The character of the economic policy of the Provisional Government was forcefully expressed in its handling of the agrarian question. Here its policy was directly associated with the name of General Kornilov.
At the beginning of July N. N. Lvov, Chairman of the Alliance of Landed Proprietors, called upon the Landowners “to abandon passivity.” “We must assume the offensive,” he said.(1) General Kornilov was one of the first to respond to this call. Long before he entered “big politics” the general had tested his strength in agrarian affairs. On July 8, 1917, Kornilov issued a compulsory order entitled “On Gathering the Harvest,” in which he stated:
“The whole crop . . . must be harvested, and harvested rapidly. It is therefore forbidden . . . forcibly to seize standing crops or gathered crops . . . or to hinder the harvesting of the crop in any way. . . .”(2)
Kornilov threatened that peasants who violated this order would be condemned to “the house of correction for a term of up to three years.”(3) This order was put into effect immediately. The Land Committee of Poltava was prosecuted for violating Kornilov’s order. A big accumulation of court cases was foreseen. The military authorities issued instructions that such cases should be given priority. Resort to military force was recommended if court proceedings failed to pacify the peasants.
Kornilov’s order applied only to the region of the South-Western Front. “The Socialist” Ministers, Chernov, Tsereteli and Peshekhonov attempted to have the general’s “law” extended to the whole country. On July 16, Chernov, the Minister of Agriculture, sent out instructions to the Land Committees advising the peasants to pay rent to the landowners in accordance with scales to be fixed by conciliation boards. Chernov even deemed it feasible that uncultivated land should be placed under the charge of the Land Committees . . . but only with the consent of the Food Committees. These muddled and “complacent” instructions, as the Socialist-Revolutionaries themselves called them, occupied a definite place in the general plan for a Kornilov offensive against the peasants. They were to serve as a liberal background to the Kornilovite actions of the two other “Socialist” Ministers—Tsereteli and Peshekhonov.
On July 18, on the heels of Chernov’s instructions, Tsereteli, the Minister of the Interior, issued his own circular, which stated:
“The population is seizing, ploughing and sowing the land of others, removing workers and making impossible economic demands on the agriculturists.”(4)
Having pointed out that incitement to the seizure of land must be prosecuted with the full rigour of the law, the Minister proposed that the provincial Commissars
“should take early and vigorous measures to put a stop to all unauthorized acts in the sphere of land relations.”(5)
Tsereteli went further than Kornilov: this “Socialist” Minister declared even “incitement to seizure” impermissible.
A similar circular was issued by Peshekhonov, the Minister of Food.
Having enumerated the “criminal” acts of the peasants in detail, he ordered:
“A stop must be put to such actions immediately. . . . Criminal proceedings must be immediately started against persons guilty of such acts.”(6)
The Kornilovite circulars of the “Socialist” Ministers were crowned by an ordinance of General Kornilov himself, who had now become supreme Commander. This new ordinance extended the scope of Kornilov’s compulsory order “to the whole theatre of war.”(7)
Directed by the Kornilovites, the government machine proceeded to give effect to these various instructions, circulars and ordinances. Proceedings began to be taken against the “land-usurpers”. The Socialist-Revolutionary Provincial Commissars set about the business with great energy.
At a meeting of the Chief Land Committee held in August, a representative from the Tula Province reported that about sixty members of Land Committees, members of Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies and “plain peasants” had been arrested in that province in July and the first half of August. In the Smolensk Province, members of fourteen rural district committees were arrested in the Elninsk district alone.
The All-Russian Peasant Soviet, which was controlled by the Socialist-Revolutionaries, had nothing more to say to this than that “the arrests and repressions are formally based on certain articles of the criminal code,”(8) which were introduced by the Stolypin government for the suppression of the agrarian movement after the 1905 Revolution.
Troops loyal to the government were dispatched to the villages on the heels of the Kornilov and Tsereteli circulars. In July and August there were twenty-two cases of armed suppression of peasant outbreaks in the eleven provinces where the agrarian movement was strongest (in the Central Black Earth Region and the Middle Volga Region). But this was only a drop in the ocean of peasant unrest. There were 1,122 cases of “agrarian offences”(9) in July alone. The landlords realised that the storm might burst at any moment and had no intention of standing with arms folded in expectation of a Constituent Assembly.
