Grain to the front. Prodrazvorstka in Russia. The idea of surplus appropriation during the famine seemed to be salutary.
No products expected to arrive
“There are many stocks of grain in the North Caucasus, but a break in the road does not make it possible to send them to the north, until the road is restored, the delivery of bread is unthinkable. An expedition has been sent to the Samara and Saratov provinces, but in the next few days it is not possible to help you with bread. Hold on somehow, in a week it will be better … - wrote Joseph Stalin from Tsaritsyn to desperate Lenin.
As mentioned in the previous part of the cycle, the future leader of the USSR was sent to the south of Russia to collect food for the cities in the north of the country. And the situation in them was really catastrophic: by July 24, 1918, food was not given to the population in Petrograd for five days in a row. The civil war engulfed the Samara province in the summer, which has long been the granary of Russia, and the flow of grain to the capital has virtually dried up. In August, only 40 wagons were delivered to Petrograd with the minimum required monthly 500. Vladimir Lenin was even offered to buy bread abroad, paying with the country's gold treasury.
It is interesting to trace the market prices for bread in the new Bolshevik Russia. With an average wage of 450 rubles in January 1919, a pood of flour was sold for 75 rubles in Penza, for 300 rubles in Ryazan province, for 400 rubles in Nizhny Novgorod, and more than 1000 rubles had to be given in Petrograd. Hunger, as always, spared only the chosen few, that is, the rich - they almost did not feel the food shortage. The poor were starving almost without exception, and the middle class could only afford a hearty meal a couple of times a month.
In an attempt to reverse the current situation, on January 1, 1919, an All-Russian meeting of food organizations located in the territories controlled by the Bolsheviks was convened. The situation of complete hopelessness at this meeting was further darkened by the Perm catastrophe, which happened a few days before the forum. The reason for this was Kolchak, who seized about 5,000 wagons with fuel and food in Perm.
The outcome of the meeting was the Decree of January 11, 1919, which went down in history under the title "On appropriation between the producing provinces of grain and fodder, subject to alienation at the disposal of the state." A fundamental difference from all previous decrees in the new was the provision that it is necessary to take grain from the peasants not so much as they can give, but how much the Bolsheviks need to take. And the new government needed a lot of bread.
Soviet Russia under siege
The food base of the Reds in the Civil War in the period 1918-1919 was completely deplorable: a third of the population lived in Moscow and Petrograd and was not employed at all in agricultural work. There was simply nothing to feed them, food prices were growing by leaps and bounds. For 11 months of 1919, the price of bread in the capital increased 16 times! The Red Army demanded new soldiers, and they had to be taken from the agricultural zone, weakening its productivity. At the same time, the whites had a much greater food potential. First, there were no cities with a population of over one million in the rear that required gigantic amounts of grain. Secondly, the Kuban, Tavria, Ufa, Orenburg, Tobolsk and Tomsk provinces, which were under the control of Wrangel, Kolchak and Denikin, regularly supplied food for both the army and the townspeople. In many ways, the decree of January 11, 1919 was a forced measure of the Bolsheviks - otherwise the food collapse would have been inevitable.
What calculations did the management give when developing the layout logic? In the provinces, which were rich in their own bread, there were about 16-17 poods of bread per capita per year. The peasants in 1919 did not starve - they simply kept the bread at home, not wanting to share it with the townspeople, since the firm purchase prices were several dozen times lower than market prices. Therefore, the government decided that from now on there will be 12 poods of bread per year for each inhabitant of the village and no more. All surpluses were withdrawn in favor of the state at meager prices, and most often free of charge. Each province received from the Center standards for the collection of grain from controlled territories, and local rulers spread these figures across counties, volosts and villages.
Village councils, in turn, distributed the norms for the delivery of grain to individual farms and households. But this ideal scheme was corrected by two factors - the civil war and the reluctance of the peasants to share food. As a result, the Samara, Saratov and Tambov provinces came under attack - military operations in them were not as intense as in other regions. This situation is clearly manifested in Ukraine. The Bolsheviks had very ambitious plans to "alienate the grain" of the richest region, but first the mutinies of Grigoriev and Makhno, and then the offensive of Denikin's army put an end to the plans. We managed to collect only 6% of the initial volumes from Ukraine and Novorossiya. I had to take bread from the Volga region, and it turned out to be a terrible time for the population of the region.
Victims of the Volga region
“We know you can be killed, but if you don’t give bread to the Center, we will hang you.” Such a suicidal response was received by the leadership of the Saratov province to a request to reduce the norms for the distribution of food. But even such draconian measures did not allow collecting more than 42% of the estimated norm. Bread was literally beaten out of the unfortunate peasants, sometimes leaving nothing in the household bins. And the following year 1920 turned out to be extremely poor harvest due to drought and lack of sowing grain reserves. The authorities went to their mercy and lowered the norms of food appropriation two or three times, but it was too late - famine covered the Volga region. The Bolsheviks rushed to the Non-Black Earth Region and knocked out 13 times more bread from the unfortunate people than they had previously. Further, the territories of the Urals and Siberia, recaptured from Kolchak, as well as the occupied regions of the North Caucasus, were used.
The destructive scale of the Civil War is clearly illustrated by the example of the Stavropol province, which in the pre-war period produced more than 50 million poods of grain. The food appropriation system obliged in 1920 to collect 29 million from the province, but in fact it was possible to knock out only 7 million. Wrangel also contributed to the general famine, who sold 10 million poods of Crimean grain abroad in just 8 months. The results of the surplus appropriation on the banks of the Dnieper were optimistic, where they managed to collect more than 71 million poods, but even here the bandits of Makhno, as well as a weak transport network, interfered. The inability to transport the harvested grain again became an acute problem for the Bolsheviks - even passenger trains were involved in transportation.
One of the consequences of the surplus appropriation is the corpse eaters of the Volga region
The results of the surplus appropriation are ambiguous and cruel. On the one hand, there is the famine of the Volga region and the atrocities of the "food army" fighters, and on the other, the supply of food to the vital regions of the country. The Bolsheviks managed to distribute bread more or less evenly over all the governorates and cities under their control. The state ration in 1918 covered only 25% of the food needs of the townspeople, and two years later it already provided two-thirds. At the Sormovo plant, it seems that they had not heard of the famine at all. Throughout the Civil War, the factory workers received bread on time and even several times almost rose to rebel when the quality of the flour in the ration suddenly decreased.
The surplus appropriation was canceled only after the destruction of the main forces of the White Army, when the need for food was not so acute. “We actually took from the peasants all the surplus, and sometimes not even the surplus, but part of the foodstuffs necessary for the peasantry, took to cover the costs of the army and the maintenance of the workers … Otherwise, we could not win in the devastated country,” - this is how Vladimir Lenin recalled the dark history of the surplus appropriation … However, the grain went not only to the military and workers. All nursing mothers and pregnant women living in cities were provided with the bread confiscated from the peasants. And by the end of 1920, 7 million children under the age of 12 were fed rations. One thing is certain: the surplus appropriation system saved millions of lives. And how many died of hunger through her fault is still unknown.
