The man whose name became the rebellion: SR leader of the Tambov 'Antonovshchina,' the largest peasant uprising against Bolshevik rule
'Power was not torn from the hands of the tsarist executioners to be handed over to a handful of executioner-communists' — from a leaflet distributed during the uprising
A Socialist Revolutionary militant who served a twenty-year katorga sentence in the Schlisselburg Fortress under the Tsar for armed expropriations. Freed by the February Revolution, he became chief of the Kirsanov district militia, but the Bolsheviks' grain requisitioning and local repression drove him underground in 1918. In August 1920 he seized leadership of the Tambov peasant uprising, building a partisan army of roughly twenty regiments and an alternative government based on Unions of the Working Peasantry: the revolt was so identified with him that it became known as the 'Antonovshchina.' He was killed in a firefight with GPU forces alongside his brother Dmitri in June 1922.
Career Timeline
- 1905Joined the SR Party; participated in armed expropriations
- 1908Raided Inzhavino railway station; multiple armed expropriations
- 1909Arrested; death sentence commuted to indefinite katorga — Schlisselburg, Vladimir Central
- 1917Freed by amnesty — deputy chief Tambov city militia → chief, Kirsanov district militia
- 1918–1920Went underground; formed a combat druzhina against Bolshevik authorities
- 1920–1921Chief of Main Operational Staff, Tambov Uprising — two armies, ~20 regiments
- 1921–1922In hiding after defeat; cornered and killed by GPU forces