Kitabı oku: «The XXth Century Political History of Russia: lecture materials», sayfa 4

No state formation before, during or after Kolchak’s dictatorship could avoid manifestations of the extreme emergency regime. The Committee of the Constituent Assembly before its breakdown resorted to execution by shooting of disgruntled inhabitants of towns and villages. Lieutenant general Rychkov, who headed the social revolutionary military units in Kazan, announced the order that confirms this information after a demonstration of Kazan workers in September 1918: «In case of the slightest attempt to disturb the peace on the part of any social group, and particularly workers, in any district where it happens, we will open fire.» And indeed, working districts in Kazan were shelled. In October 1918, leaving Samara, the Committee of the Constituent Assembly sent a punitive detachment to the factory center Ivaschenkovo.

Eighteen rebellions, civil disturbances and manifestations of disobedience, which took place from August 1918 until August 1919, indicate what means the Interim Government of the North areas resorted to. In January 1919, General Miller arrived in Arkhangelsk. Extraordinary measures and Terror, including economic extraordinary measures directed against the local bourgeoisie, became his governing methods.

Admiral Kolchak frankly spoke about his first months in power. He said: «Dissatisfaction with the internal administration is caused by the illegal activity of the lowest government agents, both military and civil. The activity of the heads of local police departments as well as of special purpose units is openly criminal.» Local Cossack organizations, which were taking part in liberating Siberia in the autumn 1918, turned out to be virtually useless as a support for the authorities. Kolchak admitted that atamans Kalmykov, Semenov, Unguern-Shtenberg, Gamov, Annenkov’s detachments «easily assumed functions of the political police and created special counterintelligence bodies.»

These agencies did not have any link with prosecutor’s office. The land council of Primorie complained about the fact that Cossack detachments organized private extrajudicial killings of political opponents – that is, everybody they met on their way. The Semipalatinsk cooperative union formally protested against ataman Annenkov’s activity several times, giving a warning note that his actions could destroy the reputation of the Omsk government and threaten the common mission of reconstituting the Russian state.

Admiral Kolchak also complained about the fact that counterintelligence offices were formed on the pattern of those which acted in Siberia under the Soviet regime, though counterintelligence should be presented only to Kolchak’s headquarters. They did not manage to control and oppress outposts, barrier troops on the railroads, or commissars authorized to represent the commanders at the front.

With the help of a whole range of decrees Kolchak tried to put an end to numerous cases of illegal confiscations, abuse of authority and the existence of police torture chambers. However, six months after coming to power he had to admit that the «malicious evil that has been killing our state and military forces since 1914 has re-appeared and is spreading.»

Sensing imminent defeat, military leaders left no stone unturned. In many places, manifestations of the extreme emergency regime appeared in the rear of Kolchak’s army, initiated from the top. It is sufficient to cite General Matkovsky’s brief order concerning the slaughter of insurgents in the villages near Omsk revolting against Kolchak’s soldiers:

«I. To scrupulously search every armed inhabitant of villages in rebellion; shoot them at the scene as enemies and traitors.

II. On the basis of evidence obtained from the inhabitants, to arrest all propagandists, members of the Soviet of Deputies who helped to organize riots, deserters, sympathizers, and those who conceal rebels and to take them to the military field court.

III. To deport unreliable and depraved persons to the Berezovsky and Nerchensky regions, sending them to the police.

IV. To bring to court, impose harsh sentences, and apply death-penalties to local authorities who did not show adequate resistance to bandits, who executed their orders and did not take steps for the liquidation of the Reds using their own means and capabilities.

V. To demolish villages where repetitive rebellions have been organized with redoubled severity, up to their complete liquidation.»

«White» armies acquired deplorable habits under General Denikin. Robberies, brigandism and other crimes against property were not prosecuted, so they became an ordinary phenomenon. An honest soldier became a prowler. Mean motives and rough arbitrariness replaced political correctness and mere human decency.

The negative influence of these battlefield morals on the rear was particularly felt in the Crimea after the retaking of Novorossiysk. Here are prince Obolensky’s reminiscences: «One morning on their way to school, children saw dead people with protruded tongues who had been hung from lamp posts in the streets of Simferopol. Never before had Simferopol seen anything like that. Even the Bolsheviks tempered their bloody business without such demonstrations.» It turned out that it was General Kutepov’s order, his way of terrorizing Simferopol Bolsheviks. The local Duma passed an official objection, and the Mayor went to Kutepov to persuade him to immediately remove the corpses from the street lamps. Kutepov gave the following answer to the the petition to cease public executions: «I have never abused public executions, but the current situation forced me to fall back upon such measures.»

