Starvin' the Peasants

In Brief

Why feed peasants when you can sell their grain and send the Cossacks to kill the ones who don't starve to death? For anyone wondering why on earth people have revolutions and put Communists in power, the antics of Czar Alexander III and his loyal Ministers may provide some food for thought. Oh how we love those peasants.

Party On

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The food's so bad, you guys, that it makes you want to puke right off. No kidding! While two-thirds of our men are eating, the rest are around the corner puking all over the place!"[1] Such were the rations expected to sustain the intrepid workers building most ambitious project man had ever attempted: the Trans-Siberian railway. Too cheap to give their workers proper coats or food, foreman watched their exhausted men simply fall off scaffolding into rivers and ravines to their deaths. Some lakes, including Lake Baikal, were so hard to build track around that no attempt was even made. The clever Russians got across water as they always had: they walked, pulling the boxcars behind them with horses. Fed with "putrid meat and bread that was so badly spoiled that even the local pigs would not eat it", workers announced, "This ain't construction! It's a struggle, a war to the death." But this was Russia. As always, it was worse somewhere else.

An undertaking whose significance rivalled the construction of the Panama canal and the discovery of the New World, the Trans-Siberian railway was a truly visionary project. After it was completed in 1904, all sorts of things would be possible, including an item that seems to have been on almost every large nation's twentieth century to-do list: a war with Japan. Siberia's embarrassingly large reserves of natural resources would be plundered in due time, always of course with the utmost respect for the environment.[2] But all these things required industrialization, and industrialization, as any good Marxist will tell you, requires capital.

Milken 'em For All They're Worth

Strangely enough, the man in charge of this effort was Alexander III's Minister of Finance, the extremely talented Ivan Vyshnegradskii. A real Michael Milken type figure (only less pronounceable), Ivan took full advantage of the privileged information he saw from day to day and speculated quite successfully with his own fortune on the European money markets. Czar Alexander knew a good thing when he saw it, commenting, "Let him make ten million, as long as he makes a hundred [million] for the government."[3] Vyshnegradskii's clever plan was to export grain to Europe in exchange for gold -- the capital needed to fuel Russia's stunted, tardy industrial revolution. Starting in 1887, he did two simple things which increased Russian exports by a third and achieved a budget surplus in the face of falling world grain prices. By moving tax collection to the fall when grain prices were lowest, he forced the peasants to sell more of their harvest. Sneaky, but on the upside the peasants at least had some cash left over. To remedy that unfortunate situation, the estimable Vyshnegradskii raised the excise tax on cigarettes and vodka -- the two things peasants bought with their meager disposable income. Now that we think about it, all this seems a bit familiar: isn't next year's US budget balanced on the hopes of a massive tobacco tax raise? There's no sense in teaching an old dog new tricks when the old ones work just as well, eh? Some called it taxation, but we here at History House would like to advance the notion that it was, in fact, theft.

For the next four years, Russia's exports soared, her stock market boomed, and the ruble stabilized. Everyone was happy -- especially French investors who continued to funnel money into Russia faster than ever. Were they expecting baguettes and escargot on the Volga? Everyone was happy, that is, except the peasants. But no one wanted to hear from them -- after all, their life had always been pathetic and downtrodden. Trouble was brewing.

Lord Fammon

One morning in May, 1891, the same year Alexander would begin construction on the Trans-Siberian railway, one of Vyshnegradskii's advisors entered his office. Having no doubt worked on a robust don't-hang-the-messenger speech, the advisor handed the minister a report and summarized it, "The most terrible specter of famine is advancing on Russia." Surprisingly, four years of taking the peasants for all they were worth seemed to have left them a bit short of food. Fortunately the bulk of the harvest was still six months away, so there was time for action to augment food reserves -- though it would have to be swift. Well, Vyshnegradskii's response was indeed swift: he threw the report in a desk drawer, locked it, and warned the advisor that, "your notes will never come out of this drawer. No one should know of this."[4] Most of the members of government did what they did every summer: took off for vacation. As the brief Russian summer started, drought set in, leaving peasants with nothing to do but pray. But this was Russia. God did not send rain.

