Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Situated at the juncture of the Red Army’s fronts against the White forces of Admiral A. V. Kolchak in the east and those of A. I. Denikin in the south, Tambov guberniia suffered particularly badly from the ravages of the civil wars—a situation exacerbated by a drought in 1919 that ruined agricultural production—but the Soviet government refused to alter the province’s official status as a region of food surplus, from which grain should be extracted (through the process of prodrazverstka) to feed both the Red Army and the cities of northern Russia. Indeed, Tambov’s contribution was raised from 18 million tons of grain in 1919 to 27 million tons to be delivered to the authorities in 1920. In the summer of 1919, the region was also ravaged by the Mamontov raid (while the weapons left behind by the marauding Whites would serve in part to arm the rebellion). All this led to an apparently spontaneous revolt against the Soviet authorities, which began at Khitrovo on 19 August 1920 and soon spread to Kamenka and Tugolukova and then across the province and into the Voronezh region.

Antonov, who had been leading a small anti-Bolshevik partisan group around Tambov since the previous year, emerged to place himself at the head of the rebellion, organizing a territorially based army (the Blue Army or Antonovtsy), which at its peak numbered between 50,000 to 70,000 men. He also cooperated with local members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries in the formation of a network of administrative committees termed Unions of the Working Peasantry (Soiuzy trudogo krest′ianstva, or STKs) to replace the Soviet institutions. The chairman of the STKs was P. M. Tokmakov. (Other prominent rebel leaders included D. S. Antonov, A. V. Boguslavskii, and I. S. Kolesnikov.) The political program of the STKs was never fully hammered out, but they tended to emphasize political equality; an end to the civil war; freedom of speech, the press, conscience, trade unions, and assembly; support for the convention of a new, freely elected constituent assembly; the transfer of land to the peasantry, and workers’ control of industry.

By the spring of 1921, Soviet rule had collapsed all across Tambov guberniia, and every effort to crush the rebels militarily had failed, while further (albeit smaller) peasant rebellions had occurred along the Volga around Samara, Saratov, Tsaritsyn, and Astrakhan, and tens of thousands of rebels were active beyond the Urals in the Western Siberian Uprising. In Tambov, on 21 May 1921, the insurgent command proclaimed the existence of the Provisional Democratic Republic of the Tambov Partisan Region. However, the Red Army was soon making inroads into the province, as (in May 1921) 50,000 seasoned troops, including large cavalry formations, were deployed (to reinforce the 50,000 Red Army men already fighting the rebels), together with tanks, artillery, armored trains, aircraft, and even poison-gas-laying detachments. From 27 April 1921, the Soviet forces deployed against the rebels were commanded by the gifted but ruthless M. N. Tukhachevskii. The end of War Communism, the introduction of the New Economic Policy (and the prodnalog method of grain procurement), and an easing off of military recruitment as the civil wars wound down also helped to appease the peasantry and undercut the rebels.

By July 1921, the Tambov rebel army had disintegrated, and many of its leaders had been killed (including Tokmakov, Boguslavskii, and Kolesnikov), although Antonov survived, on the run, for another year. The Cheka and a special Bolshevik Central Committee commission (“for the liquidation of banditism in the Tambov guberniia”) under V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko smashed the STK network and executed, imprisoned, or exiled many thousands of insurgents; at least 50,000 people were interned in specially constructed concentration camps (some of them as hostages), where the mortality rate approached 25 percent per month. It has been estimated that total mortality in Tambov guberniia from 1920 to 1922, as a consequence of civil wars, executions, and prison deaths, was around 240,000.

The Tambov Rebellion is the focus of the Russian feature film Zhila-byla odna baba (“Once Upon a Time There Lived a Simple Woman,” dir. A. S. Smirnov, 2011).