During the Civil War, the city on the Neva suffered losses comparable to the blockade in the Great Patriotic War
The Leningrad blockade of 1941-1944 led to the fact that out of the three million population in the city by the end of the war, after mass evacuation and death, no more than 700 thousand people lived. Much less is known that of the almost two and a half million who lived in Petrograd on the eve of the revolution, by 1921 about 700 thousand remained in the city. Thus, the demographic losses during the Civil War are quite comparable to the blockade.
Bread monopoly
In the second year of World War I, the Russian Empire faced a food crisis. The country was peasant, the basis of agriculture, like centuries ago, was manual labor. Eight million peasants of the most working age were drafted into the army, and already in 1915 the number of arable land in Russia was reduced by a quarter.
A commodity crisis was added to the emerging grain shortage - two-thirds of the industry switched to the production of military products and the shortage of civilian goods instantly gave rise to a surge in prices, speculation and the onset of inflation. The problems were aggravated by a poor harvest in 1916. Already in the fall of that year, the government of the empire tried to establish fixed prices for bread and began to consider the issue of introducing a rationing system. At the same time, long before the Bolshevik "food detachments", the general staff of the warring army for the first time voiced the idea of the need to forcibly confiscate grain from the peasants.
But the government's "fixed prices" for bread were violated everywhere, and the State Council of the empire recognized the rationing system as desirable, but impossible for implementation due to the lack of "technical means". As a result, the food crisis grew. To this was added the crisis of the transport system - the railways barely fed and supplied the huge warring army, but could no longer cope with other tasks.
At the same time, St. Petersburg-Petrograd, located in the north-west of Russia, like no other city of the empire, depended on a massive and uninterrupted supply of everything - from grain to coal and firewood. Previously, sea transport played a decisive role in supplying St. Petersburg. But with the outbreak of World War II, the Gulf of Finland was completely blocked by minefields, and the Baltic Sea was closed by the fleet of imperial Germany. From the autumn of 1914, the entire burden of supplying the capital fell on the railways.
At the beginning of the 20th century, St. Petersburg was the largest metropolis of the Russian Empire, the population of which doubled in 20 years. When the First World War broke out, the population of the city was 2,100,000. It was the industrial and bureaucratic center of the country.
In the first two years of the World War, the population of Petrograd increased even more due to the growth of military production in the capital's factories. By the beginning of 1917, the city's population exceeded 2,400,000. It is not surprising that under such conditions it was here for the first time in Russia that the population felt the food crisis, which resulted in long “tails” of grain queues.
In February 1917, the riot, which began precisely in the endless queues at the Petrograd bakery, quickly escalated into a revolution. The monarchy fell, but the supply of Petrograd did not improve from this. Already in March 1917, a member of the Provisional Government responsible for food supply issues, the Menshevik Vladimir Groman, realizing that the old system of private trade could not cope with the supply of the city,proposed to introduce a grain monopoly, as in Germany.
Petrograd children receive free meals, 1918. Photo: RIA Novosti
Fighting on two fronts, Germany was the first to face a shortage of food and, back in 1915, introduced a "grain monopoly", according to which virtually all peasant products became the property of the state and were distributed centrally by cards. Disciplined Germans managed to debug this system and hold out on starvation rations for another three years of the war.
Under the conditions of the growing food crisis (primarily in Petrograd), the Provisional Government decided to repeat the German experience and on March 25, 1917, adopted the law "On the transfer of grain to the state." Any private trade in bread is prohibited. As you can see, everything happened long before the Bolsheviks came to power.
Food committees were set up across the country to buy grain from peasants at fixed prices, fight illegal private trade, and organize the supply of cities. True, in conditions of inflation and a shortage of goods, the peasants were in no hurry to hand over grain at symbolic prices, and the organization of centralized supply faced a lot of technical difficulties.
A country without bread
In May 1917, the Provisional Government even approved a decision to ban the baking and sale of white bread, rolls and cookies - in order to save scarce butter and sugar. That is, the socialist revolution took place in a country where white bread had been banned for six months!
At the cost of great organizational efforts, the Provisional Government and, as contemporaries called it in those days, the "food dictator of Petrograd" V. Groman managed to somewhat stabilize the supply of the metropolis on the Neva. But all the small successes in organizing the supply of bread for St. Petersburg rested on the growing transport collapse of the railways of the former empire.
In April 1917, 22% of all steam locomotives in the country were idle due to malfunctions. By the autumn of the same year, a third of the locomotives had already stopped. According to contemporaries, in September 1917, railway officials openly took a bribe of 1,000 rubles for sending each carload of grain to Petrograd.
