Chapan War
차파니 전쟁
A peasant uprising in Simbirsk and Samara provinces on the middle Volga in March–April 1919 against grain requisitioning and forced conscription. One of the largest peasant revolts against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War, it is counted as the first vosstaniye, or great peasant rebellion, to take towns and put forward a coherent programme. Its name comes from the chapan, the sheepskin winter coat worn by the peasants of the region.
In depth
At the start of 1919 there were 3,500 food-detachment workers and 1,700 food-army soldiers from the central provinces in the villages of Simbirsk province, and by February more than 3 million poods of grain had been requisitioned there alone. At the same time collection began of the emergency tax introduced in December 1918, and the peasants came to believe they were being condemned to starvation. On 3 March 1919 the villagers of Novodevichye in Sengiley district sounded the alarm bell against the officials who had come for grain and livestock, arrested the communists and officials and disarmed a Red Army detachment. The troops sent to put them down went over to the peasants, and the revolt spread to neighbouring villages. On 7 March the rebels took Stavropol without a fight, put the First World War officer Aleksey Dolinin at their head and issued an appeal: "All power to the working people! Down with the domination of the communists!" The English-language source says they demanded the abolition of requisitioning, free elections to the soviets and an end to the "Bolshevik commissarocracy". Estimates of their numbers range from at least 30,000 to 100,000–150,000.
In Samara a revolutionary field staff was set up on the initiative of Valerian Kuybyshev, chairman of the provincial party committee, and Mikhail Frunze, commander of the 4th Army, and regular units, a workers' regiment and a Hungarian internationalist company were sent in; the English-language source puts Frunze's force at about 13,000. The Red Army retook Stavropol on 14 March and Novodevichye the same day or on the 15th, and the revolt lingered in scattered pockets until late March and early April before the fighting ended in mid-April. Frunze reported to Lenin that at least 1,000 people had been killed in the suppression, more than 600 "ringleaders and kulaks" shot, and the village of Usinskoye burned. Mass arrests, executions and camps followed, and the uprising is estimated to have cost the lives of some 10,000 peasants. A Cheka report in April found that most peasants in the rebel villages were middle peasants, with no more than five to ten kulaks per village, and on 6 April Leon Trotsky called the Volga peasant uprising "a formidable warning" in a speech in Samara. According to the Russian-language source, the participants and their children were recognised as victims of repression by the rehabilitation law of October 1991; the English-language source says they were rehabilitated by a decree of President Boris Yeltsin in 1996.