The Tambov Rebellion and the peasant uprisings

Requisitions and the village: peasant revolts and the Greens, 1918–1919

After Lenin's decree of 9 May 1918 proclaimed a "food dictatorship", the Sovnarkom introduced compulsory food apportionment, the prodrazverstka, across Soviet Russia on 11 January 1919. Both the name and the method came from the grain apportionment the tsarist Ministry of Agriculture had introduced in November 1916 for the war effort. The Food Commissariat set quotas from each province's sown area, expected yield and previous reserves, and the plan was broken down from province to district, township and village and finally to individual households. At first it covered grain and fodder; in the 1919–20 campaign potatoes and meat were added, and by the end of 1920 almost every farm product was subject to it. By Soviet figures, grain and fodder collected rose from 107.9 million poods in 1918–19 to 212.5 million in 1919–20 and 367 million in 1920–21. Requisitioning fed the Red Army and the towns, but with grain sales banned it left peasants with little, and rural discontent grew as the civil war drew to a close. 1

The requisitions were carried out by food detachments (prodotryady) and Committees of Poor Peasants (kombedy). From 1918 Food Commissar Alexander Tsyurupa organised dozens of armed detachments in the towns and sent them into the countryside. He claimed they were sent only when every other method had failed and that they also carried political awareness into the villages, but conceded that they sometimes copied the behaviour of the tsarist police. On 11 June 1918 the All-Russian Central Executive Committee ordered the creation of kombedy to locate and seize surplus grain inside each village; wealthy peasants and employers of labour were barred. According to the historian Orlando Figes, most villages thought of themselves as communities of equals bound by kinship and either refused to form a separate body for the poor or set up one that everyone joined; actual committees were often staffed by outsiders such as townsmen, soldiers and landless craftsmen and behaved "more like a local mafia". On 2 December 1918 the kombedy were merged into the village soviets and had disappeared in Russia by the following spring, but by the Soviet historian Garasimiuk's count 131,637 had been set up. 2 3

Requisitioning met resistance from the start. After the food dictatorship of May 1918, clashes between peasants and the Red Army were reported in Voronezh, Tambov, Penza and Saratov provinces and around Kostroma, Moscow, Novgorod, Petrograd, Pskov and Smolensk, and the Bolsheviks crushed them bloodily. The largest early revolt was the "Chapan War" on the middle Volga in March 1919. On 3 March the villagers of Novodevichye in Sengilei district, Samara province, disarmed a detachment requisitioning their harvest, and the first troops sent against them went over to the rebels and shot their own officers. On 7 March the rebels took Stavropol on the Volga almost without a fight, made the First World War officer Aleksey Dolinin their leader, and demanded an end to requisitions, free elections to the soviets and the end of "Bolshevik commissarocracy". The revolt was named after the chapan, the sheepskin coat local peasants wore in winter. Some 13,000 troops under Mikhail Frunze retook Stavropol on 14 March and Novodevichye on the 15th, and fighting ended by mid-April. Estimates of the rebel force range from at least 30,000 to 100,000–150,000, and about 10,000 peasants are estimated to have died. 4 5

Such armed peasant groups were collectively called the "Greens". They were semi-organised local militias that fought not only the Bolsheviks but also the Whites and the foreign interventionists to protect their communities from requisitions and reprisals. They were ideologically neutral but at times associated with the Socialist Revolutionaries. The name came from bands of deserters hiding in the forests: as the Whites were beaten, Red Army peasant soldiers who resented being ordered to keep repressing their own class took their weapons into the woods, and in 1919–21 many Green fighters and leaders were such deserters. Soviet authorities divided peasant unrest into the bunt, a brief revolt with few participants, and the vosstaniye, an insurrection of thousands able to take towns and put forward a coherent programme; the Chapan War is counted as the first true vosstaniye. Once the Whites were effectively defeated in 1920, the justification for requisitioning weakened further. Officially some 2.5 million soldiers were demobilised in 1921, and many of those who went home joined the Greens. Apart from the weapons deserters brought with them and arms seized from Red Army depots and garrisons, the Greens fought with clubs, pitchforks, axes and hunting guns. 6

