vagabonds, who despise and fear the Jews'. The Military and Workers' Oppositions, which mobilized their support from the lower party ranks, both used the rhetoric of anti-Semitism in their language of class animosity towards the

'bourgeois specialists'. The early years of the NEP, which witnessed a boom in the sort of small-scale trading where Jews were traditionally dominant, strengthened this anti-Semitism. For the lower-class Bolsheviks, in particular, it was galling to see the 'Jewish'

traders 'taking over' Moscow. During the civil war these 'speculators' would have been arrested; now they lived better than the party rank and file, while half the Russian workers were unemployed. The revolution, it seemed to them, was in retreat both on the class and the racial fronts. It was in this context that many of the more militant Bolsheviks began to argue, as Marx himself had done, that the Jews as a social group were synonymous with capitalism — that all traders were essentially 'Jews'. Such ideas were prevalent in the Bolshevik campaign against Judaism which took off in 1921. The ultimate insult of this campaign was delivered on the Jewish New Year of 1921 when a mock 'trial' of Judaism was put on for propaganda purposes. It was staged in the same courtroom in Kiev where the innocent Beiliss (also read: Judaism) had been tried in 1913.34

* * * The Bolshevik persecution of religion did little to weaken the hold of this 'opiate'

on the minds of the population. Although the 1920s witnessed a decline of religion, especially among the rural youth who went to school or left the countryside for the city, this probably had less to do with the Bolsheviks' efforts than with the secularizing tendencies of modern life. It had been happening in any case for decades. In fact, if anything, the oppressive measures of the Bolsheviks had precisely the opposite effect —

of rallying the believers around their religion. Despite the separation of Church and state, the local clergy continued to be supported by the voluntary donations of their parishioners as well as by fees and grants of land from the peasant communes.

Ironically it was not that far from the dreams of the nineteenth-century liberal clergy for an organic self-supporting parish. Even those who no longer believed in their religion with the

same unquestioning faith often continued not merely to observe but also to show a strong attachment to its rituals. Octobered babies and Red Weddings failed to supplant their religious equivalents (which also happened to be more fun). People continued to bury their dead rather than cremate them, despite the shortages of coffins and graves and the free state provision of cremations, because, in the words of one morgue official,

'the Russians are still either too religious or too superstitious to part from the Orthodox burial traditions'.35

As in religion, so in the fields of culture and social life, the attempt by the Bolsheviks to

'make the world and man anew' foundered on the rocks of reality. It was in many ways a Utopian dream — one of the most ambitious in history — to believe that human nature could be changed by simply altering the social environment in which people lived. Man cannot be transformed quite so easily: human nature moves more slowly than ruling ideologies or society. This is perhaps the one enduring moral lesson of the Russian Revolution — as it is indeed of the terrible history of this century.

iii
Bolshevism in Retreat

A letter from Sergei Semenov:

Andreevskoe, 21 January 1921
Dear Anna,

Life in the village has become unbearable. True, we are much better off than the peasants in the rest of Russia. Neither the food requisitioning nor the labour duty has really yet affected us. But we still suffer from the daily acts of robbery, stupidity and dishonesty by our local bearers of Soviet Power which make normal life impossible.

The labouring people, in whose name all this has been done, no longer support the new regime. I will not write another letter of complaint to Kamenev [chairman of the Moscow Soviet]. As the proverb goes, 'There is nothing worse than a deaf man who will neither listen.'

Despite the ending of the war and all the promises to get the country back on to its feet, our population does not believe the current authorities are capable of this. It is so fed up and angry, it is so devoured by the feeling of oppression, that it is incapable of positive thoughts and cannot see a way out of this situation. Many are despairing because Wrangel and the Poles were beaten — and yet nobody wants to admit that the answer to our problems lies not in changing things from the outside but in changing the way we live ourselves.36

The sense of anger and despair which Semenov's letter expresses was shared by peasants throughout Russia. All the ideals of the peasant revolution had been destroyed by the Bolshevik regime. The peasant Soviets of 1917, which to a large extent had realized the old ideal of
volia,
of village freedom and autonomy, had been taken over by the Communists. What had been organs of peasant self-rule now became bureaucratic organs of the state. The revolution on the land, which had aimed to make the smallholding peasant farm universal, was now threatened by the collective farms. The gentry's estates which the peasants had thought would belong to them were being transferred to the state. And what sort of state was that? Not one that helped the peasants to prosper. It was one that took away their only sons and horses for the army, one that prolonged the devastations of the civil war, one that forced them into labour teams and robbed them of their food. 'The freedom we were given by the revolution was taken from us by the new regime,' complained one peasant to a foreign journalist in January 1921. 'Life in the village is now like it was under the Tsar.'

By 1921 much of peasant Russia had been brought to the brink of a terrible famine.

While the famine crisis of 1921—2 was directly caused by a year of drought and heavy frosts, the worst affected areas were clearly those that had suffered most from the requisitionings of 1918—21. In Samara province, for example, the worst-hit region of the famine crisis, the amount of grain requisitioned during 1919—20 exceeded the actual harvest surplus by 30 per cent with the result that the average peasant household lost 118 kg of food, fodder and seed from its basic stores. In the harsh conditions of 1921 this often proved the difference between life and death. In the Balashov district of neighbouring Saratov province, where Cheremukhin's murderous brigade collected the levy, the amount of requisitioned grain even exceeded the total harvest so that the peasants were forced to pay it from stocks they had accumulated in previous years and in the autumn of 1920 there was, in the words of one official, 'no seed left to sow'.

