Antonovshchina

Naming and framing

Antonovshchina is the Soviet historiographical name taken from the surname of A. S. Antonov, chief of staff of the 2nd insurgent army and a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party; the Russian-language article redirects "Антоновщина" to the Tambov uprising article. The same revolt was also called "Antonov's mutiny" (Антоновский мятеж) or the "Tambov operation," while official propaganda labelled it a "mutiny of Socialist Revolutionaries and officers" in order to conceal the peasant revolt's real causes. The term is polysemous: it also denotes two villages, in Grodno region and Minsk region of present-day Belarus, so the dictionary entry documents the political and historiographical sense.

Origins and outbreak

War Communism extracted grain from the villages by compulsory requisition without compensation, with targets set from rough pre-war estimates rather than actual production and collection often violent. Tambov peasants produced roughly one million tonnes of grain, a third of it exported, and rural Tambov had almost no Bolshevik support: the SRs had won large majorities there in 1917, and forced requisitions and levies brought the peasants to the limit of survival. In 1920 drought struck the province: only 12 million poods were harvested while the requisition quota was not reduced, standing at 11.5 million. From summer 1919 Antonov organized a guerrilla band of Red Army deserters, SRs and peasants; his fighters killed more than 200 government grain collectors and grew from about 150 to 6,000 by early summer 1920. The revolt flared on 15 August 1920 in the village of Khitrovo in Tambov district after a requisition detachment was disarmed; on 19 August peasants in several villages refused to hand over grain and, backed by partisans, destroyed requisition detachments along with local Communists and Chekists, and that same day in Afanasyevka several small insurgent groups merged into a partisan army. The revolt then spread rapidly to the Tambov, Kirsanov, Borisoglebsk, Morshansk and Kozlov districts and into neighbouring Saratov and Voronezh provinces, where insurgents abolished Soviet bodies and destroyed their representatives and garrisons. By October 1920 the Bolsheviks had lost control of the countryside and held only Tambov city and a number of smaller towns.

Command and organization

Saying that Antonov "led" the revolt compresses a contested command structure. Accounts assign supreme command of the United Partisan Army of the Tambov Region, created on 14 November 1920, to Pyotr Tokmakov, a former militiaman, lieutenant and peasant from Inokovka in Kirsanov district, who also chaired the Union of Toiling Peasants (STK); Antonov is described as chief of staff of the 2nd insurgent army, and the Russian article's list of key participants names Tokmakov as leader of the uprising. On the basis of surviving SR organizations the insurgents formed the STK as their political organization, with slogans of overthrowing the Bolshevik dictatorship, convoking a Constituent Assembly and restoring political and economic freedoms. The rebels organized on the model of the Red Army in 18 to 20 regiments with their own political commissars, reconnaissance and communications departments, and adopted the red flag as their standard; by spring 1921, under Antonov, resistance was more coordinated, and assessments note that he offered little in the way of a positive programme. The Union proclaimed the Provisional Democratic Republic of the Tambov Partisan Region in May 1921, to rule until a democratically elected constituent assembly, and adopted the pre-revolutionary flag of Russia and, among its mottos, the White slogan "Long live the Great United and Indivisible Russia."

Turning point and suppression

In October 1920 Lenin instructed F. E. Dzerzhinsky, E. M. Sklyansky and V. S. Kornev "to speed up the rout of Antonovshchina"; in January 1921 the Orgburo again discussed the struggle; and on 6 February 1921 a Plenipotentiary Commission of the VTsIK under V. A. Antonov-Ovseyenko was sent to the gubernia and became the supreme body directing the suppression. The revolt peaked in January and February 1921, when insurgent numbers reached 50,000 organized into two armies of 14 infantry and 5 cavalry regiments and one independent brigade; they destroyed 60 state farms, took control of practically the whole gubernia, paralysed movement on the Ryazan-Ural railway, and repelled Bolshevik attempts to enter insurgent territory. By January 1921 peasant revolts had spread to Samara, Saratov, Tsaritsyn, Astrakhan and Siberia. On 12 February 1921, on the decision of the People's Commissariat of Food, requisitioning was stopped in Tambov gubernia, and in March the Tenth Congress of the RCP(b) abolished it nationwide and replaced it with a fixed food tax; a general amnesty announced on 20 March brought about 3,000 capitulations, though very few with weapon in hand. In Order No. 21 of 21 February 1921, Antonov noted that fighting spirit among the partisan detachments was weakening; of the peasants' joy at the abolition of requisitioning he remarked, "Yes, the peasants have won. Though only temporarily, of course."