While the Czar was frolicking on the Gulf of Finland, regional governors were sending desperate pleas for money to buy food for their people. We should not be surprised to learn that Vyshnegradskii was not the one who finally bit the bullet in mid-summer and did what should have been obvious from the start: ban all exports of rye, the staple food of most peasants. Minister of Internal Affairs Ivan Durnovo announced the ban only to promptly have the deadline extended by our friend Vyshnegradskii, who seemed to think it was more important to have a good foreign exchange reserve than avert millions of deaths. Proclaiming his old slogan, "we may not eat enough, but we will export," the ban was postponed until the end of the summer. It had become clear by this point that the harvest was going to be bad all over Europe, so Adam Smith's benevolent, invisible hand quickly stepped in, creating speculators to make their fortune off others' misfortunes.

Ship after ship steamed out of Odessa, Russia's great port on the Black Sea, their holds packed with grain destined for the markets of Europe. At the same time, so much grain was shipped across the western frontier during the weeks before the ban finally went into effect that even the superbly efficient German railroads needed more than a month to remove the huge mountains of rye left at Konigsberg by grain dealers anxious to beat the deadline.[5]

It Was Here All Along!

Can we blame the peasantry for rioting? Well, riot they did. Many of the peasants slashed and burned by the subsequent Cossack crackdown probably considered themselves lucky. Brutal murder is probably a better way to go than starvation. (The Cossacks are a notoriously burly tribe in southern Russia, and are the ones who do that famous Russian dance with the all the squatting and leg-kicking. They also made quite a decent go of it throughout history slaughtering the Czar's enemies). Durnovo's ban finally took effect in August, leaving Russia with just enough grain to avert a famine of Biblical proportions. People would die, but if what little grain was left could be distributed efficiently, most starvation could be prevented. Presumably grumpy at not being allowed to sell the grain that was left, Vyshnegradskii had no interest in actually distributing the stuff. The man who did had a tough job indeed. Upon visiting one grain station in the south, he found more than eight hundred fully loaded boxcars sitting unattended on a siding. Upon questioning, the locals guessed they had been there maybe two months. Russia's indomitable peasantry had long been trained just not ask, we suppose. Move along, nothing to see here folks, just a few hundred tons of grain. Nothing to see here. Move along... or we'll slit your throats, you miserable bastards!

Clay Cuisine

What did peasants do without food? This was Russia. They had seen everything before. Vodka could only last so long (even in Russia), and so with remarkable creativity, they had named their standby staple 'famine bread'. Peasants rounded out their dwindling supplies of rye variously with weeds like goosefoot and grass and baked it. Yes, you heard it right. They put weeds in the oven, baked them, and ate them.

Bread baked from goosefoot quickly induced diarrhea, vomiting, and a variety of more serious gastrointestinal disorders. Over time, it induced serious protein deficiency. Nonetheless, peasants continued to prepare famine bread during the last weeks of 1891 because they had nothing else. When there was no more goosefoot left, they ate clay to deaden the pangs of hunger.[6]

This was Russia. It would only get worse. The Communists were yet to come.

Footnotes

1. Lincoln, p.13
2. At the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russian oil companies announced that the only way they could tell if the Siberian pipeline was leaking was if oil stopped coming out of one end. Finding the leaks was usually easy: planes would fly over the pipeline looking for lakes of crude. Those clever Russians.
3. Lincoln, p.17
4. Lincoln, p.20
5. Lincoln, p.24. We note that these were the same railroads which had, two decades earlier, enabled Prussia to defeat the Austro-Hungarian empire in a couple of weeks, forever altering the balance of power in Europe. Those industrious Germans.
6. Lincoln, p.23

Bibliography

1. W. Bruce Lincoln. In War's Dark Shadow: The Russians Before the Great War. Doubleday, 1983.

 
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