Green armies

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Green armies
Leaders
requisitioning.
Active regionsThroughout Russia and Ukraine
IdeologyAgrarianism
Anti-Bolshevism
Factions:
Agrarian socialism
Neo-narodism
Anarchism
Revolutionary socialism
Political positionLeft-wing
Opponents Bolsheviks
  • Soviet Russia

White Movement

  • Russian State
Battles and wars
Southern Russia Intervention
West Siberian rebellion

The Green armies (

Socialist-Revolutionary Party. The Green armies had at least tacit support throughout much of Russia. However, their primary base, the peasantry, were largely reluctant to wage an active campaign during the Russian Civil War and eventually dissolved following Bolshevik victory in 1922.[2]

Background

Austro-Hungarian Empire on the brink of collapse (yellow), the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic with its attacks from the north (red), Lithuania (pink) and the Don Cossacks
(dark green).

The Russian peasantry lived through two wars against the Russian state, the product of revolutions that ended with state victory:

Bolshevik Party only controlled a few cities, "unique Bolshevik islets in the middle of a peasant ocean" unwilling to hand over the fruits of their labor and submit to any external authority.[4]

The conflict between the cities and a countryside was one of the main edges of the civil war.[5] This resistance was interpreted by many as a mere expression of the "social anarchy" that existed in the country.[6] The communist influence on the peasants and workers was negligible. The Bolsheviks controlled some soviets, but without coercive power over the majority of the population, who opposed them in a passive and disorganized way.[7]

Between late 1917 and early 1918 there was no serious opposition to the Bolsheviks, who controlled central Russia, Baku and Tashkent. The only opposition force was the Volunteer Army (Russian: Добровольческая армия ), barely 3,000 men, still organized in southern Russia.[8] All the White movement's hopes were on winning over the Don and Kuban Cossacks, who were initially more interested in obtaining their own independence. For their part, Ukraine and Finland were in the process of becoming independent, but the Whites refused to recognize their secession.[9] Only the violent Bolshevik repression of the Cossacks in early 1918 made it possible to win them over to the White cause.[10]

After the

horses, recruit young people to the army, and punish villages suspected of harboring deserters.[14]

The farmers' first reaction was to bury their grain, feed it to cattle, or clandestinely distill it into

Petrograd who were looking for a fixed salary and to keep some of the loot.[16] The rest were criminals, other unemployed and ex-soldiers. They formed undisciplined troops, known as prodotriady (Russian: продотряды), who did not hesitate to steal vital reserves, seed and other possessions from the peasants.[17] The prodotriady were killed at an increasing rate: 2,000 in 1918, 5,000 in 1919, and 8,000 in 1920.[15] The Bolsheviks retaliated by burning villages, confiscating livestock, and executing peasants by the hundreds. Many were accused of being kulaks but most were poor farmers, the most vulnerable to poor harvests. People fled to the forests with nothing to lose and joined the rebels [18] to defend the "local peasant revolution".[19] Thus, what in most cases began as small revolts against the requisitions, the incompetent and brutal response of the local communists turned into large rebellions.[15]

The first

pud of grain was requisitioned.[23]

Objectives

At the outbreak of the

Moscow; the third were liberals with the support of moderate sectors who wanted to maintain the freedoms won with the revolution. The Mensheviks quickly lost the support of many soviets, except in the Caucasus, and especially in the Democratic Republic of Georgia, while Bolshevik influence rapidly grew. The peasants were overwhelmingly in favour of the SR.[24] In some cases, as in Western Siberia in 1920–1921, the rebellious peasants began their revolts without any proposal or plan more complex than overthrowing the Bolsheviks (consequently, Bolsheviks who fell into their hands were assassinated and government or Party buildings razed). Only as some successful movements became more complex and territorially broad did the Greens present a political program, an adaptation of SR ideas.[25]

Russia rapidly polarized during 1917. Very soon, large masses of the population were in favor of smaller and less organized revolutionary groups than the Bolsheviks, the

Left SRs.[26] The Great War had encouraged the peasants and workers to follow a revolutionary path, [27] so Lenin proposed to turn the "imperialist war" into a "civil war."[28]

