At that time, in 1919, most of the Red Army men were individual peasant farmers, who were not afraid of hard work, but in whom the mentality of the petty proprietor was still strong. Ilyich therefore considered it very important to have all the fronts strengthened by proletarian elements. He wrote a letter to the Petrograd workers about rendering aid to the Eastern Front, when the situation there became critical; he made a speech at a meeting of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions, addressed the railway workers of the Moscow terminus, spoke about fighting Yolchak at a conference of Moscow factory committees and trade unions, wrote to the workers and peasants concerning the victory over Kolchak, spoke about the role of the Petrograd workers, delivered a speech to the mobilized workers of the Yaroslavl and Vladimir gubernias, who were going out to the Denikin front and to help defend Petrograd against Yudenich, wrote an appeal to the workers and Red Army men of Petrograd in connection with the Yudenich threat, and wrote a letter to the workers and peasants of the Ukraine about the victory over Denikin.
The organization of the Red Army was steadily improving.
In proportion as the Soviet power struck root and the civil war opened the eyes of the masses as to who was their real friend and their real enemy, the influence of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries weakened. Feeling the ground slipping from under their feet, they banded with the Anarchists with whom they organized a bomb outrage in Leontyevsky Street on September 25, where the Moscow Committee of the Party was discussing questions of agitation and propaganda. Twelve were killed, including the Secretary of the Moscow Committee Zagorsky, and fifty-five were wounded. We first heard the news of the outrage from Inessa Armand, who came to see us. Her daughter had been at that meeting.
While pointing out the scattered isolated character of small peasant economy and the adverse effect it had upon the lives and outlook of the peasants, Ilyich from the very outset stressed the need for passing over to collective forms of husbandry. He said that large-scale collective associations had to be set up for the common cultivation of the land in the form of agricultural communes and artels. He considered that the urban and agricultural workers would be the initiators in this matter, and supported all and every initiative by the workers in this respect. We know that as early as in the spring of 1918 he supported the initiative of the Obukhov and Semyannikov workers who went out to Semipalatinsk in Siberia to organize agricultural artels. He supported all efforts on a more modest scale to organize the collective cultivation of the land.
Ilyich, of course, had no illusions. He constantly spoke about the conditions that had to be created before mass collectivization of agriculture could be made practicable. At the Thirteenth Congress of the Party he spoke about tractors, about mechanized land cultivation, and the necessity of rousing the peasants, without which collectivization would make no real headway, while at the same time he believed that every initiative in the setting up of collective farms should be supported.
In the spring of 1919 Ilyich posed the question of organizing a collective farm of a new type to the workers of Gorki, where he lived. However, most of the workers there were unprepared for it. Reinbot, the former owner of Gorki, had picked Lettish workers for his estate, whom lie had tried to keep apart, isolated from the rest of the population. The workers of Gorki, like all the Lettish workers, hated the landowners, but they were ill fitted at the time for collective work, for organizing the estate along state-farm lines.
I remember, how, at a meeting at the manor, Ilyich earnestly tried to talk them over. But nothing came of his persuasive efforts. The Reinbot property was shared out, and Gorki turned into an ordinary state-run farm. Ilyich wanted the state farms to serve as a model of efficient large-scale farming to the peasants; the latter knew how to run a small farm, but they still had to learn how to run a large one.
The manager of Gorki at the time—Vever—did not grasp Ilyich's ideas in regard to the state farm. One day, when Ilyich was out walking, he met Vever and asked him how the state farm was helping the local peasants. Vever looked puzzled and answered: "We sell seedlings to the peasants." Ilyich asked him no more questions, and when he had gone, looked at me ruefully and said, "He doesn't understand the very question." He afterwards became rather exacting towards Vever, who did not understand that the state farm had to serve as a model of efficient large-scale farming for the peasants.
One day, early in 1919, I received a visit at the Extra-School Education Department from Balashov, an old pupil of mine at the Sunday Evening School. He had worked in Nevskaya Zastava, and later, during the period of reaction, had served two years in prison. He told me that he had studied agriculture, especially market-gardening, and now wanted to tackle the job. He united seven peasant households (relatives) and organized a social kitchen-garden, which they decided to work together without hired labour. They organized an agricultural artel and grew fine cabbages on it under contract with the Red Army. This undertaking though did not survive. The Committee of Poor Peasants took all the cabbages for themselves, and Balashov was jailed. He wrote to me from prison. At Ilyich's request Dzerzhinsky sent men down to investigate the affair. It turned out that former detectives had wormed their way into the committee. Balashov was released, but the undertaking was dropped.
Those market-gardening artels—they were fairly popular at the time—came up against stiff resistance due to underestimation of their significance. At Blagusha, for instance, there were market-gardening courses organized by A. S. Butkevich with an allotment garden attached to them. Our Education Department supported those courses. In February 1919, Butkevich's son, himself an agronomist and specialist on market-gardening, organized on this allotment a sort of cooperative society of trainees (most of them workers of the Gnome & Rom Factory and the Semyonov Mills) under whose rules the crop was shared proportionately to the number of work hours put in. Young Butkevich experimented with fertilizers, new varieties and new methods of planting. The crop of vegetables was higher than at any of the other common allotments in the neighbourhood, and forty-five working-class families were provided with vegetables all the year round.