In his memoirs Denikin called this and other similar incidents «black chapters» in the history of his Army. He did not hide the fact that most of the counterintelligence offices, particularly in Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa and Rostov, represented hotbeds of provocation and organized plundering. A two-way struggle was organized against this kind of offence; on the one hand they fought the agencies themselves, and on the other hand they fought individuals. In the long run the General had to admit the inefficiency and tardiness of the struggle.

Baron Wrangell tried as well to put an end to the ills of the epoch of «voluntarism.» This is demonstrated by his orders from April 1920 to June 1920, which mandated the end to violence against people. On April 27, the Department of Justice was detached from the civil government to fight against criminality. A peculiar judicial measure was Wrangell’s decree dated May 11, which ordered administrative deportation to Soviet Russia. Governors and fortress commandants were authorized to resort to such measures under a prosecutor’s supervision. The counterintelligence agencies, which were brought under control, almost stopped brigandage and acts of outrage. Criminals were subject to harsh sentencing. In his order of September 14, 1920 Wrangell expressed the following opinion about the military court commissions formed for civil protection against robbery and plunder: «The whole population living on the territories occupied by the troops of the Russian Army respects and trusts these commissions and their activity; in the immediate battle area, where a civil governing machinery is not yet properly formed, people believe these commissions to be their only protectors and address them with all their complains and problems.»

However, there was another opinion. Ivan Kalinin, former chairman of the Don Army military court commission, related that «Wrangell’s commissions never did any good,» that «the leader’s intention to establish a kind of «White Cheka» for the eradication of the lawlessness went down in flames». Later on, Wrangell himself had to admit the inadequacy of the counterintelligence agencies’ activities and criminal investigation actions, whose operations, in his opinion, were lagging. He wrote that «the population was tired of the Bolsheviks; at first, people waiting for peace greeted and welcomed enthusiastically the progress of the Army, but toward November 1919, little by little they began to feel again the atrocities of robberies, violence and arbitrariness. As a result the front collapsed and the rear rose in revolt.»

Thus, the Civil War has added new chapters to the history of the emergency regime that plagued Russia for long decades of the 19th and 20th centuries. An estimated 8 to 13 million people died on the battlefield, and of diseases, starvation, and terror. By the end of the war, about 2 million people had left the country. The damage to the national economy amounted to about 50 billion gold imperial rubles, industrial production dropped to between 4 and 20 percent of its 1913 level, and agricultural productivity decreased by almost fifty percent.

Despite the assurances of the Bolsheviks and the Provisional Government and its allies to permanently eliminate a system of governance based on the tsarist Statute on Measures to Protect State Order and Public Peace, their regimes added new dimensions to those rules. The extreme emergency regime introduced by the «Reds» and the «Whites» left traces across the whole battleground of the Civil War. In General Denikin’s words, this regime «caused the people’s cup of sorrow to overflow with new tears and blood, and it blurred the colors of the politico-military spectrum in the minds of the population, erasing the differences between the Savior and the Enemy.» To tell the truth, from time to time the Bolsheviks managed to restrain the war and regularize activity in the rear, which helped the Army and assisted in repulsing the attacks of the enemy. In the long run, it affected the outcome of the Civil War in the Bolsheviks’ favor. Nevertheless, extraordinary bodies that were once considered interim proliferated to a huge degree and became a state within a state. It was becoming more and more difficult to keep them within strict bounds and to put them under the supervision of regular state bodies. The end of the Civil War and the transition to the New Economic Policy provided hope that there would be dramatic changes in the structure of state administration.

Theme 5
FROM «WAR COMMUNISM» TO THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY: CONTRADICTIONS OF THE NEP

The disturbances that struck Russia in 1914 reached their peak in early 1920s. Devastation of the industrial and transport sectors, fuel crises, strikes, demobilization, the revolt of the sailors of the Baltic fleet and Kronstadt: these are well-known manifestations of the general crisis. There are two phenomena, however, that more than others influenced the crisis situation. The first was the largest peasant rebellion since the times of Yemelian Pugachev. The second was the terrible famine that struck many regions of the country, mostly the Volga region.

