REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

Vadim GUZUN: The Leninist Alimentary Dictatorship - The Model For Stalinist Hungers … 237
destroyed any return on livestock farming that had amplified before the war, and the
authors of the requisitions belonged to both camps: “Sometimes the red ones, other times
the white ones rob the population of everything they find in the barns and around the
house. They also commandeered hunting weapons; the game and wild animals rose in
number, often constituting a danger to the life of the humans and domestic animals.” In a
village from Taiga, in the month of August 1919, the Romanian volunteers discovered
one of the most ancient means to hide the grains and the winter garment: digging
graveyards. Moreover, the volunteers confirmed the peasants’ refusal to work and the
intensification of the requisitions, following the “drastic measures” for supplying the
army 18 .
A pressure means whereby the State “stimulated” draining the cereals, with mostly
terrorist nature, was taking hostages. Relevant examples in this respect may be found in a
volume of documents on the theme of the anticommunist resistance from Western
Siberia. Considering the “difficult” alimentary situation, the deputy head of the Political
Office from the county of Ishimsk and the deputy provincial commissar for the supply of
Tyumen, in the beginning of the month of December 1920, ordered the “immediate arrest
of all koulaks, no exception”, from a number of 8 volosts. It was stipulated that the
population should be informed that the villagers were taken hostages until the overall
execution of the food tax. From the telegram of the supply commissar of the county of
Tobolsk, there ensues that in the Abalax county, a 35-member detachment was delegated
for confiscating the wealth, following the lack of payment of the State obligations,
mentioning that, previously, 10 peasants were taken hostages. On the 10 th of December
1920, the provincial commissar of the supply, discontent with the results of the seizures
from the volost of Ghilev, showed that, for ensuring the fulfilment on time of the
razverstka, a “brutal and merciless retaliation with the koulaks” was called for.
Furthermore, Yndenbaum asked that, in every locality, 10 hostages should be captured 19 .
The main reason for the resistance from Western Siberia was the fear of famine.
According to the minutes of the Soviet organizations in the province of Tambov, of
21 st of July 1919, already affected by hunger at the time, the party activists
recognized that if they disposed of the grain from Siberia, Don and Ukraine, they
would not have been compelled to “take the last bread slice from the peasant”. A
report from late 1919 shows that the State almost exclusively obtained all grain
through confiscations, through detachments constituted according to concrete plans.
Isolation ensured the success of the punitive expeditions: “The detachments usually
acted from the periphery to the centre of each county, in order not to allow the
passage of the bread from one county to another; pickets were installed on all roads,
in order to eliminate the possibility for the bread to pass within the county”. These
detachments confiscated the entire annual surplus. Perfecting the forced-seizure
mechanism is rendered this way: “If, according to last year’s system, the peasant
could refuse, as he risked nothing; this year his situation changed, as he risks all
18 Ibidem, pp. 42, 53-54, 117.
19 V.I. Shishkin, For Soviets wihout Communists. The Peasants’ Revolt in the Tyumen Gubernia.
1921. Documents (in Russia), Novosibirsk, Sibirsky Hronograf Publishing, 2000, pp. 52-53, 56.