The landlords endeavoured to apply the old Stolypin policy in the new conditions. The conciliation boards, on which one landlord had more influence than 300 peasants, were built on typical Stolypin lines. On Stolypin lines too was the attempt to redistribute rentable land to the rich peasants at the expense of the poor peasants. Of a similar character was the policy of encouraging the spread of kulak farms. At the beginning of July a resolution was adopted by an All-Russian Congress of Landowners to the effect that land should be granted from the domain of the State and the royal family and from the estates of private persons to peasants who possessed little land. The land should be granted, the resolution went on to say, as private property. The landowners were anxious to retain their land at the cost of a few small concessions.
M. Boborykin, writing from the Petrograd Province to Rodzyanko, former President of the Duma, said:
“I am a landlord. My mind somehow cannot even conceive that I might be deprived of my land, and, what is more, for the most incredible reason: for the sake of an experiment in Socialist doctrines. If anywhere on earth, or even in Mars, there existed that ideal system for the sake of which it is proposed to have me surrender (not to say plainly—to rob me of) my property, without compensation—I would be ready to sacrifice even my last shirt. . . . Leaving exalted maxims for the future . . . I, as a person who was brought up in the countryside and who knows the real life of the Russian cultivators and landowners, declare that the countryside needs an authority, a firm and strong authority, based on the masses and the law. Our muzhik is ignorant and coarse, and therein precisely lies the crime of the former ruling noble class. In many places the muzhik has already seized the landed estates; the rough division, so to speak, is almost complete, and all that is required now is the experienced and capable hand of the Socialist-Revolutionary.”(10)
This landlord then went on to set forth his own plan of agrarian reform. He recommended the Provisional Government to meet “the spontaneous strivings of the peasants and to distribute part of the landed estates among the ‘toiling people’ even before the Constituent Assembly,”(11)—not without compensation, of course.
The landowners endeavoured to create “mass support” for themselves in the countryside by winning over the kulaks. “Alliances of Peasant Owners” began to be formed, fostered by the Alliance of Landowners. The majority of them openly adopted the programme of the Cadets. The programme of one of the alliances in the Southern Ukraine stated:
“The Alliance will widely participate in the political life of the State, and strive for the establishment of a democratic republican system in accordance with the principles proclaimed by the National Freedom Party.”(12)
The programme went on to condemn “all seizures and agrarian disorders” and proposed “on the principle of private ownership” to alienate the privately-owned estates “at a fair valuation.”
The Stolypin orientation on “the strong peasants” was supplemented by a deliberate policy of destroying agriculture, which had already been severely undermined by the war. The rural Ryabushinskys vied with the urban Ryabushinskys in strangling the revolution with the help of the gaunt hand of famine. The landlords deliberately refrained from sowing their fields, turned cattle to graze on the growing crops, destroyed their grain and slaughtered their livestock. The Izvestia of the All-Russian Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies reported in the middle of July that Esmon, a landlord in the Starobykhovsk District, was grazing cattle on his rye-fields. When a militiaman ordered him to stop this, the landlord declared, “Until the Constituent Assembly meets I am the master of my land, and therefore I will do as I please.” When asked how he intended to harvest the rye, the landlord answered, “The rye will remain in the field unharvested. . . . This is nobody’s business, since the rye is my property.”(13) At the Second Session of the Chief Land Committee, a delegate from the Moghilev Province stated that Sipailo, a landlord, was
“systematically destroying his estate. He is secretly selling off all his pedigree stock, twelve or fourteen cows every night. He is selling his farm implements to anybody that comes along; he is turning cattle to graze in his grain and hay fields.”(14)
The land council of the Balashov district reported at the end of July that
“the landlords are not moving the hay or harvesting the grain, and they sometimes set fire to them or have them trampled down by cattle.”(15)
This destructive policy provoked the peasants to put up an even fiercer fight against the landlords. The Committee of Landowners of the South of Russia sent the following telegram to Kerensky:
“The laws passed by the Provisional Government with the object of putting a stop to anarchy, and the ordinance of the Supreme Commander of July 31 of this year are being totally ignored and the peasants are living, acting and guiding themselves by the orders of local, self-appointed organisations. . . . This situation will lead to the complete collapse of agriculture with all its fatal consequences. The Chief Committee of the Alliance of Landowners requests the Provisional Government, in the interests of the State, to take urgent measures to put a stop to the disastrous activities of the Land Committees . . . and to protect the persons and property of the landowners.”(16)
This description of the state of affairs in the rural districts was written three days before the Kornilov revolt. It was now no longer a question of land only; the very lives of the landlords and their entire property had to be protected. This could be achieved only by the Kornilovite policy adopted by the government in July.