Agricultural distribution

The greens were driven by the ideal of the SR "black division",

land and liberty", to appeal to the desperate peasantry of rural Russia.[31] Another source of opposition from the population towards the Bolsheviks was the "way of life Communist leaders' feudal system,” with the excesses of Bolshevik leaders in contrast to the horrors of the civil war producing resentment from the impoverished and war-torn peasantry.[32]

The ideology of the Greens was very uniform, representing the common aspirations and goals of peasant revolutions in Russia and Ukraine. They wanted to regain the self-government maintained until 1918,[33] seize the nobility's lands, maintain rural market-economies and govern their communities with soviets chosen by them.[34] The peasants rejected the growing authority that the new state was gaining.[35] Four years after the Revolution they watched as the Soviet state centralized, with the autonomy of their Soviets integrated into the growing organs of the state. Their own small agricultural holdings were replaced by large state collectivizations, with the product produced on their farms requisitioned and the land promised to them in the Revolution occupied by the State.[36] With these worries and concerns growing, they began to accept the SR proposals: the end of Bolshevik rule, land redistribution and an end to the civil war.[37] Their opposition to the Bolsheviks was due to, rather than a political plan or national alternative, a desire to protect and preserve their communal land.[38] Interested in defending local interests,[39] these movements took a defensive stance: incapable and unwilling to march on Moscow, they hoped to remove the Bolshevik state's central influence.[33]

Rejection of the Whites

Azerbaijan and the Cossack republics of the Don, Kuban and Terek Cossacks
.

The greens were always hostile to the Whites, which is why their uprisings against the reds only became massive after ensuring the defeat of the Whites.[40] Many White officers were members of the former Tsarist Nobility, and had lost the land they had or could inherit in the peasant revolution of 1917. With deeply entrenched classism against the peasants they once ruled over, the Whites sought to turn back time and take revenge against every symbol of change. They would never recognize new national realities or the attempts at agrarian revolution.[41]

One of the main causes of the White defeat was being identified by the people with the restoration of the old regime, signaled by the treatment that their officers and officials gave to the peasants.

Urals and the Volga.[51]

The robberies and massacres at the hands of the Cossack cavalry also contributed to turning the countryside against the White advance in 1919.

Denikin proved unable to contain the violence.[53] The best White troops were from the Kuban, the Don and the Caucasus,[54] as the Cossacks were the main a source of men and resources for the Whites. When they realized that Denikin was defeated, they wanted to return to their homes en masse, seeing greater benefit in negotiating their own autonomy with the communists.[55] Despite everything, Denikin cracked down on the rights of the unions and returned the factories to their former owners, sparking the hatred and resistance of the workers. The Whites, unable to effectively contain the unrest, resorted to greater repression and terror.[56] Like Kolchak,[57] Denikin failed to create his own local government structure, resorting to repression to try to mobilize the population and its resources under his control. With these being something decisive in any modern civil or total war,[58] he attempted to tap into these possible resources[59] but the terror proved not to be enough to spurn the territories they held. Alongside this, it was unable to counteract the critical waste and bleed of already present supply.[60] When the Military aid from their western allies was reduced, White soldiers had to loot for supplies, only further stoking the rage and fear of the local populace.[53]

Finally, they failed to properly capitalize on the propaganda front.

Wrangel was the only White general to realize the mistake. He knew that the war would not be won without successfully winning over the peasants, workers and national minorities to their side.[65] Despite this, his subordinates in Crimea behaved like an occupying army, perpetrating all manner of arbitrariness and institutionalizing corruption.[66]

Cooperation with other groups

The Greens collaborated several times with other opposition groups, such as anarchists and SRs,[67] in a more strategic than ideological effort against the Reds.[68] White deserters joined their cause and came to lead bands of peasants, which served as a pretext for the Bolsheviks to exaggerate the relations between the two elements.[69] More likely to follow aggressive rhetoric and promises of violent revenge, peasants tended to reject leaders with purely political or more moderate goals, that is, any close to the Russian Provisional Government of 1917. "They prefer to fight a desperate and lonely war on their own, rather than to help the oppressors of the past [the Whites] defeat the oppressors of the present [the reds].”[70]

Organisation

A union network emerged in the villages, replacing the Soviets and helping provide supplies to the rebels.