Understanding the essence of the transition from the Civil War to peace requires analyzing the interconnection and correlation of the following phenomena: Soviet government policy, the peasant movement and the famine.

A new stage of the Civil War began in the summer of 1920. A peasant movement against the Bolsheviks, who did not want to change the policy of «War Communism» and its food rationing system (the system of surplus appropriation), spread to almost all provinces of Russia and Ukraine (the most notable rebellions were conducted by Makhno and Antonov). The struggle between peasants and Soviet troops was extremely severe. The struggle began in the context of the 1920 harvest failure and the surplus appropriation system that led to confiscation of more food from peasants than in 1918 and 1919.

So what could end such a vast peasant rebellion? Could it be the change of ration policy by the Bolsheviks, i.e. the replacement of the surplus appropriation system with an agricultural tax in kind? Or perhaps the military suppression of mass rebellions? Or simply famine?

Until recently, historians have regarded the adoption of the agricultural tax in kind as a political decision that made peasants immediately shift their alignment towards the Bolsheviks. But analysis of related documents does not provide any proof for this theory. It was only in central industrial provinces that most of peasants gladly accepted the adoption of agricultural tax in kind. People in other regions regarded it as a new form of surplus appropriation. The strongest resistance to efforts to collect the tax was manifested in Western Russia. Due to a severe crop failures in the South of Russia, the Soviet government made a decision to collect the bulk of the agricultural tax in kind from Siberia. Peasants’ resistance toward the tax collection was followed by punitive actions.

The agricultural tax in kind was perceived as another form of surplus appropriation in many Russian and Ukrainian provinces besides Siberia. This is a report of the State Political Directorate (GPU) made in October 1922: «Over two thirds of the crops will be gathered as the agricultural tax in kind in Pskov province. Peasants of Riazan and Tver provinces will starve if they are forced to pay 100 percent of the agricultural tax in kind. But it all pales in comparison to the incidence of suicides committed by peasants in Kiev province because of the excessive rates of the agricultural tax in kind.»

This is why the agricultural tax in kind did not really mean any relief for most of peasants in the situation of famine and economic chaos in 1921 and 1922, and therefore it could not have had a real impact on pacifying the insurgent peasants. The Bolshevik administration decided to crush the peasant movement. In Tambov province, for instance, regular troops under the command of Mikhail Tukhachevsky were deployed for this purpose. He issued a secret order in June 1921: «The remnants of defeated bands that fled from villages are gathering in forests. To immediately clear these forests I hereby command: Use poisonous gases in the forests where bandits are hiding, so that the poison cloud fills all the forest killing anyone hiding in it». Concentration camps were established in the province, families of insurgent peasants who refused to surrender became hostages, and their property was confiscated. But, after comparing various sources, we know that all these government steps were ineffective in suppressing the mass insurgency of peasants.

The scale of the famine of 1921–1922 in Russia and part of Ukraine surpassed by far that of all other famine disasters of previous decades. According to the Central Statistics Office (CSO) over 40 million people from 35 provinces suffered from famine in 1921–1922. According to information from the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture about 60 % of agricultural territories of Russia were affected by the disaster. Famine, and the diseases and epidemics that it provoked, caused over 5 million deaths. Thanks to the aid of overseas organizations – the American Relief Administration first and foremost – the death toll did not increase. The ARA provided food for 10.5 million people at the peak of its activity in August of 1922. Egregiously, this contribution of the United States in saving millions of Russian lives remains unrecognized— even by the current regime of the Russian Federation.

The famine catastrophe had a great demographic, economic, and social impact. The results of a new analysis of the situation in a number of provinces reveal a direct relationship between famine and peasant revolts. The famine was the determinative factor in the pacification of peasant revolts.

The urgent necessity to overcome the crisis and claims by peasants boosted the introduction of market and commodity-money relations. The new Land Code authorized the lease of land and the hiring of labor. Soon after that the agricultural tax in kind was replaced with the unified agricultural tax mostly paid in cash.

