Tambov Rebellion

Template:Short description Template:Use shortened footnotes {{#invoke:Infobox military conflict|main}} Template:Campaignbox Russian Civil War Template:Southern Front of the Russian Civil War The Tambov Rebellion of 1920–1922 was one of the largest and best-organized peasant rebellions challenging the Bolshevik government during the Russian Civil War.Template:Sfnm The uprising took place in the territories of the modern Tambov Oblast and part of the Voronezh Oblast, less than Template:Convert southeast of Moscow.

In Soviet historiography, the rebellion was referred to as the Antonovschina ("Antonov's mutiny"), so named after Alexander Antonov, a former official of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, who opposed the government of the Bolsheviks. It began in August 1920 with resistance to the forced confiscation of grain and developed into a guerrilla war against the Red Army, Cheka units and the Soviet Russian authorities. The bulk of the peasant army was destroyed by large Red Army reinforcements using chemical weapons in the summer of 1921;Template:Sfn smaller groups continued resistance until the following year. It is estimated that around 100,000 people were arrested and around 15,000 killed during the suppression of the uprising.

The movement was later portrayed by the Soviets as anarchical banditry, similar to other left-wing anti-Bolshevik movements that opposed them during this period.

BackgroundEdit

File:1920 staff tambov green army.jpg

Alexander Antonov (centre) and his staff

In 1904, Alexander Antonov was sentenced to twenty years in prison for blowing up a train, but received an amnesty from the Russian Provisional Government following the February Revolution and returned to his native Tambov, where he served in the local militia in Kirsanov.Template:Sfnm As the Provisional Government refused to discuss agrarian reform, he joined the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries.Template:Sfn

The peasants of Tambov largely supported the October Revolution, since Vladimir Lenin's Decree on Land legalized the expropriation of property. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks had problems in maintaining control of the governorate.Template:Sfn Unlike in the cities, the Bolsheviks had hardly any supporters in the rural regions, where in the elections of 1917 the Socialist Revolutionary Party had won large majorities.Template:Sfn In March 1918, the Bolshevik delegates in Tambov were even thrown out of the local soviets, following the ratification of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.Template:Sfn

Following the outbreak of the Russian Civil War, the newly established Russian Soviet Republic adopted the policy of war communism, in which food for the cities was obtained by compulsory requisition from the villages, without financial compensation. This was met with the resistance of the peasant population, especially as the requisitions were often violent in nature. Likewise, the amount of grain to be requisitioned were not measured according to production. Instead, commissions gave a rough estimate based on pre-war production, so that devastation, crop failures, and population decline were not included. Before the revolution, the peasants in Tambov produced around one million tonnes of grain. Of these, one-third was exported. On the basis of these figures, which did not include the dislocations of the civil war in the countryside, a high target for the procurement of grain was set.Template:Sfn The peasants often responded by reducing their acreage, as they no longer had the economic incentive to produce surpluses, which made the confiscations ordered from above hit them even harder.Template:Sfn

For the most part, the peasants had been indifferent to Bolshevik ideology,Template:Sfn but they came to hate the Bolsheviks for their forced requisitions, which had put them at the limit of survival, and for the forced levies that had created numerous fugitives.Template:Sfnm In the summer of 1919, Antonov fled to the forest and formed a gang that murdered several Bolshevik activists.Template:Sfn This is how the first anti-Bolshevik guerrilla movements arose, made up of Red Army deserters, Socialist-Revolutionaries and peasants who resisted the searches in the forests. Their first acts were assassinating unpopular state officials and raiding state farms.Template:Sfnm They killed more than 200 government grain collectors and over the next year their forces grew steadily, growing from an initial 150 to 6,000 by early summer 1920,Template:Sfnm but that would have to wait until after the defeat of Anton Denikin's White movement for there to be a real mass uprising.Template:Sfn The other leaders of this force were Alexander Antonov's younger brother, Template:Ill, and the SR Template:Ill.Template:Sfn

