Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the two anonymous CSSH reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions.

1. Structure and Choice in Revolutionary Process

Revolutions have provoked not only important social changes and bloody civil wars, but a huge literature. There is controversy and confusion on how to integrate seemingly disparate modes of explanation into a coherent analysis: social structure, the decisions and policies of key actors (be they leaders or organized entities like parties and assemblies), and the choices made by ordinary people. Structural theories have proven useful for describing revolutionary situations; choice theories are useful in clarifying the revolutionary process; how to integrate the two to explain revolutionary outcomes remains contentious.

Structuralist theories focus on large processes—demographic and economic shifts, the rise and fall of social classes and social formations, state failure and state building, and international competition among states. Recent comparative studies of revolutions by Moore, Wolf, Skocpol, and Goldstone have been structuralist in as much as they assign causal primacy to failed institutions, class struggle, elite contention, hegemonic ideologies, control of vital resources, and the like, and neither to the policy decisions and strategic decisions of key actors nor to the choices of people at the grassroots.¹

Moore and Wolf argue that agrarian radicalism, which toppled the old regimes in Russia and China, occurred in the precapitalist periphery when the landed upper class failed to adapt to a market economy and increased tax and labor extractions from a still viable peasantry. To explain successful revolutions in France, Russia, and China, Skocpol has emphasized class-based revolts from below, international competition among states, and a dissident political leadership that builds a more efficient, coercive, and centralized state than the regime it overthrows. Goldstone challenged Skocpol with his own brand of structuralism. He located the genesis of early modern revolutions in England, France, China, and the Ottoman empires in demographic pressures on limited resources and positions that sparked massive revolts—peasants' search for land, workers demanding employment, and degree-holders unable to secure suitable positions.

These authors have added to our knowledge of revolutions, but they are concerned primarily with origins, secondarily with outcomes, and relatively little with the dynamics of making revolution. They neglect the lived experiences of the population and how these experiences determine the revolutionary process and shape the outcome of revolution. What is the core of the revolutionary process?

Studying a much larger set of European revolutions over five centuries, Tilly identifies more proximate causes of a revolutionary situation: large discrepancies between what states demanded of their best organized citizens and what these citizens were willing to deliver; state demands on citizens that threatened collective identities and violated their rights; and strong rivals who challenged rulers.²

To understand the inner mechanisms of revolutionary action in dual authority, Tilly recognizes that the analyst should combine structural and agency/choice theory in creative fashion, yet he doubts that the theory of choice possesses the tools for dealing with the complexities of revolutionary processes. In a methodological essay he writes that “if rational actor analysts [Tilly's term for choice theorists] could somehow endogenize and measure utilities, cumulative change capabilities, alterations in routine social relations, and fluctuations in identities, they would have formidable means of political explanation.”⁴

We briefly summarize our model of revolutionary process based on agency, choice, and game theory before engaging the details. In the revolutionary situation, the authority of the state is subverted by the creation of dual or multiple sovereignties. The state fails to protect life and property, and economic dislocation puts livelihood at risk. Contending political rivals coercively extract vital resources from the people. Fearful and hungry, soldiers and civilians alike respond with strategies for security and for survival—food, arms, legal or illegal means of making ends meet, allies who will protect them, and escape. The intersection of the decisions and choices by elites and ordinary folk defines the character of the military conflict and creates a new political economy of shortage and predation typical of revolution and civil war.

The outcome of the revolutionary conflict can best be understood and explained by studying the inner workings of dual authority and the new political economy, and most especially the part played by the food supply as a weapon for coercing soldiers and civilians. Three dynamic processes dominate our model of the conflict process at the grassroots: (1) the security dilemma explains why people choose sides in the conflict even when they would prefer a peaceful outcome; (2) the polarization process explains why a third party of moderates and conciliators is unlikely to form; and (3) after sides have been chosen, the survival dilemma explains why soldiers and other insurgents create a political economy of predation at the expense of civilians and of political leaders who want them to pursue winning the war or civil war.

This is not the whole story because rival leadership groups, the regime and the challengers, want to gain control of the state, the population, and the country. They must get their soldiers to fight the enemy, and must gain compliance from civilians in their territory. That means organizing a war economy in a failed state and economy, which in turn necessitates getting control over the economy of predation and organizing an effective army. We demonstrate in our case studies that the principal means of exercising such control and of creating a war machine is food coercion (a variety of measures ranging from coercive food extraction, food rationing, and food incentives that favor supporters and punish opponents, to black-market manipulation and food blockades). We argue that that the side that does it more effectively becomes the winner in the conflict, and that is not necessarily the side that possesses the largest armies, the most weapons, gets the most help from allies, controls more of the country's resources, or formulates the most attractive ideology and program for the hearts and minds of the people. Coercion is the flesh and bones of domination in revolution, and food is the lifeblood of the political economy of shortage and predation. The winner in revolution and civil war is the side that uses coercion most intelligently and manipulates food shortage most efficiently. The winner restores a single authority and an economy that assures survival.