Tambov province in August 1920 and Alexander Antonov

Tambov province, less than 500 km southeast of Moscow, was farming country: of its roughly 4 million people before the revolution only 268,000 lived in towns. Lying on deep black earth, it counted among the richest provinces of the empire, and before 1917 its peasants produced about a million tonnes of grain, a third of which left the province. In the 1917 elections the countryside voted overwhelmingly for the Socialist Revolutionaries, and in March 1918, after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was ratified, Bolshevik delegates were even thrown out of local soviets. In August 1920 the province's 3.65 million people included 13,490 Communists and candidate members, only 4,492 of them in the countryside. Close to Moscow and far from the fronts, it saw especially intensive food-detachment activity, and according to Russian-language sources up to 40,000 people in the province took part in local revolts and partisan actions against the Bolsheviks, food detachments and kombedy in 1917–19. General Mamontov's White cavalry raid in summer 1919 left large stocks of weapons in partisan hands. 7 8

Alexander Antonov, whose name the rising came to bear, was born in Moscow in 1889 and grew up in Kirsanov in Tambov province, his father's home town. He joined the Socialist Revolutionaries and took part in "expropriations", robberies of stations and banks for the revolutionary cause; arrested in Saratov in 1909, he was sentenced to twenty years of katorga, served in the Schlüsselburg fortress and the Vladimir Central prison. Freed by the political amnesty after the February Revolution of 1917, he worked in the new militia and in October became head of the Kirsanov district militia. As Bolshevik power reached into the countryside he registered with the Left SRs to keep his post, but took little part in their work. According to Russian-language sources, in December 1918–January 1919 he formed a "combat squad" of 10–15 men that raided Soviet offices and assassinated local Bolsheviks; by summer 1919 it had grown to 150, mostly deserters. English-language sources say his bands killed more than 200 grain collectors and grew to 6,000 by early summer 1920. Food detachments avoided the areas where he operated, and peasants saw him as their protector. 9 8 7

In 1920 drought hit Tambov and the harvest came to only 12 million poods of grain, yet the requisition quota stayed at 11.5 million. According to Russian-language sources the rising began on 15 August in the village of Khitrovo in Tambov district when a food detachment was disarmed. English-language sources date the Khitrovo revolt to 19 August and say the requisition squad had taken everything it could and "beat up elderly men of seventy in full view of the public". With few rifles, the villagers armed themselves with pitchforks and clubs and drove off the troops sent against them. On 19 August peasants in several villages, among them Kamenka in Tambov district and Tugolukovo in Borisoglebsk district, refused to hand over grain and, with partisan help, killed food-detachment men, local Communists and Chekists; the same day several small groups merged into one partisan army at Afanasyevka. The rebels tried to take the provincial capital Tambov but were scattered by machine guns ten kilometres short of it. The rising then spread through the Tambov, Kirsanov, Borisoglebsk, Morshansk and Kozlov districts and neighbouring districts of Saratov and Voronezh provinces, an area with more than three million inhabitants. 8 7

On 21 August the Tambov provincial party committee set up an emergency operational staff and declared a state of siege, but events were already out of control. On 31 August Alexander Shlikhter, chairman of the provincial executive committee, led a punitive detachment against the rebels himself, was defeated and was removed from his post. The Red Army's main forces were tied down in the Polish–Soviet War and by Wrangel's offensive in northern Tavria, and according to English-language sources only about 3,000 unreliable troops, drafted from local villages and unwilling to fight their own class, remained in the province. In October Lenin instructed Felix Dzerzhinsky, Efraim Sklyansky and Vasily Kornev to "speed up the destruction of the Antonovshchina". By 15 October local reserves and units of the Internal Guard (VOKhR) and Special Purpose Units (ChON) had raised Soviet strength to 4,447 men with 22 machine guns and five guns, while Antonov already had up to 20,000 men, 44 Maxim guns and five three-inch guns. By October the Bolsheviks had lost the province's countryside entirely, holding only the city of Tambov and a few small towns; in rebel areas all Soviet institutions were abolished and about 1,000 Communists were killed. 8 7

The Union of Working Peasants and the partisan armies

On 14 November 1920 the rebels put all their forces under one command, forming the United Partisan Army of the Tambov Region. According to Russian-language sources its commander was Pyotr Tokmakov, a peasant from Inokovka in Kirsanov district. Called up during the Russo-Japanese War, he won all four classes of the St George Cross and medal on the Galician front in the First World War and rose to lieutenant; after Brest-Litovsk he went home, worked in the militia and in 1918 formed a partisan band. In June 1920 he took command of the 2nd Insurgent Army and in November of the whole united army, and as chairman of the Union of Working Peasants he headed the movement both militarily and politically. The united army comprised the 1st Insurgent Army headquartered at Kamenka under Colonel Aleksandr Boguslavsky, the 2nd headquartered at Kobyaki in Kirsanov district, and a mainly mounted 3rd army under Ivan Kolesnikov. These sources list Antonov as chief of staff of the 2nd Army. English-language sources and the Soviet-era name "Antonovshchina", by contrast, present Antonov as leader of the whole rising, and the sources weigh differently who was the real centre of command. 8 10 7

