The Bolsheviks "hoped," Kautsky thunders, "to overcome the substantial
peasants in the villages by granting political rights exclusively to
the poorest peasants. They then again granted representation to the
substantial peasantry." (Page 216.)
Kautsky enumerates the external "contradictions" of our peasant
policy, not dreaming to inquire into its general direction, and into
the internal contradictions visible in the economic and political
situation of the country.
In the Russian peasantry as it entered the Soviet order there were
three elements: the poor, living to a considerable extent by the sale
of their labor-power, and forced to buy additional food for their
requirements; the middle peasants, whose requirements were covered by
the products of their farms, and who were able to a limited extent to
sell their surplus; and the upper layer--_i.e._, the rich peasants,
the vulture (kulak) class, which systematically bought labor-power and
sold their agricultural produce on a large scale. It is quite
unnecessary to point out that these groups are not distinguished by
definite symptoms or by homogeneousness throughout the country.
Still, on the whole, and generally speaking, the peasant poor
represented the natural and undeniable allies of the town proletariat,
whilst the vulture class represented its just as undeniable and
irreconcilable enemies. The most hesitation was principally to be
observed amongst the widest, the _middle_ section of the peasantry.
Had not the country been so exhausted, and if the proletariat had had
the possibility of offering to the peasant masses the necessary
quantity of commodities and cultural requirements, the adaptation of
the toiling majority of the peasantry to the new regime would have
taken place much less painfully. But the economic disorder of the
country, which was not the result of our land or food policy, but was
generated by the causes which preceded the appearance of that policy,
robbed the town for a prolonged period of any possibility of giving
the village the products of the textile and metal-working industries,
imported goods, and so on. At the same time, industry could not
entirely cease drawing from the village all, albeit the smallest
quantity, of its food resources. The proletariat demanded of the
peasantry the granting of food credits, economic subsidies in respect
of values which it is only now about to create. The symbol of those
future values was the credit symbol, now finally deprived of all
value. But the peasant mass is not very capable of historical
detachment. Bound up with the Soviet Government by the abolition of
landlordism, and seeing in it a guarantee against the restoration of
Tsarism, the peasantry at the same time not infrequently opposes the
collection of corn, considering it a bad bargain so long as it does
not itself receive printed calico, nails, and kerosine.
The Soviet Government naturally strove to impose the chief weight of
the food tax upon the upper strata of the village. But, in the
unformed social conditions of the village, the influential peasantry,
accustomed to lead the middle peasants in its train, found scores of
methods of passing on the food tax from itself to the wide masses of
the peasantry, thereby placing them in a position of hostility and
opposition to the Soviet power. It was necessary to awaken in the
lower ranks of the peasantry suspicion and hostility towards the
speculating upper strata. This purpose was served by the Committees of
Poverty. They were built up of the rank and file, of elements who in
the last epoch were oppressed, driven into a dark corner, deprived of
their rights. Of course, in their midst there turned out to be a
certain number of semi-parasitic elements. This served as the chief
text for the demagogues amongst the populist "Socialists," whose
speeches found a grateful echo in the hearts of the village vultures.
But the mere fact of the transference of power to the village poor had
an immeasurable revolutionary significance. For the guidance of the
village semi-proletarians, there were despatched from the towns
parties from amongst the foremost workers, who accomplished invaluable
work in the villages. The Committees of Poverty became shock
battalions against the vulture class. Enjoying the support of the
State, they thereby obliged the middle section of the peasantry to
choose, not only between the Soviet power and the power of the
landlords, but between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the
semi-proletarian elements of the village on the one hand, and the yoke
of the rich speculators on the other. By a series of lessons, some of
which were very severe, the middle peasantry was obliged to become
convinced that the Soviet regime, which had driven away the landlords
and bailiffs, in its turn imposes new duties upon the peasantry, and
demands sacrifices from them. The political education of tens of
millions of the middle peasantry did not take place as easily and
smoothly as in the school-room, and it did not give immediate and
unquestionable results. There were risings of the middle peasants,
uniting with the speculators, and always in such cases falling under
the leadership of White Guard landlords; there were abuses committed
by local agents of the Soviet Government, particularly by those of the
Committees of Poverty. But the fundamental political end was attained.