OutbreakEdit

On 19 August 1920, a revolt broke out in the small town of Khitrovo, where a military requisitioning detachment of the Red Army had appropriated everything they could and "beat up elderly men of seventy in full view of the public".Template:Sfnm In anticipation of an attack by the Red Army to enforce the procurement of grain, the farmers of the village armed themselves. Since only a few rifles were available, this was partly done with pitchforks and clubs. Other villages soon joined in the uprising against the Soviet authorities, and succeeded in repelling the Red Army.Template:Sfn

The peasants rebels, after their first success, attempted to capture Tambov, the capital of the governorate.Template:Sfnm There, however, they were scattered by Red machine guns barely ten kilometers from their target.Template:Sfn It was here that Alexander Antonov, a radical Left Socialist-Revolutionary, led the movement into a guerilla war against the Reds. Before the uprising, Antonov and a few comrades had fought an underground insurrection against the Bolsheviks and had been sentenced to death. Since he was able to escape capture by the Soviet authorities, he was a kind of folk hero to the peasants. He demanded that the free trade and movement of goods should be allowed, that the grain requisitions should be ended and the Soviet administration and the Cheka dissolved.Template:Sfn His troops carried out surprise raids on railway junctions, kolkhoz and the Soviet authorities. They were supported by the population and used the villages for cover and rest. Likewise, they often disguised themselves as Red Army soldiers to move about the countryside or to exaggerate the element of surprise.Template:Sfn

The insurgent peasants organized themselves through the Union of Working Peasants (Template:Langx, STK),Template:Sfn which functioned as the political organization of the insurgents and with which Antonov worked.Template:Sfnm Having their own political program gave them a strength and coherence that other peasant uprisings lacked.Template:Sfn However, this movement was still based on the weariness of the population but without having a clear idea of how to replace the government.Template:Sfn Instead, Antonov dreamed of marching on Moscow and ending Bolshevik rule.Template:Sfn In May 1921, the Union proclaimed the Template:Ill which would rule until the holding of a democratically elected constituent assembly.<ref name="rep"/> The Republic used the pre-revolutionary flag of Russia, and the slogan "Long live the Template:Ill", one of the slogans of the White movement, became one of the mottos of the rebels and the Republic.<ref name="Sennikov"/>

Antonov organized the farmers on the model of the Red Army in 18–20 regiments with their own political commissars, reconnaissance departments and communication departments. Likewise, he introduced a strict discipline. The farmers used the Red flag as their standard and thus claimed the central symbol of the revolution.Template:Sfn They had 14,000 or 18,000 men,Template:Sfnm mostly consisting of deserters from the Red Army.Template:Sfn Of these, five to seven thousand had firearms.Template:Sfn By the end of the month, the rebels numbered six groups, each totaling 4,000 men with a dozen machine guns and several artillery pieces.Template:Sfn As the Bolshevik authorities were busy with the Polish-Soviet War and Pyotr Wrangel's offensive in northern Tavria,Template:Sfnm they only had 3,000 unreliable troops in Tambov province.Template:Sfnm These soldiers had been drafted from the local villages and often had little motivation to fight members of their own class.Template:Sfn

The rebels were able to control large parts of the region and managed to capture railway trains transporting requisitioned grain. The grain intended to supply Red Army units was instead re-distributed by Antonov's men to local farmers.Template:Sfn The rebellion also spread to parts of other provinces: Voronezh, Saratov and Penza.Template:Sfnm This territory was populated by more than three million people, 90% farmers and artisans.Template:Sfn The region was densely populated, with rich, forested land that offered many jobs, especially as the land had been appropriated in 1917 and the owners expelled. But the demands of the Bolshevik government and the Russian Civil War prevented them from profiting, which only encouraged the insurrection.Template:Sfn

In the areas controlled by the rebels, all Soviet institutions were abolished. Around 1,000 members of the Russian Communist Party were killed by the insurgents.Template:Sfn By October 1920, the Bolsheviks had completely lost control of the rural territory of the governorate, dominating only the city of Tambov itself and a number of smaller urban settlements. After numerous deserters from the Red Army joined it, the peasant army numbered over 50,000 fighters. The rebel militia proved highly effective and even infiltrated the Tambov Cheka.Template:Sfn

