20) The Peasantry Before October

"In order that the peasant might clear and fence his land, the worker had to stand at the head of the state: that is the simplest formula for the October revolution"
 

 

Throwing off the landlords

Before completing his History with the final events up until October, Trotsky summarises two key issues that would influence the success or failure of the revolution – the national question and, as summarised in this section, the peasants’ struggle to throw off the rule of the landlords.

Trotsky explains that the Russian peasants did not concern themselves overly with the political conflicts in the cities; they just wanted land. However, just as with the French Revolution over a century earlier, it was the peasants’ pressure on the landlords that made sure that the old feudal regime was completely cleared away.

While the industrial centres of Petrograd and Moscow were the centres of the workers’ and soldiers’ movements, the peasant movement centred on the large agricultural regions of Great Russia and the middle region of the Volga. Violent struggles had broken out as early as March until the Compromisers had succeeded in heading off the movement.

In April, Lenin had feared that the richer kulaks and conservative small land-owners organised in the Co-operatives, would lead the peasantry onto the side of the bosses against the workers. That was why he had originally agitated for separate organisations of the poorest peasants and agricultural workers in order to help encourage a divide.

As it turned out, rather than organising separately around their own grievances over rent and conditions, these poorer layers joined, and strengthened, the general movement to seize the land. By autumn, if differing from area to area in timescale and method, the peasant struggles had spread almost throughout the whole country.

As a general rule, the peasants first tried to go through the official institutions of the new regime, but one of the Moscow papers summed up their real mood:“The muzhik [peasant] is glancing round, he is not doing anything yet, but look in his eyes – his eyes will tell you that all the land lying around him is his land” (1).

By the summer, direct seizures of land, forest and crops began to multiply. Emboldened after the “July Days”, the government changed tack and started to send armed troops into the villages to put down the growing revolt. The repression succeeded in quelling the movement in some districts. However, the struggle simply started up in other areas instead.

By September, both the number and ferocity of peasant actions had risen sharply. By October, they had risen yet further. As winter drew close, peasants cut down the landlord’s forests for firewood. As the price of grain rose, hunger riots broke out in some areas.

“From various forms and degrees of pressure, the peasants are now passing over to violent seizures of the various parts of the landlord’s business, to the extermination of the nests of the gentility, the burning of manors, even the murder of proprietors and overseers” (2).

Manors and estates were sacked and looted. Everything that could be removed was dragged away, even the doors and floorboards. “Behind these destructive activities stood the … old strategy of all peasant wars: to raze to the ground the fortified position of the enemy. ‘The more reasonable ones’, remembers a Kursk peasant, would say: ‘ We must not burn up the buildings – they will be of use to us for schools and hospitals’, but the majority would shout out: ‘ We must destroy everything so that in case anything happens our enemy will have no place to hide ’ ” (3).

The more well-to-do peasants began to fear that this revolt might end with them losing their property too. But these ‘kulaks' realised that their best chance was to side with the village against the landlords. Indeed, they often took the most from the sacked properties since they were the ones with a horse and cart to take the loot away in!

The peasantry fought together to defeat landlordism, rather than capitalism. It was only later, in 1918, that the struggle within the peasantry, against the ‘kulak’ peasant bourgeoisie, developed.
 
The big landlords that began to realise that they would not be able to hold on to their property. The more far-sighted saw that their best strategy was to do a deal with the Compromisers for the state to buy their land from them at a good price. The ‘peasant’ leaders hoped the Constituent Assembly could enable such a deal to be struck and that they could be the recipients of much of the spoils, once the state had paid for it.

The landlords were counting on a Kornilov victory to make sure any deal was agreed on their terms. His defeat left them with little to bargain with.

The village changes its outlook  

The political limitations of the peasant movement might have been seen as guaranteeing support for the Social Revolutionaries against the Bolsheviks. Certainly, at the May congress of peasant soviets, Chernov topped the poll in the elections to the E.C. with 810 votes. Kerensky was close behind with 804 but Lenin only received 20 votes.

But the Social Revolutionaries foundered on the contradiction in their programme. They stood for taking the land from the landlords. But they supported a coalition with Kadet bankers who had billions of roubles tied up in loans to these same landlords. They supported a government that was sending troops into the villages to try and defend the bankers’ wealth.

Perversely, the peasants turned to the SRs for help and their membership grew strongly in the villages in July. However, this growth at the bottom of the party only widened the gulf between the ranks and the Social Revolutionary leaders.

“In Moscow at a meeting of the Military Organisation on the 30th of July, a delegate from the front, himself a Social Revolutionary, said: ‘ Although the peasants still think themselves SRs, a rift has formed between them and the party’. The soldiers confirmed this: Under the influence of SR agitation the peasants are still hostile to the Bolsheviks, but in practice they decide the questions of land and power in a Bolshevik manner” (4).

This contradictory outlook was also apparent in the institutions adopted by the villages for organising the agrarian revolution. Rather than turn to soviets, which tended to be dominated by more conservative layers, the peasants looked to the local land committees. These had been set up officially as government institutions but were elected by the peasants themselves. While the provincial land committees, embracing landlords, government functionaries and Social Revolutionary politicians, acted as a brake on the revolution, the town committees helped to organise it.