We unpack the concept of revolutionary situation and anarchy by demonstrating how ordinary people, soldiers, peasants, political leaders, militias, and various groups struggle for survival and security in an uncertain environment when routines, norms, expectations, and structures of settled times cease to exist. In a programmatic statement, Skocpol writes that “social revolutions should be analyzed from a structural perspective,”⁶

Game theory paradigms are suitable tools for making sense of revolutionary process, and for synthesizing structural and choice theories, as we demonstrate in the next section. The use of game theory enables the analyst to avoid simplistic psychological and cultural tautologies, such as that wars result from the actions of warlike, aggressive people. On the contrary, game models can explain how a majority of people opposed to war and aggression nonetheless take up arms against one another (see below, on the “security game”). Game theory also avoids one-dimensional structural explanations, for example, that people conform to group beliefs and conduct because they value group membership and conform to group norms and traditions. To the contrary, with a game model called “innovator-loss” it is possible to explain that even when many group members prefer non-conforming, they may nonetheless be incapable of breaking the stranglehold of norms and conventional beliefs because the first few non-conformists pay a very high cost, and thus a critical mass of deviants/innovators is never reached.⁷

2. The Security and the Survival Dilemmas in Revolution and Civil War

In the histories of civil war and of revolution, food shortages, hunger, poor harvests, and high prices for basic foodstuffs precipitate riots and popular unrest that force the resignation of governments and the overthrow of unpopular regimes.⁹

In famine, or in civil war, and especially when the two come together, the human condition becomes extremely fragile. At the macro level of social formations, organizations, and institutions, civil war and famine create anarchy in governance. Authority is de-legitimized. Police and courts become instruments of oppression, not protectors of life and property. Warlords and militias, death squads, and criminal gangs divide the turf and rule in neighborhoods and districts. Work and employment cease to be the source of income. A predatory economy based on shortage, barter, the black market, looting, and criminal extortion replace it. Collective guilt (ethnic, religious, class, etcetera) and responsibility supplant individual responsibility. Social bonds become unreliable. Just as inflation wipes out savings, social polarization wipes out social capital. Fear and security concerns undermine social ties and trust. In this moral vacuum, the category “innocent” is suspended, and women, children, the aged, ministers of religion, Red Cross workers, fence sitters, neutrals, pacifists, non-combatants all, become targets of aggression. As these conditions spread to encompass more territory and people, the political economy of shortage and predation muscles out the precrisis political economy and takes on a life of its own.

Ordinary people experience the macro level at the micro level of lived human experience. Their actions, identities, beliefs, choices, transactions, moral standards and social relationships are changed from normal times. Their microenvironment becomes dominated by the security dilemma and by the survival dilemma. These social dilemmas are a theoretical paradigm, based on game theory, and explain how the choices of ordinary people under extreme uncertainty shape the dynamics of revolution and civil war. The security dilemma explores why people choose sides even though most would prefer living at peace with one another. The survival dilemma explains why soldiers avoid fighting one another, choosing instead to prey on civilians, loot and rob, run black markets, or even trade with the enemy. We will illustrate these paradigms with stories from the Bosnian war of 1992–1995 because the hundreds of war correspondents and our own fieldwork document and illuminate human behavior when survival is uncertain and when the aggregate consequences of people's choices change the structure of institutions. We believe these stories are quite similar to grassroots experiences in the other revolutions and civil wars we studied.

What is the security dilemma? It occurs when proximate groups of people find themselves responsible for their own security in conditions of emerging anarchy.¹⁰

Asked whether there will be war, a Serb taxi driver explained his “security dilemma” to the German ambassador just a few days before the Bosnian war started: “My Muslim friends and I don't want to fight one another. But they know that if I don't take up arms, my fellow Serbs will kill me, and I know that if they don't take up arms, their fellow Muslims will kill them. So we will all take up arms, and we will fight each other.”¹¹

The security dilemma is an instance of a more general class of social dilemmas—also called “prisoner's dilemma”—that exists when the preferred choice of the interacting players cannot be enforced by external authority, but rests on mutual trust alone: “The mutually desired state is such that there is a strong incentive for each to deviate from it unilaterally. The state which results for all when they deviate is however bad for all.”¹²

Such dilemmas are founded on uncertainty and fear more so than on hatred and prejudice. They are at the existential core of the revolutionary situation. In normal times, people who are ambitious and selfish and morally deaf nevertheless make choices that contribute to each other's welfare, as Adam Smith long ago expressed with the “invisible hand” metaphor. In revolution and civil war, tragically, even people who are at bottom decent and well-meaning end up making choices that are mutually harmful.

