Tambov peasant uprising

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Expansion of the Tambov peasant uprising

The Tambov peasant uprising ( Russian Тамбовское восстание / Tambowskoje Wosstaniye / Tambower uprising ), also called Antonovshchina after the leader Alexander Stepanowitsch Antonov , was an armed uprising by peasants with the center in the Tambov governorate . It was directed against the government of the Bolsheviks . It began in August 1920 with the resistance against the forced collection of grain and developed into a guerrilla war against the Red Army , units of the Cheka and the Soviet Russian authorities. It is estimated that around 100,000 people were arrested and around 15,000 shot dead in the course of the suppression of the uprising . The Red Army also used chemical weapons to fight the peasants . Most of the peasant army was broken up in the summer of 1921, while smaller groups held out until the following year.

prehistory

The Soviet government had turned to war communism in the Russian Civil War . Food for the needs of the cities was obtained through forced evacuation from the villages without any financial compensation. This met with resistance from the peasant population, especially as the requisitions were often carried out violently and were accompanied by looting by the procurement forces. Likewise, the amount of grain to be requisitioned was not measured according to actual production. Commissions gave a rough estimate based on pre-war production, so that destruction, bad harvests and population decline were not included. The farmers often responded by reducing their acreage, as they no longer had an economic incentive to produce surpluses. This made the delivery quantities ordered from above even more utopian. In contrast to the cities, the Bolsheviks had hardly any supporters in the rural regions, where in the various elections of 1917 the Social Revolutionary Party had always won broad majorities. The peasants met the Bolshevik ideology largely with indifference. The Soviet politician Vladimir Antonov-Ovsejenko , who later himself dealt with the suppression of the uprising, characterized the peasants as follows:

"(They) have got used to seeing the Soviet government as something alien, something that does nothing but give orders, that administers with great zeal but little economic sense."

The requisition policy was also carried out in the Tambov governorate , a relatively wealthy, agrarian region 350 kilometers southeast of Moscow . The peasants of the governorate had largely supported the October Revolution , as Lenin's decree on land legalized the expropriation of the estate. Even so, the Bolsheviks struggled to maintain control of the governorate over the following years. In March 1918, on the occasion of the conclusion of peace with the German Reich , their delegates were even kicked out of the local Soviets . Although they succeeded in consolidating their rule over the next few years, this repeatedly required the use of force.

Before the revolution, farmers in the governorate produced around one million tons of grain. A third of this was exported . Based on these figures, which did not take into account the upheavals of the civil war in the countryside, a high target was estimated for the procurement of grain. According to an estimate by the historian Orlando Figes, if the estimated amount had been withdrawn in full, each farm household would only have around 10 percent of the amount of grain that was needed for nutrition, sowing and animal feed. By January 1921, half of the estimated grain had been collected. Antonov-Ovsejenko noticed from his own experience that every second farmer in Tambov was starving.

Outbreak of the uprising

In August 1920 the peasants' armed resistance to grain confiscation began in a village in the Tambov governorate called Chitrovo. The farmers refused to deliver their grain and killed several members of the local procurement team. A Soviet government report summarized the reasons for the outbreak of violence as follows:

“The commandos indulged in some assaults. On their way through, they looted everything, even pillows and kitchen utensils. They shared the booty and beat up old men of 70 years in front of everyone. The old people were punished because they couldn't get hold of their deserted sons hiding in the woods (...) What also upset the farmers was the fact that the confiscated grain was carted to the nearest train station and spoiled there in the open air . "

In anticipation of an attack by the Red Army to enforce the procurement of grain, the peasants of the village armed themselves. Since there were only a few rifles available, this was partly done with pitchforks and clubs . Other villages joined the uprising against the Soviet authorities and succeeded in repelling the hastily brought up Red Army units. One factor behind this success was the burden placed on the Red Army by the simultaneous Polish-Soviet War and the crackdown on Wrangel's White Army in the Crimea , as a result of which only around 3,000 Red Army soldiers were available in the Tambov region. These soldiers had been drafted from the local villages and also often had little motivation to take action against their own peers.

