The February Revolution and the collapse of authority that
followed it created an opportunity for peasants to fulfill their long-standing
aspirations for obtaining land and achieving greater control over their own
affairs. Even as they petitioned the Provisional Government and the Soviets'
Central Executive Committee to realize their agenda, peasants elected village
and district (volost) committees (also known as soviets) to take over local
government functions, seized crop land, implements, and draft animals belonging
to landlords, and resisted the government's attempts to requisition grain.
Politically, peasants tended to identify with the Socialist Revolutionary
Party. The entry of several SRs into the coalition cabinet on May 4 and
especially the appointment of the party's leader, Viktor Chernov, as Minister
of Agriculture therefore raised peasants' hopes of a speedy resolution in their
favor to the land distribution question. In this, though, they would be
disappointed, as Chernov met with stiff opposition from other ministers and
even members of his own party.
The inefficiency of peasant-based agriculture was one of the
chief indications of "backwardness" in pre-revolutionary Russia and a
problem that the Bolsheviks, upon coming to power, were dedicated to
overcoming. They had little following in the countryside, although many
soldiers who self-demobilized and returned to their villages were sympathetic
to Bolshevik anti-war propaganda. Moreover, while the Bolsheviks did not call for
peasant land seizures (preferring the transfer of property to the state), they
did not actively oppose them either. Thus seeing an opportunity to gain support
among the peasantry, Lenin composed the Decree on Land, which was passed by the
Congress of Soviets on November 8 (October 26), 1917. The decree stipulated
that all landed estates would become the property of local land committees
pending the meeting of the Constituent Assembly. Based on the 242 peasant
"mandates" that had been submitted by delegates to the All-Russian
Congress of Peasants' Deputies in May, it also proclaimed that "private
ownership of land shall be abolished forever; land shall not be purchased,
sold, leased, mortgaged or otherwise alienated" but rather "pass into
the use of those who cultivate it." This, in fact, had been the SR land
program. Its adoption by the Bolsheviks was sure to win the support of Left
SRs, paving the way for their entry into the Soviet government, and helping to
legitimize the government in the eyes of peasants.
Peasants by and large interpreted the Soviet government's
land decree in their own terms, relying on their own institution, the village
commune, to negotiate land transfers and other major decisions, rather than
participating in a socialist experiment exported from the towns. The peasant
revolution soon ran up against the desperate need for food in the cities and
the Bolsheviks' determination not to give into extortion by middlemen. Even
before the outbreak of civil war, the attempt by the Bolsheviks to foment class
war in the countryside by sponsoring poor peasant committees (kombedy) and the
Soviet government's dispatch of food supply committees to requisition grain and
other foodstuffs provoked widespread antagonism. These struggles were but a prelude
to the stormy and often violent relationship that peasants had with Soviet
power in the decades to come.
