Tukhachevsky, commander of the Tambov punitive expedition, summed up the experience of pacification as follows:
The Sovietization of the centers of rebellion in Tambov Province followed a definite progression, district by district. After troops were brought into a given district, we would concentrate maximum force there—the army, the Cheka, and the party and Soviet apparatuses. While the military units were busy wiping out the bands based in the district and establishing revolutionary committees, the Cheka was catching any surviving bandits. After Soviet power was consolidated in one district, all our forces were transferred to the next.171
The most important element in pacification 'Tambov style" was not the destruction of the armed rebel units but the eradication of the "spirit of rebellion" after armed resistance had been overcome. This task was entrusted to the Cheka, which worked hand in glove with the party committees. On April 4, 1921, the Central Committee sent a letter to the party province committees with the following instructions: "The province committees of the party and the Cheka units in each province must constitute a single whole in the work of preventing or suppressing counterrevolutionary outbreaks in the affected area."172 It may be assumed that the idea of fusing the Cheka and the party committees into "a single whole" was a development of Lenin's thought that "a good Communist has the qualities of a good member of the Cheka."173
The outbreak of peasant war was explained away very simply: it had been instigated by White Guards and Anglo-French imperialists. On September 8, 1921, Pravda reported that Antonov had "received his orders from abroad, from the Central Committee of the Cadet party." The Cheka reported to the Council of People's Commissars: "It has now become clear that in Ryazan, Tula, Kaluga, Smolensk, Tambov, and Tver provinces, uprisings were organized according to a general plan with the cooperation of Anglo-French capital."174 An awareness of the aims and demands of the peasant rebels, however, is sufficient grounds for rejecting this conspiracy theory out of hand. In May 1920 a congress of the working peasants of Tambov Province adopted an insurrectional program calling for: the overthrow of Soviet power and destruction of the Communist party; the convening of a Constituent Assembly on the basis of universal, equal, direct suffrage and a secret ballot; the establishment of a provisional government, composed of representatives of the parties and associations that had fought the Bolsheviks, to rule until the Constituent Assembly was held; the land to go to those who work it; both Russian and foreign capital to be allowed to help revive the country's economy.175
The peasant rebels east of the Volga also called for the replacement of Soviet power by a Constituent Assembly, universal suffrage, denationalization of the land, an end to grain requisitioning, free trade, abolition of collective farms, the transfer of power on the local level to "councils of three" or "councils of five" elected by general assemblies. They demanded recognition for all parties except the monarchist Black Hundreds and the dissolution of all institutions of the Bolshevik party as "harmful to the working people."176
In western Siberia the peasants demanded the institution of "genuine popular sovereignty"—peasant dictatorship, convening of the Constituent Assembly, denationalization of industry (for "the nationalization of factories and plants at base destroys the country's economic life"), and egalitarian land tenure. An appeal by the Tobolsk Command of March 6, 1921, proclaimed: 'The Communists say that there can be no Soviet power without Communists. Why? Can't we elect nonparty members to the soviets? Long live popular Soviet power! Down with the Communists! Long live the complete freedom of the people!"177
The best known and most fully worked out program of peasant revolt was that of the Makhno movement. Many of its participants, including Makhno himself, wrote their memoirs, and a history of the movement by one of its members exists.
Kubanin, an authority on the Makhno movement, describes the reasoning of the Ukrainian peasants as follows:
Soviet power gave the land to the peasants and raised the slogan, "Steal back what was stolen." This was the work of the Bolsheviks. But the government that carried out grain requisitioning, that refused to give all of the large landholdings to the peasants, and that organized state farms and communes—that is the government of "the commune," the government not of the Bolsheviks but of the Communists.
The peasants frequently expressed this attitude with the formula: "We're for the Bolsheviks, but against the Communists."178
In June 1918 Makhno had a long talk with Lenin and tried to explain to him the attitude of the Ukrainian peasants. The peasant masses, Makhno said, saw the revolution as "a way of freeing themselves from the yoke of the landlord and the wealthy kulak but also from the servants of the rich, the political and administrative functionaries who rule from the top down." In his memoirs Makhno writes: "Lenin asked me the same question three times and was amazed each time at the answer," because the way the peasants understood the slogan "power to the local soviets" was not the way the Bolshevik leader understood it. For the peasants it meant that "the entire government must correspond in all ways directly to the will and consciousness of the working people themselves." Lenin objected: "The peasants of your area are infected with anarchism."179
The political label Lenin sought to paste over this reality missed the main point: the peasants were willing to follow anyone, be it the SR Antonov, the "anarchocommunist" Makhno, the peasant chiefs who belonged to no party, or the Bolsheviks themselves when they gave the peasants the land and said "Steal back what was stolen." They would follow anyone if they thought it would lead to land and liberty.
The peasants accepted the revolution, interpreting it their own way, but refused to accept the Bolshevik regime.
FROM PEASANT WAR TO KRONSTADT
To Lenin, the innumerable peasant uprisings engulfing the country did not seem reason enough for a change of policy, for abandoning the attempt to build communism immediately. The peasant war did not threaten the urban centers. Its isolated hotbeds could be extinguished one by one. It was not a serious threat to the government. But the revolt of the Kronstadt sailors, as Lenin put it, lit up reality like a flash of lightning.
In late 1920 the workers, whose living conditions were growing constantly worse, began to express their discontent more and more loudly. Strikes broke out in Moscow and other industrial centers, but in Petrograd, the "cradle of the revolution," they assumed especially large dimensions. The strikers were declared not to be workers, since real workers would not go on strike against a "workers' state." "Do you really think these are workers striking?" asked a member of the Petrograd Executive Committee. "There are no real workers left in Petrograd: they are at the front, or in food supply work, and so on. These people are scum, self-seekers, shopkeepers hiding away in the factories while the war is on."180
A decree of January 22, 1921, reducing the bread ration for workers by one third, was the straw that broke the camel's back.181 The strikes and demonstrations that began involved the workers of the Trubochny Metals Factory, the Patronny and Baltic plants, and giant Putilov Factory, and many other Petrograd factories. The demonstrations were dispersed by Communist officer cadets (kursanty), because regular units were no longer considered reliable. The situation in Petrograd in February 1921 was remarkably similar to that of February 1917. Red Army soldiers were not issued boots for fear that if they left their barracks they would join the protesters. On February 24 the party's Petrograd Committee announced the formation of an emergency Defense Council. The city was placed under martial law, and mass arrests began. At the same time extra rations were distributed to workers and soldiers: one tin of preserved meat and one pound of bread daily.182