Провизионные билеты железнодорожников: к проблеме легального мешочничества в годы гражданской войны в России
Provisioning Tickets for Railroad Workers: Toward the Problem of Legal «Bag-Man» Activities During the Russian Civil War Years

Summary/Abstract: In the scholarly literature, there has been considerable neglect of the theme of so-called “legal ‘Bagman’ activities” during the Civil War in Soviet Russia, when certain categories of the population were granted special rights regarding the transport of foodstuffs. This article is designed to fill this lacunae. The author shows that the government allowed specific categories of citizens (railroad workers, in particular) special opportunities for self-supply. This mean that alongside the many illegal blackmarket “bagmen” in the country, there were also legal ones who used special provisioning train tickets. After the beginning of the NEP, efforts were made to abolish these special privileges and gradually transfer workers and employees to wage-based forms of compensation. Cooperative activity in transportation was to contribute to this. But because the position of much the population at the end of Civil War was so perilous, the authorities were forced were to return to extending privileges such as the distribution of free provisioning tickets, even to workers who were not employed within the railway system. The author argues that one should forego one-sided views on the problem of “bag-man” activities during the first years of the Soviet regime. This was a unique “adaptive syndrome”— a complex phenomenon that involved not only ordinary citizens, but the authorities as well. In spite of militant rhetoric and the promise of certain punishment, the state granted unusual opportunities for self-supply to specific categories of citizens employed in the most critical sectors, thus creating the basis for legal “bag-man” activity during the Civil War and initial period of the NEP.

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