A Question of Sincerity

Lenin often allowed the peasants to suffer in order to achieve his aims. The Land Decree of 1917
expropriated land, yet its unequal distribution disappointed peasants’ expectations of a ‘Black Repartition’.
Moreover, knowledge that the decree was only temporary and that collectivization was on its way was suggested by
the Decree on the Socialization of Land in April 1918. War Communism was a time of severe hardship for peasantswhose food was forcibly extracted for cities and troops. Although there is not much information on the matter, an
anti-Communist peasant uprising of 1918-19 is known to have been suppressed. A directive issued by Lenin on
May 26, 1918 instructed the Red Army to battle the peasantry who withheld food or fuel. Bertrand Russel relates
how Lenin described “with a chuckle how the government had forced the muzhik [peasant] to take worthless paper
for money.”41 It was only in 1921 with the advent of the New Economic Policy that the peasants could market their
grain, after Lenin’s realization that the peasantry would no longer tolerate his decrees.
Mao abandoned the peasantry during the Great Leap Forward in favor of industrialization, yet he was more
genuine in his desire to include the peasantry. The mass line movement suggests that he wanted the peasants to be
directly involved in the revolution, and did not intend to merely exploit them in order to further the revolution.