The Union of Working Peasants was built on the surviving Socialist Revolutionary organisations and adopted slogans close to the SRs': the overthrow of the Bolshevik dictatorship, the convocation of a Constituent Assembly and the restoration of political and economic freedoms. Its manifesto of December 1920 demanded political equality for all citizens without division into classes; an end to the civil war and lasting peace with foreign states; a Constituent Assembly elected by equal, universal, direct and secret suffrage with the right to recall deputies; until then, provisional authorities elected by the unions and parties that had fought the Communists; and freedom of speech, the press, conscience, association and assembly. Its economic programme called for full implementation of the land-socialisation law adopted by the former Constituent Assembly, supply of necessities through cooperatives, partial denationalisation of factories while heavy industry, coal mining and metallurgy stayed in state hands, workers' control and state supervision of production, and Russian and foreign capital in economic reconstruction. It also called for self-determination for the nationalities of the former empire, state credit for small farms, freedom for handicrafts and compulsory universal literacy. Antonov himself demanded free trade and movement of goods, an end to requisitions and the dissolution of the Soviet administration and the Cheka. 7 8

Antonov organised the peasant units on the Red Army model into 18–20 regiments with political commissars, reconnaissance and communications departments, and imposed strict discipline. The rebels had a medical staff and reinforcement brigades, and a communications and intelligence network that used women, children and the elderly. Each village was responsible for arming and feeding its own unit. According to Russian-language sources the rising peaked in January–February 1921 at about 50,000 men in two armies with 14 infantry and 5 cavalry regiments, one separate brigade, 25 machine guns and five guns. English-language sources give two armies of 21 regiments, say up to 50,000 were mobilised between October 1920 and January 1921, and put the force in February 1921 at 20,000–40,000, half of them full-time fighters and half part-time. About 6,000 were mounted. The rebels destroyed 60 state farms, halted traffic on the Ryazan–Ural railway, and seized trains of requisitioned grain and handed it out to villages. But without heavy weapons they could not take towns, and a localism focused on defending their own villages kept them from joining other peasant movements or marching on large cities. 7 8 6

In May 1921 the Union of Working Peasants proclaimed a "Provisional Democratic Republic of the Tambov Partisan Region" to govern until a Constituent Assembly met. Russian-language sources date the proclamation to 20 May at a public meeting in the village of Karai-Saltyki in Kirsanov district, and say a peasant named Shendyapin, one of the most active resisters, was put forward as its head. According to English-language sources the republic used the pre-revolutionary Russian flag, and the White slogan "Long live the Great, United and Indivisible Russia" became one of the rebels' mottos. The same sources also say the rebels fought under the red flag and so claimed the central symbol of the revolution, which suggests that symbols varied by unit and period. Accounts of Tokmakov's end also differ. His Russian-language biography says he was killed, in effect by a stray bullet, near the village of Bogoslovka on 28 February 1921 during the 2nd Army's raid into Borisoglebsk district, whereas English-language sources say he died in battle in June 1921, around the same time as Boguslavsky. English-language sources judge that its programme gave the movement a coherence other peasant risings lacked, but that it had no clear idea of what should replace the government, while Antonov dreamed of marching on Moscow and ending Bolshevik rule. 7 8 10

Western Siberia, 1921: from Ishim to Tobolsk

After the fall of the Kolchak regime, Siberia became a new source for Soviet grain policy. According to English-language sources some 35,000 food-detachment troops were stationed there. On 20 July 1920 the Sovnarkom decreed "On the Removal of Grain Surpluses in Siberia", obliging peasants to surrender the previous years' surpluses and the new harvest's at the same time. Between 20 June 1920 and 1 March 1921 the six provinces under the Siberian Revolutionary Committee (Irkutsk, Yenisei, Tomsk, Omsk, Altai and Semipalatinsk) were to deliver 110 million poods, Tyumen province 8,177,000, Yekaterinburg province 10 million and Chelyabinsk province 17 million, a third of the national quota of 440 million poods. Besides grain, 37 separate levies were imposed, including 6.27 million poods of meat as well as butter, eggs, potatoes, hides, wool, horns and hooves. Even in Ishim district, hit by a severe crop failure in 1920, local authorities took food grain and seed, and Tyumen province fulfilled 102 per cent of its plan. Following decisions of the Eighth Congress of Soviets in December 1920, a seed levy was prepared to move all household seed into communal granaries. 11 12