The social dilemma dominates the behavior of many other groups, not just men of military service age. In an interview a broadcast executive explained the growth of “patriotic journalism” in his media organization on the eve of the shooting war in Bosnia.¹³

Is there no exit then, no avoidance strategy that works for escaping polarization? Is it not possible to forge a non-ethnic identity based on moderation, neutrality, pacifism, mixed descent, or a middle ground of compromise that bridges social divisions and declares “a plague on both your houses”? Can a Catholic in Belfast unilaterally declare that from now on he is neither Irish, nor British, but simply a “human being” minding his own peaceful business, and everyone please take note (or a Palestinian in East Jerusalem, or a Jew in Hitler's Germany, or a Muslim in Republika Srpska . . .)?

In ordinary times, it is possible to bridge deep social divisions with multiple identities—ethnic intermarriage, military service in the same army, and shared activities and memberships in a web of social ties. As Tilly notes, “identities reside in interpersonal relations. That is why the possession of multiple identities . . . poses so little practical difficulties to most human beings.”¹⁴

In the decade of the 1980s, in Yugoslavia, the nationalist politicians who wanted to retain or inherit power, privilege, and economic resources in post-communist Yugoslavia—with their intellectual and media cheerleaders—succeeded in systematically destroying cross-ethnic bridges.¹⁵

Polarization, insecurity, and dual sovereignty proceed at a dizzying pace.¹⁸

Choosing sides and enlisting in the military does not mean that one really wants to fight. In war, soldiers face a survival dilemma. They can choose to battle one another and risk death or injury, or they can decide to collude with one another in making a living from the war by looting, black marketing, trading with the “enemy,” blackmailing civilians, and “taxing” (pillaging) international relief. The survival dilemma is also a variant of the social dilemma.²³

A soldier of fortune who came to Bosnia for fighting was disgusted by the inaction, and told a British journalist, “both sides hardly ever went out into no man's land. . . . After a while they never even bothered to post sentries at night, and in the winter just used to pack into their bunkers and drink . . . I mean, do they want to fight a war, or what?”²⁴

The prewar economy fell apart and work and employment no longer were the means of securing the necessities of life. Soldiers were paid little and irregularly, if at all. Instead, the combatants built a political economy of predation and criminal activity that became their source of livelihood. There were four sources of income—the remittances of the diaspora (living mostly in Germany and Austria) to its trapped kinfolk who became hostages of the soldiery that besieged them; trading across enemy lines and with the enemy; looted international food relief; and robbing civilians. “Defending Serbdom was indistinguishable from making money . . . hundreds of millions of Deutsche Marks worth of weaponry, ammunition, fuel and goods were traded across the front lines, and even more was looted . . . Croats could rent a tank from Serbs for 1000 DM a day [to use against Muslims].”²⁷

The Bosnian war was fought more against civilians than between soldiers. Amid state breakdown, volunteer militias and paramilitaries—formed to guard against outside aggressors and to assist armies in ethnic cleansing—initiated the predatory, criminal economy.²⁸

Given the weapons advantage that the Serbs held over the Bosniaks, the Serbs could have seized the Bihac enclave had they wanted it. But why would they want it? They responded as one would expect from an analysis of the survival dilemma. Soldiers made a living by preying on civilians, at little risk to themselves. What fighting there was took place not for territory and winning but over black-market share. Both sides colluded in making the political economy of shortage and predation the only functioning economy. And UNHCR and the humanitarian NGOs could do nothing but keep fueling that economy with further relief that kept being taxed and looted.

We underscore how the methodology of micro and macro level analysis, of choice and of structure, is integrated into a cohesive explanation of the revolutionary and civil war processes by the social dilemma paradigms of game theory. The politics of crisis, a failing state and economy, and group conflict disrupt the normal political and economic institutions and polarize ethnic categories. Caught in the security and the survival dilemmas, the actions taken by civilians and soldiers, by political activists and military leaders, are different from those in normal times. In the aggregate, choosing strategically, without an overall plan, they end up taking sides against one another and jointly building a political economy of shortage and predation that rests on different resources, morality, identity, and transactions than those in the prewar era. Structure and choice are in a dialectical relation. Structure constrains choices, and choices in the aggregate create new structures.

