The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (54 page)

This was not a system likely to suffer from labour-shortage. Members of the family might go to the towns, or the army, for some of the year, but they could come back at harvest-time to help the women and old men, and hundreds of thousands seem to have done so—to the factory owners’ eternal lamentation. Moreover, the withdrawal from the land of so many people meant that there was more space for animals on it: and the first great surprise of Russian agriculture was the growth recorded, in the census of 1916,
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in the animal population. The cattle-population appears
to have increased by twenty-five per cent, the sheep and goat population still more. This gave many advantages, though it also lessened the amount of surplus grain available for the towns. In the same way, removal of people from the land made it possible for more land to be farmed: and, despite the supposedly savage effects of conscription, peasant land-sowing did not only not decline, but increased by eighteen per cent in the war-years.

It was not at all true to make out the Russian food-problem to be a consequence of low harvests, provoked by labour-shortage. The harvests were, on the contrary, rather higher than before the war, if due allowance is made for the occupation by Germany of the empire’s western fringe. Taking the area available in 1916—the forty-seven provinces of European Russia—the harvest of 1914 was 4,304 million poods (1 pood= 16 kg.), that of 1915 was 4,659 million, that of 1916, 3,916 million. Even in 1917, when the food shortage of the towns became crippling, the harvest itself was not too far below pre-war levels—3,800 million poods, not including potatoes.
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It was certainly true that army demand had risen; but it was also true that exports had fallen by an equivalent amount. If it had been a simple question of dividing the grain available by the mouths that wanted to consume it, there would have been enough and to spare. Lositski quotes the following figures:
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In other words, the harvest of 1917 ought to have been enough to supply all needs, even leaving out of account the reserves that 21 out of the 44 provinces involved claimed to have.

Part of the difficulty in actually carrying out the operation of supplying that section of the country that did not live in the grain-producing areas was brought about by transport; the railways, overburdened in wartime, could not make sufficient grain available both to towns and army: a problem, however, also distorted by legend, to a degree that deserves separate discussions. Certainly, the towns did not benefit from the constant harvests of peasant Russia, but found themselves, on the contrary increasingly deprived of food. In 1913–14 they had taken 390 million poods of grain. In 1915–16 they got 330 million; and in 1916–17, 295 million, although in these years their population, swollen by natural increase,
refugees, and migrant labour, increased by one-third. In January and February 1917, Moscow and the Central Provinces as a whole received less than a third of what they needed; by mid-summer, they were receiving 6,256 waggons of grain per month of the 30,000 they were supposed to get. In December, 1916, Petrograd had got 524,000 poods of grain in place of the 3,740,000 it needed, and in January forty-nine grain-waggons per day of the eighty-nine it needed. This was the vital factor in revolution, from March until the end of the year; and it became all the greater in its effects, since the quantities that were delivered were not divided up fairly, or even, sometimes, divided up at all. Suppliers sometimes held it back, at all levels, so as to profit from the inevitable price-increase: rye rose in price in Moscow from a base of seventy-six kopecks per pood in 1914 to 333 per cent in March 1917 and 666 per cent in the autumn. Government attempts to control prices usually caused havoc. The bakers in Petrograd complained that they could not afford to bake bread at the declared price, because that price was out of joint with the price of fuel; and yet if the government tried to control fuel-prices, it would merely provoke a dry-up of fuel-supplies. Moscow and Petrograd developed all the revolutionary symptoms of a town under siege, but without the physical presence of the enemy that usually enforced unity for the duration.
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Many explanations—other than the false one of too little grain—were advanced for the dry-up of food-supplies. It was said that the army had taken up too much of the grain. But the armed forces, in reality, took less than had been exported before the war. In 1913–14, 640 million poods of grain had been exported from the area in question; thereafter, exports declined to a trivial figure (in 1916–17, not three million poods). Army demand rose from eighty-five million poods in 1913–14 to 600 million in 1915–16, and fell again in 1916–17 to 485 million. The chief factor was that the peasantry were not marketing grain as before. About twenty-five per cent of the total harvest had been marketed before the war; but by 1916–17, only fifteen per cent was marketed, although urban demand had risen by a third. Where 1,200 million poods had come on the market in 1914, 978 million did so in 1915 and 794 million in 1916. Less than 300 million went to the towns, the rest more or less completely to the army; and the country’s animals got a third as much again as towns and army put together.

The peasants preferred to use their grain for livestock or for their own consumption, because inflation had gradually forced this course upon them. Theoretically, they should have benefited from the high food-prices of wartime; in some areas near the large towns, they no doubt did so. But most of the grain was produced in scattered villages, remote from a railway-line and without easy access to markets. The grain would be collected by a
local dealer, with a hut to store it and a cart to carry it: this, not the peasant who produced the grain, was the ‘kulak’. He would sell it in turn to a larger dealer, who would perhaps pass it on to a bank—and banks, in 1916, held forty per cent of the country’s grain-reserve, doling it out according to government willingness to increase the prices. Any profit that the grain acquired would thus stick to innumerable scales, and the peasant would be left with little, unless he were near enough to the market himself, and able to by-pass dealers and banks. To start with, peasants certainly went on selling, to make up for the loss of cottage-industries, or the rise in prices of manufactured items they might wish to buy. But inflation in the summer of 1916 drove prices of this type of item far above what the peasant could pay. In Simbirsk, for instance, a pair of boots that cost seven roubles before the war cost thirty in 1916; in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, calico products rose to 319 per cent of their pre-war price in September 1916; horse-shoe nails, which cost three roubles and forty kopecks the pood in 1914 rose, early in 1916, to forty roubles. There was a ‘scissors-crisis’, not unlike that of the 1920s, when the price of manufactured items went so far above the prices that the peasant (as distinct from the dealer) would obtain for his produce that many peasants simply relapsed into subsistence: hiding their grain, where they could, or giving it out to animals, where they could not. Government institutions for collecting grain failed;
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a beginning was made, ineffectively, with requisitioning-squads; in the end, the only part of the economic mechanism that functioned with efficiency was the Black Market, and after a time even it was adversely affected by inflation. A crude system of barter, sometimes through co-operatives, sometimes by ‘bag-men’, replaced the money-exchange; and it was with this system that the Bolsheviks got through their worst crisis.