Throughout the grain-producing regions of Russia the Bolsheviks had deliberately set their food levies higher than the estimated harvest surplus on the grounds that the peasants would hide up to one-third of their actual food surplus. On this same basis the requisitioning brigades had indiscriminately seized whatever foodstuffs they could find in the village barns, often shooting peasants who resisted them as 'kulaks', even though, as many Bolshevik officials were forced to admit, these were usually the poorest peasants who would simply starve if they lost their last vital food stocks to the levy.

During 1920, as the signs of the imminent crisis became clearer, provincial food officials pleaded with the Centre to call a halt to their disastrous levies. 'There is simply no grain left to take,' warned one official from the German Volga region in September 1920. And yet Moscow pressed for more. In the German Volga region 42 per cent of the paltry 1920 harvest was seized and shipped off to the hungry north.

Villages were ransacked, children held to ransom, peasants whipped and tortured to squeeze their last few grains from them.37

To begin with the peasants defended themselves with the usual 'weapons of the weak': passive resistance and subterfuge. They buried their grain beneath the ground, fed it to their livestock, or turned it into moonshine rather than lose it to the Bolsheviks. They also began to take up arms in sporadic local revolts and rebellions of increasing frequency, size and violence. Two thousand members of the requisitioning brigades were murdered by angry peasants during 1918; in 1919 the figure rose to nearly 5,000; and in 1920 to over 8,000. By the autumn of 1920 the whole of the country was inflamed with peasant wars. Makhno's peasant army, still up to 15,000 strong after Wrangel's defeat, roamed across the Ukrainian steppe and, together with countless other local bands, succeeded in paralysing much of the rural Soviet infrastructure until the summer of 1921. In the central Russian province of Tambov the Antonov rebellion was supported by virtually the entire peasant population: Soviet power ceased to exist there between the autumn of 1920 and the summer of 1921. In Voronezh, Saratov, Samara, Simbirsk and Penza provinces there were smaller but no less destructive peasant rebel armies creating havoc and effectively limiting the Bolsheviks' power to the towns.

Hundreds of small-scale bandit armies controlled the steppelands between Ufa and the Caspian Sea. In the Don and the Kuban the Cossacks and the peasants were at last united by their common hatred of the Bolsheviks. The rebel armies of the Caucasian mountains numbered well over 30,000 fighters. In Belorussia the nationalist-led peasants took over most of the countryside and forced the Soviets of Minsk and Smolensk to be evacuated. By far the biggest (though least studied) of the peasant revolts broke out in western Siberia: the whole of the Tiumen', Omsk, Cheliabinsk, Tobolsk, Ekaterinburg and Tomsk regions, complete with most of the major towns, fell into the hands of peasant rebels, up to 60,000 of them under arms, and virtually the whole of the Soviet infrastructure remained paralysed during the first six months of 1921. And yet throughout Russia the same thing was happening on a smaller scale: angry peasants were taking up arms and chasing the Bolsheviks out of the villages. Less than fifty miles from the Kremlin, not far from Semenov's Andreev-skoe, there were villages where it was dangerous for a Bolshevik to go.38

What is remarkable about these peasant wars is that they shared so many common features, despite the huge distances between them and the different contexts in which they took place.

Most of the larger rebellions had started out in 1920 as small-scale peasant revolts against the requisitioning of food which, as a result of their incompetent and often brutal handling by the local Communists, soon became inflamed and spread into full-scale peasant wars. The Tambov rebellion was typical. It had started in August 1920 in the village of Kamenka when a food

brigade arrived to collect its share of the new grain levy. At over eleven million
puds
the levy for the province had clearly been set much too high. Even Lenin wondered in September 'whether it should not be cut'. The 1920 harvest had been very poor and if the peasants had paid the levy in full they would have been left with a mere one
pud
of grain per person, barely 10 per cent of their normal requirements for food, seed and fodder. Already in October there were hunger riots. By January, in the words of the Bolshevik Antonov-Ovseenko, sent in to help put down the revolt, 'half the peasantry was starving'. The peasants of Kamenka were relatively wealthy — which meant they starved more slowly than the rest — and an extra levy was imposed on them. They refused to pay this levy, killed several members of the requisitioning brigade, and armed themselves with guns and pitchforks to fight off the Soviet reinforcements sent in from Tambov to put their revolt down. Neighbouring villages joined the uprising and a rudimentary peasant army was soon organized. It fought under the Red Flag —

reclaiming the symbols of the revolution was an important aspect of these people's uprisings — and was led by the local peasant SR hero, Grigorii Plezhnikov, who had organized the war against the gentry estates in 1905 and 1917. Meanwhile, a network of Peasant Unions (STKs) began to emerge in the villages — often they were organized by the local SRs — which replaced the Soviets and helped to supply the insurgent army.