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the grain taken but the pricing system was heavily stacked against the peasants and often they only received rapidly depreciating currency. Narkomprod (the Ministry of Production) proved to be totally inefficient in it's supply of industrial goods and of course the production of numerous artisans who worked in small workshops was completely outside it's orbit.45 Not surprisingly the peasants weren't willing to trade on these terms and the requisition parties even used torture to force the peasants to reveal where they had hidden the grain.
The peasants were willing to supply the cities but for a fair price. From villages throughout Russia groups of peasants with bags of grain on their backs made their ways to the cities to exchange bread for goods. Rather than encouraging this self activity the Bolsheviks denounced these 'bag traders' as speculators and the state did all in its power to suppress them. But these despised bag traders were not petty capitalists but ordinary peasants obtaining goods that their village needed. It was the Bolshevik state not the bag traders who acted like a capitalist in its merciless attempts to exploit the peasantry.
The opposition advocated free trade in grain. Free trade would probably have enabled the city to supply far more to the country side because the artisans would have been able to trade directly with the peasants. Further if the bag traders did not have to face the risk of arrest and interment then they would have been prepared to accept far less for their goods.
Lenin denounced the call for free trade, saying that as the workers got half their food from the bread ration and only half from the black market they would stave without the ration.46 Isn't it a gem! For in his own words he's admitted that the workers would have starved without the black market which the state was making every effort to destroy.
Free trade in grain plus a tax in kind would have removed a large repressive apparatus and would have substantially reduced the grievances of the villages. Roi Medvedev argues that free trade would have avoided the famine in the cities.47 Medvedev though an honest historian is capable of inaccuracy.48 Nonetheless there is a strong case that it was the Bolsheviks grain policy rather than Breast-Litovsk that was responsible for the famine.
Due to it's policies Sovnarkom by the late spring of 1918 had come into conflict with both sections of the toilers. As the effect of those policies (the attack on workers control, state direction of industry and the state monopoly of trade) was to give control of the means of production into a group of state officials and party cadres. In short they had taken on the most important attribute of a ruling class.
To say it was already an exploiting class is less tenable. It is possible to find examples of the new class grasping at new privileges49 but even Voslenski (a Soviet dissident who argued that Russia was a class society ruled by [next page]