Alexander Stepanowitsch Antonow (1888–1922)

After their first success, the peasants attempted to conquer Tambov , the capital of the governorate. There they failed to defend the Red Army. After this defeat, Alexander Antonov , a former Social Revolutionary, took the lead in the movement. Even before the uprising, Antonov himself had fought underground against the Bolsheviks with a few comrades-in-arms and was sentenced to death in absentia. Since he was able to avoid persecution by the Soviet authorities, he was a kind of folk hero for the peasants. He demanded that free trade and the movement of goods be allowed again, the grain acquisitions to end and the Soviet administration and the Cheka to be abolished. As the leader of the uprising, Antonov went over to guerrilla warfare. His troops carried out surprising raids on railway junctions, collective farms and Soviet authorities. In doing so, they were supported by the population and used the villages as cover and relaxation areas. Likewise, they often disguised themselves as soldiers of the Red Army to move around the country or to add to the element of surprise. Social revolutionaries in the Tambov region also founded a union of the working peasants , which was supposed to function as the political organization of the insurgents and which Antonov worked with, even though he had left the party. At the end of 1920 he had around 8,000 insurgents under his command. In the spring of 1921 Antonov introduced compulsory military service for the peasants in the rebellious areas. Thereupon the strength of the rebels increased to 20,000 to 50,000 men. Antonov organized the peasants into 18 to 20 regiments with their own political commissars , reconnaissance departments and communication departments, following the example of the Red Army . He also introduced strict discipline. The peasants used the red flag as a standard and claimed the central symbol of the revolution for themselves. Antonov's rebels continued to wage guerrilla warfare against the Soviet authorities. The later Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov , which one in the fighting with the insurgents cavalry squadron commander, described the strategy of the insurgents in his memoirs as follows:

“The tactics of the Antonov people accordingly amounted to avoiding combat with larger units of the Red Army, only to fight when there was absolute certainty of victory and their own forces were superior, and to emerge from an unfavorable combat situation in small groups if necessary in different directions in order to then gather again at an agreed meeting point. "

They were able to bring large parts of the region under their control, and they also succeeded in stealing railroad trains with requisitioned grain. The grain not needed to supply the armed men was distributed to the local farmers by Antonov's men. The uprising also spread to parts of the Voronezh , Saratov and Penza governorates . All Soviet institutions were abolished in the areas they controlled. Around 1,000 members of the Communist Party were killed by the insurgents, mostly after torture . In October 1920 the Bolsheviks had completely lost control of the rural area of ​​the governorate. They only ruled the city of Tambov itself and a number of smaller urban settlements.

Suppression of the uprising

Martial law was imposed on the Tambov governorate in August . The official propaganda of the Bolsheviks tried the insurgents as bandits to discredit, which were led by the SRs. Internal reports by the Soviet authorities show that the leadership was well aware that it was a spontaneous peasant uprising without a major role for the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The central organs of the Social Revolutionary Party also publicly condemned the uprising and forbade their party members to support the rebels in any way. This call, however, found little response from local party members. Nor did it stop the Cheka from launching a wave of repression against members of this party in the Tambov region. As early as September 1920, the authorities and the Red Army reacted to the peasant rebellion with military force. Insurgents were executed and several villages were burned down. However, this could not stop the uprising.

In February 1921, Vladimir Antonov-Ovsejenko was sent to Tambov as chairman of a plenipotentiary commission to end the uprising. The commission reported directly to Lenin and was directly under his authority. Antonov-Ovsejenko aimed at the civilian supporters of the rebels in suppressing the uprising. With Lenin's prior approval, he ordered a wave of deportations and hostage shootings. In May 1921, on Lenin's orders , Mikhail Tukhachevsky was summoned to Tambov as military commander-in-chief to suppress the uprising. 100,000 soldiers including tanks and heavy artillery were assigned to him . Red Army soldiers were assigned to his force, but they were in the minority. The majority of the units deployed consisted of special commandos from the Cheka . In Tukhachevsky's associations there were also so-called international units consisting of Hungarians and Asian ethnic groups. Tukhachevsky rated their willingness to take action against the peasants higher than that of the mostly peasant Russian recruits. In addition, as high a proportion as possible of members of the communist youth organization Komsomol was assigned to his units, as they were considered politically loyal. The rebels responded to Tukhachevsky's and Ovseenko's measures with assassinations, kidnappings and shooting of family members of party members and members of the Red Army. The fighting with the partisans took on civil war-like proportions, and the resources and organizational structures that the Soviet government raised against them resembled those of a civil war front . Zhukov described the battle with an insurgent unit as follows:

“We got into an extremely fierce battle. The enemy saw that we were vastly outnumbered and expected to overrun us. However, it wasn't that easy. Fortunately, as I mentioned earlier, the squadron had four heavy machine guns with a large supply of ammunition and a 76 mm gun. The squadron maneuvered machine guns and guns and shot straight into the ranks of the enemy. We saw how the battlefield was covered with fallen enemies, and step by step we withdrew fighting. "

