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Bible Encyclopedias
Russia (Addition)
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
or This article from the 1922 extension to the 1911 encyclopedia is an update of the information in the article Russia.
In 1920-1 Soviet Russia had shrunk considerably by 1921 in comparison with the former Russian Empire. Instead of a population of some 180 millions it comprised in 1921 about 130 millions, of whom io millions were peasants and the rest were divided among the townsfolk and the nomadic and hunting tribes of the eastern steppes and of Siberia. It is estimated that the country lost 1,700,000 killed in the course of the World War, but it is impossible to form even an approximate conception of the number of those who perished from the indirect effects of the war through wounds, ill-health and privations, and of those who were destroyed by the massacres of the civil war, the misery of retreats and migrations, the epidemics of typhus, cholera, diphtheria which claimed a heavy toll in the unsanitary conditions of life. It would hardly be art exaggeration to put the number of victims of these disorders at some io millions. The abnormal increase of the death-rate has been definitely registered in certain cases, and there is good reason to suppose that in all centres where people congregated for political or economic reasons exceptional mortality prevailed and the health of the population was enfeebled through starvation and sickness. Petrograd, with 2,250,000 inhabitants in 1914, had been reduced to some 700,- 000, and Moscow to 1.000,000 instead of 1,800,000.
But, undoubtedly, the greatest inroads had been made by the separation of large territories that had acquired political independence. Finland accounts for a diminution of 3,000,000; Poland for 11,000,000; Esthonia and Latvia for 3,000,000; Lithuania for 5,000,000; Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan for 8,000,000; Bessarabia for 3,000,000, the districts of White Russia and Volhynia, ceded to Poland, for 3,000,000.
Economic Disruption
The great combination for economic intercourse guaranteed by the empire had been broken up to the detriment of most of its component parts. Of course, from the point of view of national separatism, the political independence of Esthonia or Latvia was a great conquest, a glorious assertion of self-determination, and a source of profit in the helpless.condition of Russia. These Baltic States serve as a kind of neutral fringe in which Bolsheviks can be met in safety by representatives of western Powers and western commerce. Gold from the Russian State reserves was being stored there, Reval and Riga serving as outlets for whatever trade was conducted with the west by the bankrupt Government of Moscow. Undoubtedly such a position, recognized by Europe and at the same time highly useful to the Soviet, might be a lucrative one. But these newborn States hardly realized sufficiently that sooner or later an account would have to be rendered to a Russia restored to its national traditions and strength. Such a historical Russia would hardly consent to leave the gates of the Baltic in the hands of alien Governments, who had done their level best to thwart its efforts at restoration in 1919, who manifested on every occasion their hostility to the Russian people and were in more dangerous proximity to Petrograd than Ireland was to London. The Bolsheviks had no objection to using Lettish mercenaries for repressing popular risings in Russia, and Lettish stockbrokers for commercial dealings with the west, but the Russian Government could not be expected to remain anti-national for ever. In the case of Poland the necessities of the industrial situation are quite as obvious as those of the commercial one. Polish industry thrived on the economic connexion with Russia. Without the Russian market Poland is economically a lifeless strip of territory: Germany does not want Polish manufactures; the only commodity it did want from Poland was cheap labour, but recent occurrences in Silesia and elsewhere show to what an extent national animosities have obstructed intercourse, even in this respect. It will be a long time before Poland will be able to use the outlet to the sea for the purpose of considerable trade and it is not likely to become ever a sea-power of some standing. In the meantime Poland in 1921 was practically bankrupt, with its currency enormously depreciated. It would certainly not seek reunion with Russia, but it might regret the opportunity it had in 1919 for helping in the restoration of a national government in Russia. Lithuania, with its unhappy situation in the intersection of the lines of action of three powerful neighbours - Germany, Poland and Russia - had to keep up a front primarily against the