West Siberia the SRs led the revolts and although there was a central authority in Tobolsk, it had little to no control of the Bolshevik-free territory. Because of this, essentially every volost was self-governed. In contrast, the Siberian movement demonstrated a high level of organization and even installed an administration in the cities it captured (the guerrillas of Tambov were unable to seize cities but also created a complex administrative network in the countryside); on the contrary, the Makhnovists were present in both countryside and cities, maintaining a loose and autonomous administration in line with Anarchist ideology.[25]

At the beginning of 1920, when the Red victory was practically assured after the defeat of the armies of

Aleksandr Kolchak,[73] continued requisitioning came to be viewed as more and more unjustifiable.[74] Numerous contingents of peasant soldiers, usually having connections and sympathy with the Peasantry, refused to repress the green uprisings and defected, forming their own "green" guerrillas in the forests.[75] In 1919-1921 most of the guerrillas were deserters,[76] including the leaders, with many in positions of leadership being veterans of the fight against the Whites.[77] Alongside this, White Holdouts described as "little White dabbling" continued to fight until 1922, however were described to be "more like a permanent hindrance than a real threat.”[73] Officially two and a half million soldiers were demobilized in 1921, with many returning to their homes and joining the Greens, worsening the situation for the central government,[78] as there were 250,000 in Tambov alone.[79]

However, by that time both Greens and Blacks could only dream of damaging the Red Army, with its experience and size making it a true "military giant",

French revolutionary ideal of a "nation in arms" and failed.[81] There were just over a million red soldiers at the end of 1918,[82] 3 million in 1919,[83] 5 million at the end of 1920,[83] and 6 million in 1921.[81] They were mainly forcibly recruited peasants.[84] There was resistance among the Communists to the massive recruitment of peasants. For many, their army of loyal workers would become a force largely made up of an element that was alien and hostile to them, a possible enemy.[85] According to the British historian Orlando Figes, at the climax of the civil war Lenin played pragmatically into the Red Army's advantages, in the form of a better organized but smaller army. Optimally disciplined, equipped and supplied, the force exerted less pressure on Rural areas by demanding less requisitions or levies and causing fewer peasant rebellions. They would also put less pressure on factory workers. Furthermore, it would not be made up mainly of peasants but rather workers, more loyal and motivated to fight for the reds.[86]

Deserters in the territories under Bolshevik control:
Based on various reports from 1919.[87]
Territory Month Deserters Captured
Kaluga July 10,000 -
Petrograd - 65,000
Ryazan - 54,697 -
Saratov - 35,000 -
Tambov - 60,000 -
Tver October 50,000 5,430
Yaroslavl July
September
9,500
s / i
s / i
1,529
Ivanovo-Voznesensk - - 3,000
Moscow June
September
- 1,500
3,329
Nizhny Novgorod April - 4,900
Oriol May - 5,000
Smolensk
(Belsk region)
June - 2,600
Vladimir September - 1,529

The massive desertion as a phenomenon that affected the entire Red Army indicates that the peasantry were hesitant to serve in it.[87] With many still having rural farms or villages to return to, many deserted during periods of Harvest, with spikes in desertion being indicated by season.[88] During 1918 more than a million soldiers deserted,[19] the following year the figure increased to 2 million,[88] and in 1921 there were almost 4 million.[19] Between 1919 and 1920 3 million men deserted.[75] In 1919, these fugitive "green deserters" numbered more than one million in the territory under Bolshevik control alone,[89] and although trace amounts went on to serve with the Whites, most fought in heavily wooded areas near their own homes against authorities from both sides.[90] Detachments were sent to villages near the battlefront and families suspected of harboring deserters were punished with fines, confiscation of livestock and land, the seizure of hostages, executing community leaders and even burning whole villages to the ground.[19] The special commissions ordered by the Cheka with pursuing them captured 500,000 deserters in 1919 and 600,000 to 800,000 in 1920. Thousands were shot and their families deported, but 1.5 to 2 million avoided capture.[91]

