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VICTORIA MCGOWAN
The civil war proved to be an extremely negative experience for the
peasantry, particularly for two reasons. Firstly, the Red Army, operating in
support of the Bolshevik government, took up to 10% of the total resources
of the state by 1920." This figure of course does not reflect White Army
resource usage, but we can safely say that more total state resources were
dedicated to the civil war than to World War One. Many of these resources,
and particularly food resources, were requisitioned from peasants, resulting
in even further food shortages in an agrarian system that was already plagued
with problems. Though Russia had not exported food since the beginning of
World War One, at the peak of the civil war food shortages, adults survived
on under 1,600 calories a day, an over 50% reduction in available food per
head than in 1915.*° The greatest strain of these food shortages fell on the
peasantry, many of whom were, by this time, so far removed from central
Russian administration that they did not necessarily even understand the goals
of the civil war. Up to 5 million died of famine between 1920 and 1922, largely
due to the requisitioning of food and resources, and the conscription of farm
labor by the army.” This was the second major problem for the peasantry.
Still reeling from the immense losses of the First World War, the Red Army
found itself quickly running up against a manpower shortage. As a result,
it turned to conscription, frequently performed in an ad hoc and extremely
violent manner as Red Army forces passed through peasant communities.
In a letter to his sister after the civil war, Natanial Banko recalled that the
Red Army men “asked who wanted to join the army” after rounding up all
the young men physically fit enough to fight in the middle of a farming town
in Bessarabia (now Ukraine).*° When one man declined, “they shot him and
asked again: who wanted to join the army.”® Banko then noted that all the
remaining young men, himself included, signed up for the Red Army; he also
observed this pattern was repeated as they marched. These two experiences,
food shortages and conscription, disproportionally affected the peasantry,
ultimately resulting in several waves of peasant refugees fleeing the hunger
and violence that followed the Russian Revolution.
We shift our focus now from Russia to the prairie provinces of Canada just
prior to the influx of refugees caused by the October Revolution. In a fortunate
turn of historical events, an exceptionally thorough census was conducted of
the prairie provinces (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta) on 1 June 1916,
a little over a year before the tumultuous events in the Russian Empire. The
Andrei Markevich and Mark Harrison, Great War, Civil War, and Recovery: Russia’s National
Income, 1913 to 1928, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 71, No. 3 (Sept. 2011), 685.
28 Ibid., 686.
2 Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War, 538.
30 Natanial Banko, letter to Sophia Banko, 27 July 1929.
31 Ibid.
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