How Russia escaped hunger, and who are the bagmen

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

With the advent of the Civil War in Russia, food supplies were finally disrupted, which put the country's economy and the existence of every citizen on the brink of disaster. But the ex-residents of the empire found a way out. People, from a peasant to a musician, moved from town to village, where there were food supplies. Mass starvation was avoided thanks to the so-called "bagmen". In simple terms, Russia was saved by the first Soviet speculators persecuted by the authorities.

Civil war and supply system

Lenin saw the main foundation of the state program of the revolutionary system in the grain monopoly and fixed prices. Only this condition, in the opinion of the new government, would become the basis for the successful provision of bread for the revolution. Even the Provisional Government established a monopoly on bread, then the Soviet government introduced a centralized distribution of products. Since the fall of 1917, and throughout the Civil War in Russia, they could not establish a proper civilian life. At first, significant territories remained under the rule of the whites, and with the advent of War Communism, not everything grew together from the first attempts. The threat of hunger hung over the cities, and then the dealers entered the game.

Historians assess the role of the shadow trade in Civic history in different ways. Contemporaries branded the bagmen and peasants who collaborated with them for hiding grain, illegal sale and worsening of the already depressing situation in the country. Researchers later admitted that the situation was twofold. The specialist in bagging, Davydov, showed in his historical works that the Soviet government did not manage to competently organize the delivery, preserving the food supplies taken from the peasants. Potatoes and grain were left lying on the bare ground, rotted at dumping points, or plundered on the way. The minimum reached the people.

It becomes clear why the peasants refused to hand over food to the authorities, unable to receive in return vital salt, clothing (fabric), shoes, and medicines. With the introduction of the grain monopoly, the Soviet territory of Russia was plunged into hunger, which was not in the same white part. Bread norms became scanty, and canteens in Moscow and Petrograd offered frank slops. Stunned and disoriented citizens decided to take care of themselves on their own, moving to the “free markets” of speculative intermediaries.

Fair station and crowded trains

Even at the end of 1917, as a Nizhny Novgorod guest testified in his travel notes, Moscow railway stations were filled with crowding people with bundles. The carry-on luggage consisted of items purchased to be exchanged for food in the villages. Soon the ideas of small off-record trade were taken up by other cities. In subsequent years, large stations resembled caravanserais, where crowded trains with passengers drove up right on the steps and rooftops. Crowds of men hung with sacks landed on the platforms and immediately exchanged goods. The townspeople who had just returned from the villages were hastily wiping their suitcases from the flour jumping through the locks. For all these bags and sacks of "suppliers" and called sackers. The most resourceful made bags in the form of vests, flaunting with rounded shapes.

The bagmen worked both for themselves and for the professional purpose of a reseller. Rural flour and vegetables were exchanged for city sugar, salt, clothes, shoes. At first, the exchange of goods was carried out directly on the station platforms, but with the growth of competition and persecution by representatives of the authorities, the bagmen moved away from the railways.

The townspeople, in the harsh life circumstances far from targeted state programs and far-reaching plans of the new regime, saw in the bagmen the only chance to survive. And experienced professional bagmen increasingly profited from intermediation, making money on the resale of goods.

Parasitic business or rescue

Some historians reject the idea that bagging has increased the flow of bread to the cities. The sackers, according to this point of view, only made the situation worse. Hunger was exacerbated not only because the state plan of procurement declined, but also because of congestion on the railways. A train of bagmen transported 4 thousand poods of grain, and one freight train delivered 10 times more flour to the city. In 1919, the Soviet government was forced to make an emergency stop to the movement of passenger trains. Lenin insisted that such a measure would provide the localities with the required amount of grain in three weeks.

From this position, it turns out that bagging did not save Russia, but only intensified hunger. And the population deceived by speculators saw them as benefactors. The authorities tried to convey to the population information that the rampant bagging did not give the country the opportunity to provide the population with even the minimum norms, increasing the dominance of the marauders. Some of the kulaks who owned the surplus profited from the workers and the hungry population. It was often possible to observe how the townspeople who arrived in the village exchanged their last belongings with the kulaks for a crumb of bread. And the problem was not only in the volume of bread sold by the bagman, but more in the fact that speculation undermined the entire system of state regulation of prices and the order of state procurement. Redeeming grain at far-fetched prices, the bagmen provoked the peasants to hide their grain with a reluctance to surrender it at a firm, one-size-fits-all price.

Another misconception historians call the phenomenon of lone bagmen. According to many testimonies, bagmen organized in large detachments broke into station grain warehouses, killed representatives of state supervision, participated in mass robberies, and under threat of physical harm forced railway workers to submit trains for their own movement. Such merchants were very often guarded by large armed gangs of dubious content, firing back with machine guns. These groups, on a paid basis, defended the bagmen from blocking detachments and pro-government security officials, seizing trains and plundering cargo. With the end of the Civil War, sacking disappeared, returning to the USSR in the 1930s as speculators of a new content.