Did the Bolsheviks have the support of the Russian peasantry?

[Ritzy Cat]

I'm not able to find definitive evidence on this, but question in the title. A book with clear anti-Soviet sentiments I am having to read makes the claim that the peasantry "never really supported the Bolsheviks" and I am naturally doubting it.

Thank you

[Hatshepsut]

In one bourgeois yet fairly honest view,

“The Land Decree (1917) responded to at least a substantial body of peasant opinion. It abolished private ownership of the land and established, in principle, ownership of it by those who worked in agriculture. However, class war ensued in the countryside as poor peasants, with Bolshevik encouragement, turned against the richer peasants” (Archie Brown, 2009, The Rise & Fall of Communism, p. 53).

Later Bolshevik grain requisitioning under the rubric of War Communism led to a serious 1921 famine in the countryside. Hard to imagine they were too popular then, and indeed, this led to the New Economic Policy of limited private grain markets announced in 1921 once the White Russian factions had been defeated.

[Blake's Baby]

What do you or the authors of the book you refer to mean by 'peasantry'? That term can be used to lump together out-and-out capitalists, the petite-bourgeoisie, artisans and rural proletarians.

It's arguable that it was actually the soviet decree on land that created a large peasant class of free landholders, from the tenant farmers of the large estates.

[Ritzy Cat]

Here is the context:

"And so was launched a swelling, unevenly matched war by the radicalized, industrialized cities--the minority--to bring to heel the conservative, religion-saturated, profoundly mistrustful countryside--the vast majority. Who were never truly fervent Bolshevik supporters."

In the previous paragraph the author quotes Lenin "Hang no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers" and such a quote bogged with pathos clearly demonstrates the anti-bolshevik viewpoint of this author.

The book is called "mastering the art of Soviet Cooking"; I have to read it for a class unrelated to economics or politics but in discussions I am trying to dispel as many myths as I can about the Russian Revolution/Soviet Union as I can because this is just indoctrinating and alienating.

[Os Cangaceiros]

The Socialist Revolutionaries got more support from the peasants than the Bolsheviks did, if memory serves me correctly.

[Hatshepsut]

The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), founded 1898, was the party the Bolsheviks came out of. The Socialist Revolutionary Party, founded 1903, had the agrarian program for socialism in one step, without a capitalist interlude. In 1917 it split into Left and Right SRs; the Left SRs joined the Bolsheviks which then smashed the Right SRs.

It's not "indoctrination" to say that relations between Bolsheviks and peasants were strained at best, nor to say that later Communist policy & officials badly mistreated the peasantry as part of their programs of forced collectivization & industrialization. These are historical facts.

Though it was Lenin, against the wishes of Trotsky and others in the Party, who authorized the New Economic Policy as a strategic retreat from collectivization.

[John Nada]

Reading a review of that book, she said the Revolution wiped out Russia's food culture, for which the Tsarist era was know for apparently.:laugh: Sounds like one of those "emigre memoirs", where it's mandatory to say the USSR was "Hell on Earth"(TM). Can't just say it was boring like the US, nobody wants to read(or publish) that shit.

Lenin did say this, even has its own wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin%27s_Hanging_Order): https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/aug/11c.htm And the Library of Congress has an alternate translation: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/ad2kulak.html Sight differences(make people say,"They're throttling the kulaks" vs. "Let's choke the kulaks"). This was a pretty bad war.

[Hatshepsut]

Perhaps a consequence of desperation due to inadequate forces. The capitalist countries also requisitioned grain during WWI, and seized factories to convert them to war production staffed with all-but compulsory labor. They were able to do so with little violence not only because many civilians still supported the war (although massive casualties was making it unpopular), but more importantly, because civilian populations in capitalist countries were largely unarmed and war procurement boards had the backing of numerous, well-organized police to enforce their orders if necessary.

Lenin, on the other hand, didn't have that many troops for a place the size of European Russia, while peasants in opposition were sufficiently armed to resist. Quite a few of Yevgenia Bosch's grain collectors got shot, too. The peasants sometimes burned their farms rather than surrender the grain. This doesn't excuse the Bolshevik activities but does put them in the context of a war where all sides were willing to use extreme brutality.

Russia was indeed hell on earth at times of war. It was hellish even for Bolshevik leaders who went hungry, too. Alhough capitalist regimes in the peacefully ascendant West manage to create their own, slow-motion hells to decorate a new century. The USA keeps 160000 prisoners incarcerated on life-without-parole sentences many countries have abolished, a significant fraction of these handed down for relatively trivial offenses where a defendant had a prior record. Such sentences tend to be served out in conditions of near-solitary confinement.

Sentencing Project, 2013
http://sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/inc_Life%20Goes%20On%202013.pdf