How did the peasants react to the land distribution in civil war of Russia?
The peasants were happy with the land distribution, it is what they had been calling for from about 1880 onwards. Before the Bolshevik Revolution they worked the land but they did not own it, so they had to pay rent, or were obliged to work their landlord’s land for free, it they were still serfs. Redistribution also included the taking of the lands of the former landlords, so peasants got quite a bit more land. It was designed for both ideological reasons – the workers owning the means of production – and in order to prevent the most militant and violent class of Russian society – the peasants – from taking up arms against the Bolsheviks What they were very unhappy about was the implementation of War Communism. This policy was the forced appropriation of food from the country in order to feed the towns and cities as well as the Red Army.
