CHAPTER 10

Peasant War in Russia: Ukraine and Tambov

IN CONSIDERING the eruption of peasant resistance in the Russian Revolution from 1917 to 1921–22, two points need to be stressed at the outset. The first is the bare fact that in 1917 Russia was even more rural and agricultural than France in 1789. Close to 85 percent of the population lived in the countryside and made its living on or from the land. Even large sectors of the urban population were first-generation ex-peasants, with strong attachments to their native villages. Perforce the imperial army was a peasant army. In social, cultural, and religious terms, the world of the peasants was the world of their forefathers. Illiteracy also ran close to 85 percent, and the atmosphere was distinctly obscurantist, especially in the eyes of the urban elites. The magic and ritual of religion, as well as its comfort and terror, pervaded everyday life and bound the cake of custom.

There was nothing exceptional about European Russia, as well as parts of western Siberia, being swept by peasant protests and uprisings. After 1789, France had a single and geographically circumscribed Vendée, although this jacquerie had coincided with the federalist defiance of the great southern cities. In contrast, early revolutionary Russia saw four major and geographically dispersed peasant upheavals, in southern Ukraine, Tambov province, the lower Volga basin, and western Siberia, as well as minor uprisings in parts of the Caucasus, Belorussia, and central Asia. Besides, the peasant rebellions in Russia were not accompanied by any urban rebellions comparable to the defiance of Lyons, Marseilles, and Toulon. Many of European Russia’s major cities were so intensely trapped in the military flux and reflux of the civil war, notably in the non-Russian peripheries, that they had no chance to affirm themselves. Changing hands a dozen times, Kiev was an object rather than subject of history, claimed as it was by Bolsheviks, Whites, and Poles, as well as by fledgling Ukrainian nationalists.¹ Of course, there was the Kronstadt rebellion in late winter 1921. But even this sizable sailors’ mutiny on the small island fortress in the Gulf of Finland some twenty miles west of Petrograd was at least as much influenced by the still raging peasant tempest as by the concurrent workers’ unrest in the ex-capital.²

Area of Makhno Rebellion

The Volga Region and Surrounding Area

Given Russia’s larger size and population, it is not surprising that it should have had a larger number of peasant insurrections and rebels than revolutionary France. Overall the peasant bands and armies counted more fighting men than the White Guards. This is not to say, however, that between 1917 and 1922 most or all of peasant Russia was seething with rebellion, let alone up in arms in opposition to the new Bolshevik regime. Although the unrest was widespread, there was little if any military or political coordination even among those rare peasant armies that were somewhat organized. Still, here and there the magnitude and proficiency of these irregulars was such that especially when the Red Army was hard pressed by the White Guards or Polish armies, they momentarily assumed disproportionate importance. At the same time, the peasants had benefited enormously from the October Revolution; they were not about to help defeat the Bolshevik government, for fear of bringing back the old regime, which would be certain to undo the land settlement of 1917–18. Ironically, once the Whites were defeated, it was too late for the Greens to prevail. To be sure, just then the peasant insurgents were at the peak of their strength and primed for battle. But though exhausted from four years of grueling war and civil war, the Bolsheviks managed to muster sufficient forces and resources to defeat them.3

The second point that needs to be stated, or rather reiterated, is the conceptual premise that a revolution necessarily calls forth movements of anti- or counterrevolutionary resistance, including revolts by the revolution’s disillusioned beneficiaries and fundamentalists. In Russia, even more than in France, at the creation the tillers of the soil were among not only the Revolution’s principal beneficiaries but also its chief agents. It is not to minimize the premier role of Petrograd’s workers, middle classes, and intelligentsia to insist on the importance of the peasants in the upheaval of 1917. Of course, the ironbound authority system first cracked in the capital. However, the soldiers who fraternized with the riotous crowds and disobeyed the order to shoot strikers in the capital were as much part of village Russia as the soldiers who deserted their regiments at the front and the peasants who seized land from gentry estates and public domains in rear areas. It is a measure of the agony of imperial Russia’s ancien régime that the normally immutable and meek world of the muzhik, the bedrock of tsarism, should have become unbound. The peasant agitation which fueled the grande peur in 1789 was largely an echo of France’s urban upheaval, and it was contained and defused by the astonishing abolition of feudal rights and privileges on August 4 and 11, with full respect for private property. In 1917, to the contrary, the peasants instantly emerged as full partners in Russia’s great renewal, and their widespread and willful intervention, notably in European Russia, left an indelible mark on the incipient revolution.

Indeed, the spontaneous and formless rebellion of the peasants and peasant-soldiers quickened the dissolution of the ex-empire’s essential but brittle centralizing control structures. It also struck both reformists and revolutionaries like a bolt from the blue. Prince Lvov and Alexander Kerensky were perplexed, and for both ideological and political reasons unwilling to face up to the pressing agrarian problem, leaving it to go from bad to worse. Although the Bolsheviks were no less bewildered and caught short by the peasant revolt, they met it by making it their own. Fully conscious of the antirevolutionary role of the peasants in the insurgency of the Vendée as well as in the repression of the European upheavals of 1848 and of the Paris Commune of 1871, Lenin sought to appease the turbulent rural world by satisfying the muzhik’s putative land hunger.

The Bolsheviks gave their blessing to a peasant uprising against the landowners that was more far-reaching if less spectacular than the proletarian uprising against the urban notables, including the sparse bourgeoisie. In the year 1917 the petty peasantry seized some 108 million acres from 110,000 large landlords, and 140 million acres from two million smaller landowners. Large landed property was liquidated in favor of small peasant farms, increasing the average peasant holding by about 20 percent and cutting in half—from 16 to 8 percent—the number of landless peasant households by 1920.4

Lenin and his associates never really intended their revolution to favor the peasants. Neither Marxist theory nor the Bolshevik program had much to say about the contemporary peasant question. There was, to be sure, a general predisposition to collectivized, large-scale, and streamlined agriculture. But this broad objective, congruent with capitalist modernization and rationalization, was embedded in a worldview that was singularly insensitive to the mentality and condition of the peasant. As men of the city Lenin and the top Bolshevik leaders were steeped in the political and literary culture of Russia’s twin capitals. For them, the industrial workers, not the peasants, were the heralds and carriers of the future. Marxists were impatient with the peasantry for being the substructure of the eternal and unyielding past. Following Marx, who, like Voltaire, disdained “the idiocy of rural life,” the Bolsheviks considered the peasants half-savage, ignorant, and superstitious. They thought them, in addition, to be the Nemesis of culture and progress, not least because they were open to manipulation by the old ruling and governing classes. In the Marxist vision the peasantry had one major saving grace: the world of petty peasants, like that of petty shopkeepers and artisans, was destined to be reduced by the rush of capitalist and socialist modernization. This warped and condescending vision of the peasantry had prevented the Bolsheviks from striking root in the countryside before 1914, leaving the field to the Socialist Revolutionaries.5

In addition, the relationship between Bolsheviks and peasants was troubled by the sheer amplitude of the land seizures, which inordinately complicated Sovnarkom’s efforts to consolidate power and restore sovereignty on a revolutionary basis. The vast redistribution and leveling of landholdings entailed a decline in productivity fatal for a broken nation caught up in foreign and civil war. Over and above the paralysis of trade and transport complicating the distribution of food, there was no incentive for peasants to produce a surplus for the market, since with the ruble in free fall, the price of consumer goods had risen beyond their reach. Like the Jacobins at the time of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks were confronted with the difficult problem of provisioning the cities and armies—but unlike the Jacobins, they had to face it all at once, on a huge scale, and with uncertain access to vital breadbaskets such as Ukraine.

Given the Bolsheviks’ resolve to fight to the death to hold on to power, they had no other recourse than to stiffen the war economy inherited from the tsarist regime which had aimed to make grain a state monopoly. In May 1918, with the declaration of a food emergency, Sovnarkom turned to rationing, price controls, and requisitioning. These measures became the foundation of War Communism, a scheme to simultaneously manage a political economy of extreme scarcity and take halting steps toward transforming it along socialist lines. But in this makeshift combination of contingent necessity and principled reform, the former was decisive. Precisely because the Bolsheviks were ideologically and politically unprepared to run an overheated war economy at the same time that they were tempted by the pathos of novelty, they plunged headlong into a search for a substitute for Russia’s failing market and financial system. As may be expected, in a cumbersome and unhinged agricultural economy the procurement of food, notably grain, became the embattled Bolshevik regime’s first politico-economic priority. In a reflex comparable to the one that had prompted the Jacobins to adopt the maximum in September 1793, the Bolsheviks arbitrarily fixed prices and delivery targets, which they soon backed by hard-driving requisitioning brigades and harsh penalties for speculators and black marketeers. Marxist scorn for the free market’s regulation of supply and demand probably inclined them to resort to administered prices and quotas, enforced by the cudgel. But this does not mean that they sidelined the market as part of a calculated drive to recast Russia’s economy in accordance with a nebulous socialist blueprint. Clearly it was less the Bolshevik leaders’ preexistent Marxist intentions than their preconceptions about rural and peasant Russia that disposed them to consider the mandatory extraction of grain from the villages the most promising way to relieve the starvation stalking the cities, all the more so since they looked to the beneficiaries of the great agrarian settlement of 1917–18 to be cooperative. Besides, they thought they could use the muzhik’s legendary submissiveness to advance his own liberation. And once the Bolsheviks met with peasant resistance, they were confident that the mere threat of force could break it.

