Prodrazvyorstka

Structure

A Sovnarkom decree of 11 January 1919 systematized requisitioning. The centre fixed a national collection total and broke it downward through province, district, volost, and finally the individual household. Because quotas were set to match figures handed down from above rather than to any survey of the actual harvest, households with no surplus were assigned deliveries all the same.

Enforcement fell to the armed food brigades directed by the People's Commissariat for Food. In the summer of 1918 the Committees of the Poor were mobilized as collaborators inside the village, but criticism that they turned the middle peasant into an enemy led to their absorption into the soviets at the end of 1918, after which brigades and local soviets collected directly.

Enforcement and resistance

What was nominally taken was surplus, but by 1920 the seizure of seed and subsistence grain had become common. Payment was made at state fixed prices that bore no comparison to market ones, and the proportion compensated in industrial goods was very small. For the peasant this amounted to confiscation.

Peasants answered in two ways. One was the passive response of reducing sown area and cutting production back to household consumption. The other was armed revolt. Between 1920 and 1921 large peasant wars were fought in Tambov, West Siberia, the middle Volga, and Ukraine, and regular Red Army units were committed to suppress them.

The turn

Following the decision of the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, prodrazvyorstka was replaced by a tax in kind. The essential change was that the assessment was fixed and published before sowing and that whatever remained after payment was the peasant's to dispose of. The absolute burden fell as well: the 1921 assessment was set at less than half the previous year's requisitioning target.

Prodrazvyorstka was not a Bolshevik invention. Its model was the grain apportionment the tsarist state introduced amid the food crisis of 1916, and the Provisional Government also proclaimed a state grain monopoly. What distinguished the Bolshevik version was its combination with armed enforcement and its formulation in the language of class struggle.