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OCR
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. + 46 +
