Food Detachments (Prodotryady)

A decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of 13 May 1918 granted the People's Commissar for Food (Narkomprod) emergency powers against the rural bourgeoisie, and the decree of 9 May 1918 confirmed the state monopoly on the grain trade. Alongside these measures, the Food and Requisition Army of Narkomprod (the Prodarmiya), consisting of armed food detachments, was created in May-June 1918, and on 20 May 1918 an Administration of the Chief Commissar and Military Director of all food detachments was set up within the commissariat. The detachments were given emergency powers, and for guarding and transporting goods they could be filled out with Red Guards (until spring 1918), demobilised soldiers and sailors.

Organization and command

Detachment members were mainly urban factory workers and poor-peasant volunteers. Trade-union structures acted as auxiliaries of the requisitions: a military-food bureau of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions operated under Narkomprod, and at local food committees provincial and district workers' bureaux formed and directed workers' food detachments. A detachment member's certificate was often issued in the name of two bodies at once, Narkomprod and the trade-union bureau.

Half of the food collected went to the organization that had formed the detachment and the other half to the People's Commissariat for Food of the Russian SFSR. The rules spoke of requisitioning "surpluses", but the norms were not observed in practice, and because there was nowhere else to obtain grain, what the peasants had was at times taken almost completely. Compensation covered less than half of the grain requisitioned in 1919 and under 20 per cent in 1920, so the requisitions were in effect uncompensated.

How requisitioning worked

The detachments were meant to secure supplies for the Red Army and the industrial centres amid an urban food crisis, but they quickly met armed resistance. The Russian historian Alexander Senin documented cases in which detachment fighters fired indiscriminately, took food from train passengers and shot at trains, killing civilians and railway workers. Peasants who resisted were branded saboteurs, and in some regions the detachments met armed revolt.

Peasant resistance grew with the requisitions. In the Tambov region in 1920-1921, resistance to forced confiscation of grain turned into guerrilla war under Alexander Antonov, and the conduct of requisitioning detachments became the trigger of that rising. Peasant uprisings in a number of other areas, including Penza province, grew out of the same conditions. The historian Orlando Figes notes that most villages saw themselves as communities of equal members related by kin and were hostile to attempts to split them, so the detachments often could not carry out their tasks without violence. As Richard Pipes assessed, peasants cut their sown area once the incentive to produce a surplus disappeared, and the outcome contributed to the famine of 1921-1922.

Disbandment

A decision of the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in March 1921 replaced the grain requisitioning system with a tax in kind (prodnalog), and the food detachments ceased to exist with the transition to the New Economic Policy. Lenin described war communism and the requisitioning system as a temporary measure forced by war and ruin, not a policy answering the economic tasks of the proletariat.