In an effort to establish a state monopoly on bread, the Provisional Government and the authorities of the grain-producing provinces banned private parcels of food. In such conditions, on the verge of starvation in big cities, Russia approached the October Revolution.
Almost immediately after the capture of the Winter Palace, a large train arrived in Petrograd with grain collected by one of the leaders of the Ural Bolsheviks, Alexander Tsuryupa, who had been the head of the food administration in the Ufa province, rich in bread, since the summer of 1917. It was this echelon that allowed Lenin's new government to stabilize the situation with bread in Petrograd in the first, most critical days after the coup.
Whether this was the plan of the Bolsheviks or a lucky coincidence for them is not known now. But it was from this moment that Tsuryupa's great state career began, who already in 1918 would become the People's Commissar for Food of the RSFSR.
The Bolsheviks quickly managed to spread their power over most of the territory of Russia, the capital coup rapidly turned into a new revolution. Lenin's government vigorously tackled the most pressing problems. And the first few months of Soviet power, the food situation in Petrograd seemed to stabilize. But by the spring of 1918, politics had again sharply intervened in the economy.
Residents of Petrograd load sacks of food onto tram platforms for distribution to the population of the city during the days of Yudenich's offensive, 1919. Photo: RIA Novosti
In the spring, Germany and Austria occupied Ukraine, which previously produced half of the bread in the Russian Empire. In May of the same year, a civil war began in the Urals and the Volga region with the mutiny of the Czechoslovak corps. The grain-producing regions of Siberia, the southern Urals and the central Volga were cut off from central Russia. In addition to Ukraine, the Germans occupied Rostov-on-Don and supported General Krasnov, who recaptured the Don Cossack regions from the Bolsheviks in May 1918. So the grain regions of the North Caucasus fell away from Soviet Russia.
As a result, by the summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks remained under control of the territory, which gave only 10% of all marketable grain collected on the territory of the former Russian Empire. This meager amount of grain had to be fed to non-black earth central Russia and the country's two largest megacities, Moscow and Petrograd.
If in March 1918 800 wagons with grain and flour arrived in the city on the Neva, then in April it was already twice as few. In May 1918, a rationed bread ration was introduced in Petrograd. At the same time, for the first time, the Petrograd people began to eat horses en masse.
In May 1918, the authorities tried to organize the evacuation of St. Petersburg children to more nourishing areas of the country. Several thousand boys and girls aged 3 to 16 were sent to the Urals, where so-called "children's nutritional colonies" were organized in the vicinity of Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg. But within a month, these areas became the battlefield of the Civil War.
The beginning of hunger
In the summer of 1918, of all the cities of the former empire, it was Petrograd that experienced the most serious problems with food. The chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Grigory Zinoviev, seeking to resolve the issue of the city's grain supply, in June 1918 even began negotiations on possible grain deliveries with the Socialist-Revolutionary Siberian government in Omsk. The Siberian government (Kolchak's predecessor), relying on the bayonets of the Czechoslovak Legion, was then waging a full-scale war against the Bolsheviks in the Urals. But in the conditions of the beginning of the famine, the head of Petrograd was ready to pay for bread even to an open enemy.
Negotiations with whites about buying bread for red Peter were not crowned with success. In July 1918, the Petrograd Food Commissariat introduced an already differentiated class ration for various groups of the population. So the 1st category (with the largest food norm) included workers with heavy physical labor, the 2nd - the rest of the workers and employees, the 3rd - persons of the free professions (journalists, artists, artists, etc.), to the 4th - "non-labor elements" (the bourgeoisie, priests, owners of large real estate, etc.)
The civil war not only cut bread from Petrograd, but also diverted the already inadequate railway transport for military transportation. For the whole of August 1918, only 40 wagons with grain arrived in St. Petersburg - while 17 wagons were required daily to deliver at least 100 grams of bread per day to each resident. In such conditions, the largest Putilov factory in the city was closed for two weeks - by decision of the Petrograd Soviet, all workers were sent on a two-week vacation so that they could feed themselves in the surrounding villages.
Peasants carry grain to the dumping point for surrender, 1918. Photo: RIA Novosti
On August 7, 1918, Izvestia of the Petrograd Food Commissariat published a decree signed by Grigory Zinoviev to allow private individuals to bring up to one and a half poods of food to Petrograd, including flour or bread "up to 20 pounds." In fact, amid famine, Petrograd abolished the grain monopoly that had existed in the country since March 1917.