The principal fuel for all the peasant revolts, without exception, was indignation and protest against the imposition of seemingly unjust prices and exorbitant quotas, compounded by the forced collection of food and impressment for occasional hard labor. This protest turned into active opposition once Red Army units and special requisitioning detachments proceeded to apply increasingly ruthless methods of procurement.6

To prevail in their uphill struggle for survival, the Bolsheviks needed to extract from the countryside not only food for the cities and armed forces but also conscripts and horses for the Red Army. As the civil war dragged on, ever more peasants were drafted for military service far from home. As at the time of the French Revolution, the escalating duress and frenzy of war and civil war revolutionized the Revolution. Increasingly coercive food procurement and military conscription triggered and radicalized resistance in village and province, not least because the grain collectors and recruiting agents were distrusted for coming from distant and hostile parts. The fact that these outside officials were Great Russians and urban workers ignorant and contemptuous of local customs and languages merely sharpened the animosity which greeted them.

Yet in spite of all these stresses and strains, the marriage of convenience between Bolsheviks and peasants lasted as long as the counterrevolution threatened and wrought havoc. The White Guards, like the Red Army, lived off the land, pillaged, and requisitioned livestock; and their persistent imperial pretense alienated the nascent political classes of the non-Russian borderlands. Furthermore, the Bolsheviks had a clear policy of granting the land to the peasants; the Whites, for class reasons, sidestepped the land issue, but their actions spoke louder than their equivocations: in territories “liberated” or reconquered by them, the old landed notables readily repossessed their lands. With good reason “the peasants usually regarded the Reds as the lesser of two evils for fear that the Whites, if victorious, would reinstate the landowners.”⁷ Before long at least 80 percent of the rapidly growing Red Army’s recruits were peasants, and despite massive desertions, their willingness to fight and sacrifice their lives was crucial for the Revolution’s survival. By and large the showdown between rebel peasants and Bolshevik rulers was suspended or postponed until after the defeat of the Whites. Meanwhile “the system [of War Communism] did work: it got food to the cities and to the armies, saved the Revolution, and prevented famine.”⁸

In and of itself the victory over the counterrevolution did not bring the reestablishment of Russia’s single and unifying political and legal sovereignty which had cracked in 1917. Rather, the civil war had two phases. The first phase involved, mainly, the struggle between, on the one hand, the Bolsheviks and, on the other, the counterrevolutionary Whites and their foreign backers. This phase came to an end, as we saw, with the defeat of Wrangel, in November 1920, following the war with Poland. The second phase, which overlapped to some extent with the first, consisted essentially of the struggle between the Soviet regime and the antirevolutionary peasant insurgencies. This second phase reached its peak starting in the fall of 1920, hence after the end of the first phase.

Once the first phase of the civil war concluded, Moscow was in a position to reinforce its military and security forces in the regions of major peasant unrest. Indeed, one of the reasons for the initial successes of the peasant jacqueries was the sparsity of Bolshevik political cadres as well as military, security, and Cheka forces in much of rural Russia. Overall the administrative and judicial apparatus was even more wasted in 1920 than in 1917. Once the Soviets were free to take on the antirevolution they were bound to get the upper hand, especially since the major peasant rebellions remained isolated from each other and had no links to the world outside Russia.

Meanwhile, however, the peasant resistance capitalized on the infantile disorders of the successor party-state. In critical areas the vacuum of power offered an unexpected opportunity to “reclaim” the personal and communal liberties of an idealized past as a hedge against the reimposition, by Russia’s new regime, of central controls complete with levies of imposts and men. In the case of the rebellion headed by Nestor Makhno in southeastern Ukraine, this bid for the recovery of a golden age was leavened by the allure of self-governing and communitarian peasant anarchism concordant with Bakunin’s and Kropotkin’s vision. In fact, to the extent that the rural rebellions had a social and political agenda it was, paradoxically, to save the essence of the Bolshevik land settlement of 1917–18 favoring small holders and local soviets.

All along and nearly everywhere, military desertion played a considerable role in this antirevolution. Whereas in 1917 peasant soldiers defected from the sclerotic Imperial Army to defy overbearing officers and seize land, starting in 1918 they deserted from the new-model Red Army, some to escape military service, others to join an active resistance. These latest runaways melted into the woodlands of their native up-country, where they joined draft dodgers who formed small bands living off the land and by plunder. These so-called Greens were hidebound and fervent provincials rather than knowing or zealous anti-Bolsheviks.9 Eventually a great many of them became involved in “spontaneous [and] … generally short-lived and easily suppressed … village uprisings … against local officials, often accompanied by lynch law (samosud), pillage, and violent acts of vengeance.”¹⁰ Lenin claimed that during the civil war such risings were “a permanent feature of the general Russian scene.”¹¹

Here and there isolated village uprisings spread to neighboring hamlets and villages, and mushroomed into full-scale jacqueries. In the process the leaders of these would-be revolts “developed sophisticated forms of political and military organization, within which local SRs and the odd White Army officer were able to play a subsidiary role.” In the rural districts or provinces where these risings originated, the peasants were enraged, as noted, by the exactions of tax and food collectors as well as of army recruiters, backed by the arm of terror. In any case, these revolts were also readily smothered, not least because the rebels had only pitchforks, scythes, and pikes with which to face the firearms of government forces.¹²

Although there were significant differences among the several large-scale peasant insurgencies, they shared important features peculiar to modern guerrilla warfare in terms of deployment, tactics, and weapons, as well as of social matrix and political pretense. Not that any of them, with the partial exception of the Makhno-led uprising, ever was of major consequence. Still, their incipient coherence accounts as much for their relative staying power as their regional expansion and their sizable hosts of peasants and Greens. But then again, for the most part, and characteristically, the field of vision of all the peasant insurgencies, including the most structured ones, was distinctly local, at best regional, and their temper was patently antimodern. This dual myopia showed forth in the rebels’ predilection for wrecking railway and telegraph lines, which they considered emblematic of the corrosive intrusion of the outside world driven and accelerated by science and technology.¹³

Of all the peasant uprisings in the Russian Revolution, the one led by Makhno was of greatest consequence. Over time his bands and brigades of irregulars ran not into the hundreds or thousands but the tens of thousands. More or less consciously they rallied to the black flag of anarchist self-liberation as well as self-sufficient and cooperative land ownership. Makhno’s partisans fought whoever tried to thwart their age-old dream, in broad but disconnected patches of open country in southeastern Ukraine between the Don in the east and the lower Dniester in the west, Ekaterinoslav in the north and the Sea of Azov in the south. This region of Ukraine kept changing hands during the civil war, which meant that the Makhnovites more or less consecutively battled the Austro-German armies; the Ukrainian hetmans Skoropatsky, Petliura, and Grigorev; the White Guards; and the Red Army. With the start of the counterrevolution early in 1918 the Whites, many of whose main bases and lifelines of Allied support were located precisely along the northern coastlines of the Black Sea, became Makhno’s sworn enemies, since they meant to restore the reign of both Great Russians and great landowners. This priority was so absolute that Makhno even joined with the Bolsheviks to defeat Denikin’s consolidation of White control of the Black Sea coast in 1918 and his northward push against the Red heartland in 1919. The Bolsheviks did not become the categorical enemy until after the defeat of Wrangel in late 1920. This sequence was implicit in the motto “[b]eat the Whites until they’re Red, beat the Reds until they’re Black.”14

Born into a poor peasant family in Ekaterinoslav province, just north of the Crimea, in 1889, at the age of twenty-eight Makhno started serving a twenty-year sentence for terrorist activities in a Moscow prison, where he picked up the essentials of peasant anarchism. Set free by the first Provisional Government, he returned to his native land, notably to the Gulai Pole region, southeast of Ekaterinoslav, to organize local artisans and press for the expropriation of big landowners and large peasant proprietors. As noted, he first fought Skoropatsky and his Austro-German patrons. By mid-1918 Makhno began to organize peasant bands, and as of the end of the year these helped the Red Army fight first Petliura and then Denikin. During the spring and early summer of 1919, with an apparent standoff between the Reds and Whites, Makhno, who was allergic to discipline and authority, balked the unified military controls which the Bolsheviks meant to impose on him. He also protested their requisitions and their betrayal of their own principles of peasant economy, local self-government, and national self-determination. To back his remonstrance Makhno ordered some of his 20,000 irregulars to harass the Red Army’s military and supply operations.

At this same time, in early May 1919, the chief of the other major peasant insurgency in Ukraine also turned against the Bolsheviks. Nikifor Grigorev was an unprincipled, not to say nihilist guerrilla leader whose host of some 15,000 men was deployed south of the Dnieper in central Ukraine, halfway between Psatikhatki and Uman, north of Makhno’s base of operations. He, too, had at first collaborated with the Reds. But now, at the height of the civil war between the Reds and the Whites, he proposed to throw in his lot with the counterrevolution. Grigorev issued a proclamation fiercely assailing both Bolsheviks and Jews, whom he conflated, as his partisans moved out in all directions, with the result that before long they were drawn dangerously thin. Their retaliation for being defeated by the Red Army included avenging pogroms against the Jews, the fiercest of them in Elisavetgrad.

In the meantime, however, Grigorev had approached Makhno to make common cause and join forces. Makhno demurred, since he would neither collaborate with the Whites nor countenance pogroms, even if some of his associated hetmans and cossack bands were prepared to do so. In turn, the Bolsheviks called on Makhno to publicly decry Grigorev as part of their effort to get him to resume collaborating with the Red Army against Denikin. On May 10, 1919, Leo Kamenev, Lenin’s representative on mission in the Ukraine, wired Makhno that with Grigorev “refusing to carry out … battle orders and … turning his coat, the decisive moment has come: either you march with Russia’s workers and peasants or you will in effect open the front to the enemy.” Insisting that this was no time for hesitation, Kamenev warned that his failure to condemn Grigorev and to answer this summons would “be taken as a declaration of war.”15 In his response, Makhno vowed to continue fighting the Whites, but reiterated that in so doing he would be “fight[ing] for the freedom of the people … [and not] for governmental power or for the baseness of political charlatans” responsible for “institutions of violence, such as your Commissariats and Chekas, which commit arbitrary violence against the working masses.”16

In mid-1919 central and southeastern Ukraine was in turmoil, and Ukrainian national authority failed to get a solid footing, all the more so with Makhno spurning it. The Reds were forced to fight Grigorev and court Makhno at the same time that they were at grips with the Whites. Denikin benefited from this war behind the Bolshevik lines. During the summer his armies advanced to Kharkov and toward Moscow, with a subsidiary drive in the direction of Rostov, at the same time that Kolchak was sending his forces from western Siberia into the Volga region, which would not be halted and driven back until June.

