From Ambivalence to Accuracy: The Provisional Government’s Grain Registration in an Intermediary Province, Penza 1917

Abstract

AbstractAmong the the existing studies of the 1917 food‐supply crisis none has examined in detail the role and impact of grain registration. This article fills that gap by investigating the implementation of grain registration in Penza province, thus adding to and complicating the increasingly decentered picture of food‐supply policy and its impact in 1917. This study asserts that a major turning point during 1917 was the poor Volga harvest, which contributed to the threat of a prolonged subsistence crisis in an intermediary province already enduring the collapse of critical resupply channels. In this context, initially ambivalent volost officials and peasants came to embrace grain registration in the post‐harvest period as a way to document a legitimate claim to receive grain. This article adds to our understanding of the variability of peasant agency exhibited during 1917. The main post‐harvest struggle was over competing interpretations of the registration process between volost and district officials. The latter were pressed by provincial and central superiors to increasingly utilize armed force, not to compel compliance with registration, but to hasten the delivery of grain to urban consumers. This study illustrates how the Provisional government’s turn to state violence to establish its procurement authority was a function of how its policies, combined with deteriorating local conditions, produced competing entitlements to grain. Rather than a continuum of crisis in which Provisional government food‐supply policies repeatedly exacerbated crisis by failing to overlap with local demands and provoked resistance among grain producers and consumers, a combination of state and non‐state factors produced an economic environment in which the interests of both volost officials and peasants were served by key features of the state grain monopoly, especially grain registration.