3. The Manipulation of Food Shortage in Revolution and Civil War

Studies of the proximate causes of success of revolutionaries and insurgents rarely include how rivals in dual sovereignty deal with a major food crisis and manipulate it to their advantage. We are principally concerned with the Bolshevik consolidation of power in 1918–1921, the Franco victory in the Spanish civil war, the Sino-Japanese war, and the Chinese civil war from the mid-thirties to 1949. But we also make the story contemporary by discussing food coercion and the diversion of humanitarian food relief to combatants in the Bosnian war, which foreshadows the conflicts and insurgencies of the twenty-first century. Our theme is the conditions, manner, and occasions in which control of food becomes a very significant, and perhaps the most important variable in the outcome of civil war and new regime consolidation.

To understand the manipulation of food shortage and its contribution to victory and regime consolidation, one has to explain the behavior of the principal actors facing life-threatening food shortages—regimes and rival leaders, soldiers, peasants and farmers, and townspeople. Regimes and rival elites faced with food shortages extract food from rural people by means of collective food quotas on villages and other coercive means of food requisition. They attempt to control food markets by mandatory prices and grain monopolies. They ration consumption with coupons and vouchers that favor their soldiers, production workers, and loyal supporters. Armies short of food will seize it from rural folk ahead of their enemies, and deny to them what they cannot seize by scorched-earth methods. Soldiers who are hungry will rob food from non-combatants, and if unable to do so they will become demoralized and surrender, desert en masse, or break up into undisciplined bands led by warlords that prey on civilians instead of battling the enemy. Hungry men and adolescents dislocated in war will join the army or armed band that is most likely to feed them.

Peasants and farmers will try to hide their food from procurement officials and the military, and when not possible, slaughter farm animals before they are coerced into surrendering them. Instead of accepting worthless currency and IOUs, peasants will sell what surplus they manage to hide in the black market, or revert to subsistence farming. In contested areas, peasants will support combatants and regimes that rob less grain and fewer farm animals than their rivals and will favor soldiers who protect the local food supply from the depredations of other groups. Hungry and starving townspeople will flee to villages, refugee camps, abroad, or wherever they have a chance of getting food. Those who do not or cannot flee will buy food in the black market. They will change their political allegiance and cooperate with a regime that keeps them from starving. When humanitarian organizations provide food relief to civilian populations, their relief convoys will be “taxed” and stripped of food and other equipment (vehicles, telecommunications) by the combatants. These food resources and other goods (cigarettes, gasoline) become an integral part of a black market that extends across enemy lines and fills the vacuum left by the collapse of the precrisis economy.

A regime can consolidate power by manipulation of food in times of shortage, but it is subject to constraints. It needs some success with food extraction in order to distribute food selectively to its soldiers and supporters, but it also counts on the black market to keep most of the population alive and provide hope of survival. The black market absolves the regime from the responsibility of feeding all the people and diverts daily energies to obtaining food and other necessities instead of plotting opposition. The black market also rewards regime supporters, soldiers, and strategic groups such as railroad workers and truck drivers with earnings opportunities.

How is a black market in food an opportunity for a regime to control coercively a population and to establish compliance? For the sake of illustration, let us assume that war, transport disruption, and drought result in a 10 percent absolute food deficit and that no imports are possible. The regime manages to extract and acquire 40 percent of total food and distributes it by direct allocation and rationing to its armed forces, political cadres, and civilian supporters. That leaves 50 percent for the remaining 60 percent of people, who—instead of organizing opposition to the regime—compete with one another in the black market, in a food triage with a 10 percent certain mortality rate. The reason for the lack of organized opposition is not only the free rider problem in large groups but also that structures and solidarities for mobilizing civic, religious, and occupational resistance have weakened and disintegrated in the anarchy of revolution and civil war (Oberschall 1973: ch. 4). It is ironic that the regime elites do not fully understand the consequences of the black market. They typically believe that it undermines their control of the people and society, but it actually diverts the resources and political will of their opponents to survival concerns. The regime cannot eliminate the black market because the transport and distribution of grain to the regime-controlled food sector depends on the very same railroad and river barge transport system whose workers operate and profit from the black market, as occurred in Russia in 1918–1921.

