The Peasants Rise Up Against The Bolsheviks - The Russian Civil War(s) 1920 I THE GREAT WAR 1920

this episode of the great war is sponsored by curiosity Street go to curiosity's dream.com slash the Great War and sign up for one year for $19.99 and if you do you'll also get access to nebula where you can find creators like the Great War ad-free you can find out more in the video description or at the end of this video it's June 1920 and general angles counter-revolutionary white forces have broken out of the Crimea while all across Russia the peasants are now rising against the Bolsheviks it's the Russian civil wars [Applause] [Music] hi I'm Jesse Alexander and welcome to the great war where we're still filming here in our pandemic lockdown studio in my living room now by the summer of 1920 the main conflict in the Russian civil wars between the revolutionary Red Bolsheviks and the counter revolutionary whites was coming to an end even as the Bolsheviks and whites were fighting to the bitter end in 1920 another aspect of the Russian civil wars began to flare up even more because 100 years ago the peasants in Russia's countryside began to rise against the Bolsheviks so in this episode were going to cover the events of the Russian civil wars during the course of 1920 let's start with the whites who were trying and failing to reverse the revolution and reestablish some form of the old order in Russia by early 1920 the white movement had been for all intents and purposes defeated in the far north the Allied intervention forces had left and the last whites evacuated from our hangars in February in the East and Siberia supreme leader Admiral Kolchak had been beaten on the battlefield and then executed in early February in 1920 and once Bolshevik forces had penetrated east of Lake Baikal they paused and shifted their troops to the south to face the whites and to the west to face the poles in southern Russia the Red Army was facing the white General Anton Denikin's armed forces of South Russia which has been forced across the dawn river in January Denis can now desperately tried to rally the white cause including an attempt to repair relations with the Cossacks now there were several different groups of Cossacks who'd briefly had independent states in 1918 but these were largely opposed by de Nika now offered concessions but it was too little too late the Cossack army of the Cubana was in the process of disintegrating and morale was extremely low to make matters worse for de Nikken the British who had supplied him with most of his heavy weaponry were essentially withdrawing their support there was even trouble amongst the white generals themselves in what became known as the generals revolution one of the nickens main critics with general peel Tov Rangel who wrote the nican a scathing letter after he'd been dismissed from his command and critiqued everything his commander had done Daniken responded in kind you were doing everything you can to undermine the government and bring on disintegration there was a time when suffering from a grave illness you said that this was God's punishment for your inordinate ambitiousness may he forgive you now for the harm you have done to the Russian cause the weakening white army was also struck by typhus and other diseases and could barely care for its sick and wounded as one British observer recalled probably no Army has ever been so handicapped from a medical point of view the Red Army facing the whites was also suffering badly from typhus but was generally in a better position than their opponents the red troops were under the command of 26-year old general Mikhail Tukhachevsky who had about 70,000 combat troops under his command as opposed to just 37,000 whites the Red Army had also begun to experiment with a new type of formation massed cavalry in late 1919 the Red Army had created the first cavalry army under the famous commander simulazioni this allowed them to mass cavalry at critical points in numbers that the whites simply could not match war commissar Leon Trotsky summed up this new approach with the slogan proletarians to horse but in actual fact most of the red cavalry consisted of Cossacks and peasants not workers the Red Army attacked across the dawn river in January but at first it was beaten back with heavy losses a white counter-attack was short-lived and the Red Army broke through on Denikin's flank in February and advanced along the rail line towards yekaterina dot the white troops and civilian refugees pulled back and disarray towards the sea and the only remaining white port of Navarra sisk one white officer recalled the chaos the exodus of the Russian people reminded me of biblical times Nomura seas became the scene of great suffering as tens of thousands waited for Allied ships to take them away to the relative safety of the Crimea or to Constantinople one witness recalled the scene it was freezing ly cold bodies lay in all sorts of corners while the hospitals were besieged by sick frozen and hungry people for whom nothing could be done so that those stricken with typhus remained just where they happened to fall the criminals of the underworld came out and in the confusion preyed on the elderly and defenseless young girls some of high birth prostituted themselves to earn enough money to pay the passage for themselves and their families it was a sick desperate terrified City this disastrous defeat in South Russia spelled the end of Daniken's leadership of the white cause and he recalled his bitter rival Randall who took control in April 19-20 Rangel was under no illusions about the desperation of the white cars and therefore tried to show more political flexibility under the motto with the devil but for Russia and against the Bolsheviks he put out feelers towards the poles the Georgians the Ukrainians and even hermanos anarchist peasants but by this time white political capital had been spent and there was no interest from other parties in a lying with the whites in Crimea vengo created a new government of South Russia in order to as he put it in act leftist policies with rightist hands but this existed only on paper and in practice he still functioned as a military dictator the Wrangell still had about 35,000 soldiers and the Red Army had shifted most of its forces west to fight the poles so in June he planned a breakout from the Crimea to coincide with a new law on land reform to gain peasant support white forces moved north into the Teredo province pushed back the weak red 13th army and made it as far north as of Orissa and as far east as Mariupol there was even an expeditionary force of 4500 men under general rule a guy sent across the Sea of Azov to the kuben to link up with white partisans but both of these offensives would eventually fail the expedition to the Cubana lasted just three weeks and in Ukraine the peasants yet again refused to rally to the white cause and the British were also continuing their policy of withdrawing their support for the whites because they wanted to normalize their relations with Bolshevik Russia and they made this plain to general Van Gogh if you attack His Majesty's Government will be unable to concern themselves any further with the fate of your army the French did give an angle some symbolic support but this had little practical effect and in October the poles and Bolsheviks signed an armistice which meant that the Red Army could shift its forces from the west to face but angle in Ukraine the whites were now isolated and weak but even so Franco was able to resist the first Bolshevik attacks but the Red Army was organized and it was now under the command of general mica influenza but even so Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin felt that the preparations were going too slowly and criticized his commander-in-chief