The Tambov Rebellion of 1920–1922 was one of the largest and best-organized peasant rebellions challenging the Bolshevik government during the Russian Civil War. The uprising took place in the territories of the modern Tambov Oblast and part of the Voronezh Oblast, less than 500 kilometres (300 mi) southeast of Moscow.
In Soviet historiography, the rebellion was referred to as the Antonovschina ("Antonov's mutiny"), so named after Alexander Antonov, a former official of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, who opposed the government of the Bolsheviks. It began in August 1920 with resistance to the forced confiscation of grain and developed into a guerrilla war against the Red Army, Cheka units and the Soviet Russian authorities. The bulk of the peasant army was destroyed by large Red Army reinforcements using chemical weapons in the summer of 1921; smaller groups continued resistance until the following year. It is estimated that around 100,000 people were arrested and around 15,000 killed during the suppression of the uprising.
The movement was later portrayed by the Soviets as anarchical banditry, similar to other left-wing anti-Bolshevik movements that opposed them during this period.
Background
In 1904, Alexander Antonov was sentenced to twenty years in prison for blowing up a train, but received an amnesty from the Russian Provisional Government following the February Revolution and returned to his native Tambov, where he served in the local militia in Kirsanov. As the Provisional Government refused to discuss agrarian reform, he joined the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries.
The peasants of Tambov largely supported the October Revolution, since Vladimir Lenin's Decree on Land legalized the expropriation of property. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks had problems in maintaining control of the governorate. Unlike in the cities, the Bolsheviks had hardly any supporters in the rural regions, where in the elections of 1917 the Socialist Revolutionary Party had won large majorities. In March 1918, the Bolshevik delegates in Tambov were even thrown out of the local soviets, following the ratification of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
Following the outbreak of the Russian Civil War, the newly established Russian Soviet Republic adopted the policy of war communism, in which food for the cities was obtained by compulsory requisition from the villages, without financial compensation. This was met with the resistance of the peasant population, especially as the requisitions were often violent in nature. Likewise, the amount of grain to be requisitioned were not measured according to production. Instead, commissions gave a rough estimate based on pre-war production, so that devastation, crop failures, and population decline were not included. Before the revolution, the peasants in Tambov produced around one million tonnes of grain. Of these, one-third was exported. On the basis of these figures, which did not include the dislocations of the civil war in the countryside, a high target for the procurement of grain was set. The peasants often responded by reducing their acreage, as they no longer had the economic incentive to produce surpluses, which made the confiscations ordered from above hit them even harder.
For the most part, the peasants had been indifferent to Bolshevik ideology, but they came to hate the Bolsheviks for their forced requisitions, which had put them at the limit of survival, and for the forced levies that had created numerous fugitives. In the summer of 1919, Antonov fled to the forest and formed a gang that murdered several Bolshevik activists. This is how the first anti-Bolshevik guerrilla movements arose, made up of Red Army deserters, Socialist-Revolutionaries and peasants who resisted the searches in the forests. Their first acts were assassinating unpopular state officials and raiding state farms. They killed more than 200 government grain collectors and over the next year their forces grew steadily, growing from an initial 150 to 6,000 by early summer 1920, but that would have to wait until after the defeat of Anton Denikin's White movement for there to be a real mass uprising. The other leaders of this force were Alexander Antonov's younger brother, Dmitri Antonov, and the SR Peter Tokmakov.
Outbreak
On 19 August 1920, a revolt broke out in the small town of Khitrovo, where a military requisitioning detachment of the Red Army had appropriated everything they could and "beat up elderly men of seventy in full view of the public". In anticipation of an attack by the Red Army to enforce the procurement of grain, the farmers of the village armed themselves. Since only a few rifles were available, this was partly done with pitchforks and clubs. Other villages soon joined in the uprising against the Soviet authorities, and succeeded in repelling the Red Army.
The peasants rebels, after their first success, attempted to capture Tambov, the capital of the governorate. There, however, they were scattered by Red machine guns barely ten kilometers from their target. It was here that Alexander Antonov, a radical Left Socialist-Revolutionary, led the movement into a guerilla war against the Reds. Before the uprising, Antonov and a few comrades had fought an underground insurrection against the Bolsheviks and had been sentenced to death. Since he was able to escape capture by the Soviet authorities, he was a kind of folk hero to the peasants. He demanded that the free trade and movement of goods should be allowed, that the grain requisitions should be ended and the Soviet administration and the Cheka dissolved. His troops carried out surprise raids on railway junctions, kolkhoz and the Soviet authorities. They were supported by the population and used the villages for cover and rest. Likewise, they often disguised themselves as Red Army soldiers to move about the countryside or to exaggerate the element of surprise.
The insurgent peasants organized themselves through the Union of Working Peasants (Russian: Союз Трудовых Крестьян, STK), which functioned as the political organization of the insurgents and with which Antonov worked. Having their own political program gave them a strength and coherence that other peasant uprisings lacked. However, this movement was still based on the weariness of the population but without having a clear idea of how to replace the government. Instead, Antonov dreamed of marching on Moscow and ending Bolshevik rule. In May 1921, the Union proclaimed the Provisional Democratic Republic of the Tambov Partisan Region which would rule until the holding of a democratically elected constituent assembly. The Republic used the pre-revolutionary flag of Russia, and the slogan "Long live the Great United and Indivisible Russia", one of the slogans of the White movement, became one of the mottos of the rebels and the Republic.