Towards the end of October, the head of the Template:Ill in the Tambov Governorate, Template:Ill, engaged in a series of battles with the rebels. According to his letters, he killed 3,000, wounded 300, and captured 1,000 along with copious amounts of weapons, ammunition, and supplies (such as a telephone and a field kitchen). His casualties were 90 dead and less than 200 wounded.Template:Sfn However, he was blamed for the rebellion and removed.Template:Sfn Some sources say the rebels numbered just 8,000 horsemen in November.Template:Sfn

Climax of the rebellionEdit

On 5 November, two to six thousand rebels, mostly on horseback, attacked the railway station at Sampur in two coordinated groups, capturing an artillery cannon, some machine guns, and numerous revolvers and rifles. However, they failed in their attempt to sabotage the railway lines and quickly withdrew.Template:Sfn At the time, Bolshevik reports said that two thousand partisans were still in the woods of Novokhopyorsk, near the station.Template:Sfn The main source of information that the peasants had about what happened on other fronts were the red prisoners.Template:Sfn In that month, there were barely 5,000 Bolsheviks in the region.Template:Sfnm

At the height of his power, thanks to their strong popular support,Template:Sfnm between October 1920 and January 1921, the rebels mobilized 50,000 partisans.Template:Sfnm By February 1921, they were between 20,000Template:Sfnm and 40,000-strong,Template:Sfnm with half of them acting as full-time combatants and the other half part-time.Template:Sfn Around 6,000 were mounted, hindering the government troops, whose lack of mobility undermined their effectiveness.Template:Sfn

But they never formed an "organized guerrilla army".Template:Sfn Because of this, most of their actions were impulsive assaults orchestrated by each band against the Bolshevik detachments in charge of requisitioning grain or repressing the villagers. This lack of coordination was, in addition to their poor weapons and training, ultimately decisive in their defeat.Template:Sfn

They were organized in two armies divided into a total of 21 regiments.Template:Sfn Their use of guerrilla warfare was based on the old tactic of launching surprise attacks and fleeing immediately afterwards, thanks to their superior knowledge of the terrain and the mobility of their cavalry. Each village was in charge of equipping and maintaining a group of these combatants, which was easy since many were locals defending their own communities.Template:Sfn That localism also played into their hands. On the contrary, being too closed in on themselves prevented them from seeking allies in other peasant movements or marching against the big cities, the control of which was what the Bolsheviks worried about because their source of support was the industrial proletariat.Template:Sfn

By the end of the year the greens had achieved one of the main objectives, the reds had stopped sending units to their territories to requisition grain. The officials in the south of Tambov were incapable of such action, as their resources were destined only to garrison the villages under their control. But the north was at peace, not being a large food-producing region, it never lived through the requisitions that had sparked the revolt.Template:Sfn The lack of heavy weapons prevented the rebels from taking over the cities, which became havens for communists and government officials.Template:Sfn During that December, reinforcements from the Cheka began to arrive, numbering 3,500 combatants in the area.Template:Sfn Two months later its leader, Felix Dzerzhinski, would arrive to direct its operations.Template:Sfn

During this time garrison officers and local Bolshevik militants complained of their ever-increasing abandonment by Moscow, from where fewer and fewer supplies and reinforcements were sent to them. In fact the military circles of the Red command had decided to concentrate on a great campaign of pacification of Tambov: as soon as their troops flooded the province the movement would soon be finished. In addition, it was increasingly difficult to help them because their main communication links, the armored trains, were continuously attacked in the area.Template:Sfn During the winter of 1920–1921, food reserves in many towns were exhausted, as in Kozlov and Morshank, towns located on the edge of the rebel zone and whose communist garrison saw most of its inhabitants leave or turn to the black market to survive.Template:Sfn

On 23 January 1921, 250 mounted cadets of the 6th Volche-Karachan regiment managed to defend the town of Borisoglebsk from a large rebel contingent. For the Bolsheviks, it was key to keep Borisoglebsk and Kirsanov in their hands, since these were their bastions in the middle of the fields controlled by the rebels.Template:Sfn During that month, the Bolshevik authorities demobilized 4,000 locals who served in their garrisons because they were not trusted. They immediately joined the partisans.Template:Sfn