On 31 December 1920 a women's assembly in Peganovo township, Ishim district, declared the food commissars' conduct illegal and disarmed a nine-man food detachment. On 31 January 1921 peasants in the villages of Chelnokovskoye and Churtan in northern Ishim district tried to stop seed grain being taken away; soldiers opened fire, killing two and wounding two. This time the peasants did not back down: armed with stakes, pitchforks and hunting guns, they drove the requisitioners out. Within three days the rising covered all of northern Ishim district and soon spread to the Tyumen, Tobolsk, Yalutorovsk, Tara, Tyukalinsk, Kurgan, Kamyshlov and Shadrinsk districts. In February the rebels paralysed both lines of the Trans-Siberian Railway for three weeks and took Petropavlovsk (today Petropavl in Kazakhstan) on 14 February, Tobolsk and Kokchetav on the 21st, Surgut on 10 March, Beryozovo on 21 March, Obdorsk on 1 April and Karkaralinsk on 5 April. In spring the insurgent zone stretched from Obdorsk in the north to Karkaralinsk in the south and from Tugulym station in the west to Surgut in the east. Petropavlovsk changed hands three times before remaining with the Red Army on 16 February. 11

By number of participants and geographic extent, the West Siberian rising was the largest of the Green revolts, yet it is also counted among the least studied. Russian-language sources say the insurgents exceeded 100,000 by April while noting that the literature gives anything from 30,000 to 150,000. English-language sources cite the historian Vladimir Shulpyakov's 70,000–100,000 but consider 55,000–60,000 the most likely figure, and put the population under rebel control at 3.4 million. The most widespread slogan was "Soviets without Communists", and the rebels demanded freedom of speech, assembly and association, free trade and the right to dispose of their land and produce, that is, an end to the grain monopoly. Freely elected township and village peasant soviets were restored in liberated areas. Yet SR views and monarchism coexisted, and in some places ranks and epaulettes reappeared. There was no single headquarters; separate commands acted independently, such as the Main Siberian Staff in the Ishim–Petropavlovsk area under the former lieutenant Vladimir Rodin. Many commanders were peasant NCOs and ensigns hardened by two wars, and men aged 18–35 (sometimes 45) were mobilised by force. 12 11

From the Volga to the Caucasus: the "peasant war" of 1920–1921

In February 1920 the "Black Eagle" rising, also called the Pitchfork Uprising, broke out in Menzelinsk district of Ufa province. According to Russian-language sources, the food commissar in the village of Novaya Yelan demanded an impossible 5,535 poods of grain within 24 hours and on 4 February locked twenty villagers, two of them women, in a barn as hostages in thirty degrees of frost. On 7 February villagers armed with pitchforks and axes freed the hostages, killing four detachment members, and on the 9th the chairman of the Menzelinsk district Cheka and the head of the Zainsk militia, who had come to negotiate, were killed. English-language sources date the first clash to 4 February. Led by the former sergeant-major Aleksey Milovanov, the rising spread to the Belebey and Birsk districts of Ufa province, Chistopol district of Kazan province and Bugulma district of Samara province, forming a "Black Eagle" army of about 50,000 with only some 1,200 rifles. The Cheka's Troops for the Internal Defence of the Republic answered with machine guns and artillery, and by mid-March the rising was crushed. According to English-language sources about 800 Soviet troops and more than 3,000 rebels died and hundreds of villages were burned. 13 14

In July 1920 a Red Army commander rose in revolt. Alexander Sapozhkov, a second lieutenant of peasant stock from Novouzensk in Samara province, was a Left SR who had been the first chairman of the Novouzensk district soviet in 1917. In the civil war he commanded the 22nd Division and won fame holding Uralsk through an 80-day siege in 1919, but was removed from the front for "incompetent command and a corrupting policy". While forming the 9th Cavalry Division in Buzuluk district he learned of his dismissal on 8 July, and on the 14th, at a divisional meeting in the village of Pogromnoye, his Order No. 1 renamed the division the "1st Red Army of Truth". He demanded new elections to the soviets, the abolition of food detachments and free trade, and charged that the Communists were exercising the dictatorship of one party rather than of the whole proletariat. With 500 infantry and 500 cavalry he took Buzuluk but gave it up on the 16th, and attacks on Uralsk and Novouzensk failed. The authorities took the leaders' families hostage. On 6 September Sapozhkov was shot by pursuers near the aul of Koim in the Astrakhan steppe. The Samara revolutionary tribunal sentenced 52 of 150 defendants to death, and travelling sessions sentenced at least 117 more. 15 16

