Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams 319The second and perhaps decisive consequence of the revolution was that it had
greatly enhanced the determination and capacity of peasant communities to resist
the state. Every revolution creates a temporary power vacuum when the power of
the ancien regime has been destroyed but the revolutionary regime has not yet
asserted itself throughout the territory. Inasmuch as the Bolsheviks were largely
urban and found themselves fighting an extended civil war, the power vacuum in
much of the countryside was unusually pronounced. It was the first time, as
Orlando Figes reminds us, that the villages, although in straitened circumstances,
were free to organize their own affairs.^44 As we have seen, the villagers typically
forced out or burned out the gentry, seized the land (including rights to common
land and forests), and forced the separators back into the communes. The villages
tended to behave as autonomous republics, well disposed to the Reds as long as
they confirmed the local ‘revolution’, but strongly resistant to forced levies of grain,
livestock or men from any quarter. In this situation, the fledgling Bolshevik state,
arriving as it often did in the form of military plunder, must have been experienced
by the peasantry as a reconquest of the countryside by the state – as a brand of
colonization that threatened their newly won autonomy.
Given the political atmosphere in rural Russia, even a government having
detailed knowledge of the agricultural economy, a local base of support, and a
knack for diplomatic tact would have confronted great difficulties. The Bolsheviks
lacked all three. A tax system based on income or wealth was possible only with a
valid cadastral map and an up-to-date census, neither of which existed. Farm
income, moreover, varied greatly with regard to yields and prices from year to year,
so any income tax would have had to have been exceptionally sensitive to these
conditions in local harvests. Not only did the new state lack the basic information
it needed to govern efficiently, it had also largely destroyed the czarist state appa-
ratus of local officials, gentry and specialists in finance and agronomy who had
managed, however inadequately, to collect taxes and grain during the war. Above
all, the Bolsheviks generally lacked the village-level native trackers who could have
helped them to find their way in a hostile and confusing environment. The village
Soviets that were supposed to play this role were typically headed by villagers loyal
to local interests rather than to the centre. An alternative organ, the Committee of
the Rural Poor (kombedy), which purported to represent the rural proletariat in
local class struggles, was either successfully coopted by the village or locked in
often violent conflict with the village soviet.^45
The inscrutability of the mir to most Bolshevik officials was not simply a result
of their urban social origins and the admitted complexity of village affairs. It was
also the product of a conscious local strategy, one that had demonstrated its pro-
tective value in earlier conflicts with the gentry and the state. The local commune
had a long history of underreporting its arable land and overreporting its popula-
tion in order to appear as poor and untaxable as possible.^46 As a result of such
deception in the census of 1917, the arable land in Russia had been underesti-
mated by about 15 per cent. Now, in addition to the woodland, pastures and open
land that the peasantry had earlier converted into cropland without reporting it,