During the Sino-Japanese war and the subsequent civil war, there was also an absolute shortage of grain and assured mortality for many. Yet grain distribution and starvation by grain triage was bounded to local areas in China due to the relative lack (compared with Russia) of long-distance railroads and the interruption of transport by war and guerrilla operations. Food coercion of cities took the form of the millennia-old military tactic of surrounding, blockading, and starving fortified places. In this mode of warfare, the Kuo Ming Tang (KMT) control of cities with their swelled refugee populations was a liability. Also, as we argue below, the decentralized grain extraction strategy of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), which necessitated protecting their own and the villages' shared food resources, was more successful than the KMT's outright grain looting and grain tax coercion.

In all our cases, the margin between survival and slow starvation was narrow. Rather than act collectively against the regime, individuals competed against one another for food in the black market. Others weakened, died of disease, and even committed suicide. Many resignedly became supporters of the regime as the price of survival. Thus a minority regime, through food coercion, secured passive acceptance, conformity, and even allegiance from a starved and sometimes hostile population. When all was said and done, the control of food in a hungry population may have created more compliance than the possession of guns or adherence to an ideology.

4. Food Coercion in Russia

Russia possessed vast, productive farmlands and a numerous peasantry. Under normal conditions it was an exporter of grain because it produced food beyond domestic consumption. The sheer size and scattered location of farmlands made it unlikely that natural disasters would be severe and simultaneous everywhere. With railroad and river transportation, food could be shipped from surplus to deficit regions, and large-scale famine avoided.³¹

After the Russian revolution broke out in the fall of 1917, the Russian state ceased to exist in rural districts. The peasantry took local power, and popularly elected militias replaced the police. Village governance reverted to the peasant community, the mir, and to elected canton committees. Local autonomy was established, and peasant resistance against outsiders organized, especially around the issue of fixed-price grain sales and other means of food extraction. Peasant autonomy and resistance set the stage for an inevitable confrontation with the urban revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries because their armies and civilian populations had to be fed.³³

To be sure, in the capitals, Bolsheviks, Social Revolutionaries, and other political groups and parties debated over declarations, proclamations, platforms, programs, resolutions, and laws on land and land reform. But whether or not land was “nationalized” or “socialized,” whether renting land became legal or illegal, whether land belonged to the tiller or the peasant community, and how it was to be divided for ownership and use, could not change the fait accompli of peasant control and self-organization in thousands of villages. The political groups and their state and military agents had to get hold of a great share of the peasants' food stock to satisfy their military and civilian needs. They tried limited material incentives, persuasion, and coercion, but coercion prevailed and exacted a horrible human toll.

In revolution and civil war, the eventual winners prevail, not because they win the hearts and minds of the population, but because they manage to increase the size, penetration, and coercive capacity of the state more than their rivals. Despite the economic dislocation and political chaos of dual sovereignty and war, despite inheriting a failed state, they create a formidable military and administrative organization, extract vital resources at a time of great scarcity, coerce the people into compliance, and beat their opponents on the battlefield. In the Russian revolution, successful food extraction from the peasantry and food coercion of soldiers and civilians were the keys to the Communists' success.

In the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, the extraction of food from peasants in villages was massive, and also massively evaded and resisted. DuGarm writes, “during the Russian Civil War, the Bolshevik government's biggest task was to obtain enough food to feed the Red Army and the capitals in a time of economic collapse, hyperinflation and transportation breakdown.”³⁴

The methods of requisition were crude and increasingly coercive. First, a state grain monopoly under the Commissariat of Food was established. Later, agents of the Commissariat spread out to villages and, with local officials, imposed a tax in kind on peasant households. Next, a food tax in kind was levied on entire villages, with collective punishment for villagers that did not raise it. Up to this point there had been at least some relationship between the grain tax and village grain output and surplus, but eventually a grain quota—the razvertsa—violated this principle by ignoring village output. To collect the requisitioned grain, village Soviets were replaced by Committees of the Poor. Half of their members were actually city Bolsheviks, responsible for ferreting out the village surplus from the alleged “rich” peasants (later called kulaks). Food detachments, also composed of Bolsheviks, poor peasants, military, and city workers forcibly collected the grain quotas.³⁷

The Bolsheviks classified the population into three food-ration categories, and issued corresponding food values in coupons that could be redeemed at bakeries, food stores, communal kitchens, and other legal outlets for food that were supplied by the Commissariat of Food from the requisitioned food stocks.³⁸

Faced with this food crisis, the people in the big cities left to live with family and acquaintances in villages or traveled to villages where they bartered watches, clothing, linen, or anything of value for food. Sorokin describes one such train journey of Muscovites in search of food: “We reached Kozloff. Up to this point it had been impossible to buy any food, but here we found bread, real bread, with plenty of milk and meat. Passengers . . . made a mad descent upon that food. To understand it one must have known starvation. Like wild animals we fought each other, striking, gouging, kicking, grabbing what we could.”⁴²