Antonov-Ovsejenko reacted to the counter-terror of the partisans by tightening his measures. Civilians who refused to give their names were shot without trial. When weapons were found, the oldest member of the family who was able to work was shot. The same was true for hiding insurgents. In this case the family was also expropriated and deported . This regulation also included taking in children or orphans of rebels. If a family escaped from the village, they were expropriated, their house burned down, and their movable property distributed among loyal farmers. In March 1921, the forced collection of grain in the rebellious regions was finally stopped. As a result, civilian populations became less willing to support the rebels. In May 1921, Tukhachevsky succeeded by systematic occupation of villages to push the rebels more and more into the forest areas of the region around Tambov and to isolate them. In June he received permission from Antonov-Ovseenko's commission to use poison gas in the forests and ordered his units to use it as well. By June 1921 Antonov's army was encircled and destroyed. Antonov himself escaped and was only captured and shot by Soviet authorities a year later. At the beginning of September 1921, only dispersed groups of insurgents operated, which were estimated at around 1,000 armed men. It took until mid-1922 for the province to calm down completely.

consequences

The suppression of the uprising resulted in very heavy casualties among the population. It is estimated that in July 1921 around 50,000 people , including around 1,000 children, were in specially designed concentration camps as a result of the revolt . The inmates suffered badly from cholera and typhus epidemics . The death rate for the fall of 1921 is estimated at around 15–20% per month. Exact numbers of the victims of the uprising are not available. A total estimate is around 100,000 detainees and around 15,000 people executed by the authorities . As a result of the military operations against the rebels, around 6,000 of their fighters surrendered. They were either shot or deported. After the suppression of the uprising, the deportees were transferred from the local camps to special camps in the northern regions of Russia. These camps were otherwise reserved for officers of the White Army and captured insurgents from Kronstadt . Compared to the rest of the camp system, there was a particularly high mortality rate for inmates in the camps. The devastation of the fighting and punitive measures, together with the agricultural policy of the Bolsheviks, led to famine in the insurgent areas. In addition to Tambov, large parts of Russia were affected in the following two years.

The uprising served the leadership of the Bolsheviks as an occasion to take action against the Social Revolutionary Party. In mid-1921, thousands of its members were in prisons and camps in the Cheka, including all members of the party's central committee that condemned the uprising. The uprising and the assassination attempt by Fanny Kaplan on Lenin in 1918 served the authorities as charges in the show trial of the leaders of the Social Revolutionaries in June 1922, which initiated the final breakdown of the party.

The uprising also made it clear to the Soviet leadership that they had failed to deal with the peasants. As a result, the insurrection is seen as one of the factors that induced Lenin to initiate the New Economic Policy . The Russian sociologist and contemporary witness Pitirim Sorokin even concluded that the insurgents had forced the NEP through their actions. The new policy relied more on a tax in kind based on actual production, rather than on compulsory confiscation of agricultural products. In the military field, it is mentioned that the Soviet military leader Mikhail Frunze was impressed by the resistance of the guerrillas against regular troops. Therefore, as Commander in Chief of the Red Army in the 1920s, he had studies carried out on the guerrilla struggle. This is seen as a precondition for the partisan war of the Red Army in World War II against the German invaders.