On 27 April 1921 the Politburo appointed M. N. Tukhachevsky commander of the forces in Tambov gubernia, with I. P. Uborevich as his deputy and N. E. Kakurin as chief of staff, G. I. Kotovsky also sent and G. G. Yagoda and V. V. Ulrich arriving from the Cheka; Tukhachevsky was directed to liquidate the uprising within a month, and the end of the Polish-Soviet war and Wrangel's evacuation freed large Red Army forces. In total up to 55,000 Red Army servicemen were involved: 37,500 bayonets, 10,000 sabres and 7,000 in nine artillery brigades, plus armoured car detachments, armoured trains, armoured railcars, air detachments and cadets; the plan was to "flood the rebellion area with troops," and the forces included regular units, Chinese and Hungarian internationalists, Cheka detachments, Units for Special Purposes and the Militarised Guard. Tukhachevsky based the campaign on a harsh military regime and terror against the population. Order No. 171 of 11 June 1921 prescribed shooting on the spot of citizens refusing to give their names, hostage-taking and the shooting of hostages in villages hiding weapons, the shooting of the eldest worker in a family where hidden weapons were found, and the arrest, expulsion and expropriation of families that sheltered a "bandit." Order No. 0116 of 12 June 1921 ordered forests where bandits hid to be cleared with poison gases, and Order No. 116 of 23 June 1921 set out the "cleansing" method: surrounding a volost, taking 60 to 100 of the most prominent persons as hostages, giving residents two hours to hand over bandits and weapons, and shooting the hostages in public if they did not comply. Artillery fire completely destroyed the villages of Koptevo, Khitrovo and Verkhnespasskoye in Tambov district. The hostage system embittered the insurgents, who in turn took and shot Red Army men, Communists, Soviet employees and their families; in improvised concentration camps many children were held alongside adults, and even after a July 1921 relief campaign over 450 child hostages aged 1 to 10 remained. In Osinovka on 27 June 1921 up to 40 hostages were taken and 21 shot before the village assembly; 36 hostages were shot on 3 and 4 July in Bogoslovka; and in 2nd Kareyevka the inhabitants were evicted, property confiscated and the village burned. Yulia Kantor estimates 30,000 to 50,000 Tambov gubernia peasants were subjected to repression.

Contested chemical weapons use

Chemical weapons were used as well as artillery, aviation and armour. On 9 June 1921 a VTsIK commission chaired by Antonov-Ovseyenko decided to use gases to "smoke out" insurgent detachments from the forests, and the agent used was chloropicrin, a tear agent, in АЖО-type shells. Three instances are documented: on 13 July 1921 a battery expended 47 chemical shells, and on 3 August 1921, 59 chemical shells were fired at an island on Lake Kipets. Researcher A. S. Bobkov confirmed the three documented combat uses but doubted their effectiveness, since the Red Army had no experience and there was no information on victims; military historians A. Glushko and N. Shilo note that in all three cases the quantities of chemical shells were insufficient for combat effect, which explains why further use was abandoned.