On September 8 the government decided to subordinate the Land Committee and Food Committees to the courts for administrative affairs. The peasant organisations again found themselves under the heel of the landlords, who controlled the administrative machine. That very same day, September 8, Kerensky, the Chairman of the Directory and the Supreme Commander, having “defeated” Kornilov, hastened to prove his loyalty to the defeated general. Kerensky issued Order No. 911, which supplemented and endorsed Kornilov’s order of July 31. Making no claim to originality, the new Supreme Commander literally repeated Kornilov’s order and stated:
“I categorically forbid (1) the forcible seizure of crops or of harvested grain . . . (2) the seizure of livestock or farm implements by forcible and illegal means.”(17)
At the same time, the government continued its old policy of hoodwinking the peasantry. Chernov, the “muzhik Minister,” was replaced by Semyon Maslov, a Socialist-Revolutionary. A namesake of the latter, Pyotr Maslov, the Menshevik theoretician on agrarian questions, hastened to give a summary of the effects of Chernov’s activities.
“The muzhik policy,” he wrote in the Den, “. . . is in the long run harmful to the peasants themselves. . . . The Provisional Government has evidently somewhat smoothed out and neutralised the partisan character of the measures taken by the Ministry of Agriculture. Thanks to this, and owing to Chernov’s wise flexibility, the activities of the Ministry of Agriculture have had no evil consequences.”(18)
This appreciation contained the whole programme of the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik bloc. And the fact that right down to the October Revolution the landowners felt no “evil consequences” from the peasant movement was entirely due to the “wise flexibility” of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks.
In pursuance of its policy of duping the peasants, the government announced in a declaration of September 27 that:
“The direct regulation of land relations should be entrusted to the Land Committees, to which, in a manner to be defined by special law, but without violating existing forms of land ownership, may be transferred the control of arable land . . . in order to save the economic life of the country from utter collapse.”(19)
This declaration was a prelude to a crafty manœuvre on Kerensky’s part. In view of the growing revolt of the peasants, the economic life of the “country,” i.e., of the landlords, could be saved “without violating existing forms of land ownership” only by transferring the landed estates to the provincial land Committees. The provincial Land Committees were headed and controlled by landowners. If this manœuvre succeeded, the land would fall into reliable hands. But the position of the landlords was not very secure even on the provincial Land Committees. Before deciding on this risky step, the Provisional Government set about reinforcing “local authority.” At its meeting on September 29 the Government decided that
“it is necessary in the provinces in which agrarian disorders are rife to set up special committees, whose function it would be to take urgent measures to remove misunderstandings arising locally and to maintain law and order in the sphere of agrarian relations.”(20)
The second point in this decision defined the composition of the “special committees.” The members of these agrarian courts martial were to consist of the local representatives of the central government and
“representatives of local government bodies . . . which are directly concerned with questions affecting agrarian relations.”(21)
It was only the landlords, of course, who were “directly concerned” with agrarian relations. And it was into their charge that the “special committees” were delivered as a method of dealing with the peasantry. The Provincial Commissars and military authorities were instructed to act in conjunction with the special committees and not to hesitate to resort to armed force in suppressing disorders.