With the introduction of the market, private traders appeared in the national economy. The state aimed at privatization of handicraft, small-scale and (some time later) medium-scale industry. The leasing of state companies and licenses to operate (a special form of lease) were authorized. Cooperation was promoted. Industrial companies under the Supreme Council of National Economy were allowed to form trusts. They operated on the basis of self-support, self-finance and self-repayment. Universal labor duty was abrogated, and the system for equal remuneration of labor at state companies was cancelled. In-kind compensation (rations in kind) was replaced with wages. The rationing system was finally cancelled.

Industrial management was decentralized. The number of branch central offices for industrial management was dramatically decreased. The National bank was created to regulate and revitalize finances. It had the right to issue chervonetses (bank bills backed by the gold standard) instead of devaluated Soviet rubles. The ruble became a convertible currency in Russia and abroad by 1924.

These swift and profound changes in economic policy took place at the same time as important steps in state construction. The state of disunity that had followed the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917–1918 was replaced with a movement toward unification; it resulted in the creation of the United Soviet Socialist Republics in December, 1922. The Russian Communist party played the central role in the unification movement and the creation of a union of equal Slavic (Russia, the Ukraine, Byelorussia) and Transcaucasian republics (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia). The Central Asian republics (Kirghizia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenia, Tajikistan) joined the union in late 1920s.

In 1923/1924 the Constitution of the USSR was adopted, the USSR government was created and the second chamber of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR was assembled.

The New Economic Policy led to an economic upturn. Agriculture and related branches of industry started to develop. Commerce contributed to the process, creating a nation-wide market. Social stratification began at the same time. The mass of the population began to envy the prosperous life of kulaks and the city bourgeoisie.

The policy was confronted with its first crisis in 1923; it was the «crisis of sales.» At that time, industrial prices were adjusted according to the needs of the countryside. But the desire to get the highest profits possible provoked a rise in prices of industrial goods by more then three times in relation to prices for agricultural production. The unevenness of prices led to a decreased spending capacity in rural areas. The government intervened in the price formation and administratively lowered industrial production prices and increased prices for agricultural production.

The reconstruction process was over by the mid-twenties. However, it was substantially influenced by a reduction in military spending. The armed forces, for instance, were reduced to 600 thousand people from 5.3 million people. Yet the future of the Soviet Union depended on the activity of capitalist powers. A perception of increased military threats could influence the further support of the NEP.

In 1925 the government decided to move towards industrial modernization of the country to place it among developed countries, making it capable of defending its borders. The industrialization program required an increase in grain exports to purchase necessary machinery and equipment.

The new phase of NEP began at the same time as the intensification of the power after the death of the founder of the Soviet state Vladimir Lenin. Leon Trotsky started to actively criticize the expanding bureaucracy because administration functionaries were appointed directly by Joseph Stalin instead of being elected by the people. And since Stalin was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the party became the only institution providing access to the nomenklatura. The nomenklatura was to become the basis of Soviet state organization. But Trotsky’s «new course» was based on the idea of free discussion of any issue. He believed that the old guard of the party was turning into a group of «new-style bureaucrats» who had forgotten the language of the revolution and were adopting a «party-style» of speech. This fact made it necessary to replace the old functionaries with new ones.

This was also the moment when Stalin advanced the theory of «Socialism in One Country» – that is, that a socialist regime could be established independently in the USSR. Other party leaders, such as Grigorii Zinoviev and Leo Kamenev, disagreed. They argued that socialism could only triumph if the Western European proletariat revolted as well, which meant in effect a «world revolution.» They regarded Stalin’s theory «national-bolshevist,» implying that it was more nationalist than socialist.

In 1927, with the tenth anniversary of the October revolution at hand the struggle among party leaders became more intense. Besides personal ambitions it was also driven by objective reasons. The NEP had not completely succeeded; it did not reach down to the production collectives – the fundamental components of the economy. Industry could not continue to exist without active state support. Workers demanded an administrative guarantee of their interests, and over a third of the peasantry (proletarians, half-proletarians, and the poor) were directly supported by the government’s intervention in the economy. Tax policy was based on the class principle. The same principle was applied to the elections to different levels of soviets. The bureaucracy became the indispensable component of every sphere of life.

The preceding analysis demonstrates that the country was nearing a historic choice between further pursuit of the NEP and an increase in the centralization of and administrative interference in all domains of state policy. Not only did the new crisis of the NEP reveal all of these contradictions; it also changed the direction of Russia’s development in the 20th century.