The powerful class of rich peasantry, if it was not finally
annihilated, proved to be shaken to its foundations, with its
self-reliance undermined. The middle peasantry, remaining politically
shapeless, just as it is economically shapeless, began to learn to
find its representative in the foremost worker, as before it found it
in the noisy village speculator. Once this fundamental result was
achieved, the Committees of Poverty, as temporary institutions, as a
sharp wedge driven into the village masses, had to yield their place
to the Soviets, in which the village poor are represented side by side
with the middle peasantry.
The Committees of Poverty existed about six months, from June to
December, 1918. In their institution, as in their abolition, Kautsky
sees nothing but the "waverings" of Soviet policy. Yet at the same
time he himself has not even a suspicion of any practical lessons to
be drawn. And after all, how should he think of them? Experience such
as we are acquiring in this respect knows no precedent; and questions
and problems such as the Soviet Government is now solving in practice
have no solution in books. What Kautsky calls contradictions in policy
are, in reality, the _active manoeuvring_ of the proletariat in the
spongy, undivided, peasant mass. The sailing ship has to manoeuvre
before the wind; yet no one will see contradictions in the
manoeuvres which finally bring the ship to harbor.
In questions as to agricultural communes and Soviet farms, there could
also be found not a few "contradictions," in which, side by side with
individual mistakes, there are expressed various stages of the
revolution. What quantity of land shall the Soviet State leave for
itself in the Ukraine, and what quantity shall it hand over to the
peasants; what policy shall it lay down for the agricultural communes;
in what form shall it give them support, so as not to make them the
nursery for parasitism; in what form is control to be organized over
them--all these are absolutely new problems of Socialist economic
construction, which have been settled beforehand neither theoretically
nor practically, and in the settling of which the general principles
of our programme have even yet to find their actual application and
their testing in practice, by means of inevitable temporary deviations
to right or left.
But even the very fact that the Russian proletariat has found support
in the peasantry Kautsky turns against us. "This has introduced into
the Soviet regime an economically reactionary element which was spared
(!) the Paris Commune, as its dictatorship did not rely on peasant
Soviets."
As if in reality we could accept the heritage of the feudal and
bourgeois order with the possibility of excluding from it at will "an
economically reactionary element"! Nor is this all. Having poisoned
the Soviet regime by its "reactionary element," the peasantry has
deprived us of its support. To-day it "hates" the Bolsheviks. All this
Kautsky knows very certainly from the radios of Clemenceau and the
squibs of the Mensheviks.
In reality, what is true is that wide masses of the peasantry are
suffering from the absence of the essential products of industry. But
it is just as true that every other regime--and there were not a few
of them, in various parts of Russia, during the last three
years--proved infinitely more oppressive for the shoulders of the
peasantry. Neither monarchical nor democratic governments were able to
increase their stores of manufactured goods. Both of them found
themselves in need of the peasant's corn and the peasant's horses. To
carry out their policy, the bourgeois governments--including the
Kautskian-Menshevik variety--made use of a purely bureaucratic
apparatus, which reckons with the requirements of the peasant's farm
to an infinitely less degree than the Soviet apparatus, which consists
of workers and peasants. As a result, the middle peasant, in spite of
his waverings, his dissatisfaction, and even his risings, ultimately
always comes to the conclusion that, however difficult it is for him
at present under the Bolsheviks, under every other regime it would be
infinitely more difficult for him. It is quite true that the Commune
was "spared" peasant support. But in return the Commune was not spared
annihilation by the peasant armies of Thiers! Whereas our army,
four-fifths of whom are peasants, is fighting with enthusiasm and with
success for the Soviet Republic. And this one fact, controverting
Kautsky and those inspiring him, gives the best possible verdict on
the peasant policy of the Soviet Government.