see the acquisition of grain and distribution of food in the villages. However this proved inefficient and the town workers were sent in to requisition grain for themselves and to give industrial goods to those peasants that helped to gather the grain. In 1920-21 when the 'White' army was no longer a threat the peasants started to rise against the Bolsheviks in a series of insurrections in the black-earth provinces. An example being Tambov where an old SR leader Antononov lead a peasant 'army' against the Bolsheviks. Those peasants suspected of being part of Antonov's army were executed and even whole villages were burned to the ground. Here Lenin can be seen as repressing a section of Russian society and using terror to force the peasants to give up their grain. Stalin, in the 1930s, used terror to enforce the wholesale collectivization of agriculture to a much greater extent than Lenin in order to fund industrialisation, to quote Alex De Jonge,"..Stalin declared war on his peasants, calling for the immediate 'liquidation of the Kulaks as a class'. The party went into immediate action, rounding up those peasants and their families, right down to breast-fed infants, that local activists had decided were Kulaks."From this it can be seen that to Lenin the peasants were a problem that was dealt with harshly, but from 1921 onwards the policy became more relaxed with the taxation on the peasants and the halting of forced grain requisitioning. This was extended with the introduction of the NEP and a return to some level of capitalism in agriculture. However to Stalin the peasants were some form of enemy who, especially the Kulaks, needed to be 'liquidated' as a class. This idea of 'liquidation' seems almost reminiscent of Hitler's attitude toward the Jews in the 1940s. So Stalin's method of dealing with the peasant question was much more extreme than that of Lenin.Lenin was not afraid to use terror when it was necessary. In march 1921 the Red...