Just as the civilian population became totally absorbed in the ceaseless search for food, the Bolshevik regime was preoccupied with how to feed its supporters and to starve its opponents. Workers showed up for their jobs because they were provided with bread coupons and canteens at the factory. A worker in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov put it succinctly: “That power is good which gives us bread.”⁴⁴

The Bolsheviks were vulnerable on their food policies and rightly feared food strikes and revolts even by their most likely supporters. In February 1921 the already skimpy bread rations in Moscow and Petrograd were cut by a third, and the workers responded with strikes and demonstrations. The Kronstadt sailors revolted and formed a Provisional Revolutionary Committee, and demands escalated from food to political reforms. The sailor's uprising was mercilessly repressed.⁴⁵

According to Pipes, “the bulk of the food consumed by the urban population under War Communism came from the illegal free market [i.e., the black market] . . . as measured by their caloric value, the free market furnished between 66 to 80 percent of food consumed.”⁴⁷

The blackmarketeers, dubbed sackmen or breadhunters (meshechniks), could not transport sacks of grain on trains without the collusion of railroad employees. Like peasants who had surplus food, transportation workers could thus profit from shortages, and they in turn kept the trains running.⁴⁸

The responses of the hungry were varied—they stole from communal kitchens, migrated to villages, or escaped abroad, and some committed suicide. Many died from starvation and disease. Most anti-Bolshevik middle class and professional people, civil servants, and Tsarist officers, however, complied with the regime and even became active collaborators in return for more food, usually through reclassification into the most favored food ration category. In the end, Sorokin sadly comments, “those who had deplored working for the communists . . . began to seek appointments to high positions and to praise highly their honest and sacred work . . . when starvation faced them on one side and there were wonderful rations on the other.”⁵¹

The famine could only be turned to the Bolsheviks' advantage if they controlled a substantial part of food procurement and distribution to favor their members and supporters and to enable them to bribe turncoat professionals, officers, and civil servants with food rations that assured survival. Yet a sizable black market had to be allowed despite the halfhearted crackdown on blackmarketeers, because without it, faced with certain starvation, many people would revolt. Regime opponents thus expended all their resources and energies in search of food, and not in active opposition. The Bolsheviks kept their supporters and essential workers alive, and let their opponents and expendable humanity starve.

The civil war itself was not won by a more convincing ideology or vision of the future but by better military organization, in which feeding soldiers loomed large.⁵³

In contrast the White generals and armies failed to create a workable system for supplying their soldiers. Instead, various units plundered the population in opportunistic fashion on a day-to-day basis. General Denikin's Cossack cavalry robbed and terrorized the peasants for personal benefit rather than for military objectives. Bribery and corruption in his supply organization were notorious. Denikin's inability to secure supplies from the local civilian population and to create a functioning economy made his forces rely on Allied aid. However, the British and the French could not or would not provide for his needs. Admiral Kolchak's army and administration similarly relied on plunder and “systematic robbery” for military supplies. The results were predictable: “The army gradually lost such fighting value as it had, and the civil population became more and more discontented and disloyal.”⁵⁶

5. Food in the Spanish Civil War

The historiography of the Spanish Civil War has traditionally been dominated by a political orientation and has neglected the key issue of food supplies during the conflict. Few analyses exist of the political economy in the Republican or, for that matter, the Nationalist zone during the conflict. We shall attempt to partially fill this gap by examining the Republican inability to feed its military and civilian populations and the Nationalists' comparative ease in supplying its people.

After the 18 July 1936 pronunciamiento of General Franco and other officers, the Republic—like the Bolsheviks during their civil war—controlled the most populous regions and cities. This considerable numerical superiority meant, of course, that the Republic had to feed many more people than its Nationalist enemies. Republicans proved unable to capitalize on their greater industrial resources, control of the major citrus-growing areas, and initial superiority in wines and olive oil to defeat Franco's forces who had an advantage in wheat and meat. The Republic had a hard time provisioning its troops. The unplanned waste and over-consumption of the first few months of the conflict, when many believed that the war would be short and the Nationalist rising would soon fail, had led to a precipitous slaughter of livestock. For example, hens, which should have been nurtured and used to produce eggs, were butchered.⁵⁷

Valencia encouraged a project to produce massive amounts of cheese from sheep's milk, which began auspiciously. Local officials believed that if they overcame “exchanges, hoarding and speculation,” they could help solve the Republic's food shortages and enable it to reduce imports.⁶⁰

