The Council of the People’s Commissars Decree on Prodrazverstka issued

On January 11, 1919 under the decree of the Council of the People’s Commissars in the entire territory of Russia was imposed Prodrazverstka (food apportionment). It obliged peasantry to surrender the surpluses of almost any kind of agricultural produce for a fixed price. The absolute limit of a given product for personal or household needs was pre-determined by the state. Thus the Soviet state resumed, in broadened version, the policy of food levy applied by the tsar’s government and later by the Provisional government in order to support the industrial centers during the war and economic dislocation.

V.I. Lenin considered Prodrazverstka the main element and the basis of the entire policy of “the war communism”. In his work “On the food tax” he wrote: “It was a sort of “war communism” when we took away from peasants all the surpluses and sometimes not surpluses but a part of rations needed for a peasant. We took it to cover the charges for the army and the supply for workers. Mostly we took it on credit, paying soft money. There was no other way for us to defeat capitalists and landed classes in a separate, petty bourgeois country”.

Food levy was carried out by the agencies of the People’s Commissariat for Food Supplies (Narkomprod), food levy units with the assistance of the Poor Peasants Committees (kombed) and local Soviets. At the first stage, in the second half of 1918 – beginning of 1919, Prodrazverska spread only over a part of the Central Russia provinces and extended just to bread and grain fodder. During the laying-in campaign of 1919-1920 it involved the entire territory of the RSFSR, the Soviet Ukraine and Belorussia, Turkestan and Siberia applying also to potatoes, meat and by the end of 1920 almost all agricultural produce.

Food was confiscated from the peasants in fact for free since the banknotes given to them as compensation were devalued but the government could not provide peasants with manufactured goods for the confiscated grain due to the industrial production decline during the war and the intervention.

The peasants’ discontent and aggressive resistance to the food levy were suppressed by the armed units of the Poor Peasants Committees as well as the Red Army special detachments and the units of the Prodarmy (food levy units). In response the peasants began to adopt passive ways resistance: they concealed grain, refused to accept the devalued money, reduced the areas under crops to avoid producing useless for them surpluses, and produced only the quantity needed for their own families.

Prodrazverstka had grave consequences both in economic and social spheres. The sphere of commodity-money relations had narrowed dramatically: the trade curtailed, the free sale of grain was prohibited, money devaluation quickened, workers’ wages were naturalized. All of that made it impossible to revive the national economics. Besides, the relationship between a city and a village, peasants and representatives of the Soviet rule worsened considerably, peasant revolts broke out everywhere. That is why in March of 1921 Prodrazverstka was replaced by the fixed food tax.

Lit.: Гимпельсон Е. Г. «Военный коммунизм»: политика, практика, идеология. М., 1973; Дмитренко В. П. Продразвёрстка // Большая советская энциклопедия. Т. 21. М., 1975; Кара-Мурза С. Г. Чрезвычайные продовольственные меры // Кара-Мурза С. Г. Советская цивилизация. Кн. 1. М., 2002. Гл. 6; Кондратьев Н. Д. Рынок хлебов и его регулирование во время войны и революции. М., 1991; Осипова Т. В. Российское крестьянство в революции и гражданской войне. М., 2001; Lars T. L. Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921. Berkeley, 1990.