The Makhnovites spared no effort to hold off the counterrevolutionary forces, which were closing in on them. But the Bolsheviks distrusted Makhno, convinced that whoever was not fully with them was against them. When Makhno summoned a congress of his supporters for June 15 to decide future policy, Moscow banned it. Insisting that there was “no room for ‘Greens’ in this war,” Trotsky preferred “an open White-Guard enemy … [to] a low-down ‘Green’ traitor who crouches … in the woods until the Denikins approach, when he sticks his knife in the back of the revolutionary fighters.”¹⁷ Presently Trotsky accused Makhno’s partisans of having seized critical supplies intended for the Red Army. More peremptory than Kamenev a few weeks before, Trotsky thundered that the time had come to put an end to such “anarchist-kulak abuse” and alleged that to “scratch a Makhno follower … [was to] find a Grigorevite.”¹⁸ All remaining ties between Makhno and the Red Army were broken.

Caught between the hammer and the anvil of the two archenemies in Russia’s civil war, Makhno hung in doubt.¹⁹ Pressed by both sides, he and some of his followers decided to retreat northwestward in the direction of Grigorev’s territory, whose partisans were also being forced to give ground. Although Makhno had recently rebuffed Grigorev’s overtures, he now proposed a meeting with a view to either come to an agreement or outwit him. Apparently the idea was to join the two partisan movements in a single host, with Grigorev assuming the military command and Makhno the political direction. But the gulf between them would be difficult to bridge. Grigorev refused to recognize any enemies on the right, which meant that he was prepared to collaborate with Denikin to defeat the Bolsheviks. He also persisted in his visceral and militant anti-Judaism. On both points Makhno was intractable. With his call for a plague on both houses falling on deaf ears, Makhno had to recognize that ultimately he conceived of his struggle in social-revolutionary, not counterrevolutionary terms. In addition, he persisted in his repugnance for anti-Semitism. He had several Jews in his military and political directorate and acted together with several Jewish self-defense units. Especially in the wake of Grigorev’s monstrous anti-Jewish massacre in Elisavetgrad, Makhno made an explicit disavowal of pogromism a prerequisite for cooperation.

These issues were to be aired on July 26 or 27 at a mass meeting in the village of Sentovo, just north of Elisavetgrad. Coming from the neighboring provinces of central Ukraine, some 20,000 partisans and peasants sworn to agrarian resistance assembled to witness a public debate about which course to follow. Grigorev was the first to speak. He reiterated his position about the absolute priority of defeating the Bolsheviks and driving them out of Ukraine. One of Makhno’s lieutenants was the second speaker. He was in the midst of criticizing Grigorev’s position when rhetorical jousting gave way to bloody guerrilla theater. Allegedly Grigorev, enraged by the remarks of his respondent, reached for his revolver. But some of Makhno’s chief acolytes, presumably forewarned, were quicker to draw. Their shots wounded Grigorev, and Makhno himself is said to have rushed forward to fire the coup de grâce.

Without the least delay Makhno’s partisans encircled Sentovo and disarmed Grigorev’s men. Several Grigorevites were put to death in full view of the assembly, and the rest were urged to join their would-be confederates. For all intents and purposes, hereafter Makhno’s movement was the only organized, peasant-based antirevolutionary resistance in Ukraine, now concentrated in Grigorev’s erstwhile base of operations. But notwithstanding his political ascendancy, Makhno was unable to consolidate and expand his mastery on the left bank of the Dnieper. In late August 1919, soon after being surrounded by White troops west of Uman, he and some of his men managed to break free and head for his homeland around Gulai Pole.

In the coming months Makhno won support among peasants who had experienced the momentary return, in the train of the Whites, of the old landed and governing elites. At the same time he took advantage of the fact that most of Denikin’s forces were engaged in the drive on Moscow, which was about to falter. Meeting with little opposition, in October Makhno briefly managed to occupy several cities near Gulai Pole: Berdiansk and Mariupol to the south and southeast, on the Sea of Azov, and Alexandrovsk and Nikopol to the northwest. Late that month his troops for several weeks also took possession of Ekaterinoslav, the administrative seat of the province of some 110,000 inhabitants which included Gulai Pole. Upon seizing control of this manufacturing and transportation center, Makhno issued a proclamation granting “all political parties and organizations complete freedom to spread their ideas” but also warning that none of these would be permitted “to prepare, organize, or impose political power upon the toiling people.” His embryonic government promised to guarantee peasants and workers self-government “from the bottom up,” with safeguards against the encroachment of outside powers.20

Evidently Makhno was a man of many or no seasons. He was both parochial and tolerant, wild and temperate. In the whirlwind that swept through eastern Europe he spurned becoming either a born-again Great Russian or a new-model Ukrainian nationalist. At the same time he denounced the political instrumentalization of anti-Judaism from within the heartland of pogroms. Shortly before his showdown with Grigorev he had admonished his partisans that among them “there was no place for those who seek, under cover of the revolutionary insurrection, to satisfy their instinct for profit, violence, or looting at the expense of the peaceful Jewish population” which had suffered martyrdom through the ages. On this same occasion he reminded them that their “enemies as well as those of the entire people are [not only] the rich bourgeoisie, be they Russian, Ukrainian, or Jewish, … [but also] all those who defend the unjust regime of the bourgeoisie, such as Soviet commissars, members of repressive expeditionary forces, and extraordinary commissions, who go from town to town and village to village, torturing the toiling people who refuse to submit to their arbitrary rule and dictatorship.” And just as these usurpers should be “arrested and, … in case of resistance, … shot on the spot, … [so all perpetrators of] violence against the peaceful toilers of any nationality … should be punished with death.”²¹

Not that in this time of civil war the Makhnovites themselves were altogether harmless. They had briefly, for a week, entered Ekaterinoslav once before, in December 1918. At that time they had burned “archives, records, and libraries,” as well as “shops and bazaars … in the streets adjacent to the railroad station,” with Makhno expressing his “city-hatred” by himself “firing … a three-inch cannon … point blank into the tallest and most beautiful buildings.”22 Both then and later the partisans made a special point of destroying jails and engaging in widespread looting. The scale and intensity of their retributive violence against political enemies remains undetermined.

Makhno’s situation changed radically in the autumn of 1919, when Denikin’s batallions retreating before Trotsky’s legions, put to flight and broke up Makhno’s forces. This military reversal hastened the end of Makhno’s incongruous domination of so many hateful and uncongenial cities, which were in any case about to be seized by the advancing Red Army. By this time, having momentarily thwarted the Whites to the east and south, the Bolsheviks were gearing up to repel Pilsudski’s forces advancing from the west. Moscow called on Makhno to join the battle on the Polish front. He refused, and in mid-January 1920 he and his movement were outlawed. For much of the remainder of the year the Reds and the Makhnovites were locked in a fierce and violent struggle in which neither side showed mercy.

But once again the Bolsheviks and Makhnovites suspended hostilities in order to stand together against their common enemy: from early October through mid-November 1920 they joined forces to fight General Wrangel, whose offensive was the Whites’ desperate last throw of the dice. Wrangel’s troops advanced into Makhno’s home base, capturing Alexandrovsk and Sinelnikovo, respectively southwest and northwest of Ekaterinoslav, which now was endangered as well. Even so, Makhno rebuffed Wrangel’s proposal for “common action against the Soviets by hanging the unfortunate envoy who brought it to him.”²³ Instead, true to himself, he offered to temporarily put his warriors under the field command of the Red Army. In exchange, Moscow agreed to respect Makhno’s full control of his own troops, to amnesty anarchist prisoners, and to grant a considerable degree of political freedom.²⁴

Michael Frunze, the commander of the Red Army’s southern front, promptly ordered Makhno to “seize the Gulai Pole area and pursue the retreating enemy,” a singularly welcome assignment.25 All in all, however, Makhno’s partisan brigades played a considerably lesser role in Wrangel’s than Denikin’s defeat. In any case, on all fronts the drive against the counterrevolutionaries moved swiftly, Wrangel having overextended his forces in a sweeping all-or-nothing offensive. By November 15, following the water-borne evacuation of retreating Whites, the Red Army captured Sevastopol and began to invest the Crimea. Not long before, having regained much (though by no means all) of the territory lost in the west, Moscow had also made peace with Warsaw.