As in Russia during its civil war, barter and not devalued Republican money was needed to obtain goods.⁶¹

The Nationalists' logistic successes were an important reason for their victory over Republicans. The Navarre quartermaster of the Nationalist Northern Army was proud of his ability to feed and clothe its forces, thereby “improving their health and spirit. The proof of this was the very low percentage of the sick during the hard winter.”⁶⁷

On the other side, poor rations must have reduced desires to sacrifice for the Republican cause. Despite ambitious official recommendations, soldiers of the 37th Mixed Brigade stationed near Madrid, received 20 grams of meat, 40 of oil, 20 of sugar, and 10 of salt in November 1937.⁷³

Nationalist troops received ten times more meat than their Republican counterparts. Of course, Nationalist zones were rich in grazing, but this does not entirely explain the superior diet of their troops. Other explanations—in keeping with the dominant tradition of political history from above—have blamed the Republican food deficits on incompetent leadership. Whether the fault was attributed to anarchists, Communists, or Socialists has depended upon the ideology of the historian.⁷⁸

Just as significantly, price maximums (tasas) did not encourage peasants who wanted to produce a large surplus and sell it legally.⁷⁹

6. China: Food Coercion in War and Civil War

Food shortage and famine are integral to the history of China. Though a vast country, much of it is desert, mountains, and high plateaus unfit for agriculture. The population is crowded into the Eastern seaboard and the great river valleys and plains that were frequently inundated despite centuries-old traditions and systems of flood control. During the worst floods, the loss of life and crops were enormous.

Because of large-scale studies of Chinese agriculture in the 1920s and 1930s, an anthropological tradition of village studies, and a sophisticated academic literature based on demography, agricultural economics, and agricultural science, the condition of rural China before, during, and after the wars and civil wars of the 1930s and 1940s is well documented and analyzed. China's rural poverty, low food surplus beyond village consumption, minimal agricultural productivity, and periodic famines were not due to absentee landlords exploiting their tenants or the state taxing the peasantry into poverty and starvation.⁸⁰

The rural economy was stagnant. It was caught in a vicious cycle of poverty (the so-called low income poverty trap) driven by Malthusian competition for survival. The poorest were unable to marry and their lineages died out. Their ranks kept being filled by others who inherited dwarf holdings too small to sustain a household. The Communists and Marxist scholars exaggerated landlordism at the root of peasant poverty. In a rural district near Yenan, the Communist base area in the late 1930s, after Communist land seizures and redistribution the average land per capita was only 2.2 acres: “47 percent of the inhabitants were still classified as hired laborers and poor peasants . . . they remained locked in the cycle of poverty.”⁸¹

Because of the precarious relationship between food consumption and food production in China, during the wars of the 1930s and 1940s control of grain and the manipulation of food in the midst of hunger and famine were of the utmost importance for the regime and its opponents, as it was for the Japanese army of occupation. The KMT never achieved a workable grain policy for civilian and military needs. It was unable to extract grain from villages through taxes and purchases, stockpile it, transport it to cities and the armies, and distribute it at reasonable prices.⁸⁴

The Japanese strategy was to starve China into submission. They tried to deny grain to the Chinese by deep forays into the rice surplus districts just after the harvest, ahead of Chinese troops who were also trying to get the rice, looting as much food as they could and laying waste the rest, and repeating this at the next harvest. The war between Japan and China was a war for food more than for territory. According to Chi, “after 1940 . . . the Japanese developed the strategy of forays into government held territories at harvest seasons for the specific purpose of seizing or destroying grain.” As for the KMT, “its troops had the responsibility to round up any surplus grain before the Japanese and puppet forces could reach it.”⁸⁸

During the Kiangsi soviet in the early 1930s, the Communist experience with building an army of “peasants and workers” was not a happy one. Mao wrote, “wherever the Red Army goes it finds the masses cold and reserved. Only after propaganda and agitation do they slowly rouse themselves.”⁹⁰

The same can be said about the civil war that followed. After the Japanese surrender, the civil war between the KMT and the PLA continued, and peasants were trapped between two evils. The PLA manipulated hunger for coercive recruitment into its ranks with food rationing, but at least rationing promised survival for compliance. If the Communists conscripted the breadwinner of a peasant family, they provided food for the family. If the breadwinner refused, the family would starve. According to an observer, “country folks do not want to join the Communists despite this treatment, but they have to when they have nothing to eat. The Communists first ask for stretcher-bearers who will soon be trained and taken into the army, and this is the way the Communists obtain their manpower. As practically all the food available is taken away, anyone who does not want to cooperate with the Communists will just have to face starvation.”⁹⁷