general communist it turns out that all the calculations of the main commander-in-chief are not worth a damn and are changed weekly like those of an ignoramus boo Tony's first cavalry army was one of the formations moved to Ukraine from the polish front in the West but it was slowed by low morale fatigue because of defeats that had suffered at the hands of the poles and the time that it took committing pogroms against the local Jewish population on route by October the Red Army had five armies totaling one hundred and thirty three thousand men including some of Mac nose anarchist units as against thirty seven thousand remaining whites the Bolshevik plan was to cut off the white armies north of the pedicle isthmus which would make an easier defensive position for wrangles army but I'm gonna do this but nonetheless wanted to hold the line as long as possible in order to bring in the grain harvest since hunger was still an ever-present danger the red attack began on October 28th and the whites were outnumbered and pushed back 20,000 were captured but the rest did manage to escape to the Isthmus and set up a new defensive line general Franza was surprised at the defense I am amazed that the enormous energy of the enemy's resistance there is no doubt that he fought more fiercely and stubbornly than any other army could have on the third anniversary of the October Revolution on November 7th the Red Army outflanked the white positions by crossing a small shallow sea from the offered peace terms including the right of emigration for white commanders but Rangel refused white forces pulled back towards the coast and the final evacuation began by November 16th 146 thousand white soldiers and civilian evacuees had been taken to Allied occupied Constantinople Hungarian Bolshevik Bella Kuhn who you might remember as the leader of the failed Hungarian Soviet republic in 1919 was now put in charge of the Crimean Revolutionary Committee which according to white claims carried out tens of thousands of executions although the exact number is impossible to establish from now on old Russia would exist only in exile and scattered bits and pieces for now in the Far East now at the same time as the whites were being thrown out of Russia by the Bolsheviks a new faction in the Russian civil wars was beginning to become more prominent this was the greens and this is one of the reasons why historians sometimes talk about Russian civil wars in the plural because the war between the Bolsheviks and the greens was quite a different affair there was no nationally coordinated green movement instead in different provinces at different times peasants rose up against the Bolsheviks who they resented for their policy in the countryside despite the Bolshevik rhetoric about the Russia of workers and peasants the peasants actually preferred the social Revolutionary Party because its land policy was in line with peasant aspirations in 1917 and 1918 which was to keep the land that they had seized from the landowners the peasants wanted to use their traditional village councils to administer the land that had been redistributed and in 1919 and 1920 even though the Bolsheviks had suppressed the social Revolutionary Party they allowed the peasants to keep their land and so the peasants basically tolerated the Bolsheviks more than they did the whites who represented the hated old order of land owning aristocrats but as time went by and the civil war raged peasant bitterness and resentment against Bolsheviks grew exponentially now the main reason for this was the Bolshevik economic policy which we often refer to as war communists even though there's a debate as to whether this was really a coherent policy are just a series of responses to different crises in any case one element of war communism that drove the peasants crazy was the prod Armia or the food supply arm which was Red Army units sent into the countryside to requisition grain the red army seized grain and livestock from the peasants in order to feed itself and the hungry workers in the cities who were more likely to support the Bolsheviks they also forcibly conscripted peasants into the Red Army even the Bolsheviks themselves were forced to admit that their policies were alienating the majority of the population in general the Soviet regime was in the eyes of the majority of the peasants identified with flying visits by comma SARS or plenipotentiaries who were valiant at giving orders and went around imprisoning the representatives of the local organs of authority for the non-fulfillment of frequently quite absurd requirements the Bolsheviks began a propaganda campaign to turn the peasants against each other by vilifying the so called kulaks or the wealthier peasants and giving power to poor peasants but this policy had limited success since peasant culture resisted intrusions from outsiders the happiness of the village consists in not having any officials about trying to see how their orders are carried out the village therefore began to lead a completely independent life as if all this wasn't enough to put the peasants in a difficult situation life in Russia during the Civil War was nasty brutish and short this where many peasants had moved to find work were now extremely short of food harvests had been falling since 1916 but the harvest of 1918 was actually good it's just that it couldn't be transported to the cities because of the wrecked transportation system the harvests of 1919 and 1920 however were terrible and I'm gonna check my notes here for a few statistics about how much the Russian population was suffering as a result of this famine in the province of Viet cough for example the grain harvest fell by 86 percent between 1916 and 1921 in the cities between 50 and 70 percent of Russian women were no longer menstruating because of malnutrition as a result the peasants fled the cities back to their home villages which led to a depopulation of Petrograd by 66 percent and Moscow lost 33 percent of its population and many of the peasants who fled from the cities back to the countryside brought disease with that especially typhus which raged throughout the country and killed hundreds of thousands in the Samara province for example the rate of death from disease increased tenfold from 1918 to 1919 and 1920 in these kind of circumstances the peasants tried to get what comforts they could from the manners of the landowners that they had seized back in 1917 as Victor Serge recalled from the leather upholstery of sofas one could make passable shoes from the tapestries clothing I myself burned the collected laws of the Empire as fuel for a neighboring family a task which gave me considerable satisfaction and the 1 million red army deserters roaming the countryside certainly did not make the situation any easier all this led to a series of growing peasant revolts as Bolshevik power increased and pressure on the countryside did as well peasants tried to resist by planting only as much grain as they needed refusing to give it up to the Bolsheviks and even by killing their own livestock rather than having them seized by the food supply army as the workers in the cities grew hungrier the Bolsheviks put more pressure on the peasants and the cycle continued the first major peasant revolts broke out in 1918 behind the Red Army's front where requisitioning was most common but by the end of 1921 in all about two to three million peasants had participated in armed revolt against the Bolsheviks and about half a million had been arrested by the Bolsheviks secret police the Cheka there was a major peasant revolt in spring 1919 known as the Chopin war which took place in the regions of Simba and Samara but it was really in 1920 that the peasant revolts began to shake the entire country the peasants had