The mass desertions started much earlier. From the

Kerensky Offensive to the October Revolution two million soldiers abandoned their positions and returned to their homes.[92] The Tsarist army that was 10,000,000 strong had been defeated by shattered morale in its ranks and the weakness of its institutions,[93] with millions returned to their farms.[94] That same year, 1917, a massive demobilization was decreed.[81] Many of these deserters were peasants,[95] "the Imperial Army was a peasant army",[96] who called themselves Marxists, despite lacking knowledge or understanding of the ideology.[97] Their "trenches Bolshevism reflected above all an aspiration for peace, shared by the combatants of all the countries involved for three years in the most deadly and total wars.”[29] More than 2 million of their comrades had perished fighting the Central Powers.[98] Many supported the Bolsheviks in 1917 because they promised an assured peace,[99] but due to the outbreak of the civil war, the peasants were very reluctant to be recruited.[88] During the civil war, the desire for peace in the face of devastation led many communities to declare themselves "neutral republics" to prevent the red or White armies from entering their territories.[88]

It's possible that the Reds never gathered more than half a million "equipped soldiers" at any one time.

Official size of the Russian armies:
Based on government reports.[105]
Year Numbers Institution
1914 1,423,000
Russian Imperial Army
1918 106,000 Red Army
1919 435,000 Red Army
1920 3,538,000 Red Army
1921 4,110,000 Red Army
1922 1,590,000 Red Army
1923 703,000 Red Army
1924–1927 562,000 Red Army

The Bolshevik forces were militarily fragile, as proven after the

Versailles.[110] The red soldiers were unable to defeat the newborn Polish army, ensuring that they would be unable to compete with the established and powerful industrial countries of central and western Europe.[106] The failure to spread the Revolution across Europe would spurn on internal debate within the Bolsheviks, with Bukharin and Stalin later formulating the dominant theory of socialism in one country
.

Within this Red Army, the special units of the Cheka and the "internal defense troops of the Republic" stood out, with 200,000 members in 1921. In the wake of the Revolution, they were the main repressive organs of the fledgling Soviet State.[80] Due to the small number of regular soldiers at the disposal of all sides, the armies that were in the Russian battlefields were very small - tens of thousands in the largest battles - compared to those used in the World War I.[111] Volunteers were scarce and undisciplined, forcing Soviet commanders to recruit peasants, a social group that Soviet military leadership considered unreliable.[85] This was coupled with increased pressure towards requisitions,[88] which only contributed to the formation of new peasant guerrillas.[83]

Leadership

Besides Soviet records of their oppositional activity, there is very little personal information about the Green leaders, described as "men who acted and wrote not" due to the widespread

railroad workers, who had "fled back to the villages" and informed the peasants about the horrendous working conditions of developing industry.[114] Among these atamans were Aleksandr Antonov, Nykyfor Hryhoriv, Danylo Terpylo and Nestor Makhno.[79]

Constituents, leadership and goals

Despite

Soviet attempts to associate the Green armies with White leadership, such a designation overemphasizes the political aspects of the movement. In a broad sense, the Green armies were spontaneous manifestations of peasant discontent rather than of any specific ideology. By 1920, the Bolsheviks had secured victory over the Whites. The peasant soldiers of the Red Army, outraged at the prospect of continuing to violently oppress their own class in the interest of the new government, deserted and consolidated in groups in the forests, eventually leading to their "Green" designation. While these groups primarily opposed the Bolsheviks, they often did so without a plan or alternative form of government in mind; rather, they simply wanted to rid the countryside of Bolshevik influence by any means necessary.[115]

Peasant Wars

The revolts varied greatly from one another, however, the Soviets tended to classify them into two main categories: bunt, a specific, brief revolt with few participants; and vostante, an insurrection of thousands of peasants, capable of conquering cities and giving themselves a coherent political program,[67] usually of a social-revolutionary type, as in Tambov,[74] or anarchist, like the peasant armies of Makhno.[116]

First revolts

Among the initial movements would be the

Livny rebellion, easily put down during August 1918. Also included is the Izhevsk–Votkinsk Uprising of that year and what is considered the first true vostante, the Chapan rebellion, which broke out on the banks of the Volga, in the districts of Karsun, Syzran, Sengilei and Stavropol
in 1919.

