The District Extraordinary Commissions and the revolutionary tribunals were kept busy dealing with cases of food-hoarding and speculation. A typical report is the following taken from the Bolshevist Derevenskaia Communa (No. 222), October 2, 1919. This paper complained that the peasants were concealing and hoarding grain for the purpose of selling it to speculators at fabulous prices:
Every day the post brings information concerning concealment of grain and other foodstuffs, and the difficulties encountered by the registration commissions in their work in the villages. All this shows the want of consciousness among the masses, who do not realize what chaos such tactics introduce into the general life of the country.
No one can eat more than the human organism can absorb; the ration—and that not at all a “famine” one—is fixed. Every one is provided for, and yet—concealment, concealment everywhere, in the hope of selling grain to town speculators at fabulous prices.
How much is being concealed, and what fortunes are made by profiteering, may be seen from the following example: The Goretsky Extraordinary Commission has fined Irina Ivashkevich, a citizeness of Lapinsky village, for burying 25,000 rubles’ worth of grain in a hole in her back yard.
Citizeness Irina Ivashkevich has much money, but little understanding of what she is doing.
Neither force nor threats could overcome the resistance of the peasants. In the latter part of November, 1919, sixteen food-requisitioning detachments of twenty-five men each were sent from Petrograd to the Simbirsk Province, according to the Izvestia of Petrograd. They were able to secure only 215 tons of grain at a very extraordinary price. Speculation had raised the price of grain to 600 rubles per pood of 36 pounds. The paper Trud reported at the same time that the delegates of forty-five labor organizations in Petrograd and Moscow, who left for the food-producing provinces to seek for non-rationed products, returned after two months wholly unsuccessful, having spent an enormous amount of money in their search. Their failure was due in part to a genuine shortage, but it was due in part also to systematic concealment and hoarding for speculation on the part of the peasants. Much of this illicit speculation and trading was carried on with the very Soviet officials who were charged with its suppression![10]
[10] The Bulletin of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets (No. 25), February 24, 1919, reports such a case. Many other similar references might be quoted. Pravda, July 4, 1919, said that many of those sent to requisition grain from the peasants were themselves “gross speculators.”
How utterly the attempt to wrest the food from the peasants by armed force failed is evidenced by figures published in the Soviet journal, Finances and National Economy (No. 310). The figures show the amounts of food-supplies received in Petrograd in the first nine months of 1918 as compared with the corresponding period of the previous year. The totals include flour, rye, wheat, barley, oats, and peas:
| Jan.-Mar. Tons | Apr.-June Tons | July-Sept. Tons | Total for Nine Mos. Tons | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| In 1913 | 24,626 | 24,165 | 20,438 | 69,229 |
| In 1918 | 12,001 | 5,388 | 2,241 | 19,639 |
If we take barley and oats, which were drawn mainly from the northern and central provinces and from the middle Volga—territories occupied by the Bolsheviki and free from “enemy forces”—we find that the same story is told: in the three months July-September, 1918, 105 tons of barley were received, as against 1,245 tons in the corresponding period of the previous year. Of oats the amount received in the three months of July-September, 1918, was 175 tons as against 3,105 tons in the corresponding period of 1917.
Armed force failed as completely as Gorky had predicted it would. References to the French Revolution are often upon the lips of the leaders of Bolshevism, and they have slavishly copied its form and even its terminology. It might have been expected, therefore, that they would have remembered the French experience with the Law of Maximum and its utter and tragic failure, and that they would have learned something therefrom, at least enough to avoid a repetition of the same mistakes as were made in 1793. There is no evidence of such learning, however. For that matter, is there any evidence that they have learned anything from history?
Not only was armed force used in a vain attempt to wrest the grain from the peasants, but similar methods were relied upon to force the peasants into the Red Army. On May 1, 1919, Pravda, official organ of the Communist Party, published the following announcement:
From the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party.
The Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party announces the following—
To all provincial committees of the Communist Party, to Provincial Military Commissaries.
The All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets, at the session of April 23d, unanimously adopted the decree to bring the middle and poor peasants into the struggle against the counter-revolution. According to this decree, every canton must send 10 to 20 strong, capable soldiers, who can act as nuclei for Red Army units in those places to which they will be sent.