Introduction

Abstract

Interrogator Gletkin, Arthur Koestler’s infamous OGPU (Ob”edinennoe gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie)creation, informed Rubashov, Koestler’s Bukharin, about police relations with peasants: “In all other countries, the peasants had one or two hundred years to develop the habit of industrial precision and the handling of machines. Here they only had ten years. If we didn’t sack them and shoot them for every trifle, the whole country would come to a standstill, and the peasants would lie down to sleep in the factory yards until grass grew out of the chimneys and everything became as it was before.”¹ Gletkin remains the archetypical political policeman, a symbol of arbitrariness and brutality that proved to many that the Bolshevik Revolution stood for little more than deceit and cant. But just as our vision of the peasantry on the eve of revolution has undergone a serious critique by such investigators as Teodor Shanin,² political police-peasant relations in the pre-Stalinist years of the Soviet Union deserve much fuller treatment than we have had to date.