Risings continued elsewhere. In January 1921, east of Barnaul and north of Biysk in the Altai, 5,000–10,000 peasants centred on Sorokino rose under the slogans "For a clean Soviet power" and "Soviets without Communists". White veterans and anarchist partisans fought side by side, and a battle near Sorokino in February killed about 400 rebels and five Red Army soldiers. On 24 January 1921, in Yadrin district of the Chuvash Autonomous Region, 5,000–7,000 peasants rose against requisitions and were crushed within three days. In the south, Kuban and Don Cossacks and Caucasian mountaineers rose in 1920, forming guerrilla forces of more than 30,000; after their decisive defeat the following summer, small Green bands remained active in the Kuban and Don until 1923. In Ukraine Danylo Terpylo controlled the countryside of Kiev province with 20,000 armed followers, and atamans such as Nykyfor Hryhoriv fought while switching sides. The largest and best-organised movement was Nestor Makhno's anarchist peasant army. Ukraine's peasant armies and Makhno's course are covered in the Ukrainian Revolution and war. 17 5 6

By January 1921 peasant revolts had spread beyond Tambov and Western Siberia to Samara, Saratov, Tsaritsyn and Astrakhan. English-language sources say the great risings in eastern Ukraine, Tambov and Siberia in 1919–21 involved more than 100,000 guerrillas and millions of peasant supporters. Lenin called it the first "great internal political crisis" in Soviet history, and in his opening speech to the 10th Party Congress on 8 March 1921 he said this petty-bourgeois counter-revolution was "far more dangerous than all the forces of Denikin, Yudenich and Kolchak combined". The crisis reached the towns at the same time: workers protested in Petrograd and Moscow, and in March 1921 the Kronstadt sailors' resolution combined new elections to the soviets with demands on behalf of the peasants in revolt across the country. That rising and its suppression are covered in the Kronstadt rebellion. One assessment holds that the Soviet leadership treated each rising as a separate disturbance and suppressed it harshly, and that by the time it grasped the movement's strength it had become a serious social and military threat to Soviet power. 7 6

From requisition to tax in kind: the policy turn of February–March 1921

The policy turn came in stages under the pressure of the risings. On 8 February 1921 the Politburo heard Valerian Obolensky's (pen name Osinsky) report "On the sowing campaign and the condition of the peasantry" and discussed replacing apportionment with a tax in kind; on 16 February it decided to open a public debate in Pravda, and the first articles appeared on the 17th and 26th. Tambov was dealt with earlier. According to English-language sources Nikolai Bukharin was commissioned to draw up "non-coercive measures" to win over the population and recommended lowering quotas, and Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko saw for himself that every other Tambov farmer was starving. The same sources say the Soviet leadership announced on 2 February the end of requisitioning and a tax in kind for the region, and that the news began circulating in Tambov on 9 February. Russian-language sources say that by decision of the Food Commissariat the collection of the apportionment was halted in Tambov province on 12 February. Either way, the halt in Tambov came before the national decision of the 10th Party Congress. 18 7 8

The 10th Party Congress met in Moscow from 8 to 16 March 1921 with 694 voting and 296 non-voting delegates; its agenda included food supply, apportionment, the tax in kind and the fuel crisis. Lenin cautiously introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP) in his general report, and Leon Trotsky explained in two speeches that war communism had been "dictated not by economic, but by military needs, considerations and conditions". Following the congress's decision, on 21 March the All-Russian Central Executive Committee issued the decree "On the Replacement of Apportionment by a Tax in Kind". The tax in kind was a fixed levy assessed as a share of output according to the harvest, the number of mouths and the livestock; it was progressive, weighing more heavily on wealthier peasants, and the poorest households were exempt. Whereas apportionment had taken 367 million poods of grain in 1920–21, the tax for 1921–22 was set at 240 million poods, and because of the crop failure even less was actually collected. Russian-language sources on the West Siberian rising count it among the causes of the 21 March change. The same congress also adopted a resolution banning factions within the party. 19 20 18 11

In Tambov the concessions came with a publicised amnesty. Rank-and-file rebels were promised amnesty on condition that they surrendered their weapons and revealed where their commanders were, and the measures were spread through 77 different appeals, leaflets, posters and pamphlets. According to English-language sources a general amnesty for all who surrendered was announced on 20 March; in the two weeks it was in force about 3,000 rebels gave themselves up, but very few brought weapons. The rebel leadership felt the change. In Order No. 21 to the 1st Insurgent Army on 21 February Antonov wrote that "fighting spirit is beginning to weaken among the partisan units, and shameful cowardice is observed", and according to Russian-language sources he told peasants of Goreloye who rejoiced at the end of requisitions: "Yes, the muzhiks have won. For a while, of course. But for us, father-commanders, it's the end now." Still the fighting went on. On 11 April Antonov struck the Rasskazovo garrison in a pincer attack with 5,000 men, capturing an entire Red Army battalion along with a gun, 11 machine guns and 400 rifles. But both assaults on Kirsanov in late April failed, and by Communist estimates 2,000 rebels died in the pursuit that followed. 8 7