Literary processing

Alexander Solzhenitsyn dealt with the uprising in his story "Ektow the Philanthropist" , published in 1995 in the Russian literary magazine Nowy Mir . In it he describes the fate of a fictional character from the urban intelligentsia who joins the uprising. At the same time he published another short story in 1995 called "Ein Heldenleben" . In it Solzhenitsyn describes the career of the Soviet Marshal Georgi Zhukov and describes the peasant uprising as an episode of his rise to the top of Soviet society.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Manfred Hildermeier : The Russian Revolution and its consequences. In: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 67, Heft 34–36 (2017), p. 14 ( online ), accessed on October 21, 2017.
  2. ↑ Orlando Figes : The Tragedy of a People. Berlin 1998, p. 811.
  3. ↑ a b c d e Richard Pipes : Russia under the Bolshevik regime. New York 1993, p. 374 ff.
  4. ^ A b Nicolas Werth: A state against its people. Violence, Oppression and Terror in the Soviet Union. In: Stéphane Courtois et al .: The Black Book of Communism. 4th edition, Munich 1998, p. 124.
  5. ^ Translation of a quote from Richard Pipes: Russia under the Bolshevik regime , New York 1993, p. 375; Original text in English: "(They) have become accustomed to viewing the Soviet government as something extraneous, something that does nothin but issue commands, that administrators with great zeal but little economic sense."
  6. ↑ Peter Scheibert: Lenin in Power - The Russian People in the Revolution 1918–1922 , Weinheim 1984, pp. 389–393.
  7. ↑ a b c d Orlando Figes: The tragedy of a people. Berlin 1998, p. 796 ff.
  8. ↑ a b c d e f g Richard Pipes: Russia under the Bolshevik regime. New York 1993, p. 376 ff.
  9. ↑ Quote from Nicolas Werth: A state against its people. Violence, Oppression, and Terror in the Soviet Union ; in: Stéphane Courtois et al .: The Black Book of Communism , 4th edition, Munich 1998, p. 125.
  10. ↑ a b c d Nicolas Werth: '' A state against its people. Violence, Oppression and Terror in the Soviet Union ''; in: Stéphane Courtois et al .: The Black Book of Communism. 4th edition, Munich 1998, p. 126.
  11. ↑ Georgi K. Schukow: Memories and Thoughts , Stuttgart 1969, p. 69 f.
  12. ^ Richard Pipes: Russia under the Bolshevik regime. New York 1993, pp. 376-378.
  13. ^ A b Richard Pipes: Russia under the Bolshevik regime. New York 1993, pp. 378-387.
  14. ^ Richard Pipes: Russia under the Bolshevik regime , New York 1993, pp. 378 ff.
  15. ^ Georgi K. Schukow: Memories and Thoughts , Stuttgart 1969, p. 72.
  16. ↑ Orlando Figes: The Tragedy of a People. Berlin 1998, p. 811 ff; Richard Pipes: Russia under the Bolshevik regime. New York 1993, pp. 387-401.
  17. ↑ a b c Nicolas Werth: A state against its people. Violence, Oppression and Terror in the Soviet Union. In: Stéphane Courtois et al .: The Black Book of Communism. 4th edition, Munich 1998, p. 134.
  18. ^ A b c Richard Pipes: Russia under the Bolshevik regime. New York 1993, p. 404.
  19. ↑ Orlando Figes: Die Tragödie eines Volkes , Berlin 1998, p. 811 ff.
  20. ↑ Nicolas Werth: A state against its people. Violence, Oppression, and Terror in the Soviet Union ; in: Stéphane Courtois et al .: The Black Book of Communism , 4th edition, Munich 1998, p. 124 f; P. 137 f.
  21. ↑ Nicolas Werth A state against its people. Violence, Oppression, and Terror in the Soviet Union ; in: The Black Book of Communism , 4th edition, Munich 1998, p. 124 f; P. 144.
  22. ↑ Orlando Figes: The Tragedy of a People , Berlin 1998, p. 808.
  23. ↑ Peter Scheibert: Lenin in Power - The Russian People in the Revolution 1918–1922 , Weinheim, 1984, p. 393.
  24. ^ Richard Pipes: Russia under the Bolshevik regime , New York 1993, p. 388 ff.
  25. ↑ Alexander Solschenizyn: Ein Heldenleben , Zurich 1995, pp. 7–64.
  26. ↑ Alexander Solschenizyn: Ein Heldenleben , Zurich 1995, pp. 65–152.

literature

Scientific representations

  • Nicolas Werth : A state against its people. Violence, Oppression and Terror in the Soviet Union. In: Stéphane Courtois , Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin. Collaboration: Rémi Kauffer, Pierre Rigoulot, Pascal Fontaine, Yves Santamaria, Sylvain Boulouque: The Black Book of Communism . Oppression, crime and terror. With a chapter "The processing of the GDR" by Joachim Gauck and Ehrhard Neubert. Translated from the French by Irmela Arnsperger, Bertold Galli, Enrico Heinemann, Ursel Schäfer, Karin Schulte-Bersch, Thomas Woltermann. Piper. Munich, Zurich 1998, pp. 51-295 and pp. 898-911, ISBN 3-492-04053-5 .
  • Orlando Figes : A People's Tragedy. The epoch of the Russian Revolution from 1891 to 1924. (Original title: A people's tragedy , translated by Barbara Conrad with the collaboration of Brigitte Flickinger and Vera Stutz-Bischitzky). Berlin-Verlag, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-8270-0243-5 .
  • Richard Pipes : Russia under the Bolshevik Regime. Random House, New York, NY 1994, ISBN 0-394-50242-6 .
  • Peter Scheibert : Lenin in power. The Russian people in the revolution 1918–1922. VCH - Acta humaniora , Weinheim 1984, ISBN 3-527-17503-2 .
  • Seth Singleton: The Tambov Revolt (1920-1921) . in: Slavic Review 25, No. 3 (1966), pp. 497-512.

Literary works

Web links

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on April 10, 2008 .

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