The fate of peasants in Nationalist areas was even grimmer. Nationalists confiscated food, fuel, and draft animals without compensation. KMT soldiers and officers plundered and looted more than the PLA did. Chiang Kai-shek accused his own officers of embezzling the grain and money consigned to their troops.⁹⁸

The outcome of war in Manchuria was decisive for the Communist victory and seizure of power in China. The KMT held the cities, which were gradually encircled and became a hunger trap for the KMT armies, civilian inhabitants, and refugees. The PLA shut down the food supply into the cities and waited. According to an American newsman, in Shenyang in the summer of 1948, “food and fuel had become unobtainable from the communist controlled countryside. About 300,000 people (one quarter of the population) were subsisting on barks and leaves, and pressed soybean cakes ordinarily used as fertilizer and fodder . . . I walked down the desolate streets past the emaciated bodies of the dead in the gutters . . . by early October reports of cannibalism circulated.”¹⁰⁰

In the areas they controlled, the Communists pursued a different food production and distribution strategy. The war had resulted in a huge population of dislocated, armed young males with neither employment nor homes. They attached themselves to local warlords and groups of armed bandits, as happens in the political economy of shortage and predation. Communist land reform brought some of these displaced males back under village control and provided the opportunity for farming instead of banditry for food. Land reform in China thus played a similar role of putting the most likely and active participants in the economy of predation under party and village discipline as the Bolshevik labor armies did for the demobilized soldiers in the Russian civil war.

Fairbank writes, “when peace broke out in 1945, the Nationalist armed forces were at least twice the size of the PLA and . . . had the advantage of American equipment and supplies. . . . For Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists to lose the civil war was a remarkable achievement.”¹⁰²

The control of food was also the main instrument of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) consolidation of power and was at the core of the party-state. After 1949, the CCP experimented with various cooperative and sharing systems for agriculture before the collective farms were instituted. For villagers, markets ceased to exist, and all grain had to be sold directly to the state at fixed prices, which were set low in relation to manufactured goods and amounted to high taxation of the peasants for financing urban industrial growth. Peasant migration of all types—permanent, seasonal, daily, labor and non-labor—was frozen or controlled by the issuance of registration cards and travel permits. Food extraction from the peasants was ruthlessly enforced.¹⁰³

In cities, everyone was assigned to residential work units (called danwei) for work, housing, medical care, primary schooling of children, consumer goods, recreation, and transportation, that is for total control over the entire life-cycle from infancy to death.¹⁰⁴

7. Conclusion

We have developed two themes about revolution and civil war. The first theme explains how victory is achieved. That theme builds on the inner workings of the political economy of shortage and predation, and we describe it for the Russian, Spanish, and Chinese revolutions and civil wars. During the conflict process, which is characterized by dual authority and economic dislocation, desperate people are compelled to make choices about security and survival that have little to do with ideology or the promise of a better future society. When faced with the security and the survival dilemmas, the soldiery, the citizenry, and the war lords and their militias establish black markets in food and vital resources and keep reproducing the state of anarchy and the political economy of shortage and predation. The origins of revolution and civil war may have structural roots, but their contingent outcomes depend on which contender manages to build an efficient organization of food procurement and allocation for military and civilian needs, and uses the food weapon more effectively and ruthlessly. Proficient food control creates its own triumphant dynamism. Peasants are plundered and exploited, but well-fed soldiers desert less frequently and fight more effectively. Workers who obtain adequate food with ration cards spend less time searching for it on the black market and have more energy and motivation for work. Army officers, civil servants, and professionals who are starved will seize the opportunity for more food allocation and side with food providers, whether or not they subscribe to the political goals, policies, and ideologies of their new masters.

The second theme concerns the theoretical tools that historians and social scientists use for explaining the dynamics of conflict. The intellectual challenge is to join structuralist macro theory with action and choice micro theories describing the behavior and choices of rank and file soldiers and citizens, and the decisions and actions of political and military leaders and their key organizations. Under normal, preconflict conditions, micro choices concerning work and consumption, family formation and inter-group relations, reproduce the inherited social structures. In crisis times, faced with security and survival dilemmas, micro choices in the aggregate change social structures. Dual authority and an economy of predation become the new reality that constrains the decisions of leaders, activists, and ordinary people alike. Structure and choice coexist in creative tension, in a dialectic, both existentially for those who live the conflict, and methodologically for those who analyze it. The theory bridging macro and micro, structure and choice, rests on the paradigms of game theory, which are both structure and choice.