wanted a revolution in 1917 but it was not the revolution that the Bolsheviks were putting into place by 1919 and 1920 historians Alexis better lovak and victim Danilov put the situation this way in the fight between Bolshevism and the peasant movement the armies confronting each other were of the same composition peasants fighting under the same red banner for the same slogan victory to the real revolution but they understood the meaning of this revolution in different ways the first major peasant revolt of 1920 began in February in the region of Ophir where peasants had been arrested for refusing to give up their grain to the Red Army this was known as the pitchfork uprising because many of the participants used farm tools instead of rifles about forty to fifty thousand peasant rebels took part but were crushed in march by ten thousand well-armed Red Army troops with artillery and armoured trains by the end of the revolt about 3,000 peasants had been killed an even larger uprising known as The Selfish Cove uprising aged between the volga and the Urals between July and September 1920 it was led by Alexander Safarov who was a social revolutionary sympathizer and had previously been a Red Army officer but since he hesitated to use his troops to oppress the peasants and seize grain from them he was dismissed from his command but instead of accepting his dismissal he instead rallied eventually 6,000 troops who deserted the Red Army and began to resist the Bolsheviks he named his army the Red Army of Justice and even though most of the rank-and-file soldiers were not particularly ideologically motivated there was a clear political program behind his movement Bolsheviks should be removed from the councils there should be an end to the requisitioning of grain the Cheka should be abolished and free trade should be restored suppose cough adopted the slogan soviets without communists and even though his forces were able to capture several significant towns they were eventually crushed by the Red Army that fall one of the biggest and most important peasant revolts of the entire Russian Civil War was the tempo of rebellion which was named after the province of Tambov in which it first broke out but the revolt soon spread to the neighboring provinces of piensa Saratov and Baron yesh in Soviet historiography this revolt is often called Antonovs rabble or Antonov Shiina because of the leader Alexandre Antonov who had ties to the social Revolutionary Party which has been helping the peasants in the region to resist grain seizures since 1918 the social revolutionaries had joined with the peasants to create the union of toiling peasants even though the exact role of the social Revolutionary Party in the union is still debated the revolt broke out in August 1920 when a Bolshevik requisitioning unit visited the same village twice and soon spread like wildfire by the fall even the Bolsheviks themselves had to admit that they had lost control of the region bands now cover practically the entire district Soviet authority has ceased to exist the union of toiling peasants was not leading just a disorganized peasant revolt it had a coherent political program based on peasant demands and social revolutionary ideas these included the re-establishment of civil liberties and the Free Press the Equality of all citizens land redistribution to the peasants the privatization of small industry worker control of production self-determination for minorities and the re-establishment of democracy and the elected Constituent Assembly now the peasants union used the standard ways of the day in order to try to legitimize its power and even borrowed some of these symbols and methods from the Bolsheviks they had a command hierarchy they had a political program they set up various committees and they even had a group of peasant officials who wore leather jackets like the hated checker and kept lists of loyal households villagers could vote on whether to join the Union but were sometimes pressured to do so and produce statements like this one we declare to our cursed Bolshevik enemies on Russian land there will not remain one single communist the peasant Union even introduced its own grain quotas fought under a red banner and called each other comrade or tovarisch the Bolsheviks of course referred to the peasants as criminals and bandits the peasant army in Tambov numbered somewhere between twenty and forty thousand men and was made up of red army deserters and poorly armed peasant militias using farm tools instead of rifles at first the red army detachments in the area were taken by surprise as they only had about 3,000 troops in the province as most of the Red Army's forces were in the West fighting against the poles but once the armistice was signed with Poland in October 1920 the Red Army crackdown was not long in coming and even included the use of poison gas General tohe cheves key took control of the region and eventually had about 130,000 Red Army troops under his command now he adopted a policy of military occupation with mobile pursuit of armed peasant groups rather than a traditional campaign the revolt was eventually completely snuffed out by the middle of 1921 but not before up to a maximum claim of about 240,000 peasants had lost their lives many of them in Bolshevik internment camps now the peasant revolts that I've mentioned in this episode were not the only ones raging across Russia in the Civil War years in fact a checkered report in 1920 concluded that only the regions around Petrograd and Moscow could be considered calm the anarchist peasant rebels of nestor makhno were finally defeated in November 1920 and in the lawless expanses of Western Siberia and even larger peasant revolt was brewing which we will cover in a future episode so as 1920 came to an end the Bolsheviks had all but defeated the whites and all that the whites had achieved according to some historians was helping the Allied powers set up the cordon sanitaire and perhaps helping the poles achieve more success in the war against the Bolsheviks by distracting the Red Army from the Western Front the green peasant movements were also losing to the Bolsheviks even though the resistance in the countryside continued and the peasants were losing because they could not coordinate their activities across the country and they could not match the military might of the growing Red Army even so the peasant revolts had shaken the Bolshevik regime to its core and it would soon think of a new economic policy for the countryside thanks again to curiosity stream for sponsoring this episode curiosity stream is a stream service offering you thousands of high-quality documentaries for just $19.99 a year when you sign up with curiosity stream comm slash the Great War you also get nebula bundled in with your account on nebula you can watch a whole variety of creators like us ad free and support us at the same time there's a regional content on nebula as well which you won't see on YouTube for example we're releasing our documentary series 16 days in Berlin on nebula the most detailed documentary about the Battle of Berlin one of the last big battles of world war ii and for several reasons we wouldn't be able to upload it here due to youtube's content restrictions so go to curiosity stream comm slash the Great War and sign up for one year for $19.99 as usual all the sources we use for this episode can be found in the video description below and if you want to support our channel which we would very much appreciate you can find a link to our patreon page in the video description as well I'm Jesse Alexander and this is the Great War 1920 a production of real time history and the only YouTube History Channel whose comments section can sometimes feel a little bit like a peasant pitchfork uprising you