After the crisis in August, in the fall, at the cost of titanic efforts to organize centralized grain deliveries and allow private trade, it was possible to somewhat improve the food supply of Petrograd. But by the end of the year, due to a new round of civil war, when Kolchak captured the entire Urals and launched a general offensive, the food supply to St. Petersburg again fell into a deep crisis.
In the winter from 1918 to 1919, when the supply of food to Petrograd was minimal, the distribution of food on cards of the 4th, and sometimes even the 3rd category was periodically stopped. This is usually presented as a special villainy of the Bolsheviks before the intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie, forgetting that these strata of the population - especially the former owners of real estate - have kept savings and property since pre-revolutionary times, which could be exchanged for bread from black market speculators. The majority of the proletarian population did not have such opportunities.
In January 1919, the population of St. Petersburg was about 1,300,000 people, that is, in just a year and a half, it decreased by more than a million. Most left the hungry and cold city. Mass mortality began. By the beginning of 1919, there were only a third of factory workers in Petrograd of their number a year earlier.
In addition, it was 1919 that was the time of two great White offensives against Petrograd from the west, from Estonia. In June and October, the troops of General Yudenich twice approached the distant outskirts of the city. All this time, the Baltic Sea was blocked by the British fleet, any supply from Finland was also impossible - after their civil war, local whites ruled there, actively hostile to Soviet Russia.
In fact, Petrograd found itself in a real blockade. In those conditions, all the supply of the city was kept, in fact, on one railway line from Tver. But during the hostilities that went on the approaches to the city throughout 1919, the army was primarily supplied with food - for example, in June of that year, there were 192 thousand people and 25 thousand horses on the allowance of the Petrograd military district. The rest of the urban population was supplied by barely functioning transport in the last turn.
Petrograd ration
The growing collapse of the railways meant that even the available food was hardly delivered to the city. For example, in 1919, one of the trains with salted fish from Astrakhan moved to Petrograd for more than two and a half months and the product arrived at its destination spoiled.
According to statistics, in Petrograd, the average daily ration of bread during 1919 was 120 grams for a worker and 40 grams for a dependent. That is, it was purely symbolic. Only some military production facilities, such as the Putilov factory, were supplied at higher rates.
In July 1919, the People's Commissariat for Food allowed workers returning from vacations to bring with them up to two poods of food without hindrance. As a result, over the next month, over 60,000 St. Petersburg proletarians - almost half of all workers - left their factories and went on vacation to the countryside for food.
A worker at the Siemens plant in Petrograd, Platonov, speaking on December 17, 1919 at a meeting of the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet, testified: "In our canteens, for several days, they cooked soup from peelings, and made cutlets from rotten potatoes." The supply of civil servants was not the best, and the supply of the rest of the population at the height of the Civil War was often simply absent.
By the beginning of 1920, the population of Petrograd had decreased by another half a million - to 800 thousand. At the same time, it cannot be said that the city authorities, headed by Zinoviev, were inactive - on the contrary, they worked very actively. In addition to distributing bread according to ration cards, the authorities were engaged in creating a system of canteens, organizing free meals for children, centralized baking of bread, etc. From the St. Petersburg workers, they formed food detachments that were sent for food to the grain-growing provinces.
But all this did not solve the supply issue. First, there was little bread. Secondly, the transport and financial system, shaken by revolutions, world and civil wars, did not allow organizing an uninterrupted supply of even the insufficient amount of grain that was.
Fuel hunger
But any large city, even a century ago, depends not only on food supplies, but also on an uninterrupted and sufficient supply of fuel. Petrograd is not a southern city at all, and for a normal life it required impressive volumes of fuel - coal, oil, firewood.
In 1914, the capital of the Russian Empire consumed almost 110 million poods of coal and almost 13 million poods of oil. If during the Civil War the railways could not cope with the supply of grain, then all the more they could not cope with the transportation of fuel. In addition, high-quality coal in the country then was provided mainly by the Donbass, and oil - by Baku. In 1918-1920, these energy sources were repeatedly cut off by fronts. Therefore, it is not surprising that at the height of the civil war, coal was supplied to Petrograd 30 times less than in 1914.
Residents of Petrograd dismantle wooden houses for firewood, 1920. Photo: RIA Novosti
The first big fuel crisis in the city broke out in January 1919 - there was no coal, no firewood, no oil. Dozens of factories were closed that month for lack of fuel. The Petrograd Soviet, seeking on their own to find a solution to the fuel crisis, decided to turn off the electric lighting in order to save energy, minimize the work of enterprises and organize the procurement of firewood, peat and shale in the nearest localities around Petrograd.
When in April 1919 the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Grigory Zinoviev, asked the Council of People's Commissars to send at least a little fuel oil and oil to the city, he was answered with a very laconic telegram: "There is no oil and there will not be."