Suppression: the Plenipotentiary Commission and Tukhachevsky

On 6 February 1921 the All-Russian Central Executive Committee sent a Plenipotentiary Commission chaired by Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko to Tambov province, and it became the supreme body for crushing the rising. At that point A. V. Pavlov commanded 11,602 men with 136 machine guns and 18 guns. With the war against Poland over and Wrangel's army evacuated from the Crimea, the Red Army could divert regular troops. On 27 April the Politburo appointed Mikhail Tukhachevsky commander of the forces in Tambov province, Ieronim Uborevich his deputy and Nikolai Kakurin chief of staff, and Grigory Kotovsky was also sent. Genrikh Yagoda and Vasily Ulrikh came from the All-Russian Cheka. Tukhachevsky was directed to finish the rising within a month. According to Russian-language sources, by the end of May he had 43,000 men (35,000 infantry and 8,000 cavalry with 463 machine guns and 63 guns), and in all up to 55,000 were committed, including nine artillery brigades, five armoured-car detachments, four armoured trains, two air detachments and cadets of the Moscow and Oryol infantry schools and the Borisoglebsk cavalry school. English-language sources give 50,000–100,000. 8 7

Tukhachevsky announced his pacification campaign on 6 May with a plan to "flood the rebellion area with troops". According to English-language sources, besides regular forces he deployed Chinese and Hungarian internationalist units, Cheka detachments, Special Purpose Units and large numbers of Komsomol members, considered politically reliable. On 25 May Kotovsky's separate cavalry brigade routed two rebel regiments under Vasily Selyansky, who was mortally wounded. On 31 May seven armoured cars under Ivan Fedko surprised 3,000 rebels at the village of Dve Sestritsy and dispersed them with heavy losses. According to Russian-language sources, between 28 May and 7 June, around Inzhavino station, Kotovsky's brigade, the 14th Separate Cavalry Brigade, the 15th Siberian Cavalry Division and Borisoglebsk cavalry cadets under Uborevich's overall command destroyed Antonov's 2nd Insurgent Army. English-language sources say that on 1–9 June three forces under Uborevich fought six battles near Kamenka against 2,000 rebels under Antonov and Boguslavsky, killing 800. After that Boguslavsky's 1st Insurgent Army avoided a decisive battle, and the initiative passed entirely to the Red Army. 7 8

On 11 June 1921 the Plenipotentiary Commission issued Order No. 171, "On the beginning of repressive measures against individual bandits and the families sheltering them". To "finally uproot the SR-bandit roots", it ordered that citizens who refused to give their names be shot on the spot without trial; that hostages be taken in villages hiding weapons and shot if the weapons were not surrendered; and that where hidden weapons were found, the eldest working member of the household be shot without trial. Families who sheltered a bandit were to be arrested and deported from the province, their property confiscated and their eldest worker shot; the property of families who fled was to be shared among peasants loyal to Soviet power and their houses burned or pulled down. Signed by Antonov-Ovseenko, Tukhachevsky and provincial executive chairman Lavrov, the order was read out at village assemblies. Order No. 116 of 23 June recommended cordoning off whole townships, taking 60–100 hostages and shooting them in front of the villagers if bandits and weapons were not handed over within two hours. On 27 June 21 of some 40 hostages were shot in the village of Osinovka, and on 3–4 July 36 hostages in Bogoslovka. Tukhachevsky wrote: "Without shootings nothing works." 8

On 9 June a meeting of the Plenipotentiary Commission decided to "smoke out" the rebels remaining in the forests with gas, and on 12 June Tukhachevsky signed Order No. 0116: "The forests where the bandits are hiding are to be cleared with poison gases, calculated precisely so that the cloud of asphyxiating gas spreads fully through the whole forest, destroying everything hiding in it." On 24 June the inspector of artillery reported that 2,000 chemical shells had been ordered and would be distributed among the combat sectors. According to Russian-language sources, gas released from cylinders was tried first without effect, and chemical artillery shells were then used, filled with the tear agent chloropicrin. Three uses are documented: on 13 July an artillery battalion fired 47 chemical shells, and on 3 August a battery shelling an island in Lake Kipets fired 59. Interpretations of the effect differ. Some studies say the chemical shells killed civilians as well as rebels. A. S. Bobkov, while confirming the use, doubted its effectiveness given the Red Army's lack of experience and noted the absence of any record of casualties; the military historians Glushko and Shilo conclude that in all three cases too few shells were used to have a combat effect, which explains why their use was abandoned. 8 7

