One of the gravest problems facing the victorious Bolshevik revolutionaries as the year 1918 opened was that of the food supply to the cities and towns. Before the Revolution, most of the country's grain had been produced by the great landow ners and the well-to-do farmers. With the socialist victory, the great estates had been confiscated and the better-off farmers (so-called kulaks) came under suspicion as capitalist counterrevolutionaries. Furthermore, the ensuing civil war in Russia disru pted the market, bringing chaos to the countryside. But Lenin and the party leaders, ferven in their desire to transform Russia to their vision of a socialist future unshakeably opposed to capitalism, could not bring themselves to make rational judgements on resolving the crisis. Instead of making allies of the productive elements am ong the peasantry by tolerating the private market, a virtual war--a class war--was unleashed against them in the so-called Battle for Grain. Those who refused to hand over surplus grain as well as those accused of hoarding and speculating were ruthlessl y dealt with by government terror squads and the Cheka police.

The ultimate responsibility for this brutal episode in Soviet history--dubbed War Communism by the regime--lay with Lenin himself. Evidence of his fanatical spleen against the peasant victims lies in the state archives, as revealed in D. Volkogonov's biog raphy of the leader. The alleged 'kulaks' are luridly depicted as "bloodsuckers," "leeches," and "spiders." In other contexts, Lenin issued to the marauding agents of the state such orders as: " Draw up district lists of the wealthier peasants, who will answer with their lives for all grain surpluses," or "Shoot the conspirators and waverers without asking anyone . . . lock up the doubtful ones in a concentration camp." Such violent sentiments are also echoed in the following official document.

A ruinous process of disintegration of the food procurement of the country-the heavy legacy of a four-year war [viz., World War One]-continues to expand and aggravate the existing distress.
While the consuming provinces are starving, great stocks of cereals, including the 1916 harvest and the 1917 harvest which has not yet been threshed, lie, as habitually, in the producing provinces. These stocks are in the hands of rural kulaks [the better-off farmers] and wealthy people; in the hands of the rural bourgeoisie. Replete and satisfied, having accumulated an enormous mass of money earned in the years of war, this rural bourgeoisie remains deaf and unresponsive in the face of the moanings of starving workers and poor peasants; it refuses to dispatch cereals to the state station points with the aim of forcing the state to increase again and again the price of cereals, while at the same time it sells for its own benefit cereals in the provinces at fabulous prices to speculators and bagmen.

The obstinacy of the greedy kulaks and wealthy peasants must be brought to an end. The food procurement experience of the last years has shown that the failure to apply fixed prices on cereals . . . . facilitates the feeding of a small group of our capitalists by making food inaccessible to several millions of toiling people and exposing them to the inevitability of death by starvation.

The reply to the violence of grain holders upon the rural poor must be violence upon the bourgeoisie. Not one single pud [a measure of around 35lbs of grain] of grain must remain in the hands of the grain holders, except the quantity needed for sowing and subsistence of the household until the next harvest. . . .

Taking into account this situation and considering that only by rigorous accounting and even distribution of all grain stocks of Russia is it possible to get out of the food provision crisis, the All- Russian Executive Central Committee has decreed:
(1) By keeping firmly the grain monopoly [in the hands of the state]and fixed prices and also carrying out a merciless struggle against grain speculators and bagmen, to compel each grain holder to declare the surrender of all surpluses, except the quantity needed for consumption on established norms until the next harvest . . .
(2)To invite all toiling people and propertyless peasants to unite immediately in a merciless struggle against the kulaks.
(3) To declare enemies of the nation all people having surpluses of grain and not handing them over to the station points and even dissipating the stocks of cereals for their own home brew [i.e., make illegal 'moonshine'] instead of delivering them to the collecting stations; to bring them before the Revolutionary Courts, put them in jail for not less than ten years, confiscate all their belongings, banish them out of the [village community] and condemn the holders of home brew to forced labor in public works.
(4) In the case of discovery of any surplus of grain which had not been declared for delivery, according to point 1, grain will be requisitioned without payment and half of the value which was due at fixed Prices for the undeclared surplus will be paid to the people who took part in discovering the surpluses . . .

(Elsewhere in the decree, authority was given to "make use of armed troops in the case of resistance to requisition of grain and other foodstuffs.")

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