Green armies (Russian Civil War)
녹색군 (러시아 내전)
The collective name for the armed peasant groups that fought all governments in the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1922: the Bolsheviks, the Whites and the foreign interventionists. They were semi-organised local militias defending their communities against requisitions and reprisals, politically neutral but at times associated with the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The name came from the bands of Red Army deserters who hid in the forests, and the movement dissolved in 1922 as the Bolshevik victory approached.
In depth
The background to the Greens was the grain requisitioning of war communism. The Bolsheviks formed an 80,000-strong supply army to seize grain surpluses by force, and when its detachments took seed and vital reserves as well, peasants fled to the forests and joined the rebels. The Greens wanted to seize the nobility's land, keep the rural market economy and govern their communities through soviets of their own choosing, and they were always hostile to the Whites, who sought to restore the landowners' rights. Once the Whites were effectively beaten in 1920 and requisitioning lost its justification, peasant soldiers of the Red Army who refused to keep oppressing their own class deserted with their weapons to the forests, and in 1919–1921 most Green fighters and leaders were such deserters. Officially some 2.5 million soldiers were demobilised in 1921, and many who went home joined the Greens. The Soviet authorities divided peasant unrest into the short, small bunt and the vosstaniye, an insurrection of thousands able to take towns and put forward a coherent programme; the Chapan War of 1919 is counted as the first vosstaniye. Major Green movements included the Pitchfork uprising of 1920, Alexander Antonov's Tambov rebellion, the West Siberian rebellion of 1921–1922, the largest of the Green uprisings, and the risings of the Ukrainian atamans Nykyfor Hryhoriv and Danylo Terpylo, while Nestor Makhno's anarchist peasant army is treated alongside them.
Apart from the arms that deserters brought or that they captured, the Greens fought with sticks, pitchforks, axes and hunting rifles, waging guerrilla war by blowing up bridges and cutting telegraph lines and railways. The great uprisings in eastern Ukraine, Tambov and Siberia in 1919–1921 involved more than 100,000 guerrillas and millions of peasant supporters; Lenin called this the first "great internal political crisis" in Soviet history and on 8 March 1921, at the 10th Party Congress, declared it "far more dangerous than all the forces of Denikin, Yudenich and Kolchak combined". The Bolsheviks portrayed the Greens as a branch of the White movement and exaggerated the role of the kulaks; at first they treated each revolt as a separate disturbance and crushed it harshly, later turning to mass terror, propaganda and flooding rebel areas with troops. The Greens failed because of their local outlook, their lack of coordination and internal tensions. The English-language source holds that the Greens clearly contributed to the turn to the New Economic Policy in 1921, though the extent is debated, and stresses that the NEP and increased rainfall undercut their base by improving rural conditions and that the famine of 1921–1922 was the main weapon that ended the revolts.