Poles as its most dangerous neighbours. As German protection was excluded by the policy of the Entente and especially of France, it seemed certain that the Lithuanians would sooner or later have to lean on Russia. But it would have to be a Russia with a civilized Government and a solid national basis. As for Rumania, the seizure of Bessarabia, though confirmed by decree of the Entente Powers, and the wholesale dispossession of Russian landowners, had not pacified the province, of which half the population belonged to the Russian stock and in which even many Moldavians were reputed Russophiles. The alliance between Rumania and Poland, concluded in the spring of 1921, might serve the purpose against a possible Bolshevist offensive, but would hardly help against a reconstituted National State. In the Caucasus again, the various alien nationalities are so intermixed and so hostile to each other that it was impossible to expect the rise of any local federation or even of durable peace: the Armenians, the Georgians, the Caucasian Tartars, as soon as they were free of their movements, were inclined to jump at each other's throats, and the necessity of a strong empire holding their appetites for self-determination in check was recognized even in 1921: it formed the background of the Soviet Govern ments artificially created in Azerbaijan, in Georgia and in Armenia. The factor of economic interdependence was also clearly to the fore: Georgians normally hate Armenians, though the rural population of Georgian stock wants the cooperation of the Armenians in the towns. The Tartars would fain swoop down on the people in the plains, and have repeatedly tried to do so, but after a time the necessity of drawing supplies from peaceful agriculturists and traders asserts itself among them. The oil treasures of Baku are of paramount importance to any Russian State and on the other hand these oil wells cannot be exploited without drawing supplies from a "Hinterland" furnishing food and manufactured articles. Above all, these regions can reckon on peaceful development only if there is a strong police force to keep the heterogeneous elements in order. Such a force could only be provided under existing conditions by Russia. Even the Bolsheviks had found access to this disturbed region as negotiators and pacifiers although their methods of pacification were of a peculiar kind - mainly the extermination or driving out of elements opposed to the Soviets.
On the whole there could be no doubt in 1921 that anti-Russian tendencies and political arrangements found their chief support in the absurdity of Bolshevik rule as well as from a recollection of the oppressive policy of the Tsarist period. A change for the better in the direction of freedom and democracy in Russia would render it possible to restore to some degree the economic and political ties which rendered fruitful the coOperation between these interdependent elements. As things stood, Soviet Russia was in 1921 deprived of important commercial outlets and industrial auxiliaries, and had to pay a proportionate price for such help as she could get from them.
Commercial Intercourse
The curtailment of these resources was, however, of small importance when compared with the misrule of the Communist authorities in Russia proper. As a result of the civil war, of the proscription of trade, of the destruction of the middle classes, of the ruin of currency and credit, the processes of circulation had been impeded and blocked to such an extent that one had to look back to the Mongol invasions in order to find anything similar in magnitude to the misery of the situation up to the middle of 1921. The struggles in the Ukraine, with the repeated changes of rulers (democratic Ukrainians, the German protectorate, Petlura's bands, Bolsheviks, Denikin's White Guards, the Bolsheviks again, a Polish invasion, the Bolsheviks again), and the accompanying sequence of risings and punitive expeditions had made the south-western granary of the black soil almost unavailable for years to come. In the same way the Donets basin, the Cossack territories, the Volga provinces had been the scene of bitter conflicts and disturbances which had affected their productivity in a most unfavourable way.' In 1921 one could hardly talk of a Russian railway system. It was already worn out to a great extent by the war and rendered useless for the bulk of the population by the strain put on it by military exigencies. The Soviet administration had been trying hard to effect the most urgent repairs as to rails, engines and trucks, and had utilized a considerable part of the gold reserve to buy locomotives and rolling-stock abroad. But the needs were so great and the engineering resources of Russia had fallen so low, that there was no marked improvement in this respect.