It should be mentioned that the Kuban and Don Cossacks and the tribes of Caucasus rose up in 1920, forming their own peasant guerrillas.[15] The latter reached more than 30,000 rebels in arms.[15] They remained very active until the summer of the following year, when they will be definitively defeated, although small green parties in Kuban, Don and Western Siberia remained active until 1923.[117] Later, in 1924, there would be a last revolt in Georgia. It was quickly and harshly repressed.[118]

Ukrainian Atamans

Kiev province, but not the big cities, and had 20,000 armed followers.[119]

Another green movement was the brief rebellion of Nykyfor Hryhoriv, ataman of Kherson, and Yuriy Tyutyunnyk. Hryhoriv was an opportunistic leader who knew how to switch sides when it suited him.[120]

Siberian rebellions

Map of European Russia between 1918 and 1921. In yellow the boundary of the areas controlled by the Bolsheviks in November 1918; in blue the maximum advances of the Whites during 1919; and in red the Soviet borders of 1921.

Admiral Kolchak made the fatal mistake of winning the animosity of peasants eager for agricultural reform by restoring the rights of landowners.[121] The problem worsened in early 1919.[122] Kolchak resorted to terror to appease them.[123] With his rear weakened by the wear and tear of the guerrillas,[122] the White regime could not stop the Bolshevik advance, which on the other hand, knew how to add local partisans to its forces wherever it advanced.[124]

At the beginning of 1920 the "

Simbirsk and Ufa.[125] However, the rapid Bolshevik reaction brought their annihilation the following month.[126]

Between the beginning of 1921 and the end of 1922, the West Siberian rebellion took place, the largest green uprising, and perhaps the least studied,[15] both in number of rebels and in size geographic.[127]

Makhnovist Revolution

One of the best known and most organized of these movements was the

Berdyansk, and were targets of Denikin, Wrangel and Bolsheviks.[130]

Tambov Rebellion

Probably the best known green movement is the rebellion that broke out on August 19, 1920 in the small town of Khitrovo, as a rejection of food requisitions in the Tambov Oblast and quickly spread to Penza, Saratov and Voronezh.[126] This was defeated in June 1922 with the death of its leader, Aleksandr Antonov.[131]

Tactics

While it can be difficult to distinguish Green armies from other forms of peasant unrest, they were marked by concentrated leadership and distinct units, displaying a higher level of organization than most peasant uprisings. For instance,

burying victims alive.[138]

No more than 6,000 men, evenly distributed, fought in the first battles between the Whites of Lavr Kornilov and the Reds of Rudolf Sivers. Because of the small number of men involved and the tiny territory affected, it is difficult to call this even a civil war.[139] During the entire first year of the war there were only skirmishes and artillery duels with small armies or partisan forces, more concerned with obtaining supplies. Territory continually changed hands, there were no front lines or fixed positions.[140] In the decisive battles of 1919, they mobilized the peasantry by force, to fight in large armies with hundreds of thousands of men facing each other on fronts of hundreds of kilometers and supported with heavy weapons.[141]

Their favored activities included blowing up bridges, cutting telegraph lines and raising railways in an attempt to paralyze communications and movements of the Reds.[142] They preferred to prowl during the day, keeping watch over their enemies and attacking at night. They permanently refused to fight in the open, hiding in hills and forests to ambush and retreat quickly. Their greater mobility made up for their total absence of artillery.[33] In Western Siberia and Central Russia, their guerilla tactics were aided by the wooded terrain of the taiga.[143] When they were defeated they mixed with the civil population or fled on horses provided by the locals.[33]

The Greens often used red flags[71]

The Greens formed multitudes of peasants with

hunting rifles, pistols and rifles.[145] Also many greens fought under red flags, symbols of the revolution later appropriated by the communists.[71]

The first small units sent by the Bolsheviks to subdue them were easily defeated and practically did nothing more than give them more weapons.

poison gases leftovers from the arsenals of the Great War. In addition to flooding rebel areas with troops and propaganda.[148] Quickly, the communists learned that: "Conventional armies, however well armed, are ill equipped to fight against a well supported peasant army." A lesson they would learn again much later in Afghanistan.[72]