The machine was set in motion. In September and October the Provisional Government began more and more frequently to resort to armed force in dealing with the peasant movement. There were seventeen cases of armed suppression of revolt in the period March to June, thirty-nine in July and August, and 105 in September and October. Some of the landlords even began to cherish the illusion that Kerensky was consolidating his position. He must be strong if he can suppress the muzhiks by armed force, they reasoned. In the more disturbed districts martial law was proclaimed. A detachment under the command of Captain Mironovich was sent to the Tambov Province. The detachment was accompanied by Court Prosecutor A. F. Staal, a member of the Chief Committee of the Peasant Alliance, who had come from Moscow. How difficult it was for these gentlemen to “pacify” the peasants can be judged by the measures to which they resorted. Cavalry, Cossacks and even armoured cars were dispatched to the villages. Protected by the armoured cars brought by the member of the Chief Committee of the Peasant Alliance, the landlords began to raise their heads. An emergency assembly of the nobility of the Tambov Province demanded the return of land seized by the peasants, an increase in rents and, chiefly, the adoption of vigorous measures.
In September a force of 2,775 soldiers was dispatched to the Kazan Province. But it was soon reported:
“Certain squads are absolutely unreliable: thus in the Kozmodemyansk district the soldiers fled when the women started a riot.”(22)
Even the force most loyal to the bourgeois, i.e., inherited by Kerensky from the old régime, refused to serve.
“In the Gressk rural district,” it was reported from the Minsk Province in October, “Cossacks dispatched thither to restore order fled when the peasants threatened to stone them.”(23)
Even where order was superficially established with the help of gun-fire, the situation remained very tense.
“As long as questions of a general nature are dealt with,” the bourgeois Russkiye Vedomosti stated in reference to the situation in the countryside, “the peasants are restrained and calm and listen attentively; but as soon as the speaker refers to a local question, the calmness and restraint at once disappear.”(24)
The illusions of the landlords were soon dissipated. Having failed to crush the peasant movement in July and August, the government proved helpless in face of the peasant revolt in September and October. Under the circumstances, the landlords were obliged to consent to a dangerous manœuvre, namely, to make a show of handing over the land to the peasants. They made the attempt to place the land under the control of the semi-landlord (Socialist-Revolutionary) Land Committees, and thus to preserve their strength in order to crush the peasant revolt.
The Chairman of a congress of rural district, district and provincial Zemstvos of the Saratov Province sent the following telegram to the Ministry for the Interior on October 5:
“The only measure capable of halting the development of the disorders is to immediately place all privately-owned land under the control of the Land Committees.”(25)
On October 13 the Nizhni-Novgorod Provincial Commissar of the Provisional Government, the provincial Land Committee and the Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, sent a wire insisting that all land be placed under the control of the Land Committees in order to save the modern farms and to pacify the population.”(26) Just as in the preceding stage the peasants had been duped by the promises of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the speeches of Chernov, so now this honourable task was entrusted to the new Minister of Agriculture, the Right Socialist-Revolutionary S. Maslov. Maslov had already displayed uncommon Ministerial abilities in July. Speaking at the Second Session of the Chief Land Committee, he was shrewd enough, while actually defending the interests of the landowners, to make a show of standing “above” the aspirations of the various classes.
“This requires,” the future Minister said, “that all land relations in the localities should be in the charge of some supreme body, some supreme justice, some supreme standard, which would hold in check the landlords on the one hand, and the peasants, on the other, and would regulate their mutual relations.”(27)
Such a Minister was a real godsend to the landlords. When he replaced Chernov, S. Maslov hastened to announce that he would continue the policy of his predecessor. In the early part of October this prolific and energetic Minister submitted a number of bills to the government dealing with the regulation of agrarian relations, the leasable land reserve, disputes arising over leases, and so forth. These bills were submitted to the government “at the right time.”
At a meeting of the Chief Council of the Alliance of Landowners held on October 1, to which twenty-five representatives of its provincial organisations were invited, the following vivid description of the situation in the localities was given:
“The agrarian disorders are spreading to all parts of the country, are becoming more savage and destructive in character, are being increasingly accompanied by violence and murder, and the victims of the disorders are now not only the landowners but also the more prosperous part of the peasantry. Rural Russia is perishing materially and she is perishing morally and spiritually. . . .”(28)
In this heated atmosphere, greater attention was paid to Maslov’s proposals than had been paid to Chernov’s. The present Minister of Agriculture displayed even greater flexibility than the “flexible” Chernov. On October 16, at a meeting of the Chief Land Committee held behind closed doors, Maslov reported on his bill for placing the land under the control of Land Committees before the Constituent Assembly was convened. According to this bill a land lease reserve was to be set up under the control of the Land Committees, and the lands of the State and the monasteries were to be included in this reserve. As to the landed estates, only such of their lands were to be included in this reserve as used formerly to be leased out by their owners, and for these lands the latter were to receive rent. True, the landlords were also recommended to hand over land to the reserve voluntarily.
