The Peasants Take The Land

While the workers and soldiers were issuing demands for others to meet, and slowly realising that only they themselves could attain their ends, the peasants were taking direct action. Peasant risings and land seizures were widespread. The peasants carried out their own agrarian reform measures and ignored the Provisional Government which was set against the seizure of land. Peasant committees were formed at the village, volost, uezd (district) and guberniya (regional) levels. Decisions tended to flow upwards: those coming down were only obeyed if they were agreed with. The arguments within the Social Revolutionaries, the peasant party, were no longer of real concern to the peasants. What mattered to them was that the decisions they were taking and the regulations they were adopting on the land issue should be irreversible.

The image of the peasants as a mass of ignorant anti-socialists, in a sea of which Russia's workers would drown, is quite wrong. They set to running their own affairs with enthusiasm: illiteracy was no bar to their abilities. The 45 elected members of the Peasant Committee of Novochastky uezd said they would "organize the new society". The Peasant Convention of Penza on May 15th was composed of illiterate peasants with a single literate teacher to take down their resolutions. They called on owners "to apply its decisions and freely give their property to the (volost) land committee so as to avoid illegal occupation by individual peasants' " [15] The convention set out to control rents, sort out the amounts of land each person or family unit could have, supervise the harvests and ensure an efficient utilisation of the land. The peasant assembly of Samara showed the peasants' great impatience with the politicians over the land question. A peasant shouted at a Menshevik "We always have to wait, you ass, don't play the fool with us." They paid scant regard to the 'legality' of their actions -- "That bunch of lawyers again," said one, "saying they're on our side, but we know different; they'll betray us." [16] Lenin's Decree on Land could do no more than recognise a fait accompli : 65 out of 70 peasant soviets had already divided the land.

The peasants were quick to throw off the shackles of religion. A priest moaned: "My parishioners will nowadays only go to meetings of the soviet, and when I remind them about the church, they tell me they have no time." [17] A peasant told a priest straight to his face why : ''For centuries a few nobles and landowners subjected millions of poor people, bled and sweated them -- and you priests said it was right, chanting in chorus 'Long life to the Tsars and our leaders' ; yet, now that the people has power and is trying to establish equality, you, the 'Holy men' will not recognise us." [18]

The workers knew the importance of the peasantry for the success of the revolution. The Petrograd conference of factory committees debated the agrarian issue with a view to sealing relations with the peasants. The Petrograd workers created special commissions in the factories to gather scrap metals and damaged pieces for a project they called 'Worker to Peasant', making agricultural tools for the peasant committees. Delegates were sent into the countryside to negotiate directly, worker to peasant, over grain deliveries. There is no reason to suppose that workers and peasants could not have developed a workable relationship: workers' self-management was no threat to the peasants.

Notes

[15] quoted in Ferro (October), p118.

[16] quoted in Ferro (October), p120.

[17] quoted in Ferro (October), p62.

[18] quoted in Ferro (October), p65.