“Getting control of the militia in certain localities, the town committees would issue laws, establish rents, regulate wages, put their own overseers on estates, take over the land, the crops, the woods, the forests, the tools, take the machinery away from the landlords, and carry out searches and arrests” (5).

Workers and soldiers were an important influence aiding the change in outlook of the villages. Many industrial plants were situated in rural districts in any case. Thousands of workers returned to the villages to escape from unemployment caused by the summer lockouts. Many became leaders of the peasant revolt.

In May and June, with the support of the Bolsheviks, workers in Petrograd created ‘back-home clubs’ to make links with particular provinces, counties and even villages. The movement spread to Moscow and other industrial cities.

“Whole columns of the workers’ press were devoted to announcements of back-home club meetings, where reports about journeys to the villages would be heard, instructions drawn up for delegates, and money collected for agitation” (6).

Peasant organisation at the front was weak but in revolutionary centres like Petrograd and Kronstadt, soviets of peasant soldiers and back-home clubs followed the examples of the workers and sent agitators into the villages.

But the influence of these official delegates was slight compared to the effect of millions of ordinary soldiers returning to their villages from the front, either on leave or deserting their posts.

“The men from the front introduced into the business the heavy determination of people accustomed to handle their fellow-men with rifle and bayonet. Even the soldiers’ wives caught the fighting mood from their husbands …[and] spoke at meetings in favour of the raids” (7).

As the revolt moved from semi-peaceful activities to direct seizures, control passed from the land committees to mass meetings and peasant assemblies set up to divide appropriated goods and negotiate with the landlords.

“Autumn with muzhiks is the time for politics. The fields are mowed, illusions are scattered, patience is exhausted. Time to finish things up! The movement now overflows its banks … draws in all the strata of the villages, washes away all considerations of law and prudence, becomes aggressive, fierce, furious … arms itself with steel and fire, revolvers and hand-grenades, demolishes and burns up the manorial dwellings, drives out the landlords. Bourgeois historians have tried to put the responsibility upon the Bolsheviks for the ‘vandalism’ of the peasant’s mode of settling accounts. In reality [he] was completing a business entered upon many centuries before the Bolsheviks appeared. With revolutionary barbarism he was wiping out the barbarism of the middle ages” (8).

Cases where soldiers were taking the lead in peasant disorders rose steadily from April to October. “The dying leadership of the Social Revolutionary teachers, town clerks and functionaries, was giving place to the leadership of soldiers who would stop at nothing” (9).

Of course, the soldiers’ support for the village struggles meant the government could not rely on the troops to put down the peasant revolt. “In a majority of cases the soldiers went over to the peasants. Thus the rural revolt loosened the last bolts of the army. There was not the slightest possibility that in the circumstances of a peasant war headed by the workers, the army would permit itself to be thrown against the insurrection in the cities” (10).

The peasants and the Bolsheviks

The workers and soldiers also brought with them slogans and news about the Bolsheviks that countered the smears of the Social Revolutionaries. The Party itself tried to organise its intervention into the villages more concretely with a peasant newspaper, Byednota, coming out in September. But while technical resources still remained very weak, the correct policy of the Bolsheviks ensured their ideas penetrated into the villages.

“In Smolensk province, according to the recollections of Ivanov, ‘Bolsheviks were very rare. There were no Bolshevik papers. Leaflets were very rarely given out … nevertheless the nearer it came to October, the more the villages swung over to the Bolsheviks’ ” (11).

Where the Bolsheviks had built more influence, they were able to limit some of the pointless destruction of property. In other areas, the Bolshevik slogans of ‘land to the peasants’ simply added to the impetus to seize or destroy the landlords’ property.

The Bolsheviks worked to explain to the peasants that soviet power could give the peasants land, end the war and establish workers’ control of production so that the price relations between agricultural and industrial products could be regulated to combat rural poverty.

As Trotsky explained at a conference of factory committees on October 10th: “We must explain to the village that all the attempts of the worker to help the peasant by supplying the village with agricultural implements will give no result until workers’ control of organised production is established” (12).

Nevertheless, for agitational reasons as much as anything, the Bolsheviks organised Petrograd workers to collect scrap metal to turn into simple agricultural tools to send to the villages.

The Bolshevik weakness on the ground meant that the political awakening in the villages was channelled in to the “Left Social Revolutionaries” which emerged as an unstable form of rural Bolshevism in the villages over the coming months.

It was only now, as the Bolsheviks and Left Social Revolutionaries began to win the leadership of county and provincial city soviets, that the peasants began to look to the soviets for leadership. Unable, thanks to its intermediate economic position in society, to create its own independent leadership, the peasants now looked to the workers.

“The strength of the agrarian… and essentially bourgeois revolution was … that it overcame for a time the class contradictions of the village: the farmhand helped the kulak in raiding the landlord. The weakness … was … that the peasant war did not urge the bourgeois revolutionists forward, but threw them back conclusively into the camp of reaction. Tseretelli, the hard-labour convict of yesterday, defended the estates of the landlords against anarchy! The peasant revolution, thus rejected by the bourgeoisie, joined hands with the industrial proletariat. In order that the peasant might clear and fence his land, the worker had to stand at the head of the state: that is the simplest formula for the October revolution” (13).