320 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
they had an interest in hiding much of the land they had just seized from the land-
lords and the gentry. Village committees did, of course, keep records for allocating
allotment land, organizing communal plough teams, fixing grazing schedules, and
so on, but none of these records was made available either to officials or to the
kombedy. A popular saying of the period captures the situation nicely: the peasant
‘owned by decree’ (that is, the Land Decree) but ‘lived secretly’.
How did the hard-pressed state find its way in this labyrinth? Where possible,
the Bolsheviks did try to establish large state farms or collective farms. Many of
these were ‘Potemkin collectives’ designed merely to give cover of legitimacy to
existing practices. But where they were not a sham, they revealed the political and
administrative attractiveness of a radical simplification of the landholding and tax-
paying unit in the countryside. Yaney’s summary of the logic entailed is impecca-
ble.
From a technical point of view it was infinitely easier to plough up large units of land
without regard for individual claims than it was to identify each family allotment, meas-
ure its value in the peasants’ traditional terms, and then painfully transpose it from
scattered strips into a consolidated farm. Then, too, a capital city administrator could
not help but prefer to supervise and tax large productive units and not have to deal with
separate farmers... The collective had a dual appeal to authentic agrarian reformers.
They represented a social ideal for rhetorical purposes, and at the same time they seemed
to simplify the technical problems of land reform and state control.^47In the turmoil of 1917–1921, not many such agrarian experiments were possible,
and those that were attempted generally failed badly. They were, however, a straw
in the wind for the full collectivization campaign a decade later.
Unable to remake the rural landscape, the Bolsheviks turned to the same meth-
ods of forced tribute under martial law that had been used by their czarist prede-
cessors during the war. The term ‘martial law’, however, conveys an orderliness that
was absent from actual practice. Armed bands (otriady) – some authorized and
others formed spontaneously by hungry townsmen – plundered the countryside
during the grain crisis of spring and summer 1918, securing whatever they could.
Insofar as grain procurement quotas were set at all, they were ‘purely mechanical
accounting figures originating from an unreliable estimate of arable and assuming
a good harvest’. They were, from the beginning, ‘fictional and unfulfillable’.^48 The
procurement of grain looked more like plunder and theft than delivery and pur-
chase. Over 150 distinct uprisings, by one estimate, erupted against the state’s
grain seizures. Since the Bolsheviks had, in March 1918, renamed themselves the
Communist Party, many of the rebels claimed to be for the Bolsheviks and the
Soviets (whom they associated with the Land Decree) and against the Commu-
nists. Lenin, referring to the peasant uprisings in Tambov, the Volga and the
Ukraine, declared that they posed more of a threat than all the Whites put together.
Desperate peasant resistance had in fact all but starved the cities out of existence,^49
and in early 1921, the party, for the first time, turned its guns on its own rebellious