By this time, only half of the desired grain had been collected by the Bolshevik requisition squads. Antonov-Ovseyenko noticed from his own experience that every other farmer in Tambov was starving.Template:Sfn To win over the population, Nikolai Bukharin was commissioned to draw up "non-coercive measures", in which he recommended that the required grain quotas be lowered.Template:Sfn In response, on 2 February 1921, the Soviet leadership announced the end of the "prodrazvyorstka", and issued a special decree directed at peasants from the region implementing the "prodnalog" policy. The new policy was essentially a tax on grain and other foodstuffs. This was done before the 10th Congress of the Bolsheviks, when the measure was officially adopted. The announcement began circulating in the Tambov area on 9 February 1921.Template:Sfn

On 20 March, a general amnesty was also announced for anyone who surrendered. During the two weeks that the amnesty was in place, about 3,000 rebels capitulated, but very few with weapons in hand.Template:Sfn By then, Bolshevik power had disappeared almost entirely from the regionTemplate:Sfn despite having 32,500 foot soldiers and 8,000 cavalry plus machine guns and cannons in the area.Template:Sfn

By this time, the rebels were able to mobilize large field armies. On 11 April, Antonov gathered 5,000 partisansTemplate:Sfn and launched a pincer attack on Rasskazovo (an hour prior he launched a diversionary attack on Nizhne-Spasskoe with a small force).Template:Sfn The garrison consisted of a company of infantrymen, a unit of Bolshevik militants, a machine gun platoon, the Volga Infantry Brigade (which had arrived in January from Saratov), and the 2nd Cheka regiment,Template:Sfn and it quickly collapsed. The rebels' goal was achieved: an artillery cannon with two or three hundred rounds, eleven machine guns, four hundred rifles, one hundred thousand ammunition, eighty telephones and 50 versts of cable.Template:Sfn On 24 April, they gathered in the village of Template:Ill Template:Sfn five to ten thousand fighters under the command of "Vaska Karas" (identified as Template:Ill) and Vasili F. Selianski. Not everyone participated in the battle. They intended to take the town of Kirsanov, garrisoned by a Moscow infantry brigade led by cavalry commander V. I. Dmitrenko.Template:Sfn A day later they launched two equally unsuccessful assaults, abandoning 22 machine guns, small arms and ammunition of the victors.Template:Sfn Pursued by the enemy cavalry, the rebels had 2,000 dead in the following days according to estimates by the communist government.Template:Sfn

SuppressionEdit

By January 1921, peasant revolts had spread to Samara, Saratov, Tsaritsyn, Astrakhan and Siberia.Template:Sfn But with the end of the Polish–Soviet War and the defeat of General Wrangel, the Red Army could divert its regular troops into the area.Template:Sfn In May 1921, Mikhail Tukhachevsky was ordered by Lenin as military commander-in-chief to suppress the uprising in Tambov. Assigned to him were tanks, heavy artillery and 100,000 soldiers,Template:Sfn mostly special units of the Cheka, with additional Red Army units.Template:Sfn As many members as possible of the communist youth organization Komsomol were assigned to him because they were considered politically loyal. The Red Army used armoured trains and engaged in the summary execution of "civilians". The rebels responded with assassination attempts on Tukhachevsky and Ovseyenko, and the kidnapping and shooting of family members of members of the Party and Red Army.Template:Sfn

On 6 May, Tukhachevsky announced his pacification campaign. That month a large army of between 50,000Template:Sfnm and 100,000 Red soldiersTemplate:Sfnm reached the southern part of the oblast.Template:Sfn The plan was to "flood the rebellion area with troops".Template:Sfn They included regular forces, Chinese and Hungarian internationalists and detachments of the Cheka, the Template:Ill and the Template:Ill,Template:Sfn although the decisive contingents were the numerous cadets and horsemen who arrived.Template:Sfn They were supported by 70 heavy artillery pieces, hundreds of machine guns, 3 armored units, a plane,Template:Sfn armored trainsTemplate:Sfn and chemical weapons left over from World War I stockpiles.Template:Sfnm