Channel: The Great War

Views: 165,754

Keywords: History, World War 1, WW1, First World War, Documentary, Documentary Series, The Great War, Indy Neidell, 1919, Interwar Period, 1920s, Educational, Russian Civil War, Revolution, Interbelum, Russia, Bolsheviks, Peasants, Uprising, Rebellion, Tambov, White Movement

Id: oLx_4cQpzA8

Length: 28min 38sec (1718 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/1948TheCivilWar]

Excellent episode - very rarely spoken about topic of the Green and Black Army in Russian Civil War since people mostly think that it was just Reds vs Whites which couldn't be further from the truth

[u/flobota]

Our latest episode about the peasant rebellions in the Russian Civil War is out. With a bit of luck it was the 2nd to last episode Jesse needed to film in his living room in Vienna. When the pandemic lockdown hit, we improvised a recording setup with his iPhone 11 and an external mic. Given these circumstances we did the best we could do keep bringing you videos every other week. Naturally, it's not what we usually delivered in picture and sound quality, but for us it was important to keep the show on since learning about the world 100 years ago is pretty important.

[u/WithAHelmet]

First time I heard of the Green Army was in my first semester of Russian in college. The Russian Club had a viewing of the classic Soviet movie Гори, гори, моя звезда (Shine, Shine my Star). The Green Army is the antagonist of the second half of the movie. The movie doesn't go into their politics, and when I asked my professor about them all she said was they were "Cossack bandits".