The final defeat of the White counterrevolution opened the terminal phase in the struggle between the Bolsheviks and Makhno’s anarcho-peasant antirevolutionaries, their mutual suspicion and hostility precluding an accommodation. Makhno was not about to bend the knee to centralized Bolshevik rule any more than Lenin and Trotsky were prepared to bear with the survival and consolidation of an anarchist stronghold around Gulai Pole. Incidentally, at the time no government would “long [have] tolerate[d] an independent or autonomous area within its borders,” particularly not Lenin’s “authoritarian state,” which was determined to assert its all-out sovereignty.²⁶

Unburdened of their White and Polish enemies, in late November 1920 the Bolshevik leaders once again outlawed the Makhnovites and ordered the Red Army to bring them to heel at the same time that the Cheka proceeded to arrest and execute several prominent anarchists in Kharkov.²⁷

Characteristically the critical military engagements took place in the Gulai Pole region, which was Makhno’s principal bastion, and also both defined and circumscribed his narrow political, social, and strategic vision. Indeed, “the village of Gulai Pole, which passed from one side to the other several times, [was] to suffer the most.”²⁸ When the Red Army occupied the village, Makhno managed to escape. Although he reclaimed it for several hours in early December, thereafter an ever smaller number of his men carried out hit-and-run attacks when not scrambling to elude Red forces. With time more and more combatants and supporters became weary of an increasingly futile cause. In late August 1921 Makhno and a band of some 250 mounted partisans finally “gave up the struggle as hopeless” and crossed the Dniester river into Rumania.29

Throughout their verbal and military struggle—except during their brief cooperation against Wrangel—both Reds and Greens resorted to terror. Probably the terror was more systematic on the Bolshevik than the rebel side. In their search-and-destroy operations, as well as their punitive expeditions, the Reds arrested and executed proven and suspected peasant insurgents and their fellow travelers, not a few of whom were also taken hostage. Since the partisans usually faded into the countryside as soon as Soviet troops drew near, more often than not the latter “defeated, captured, or shot … not insurgents of Makhno’s army but local peasants … who sympathized with [them].” According to one of Makhno’s lieutenants, the Bolshevik retribution “contained all the symptoms of terror inherent in a ruling caste.” Whenever the Soviets did “not shoot prisoners on the spot, they imprisoned and subjected [them] to all types of torture so as to force them to repudiate the movement, to denounce their comrades, and to join the police.”³⁰ The Red military and security forces, including the Cheka, proceeded in like manner in the insurgent zones of the Volga and western Siberia. A Soviet newspaper reported that in Saratov “repressive measures were … curing the population of its sympathies” for the rebels, with the result that it was “obediently” ferreting out and handing over the “bandits” and their arms caches. According to an eyewitness, beyond the Urals “the Chekists hit the village clergy particularly hard, … executing more than a hundred priests … in the Diocese of Tobolsk alone.”³¹

The Greens, for their part, “replied to the Bolshevik terror with blows no less severe.”³² The objective of many of their raids was to eliminate the entire local leadership of their Red enemies. They “killed all the Communist Party members they could catch, all Cheka and Militia members, and all officials of the Committee of the Poor and of food requisitioning organizations.” Although as a rule Makhno’s partisans set free captured Red Army soldiers, they shot their officers, “unless the rank and file interceded strongly on their behalf.”³³ The degree of needless savagery attending this violence is still uncertain. Apparently excesses were confined to operations in towns and cities—in an overnight raid on Berdiansk the partisans allegedly killed 83 Communists.³⁴ Presumably, the opposition in the countryside “rarely justified … nastier” methods. While some of the Makhnovite killings “were as brutal as those of their enemies, … it cannot be said that they … [were carried out] with the same methodical cruelty.”35

The Makhnovite antirevolution in the Russian Revolution invites comparison with the Vendean antirevolution in the French Revolution. One of the more striking differences is the Ukrainian Greens’ embrace of anarcho-agrarianism and equalized land ownership; it was this social radicalism which largely accounts for their becoming a beacon of hope for so many peasants and workers who were disenchanted with the Bolsheviks for having betrayed their original promise. But there are some other equally noteworthy dissimilarities: church, religion, and priest seem not to have played a major role among the Greens; there were practically no old-regime military or civilian notables in the leadership; and the rebels neither expected nor solicited help from émigrés or foreign powers. Even so, the family resemblances are no less telling than these dissimilarities. Both the Vendée and Gulai Pole were geographically remote, and the two insurgencies were and remained distinctly regional, exploiting the breakdown of sovereignty, the vacuum of power, and the collapse of the judiciary. The primitive rebels of 1792–94 in France and of 1918–21 in Russia were less newly sworn anti-Jacobins and anti-Bolsheviks than quintessential champions of a perennial provincial world against the forever invasive distant state and nearby city, whose agents became intolerably intrusive once they exceeded the traditional norms governing the levy of taxes, collection of grain, and conscription of peasants. Construing this encroachment as an affront to their time-honored belief system and self-rule, the Vendeans and Makhnovites closed ranks around local customs, institutions, and memories. As for their terror, while it was less systematic than that of their Jacobin and Bolshevik foes, it was no less ferocious. Nor was it less immanent to their cause for being spontaneous and “primitive.” Neither side was innocent and, as in all civil wars, terror and counter-terror were, in the main, fatally interactive and avenging. Still, and to repeat, all things considered, the Vendean uprising eventually assumed a distinct counterrevolutionary thrust; the Makhnovite insurgency remained an essentially local if expansive jacquerie of olden times.

Compared to Grigorev and to Alexander Antonov, the peasant leader in Tambov, Makhno was tactically much more astute and flexible and hence relatively resilient. He practiced an uneven mixture of regular warfare and wild “banditry,” and his versatility gave him a distinct advantage, even if it is not clear whether it was a matter of careful design or hectic improvisation. Though standing against the modern world, Makhno’s men fought with not only pitchforks and cudgels but rifles and machine guns. While it had no truck with ex-tsarist officers, the Makhno resistance attracted not a few deserters from the Red Army, even if the hoped-for massive crossover of seasoned soldiers never materialized. Although all calculations of the fluctuating number of partisans are approximate, according to one reasonable estimate, at its “peak in the autumn of 1919” Makhno’s host of chiefly poor peasants counted some 40,000 fighters, of whom 15,000 were foot soldiers, 10,000 mounted infantrymen, 5,000 auxiliaries, and 10,000 “on the sick list, mostly with typhus.”36

But ultimately, precisely because he exulted in the not inconsiderable support of the ambient peasantry, Makhno was blind to his weakness: lacking an overall strategic military and political vision, he remained, above all, fatally isolated. To be sure, he advocated local self-rule and small individual landholding. Makhno never did, however, “clearly say where he stood in relation to Bolshevik land policy as a whole” and how he proposed to fit his anarchist peasant republic of participatory democracy into either a nascent post-tsarist Russia or an at best embryonically independent Ukraine.³⁷

The second major jacquerie was centered in and around Tambov, in the Penza guberniya, or province, some 250 miles southeast of Moscow. Eventually Antonov emerged as its most distinctive and effective military leader. Although of petit-bourgeois background, like Makhno he was very much a man of the back country. The villages, small towns, and open fields around the administrative city of Tambov were to him what those around Ekaterinoslav were to Makhno. Compared to the latter’s operational lands, Antonov’s were more fertile and wooded, as well as much more densely populated, making for an ample supply of labor. While the radical land reform of 1917–18 fired the expectations of the poor peasants at the expense of the very rich, who were driven out, the continuing exactions of war and civil war precluded early economic gains.38

Antonov had joined the Socialist Revolutionaries in his youth. A few years after 1905 he was sentenced to twelve years in Siberia, but apparently for robbery, not political opposition. Amnestied in the first dawn of 1917, he returned to his native province, where he drifted into a local militia in the Kirsanov district. The Provisional Government’s evasion of agrarian reform prompted Antonov to shift to the Left Socialist Revolutionaries in the manner in which Makhno embraced active peasant anarchism. Following the Left SRs’ stillborn risings in the summer of 1918, Antonov fell out with the Bolsheviks. Seeking cover in the forests, he helped form a small peasant band which in the summer of 1919 killed several score Bolshevik activists. By this time the civil war between Reds and Whites had given rise to the forced collection of grain and the military draft, stimulating unrest in the countryside. Antonov proceeded to recruit among draft resisters, army deserters, and irate peasants.³⁹

Paradoxically, despite the strength of the Socialist Revolutionaries in the Tambov region, Antonov’s insurgency had even less of a clear-cut political agenda than Makhno’s. Antonov not only had cast in his lot with the Socialist Revolutionaries before 1905 but had switched to their left-wing faction in 1917. One and all were sworn to a peasantism embedded in an “instinctive” distrust, if not hatred, of the city as well as of the city-oriented political class, including the Bolsheviks. Although the Socialist Revolutionaries, not the Bolsheviks, had struck roots in Tambov province, and although the Union of the Working Peasantry, the political agency of the insurrection, issued a program of Socialist Revolutionary coloration, Antonov never really embraced or espoused it. However, even if for prudential reasons—the Bolsheviks had taken several Socialist Revolutionaries hostage—the “national,” regional, and local leaders of the party avoided direct involvement with the uprising, they could hardly hide their sympathy for it. Besides, its members, on their own account, were active as advisors, partisans, and covert collaborators. While the Socialist Revolutionaries certainly did not mastermind the Tambov insurgency as the Bolsheviks charged, there is no denying their implication in it. The contrary would have been surprising, for their peasant-focused revolutionary consciousness sensitized them to the rebels’ plight and plaint, especially in a time of acute misery.40

There were, of course, significant differences between the Makhno and Antonov risings. Unlike Antonov, Makhno forged his movement and its intentions before he broke with the Soviet regime, and thereafter intermittently collaborated with it. In addition, geographically he ranged farther from his original operating base, so that compared to Antonov he was marginally less parochial and inconstant, perhaps because of his immanent social concerns. But at bottom the peasant revolts in southeastern Ukraine and in Tambov province, as well as those in the lower Volga and western Siberia, were cut of the same cloth. Besides practicing identical guerrilla tactics, they all had essentially similar if not identical causes, dynamics, social carriers, sympathizers, and outcomes.