Camps and the human toll

Hostages and rebels' families were held in "concentration camps" hastily set up by the provincial forced-labour administration. According to English-language sources, 50,000–100,000 villagers, including about 1,000 children, were interned in such camps in July 1921, and in some cases entire villages were held. Inmates suffered from cholera and typhus, and the monthly death rate in autumn 1921 is estimated at 15–20 per cent. According to Russian-language sources, the Plenipotentiary Commission noted on 27 June "a large influx of minors, starting with infants" into the camps and proposed holding child hostages under fifteen apart from adults and letting mothers stay with three-year-olds. Even after the camps were partly emptied in July and hostages with small children sent home, more than 450 child hostages aged one to ten remained. On 20 July the Tambov district political commission had to issue a separate order forbidding the arrest of children, pregnant women and women with small children as hostages. Property confiscated from arrested and deported families was given to the regime's supporters and collaborators; villages such as Koptevo, Khitrovo and Verkhnespasskoye were destroyed entirely by artillery, and some, like the 65–70-household 2nd Kareyevka, were emptied of their inhabitants and burned. 7 8

Estimates of the toll vary widely. English-language sources estimate that about 100,000 people were arrested and about 15,000 killed during the suppression, and say some 6,000 rebels who surrendered were shot or deported. The deportees passed through local camps to special camps in the north otherwise reserved for White officers and captured Kronstadt insurgents, where mortality was particularly high compared with the rest of the camp system. In Russian-language sources the historian Yulia Kantor estimates the number of Tambov peasants subjected to repression at 30,000–50,000. Russian researchers and local historians calculate the province's population loss after the rising and its suppression at about 240,000, and Boris Sennikov puts the Tambov region's losses from war, executions and camps in 1920–22 at about that figure. There was violence on the other side too. The rebels killed some 1,000 Communists and, in answer to the hostage system, took and shot Red Army soldiers, Communists, Soviet employees and their families; there were also assassination attempts on Tukhachevsky and Antonov-Ovseenko. Fighting, punitive measures and Bolshevik agrarian policy together brought famine to the rebel areas, which ran into the following year's Volga famine. 7 8 4

The last resistance: Nizhny Shibryai and Ishim

In summer 1921 the main Tambov rebel forces collapsed. In early July the leadership ordered combat units to split into small groups and either hide in the forests and fight as guerrillas or go home, and guerrilla fighting went on until August. According to English-language sources the rebels were down to about 1,000 by September; the same sources also say no more than 4,000 were still fighting at the end of the year, so the figures conflict, but with almost all their leaders dead the last groups lived on the run in swamps and forests. Boguslavsky of the 1st Insurgent Army was also killed in action. Scattered clashes continued until summer 1922 before dying away. On 24 June 1922 Antonov and his brother Dmitry were surrounded by a Cheka detachment in the village of Nizhny Shibryai near Borisoglebsk. When the detachment set fire to the house where they were hiding, the brothers tried to break out and were shot down; documents say Antonov fought to the end without laying down his weapon. They were buried on the fifth day near the walls of the Kazan Mother of God monastery in Tambov. According to Russian-language sources, on 16 July Tukhachevsky reported to the Central Committee: "The mutiny has been liquidated, Soviet power has been restored everywhere." 8 7 9

In Western Siberia a plenipotentiary "troika" formed on 12 February, made up of Siberian Revolutionary Committee chairman Ivan Smirnov, assistant commander-in-chief for Siberia Vasily Shorin and Siberian Cheka chief Ivan Pavlunovsky, took charge of the suppression. An order of the Siberian Revolutionary Committee the same day made villagers along the railways responsible for its safety and had hostages taken from among them, to be shot if rebel bands appeared. Records say that whenever the track was damaged, every village within ten versts was burned. Smirnov put Red Army and rebel losses at 1 to 15 in mid-March, and counted about 7,000 peasants killed in Ishim district and 15,000 in Petropavlovsk district in less than the first month and a half of fighting. The Red Army counter-attacked along the railways behind armoured trains and artillery. On 24 February units advancing toward each other along the northern line met at Vagai station, and on 4 March the Omsk–Chelyabinsk line was cleared. More than 20,000 rebels of the Ishim–Petropavlovsk grouping were encircled, and commander-in-chief Rodin was killed amid infighting. Some 2,000 Cossacks driven toward Kokchetav crossed into China in mid-May. 11 12

