In 1918 many would have found this system familiar. The Russian imperial government, tormented by wartime food shortages, had begun to confiscate grain at gunpoint—a policy known as prodrazvyorstka—as early as 1916. In March 1917 the Provisional Government had also decreed that peasants should sell all grain to the state at prices dictated by the state, with the exception of what they needed for their own sowing and consumption.63 The Bolsheviks followed suit. In May 1918 the Council of People’s Commissars followed up on tsarist policy and established a “food-supply dictatorship.” The
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