Hans Georg Lehman, in his very interesting essay "The Debate on the Agrarian Question in German and International Social Democracy: from Marxism to Revisionism and Bolshevism," translated and published in Italy by Feltrinelli in 1977, had already framed the problem of the historical and ideological misunderstanding of social-communist thinkers with respect to peasant (in this case European) realities. The basis of this misunderstanding then became the foundation of an open war that was declared by the Bolshevik power as soon as it took power in Russia.
A war that, as Andrea Graziosi explains in "The Great Peasant War in the USSR - 1918-1933," went on for decades, centered on the idea that it had to eliminate what we would call the small family farmers, or direct cultivators (in Italy) in order to create an a-historical collective system, which then failed miserably.
I quote what Graziosi writes: "The Bolshevik leaders then spoke openly about starvation as a means of imparting a Pavlovian lesson to the peasants: those who do not accept collectivization (which the peasants called the 'second serfdom') and do not work on the collective fields do not eat."
The war waged by the Bolsheviks against the peasants in the country's large agricultural regions cost something like 7-8 million dead (a figure by default). Thanks to the Bolsheviks, cannibalism became a survival tactic until the 1930s, as reported in the reports of Italian embassies and consulates at that time, without any mention of it by any Western country, although aware of these disasters.
Josuè de Castro, at that time, was studying the structural causes of starvation in northeastern Brazil, where peasants were dying like flies because of an agrarian system that wanted to enslave them to the desires of large landowners. His magnificent book, "The Geography of Hunger," came out in 1946, but without any mention of the genocide perpetuated by the Soviets against their peasants, since no one talked about it and no study was therefore undertaken.
Today we should think of an actualized version, to better frame the world peasant and agrarian question in the light of so much new knowledge, and analyze how it was possible for Bolshevik ideology to become the intellectual basis of world movements of landless peasants.
In my nearly forty years (from my first trip to Nicaragua in 1983 to the present) of interest in these issues, I have never read a self-critical reflection by leftist parties and movements with respect to their ideological roots regarding the peasant issue. The manipulation still at work that leads one to want to believe that a better future in the world's countryside is possible in light of socialist and communist ideology continues its work, and to me this remains a mystery as to how it is possible to believe this nowadays.
Leftists almost everywhere have abandoned the lower classes in the global north, thinking that their political future was to be sought in the support of the middle classes. The peasant world, a world never understood by these leftists, has at times been beguiled by these sellers of smoke (see Lula's promises in Brazil for agrarian reform that never happened), but at the end of the day it remains left to its own devices.
At this particular historical moment where, because of climate change induced by an urban-industrial development model against nature, more we should turn our gaze toward the countryside, rural areas, forests and ecosystems in general, we have no historically acceptable key to read understand and interpret who these actors (and actresses) are and what they do, whom we continue to define as backward, slow, good-for-nothings that we have to replace them with machines so as to create macro farms of thousands if not millions of hectares, highly mechanized and with cutting-edge technology, which we then see become, for the umpteenth time, part of the problem and not part of the solution.
We had hoped for decades, pressing the people we were talking and working with, that the self-described "progressive" parties and movements would do an internal soul-searching, a kind of "refresher" to understand what the peasant world was on which, whether we like it or not, we all depend for our daily eating.
Graziosi's book was very helpful in understanding how many skeletons there are in the closets of these forces, which perhaps helps to understand why they do not want to talk about it, preferring to continue their manipulative exercise that will never bear any real fruit to the world they say they want to help.
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