Antonov organized the farmers on the model of the Red Army in 18–20 regiments with their own political commissars, reconnaissance departments and communication departments. Likewise, he introduced a strict discipline. The farmers used the Red flag as their standard and thus claimed the central symbol of the revolution. They had 14,000 or 18,000 men, mostly consisting of deserters from the Red Army. Of these, five to seven thousand had firearms. By the end of the month, the rebels numbered six groups, each totaling 4,000 men with a dozen machine guns and several artillery pieces. As the Bolshevik authorities were busy with the Polish-Soviet War and Pyotr Wrangel's offensive in northern Tavria, they only had 3,000 unreliable troops in Tambov province. These soldiers had been drafted from the local villages and often had little motivation to fight members of their own class.
The rebels were able to control large parts of the region and managed to capture railway trains transporting requisitioned grain. The grain intended to supply Red Army units was instead re-distributed by Antonov's men to local farmers. The rebellion also spread to parts of other provinces: Voronezh, Saratov and Penza. This territory was populated by more than three million people, 90% farmers and artisans. The region was densely populated, with rich, forested land that offered many jobs, especially as the land had been appropriated in 1917 and the owners expelled. But the demands of the Bolshevik government and the Russian Civil War prevented them from profiting, which only encouraged the insurrection.
In the areas controlled by the rebels, all Soviet institutions were abolished. Around 1,000 members of the Russian Communist Party were killed by the insurgents. By October 1920, the Bolsheviks had completely lost control of the rural territory of the governorate, dominating only the city of Tambov itself and a number of smaller urban settlements. After numerous deserters from the Red Army joined it, the peasant army numbered over 50,000 fighters. The rebel militia proved highly effective and even infiltrated the Tambov Cheka.
Towards the end of October, the head of the Internal Guard in the Tambov Governorate, Vasili Kornev, engaged in a series of battles with the rebels. According to his letters, he killed 3,000, wounded 300, and captured 1,000 along with copious amounts of weapons, ammunition, and supplies (such as a telephone and a field kitchen). His casualties were 90 dead and less than 200 wounded. However, he was blamed for the rebellion and removed. Some sources say the rebels numbered just 8,000 horsemen in November.
Climax of the rebellion
On 5 November, two to six thousand rebels, mostly on horseback, attacked the railway station at Sampur in two coordinated groups, capturing an artillery cannon, some machine guns, and numerous revolvers and rifles. However, they failed in their attempt to sabotage the railway lines and quickly withdrew. At the time, Bolshevik reports said that two thousand partisans were still in the woods of Novokhopyorsk, near the station. The main source of information that the peasants had about what happened on other fronts were the red prisoners. In that month, there were barely 5,000 Bolsheviks in the region.
At the height of his power, thanks to their strong popular support, between October 1920 and January 1921, the rebels mobilized 50,000 partisans. By February 1921, they were between 20,000 and 40,000-strong, with half of them acting as full-time combatants and the other half part-time. Around 6,000 were mounted, hindering the government troops, whose lack of mobility undermined their effectiveness.
But they never formed an "organized guerrilla army". Because of this, most of their actions were impulsive assaults orchestrated by each band against the Bolshevik detachments in charge of requisitioning grain or repressing the villagers. This lack of coordination was, in addition to their poor weapons and training, ultimately decisive in their defeat.
They were organized in two armies divided into a total of 21 regiments. Their use of guerrilla warfare was based on the old tactic of launching surprise attacks and fleeing immediately afterwards, thanks to their superior knowledge of the terrain and the mobility of their cavalry. Each village was in charge of equipping and maintaining a group of these combatants, which was easy since many were locals defending their own communities. However, that localism was also played a disadvantage. Being closed in on themselves prevented them from seeking allies in other peasant movements or marching against larger urban centres, the control of which was what the Bolsheviks worried about since their source of support was the industrial proletariat.
By the end of the year the rebellion had achieved one of its main objectives as the reds had stopped sending units to their territories to requisition grain. The officials in the south of Tambov were incapable of such action as their resources were sufficient only to garrison the villages under their control. But the north was at peace as, not being a large food-producing region, it never lived through the requisitions that had sparked the revolt. The lack of heavy weapons prevented the rebels from taking over the cities, which became havens for communists and government officials. During that December, reinforcements from the Cheka began to arrive, numbering 3,500 combatants. Two months later its leader, Felix Dzerzhinski, would arrive to direct its operations.
During this time, garrison officers and local Bolshevik militants complained of their increasing abandonment by Moscow, from where ever fewer supplies and reinforcements were sent to them. In fact, the Red military command had decided to concentrate on a great campaign of pacification of Tambov: as soon as their troops flooded the province, the movement would be finished. In addition, it was increasingly difficult to help them because their main communication links, the armored trains, were continuously attacked in the area. During the winter of 1920–1921, food reserves in many towns were exhausted, as in Kozlov and Morshansk, towns located on the edge of the rebel zone and whose communist garrison saw most of its inhabitants leave or turn to the black market to survive.