But the Tambov uprising did not really explode until late summer or early fall 1920, well after the defeat of Denikin, in which Antonov had had no part. Because of a poor harvest the peasants were doubly disinclined to part with their grain; at the same time, in face of the shortfall, the Bolsheviks set altogether unrealistic delivery targets. Presently the arrival of the heavily armed and intermittently venal requisitioning detachments triggered spontaneous peasant counteractions which were surprisingly successful on account of the obvious dearth of Bolshevik cadres and security forces in the region. Since the rising coincided with Pilsudski’s counterattack against Tukhachevsky, Wrangel’s lunge out of the Crimea, and Makhno’s intractability, Moscow had few divisions to spare. Antonov crisscrossed the Tambov area to encourage villagers to either resist or attack Bolshevik collection brigades, with the result that before long the peasants looked to him “as the invincible avenger of their violated interests.”⁴¹

At the outset the Bolsheviks were overwhelmed both politically and militarily, making them all the more determined and fierce. Counting the local Cheka units, which were bolstered by December, “the Soviet forces in Tambov province numbered 3500 men.”⁴² These had to face a fast-spreading wildfire of peasant furies.

Tambov’s antirevolutionary rebels never congealed into an organized guerrilla army. Many if not most of their actions were impulsive. Although the city of Tambov, unlike Ekaterinoslav, was never invested or captured, at one point the peasants did advance upon it. Apparently this particular host of piedsnus, armed with farm tools and accompanied by women and children, was in the nature of a “procession both threatening and defenseless, snowballing … as more peasants joined upon hearing church bells proclaiming the marchers’ approach.” Although some Red soldiers, touched by the “ancient and honorable” aspects of this remonstrance, deserted to join the Greens, Bolshevik military and security forces “dispersed … the procession ten kilometers from Tambov,” killing dozens of marchers “by machine gun fire.”43

Eventually, starting in late fall and early winter 1920–21, the forces on both sides assumed sizable proportions. At the height of the Tambov uprising the partisan bands of the irregular Green Army consisted of between 20,000 and 40,000 full-time peasant fighters with considerable support at the grass roots.⁴⁴ In turn, when Tukhachevsky assumed command of the Tambov region in the spring of 1921—after having directed the rollback of the Poles, the defeat of Wrangel, and the assault on the Kronstadt rebels—he disposed of “more than 50,000 regular troops, three armored trains, three armored units, several mobile machine-gun units, about seventy field guns, hundreds of machine guns, and an aircraft unit.”⁴⁵

Even if their numbers were impressive, the partisans were at a distinct disadvantage. Compared to the Red Army, Antonov’s brigades, even more than Makhno’s, were poorly trained, officered, and armed. To boot, each band mounted its own hit-and-run raids against Bolshevik grain requisitioning squads or punitive detachments. While there was a tactical advantage to such pinprick surprise strikes, the partisans paid a heavy price for the want of military coordination and the absence of a clear political program, a dual deficit rooted in ageless localism. Needless to say, the Greens of Tambov never even thought of linking up with rebels in adjoining provinces, of whom they were totally unaware. This psychologically and culturally conditioned parochialism also explains their having kept away from the alien and threatening cities, which the Bolsheviks managed to keep under their control.⁴⁶

This peasant war was fought with the utmost ruthlessness by Reds and Greens alike. Both gave measure for measure, and were as likely to be avengers as re-avengers. There may have been a qualitative difference in the nonmilitary violence wrought by the opposing camps: “an excess of torture on the side of the Greens, an excess of killing on the side of the Reds.” The greater recourse to raw brutality by the rebels may have been due not only to their having been the “weaker party in numbers or in weapons” but also to their having come of age in traditional societies with peculiar cultures and collective memories of “primitive” violence. This is not to suggest that the Reds’ violence was altogether “modern,” since there were several instances of Bolsheviks savagely flogging, mutilating, and burying peasants.47

The Red repression began in December 1920, following Wrangel’s collapse. Disquieted by the Tambov uprising, Lenin charged Dzerzhinsky with heading up a special commission to speed and intensify the drive to crush it. Almost simultaneously Bukharin was asked to propose noncoercive measures. On February 2, 1921 he won the support of the Politburo for “a reduction in the confiscation of produce in order to relieve the peasants.”⁴⁸

Evidently Moscow resolved to sharpen the use of the mailed fist while exploring ways to appease the restless peasants throughout the realm. Indeed, this was the time that Lenin conceded that with Russia drained and the industrial proletariat a tiny minority, should a teeming and defiant peasantry ever provide the mainstay of a counterrevolutionary front, it would be far more “dangerous than Denikin, Iudenich, and Kolchak put together.”⁴⁹

Presently Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, who had helped seize the Winter Palace and headed Petrograd’s Military Revolutionary Committee, was sent to Tambov to take command of the security and Cheka forces which were being battered by Antonov’s partisans. He promptly decided to renew the local political cadres and reinforce the military effectives in preparation for a full-scale and uncompromising pacification campaign.⁵⁰ In March and April 1921 his staff drew up lists of rebels, devised a hostage system, and sought to set poor peasants against kulaks.⁵¹ But these steps turned out to be unequal to the task. As early as December 20, 1920, the commander of the Internal Security forces had forewarned Dzerzhinsky that in order to “liquidate Antonov’s bands it [would be] necessary to flood the area of rebellion with troops so as to saturate it with a total occupation.”⁵²

Following the defeat of the Whites, the Bolsheviks diverted additional army and security forces to the Tambov region. By March 1921 Moscow’s “military strength … stood at 32,500 infantry and 8000 cavalry, besides artillery and machine guns.”53 As a further sign of its concern and resolve, on April 27 the Politburo appointed Tukhachevsky to take command of military operations. On July 16, 1921, after two months on the ground, Tukhachevsky informed Lenin that in Tambov the “causes of the uprising were the same as throughout the entire RSFSR, i.e., dissatisfaction with the clumsy and exceptionally harsh enforcement of the policy of food requisitioning.” Besides the danger of the revolt spreading to neighboring provinces, “in five districts of Tambov province the Soviet regime no longer exists.” Tukhachevsky wanted his superiors to know that with “a total of up to 21,000 bandits … the action to be undertaken had to be considered not as some sort of more or less protracted operation but as an entire campaign, or even a war.”⁵⁴ In this same dispatch he also insisted, however, that in addition to “extracting bandit elements implanted in revolutionary committees … [and] applying terrorist methods against bandit sympathizers,” the local Soviet authorities should “split up the peasantry by … arming it against the bandits while at the same time providing it with a material interest in the shape of property confiscated from them.”⁵⁵

Clearly Tukhachevsky and Antonov-Ovseenko were working hand-in-glove. On June 1, 1921, they issued Order No. 130 directing that in reprisal for “Green holdouts,” their families be taken hostage and held “in concentration camps, [soon to be] followed by exile and confiscation of property.” This decree also prescribed the death penalty for anyone caught concealing weapons and “for the senior breadwinner of any household in which a weapon is found.” While Red military and security forces successfully pacified village after village, they soon realized that more and more rebels managed to vanish into the countryside, thereby raising the specter of their regrouping to resurface before long.⁵⁶

This specter prompted Tukhachevsky and Antonov-Ovseenko, in accord with Moscow, to raise the pressure still further. On June 11 they issued Order No. 171 mandating the establishment of a reign of terror based on collective guilt and punishment. The aim was to deracinate every last rebel. In a preamble, the order praised Soviet troops for having “defeated and dispersed Antonov’s bands” and Soviet power for having “reestablished order in the countryside … [and] the peaceful work of the peasants.” But the remainder of the text spelled out, in six articles, the measures necessary to “tear out all the roots of SR-permeated banditry.” In the spirit of Order No. 130, it established the following schedule of retributions: any citizen refusing to give his name was “to be shot on the spot without trial”; in any village in which weapons were hidden “hostages are to be taken and shot unless such weapons are surrendered”; in any household in which “weapons are found the oldest member of the family present is to be shot on the spot without trial”; any family giving shelter to a bandit was to be “deported from the province, its property confiscated, and its breadwinner shot on the spot without trial”; any family hiding the family members or the property of bandits was subject to having its “oldest breadwinner shot without trial”; and in case a bandit family managed to flee, “its property [was] to be distributed among peasants loyal to Soviet authority and its abandoned house to be burned.” To maximize the effectiveness of the proposed reign of fear, this ukase was to “be read out at village assemblies and … carried out firmly and mercilessly.”57

The next day, June 12, Tukhachevsky issued another order, this one confidential, which confirmed that by now the concern was no longer with liberating insurgent villages and punishing proven or suspected Antonovites but with hunting down rebels who had made good their escape. Very much like General Turreau after the defeat of the Vendée militaire, Tukhachevsky meant to turn Tambov province into a département-vengé with a view to deter the resumption of rebellions near and far. He insisted that since “remnants of defeated bands and individual bandits” were launching attacks on “peaceful inhabitants” from their forest hideouts, these needed to be “cleared with poison gas.” As theater commander he ordered the “inspector of artillery … [to] immediately release … to [designated] localities the required number of poison gas balloons as well as specialists … [capable] of making careful calculations … to make sure that the cloud of asphyxiating gas spreads throughout the forest and exterminates everything hiding there.”⁵⁸

In addition, there were many punitive search-and-destroy expeditions against settled districts and villages. In the small rural district of Estalskai “76 persons [were] executed,” among them captured guerrillas and hostages, and 33 houses were razed. Southeast of Tambov, in Kamenka district, “all males were rounded up” with a view to frightening the womenfolk and hostages into “revealing the location of stores and hideouts.” In Krivopoliane it took the slaying of 13 hostages for the villagers to “hand over several ‘bandits’ ” and to divulge the hideaway of guerrillas and their caches of arms.59

Evidently, probably following orders Nos. 130 and 171, soldiers as well as security and Cheka operatives not only killed captured and presumed rebels and sympathizers but also set fire to houses and villages, and, above all, took hostages among relatives and friends. Many of the hostages were randomly chosen. Relatively few of them were executed or released, most of them being deported. In fact, apparently entire families were forcibly relocated, and so were several villages.⁶⁰

