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.
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.
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.