On 31 May, seven armored vehicles commanded by General Ivan Fedko surprised 3,000 rebels in the village of Dve Sestritsy and dispersed them with heavy casualties.Template:Sfn Two infantry brigades and one veteran cavalry brigade under General Grigori Kotovski were assigned to the Tambov sector.Template:Sfn During the first two weeks of May, 15,000 Red Army officers concentrated in Tambov to prepare for the campaign.Template:Sfn On the dawn of 1 June, Fedko with three vehicles armed with machine guns, Kotovski's horsemen and the brigade of Siberian cavalry of M. D. Kovalev launched a surprise attack against Antonov and the 3,000 partisans with whom he occupied Template:Ill. Although the rebels managed to repulse the armored vehicles with their rifles, they fled before Kovalyov's cavalry.Template:Sfn On 6 June, the armored vehicles commanded by Fedko achieved another victory near Chernyshovo.Template:Sfn Between 1 and 9 June, three Bolshevik forces led by Uborevich launched a coordinated attack with seven armored vehicles against the rebel stronghold, near the town of Template:Ill, and faced 2,000 rebels led by Antonov and Boguslavski in six battles, during which 800 partisans died. The region between Tambov and Kirsanov was pacified.Template:Sfn These three forces intended to converge on Rzhaksa: Dmitrenko's cavalry brigade (2,000 men from the Sampur in the Tambov uyezd), Kotovski's cavalry brigade (1,000 soldiers from the Lomovis station in the Kirsanov uyezd) and the 14th cavalry brigade (1,000 cavalry up the Vorona River from Karai-Pushkino in Kirsanov's uyezd).Template:Sfn Two weeks later rebel commander Aleksandr Boguslavski was killed in combat.Template:Sfn The same fate befell Tokmakov, Karas and Selianski.Template:Sfn

On 12 June 1921, Tukhachevsky received permission from Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko to begin the use of chemical weapons against the remaining rebels. They ordered their troops to clear the forests with poison gas, stipulating that it "must be carefully calculated, so that the layer of gas penetrates the forests and kills everyone hiding there."Template:Sfnm Publications in local Communist newspapers openly glorified liquidations of "bandits" with the poison gas.Template:Sfnm Antonov's army was encircled and destroyed,Template:Sfn leaving the rebellion practically defeated by the end of June.Template:Sfn By the month of September, the rebels had been reduced to a thousand due to the massive arrival of red troops.Template:Sfn By the end of that year, there were no more than 4,000 rebels left on the warpath.Template:Sfn With almost all their leaders dead, the last parties took refuge in swamps and forests under constant persecution.Template:Sfn

It took until the middle of 1922 for the province to be pacified completely.Template:Sfn The Antonov brothers and several of their last followers were killed in combat against a Red detachment on 24 June 1922Template:Sfn in the village of Template:Ill, where they hid their few personal possessions. The Cheka wanted to arrest themTemplate:Sfnm and set fire to the house where they took refuge. When they tried to flee, they were shot down.Template:Sfn By then, their movement was reduced to only a few groups.Template:Sfn

ConsequencesEdit

As a result of the military operations against the rebels, around 6,000 of their fighters surrendered and were either shot or deported. The deportees were transferred from the local camps to special camps in the northern regions of Russia after the suppression of the uprising. These camps were otherwise reserved for officers of the White movement and captured insurgents from Kronstadt. In these camps there was a particularly high mortality of prisoners compared to the rest of the camp system.Template:Sfn The devastation of the fighting and punitive measures, together with the Bolshevik agricultural policy, led to a famine in the areas of the insurgents. In addition to Tambov, large parts of Russia were affected in the following two years.Template:Sfn

Family members of the rebels were usually used as hostages, others were held at randomTemplate:Sfnm and in some cases entire villages were interned.Template:Sfnm Between 50,000Template:Sfn and 100,000 villagersTemplate:Sfnm including some 1,000 children,Template:Sfn were interned in dedicated concentration camps in July 1921.Template:Sfnm There they suffered severely from cholera and typhus epidemics. The death rate is estimated to be around 15–20% per month for the fall of 1921.Template:Sfn Relatively few were released or executed, "barely" 15,000 were shot.Template:Sfnm However, mass executions of suspected villagers and prisoners were frequent in the villages.Template:Sfn