The restrictions as to trade had been relaxed lately, by the decrees of March 29 and May 17 1921, and a lame attempt had been made to revive trade, but all these concessions were too much in contradiction with other standing features of Communist policy to produce an extensive change in the situation. The fact 1 Production of coal in the Donets basin for the first four months of 1913, 1919 and 1920 (in thousands of poods).
| Months | 1913 | 1919 | 1920 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| January. ... . | 143,000 | 36,600 | 14,000 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| February | 117,000 | 34,800 | 19,300 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| March. ... . | 156,000 | 33,300 | 24,300 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| April. .. . | 84,000 | 12,500 | 13,800 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Total . | 500,000 | 117,200 | 71,400 (Report of Lord Emmott's Committee.) remained that the dictatorship of the Soviets had employed itself systematically on cutting the connecting nerves of the economic organism and had thereby produced a state of paralysis which it was out of question to heal by a few decrees. One of the hateful consequences of this self-inflicted disorder was the severance between town and country. The rise and the growth of towns depend directly on ways of communication and the circulation of men and goods. They are primarily centres of distribution and exchange, and if the roads to them are obstructed they are unable to perform their economic functions of distribution and exchange. There was, of course, a secondary cause to their decay in "Sovdepia," namely the fact that they were centres of industry and affected by the ruin. But their decay as centres of commerce was bound in itself to produce a back flow of the population towards the villages. Such a back flow was especially indicated in Russia, where the distinction between rural and urban life was never a very marked one, and where large numbers of the inhabitants, such as cabmen, carriers, porters, small tradesmen, were recruited from the villages for a time and accustomed to return to their rural homes at certain periods of the year. In "Sovdepia" this mixed population tried to escape from the deadening grip of the Bolsheviks in the towns to the rural districts. It could live a freer life there, and, besides, it was nearer to the direct source of food-stuffs - the tilled soil. In this way the economic evolution of "Sovdepia" might be described as a regress from commercial to natural husbandry. Another side of this process of "naturalization" was connected with the disappearance of the mainspring of flourishing commerce - credit. The causes of this phenomenon are partly of an economic and partly of a political nature. As the whole system of Communism is based on war against capital, no accumulation of wealth or resources should be allowed in private hands. This being so, no transactions can be carried out in the strength of confidence in a person's ability to meet engagements in the future. Cash payments and (in view of the worthless currency) barter are the only legitimate forms of exchange. To this must be added the effect produced by arbitrary expropriations by the renunciation of State liabilities, at home and abroad, by the absence of any legal security against dispossession. In such conditions there can be no talk of prosperous economic intercourse. Not the market but the barrack is the social center. The will of a people to live cannot be entirely extinguished even by a Communist regime. Practice reacts by all conceivable means against the theory. Clandestine trade had been going on in Russia all through the years 1918-21. The Sukharevka market in Moscow teemed with people bidding all kinds of goods for sale. Those who succeeded in getting a passage by rail or by river-craft carried little stores of merchandise in sacks, ostensibly for their own use, in reality for trade purposes. What prices such contraband goods fetched was another matter: people had to pay fantastic sums for the risks incurred by the traders, besides making up for the depreciation of the currency. Anyhow the flow of speculation had never ceased in spite of all the decrees of the Soviet, and the rulers had recently made up their mind to recognize the existence and to admit in half-hearted way the legality of local trade (March 1921). This was proclaimed in the west as a great victory of common sense over extremist doctrine: it was in truth an inevitable admission which did not do away with the main causes of the disorder - insecurity, disruption of communications, distrust, corrupt and arbitrary interference by the commissars. As long as these causes continued to operate, the economic life of Russia would be suffering from their cumulative effects, and the social intercourse of the country was bound to be disturbed by the fever of fraudulent and rapacious profiteering in an atmosphere of misery and disease. AgricultureState of Peasantry. - One of the first decrees of the Bolsheviks proclaimed the abolition of private property and the nationalization of the land. In practice this decree sanctioned the disorderly grabbing of estates by the adjoining peasantry, and the new rulers