Expropriations and Requisitions
Expropriations and Requisitions. March 1918
Drawn from Pravda and Novaia Zhizn in spring 1918, these newspaper dispatches describe an emerging "bread war" across central Russia. Armed Red Guard detachments roamed Voronezh, Tambov, Smolensk, and other guberniias to seize peasant grain. Villages organized armed defense, attacked food trains, and frequently sent the requisitioners home in coffins.
Original Source: Pravda, No. 51, 17 March 1918, p. 4.
Pravda, No. 51, March 17, 1918, p. 4.
The Food Commission of Ufa received a telegram from Inza that a band of hungry "partisans" had attacked a food train. They first tore up the tracks and then opened fire on the train guard. They were driven off, and the train reached Ruzaevka ...
Novaia Zhizn, No. 51, March 26, 1918, p. 4.
In the beginning of March a small company of men was sent to the village of T--- to requisition the bread reserves. When the men arrived they were disarmed ... by the peasants Another company with two machine guns was sent, and they returned without the machine guns. A third expedition was ordered out ... At a given signal the peasants opened fire, killed six, and wounded others ... A fourth and much better armed force was put into the field. It arrested the local Soviet, recaptured the machine guns and rifles ... Investigations are being made ...
Novaia Zhizn, No. 71, April 19, 1918, p. 4.
News is arriving of the bread war which is taking place in Voronezh, Smolensk, Tambov, Riazan, Simbirsk, Kursk, Kharkov, Ufa, Orenburg, and a number of other guberniias. Armed detachments of Red Guards and hired soldiers are roaming over villages and hamlets in quest of bread, making searches, laying traps with more or less success. Sometimes they return with bread; at other times they come back carrying the dead bodies of their comrades who fell in the fight with the peasants ...
Many of the villages are now well armed, and seldom does a bread expedition end without victims ... At the first report of a requisitioning expedition the whole volost is mobilized and comes to the defense of the neighboring village.
Voronezh has ten requisitioning companies, with a hundred men in each, provided with machine guns, automobiles, and bombs ...
In February there was a real battle at the station Muchkala. It is reported that several thousand people participated ...
At Smolensk two villages were wiped out and many peasants and Red Guards were killed and wounded ...
The situation of the uyezd and volost Soviets is not enviable.
They are between two fires ... If they take the part of the requisitioning gangs they are beaten by the peasants, and if they protect the peasants they are pounced upon by the guberniia Soviets. Recently one of the Soviets drove out the requisitioners, and immediately a punitive expedition was sent out and arrested the Soviet.
The bread requisitioned does not always reach its destination. Occasionally it is stolen on the way ... Trains are held up and plundered ... Sometimes it takes two or three hundred men to guard a train ... Many villages have organized gangs who attack neighboring villages and waylay people with food ...
Source: James Bunyan and H.H. Fisher, ed., Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1918; Documents and Materials (Stanford: Stanford University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 664-665.