One of the most ferocious punishments—though perhaps exceptionally so—was visited on Belomestnaia Dvoinia, a small town of fewer than 2,000 inhabitants some twenty miles west of the city of Tambov: “154 ‘bandit hostages’… were shot, 227 ‘bandit families’ were seized, 17 dwellings were burned, 24 torn down, and 22 given over to poor peasants.” In this same locality a band of guerrillas had previously “burned the quarters of the soviet and killed up to 50 people, including members of the local soviet.” Belomestnaia Dvoinia seems to have been caught up in a typical cycle of revenge and re-revenge. But even if such was the case, “the ratio of vengeance was better than three to one and [was] inflicted, vicariously, on the sedentary population instead of the mobile force that had … [carried out] the raid.”⁶¹

Belomestnaia Dvoinia was not the only village in which the Green Terror came first, calling forth a Red counter-terror that was much worse than the original rage. In March 1920 in the north and northwest of the Volga region, in addition to cutting communications and terrorizing local Bolshevik authorities, peasant rebels “murdered over 600 party and soviet officials,” which led the Bolsheviks to send in “punitive detachments … [to] suppress the rebellion mercilessly.”⁶² Both sides practiced terror and counter-terror. It was this reciprocation that intensified the horrors of the second phase of the civil war in the Russian Revolution. Whereas the terror of the Reds became increasingly methodical and, with victory, ever more gratuitous, the terror of the Greens became increasingly frenzied and bestial, notably once they began to lose heart.⁶³

Perhaps by virtue of being “primitive rebels,” the Greens practiced a violence and terror that usually if not invariably reproduced those of times of old. To be sure, they perpetrated modern-style mass executions, as in the case of a commune in Tambov province near Rasskazovo, where they allegedly “killed everyone, even the young and the aged.” But characteristically such cold violence did not preclude “crude and refined tortures.” Gorky claimed that there were instances of Communists being “nailed to trees with railroad spikes” and their “half-crucified” bodies being left to “flop about and dangle in agony.” According to a rebel eyewitness, some “captured workers were buried alive up to their necks” after having been charged with both “religious apostasy” and the plunder of peasants. In Tambov there were cases of victims being buried “straight up or in a sitting position with only the head above ground.” These torments tended to be publicly staged to enable the in-group to express its utter contempt and loathing for the cursed outsiders. In Siberia captured Red soldiers were buried “head downward,” with their legs left “as far as the knees above the ground.”64

There were other forms of punishment as well. Here and there prisoners and suspects were flogged, maimed, eviscerated, and quartered. When Tishchenko, one of the chiefs of Soviet military operations in Tambov province, was taken prisoner, his captors “carved a red star on [his] back … [before] hacking off first his right and then his left arm, and—after further torture—finally beheading him.”⁶⁵ In the lands of the Volga, it was not altogether uncommon for rebel bands, upon entering a village, “to hunt out and eliminate the Soviet and Bolshevik leaders.” Likewise, in the “Nikolaevsk district over 300 party members were killed … before October 1921 … [and in] the Pokrovsk region more than 100 were killed before April.” Judging by the tortures inflicted on some of these officials, this retribution was not without its “archaic” sides: “eyes and tongues were cut out; bodies were dismembered; crosses were branded on foreheads and torsos; heads were cut off; men were burned alive or drowned in ice-packed rivers and ponds.” These inflictions, carried out in public, must have been condoned if not acclaimed by villagers whose “hatred and desire for vengeance” were fired by “the terrible conditions at the end of the civil war, when the famine crisis reduced some people to murderous cannibalism.”⁶⁶ In some places along the Volga “the anger of the crowd … spilled over into personal acts of vengeance and gory murders.” In one village “nine members of a food-requisitioning brigade were drowned under the ice of the Volga River” while in another “the chairman of the district party was beheaded …, his body thrown … into the river and his head put on top of a stake.”67 These saturnalias of cruelty not infrequently helped set the tone for the destruction of party offices, railway equipment, and telegraph lines, as well as with the burning of tax records.⁶⁸

There is no way to make an exact estimate of the human and material cost on both sides of the struggle between revolution and antirevolution in Tambov province. It is equally difficult to get a precise measure of the number of victims and hostages of the “infernal columns” sent to pacify the province. Apparently, “as at July 20, 1921, 5,000 hostages were held in concentration camps, waiting transportation to exile.”⁶⁹ According to the head of Moscow’s Committee of the Red Cross, by September “a large number of peasants, [who were] hostages from Tambov province,” were confined in the capital’s “detention centers.” There were “56 people in the Novo-Peskov camp, 13 in Semonov, and 295 in Kozhukhov, including 29 men over sixty, 158 young people under seventeen, and 42 under ten, and 5 not yet one year old.” All these hostages “arrived in Moscow in pitiful condition, ragged, half-naked, and so hungry that small children root around rubbish dumps to find scraps to eat.”⁷⁰

Before coming to some conclusions about the peasant wars, there is need for a brief recounting of the rebellion of sailors and soldiers at Kronstadt in March 1921. This rising took place four months after the defeat of Wrangel, and hence following the end of the civil war with the Whites, but before the repression of the Tambov insurgency, which closed the peasant wars. Especially because the vital naval base was next door to Petrograd, prima facie the resistance in Kronstadt bade fair to pave the way for an uprising against the Bolshevik regime, in a city that was both the cradle of the Revolution and the lofty peak of urban Russia. In actual fact it was closely tied into the agrarian unrest. Certainly it had little if anything in common with the revolt of the southern cities during the French Revolution: whereas the federalist uprisings of 1793 were initiated and led by local elites, the Kronstadt rebellion swelled up from below and remained self-directed. The bulk of the insurgent sailors and soldiers of the local naval and army garrisons were of peasant origin. They meant to overturn the coercive economic and political practices of the Bolshevik regime, thereby reclaiming the popular and liberating thrust of the October Revolution, including the right to owner-operated landed and artisanal property. They rebelled to regenerate the Soviets of Workers and Peasants, not to revive the Constituent Assembly, as the necessary agency and bulwark for freedom of speech, press, assembly, and association.71

Kronstadt utterly confounded the Bolshevik leaders. They faced, to be sure, a disconcerting political and ideological challenge. No less disquieting, although there were fewer rebels on the island fortress than in Tambov, they were trained and well-armed fighting men. In addition, their bastion was in a strategic location open to military intervention by foreign powers rather than in the far interior closed to the outside world.⁷² Admittedly, even with the counterrevolution crushed, Lenin and his colleagues loudly decried the Kronstadt revolt as yet another White maneuver, supported from abroad.⁷³ But among themselves as well as at the Tenth Party Congress, whose meeting in Moscow coincided with the naval rising, they conceded that the reality was considerably more complex. It was a measure of the jolt to the revolutionary sensibility and the “gravity with which Kronstadt was viewed” that on March 10, 1921, a week after the outbreak, over a quarter of this congress, or 300 delegates, “volunteered” for service on the Kronstadt front.⁷⁴

If the Kronstadt revolt became so intensely disquieting it was, in large part, because it coincided with labor disturbances in neighboring Petrograd. In late January the bread ration was temporarily reduced by one-third in a city that for several years had suffered grim shortages and hardships. Presently this cutback triggered demonstrations and strikes among industrial workers, who had expected the end of the civil war to bring relief and usher in the promised future. Partly under the influence of local Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, these would-be rebels combined their economic demands with calls for free trade and speech, as well as free and secret elections of soviets and the release of political prisoners. Initially perplexed by this defiance, the municipal authorities resorted to both the stick and the carrot. To begin with, they declared martial law, closed select factories, and arrested hundreds of militant workers as well as leading Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. They also brought in reliable policemen and soldiers, including Chekists, to bolster the local forces of law and order. At the same time, probably after consultation with Moscow, where the Party Congress was about to phase out War Communism, the local Bolshevik leaders made available extra food supplies. The end of forced food requisitions was also adumbrated, promising to pacify the enraged ex-peasants in Petrograd’s workforce and their restive cousins in the countryside.75

Unexpectedly, the labor unrest in Petrograd was defused by early March. By then, however, it had emboldened the rebels in Kronstadt, who had an inflated view of the neighboring workers’ militancy and rage. At any rate, the insurgents were now completely on their own and without the prospect of help from beyond the island. Even so they persisted, in league with the crews of the warships at anchor in the harbor. They demanded essentially the same rights and freedoms as their counterparts in Petrograd, except that they proposed to limit these rights to workers and peasants. They also pressed for self-governing soviets, trade unions, and peasant councils, though they spurned the idea of a constituent assembly. Even if the project of the rebels was vague, their negations were explicit. They cried out that they were rising against the “Communist usurpers” who instead of emancipating workers were putting them in “fear of … the torture chambers of the Cheka, whose horrors—including the bayonets, bullets, and gruff commands of the Chekists—far exceed those of the tsarist regime.” Indeed, they charged that even the White Guards had not “surpassed the mass executions and bloodletting” wrought by the Communists while quelling “the protests which peasants express in spontaneous uprisings and which workers, driven by [terrible] living conditions, express through strikes.”⁷⁶

Arriving in Petrograd on March 5, following the city’s appeasement, Trotsky issued a call for the Kronstadt rebels to “surrender unconditionally,” which they spurned.⁷⁷ That same day Tukhachevsky took command of all forces in the Petrograd military district. He proceeded to reinforce them with politically reliable Red Army units, backed by detachments of Chekists, military cadets, and young Communists. Tukhachevsky launched an abortive attack on March 8, before this buildup was completed. He felt pressed by time: the ice in the Bay of Finland was about to melt, giving the 15,000 rebels, notably their naval units, a major advantage. Having regrouped his effectives and made several dry runs on the ice, and following steady artillery barrages, Tukhachevsky attacked in the early hours of March 17. Some 35,000 men moved on Kronstadt from the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland, 15,000 of them hugging the northern coastline. By then the 300 volunteer party delegates were on the ground urging on the Red forces, their efforts helped by word that on March 15 the Moscow congress had “voted to replace forced requisitions with a tax in kind.”78

