Food Crisis in the Spring of 1918. April 19, 1918

This April 1918 newspaper analysis surveyed the deepening food shortage as Russia confronted the loss of Ukrainian grain to German occupation. The author criticized the Soviet government's insistence on bread monopoly and fixed prices, arguing that armed requisition produced peasant resistance and that famine could only worsen until the harvest.

Original Source: Svoboda Rossii, No. 7, 19 April 1918, p. 5.

The problem of provisioning the people until the new harvest is now clearly understood. There can be no more illusion about the improvement of nourishment during the next few months.

The recently published data dealing with the crop of 1917 indicate that there was a surplus of grain in European Russia (excluding Siberia and the Caucasus) amounting to from 320 to 300 million poods. The separation of the Ukraine and the [Kuban region] reversed that surplus into a shortage of over 190 million poods. So that, in proportion as the free exchange of commodities with the south comes to a standstill, the provisioning of the guberniias which remained in the Soviet Republic is bound to become worse.

Other places from which grain is usually obtained cannot make up the lack caused by disappearing Ukrainian bread. The regions of the middle and the lower Volga and that of the Urals ... have a shortage of 82,000,000 poods. The Caucasus and Siberia remain as the only hope, but the civil war makes it impossible to import their surpluses. Furthermore, the Siberian grain is unavailable on account of transport [conditions]. Western Siberia had orders to ship ... by the first of May a total of 43,000,000 poods. But the Omsk Railroad has a monthly capacity of only 4,000,000 poods. Actually only about 3,000,000 poods were shipped during the past two and a half months. To help the situation, the Sovnarkom granted the other (lay a sum of 10,000,000 rubles to build railroads in the bread-producing regions of Siberia. But this measure can have no practical significance for the current food campaign.

Under such conditions it would seem that the only way to prevent famine would be to allow free trade. But the Soviet Government holds on firmly to the bread monopoly. Stern rules are being published daily directed against "speculators" and bagmen; food "dictatorships" have been announced in Siberia and in the Ukrainian regions occupied by the Germans ...; an ever greater number of articles of consumption are being taken under control ...

These socialist utopias, however, cannot stand the test of life. In a number of guberniias fixed prices have already been abolished. All measures of the central authorities suffer defeat as soon as they are applied by local authorities. At present not a single person will find his way in that chaos which results from the variety of food organs, commissars, and committees which, together with the local "Sovdeps" and "Sovnarkoms," take charge of the distribution and collection of the "monopolized" grain. Each institution of the consuming guberniia sends its messengers to investigate the situation in the food-producing guberniias. Upon arrival these messengers, invested with all sorts of extraordinary and ordinary powers, begin to negotiate with one another as well as with the local regional Soviets, Sovdeps, and other authoritative bodies. Soon the telegraph office becomes congested with the overflow of long-drawn-out dispatches containing complaints against the arbitrariness and "selfishness" of the local authorities. Negotiations with the local authorities assume the aspect of regular diplomatic negotiations in which at first "Petrograd" and now "Moscow" plays the part of mediator. Finally, an "agreement" is drawn up ... usually founded on the so-called "exchange of goods." In fact, the only method of getting the peasant to give up his bread voluntarily is to offer in exchange manufactured and industrial articles. But even here ... the business is so organized that the exchange amounts to a free distribution of the remaining stock of goods to the "poorest peasants" without getting back a quantity of bread of equal value. Armed force appears in the last analysis to be the most reliable method for grain "collection" by the state ... But these methods encounter the organized resistance of the peasants and in the end cannot yield very much.

The grain monopoly remains a paper measure. In connection with that monopoly hundreds of thousands of members of the different committees have to be fed, and the extra expenses which this organization entails fall as a heavy burden on a negligible quantity of food which the people receive. In Moscow government-controlled bread is sold at higher prices than in the provinces, where free trade has been declared ... There is no prospect of alleviating the crisis so long as the bread monopoly continues to function ... In the face of these facts the official optimism of the Soviet Government is gradually waning, and every declaration relative to the food situation sounds more and more hopeless.

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. 666-668.