Food Dictatorship

The decrees of May 1918

By the spring of 1918 the urban food situation had reached the point where the bread ration fell to around fifty grams a day. A decree of 9 May reaffirmed the state monopoly on grain and the ban on free trade, and the joint decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and Sovnarkom of 13 May granted the People's Commissariat for Food effectively unlimited powers of collection. The decree declared anyone holding undeclared surplus grain an enemy of the people and prescribed imprisonment of no less than ten years.

Organizational measures followed. From late May armed food brigades formed from factory workers were sent into the countryside, and a decree of 11 June established the Committees of the Poor, whose role was to identify where grain was held inside the village. An incentive structure was built in by allotting the committees a share of what was collected.

The language of class war

The decrees justified themselves as a struggle against kulaks and bag-men. In practice collection was not confined to rich peasants. Because the determination of surplus was subordinate to regional quota figures, middle and even poor peasants were repeatedly assessed. The gap between the policy's class justification and the indiscriminate character of its enforcement remained a feature of peasant policy long afterwards.

Economic compensation was largely notional. State fixed prices were a small fraction of market ones, and by 1920 less than twenty percent of requisitioned grain was compensated with industrial goods. With industry in collapse there was little to exchange.

Outcome and replacement

The food dictatorship succeeded to a degree in supplying a minimum ration to the Red Army and urban workers. It also removed the peasant's incentive to produce, and from 1920 provoked resistance in the two forms of reduced sowing and armed revolt. A large part of urban consumption continued to be met through the prohibited trade it was meant to suppress.

The regime was dismantled with the introduction of the tax in kind in March 1921. The underlying principle, that the state controls grain circulation and sets procurement prices, did not disappear. It returned as emergency measures in the grain crisis of 1928 and then as the system of compulsory deliveries that followed collectivization.