connived at this form of appropriation for the sake of its psychological effect as a revolutionary act. This meant that they renounced "nationalization" at the same time as they professed to carry it out, and although they tried to save their face by distinguishing between the ownership attributed to the republic and the possession of land snatched by the peasants, the fact remained that the October Revolution as translated into agrarian terms meant the passage of some 50 million dessiatins (135 million ac.) from former landowners into the hands of "petty bourgeois" of the peasant class. The fact that some of the new proprietors held in village groups while others held in individual homesteads did not alter the fundamental opposition between the two social conceptions. The history of the years of Soviet domination up to July 1921 showed that the Communists did not realize at once the consequences of the agrarian revolution registered by their decree. They strove to carry out their programme of nationalization in two directions: they kept in the hands of the Commonwealth a considerable number of estates which had belonged to the State, the Imperial family and certain private landowners - they based their policy of food supply on the principle that the peasants were tenants at will of the republic liable to unlimited exactions for the benefit of the whole. Under the first head a series of measures were adopted for the exploitation of estates on communistic principles. In the peculiar terminology of the Soviet a number of "Sovkhoses" and "Kolkhoses" were carved out of the land fund and put under the economic control of the administration. The "Sovkhoses" were economic organizations carried on under the immediate direction of the Government while the "Kolkhoses" were communes and associations of peasants enjoying economic support from the Government. Sovkhoses either carried on agriculture in general or cultivated special kinds of technical plants such as beetroot or tobacco. In the first case the Sovkhoses were mainly organized as colonies of industrial workers fitted out with agricultural implements of all kinds, cattle, seeds, etc. The object was to make town workers more independent of the "yoke" of the villages by giving them the opportunity of growing their own corn and vegetables, managing their own dairy farms, etc. These annexes of the factories, designed to rear privileged proletarians in a healthy atmosphere of occasional rural occupation and to provide the surrounding villages with examples of model farming, proved a dismal failure. According to a report presented to a congress of agricultural workers in July 1920 the delays and red tape of administrative patronage rendered the condition of the proletarian husbandmen exceedingly precarious.' And as for the workers it could not be expected that they would be able to give satisfaction in their amphibious pursuits. The progress of the Kolkhoses was not more successful. Some were started as actual "communes" with individual cooperation and individual "profits," and those were doomed to be a failure; other Kolkhoses merely drew assistance from the Government, and had to encounter the hostility of neighbouring, less-privileged villages. The negative results of this experiment may be gauged from the fact that the number of Kolkhoses in action decreased in one year from 1,900 to 1,500. The immense area covered by peasant tenures on the old lines was little affected in its constitution by the Bolshevik usurpation. The attempt of the Soviet to bait the well-to-do peasants by the needy folk proved that the Communist intellectuals did not know the material with which they had to deal. There was no "village proletariat" to speak of, which could serve as a basis for the intended subversion of social relations in the villages; and such tramps and drunkards as the Bolsheviks were able to bring together in their crusade against welfare and order did not succeed in effecting much more than occasional disturbances, which ended mostly in the suppression of the "needy folk" by the peasantry. 1 According to the decree of June 8 1919, the control of the Sovkhoses farms was given to the Gla y semkhose (the Central Board of Agriculture), which (1) united all agricultural farms organized by the industrial proletariat; and (2) united all the central boards controlling those branches of industry which were in need of agricultural plants for their production, such as "Glaysakhar," "Glavtabak," "Glavkrachmal," "Centrochai," and "Pharmacentre" (Economic Life Oct. 2 1919). The original area allotted to different industrial boards amounted to 200,000 dess. (540,000 ac.), but the area actually distributed amongst them was much smaller, amounting only to 80,000 dess. ( Russian Economist, Jan. 1921). Much more irksome were the requisitions and expropriations exercised in virtue of the eminent ownership of the Commonwealth. The Soviet was constrained to fall back on this means of extracting some supplies for feeding the army and the towns, but the decrees enjoining the confiscation of the entire produce with the exception of the quantity necessary for the subsistence of the husbandmen, could not fail to provoke a stubborn resistance. The answer of the peasantry was that the