Bolshevik response

The Bolshevik government tried to build an

anti-communist image for the Green armies. Provincial Communist officials announced to locals that the Green armies were a subsection of the villainous White movement, despite the fact that Green armies were generally just as hostile to the Whites as they were to the Reds. The Bolsheviks also exaggerated the influence of the kulaks in Green armies, who were undoubtedly involved,[149] but hardly the driving force of the movement.[150]

These massive uprisings, which shook Soviet power in

Yudenich and Kolchak combined,"[152] as he proclaimed on March 8, 1921, in his opening speech at the 10th Party Congress.[137]

The civil war in Russia has generally been analyzed as a conflict between the

white army, the most important thing was what happened in the rear of the most important front lines.[121]

The Bolsheviks initially believed that they could easily defeat the Greens, treating them as a hopeless cause both in their

famine of 1921-1922,[126] which affected 29 million people in total and killed about five million, being the main weapon of the regime to regain control over many provinces.[156] Ruthless terror played its part in suppressing the revolts, but the main weapon was hunger.[155]

In the opinion of the anarchists: "The basic psychological trait of Bolshevism is the realization of its will by means of the violent elimination of all other wills, the absolute destruction of all individuality, to the point where it becomes an inanimate object."[157] Many local communist officials saw that the requisition orders starved their own people to death, but "The good comrade did the what was said to him; he was pleased to leave all critical thinking to the Central Committee." That was the discipline the Party advocated.[158] Ironically, many Bolshevik officers were the children of peasants educated in Tsarist military schools. With their minds open when leaving the narrow rural world, they rejected the mentality of their parents and grandparents and did not hesitate to repress their own people.[159]

The resistance of the Cossacks led to a fierce campaign of

François Babeuf, inventor of modern communism, who planned the "populicide" of Vendée,[165] which found its climax in the "infernal columns
".

The

Left SR Uprising.[171] According to the anarchists, both sought to subjugate the people through the state.[172]

Lenin also ordered the

Bolshevik Party itself to be purged to get rid of potentially unfair or useless elements. In parallel there was an exorbitant growth of the Party, distancing the bases from its leaders. The first purge took place in the summer of 1918, the second in the spring of 1919, and the third in the summer of 1920, focusing on comrades of peasant or non-Russian origin. The Party did not inspire loyalty[173] and people voluntarily left it in waves.[71]

Reasons for failure

Aside from the Bolshevik response, a number of internal aspects of the Green movement led to its failure. Green activity often amounted to violence without an actual goal beyond killing communists and interrupting their economic and political activity. Thus, the armies rarely moved outside of their original geographic region.[174] When Greens conquered towns or villages, they did not install themselves politically, leaving the territory to be retaken later by Bolsheviks.[175] At the same time, many peasant militias were loosely organized and lacked greater military or political coordination among them, which made it difficult to take advantage of the widespread discontent, preventing "most or all of peasant Russia bustling with rebellion" to overthrow the new regime.[101] Furthermore, there was a great deal of tension within the bands, which often included agrarian peasants, kulaks, workers and Whites, many with preexisting resentment towards each other. The Green armies were underfunded, low on supplies, and outmatched by the Red Army (which, despite its flaws, had better organization and morale as a result of greater, more frequent victories).[174]

The civil war caused more than ten million deaths from fighting, terror, plagues and mainly famine, which took about half, and another couple of million emigrated, affecting mainly adult men. Another ten million people were not born as a result of the fall in the birth rate according to demographic estimates.

venereal diseases than in combat.[178] According to Urlanis, 300,000 Reds, Whites and Poles died in combat, but more than 450,000 from disease.[179] According to the historian Evan Mawdsley epidemics decimated the Russian population. In 1917, 63,000 deaths from typhus and typhoid fever were counted, in 1919 there were 890,000 and in 1920 another 1,044,000. To this is added the quota in lives that dysentery, cholera and Spanish flu took in 1918–1919, so the figure probably exceeded three million based on data on extremely high infant mortality.[177] About seven million orphans were left roaming the streets, living off handouts, robberies and prostitution.[180] Many were later recruited into the army to become the soldiers and repressors of Stalinism. Ironically, this is how they received education, clothing and food, and established child-parent relationships with their officers.[181]

