Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

TACTICAL CENTER. This clandestine anti-Bolshevik organization was formed in Moscow in April 1919, with the aim of coordinating the activities of a number of anti-Bolshevik groups. While retaining their organizational independence, representatives of the National Center, the Union for the Regeneration of Russia, the Union of Public Men, and other groups entered the Tactical Center, on the basis of the slogan “Russia, One and Indivisible” and support for a one-man dictatorship to lead the anti-Bolshevik struggle. The center recognized Admiral A. V. Kolchak as supreme ruler and maintained close contacts with the Whites in Siberia, South Russia, and elsewhere, but its plans to organize an uprising to coincide with the Armed Forces of South Russia’s advance on Moscow in the autumn of 1919 came to nothing, and the organization was liquidated by the Cheka over the course of the following year. Among the organization’s leading members were N. N. Shchepkin, O. P. Gerasimov, and Prince S. E. Trubetskoi (from the National Center), as well as S. P. Mel′gunov (of the Union of Regeneration).

TAMAN (RED) ARMY. This celebrated group of Red forces was active in the North Caucasus from 27 August 1918 to February 1919. It took its name from the Taman peninsula, in western Kuban, which stretches across the mouth of the Sea of Azov toward the Kerch peninsula in the Crimea. The Taman Army, which at its birth was composed of 30,000 men in three columns, was created at Gelendzhik (in the aftermath of the capture of Ekaterinodar by the Volunteer Army on 16 August 1918) from the remains of various Red forces that had been fighting the Whites and the forces of the Austro-German intervention. Workers from Novorossiisk and sailors from the recently scuttled Black Sea Fleet were prominent among its members. The sailor I. I. Matveev was chosen as commander, with E. I. Kovtiukh as his deputy, G. N. Baturin as chief of staff, and N. K. Kich as military commissar.

The Taman Army’s first operation was an attempt to unite, by a march through Tuapse, with the Red Army of the North Caucasus, although progress was hampered by the 25,000 refugees who accompanied the army. The first column, which made up the vanguard, battled with the forces of the Democratic Republic of Georgia; the second column was harried by forces of the Kuban Cossack Host; and the third column, in the rear, was beset by the Volunteers. The first column took Tuapse on 28 August 1918 and proceeded across the main ridge of the Caucasus Mountains to Khadyzhensk and Belorechensk (which was captured on 12 September 1918). It was joined there by the other columns two days later, and on 18 September 1918, the Taman Army united with the main Red force in the region at Armavir. Having completed this odyssey, Matveev was removed from his post on the orders of the insubordinate commander of the Red Army of the North Caucasus, I. I. Sorokin, and executed as a traitor at Piatigorsk on 8 October 1918.

Subsequently, under Kovtiukh’s command (and later that of I. F. Fed′ko), the Taman Army was reorganized into two infantry divisions, three cavalry regiments, and an artillery brigade and was involved in heavy fighting against White and Cossack forces around Stavropol′ in November and December 1918, following which the army was awarded the Order of the Red Banner (even though Stavropol′ was abandoned to the enemy). Having suffered a great loss of men in battle and to typhus, it was then reorganized again into the 3rd Taman Rifle Division, which in January 1919 withdrew to Astrakhan under pressure from the Whites.

“The Heroic March of the Taman Army” was much mythologized in Soviet times, one of the prime examples being the major novel of the Soviet author Aleksandr Serafimovich (A. S. Popov), Zheleznii potok (“The Iron Flood,” 1924), which was made into a feature film, under the same title, by Efim Dzifan in 1967.

TAMBOV REBELLION. Sometimes referred to (particularly in Soviet sources) as “the Antonov uprising” or the Antonovshchina, after its leader A. S. Antonov, this large and uniquely well-organized peasant rebellion engulfed Tambov guberniia and parts of neighboring provinces in southeast European Russia from the summer of 1920 to the summer of 1921.