The battle was bound to be unequal. As usual the defense had a significant tactical edge, in this case sharpened by inclement weather. But in every other respect the rebels were at a disadvantage, notwithstanding their high esprit and courage. Since neither the workers of Petrograd nor the foreign powers rushed to their side, they were completely on their own. With the island cut off from the outside world, short of a quick victory, there was no feeding a population of 50,000 and no replenishing military stores.⁷⁹

Their uniforms covered by white cloaks, the Red troops advanced from several directions and in successive waves across the perilously thin ice covering the waters of the easternmost bay of the Gulf of Finland. They suffered very heavy losses. Many drowned as the ice broke either under their weight or from exploding shells, and many more were killed or injured by rebel artillery and machine-gun fire. But eventually and inevitably the key forts of Kronstadt fell in the early afternoon of March 18. Driven by deep but irreconcilable convictions, both sides fought fiercely in what turned into a battle whose cruelty and loss of life were unequalled in Russia’s civil war.⁸⁰

A well-informed estimate puts rebel losses at about 600 killed, over 1,000 wounded, and some 2,500 prisoners. These losses would probably have been even heavier if 8,000 rebels, including key members of the provisional revolutionary committee, had not managed to escape to Finland, thereby also reducing the reason for Bolshevik vengeance in the aftermath of a hard-won victory. Indeed, the Red forces paid by far the steeper price: their casualties ran to about 10,000 killed, wounded, and missing. Fifteen of the 300 volunteers from the Tenth Party Congress were among the dead.81

It is not clear how many of the rebel casualties can be laid to Bolshevik vengefulness after the revolt was broken. To set a fear-inspiring example, on March 30 thirteen of the prisoners captured during the fighting were summarily tried and executed. In social background, “five [of them] were ex-naval officers of noble birth, one a former priest, and seven of peasant origin.” While “several hundred … of the remaining prisoners” most likely were shot outright, the Cheka dispatched the others to prisons in Petrograd as well as to concentration and labor camps, their subsequent fate unknown.⁸²

The crushing of the Kronstadt revolt and the ensuing punitive pacification sparked another spurt of political repression. In the two capitals as well as in major Ukrainian cities, anarchists who “had been released after their arrest” a few months before “were taken into custody again.”⁸³ As previously noted, the Mensheviks were implicated in Petrograd’s industrial unrest, even if they were blameless in the Kronstadt rising. At any rate, and hardly surprisingly, on February 25–26 the Cheka proceeded to detain leading Mensheviks in Moscow, Petrograd, and several provincial cities. There were also “mass arrests … in seven Ukrainian provinces.” In mid-April, after the Kronstadt revolt, but before Tukhachevsky was sent to put down the Tambov rising, Lenin opposed a recommendation to release certain Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and anarchists, insisting that their “place [continues to be] in prison.”⁸⁴

The non-Bolshevik left, including the anarchists, heralded the Kronstadt uprising for echoing the insurrection of the Paris Commune. Ironically, Kronstadt fell the very day of the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the mythologized if problematic insurrection of 1871. Whereas in early 1918 Lenin and his associates had rejoiced when their rule had survived the first hundred days, or the life span of the Commune, they now sought to appropriate its commemoration to support their enforcement terror. The Bolsheviks knew their military victory to be morally flawed, and were troubled that enemy brothers would vilify them as the Versaillais of their day. The Bolsheviks who fell in the assault, including the fifteen party delegates, “were buried with military honors in a mass funeral” in Petrograd. In Kronstadt, meanwhile, “the battleships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol were rechristened the Marat and the Paris Commune, while Anchor Square became the Square of the Revolution.”85

No doubt the terror attending the military operations of the peasant rebels was more spontaneous and less systematic than that practiced by their enemies. Even if Makhno and Antonov had left a significant paper trail, there is little reason to believe that it would have led to a warrant analogous to Order No. 171. The bulk of rebel terror was wild, and much of it was raw and cruel. The Greens were, as noted, primitive rebels whose thoughts and actions were driven by local mentalities and loyalties. They had little if any coherent ideology, political organization, and military strategy. For all that they did have a set of goals, even if by and large they aimed to reclaim and regenerate an idealized pastoral order rather than propose and build a truly new one. Likewise, the fact that the peasant rebels kept being forced to take flight and were eventually defeated does not mean that they were intrinsically defensive and harmless, averse to violence and terror except when driven to retaliate for prior injury.

The rural rebellions faltered and failed despite their solid roots in the poor and middle peasantry as well as wide backing by the muzhiks of the surrounding countryside. It is difficult to estimate the level of support among workers and artisans of nearby towns and cities. In any case, one of the chief weaknesses of the rural antirevolution was the inability of its leaders to forge links either between the different peasant rebellions or with urban revolts. The mentality of Makhno and Antonov was as insular as that of the rank and file. No doubt the Socialist Revolutionaries could have done more to de-parochialize and politicize the jacqueries had they not been broken by the failure of their would-be uprising of July 1918.

Ultimately the course of this mutually brutalizing civil strife was defined by the intersection of the intrinsic deficits of the peasant rebellions and the contingent frailties of the Bolsheviks. Despite their material handicaps, partly compensated by their moral strength and corporate solidarity, the Greens made good only wherever and as long as they could benefit from the power vacuum growing out of the breakdown of political and legal sovereignty. Even assuming more than a modicum of coordination between and among Makhno, Antonov, and other peasant leaders, it is most unlikely that ill-organized, ill-equipped, and ill-articulated guerrilla bands could have defied the Red Army for long, especially with the Bolshevik regime putting in place a new-model centralizing authority in the form of a party-state.

There was, to be sure, another side to the complex relationship of Bolshevik and peasant. At the start of the second phase of the civil war, the Bolsheviks had envisaged combining vigorous repression with economic concessions to the peasants. Even though the moment was inauspicious for this new departure, in the end the Bolsheviks were obliged to blend firmness with appeasement. By and large the height of the peasant wars coincided with the economic collapse and great famine of 1921–22.86 It is not clear whether, on balance, acute material hardship exacerbated or dampened peasant resistance. It is more than likely that the infernal logic of rebellion and repression aggravated the economic emergency and the risk of starvation. At any rate, whatever the real or perceived causalities, the peasant fury and the portentous famine conspired to precipitate Moscow’s relaxation of the iron hand of War Communism for the less visible, not to say invisible hand of the New Economic Policy. In fact, NEP quickly sapped the rural upheaval and bade fair to increase food production. There is reason to believe that the chief legacy of the peasant rebellions was their contribution to speeding up Lenin’s shift from War Communism to NEP.

But the leverage of the peasants was short-lived. To be sure, important sectors of the composite peasantry continued to reap the benefits of the land settlement of 1917–18. Overall, however, the sons and daughters of the soil were cheated out of their political and communal rights by the abolition of the system of self-governing soviets. At the same time the barbarous and antimodern side of the rebellion confirmed the Bolshevik leaders in their condescending view, both in doctrine and practice, of peasant, village, and countryside.

It is impossible to estimate, let alone closely calculate, the human costs of the second phase of Russia’s civil war. Not only is the death toll on both sides difficult to establish, but so is its breakdown into battle casualties, victims of terror, and deaths due to civil war-related disease and famine. Needless to say, whatever the blood tax, it came on top of millions of battlefield casualties of the Very Great War as well as of military and civilian casualties during the first phase of the civil war. In the aggregate, between 1914 and 1922 Russia’s loss of life is likely to have run to well over ten million. This figure includes the millions of victims of disease and of the famine of 1921–22.87 Alone among the major belligerents of the First World War, Russia counts more civilian than military deaths. The killing of captured enemy combatants and of hostages by the opposing sides in the peasant wars made but a relatively modest contribution to this monstrous pyramid of Russian dead. This judgment is suggested by a considered estimate that in Tambov, in addition to about 5,000 Greens having been killed in action, “not less than 2,000 prisoners and hostages were executed.”⁸⁸ Needless to say, the horrors of civil war cannot be reckoned exclusively by the number of killed and maimed. Although this quantitative aspect cannot be ignored, it is inseparable from the qualitative damage caused by the terror practiced by both sides.

Of course, the material cost was huge as well, though again it is not easy to evaluate how much of it to attribute to the First World War and the first phase of the civil war, and how much to the peasant wars. By 1922 livestock stood at about two-thirds of the prewar level. There was, likewise, a drastic decrease in the area sown: in Tambov it fell to about 45 percent of the prewar level. As for the grain crop, including potatoes, it went down by nearly 60 percent between 1909–13 and 1921. Nationwide industrial production was reduced to about 30 percent of the prewar figure: in Tambov it was down to about 20 percent in 1921.⁸⁹

One need not pronounce on the ultimate causes of the civil war and the particularities of its attendant terror on the opposing sides in order to reflect on its legacy to the post-civil war political regime and culture.⁹⁰ Any such discursive considerations cannot help being colored by the outcome of the civil war, which left the Bolsheviks the undisputed victors and masters. Indeed, the fact of having prevailed against enormous odds fostered a certain hubris among Bolshevik leaders and doubtless legitimated their peculiar pretense and praxis, also in eyes other than their own. Although they had been, to a degree, mentally and theoretically prepared for the eventuality and necessity of civil war, they could hardly have anticipated its scale, duration, and fury.