farmers restricted the area under seed to the extent necessary to feed them and their families. Why should they toil to increase cultivation if the fruits of their labour were to be taken from them? According to a Soviet authority (Larin) the quantity used for cultivation had shrunk from 5 milliard poods in 1917 to 22 milliard poods in 1920. The Soviet Government brought all the weight of its terroristic coercion to bear against this passive resistance. It sent punitive expeditions, it encouraged its privileged proletarians to raid the countryside for supplies, it issued a decree ordering the maximum of available soil to be taken over in cultivation and threatening recalcitrant farmers with confiscation and imprisonment: all in vain as far as the general results were concerned. The hardships and disorder were increased hundredfold, but it proved impossible to drive a mass of ioo,000,000 peasants by the whip to perform work which was distasteful to them. The Soviet dictators had to acknowledge their defeat, and in the spring of 1921 (on March 23), in view of a threatening famine, a decree was issued by the Executive Council of the Soviet recognizing and guaranteeing the private tenure of householders who would conform to the payment of a tax in kind. Instead of charging the provinces with certain lump sums to be partitioned among the uyezds (districts) and, lower down among the volosts, and to be collected from the harvest according to the requirements of the Government, a land tax was imposed which had to be assessed according to the outfit and means of each separate household. It was calculated that this substitution of a land tax for the system of repartition amounted to the reduction from 470,000,000 poods of corn to 240,000,000. It remained to be seen whether the business of assessing and collecting the tax could be carried out with sufficient skill and fairness. The one positive asset of the revolutionary period from the point of view of the peasants consisted in the passage of land from the squires to the tillers, and this was certainly a conquest which the villagers were not going to give up. All attempts at political reconstruction would have to reckon with this basic fact. IndustryThe history of industrial economy presents the same features, and describes the same curve, from partial disorganization through blockade and war to general ruin in consequence of absurd Utopianism, and, ultimately, to desperate attempts to reconstitute production by reverting to methods condemned and destroyed by the Communists. There is, however, a notable difference: while the enormous block of the rural population was able to oppose unconquerable passive resistance to the dictators in spite of terrorism and heavy losses, the scanty stratum of the industrial workers was almost worn out in the struggle. We have again to start in our survey in the case from the years immediately preceding the Revolution. Bolshevik experiments were the culminating phase of a process of destruction which had started long before the Oct. 1917 upheaval: the guilt of the Communists consisted in the fact that instead of fighting the evil, they did everything in their power to aggravate it. The initial stage of industrial decay dates from the time when Russia was isolated from western resources by the Central Powers in alliance with Turkey and Bulgaria. The country had to attempt the impossible task of providing by its own primitive resources for the tremendous technical requirements of the war. The criminal levity of Tsarist administration under men like Sukhomlinov had left it with exhausted equipment and munitions by the end of some nine months of military operations, and an unsoluble problem was set to its patriotic leaders in 1915; they had to make up the deficiencies and to prepare further efforts. This meant technically that all the coal and all the railway machinery had to be diverted for the use of the army while the economic needs of the population were entirely disregarded. As a result, though, with the help of Zemstvo and Municipal Committees acting for purposes of national defence, the fabrication of shells and machine-guns was to some extent reestablished and maintained, the, economic work in the rear necessary for production and repairs was rapidly deteriorating. Train service, for example, was officially suspended for weeks between Petrograd and Moscow in order to make room for military transport and the most urgent needs of food supply. Repairs of locomotives had to be carried out in a more and more imperfect and insufficient manner, and the statistics as to the state of rolling-stock presented drastic symptoms of a lamentable deterioration. The March 1917 Revolution accentuated all these evils because another cause of decay came to the fore with ever-increasing force: the discontent and the demoralization of the workers broke out like a stream of all-consuming lava. The responsibility for the sufferings of the time was laid entirely at the door of greedy capitalists, and the workers were convinced that they were justified in demanding increased wages and decreased labour. A Minister of Labour of the Provisional Government, Skobelev, upheld emphatically their contention.
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