“Eat as much bread as you like, my son,” he said.
He told me all his woes—how he was branded as a village “grabber, bourgeois, and capitalist,” because he had possessed three horses and five cows; how four cows and two horses had been “requisitioned”; and how half his land had been taken by the Committee of the Village Poor to start a Commune on.
Committees of the Village Poor were bodies from which were excluded all such as, by enterprise, industry, and thrift, had raised themselves to positions of independence. Composed of the lowest elements of stupid, illiterate, and idle peasants, beggars and tramps, these committees, endowed with supreme power, were authorized to seize the property of the prosperous and divide it amongst themselves, a portion going to the Government.
The class of “middle” peasants, that is, those who were half-way to prosperity, incited by agitators, sided at first with the poor in despoiling the rich, until it was their turn to be despoiled, when they not unnaturally became enemies of the Bolshevist system. The imposition of a war tax, however, finally alienated the sympathies of the entire peasantry, for the enriched “poor” would not pay because they were technically poor, while the impoverished “rich” could not pay because they had nothing left. This was the end of Communism throughout nine-tenths of the Russian provinces, and it occurred when the Bolsheviks had ruled for only a year.
“Uncle Egor,” I said, “you say your district still has a Committee of the Poor. I thought the committees were abolished. There was a decree about it last December.”
“What matters it what they write?” he exclaimed, bitterly. “Our ‘comrades’—whatever they want to do, they do. They held a Soviet election not long ago and the voters were ordered to put in the Soviet all the men from the Poor Committee. Now they say the village must start what they call a ‘Commune,’ where the lazy will profit by the labour of the industrious. They say they will take my last cow for the Commune. But they will not let me join, even if I wanted to, because I am a ‘grabber.’ Ugh!”
“When they held the election,” I asked, “did you vote?”
Uncle Egor laughed. “I? How should they let me vote? I have worked all my life to make myself independent. I once had nothing, but I worked till I had this little farm, which I thought would be my own. Vasia here is my helper. But the Soviet says I am a ‘grabber’ and so I have no vote!”
“Who works in the Commune?” I asked.
“Who knows?” he replied. “They are not from these parts. They thought the poor peasants would join them, because the poor peasants were promised our grain. But the Committee kept the grain for themselves, so the poor peasants got nothing and are very angry. Ah, my little son,” he cried, bitterly, “do you know what Russia wants? Russia, my son, wants a Master—a Master who will restore order, and not that things should be as they are now, with every scoundrel pretending to be master. That is what Russia wants!”