Events showed that the rural communities were no favourable terrain for class warfare. The ties of family and religion, a com mon dislike of tax-collectors, towns and townsmen, and a sullen distrust of any central authority which took their young men as soldiers and requisitioned their grain and cattle, proved stronger than categorical distinctions. These distinctions tended to be more arbitrary than real; many of the Middle Peasants were the young relatives of kulaks, whose chief aim was to become kulaks themselves; many of the Poor were dependent, ignorant and shiftless. Bolshevik orators and newspapers spoke only of kulak opposition, but the attempts to apply class warfare and Com munism to the villages were resented by the Middle Peasants also Peasant delegates to the Eighth and Ninth Congresses of the Communist Party in 1919 and 192o had expressed the murmurs of the villages, and there were signs that the army, largely re cruited from the Middle Peasant class, was growing restive. The Polish War brought a new élan of patriotic ardour in which this sentiment was for a time forgotten, but early in 1921 it burst forth. In February the garrison of the naval fortress of Kron stadt, near Leningrad', demanded the abolition of the grain monopoly. The flame was fanned by Social Revolutionary agita tors, and a mutiny followed, which was suppressed only after heavy fighting. Almost simultaneously the peasants of Tambov, one of the central provinces of Russia, refused to yield their grain to requisition. Troops sent to enforce obedience made common cause with the peasants. Resentment had become revolt.
Lenin realized the danger, and induced the Tenth Communist Congress in March, 1921, to sanction a decree substituting a graduated food tax for the system of requisitions. Commodities demanded by the peasants, kerosene, salt, tools and leather, were rushed to Tambov, to be sold or bartered on a free trading basis. Those measures quickly ended the revolt. The source of trouble had been economic discontent rather than political unrest or counter-revolutionary agitation.
The Famine.—It is significant that both of these mutinies occurred at the end of winter, when climatic conditions had caused a failure of the autumn-sown grain, and the peasants, whose reserves were depleted by requisitions, were beginning to fear one of the famines that have devastated Russia periodically. Their anxiety was well founded. A prolonged drought in the early summer ruined the spring-sown grain throughout the "black earth" districts of the Volga, North Caucasus and Ukraine. By the middle of July a million peasants were in flight from their parched fields towards the centres of urban and river transport, where they were huddled in refugee camps infested with cholera and the epidemics of malnutrition. The crop failure was reckoned to have affected an area inhabited by 20 to 30 million people. Unless help was forthcoming, not less than Io million seemed doomed to perish from starvation before spring.
In July the Soviet Government permitted an appeal by the writer Maxim Gorki to Herbert Hoover, then chairman of the American Relief Administration (A.R.A.), which had kept alive
millions of hungry children in Belgium and northern France during the War, and had been at work later in Central and Eastern Europe. Hoover agreed to help, and a modus operandi was soon arranged between the A.R.A. and the Soviet authorities. This example was followed by a number of European charitable organ izations, but the brunt of the work was done by the A.R.A., which at the peak of its activity, in March 1922, was giving daily rations to io million children and adults. Altogether foreign aid fed probably 12 million persons, and the Soviet Relief Administra tion maintained at least an equal number.
It was difficult to estimate the famine death roll, owing to the confusion between disease and starvation in the vital statistics. Deaths from actual hunger probably did not exceed half a mil lion. Foreign relief for the famine rendered two other important services. It allayed much of the xenophobia provoked by inter vention, and thus paved the way for a renewal of normal relations between Russia and the outer world. It also helped the Soviet to cope with the problem of disease, especially cholera and typhus, which had been epidemic in Russia for centuries. After 1922 there was nc widespread recurrence of either pest.
section of the Communist Party saw it in that light. Lenin him self may not have shared this view. He was above all a realist, alive to the practical necessities of the moment. He had shown that he was well aware of the anomaly of an industrial prole tarian revolution in a country 85% of whose population were backward peasants. By force of circumstance and the exigencies of war he had been compelled to adopt a programme of Socialist centralization which many of his followers welcomed as the cor rect and natural policy of a Socialist State. Lenin, himself born and bred in a Russian province, knew better than many of his colleagues the well-worn channels of life on the Russian plains.
Before the Communist Party reached a decision in its pro tracted discussion of agrarian policy in 1920 and 1921, Lenin found himself advocating not merely a change with regard to requisitions and the grain monopoly, but a general readjustment of the economic framework. Instinctively he felt that Socialist centralization had been pushed too far, that they were stifling the individual initiative without which the country could not recover from the effects of foreign and civil war. The reform of industry for peace purposes would require effort and expendi ture which the State was unable to provide, and finance and transport were also in a desperate position.