The civil war furthered and vindicated revolutionary militancy and voluntarism as well as administrative license and centralization. It invited and justified recourse to violence and terror, summary justice, and iron governance. This propensity for rigid, distended, and coercive authoritarian rule was all the stronger by virtue of the new regime’s narrow social base and pool of professionals and experts, compounded by the weight of tsarist Russia’s autocratic, patrimonial, and Gothic traditions. The militarized Bolshevik party replaced the skeletal and fragmented state, its raw cadres compensating for the deficit of reliable and skilled proletarian and peasant activists and agents.

Actually, the civil war weakened the new social and cultural forces in the symbiosis of Russia’s immutable past and late-coming but malleable present, bending the “simultaneity of the unsimultaneous” even more in favor of the gravity of former times. Ever so many members of the modernized and modernizing professional, bureaucratic, and business elites went into foreign exile or to the margin, while the vitality of the industrial labor force of the big cities was undermined above all by the massive reflux of workers to the countryside: the number of workers in large and medium-sized industries was cut by more than half by 1920, and so was the celebrated proletariat of Petrograd. Notwithstanding the removal of the old governing and ruling classes, seared by their defeat in the civil war, Russia was still, or perhaps more than only yesterday, a society of illiterate peasants bolstered by the land redemption and bound by immemorial institutions, values, and traditions from which the Bolsheviks were estranged. This alienation was all the more serious since the “lame and impotent conclusion” of the revolution in central Europe meant that the Bolsheviks were forced to modernize and reform backward Russia with its windows all but closed on the outside world. At the end of the civil war and the beginning of NEP the Bolsheviks were an embattled vanguard with a siege mentality, in both national and international terms. As they turned to building “Socialism in One Country”—by necessity rather than choice—they had to recover and assume a distinctly Russian identity. Not that they abandoned their universal vocation. But hereafter Russia would be as much a model of socialist modernization for the Third World as one of socialist redistribution for the First World.

NOTES

1. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), p. 698.

2. Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 53.

3. Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), p. 322 and p. 327; Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, p. 56; Vladimir N. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918–1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 161, p. 322, and p. 390.

4. Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, p. 43. See also Teodor Shanin, The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society, Russia 1910–1925 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), pp. 145–47.

5. See David Mitrany, Marx against the Peasant: A Study in Social Dogmatism (New York: Collier, 1961); Moshe Lewin, “Dimensions of Stalinism in Russia: The Social Background of Socialism,” in Robert C. Tucker, Stalinism (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 111–36, esp. pp. 120–22; Alvin Gouldner, “Stalinism: A Study of Internal Colonialism,” in Telos 34 (Winter 1977–78): pp. 5–48. Cf. Brovkin, Front Lines, passim.

6. See Peter Holquist, A Russian Vendée: The Practice of Revolutionary Politics in the Don Countryside, 1917–1921 (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation: Columbia University, 1995), esp. ch. VIII.

7. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 24.

8. Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Land and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon, 1966), p. 87. This is Moore’s judgment, based on Mathiez, of the economic policies of the Committee of Public Safety, which can be applied to those of Sovnarkom.

9. Michael Malet, Nestor Makhno in the Russian Civil War (London: The London School of Economics and Political Science, 1982), pp. 150–51, 153.

10. Figes, Peasant Russia, pp. 323–24.

11. Cited in ibid., p. 324.

12. Ibid., p. 324 and p. 329; and Brovkin, Front Lines, pp. 321–22.

13. Figes, Peasant Russia, p. 329; and Bruce W. Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 324.

14. Cited in Malet, Makhno, p. 83.

15. Cited in ibid., p. 35.

16. Cited in William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1957), pp. 233–34.

17. Leon Trotsky, The Military Writings and Speeches: How the Revolution Armed, vol. 2 (London: New Park Publications, 1979–81), pp. 326–27.

18. Cited in Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, p. 234. See also Malet, Makhno, pp. 34–39; and Brovkin, Front Lines, pp. 115–16.

19. The following three paragraphs are based on Malet, Makhno, pp. 40–45, 84; and Peter Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement, 1918–1921 (Detroit: Black and Red, 1974), ch. 7.

20. Cited in Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, pp. 235–36.

21. Cited in Malet, Makhno, p. 171.

22. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 64.

23. Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, p. 238.

24. Malet, Makhno, pp. 64–66. See also Trotsky, Military Writings, p. 285 and p. 291.

25. Malet, Makhno, p. 66.

26. Ibid., p. 129.

27. Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, p. 239; and George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), p. 335.

28. Arshinov, Makhnovist Movement, p. 165.

29. Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, p. 39.

30. Arshinov, Makhnovist Movement, pp. 166–67.

31. Cited in Brovkin, Front Lines, p. 382.

32. Arshinov, Makhnovist Movement, p. 166.

33. Leggett, Cheka, p. 334. For this violence, also see the excerpts from the diary of Makhno’s wife cited by Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, pp. 237–38.

34. Malet, Makhno, pp. 72–73; and Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, p. 239.

35. Malet, Makhno, pp. 103–4.

36. Ibid., pp. 85–92, 95.

37. Ibid., p. 118; and Michael Palij, The Anarchism of Nestor Makhno, 1918–1921: An Aspect of the Ukrainian Revolution (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976), pp. 252–53.

38. See Lincoln, Red Victory, pp. 469–70.

39. Leggett, Cheka, p. 330.

40. Ibid., p. 332; Lincoln, Red Victory, p. 469; Brovkin, Front Lines, pp. 363–68; Roger Pethybridge, One Step Backwards, Two Steps Forward: Soviet Society and Politics in the New Economic Policy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), p. 65.

41. Seth Singleton, “The Tambov Revolt, 1920–1921,” in Slavic Review 25:3 (September 1966): pp. 497–512, esp. p. 504. See also Brovkin, Front Lines, p. 363.

42. Leggett, Cheka, p. 331.

43. See Brovkin, Front Lines, pp. 362 ff.

44. Figes, Peasant Russia, ch. 7; Geoffrey Hosking, The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 78; Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, p. 51; Leggett, Cheka, p. 330.

45. Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (New York: Free Press, 1994), p. 344.

46. Pethybridge, One Step Backwards, pp. 65–66.

47. Oliver H. Radkey, The Unknown Civil War in Soviet Russia: A Study of the Green Movement in the Tambov Region, 1920–1921 (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1976), pp. 334–36.

48. Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 303.

49. “Report on the Political Work of the Central Committee: March 8, 1921,” in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 32 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), pp. 170–91.

50. Lincoln, Red Victory, pp. 471–72.

51. Brovkin, Front Lines, pp. 385–86.

52. Cited in ibid., p. 384.

53. Leggett, Cheka, p. 332. See also Lincoln, Red Victory, p. 472.

54. Cited in Leggett, Cheka, p. 330.

55. Cited in Brovkin, Front Lines, pp. 384–85.

56. Radkey, Civil War, pp. 322–23.

57. The text of Order no. 171 is cited in slightly discordant translations in Radkey, Civil War, p. 324; Brovkin, Front Lines, pp. 386–87; Volkogonov, Lenin, pp. 343–44; Alexandre Soljénitsyne, Ego (Paris: Fayard, 1995), pp. 88–89.

58. Cited in Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 303; and Soljénitsyne, Ego, pp. 89–90.

59. Radkey, Civil War, pp. 326–27.

60. Ibid., pp. 328–32, 349–51.

61. Ibid., p. 326.

62. Ibid., p. 320.

63. See ibid., pp. 321–22; and Lincoln, Red Victory, p. 473.

64. Radkey, Civil War, p. 319.

65. Ibid., p. 320.

66. Figes, Peasant Russia, p. 346.

67. Ibid., p. 328.

68. Ibid., p. 347.

69. Leggett, Cheka, p. 333.

70. Cited in Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 344.

71. Paul Avrich, Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 190–91.

72. Ibid., p. 218.

73. See Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 382; and Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994), p. 143.

74. Avrich, Kronstadt, p. 194.

75. Ibid., p. 194; and Brovkin, Front Lines, pp. 389–95. Brovkin systematically exaggerates the scale and intensity of the storm and stress of February–March 1921, insisting that the “entire social system” was in crisis, and “the country ungovernable” by virtue of Bolshevik misgovernment. Leggett and Conquest have this same perspective, as does Malia.

76. Manifesto published in the rebels’ short-lived newspaper on March 8, 1919, cited in Lennard D. Gerson, The Secret Police in Lenin’s Russia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), p. 189.

77. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky: 1879–1921 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 312.

78. Avrich, Kronstadt, pp. 193–200, 202.

79. Ibid., pp. 200–1. See also Pipes, Bolshevik Regime, pp. 382–84.

80. Deutscher, Prophet Armed, pp. 513–14; Avrich, Kronstadt, p. 205 and p. 210; Pipes, Bolshevik Regime, pp. 384–85.

81. Avrich, Kronstadt, p. 211.

82. Ibid., pp. 214–15.

83. Ibid., p. 233.

84. Leggett, Cheka, pp. 320–22.

85. Avrich, Kronstadt, p. 211 and p. 213.

86. See chapter 12 below.

87. Conquest advances the following approximate figures: 2 million killed in the First World War; 1 million in the first phase of the civil war; 2 million in the peasant wars; 3 million by disease; and 5 million by famine. Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, pp. 53–54.

88. Radkey, Civil War, pp. 347–48.

89. Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, p. 55; and Radkey, Civil War, p. 338 and p. 340.

90. The following reflections draw heavily on the essays by Sheila Fitzpatrick, Leopold Haimson, Reginald Zelnik, and Moshe Lewin in Diane P. Koenker et al., eds., Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 3–23, 24–47, 374–380, 399–423; Fitzpatrick, “Origins of Stalinism: How Important Was the Civil War?” in Acta Slavica Iaponica 2 (1984): pp. 105–25; Fitzpatrick, “The Civil War as a Formative Experience,” in Abbot Gleason et al., eds., Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 57–76.