Ruling the Soviet Countryside behind the Frontlines

Abstract

During the Russia civil war, weak rural organs justified outside intervention in the pursuit of centralization in the form of procurement agents and food brigades to implement state grain obligations and establish Soviet authority in the Russian countryside. This study of Penza province suggests that by late 1920 the types of resources available to provincial authorities to reinforce the procurement work of local officials had expanded well beyond agents and brigades. Procurement authorities in Penza engaged in a significant effort to raise the level of institutional discipline among volost and village officials. Provincial officials, in taking significant steps to strengthen the performance of the rural procurement machinery, were better positioned to use armed force more selectively rather than primarily. Their sense of caution about the use of armed coercion was heightened by the Antonov revolt and its potential for destroying or destabilizing the local procurement apparatus as it had in Tambov. Thus, when Penza reached 105% fulfillment of its rather modest procurement quota this was not a significant procurement success as much as a bureaucratic one; provincial officials managed to enforce expectations that subordinates work well beyond their previous capacity to accomplish institutional goals while peasant resistant was kept to a manageable level. Penza province’s procurement experience suggests a more complex picture of Civil War economic management and state-peasant relations and that stable provinces, strategically situated, allowed the Bolsheviks to avoid more widespread peasant violence, driven to a great degree by large-scale forced grain requisitions in 1920–21.