The situation with supplies, or rather the lack of fuel supplies to Petrograd, was such that the idea of a general evacuation of St. Petersburg industry closer to the sources of grain and fuel was heard more than once. On September 15, 1919, the chairman of the main economic body of Soviet Russia, the Supreme Council of the National Economy, Aleksey Rykov, proposed, due to the lack of fuel, to evacuate the most important Petrograd enterprises beyond the Urals, and send the workers of Petrograd to various regions of the country to restore industry. But even the Bolsheviks did not dare to make such a radical decision.
Already the first year of the Civil War significantly reduced the industry of Petrograd. Thus, the number of workers at the Putilovsky plant, the largest in the city, fell by half, from 23 to 11 thousand. The number of workers at the Petrograd Steel Plant has decreased three times, the Machine-Building Plant - four times, and the Mechanical Plant - ten times.
Not hoping for help from the center, the authorities of Petrograd tried to solve the fuel crisis on their own. Back in December 1918, in Petrograd and the surrounding regions, the conscription of all workers in the fuel industry, including lumberjacks, timber carriers, peat bogs and coal miners, was suspended. In the conditions of the Civil War, fuel was primarily required to continue the operation of the military factories of Petrograd, therefore in October 1919 all the stocks of firewood within a radius of 100 versts around the city were transferred to the St. Petersburg factories. At the same time, the Petrograd workers were mobilized for the procurement of firewood and peat in the neighboring provinces.
The fuel crisis was considered no less dangerous than the military one. Therefore, immediately after the defeat of the white troops of Yudenich, on January 20, 1920, Grigory Zinoviev proposed to organize a special Labor Army from the units of the 7th Red Army defending the city with special tasks for the extraction of peat and the development of oil shale in the vicinity of Petrograd.
But there was still not enough fuel, and the city began to consume itself. In 1920, workers in the utilities of Petrograd dismantled more than 1,000 houses for firewood. Residents, who were fleeing from the cold, burned no less number of wooden buildings within the city in their own stoves. A handicraft tin stove, installed and fired with whatever came right in the living room, became a symbol of the Civil War in Petrograd.
Epidemics and the end of the first blockade
Devastation and fuel hunger struck even the city water supply. In 1920, he supplied water one and a half times less than on the eve of the revolution. At the same time, due to a malfunction of pipes that had not been repaired for a long time, up to half of the water went into the ground. In the summer of 1918, the temporary cessation of the chlorination of tap water caused an outbreak of a cholera epidemic in Petrograd.
Numerous epidemics and infectious diseases accompanied the city throughout the years of the Civil War, exacerbating the losses from hunger and cold. The city horses eaten from hunger meant not only the absence of cabs, but also the cessation of the removal of sewage and garbage. Added to this was the lack of medicines, the lack of soap and fuel for the baths. If in 1914 there were over two thousand doctors in the city, by the end of 1920 there were less than a thousand of them.
Therefore, the years of the Civil War in Petrograd turned into an almost continuous series of epidemics. In the spring of 1918, the city was struck by the first epidemic of typhus. From July it was replaced by an epidemic of cholera, which raged in the city until September 1918. And after it, the Spanish flu epidemic began in the fall. In the fall of 1919, the second epidemic of typhus began and continued throughout the winter, until the spring of 1920. However, already at the end of the summer of 1920, Petrograd experienced a real epidemic of dysentery.
In 1920, the city's population reached its minimum during the Civil War - about 720 thousand people. In the same year, the value of the entire gross output of Petrograd industry was only 13% of the 1914 level.
In February 1921, at a special meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the "Petrograd question" was discussed separately. It was officially recognized that as a result of the Civil War, Petrograd was devastated more than any other city in Russia, suffered the most casualties and could no longer be rebuilt on its own without the help of the entire country.
The end of the Civil War immediately made it possible to solve a number of urban problems. At the beginning of 1922, food for Petrograd was bought abroad, and firewood in Finland - because of the devastation on the railways, all this was easier and faster to deliver by sea directly to the city port. Bread and firewood were purchased at the expense of valuables confiscated from the church.
During the summer of 1922, about a million poods of grain and almost two hundred thousand poods of sugar arrived at the port of Petrograd from abroad. During the navigation period, from May to October of that year, about 500 foreign steamships arrived at the city port, which had been closed since 1914 due to hostilities.
The year 1922 brought a rich harvest, the first fruits of the NEP and the first results of the restoration of the country's economy and transport. By the end of 1922, the crisis had finally passed - the Civil War, and with it the first blockade of the city on the Neva ended.