Insurgent operations (examples)

On 11 April 1921 Antonov gathered 5,000 partisans and launched a pincer attack on Rasskazovo after a diversionary attack on Nizhne-Spasskoe; the garrison, including an infantry company, Bolshevik militants, a machine-gun platoon, the Volga Infantry Brigade and the 2nd Cheka regiment, quickly collapsed, yielding a cannon, eleven machine guns, four hundred rifles, ammunition, telephones and cable. On 24 April, 5,000 to 10,000 fighters under "Vaska Karas" and Vasili F. Selianski gathered at Kobiaki intending to take Kirsanov, garrisoned by a Moscow infantry brigade; two assaults failed the next day, and according to communist government estimates 2,000 rebels were killed in the following days. In fighting from 28 May to 7 June 1921 near Inzhvaino station, Red Army units under the overall command of Uborevich destroyed the 2nd insurgent army commanded by Antonov, after which the 1st insurgent army under Colonel A. V. Boguslavsky avoided a general engagement and the initiative passed definitively to the Red Army.

End and casualties

By summer 1921 the main insurgent forces had been defeated, and in early July the leadership ordered combat detachments to split into groups, hide in the forests and shift to partisan actions or disperse home; the uprising disintegrated into small isolated pockets, with clashes in Tambov continuing until summer 1922 and gradually dying out. On 16 July 1922, shortly after Antonov's liquidation, Tukhachevsky reported to the RCP(b) Central Committee that "the mutiny is liquidated, Soviet power is restored everywhere." Casualty figures are estimates and should be attributed as such: it is estimated that around 100,000 people were arrested and around 15,000 killed during the suppression, and the English infobox lists 50,000 civilians interned in camps and 15,000 dead; the Russian infobox gives Red Army losses of about 5,000 and insurgent losses of about 15,000, with total losses around 230,000 to 240,000 sentenced, wounded and dead including civilians.

Distinctions and significance

Both the Tambov uprising and the Kronstadt rebellion substantially contributed to the RCP(b)'s decision to abandon War Communism and move to the NEP, but Tambov is a peasant uprising against grain requisitioning in the countryside, whereas Kronstadt was an armed uprising of sailors, soldiers and civilians at the Baltic Fleet base demanding free soviet elections, freedom of speech and assembly and amnesty for political prisoners, crushed by Tukhachevsky in March 1921. The movement was later portrayed by the Soviets as anarchical banditry, similar to other left-wing anti-Bolshevik movements that opposed them in this period. The rebels' demands were that free trade and movement of goods be allowed, grain requisitions ended and the Soviet administration and the Cheka dissolved; they were supported by the population, used villages for cover and rest, and often disguised themselves as Red Army soldiers. Insurgents in rebel-held areas abolished all Soviet institutions, and around 1,000 members of the Russian Communist Party were killed. As White resistance in southern Russia petered out in summer and autumn 1920, the temporarily triumphant Bolsheviks faced a revolt of the peasantry, the "unspoken junior partner in the 'union of laboring classes'" in the historian James von Geldern's phrase; by spring 1921 peasants were in full insurrection across the black-earth districts, the Northern Caucasus and the Volga region, with the largest revolt apparently in western Siberia and the most extensively documented outburst in Tambov province. Soviet accounts of the revolt did not stand alone: White governments paid insufficient attention to organizing the insurgent movement behind the Reds, though in summer 1919 the command of the Armed Forces of South Russia tried to contact the Tambov "Green" insurgents, tasking esaul A. P. Padalkin to establish contact with Antonov and arrange their joining Mamontov's corps; Padalkin failed and was himself arrested, while Mamontov's corps distributed large quantities of captured weapons to the partisans. Historian V. Zh. Tsvetkov infers from these archival facts that White-command complicity in organizing the Tambov uprising can be asserted, but the movement's own political organization and slogans remained the peasants' and SRs' own. To conceal the real causes of the peasant uprisings, official Soviet propaganda later called them "mutinies of SRs and officers." Von Geldern concludes that the revolt was not a wasted effort: Lenin and the state leadership drew a clear message from it and other popular unrest, and in the NEP reforms announced soon afterwards many sources of peasant discontent were eliminated.