The Extra-School Department supported this undertaking, but the Moscow Education Department, which had a big say in things those days, took the courses' allotment away on the grounds that "providing some 45 or 50 families with vegetables was a matter of trivial social significance compared with work organization in the school." It failed at the time to appreciate the propaganda value of collective forms of husbandry. The school farm for the sake of which the Moscow Education Department had appropriated this allotment was itself a failure.
It is difficult today to imagine the obstacles which such undertakings found themselves up against in 1919. Those obstacles—and there were many of them—are now forgotten, but the people who took part in those undertakings have hardly forgotten them. Vladimir Ilyich was particularly interested in such undertakings.
To bring the peasant masses to identify themselves with the organization of farms on collective lines required a long period of preparatory work among the bulk of the peasantry. Ilyich was being constantly made aware of this when he read letters from peasants. One such letter concerning the situation in the countryside (the letter is dated February-March 1919) has a marginal note by Ilyich: "A cry far the middle peasant."
The question of the attitude towards the middle peasant loomed large at the Eighth Congress of the Party (March 18-23, 1919). In his speech at the opening of the congress Ilyich formulated the issue with unmistakable clarity:
"Implacable war against the rural bourgeoisie and the kulaks brings to the forefront the task of organizing the proletariat and semi-proletariat of the countryside. But for a party that wishes to lay the solid foundations of a communist society the next step is to correctly solve the question of our attitude towards the middle peasants. This is a task of a higher order. We were not able to deal with it on a broad basis until the essential conditions of the Soviet Republic's existence were assured."
And further on:
"We have entered such a phase of socialist construction when it is necessary, on the basis of our experience in rural work, to draw up concretely and in detail the basic rules and directions by which we should be guided in order to fake a firm stand for alliance in regard to our attitude towards the middle peasants." (Works, Vol. 29, pp. 124-125.)
At this congress Ilyich spoke about the necessity of a comradely approach to the middle peasant, about the impermissibility of using coercion, and about the necessity of assisting him, first and foremost in the matter of mechanizing farming processes, relieving and improving his economic position, and raising his standard of living and culture. Ilyich spoke a lot about raising the cultural level of the village, and about how we were constantly coming up against the stumbling block of insufficient culture among the masses. He spoke about the enforcement of Soviet laws being hampered by the low cultural level: "...Besides the law, there is a cultural level, which is subject to no laws." Remarking on certain limitations in the electoral rights of the peasantry, he said:
"...As we point out, our Constitution was obliged to introduce this inequality because the cultural level was low and because with us organization was weak. But we do not make this an ideal; on the contrary, in the programme the Party undertakes to work systematically for the abolition of this inequality between the more organized proletariat and the peasantry, an inequality we shall have to abandon as soon as we succeed in raising the cultural level. We shall then be able to get along without these limitations." (Ibid., p. 163.)
Now, when the countryside is collectivized, when the mechanization of agriculture has become a reality, when the village has reached a much higher level of education and culture, this directive of Ilyich's has become attainable. The new Constitution of the Soviet Union gives full and equal suffrage to both the workers and the peasants. Reading this Constitution makes one's heart beat faster; it is the fruit of long years of work, guided by the Party into the proper channels.
A week after the Eighth Party Congress, at a meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on March 30, 1919, during which he proposed M.I. Kalinin as a candidate for the post of Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in place of the late Y. Sverdlov, Ilyich said that Kalinin had a record of twenty years' Party work, that this St. Petersburg worker, who was at the same time a peasant by origin from the Tver Gubernia, had preserved close ties with peasant economy and was constantly renewing and refreshing those ties, that he showed a comradely approach to the broad masses of the working people. The middle peasants would see in the person of the highest representative of the Soviet Republic one of their own people. The nomination of Kalinin would serve as a practical means of organizing a number of direct contacts between the highest representative of the Soviet power and the middle peasants, would tend to bring them closer together.
Ilyich's hopes, as we know, were completely fulfilled. Kalinin is extremely popular with the peasant masses, who love him.
Ilyich's daily work showed what careful attention had to be given to all questions that concerned the interests of the middle peasant.
The Skopin Uyezd Consultative Congress sent a delegation of three peasants to Ilyich on March 31, 1919, with instructions "to petition for the middle and lower-than-middle peasants to be relieved of the air tax," "to petition for the complete repeal of the milch cow mobilization, because there is only one milch cow left among our population per 8 to 10 persons, besides which we are suffering from violent epidemics of typhus, the Spanish flu and other such diseases, and milk is the only food product for the sick. As to other products, such as butter and fats, these are completely lacking and unobtainable anywhere." The instructions also said something about horses and contained details of the tax collection.
Ilyich booked through the "mandate," and without asking any questions as to what the "air tax" could mean, he immediately answered the peasants of the Skopin Uyezd to the point:
"The imposition of a special tax on the peasants with incomes below the average is unlawful," he wrote. "Steps have been taken to lighten the burden of taxation for the middle peasants. A decree will be issued in a day or two. On the other questions I shall immediately demand information from the People's Commissars. You will be duly informed.