Some villages were burned to the ground.Template:Sfnm The properties confiscated from the arrested and exiled families were given to supporters or collaborators of the regime.Template:Sfnm The activities of the Cheka, the incorporation of thousands of locals into the Communist Party (with the benefits that it implied) and the concessions of the New Economic Policy helped the Bolsheviks in the spring of 1921 to defuse the situation, especially the end of grain requisitions.Template:Sfnm

The uprising made the Soviet leadership aware of its failure to manage relations with the peasants and is seen as one of the factors that prompted Lenin to initiate the New Economic Policy. The Russian sociologist and contemporary witness Pitirim Sorokin even concluded that the insurgents had forced the NEP by their actions.Template:Sfn The new policy relied more on a natural tax on actual production instead of on compulsory collection of agricultural products.Template:Sfn In the military field it is mentioned that the Soviet Army Commander Mikhail Frunze was impressed by the guerillas' resistance to regular forces. He therefore began studying guerrilla tactics as a commander in the Red Army. This is regarded as a precondition of the Soviet partisans' strategy in their World War II campaign against the Nazi invasion.Template:Sfn

Union of Working PeasantsEdit

The Union of Working Peasants (Template:Langx) was a local political organization that emerged from the rebellion in 1920. The organization was led by the former Social-Revolutionary politician Aleksandr Antonov.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The goal of the organization was the 'overthrow of the government of Communist-Bolsheviks'.<ref>Kowalski, Ronald I. The Russian Revolution: 1917–1921. Routledge sources in history. London: Routledge, 1997. p. 232.</ref>

In December 1920, the Union of Working Peasants released a manifesto, stating their intention to overthrow the Bolshevik government and their aims in doing so:<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Political equality for all citizens, without division into classes.

An end to the civil war and a return to civilian life.

Every effort to be made to ensure a lasting peace with all foreign states.

The convocation of a Constituent Assembly on the basis of equal, universal, direct and secret suffrage, without predetermining its choice of political system, and preserving the voters' right to recall deputies who do not carry out the people's will.

Prior to the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, the establishment of provisional authorities in the localities and the centre, on an elective basis, by those unions and parties which have taken part in the struggle against the communists.

Freedom of speech, the press, conscience, unions and assembly.

The full implementation of the law on the socialisation of the land, adopted and confirmed by the former Constituent Assembly.

The supply of basic necessities, particularly food, to the inhabitants of the towns and countryside through the cooperatives.

Regulation of the prices of labour and the output of factories run by the state.

Partial denationalisation of factories; heavy industry, coal mining and metallurgy should remain in state hands.

Workers' control and state supervision of production.

The opportunity for both Russian and foreign capital to restore the country's economic life.

The immediate restoration of political, trade and economic relations with foreign powers.

Free self-determination for the nationalities inhabiting the former Russian empire.

The initiation of wide-ranging state credit for restoring small-scale agriculture.

Freedom for handicraft production.

Unfettered teaching in schools and compulsory universal literacy education.

The volunteer partisan units currently organised and operating must not be disbanded until the Constituent Assembly has been convened and it has resolved the question of a standing army.{{#if:|{{#if:|}}

— {{#if:|, in }}Template:Comma separated entries
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In popular cultureEdit

Some scenes of the rebellion are depicted in 2011 movie Once Upon a Time There Lived a Simple Woman by Andrei Smirnov.
Apricot Jam and Other Stories (2010) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In a short story about Marshal Georgy Zhukov's futile attempts at writing his memoirs, the retired Marshal reminisces about being a young officer fighting against the Union of Working Peasants. He recalls Mikhail Tukhachevsky's arrival to take command of the campaign and his first address to his men. He announced that total war and scorched earth tactics are to be used against civilians who assist or even sympathize with the Union. Zhukov recalls how Tukhachevsky's tactics were adopted and succeeded in breaking the uprising. In the process, however, they virtually depopulated the surrounding countryside.