Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

These events might have been explained by the delay in news arriving of the Soviet government’s announcement of a softening of its attitude toward the peasants in March 1919, when local Bolsheviks were ordered to put an end to one aspect of the class war in the countryside by treating “middle peasants” (i.e., those who did not exploit the labor of others) more mercifully. However, matters did not improve; late the following year, first Ufa (the “Pitchfork Rebellion”) then Tambov provinces, in the western Urals and in southeast European Russia, respectively, erupted, and then, from January 1921 much of Western Siberia (including Tiumen′, Omsk, and Akmolinsk provinces and the eastern stretches of Cheliabinsk and Ekaterinburg provinces) was overrun by peasant rebellions. Both the Tambov Rebellion and the Western Siberian uprising were less easily quashed than those in the Volga–Urals region, as they rapidly assumed a mass character, in which political and military leaderships (sometimes dominated by SRs or former SRs, as in the case of the Tambov leader A. S. Antonov) emerged to organize the peasantry, and led to the construction of real and substantial internal fronts, on which the Red Army battled peasant forces that could be numbered in the tens of thousands and proved themselves capable of capturing and holding large towns. A feature of the Siberian uprising that was especially galling to the Soviet government was the prominence in the ranks of the rebels of former members of anti-Kolchak partisan forces that had merged with the Red Army as it advanced eastward in 1919–1920.155

In a very lengthy analysis of the Tambov experience, sent to Lenin on 20 July 1921, V. A. Anotonov-Ovseenko (since February 1921 chairman of the VTsIK Plenipotentiary Commission for Tambov), although deploying the usual Soviet terminology of “kulaks” and “bandit gangs” to describe the hardly gang-like, 21,000-strong rebel army that the Red Army had to confront across the province, was openly critical of Soviet policy:

In general the Soviet regime was, in the eyes of the majority of the peasants, identified with flying visits by commissars or plenipotentiaries who were valiant at giving orders to the volost′ (District) Executive Committees and village Soviets and went around imprisoning the representatives of these local organs of authority for the non-fulfillment of frequently quite absurd requirements. It was also identified with the food requisitioning units, which often acted directly to the detriment of the peasant economy, without in any way profiting the State. The peasantry, in their majority have become accustomed to regarding the Soviet regime as something extraneous in relation to themselves, something that issues only commands, that gives orders most zealously, but quite improvidently.156

Most common, Antonov-Ovseenko noted, were peasant complaints against the dictatorship of the proletariat: “What sort of worker-peasant regime is it that we have?” they would ponder—“The regime in fact is that of the workers at the expense of the peasants.”157

To remedy matters, in a region that had been particularly adversely affected by the shifting fronts of the civil wars (not least during the aforementioned Mamontov raid), Antonov-Ovseenko suggested the merciless expunging of the rebel leadership, combined with a no less thorough, root-and-branch overhaul of the local Soviet administration and a campaign of reeducation. Tellingly, though, as a first step, he had some months earlier suggested the dispatch of two divisions of seasoned Red troops to the province.158 Soon afterward, Tukhachevskii arrived and began a process of pacification of the region through assigning Red forces to the villages, to guard against renewed flare-ups of rebellion, as the major Antonovite groups were extinguished one by one.159 A recent account has it that Tambov province experienced a gross loss of 240,000 people in the course of the suppression of the Tambov Rebellion, most of them while under internment or during subsequent repressions rather than in the actual fighting (although this figure includes questionable estimates of the “unborn”).160

In the end, of course, there could only be one victor in these unequal struggles, which, although almost simultaneous, remained isolated from one another. That victor would be the force that could deploy tens of thousands of trained and battle-hardened soldiers, supported by armored trains, tanks, aircraft, and (in the case of Tambov, and apparently for the first time in the civil wars) poison-gas brigades.161 That victor was, of course, the Red Army, largely free by the spring of 1921 of other commitments and headed by experienced commanders with whom the rebels could not compete.