The entire peasantry of Russia was resisting. Besides the major revolts, countless minor ones broke out. From 1918 to 1920 the reality of the peasant war was concealed beneath the war between Reds and Whites. Yet all along the peasants were fighting on two fronts. A peasant song of the time included these words:
Hey, little apple tree, Color so ripe,
On the left we fight the Reds, On the right the Whites.
By the end of 1920 the civil war was actually over. The Red Army had won. Soviet power had completed its "triumphal march," begun in October 1917 but interrupted by the war. The danger that the large landowners would return was now past. The peasants considered the land theirs for good. Resistance to the requisitions and to the party's policy in the countryside intensified. The Soviet authorities responded more harshly than ever.
From 1920 to 1921 the civil war became a peasant war. Mikhail Pok- rovsky, the first Russian Marxist historian, wrote that in 1921 "the heartland of the Russian Republic was almost completely surrounded by peasant uprisings, from Makhno on the Dnepr to Antonov on the Volga."158 But the dimensions of the war were far greater than indicated by Pokrovsky. The Red Army was battling the peasantry in Byelorussia, in the southeast of European Russia, in eastern and western Siberia, in Karelia, and in Central Asia.
Just as the peasant revolt spread geographically, it grew numerically, becoming a genuine mass movement. Entire armies appeared. By the end of 1920 Makhno's army in the Ukraine was 40,000-50,000 strong. The peasant army led by Antonov in the Tambov and Voronezh regions numbered 50,000 in January 1921. An informational report from the Bolshevik party's regional committee in the Kuban area spoke of the formation of "full-scale
rebel armies" there in the spring of 1921. In western Siberia, the Ishim District (uezd) alone had 60,000 peasant rebels, and there were peasants fighting throughout the region, in the provinces of Chelyabinsk, Ekaterinburg, Tyumen, Tobolsk, and elsewhere. The "First Army of Justice," led by Sapozhkov, active along the Volga, had 1,800 bayonets, 900 sabers, 10 machine guns, and 4 artillery pieces.159 By comparison, the White armies in the period of February 1—15, 1919, had 85,000 men on the southern front, 140,000 on the eastern front, 104,000 on the western front, 12,500 in northern Russia, and 7,500 in the Northern Caucasus.160
The tactics of the peasant fighters varied according to local conditions, their material resources, and the talents of their commanders. Makhno and Antonov favored guerrilla warfare, sudden attacks and speedy retreats. Perfect knowledge of the terrain and, above all, the support of most of the peasants allowed the rebels to "swim like fish in the sea" and assured the success of these tactics. The enemy was furious and denounced the guerrillas because they would not "engage in open battle, face to face, but resorted instead to sneak attacks, like bandits and thieves."161 In other areas the peasant armies did engage in open combat, laying siege to cities and taking many. In February 1921 peasant units in the lower Volga region took Kamyshin, and in March Khvalynsk.162 At the same time Siberian peasant armies took Tobolsk and Kokchetav and occupied all seven districts of Tyumen Province, four districts of Omsk Province and Kurgan District in Chelyabinsk Province. They laid siege to Ishim, Yalutorovsk, and Kurgan and reached the approaches of Akmolinsk and Agbasar.163
Operational command of the campaigns against the peasants went to the most prominent military leaders of the Red Army, including the commander- in-chief, Sergei Kamenev, two commanders of fronts, Tukhachevsky and Frunze, and such commanders of armies as Budyonny, Yakir, Fedko, Tyu- lenev, and Uborevich. Just as under Catherine the Great the best-known generals were sent in pursuit of Pugachev, in 1921 the Red commanders who had won the greatest fame in battle with the Whites were assigned to hunt down Antonov, Makhno, Sapozhkov, and the other peasant chieftains.
Tukhachevsky, who a moment before had been knocking at the gates of Western Europe, took charge of operations against the Antonov rebellion. In May 1921 he had under his command 35,000 bayonets, 10,000 swords, several hundred machine guns, and 60 cannon. The latest in military technology was available for his use: armored cars and airplanes. Tukhachevsky was issued orders that said: 'The task of eradicating these bands must not be thought of as a more or less prolonged operation, but as a serious and urgent military mission, a campaign, even a war."164
Antonov's comrades did not leave behind a history of their movement written from their own point of view. All the leaders of the movement were killed. All that is known of the rebellion comes from official Soviet sources.
Antonov himself, a Socialist Revolutionary from Tambov, had spent many years in prison before the revolution. He first came out against Bolshevik policies in August 1918. In the spring of 1919 he began a systematic struggle against the local authorities in the Tambov region. In 1920 the Tambov peasants refused to accept the policy of confiscation any longer, a policy enforced by the cruelest methods. Its harshness can be guessed from the following tactful admissions in a circular addressed to all provincial food supply committees by the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets: "Requisitions, which are a burdensome obligation to the state, are carried out by persuasion and by force. But there are many cases in which force has been applied in illegal and unacceptable ways." The circular, dated February 23, 1921, added that "violations of revolutionary legality" had by that time become a regular part of "the work of the food supply system."165 Rebelling against this system, the peasants joined Antonov. "In the Tambov District the following percentages of the population have joined the bandits: in the village of Aleksandrovka, 25 percent; the village of Afanasyevka, 30 percent; Khitrovo and Pavlodarovo, 40 percent. ... In some villages of Kirsanov District more than 80 percent of the male population belong to the outlaw bands."166
No Soviet historian has yet claimed that the number of kulaks in Tambov Province ever reached 80 percent, or even 25 percent. Antonov's was an army of peasants, not kulaks. The full military might of the Soviet Republic was thrown against this army. A Central Interdepartmental Commission for the Struggle Against Banditry was formed, including representatives from the party's Central Committee, the government's Council of Labor and Defense, the Cheka, even the Commissariat of Posts and Telegraph. The head of the commission was Efraim Sklyansky, deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic.167
In the war against the peasants not only were regular military units used, the rebel movements were widely infiltrated by agents. A retired Chekist has described how Antonov's command staff was penetrated this way.168 No less important, however, were the "administrative measures." First of all, hostages were taken—people who would be shot if any rebel units appeared in the given area. Anyone who "harbored bandits" or their families would also be shot.169 After March 1921 the families of "bandits" began to be deported from Tambov Province. In June the commission to combat banditry found it necessary, "although most of the bands in Tambov Province have been smashed and the kulaks have come to understand the power of the
Soviet government," to deport from the province "all persons who were involved in any way with banditry, including some rail workers." In 1929, Kalinin recalled the Antonov rebellion. It had been necessary, he said, to deport to the north of Russia "the villages most seriously infected with banditism." In other words, entire villages were deported. "Many peasants in Tambov and Voronezh provinces," Kalinin recalled, "took part in that struggle between Soviet power and the old world."170 It was not by accident, incidentally, that Kalinin was discussing the subject of mass repression against the peasants in 1929. That year a new phase began in "the struggle between Soviet power and the old world"—forced collectivization and "de- kulakization."