318 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
socialized farms. For Trotsky, the sooner what he called ‘the Russia of icons and
cockroaches’ was transformed and ‘urbanized’, the better. And for many of the
newly urbanized, rank-and-file Bolsheviks, the abolition of the ‘dark and backward
peasant world’ was a ‘vital part of their own emerging personal and working-class
identity’.^40
The peasantry was virtually terra incognita to the Bolsheviks. At the time of
the revolution, the party had throughout Russia a grand total of 494 ‘peasant’
members (most of them probably rural intelligentsia).^41 Most villagers had never
seen a Communist, although they may well have heard of the Bolshevik decree
confirming peasant ownership of the land that had been seized. The only revolu-
tionary party with any rural following was the Social Revolutionaries, whose pop-
ulist roots tended to make them unsympathetic to Lenin’s authoritarian outlook.
The effects of the revolutionary process itself had rendered rural society more
opaque and hence more difficult to tax. There had already been a sweeping seizure
of land, dignified, retrospectively, by the inappropriate term ‘land reform’. In fact,
after the collapse of the offensive into Austria during the war and the subsequent
mass desertions, much of the land of the gentry and church, as well as ‘crown land’,
had been absorbed by the peasantry. Rich peasants cultivating independent farm-
steads (the ‘separators’ of the Stolypin reforms) were typically forced back into the
village allotments, and rural society was in effect radically compressed. The very
rich had been dispossessed, and many of the very poor became smallholders for the
first time in their lives. According to one set of figures, the number of landless rural
labourers in Russia dropped by half, and the average peasant holding increased by
20 per cent (in the Ukraine, by 100 per cent). A total of 248 million acres was con-
fiscated, almost always by local initiative, from large and small landlords and added
to peasant holdings, which now averaged about 70 acres per household.^42
From the perspective of a tax official or a military procurement unit, the situ-
ation was nearly unfathomable. The land-tenure status in each village had changed
dramatically. Prior landholding records, if they existed at all, were entirely unreli-
able as a guide to current land claims. Each village was unique in many respects,
and, even if it could in principle have been ‘mapped’, the population’s mobility
and military turmoil of the period all but guaranteed that the map would have
been made obsolete in six months or sooner. The combination, then, of smallhold-
ings, communal tenure and constant change, both spatial and temporal, operated
as an impenetrable barrier to any finely tuned tax system.
Two additional consequences of the revolution in the countryside compounded
the difficulties of state officials. Before 1917, large peasant farms and landlord
enterprises had produced nearly three-quarters of the grain marketed for domestic
use and export. It was this sector of the rural economy that had fed the cities. Now
it was gone. The bulk of the remaining cultivators were consuming a much larger
share of their own yield. They would not surrender this grain without a fight. The
new, more egalitarian distribution of land meant that extracting anything like the
czarist ‘take’ in grain would bring the Bolsheviks in conflict with the subsistence
needs of small and middle peasants.^43