It was characteristic of the times that men should have misunderstood the difficulties of grain-supply. These difficulties were variously written down, by civilians to the army, by anti-semites to speculators,
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by revolutionaries to landlords and ‘kulaks’, by liberal economists such as Struve to blundering price-controls, and—most bizarrely of all—by Antsiferov to peasant prosperity. The greatest and longest-lasting such explanation also happened, not altogether coincidentally, to be the one that seemed to remove most of the political heat from the issue: it was claimed that the railways were insufficient to transport the country’s grain, because wartime needs, particularly those of the army, cut across grain-supply. The grain-crisis was thus said to have been caused by a railway-crisis. But the evidence suggests that, if anything, it was the other way about.

Army transport authorities ran the railways of the front area which, generously interpreted by them, came to encompass about a third of the rolling-stock, and that part of the country ‘west of the meridian Saint Petersburg—Sevastopol’. The wastage with which these lines were run was notorious: generals wrestled for supply-waggons, and were slow in forwarding empty ones; battles of competence developed; crazy prudence reigned as regards speed and length of trains; unloading was never efficiently carried out. Even so, army transport, as a whole, did not add an extra strain to the railways. The railways of that part of Russia had served importing from, and exporting to Germany, or the needs of western provinces that were quite soon occupied by the Central Powers, and that in any case suffered from an immediate drop in economic activity as soon as war came. The army’s railway-traffic did little more than take up slack created by this drop, in Poland and elsewhere, as exporting to Germany (and of course importing) came to a stop. In 1913, these lines had taken ninety-three million passengers and 3,381 million poods of freight. In 1915 they took army traffic similar in scale: ninety-five million passengers, 3,304 million poods of freight; in 1916, 112 million and 3,763 million respectively. There were of course temporary crises of some severity, notably with the evacuation and retreat of September 1915, which caused a general railway-crisis in the country. But army movement alone was no greater than the civilian movement of that section of the country before the war, and, for much of the time, army movement was less.

The rest of the country ought, then, to have had as much rolling-stock available for its purposes as before the war. Indeed, it should have had more, because grain-exporting, which had taken a substantial number of waggons and locomotives in 1913, came to an almost complete stop: in the second half of 1913, 712,000 waggon-loads of grain had to be shifted, but in the equivalent period of 1914, only 353,000. But this advantage was obscured by further legendry, to the effect that the country’s railways fell into disrepair, and that the amount of rolling-stock available declined. Neither assertion had a germ of truth in it. On the contrary, the ministry of transport became the greatest spender in Russia, after the war ministry, and its expenditure rose from 400 million roubles in 1915 to 1,100 million in 1916. In all, it spent 2,500 million roubles during the war, and acquired a great deal of mileage and rolling stock. By 1917, 4,000 kilometres of new line, 1,195 of doubletracking, and 1,500 of gauge-broadening had been undertaken; a further 5,000 had been prepared for future construction, and 3,500 were already being built. Rolling-stock followed this pattern. Although the Germans, occupying the western part of the country, made off with a considerable amount of rolling-stock, the quantity
of rolling-stock available in Russia actually rose throughout the war, with American imports and Russian construction. In 1918, there were 18,757 locomotives and 444,000 waggons as against 17,036 and 402,000 respectively in 1914, in the territory subsequently to become the U.S.S.R. In 1915–16, 2,188 locomotives and 70,000 waggons were acquired from Russia and America, which added a tenth to the existing stock, and of course, a tenth of higher quality than the rest. It was thus misleading to explain Russia’s railway-difficulties in terms of a declining infrastructure, however much it suited both opposition and government to do so.

The railways’ principal difficulty was that the patterns of economic life altered very rapidly in wartime, as the country modernised. Grain was an obvious source of trouble. It was, apart from coal, the bulkiest item to be carried, whether by waterway or railway. During the war, traditional suppliers failed to supply as before: the great estates, the northern Caucasus and the Kuban region were all affected by problems of shortages; and yet the railway-system had been geared to transport quantities of grain from such surplus-producing areas to the deficit-areas. In reality, the deficit-areas were often deficient, not in grain, but in farmers willing and able to market it; and if their supplies could be got at—as the Bolsheviks got at them—more grain would have been available, both locally and nationally. The railway network thus had to follow a switch in supply, at a time when all manner of other calls were being made on it. It was not trains, but timetables, that offered problems. Trains chased grain, not the other way about, and although the railways had to carry less grain than before 1914, that quantity needed longer railway-journeys and more trains. The government helplessly watched grain, train and fuel competing, and each falling into chaos. This occurred at a time when economic activity at home was making demands on the railways that they had never experienced before. Labour-mobility brought an increase from 235 million to 348 million passengers in the period 1914–16; increased movement of goods similarly caused the railways to shift 17,228 million poods of freight in 1916, as against 13,826 million before the war. It was not that the railway-network declined—rather the contrary: it was rather that railway-development and railway-usage ran higgledy-piggledy after the economic boom, without plan, and to the confusion of all concerned.
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