“Before the war, we had a firm belief that there is no need to draw up any plans and considerations about how to provide food for the army and the country during the war; the natural wealth of Russia was considered so vast that everyone was calmly confident that getting everything they needed would not present any difficulties."
This is how Nikolai Golovin, a professor at the General Staff Academy and Tsarist General, put it many years after the First World War. The country's leadership was based on the fact that 80% of the entire population of Russia was employed in agriculture, and such a labor force could not fail to provide bread for the multimillion army. However, the mass conscription of peasants into the army provoked a crisis, when in 1916 the gross harvest of grain, cereals and potatoes fell by 28% compared to the last pre-war year. There was nothing surprising in this: peasant labor in Russia then was predominantly manual, and the conscription of even one man from the family into the army significantly reduced the harvest. The commodity shortage also added fuel to the fire due to the transfer of most of the factories and factories to the military track. The consequence was speculation, soaring prices, black market and inflation acceleration. It was then that the seditious idea arose about the introduction of fixed prices for bread, the rationing system and, as the apotheosis of everything, about the confiscation of grain from the peasantry. Note that the idea belonged to the General Staff and it was born in 1916, three years before Lenin's decree on December 11, 1919 on food appropriation. That is, the forced confiscation of the "surplus" from the peasants was not Soviet, but tsarist know-how, which the Bolsheviks later "creatively" rethought.
The tsarist government formalized the food appropriation system in a documentary format in December 1916, and it provided for the seizure of peasant grain at fixed prices with further distribution to those in need. But it was good on paper, but in reality everything worked not in the best way. Pricing was not respected, the card system was not introduced at all due to technical difficulties, and the greatest difficulties were with the transport system. Railroad transit could not cope with the huge flow of military traffic, which seriously hampered the distribution of the peasant harvest throughout the country.
1917 year. Ghost of hunger
The bread lines in Petrograd in February 1917 became one of the symbols and reasons for the revolutionary mood in Russia. But this was not a unique metropolitan phenomenon. The central part of the country also suffered from chronic urban food shortages. But it was in the cities that the military-industrial enterprises were concentrated, engaged in vital production for the country. The Bryansk Machine-Building Plant, which produces shells and railway equipment, at the beginning of 1917 was provided with food by only 60%. The publication "Profile" in a thematic essay cites in this connection a telegram from the head of the Penza province:
“Every day I receive telegrams from cities and counties about a crying need for flour, in places full of hunger … There is absolutely no supply of rye flour, cereals, potatoes, feed for livestock to local bazaars.”
From Tambov, Archbishop Kirill echoed in February 1917:
"The churches of the Tambov diocese are in need of flour for prosphora, there are cases of termination of services in parishes."
In addition, information about the impending "grain riots" and the imminent "confusion of the Orthodox people" flocked to Petrograd. It is worth noting that both the Tambov and Penza provinces in the pre-war period always had surplus food and generously shared them with other regions of Russia.
With the coming to power of the Provisional Government, a legislative act "On the transfer of grain to the state's disposal" appeared, in accordance with which purchases must be organized at fixed prices. The reason for such a tough step was the analysis of the work of the tsarist government over the previous several months. During this time, we managed to procure 46% of the required amount of food. Hunger was approaching the country more and more clearly, and without the forcible distribution of food among the needy, it was difficult to avoid it. However, in 1917, the critical situation only worsened. In the summer, there was a very uneven harvest, and the weak transport network did not allow to quickly transfer food from the "well-fed" regions to the needy ones. The devastation in the country did not allow the repair of the locomotive fleet in time, and in the fall a third of the locomotives stood idle in the depot. The regions weakly obeyed the requirements of the Provisional Government - the Rada of Kiev, for example, generally prohibited the export of grain outside Ukraine. In Syzran, the local authorities radically solved the problem and seized a barge to the Volga with 100 thousand poods of grain, which went to the needs of the front. Note that the Samara province, which included Syzran, in the pre-war period was among the all-Russian leaders in the accumulation of surplus grain.
The food crisis in the army became the point of no return. By September 1917, the government sent only 37% of the required amount of grain. And this is for the 10 million army, which had weapons in its hands.
The convulsions of the Provisional Government looked like decrees prohibiting, for example, the baking of white bread and buns in order to preserve the precious flour of the highest grade. The cities plunged into the hunger catastrophe of the autumn-winter of 1917 …
Lenin's Hungry Legacy
It seems that Vladimir Lenin did not fully realize in what state the country fell to him. Kerensky, who had fled to the Winter Palace, left a note on the pages of his report on the situation with bread in the capital: "Bread for ½ days!" At first, the revolutionary government was helped by a train with grain from the Ufa province, which was assembled by the Bolshevik Alexander Tsyurupa. It was he who somehow stabilized the crisis for several days in October. They say that for such initiative Tsyurupa was appointed People's Commissar for Food of the RSFSR for several years. Lenin saw the solution to the current situation in the reduction of the multimillion army with the return of men back to the villages. However, the situation continued to worsen, and until the spring of 1918, the Bolshevik government continued to forcibly purchase bread at deliberately low prices. With such a predatory attitude, it was possible to collect only 14% of the required amount, and in April 1918, fees fell to a minimum of 6, 97%. By that time, Ukraine was under German occupation, bread was not deprived, but it was not shared with Russia at all. The Don and Kuban have accumulated such amounts of food, which would have been enough for a couple of years to feed the Non-Black Earth Region with Moscow and Petrograd, but this was not without politics. The "Kuban Republic" and the "Great Don Host" blocked the supply of grain and carried on zealous anti-Bolshevik activities.
As a result, Lenin had to bargain with the peasants of the Volga and Chernozem regions, exchanging bread for manufactured goods. Nails, threads, soap, salt and similar essential products were used. For this purpose, in March 1918 the government allocated a whole billion rubles, hoping to receive as a result 120 million poods of grain. In the end, it was not possible to agree with the peasants - they expected to receive much more for bread, and the state of the railways did not allow them to quickly transport grain to the starving regions. We managed to collect only 40 million tons, which was clearly lacking in the main cities of Russia: Petrograd and Moscow. In the capital, in May 1918, the mass eating of horses began, and during the first half of the year, only a quarter of the food was received in the city relative to the pre-war time.
The Bolshevik government did not succeed in resolving the current situation with liberal methods. And then Joseph Dzhugashvili came to the rescue. At that difficult time, he worked in Tsaritsyn's Chokprod (Extraordinary Regional Food Committee) and was responsible for transporting grain from the Volga region and the North Caucasus.
When Dzhugashvili got acquainted with the situation on the spot, he described it in two words: “Bacchanalia and speculation,” and began to restore order with an iron hand. He wrote to Moscow:
"You can be sure that we will not spare anyone - neither ourselves, nor others, but we will still give bread …"
And at first everything went well: 2,379 wagons loaded with grain went from the south to the large cities of Russia. The situation was spoiled by the Cossacks of Ataman Krasnov, when they cut the transport artery along which bread went to the north. The threat of severe famine looms over the cities again …