New Economic Policy

Short of food and fuel, Petrograd was abandoned by most of its population. Of its 2 million inhabitants in 1918, barely 500,000 remained in 1920.[182] Millions returned to the countryside to get food, crowding the railway stations.[183] The fuel shortage, the economic crisis and the impossibility of repairing the cars caused these transports to collapse.[184] The first to do so were those peasants who had arrived to the cities a few years ago or those who still had close ties with their native villages. For their part, the villagers received migrants with kinship ties or who knew some trade (carpenters or blacksmiths), but not the rest.[185] Many were workers whose factories had closed,[186] others only migrated to exchange manufactured objects for food and return to the cities, they went in armed brigades on stolen trains, becoming uncontrollable for the Bolshevik authorities.[185] In addition, many railway officials were very corrupt; trains leaving the farms laden with food were looted by hungry crowds until they were emptied before reaching the cities.[184] This only contributed to throwing transport into chaos and paralyzing industry,[187] with the majority of workers spending most of their time making their own products and then going to exchange them for food on long trips.[188]

Thus, in 1920 most of rural Russia was in the power of rebellious peasant smallholders, while the Bolshevik authorities only controlled the cities with

Petrograd, Moscow and other cities, in "a last desperate attempt to bring it down",[191] sparking the Kronstadt rebellion.[192] Its subsequent submission led to the fierce repression of the SRs and Mensheviks, parties closely linked to the organization of the protests.[193]

In the end, this was the cause of the abandonment of war communism and the adoption of the New Economic Policy (NEP): "Having defeated the Whites, who were backed by no less than eight Western powers, the Bolsheviks surrendered to the peasantry.”[194] War communism had brought massive desertions and the blocking of supplies by the peasantry,[83] and it was clear that "the national question was also ipso facto the peasant question",[195] after all, 85% of Russians lived in rural areas.[96] This change was nothing more than a "temporary deviation" in everyone's mind, possibly more than a decade in Lenin's mind, and for the sole purpose of rebuilding Russia.[193] The market would always be regulated and would be gradually socialized by the State.[193]

The Bolsheviks searched for a way to end popular support for the Greens. Salt and manufactured goods were offered to villages that passed a resolution declaring the rebels "bandits," knowing that the latter would attack them in retaliation.[117] The guerrillas themselves helped them in their work. Many criminals joined them and dedicated themselves to looting and raping, earning the hatred of the people.[72]

At the end of the war, the large urban populations were disintegrated and the industry had almost disappeared, only the small rural owners remained.

peasants, that is, it was a predominantly rural country.[195]

Famine

The year 1921 in the Russian countryside was characterized by droughts, extreme frosts, and strong spring winds that ripped off the topsoil and ruined fledgling crops. To make matters worse, plagues of locusts and mice followed and the harvest of the previous season had been terrible, so much so that they knew that if they delivered everything the prodotriady demanded they knew that they would starve, being forced to rebel.[197] However, war communism had its part in the disaster. Faced with requisitions, the peasants preferred to cultivate less land, just enough to survive.[198] Faced with the almost non-existence of surpluses, the Bolsheviks began to take away their vital reserves, arguing that they had more hidden.[199] They were accustomed to poor harvests and they overcame them by keeping communal reserves, but to avoid requisitions they reduced their production to mere survival, leaving them extremely vulnerable to bad weather conditions.[200] Thus, the regions most affected by the famine of 1921-1922 had suffered the most from the requisitions of 1918–1921.[201] The regions most disputed in the war, with constant changes of the front, were even more ruined.[51]

Hunger made them eat grass, weeds, leaves, moss, tree bark, roof coverings, and flour made from acorns, sawdust, mud, and horse dung. They devoured their livestock, and hunted dogs, cats, and rodents.

Ukraine to the Volga, feeding one affected region and further damaging another. The intention was to punish the Ukrainian peasantry for their resistance to the new regime, as Stalin did again in the 1930s.[205]

Russian famine of 1921–22
.