Lenin exposed this bill in the following terms:
“Instead of the confiscation of landed property, we have its consolidation. . . . The Cadets are pretending that the bill of the Socialist-Revolutionaries is extraordinarily ‘revolutionary.’ All the bourgeois papers are raising an outcry against the bill. . . . All this is a farce, a game, the bid of a haggling merchant, who sees the spinelessness of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and hopes to drive a better bargain. The fact is that S. L. Maslov’s bill is a ‘landlords’ bill, a bill written for the purpose of reaching a compromise with the landlords and saving them.”(29)
On October 17 the government decided that the bill should be given a supplementary examination, for which purpose a special commission was appointed. The commission clipped the bill still more. It was again discussed by the Provisional Government on October 24.
For all the crafty manœuvres of the Cadets, neither Kerensky nor Maslov was now able to save the landlords and the bourgeoisie. The agrarian question, like the questions of industrial regulation and improving of the work of the railways, remained unsettled.
[1] “The Congress of Landed Proprietors,” Rech, No. 158, July 8, 1917.
[2] “A Compulsory Order,” Kievskaya Mysl (Kiev Thought), No. 170, July 13, 1917.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Central Archives, The Peasant Movement in 1917, Moscow, 1927, p. 415.
[5] Ibid., p. 415.
[6] Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies and Other Peasant Organisations, Vol. I, part 2, Moscow, 1929, pp. 336-37.
[7] Central Archives, The Peasant Movement in 1917, Moscow, 1927, p. 416.
[8] “The Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies to the Provisional Government,” Izvestia of the All-Russian Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies, No. 93, August 25, 1917.
[9] Central Archives, The Peasant Movement in 1917, Moscow, 1927, Appendix.
[10] Central Archives of the October Revolution, Records—4, Chancellery of the President of the State Duma, File No. 78, folio 9.
[11] Ibid., folio 6.
[12] Ibid., folio 6.
[13] “A Refractory Landlord,” Izvestia of the All-Russian Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies, No. 54, August 11, 1917.
[14] Proceedings of the Second Session of the Chief Land Committee, Sittings of July 1 and 2, 1917, Petrograd, 1917, p. 47.
[15] Central Archives of the October Revolution, Records 3, Chancellery of the Prime Minister of the Provisional Government, File No. 58b, folio 4.
[16] Ibid., File No. 80, folios 11-14.
[17] Central Archives, The Peasant Movement in 1917, Moscow, 1927, p. 420.
[18] P. Maslov, “The Muzhik Minister,” Den, No. 152, September 1, 1917.
[19] “From the Provisional Government,” Vyestnik (Provisional Government), Supplement to No. 162, September 27, 1917.
[20] Central Archives of the October Revolution, Records—6, “Chancellery of the Provisional Government,” File No. 343, folio 2.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Central Archives, The Peasant Movement in 1917, Moscow, 1927, p. 278.
[23] Ibid., p. 351.
[24] “An Object Lesson,” Russkiye Vedomosti, No. 102, May 7, 1917.
[25] “Anarchy,” Volga Naroda (Peoples’ Will), No. 137, October 6, 1917.
[26] Central Archives of the October Revolution, Records—406, Chief Department of the Militia, Section 2, File No. 17, Part 44, Vol. II, folio 26.
[27] Proceedings of the Second Session of the Chief Land Committee, Sittings of July 1 and 2, 1917, Petrograd, 1917, p. 142.
[28] “The Bourgeoisie and the Provisional Government,” Proletarskaya Revolutsia, 1926, No. 10 (57), p. 247.
[29] Lenin, “A New Fraud Practised on the Peasants by the Socialist-Revolutionary Party,” Selected Works, (Eng. ed.), Vol. VI, p. 395.
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