The northern rebels held out into spring. On 7 April the Red Army stormed Tobolsk, the insurgents' de facto capital, taking it the next day and capturing 5,000 rebels. In night battles at Yevsino on 28 April and Aromashevo on 1 May the northern Ishim rebels, about 10,000 strong, lost some 700 killed, wounded or drowned and about 5,700 taken prisoner. On 11 May a landing party of 40 men under Platon Loparev, after a march of a thousand kilometres, surprised Samarovo, and on 16 May the "People's Army" commander Vasily Zheltovsky was killed in fighting nearby. Beryozovo and Surgut were retaken at the end of May and Obdorsk on 2 June. The rebels then turned to guerrilla warfare. In early August Pyotr Shevchenko's "1st Liberation Regiment" again occupied the Aromashevo area, but on 25 August it was surprised and Shevchenko and 111 of his men were cut down. From summer 1921 famine and cholera struck Ishim district, where incomplete official figures counted 8,159 deaths from hunger. The last centres of resistance disappeared only at the end of 1922, when a December report stated that "banditry" had all but disappeared. 11 12

"Kulak-SR mutiny" or "peasant war"?

Soviet historiography called the Tambov rising the "Antonovshchina", the "Antonov mutiny" or sometimes the "Tambov operation". A 1923 collection published by the Tambov provincial party committee was subtitled "materials on the history of SR banditry in Tambov province", and Order No. 171 likewise targeted "the SR-bandit roots". Official propaganda called the revolts "risings of SRs and officers", hiding their real cause in requisitioning, and the Bolsheviks portrayed the Greens as a branch of the Whites and exaggerated the role of kulaks. The Sorokino rising in the Altai was officially named the "Kulak Rebellion of Sorokino". According to English-language sources, the Soviets portrayed the movement as anarchic banditry, like other left-wing movements opposing them in the period. Tukhachevsky, who directed the suppression, summed up his experience in a 1926 article, "The Struggle against Counter-revolutionary Risings", and Mikhail Frunze, impressed by the guerrillas' resistance to regular forces, began studying guerrilla tactics. According to Russian-language sources, the historian Vasily Tsvetkov argues from records of a failed 1919 mission by the White command in South Russia to contact Antonov that the White command was complicit in organising the rising. Nikolai Virta's novel Loneliness won a Stalin Prize in 1941. 8 6 17 7

After the Soviet collapse, opened archives shifted the focus to the peasants themselves and to the repression. In 1994 a document collection, The Peasant Uprising in Tambov Province, appeared under the editorship of Viktor Danilov and Teodor Shanin, and in 2007 the Tambov State Archive published an 800-page volume of documents and memoirs. The title of the American historian Erik Landis's 2008 study, Bandits and Partisans, itself sets the two perspectives side by side. The Russian historians P. F. Aleshkin and Yu. A. Vasiliev have studied the risings of 1918–22 as a whole as "a peasant war under the policy of war communism" and "a peasant war for the Soviets against the Communists". Boris Sennikov read the Tambov rising of 1918–21 together with the "de-peasantisation" of 1929–33, and in 2011 the BBC Russian Service took up the question "The Russian Vendée: political reprisal or genocide?". On chemical weapons, Bobkov sought in 2011 to separate "fictions and facts". A 1996 decree of President Boris Yeltsin rehabilitated participants in the Chapan War and the 1921 Chuvash rising, and in 2007 a monument to the "Tambov Muzhik", dedicated to all the peasants caught up in the tragic events of 1921, was unveiled in Tambov. 8 5

How far the risings shaped the NEP is also debated. The Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, a contemporary witness, concluded that the insurgents had forced the NEP through their actions, and Russian-language sources write that the Tambov rising, like Kronstadt, contributed greatly to the decision to abandon war communism for the NEP. Russian-language sources on the West Siberian rising likewise count it among the causes of the 21 March change. The English-language source on the Green armies, however, holds that while the Greens certainly contributed to the policy change, the extent of their influence is open to debate; it considers far less contestable that the NEP, together with better rainfall, improved rural conditions and so removed the peasant discontent on which the risings drew. The same source argues that ruthless terror played its part but that the main weapon in ending the risings was the famine of 1921–22. In Tambov, the tax in kind, the Cheka's work and the enrolment of thousands of locals in the party, with the benefits that brought, together defused the situation in spring 1921. The sources weigh differently whether village resistance forced the policy change or a change already in preparation extinguished the risings. 7 8 11 6