Out of shame, the Bolshevik government did not recognize the famine until July 1921.

counterrevolutionary. Many were exiled or banished to restricted access areas in the interior of Russia.[206]

In the summer of 1922 the ARA fed eleven million people a day and brought medicines, clothes, tools and seeds that were essential to achieve two large harvests of 1922 and 1923, bringing Russia out of the famine.[207] In contrast, the corrupt and inefficient central commission created by Lenin helped less than three million.[208] The gratitude of the Bolshevik government was translated into accusations to the ARA of attempting to discredit, spy on and shoot them down, interfering in their operations, searching their convoys, stopping their trains, stealing supplies and arresting members of assistance teams.[206] However, the US aid was not canceled until it was made public that in full famine the communist government continued to export millions of tons of its own cereals abroad, excusing itself from buying industrial and agricultural equipment. The ARA ended its operations in June 1923.[209] The Bolsheviks alone wrote a short formal note of thanks, Gorki was much more grateful in a long letter to Hoover.[210]

Despite the efforts, some five million people died. The famine marked the end of the revolution.[211]

Collectivization and restart of conflict

Unable to rule the countryside peacefully or to produce manufactured goods to trade with, the Bolsheviks resorted to terrorizing it and forcibly taking the fruits of their labor. This started a "hidden civil war" between the peasantry and the nascent Bolshevik state,

collectivization.[214]

On March 10, 1923, Lenin suffered his third stroke. From then on, and especially after his death on the following January 24, the struggle to succeed him as unquestionable

self-governed themselves according to the traditions of each village. The presence of the state was reduced to a minimum.[215] However, this calm only masked the tension between the repressive state and the broader society.[216] In those years, state terrorism tended to be concentrated in the peripheral areas of the USSR, such as the Caucasus and Central Asia, recently subdued areas of non-Russian culture and with a long tradition of resistance to Moscow.[217]

The first Soviet ethnographers who visited the villages around Moscow felt that they were going to the

Cooperatives among peasants also grew:[220] "with its smallholder instincts, superstitions and attachment to tradition, it would be abolished by these socialist farms."[21] A literate youth was born among the peasantry that was much more ambitious than their parents, defiant before the authority of the elderly and religion, they were more individualistic. The Party based its influence in the countryside on them.[220] Many young people sought in it the way to escape from the boring life in the countryside and helped organize Stalinist collectivization, all in order to break with the old ways of life.[221] The villages were not divided between rich and poor, as the Bolsheviks believed, but between old and young.[220]

At the end of the decade the Bolsheviks tried to centralize power. They resorted to reducing the number of rural Soviets, but this left many villages without any authority in 1929,[214] making it impossible to collect taxes or enforce laws.[222] The small rural owners had been decisively strengthened by the revolution and as a consequence of the civil war, most of the villages were ruled by their own community. The state only reached the cities with volost.[223] Stalin realized that the longer the NPE lasted, the greater the distance grew between the regime's plans and its impotence before the peasantry, until they could do nothing against the "kulak," that is, small and medium-sized owners. It was better to go ahead and restart the civil war with an advantage.[224] Only in 1927, after banishing, displacing or eliminating his main opponents and remaining safe as boss,[225] did Stalin put an end to the "peasant utopia" based on the "eserovschina" or "revolutionary socialist mentality".[226] That year, greater state intervention on agricultural production began with a strong political repression, despite the fear of some leaders of a new war. This brought down production, causing a "harvest crisis", which served as a pretext for Stalin to initiate collectivization.[227]

There was no resistance from the peasantry until the confrontations against Stalinist collectivization, the expropriation of cattle and church closings. This hit particularly hard in 1930, with two and a half million villagers taking part in 14,000 revolts, riots and mass demonstrations that year. These mainly affect Chernozem, the North Caucasus and Western Ukraine (especially border areas with Poland and Romania), regions that came to be outside government control.[228] About five million fled from the Kolkhoz in the aforementioned regions and Kazakhstan.[229] But this new movement could not federate or organize like the previous one, they had no capable leaders or political cadres (decimated during the civil war), had to fight with pitchforks and axes (firearms were progressively requisitioned during the 1920s) and the regime reacted too quickly.[230]

See also

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Bibliography

External links