Traveling around the Tambov region and collecting materials for our research, we are surprised at how steadily the historical memory of the people is preserved. People, especially in the outback, remember everything. And this is despite all the futile attempts of the authorities to erase the milestones of Tambov history that are unsightly for them. We are talking about the peasant uprising of the beginning of the last century. The local authorities are even afraid to perpetuate this tragedy of the Tambov peasantry in a normal monument.
With the help of Wikipedia, let's briefly recall our history. Under the Bolsheviks, the peasants in the Tambov region, as well as throughout Russia, were deprived of any political and economic rights, banned the trade in bread and began to take it by force. The relative proximity of the Tambov province to the center and its remoteness from the fronts predetermined the wide scope of the activities of the food detachments, which caused strong discontent among the local peasant population. The population of the Tambov region responded to the communists with active armed resistance. In 1918, up to 40 thousand people took part in the uprisings and partisan movement against the Bolsheviks, food detachments and commanders. The position of the authorities was complicated by the frequent transitions of the Red Army (often with weapons in their hands) to the side of the partisans. After the capture of Tambov on August 18, 1919, Lieutenant General Mamontov handed over to the Tambov partisans a huge amount of weapons captured in the city. This largely contributed to the duration and scope of the partisan and insurgent movement in the Tambov region. In June 1920, at a meeting of the commanders of partisan groups and local self-defense units, it was decided to combine all forces into two armies (1st and 2nd insurgents) for better coordination of actions.
YouTube video
In 1920, the Tambov region was struck by a drought, and only 12 million poods of grain were harvested. Meanwhile, the surplus was not reduced, amounting to 11.5 million pounds. The uprising broke out on August 15, 1920 in the village of Khitrovo, Tambov district, where the local STK committee disarmed the food detachment. On August 19, 1920, in several villages at once (Kamenka, Tambov district, Tugolukovo, Borisoglebsky district), the peasants refused to hand over bread and, with the support of the partisans, destroyed food detachments, local communists and security officers. On the same day, in the village of Afanasyevka, Tambov district, several small rebel groups united, and the uprising began to spread rapidly. Soon the uprising spread to the territories of the Tambov, Kirsanovsky, Borisoglebsky, Morshansky and Kozlovsky counties of the Tambov province, as well as neighboring counties of the Saratov and Voronezh provinces. The rebels liquidated the organs of Soviet power, destroyed its representatives and military garrisons, and took power into their own hands.
Footage from the filming of the film "Once upon a time there was a woman"
On August 21, 1920, at a meeting of the Tambov Provincial Committee of the RCP (b), an emergency operational headquarters was created, a state of siege was introduced in the province, but control over the development of events had already been lost. Although the troops of the Tambov province managed to inflict significant losses on the rebels, the uprising acquired a massive and protracted character. On August 30, the provincial committee described the situation as "extremely serious", the communists were mobilized: 500 people were transferred to the barracks. On August 31, the chairman of the Tambov provincial executive committee, A. G. Schlikhter, led a punitive detachment against the rebels, but was defeated and fled to Tambov. In October 1920, Lenin instructed F.E. Dzerzhinsky, E.M. Sklyansky and V.S. Kornev "to speed up the defeat of Antonovism." By October 15, 1920, due to the mobilization of local reserves, attached units of the VOKhR and ChON, the number of troops was increased to 4447 people. with 22 machine guns and 5 guns.On November 14, 1920, the rebels decided to unite all their forces under a single command. They created the United Partisan Army of the Tambov Territory (which was headed by the Knight of St. George, Lieutenant Pyotr Tokmakov, originally from the peasants of the village of Inokovka, Kirsanov district) as part of three armies (1st, 2nd and 3rd insurgents), formed their political agencies on the basis of the surviving Socialist-Revolutionaries organizations and own political organization, Union of the working peasantry. The political program of the uprising was built on a democratic basis under the slogans of overthrowing the Bolshevik dictatorship, convening a Constituent Assembly, restoring political and economic freedoms. In January 1921, at the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), with the participation of F.E. Dzerzhinsky, V.S. Korneva, S.S. Kamenev and the leadership of the Tambov province again discussed the course of the fight against Antonovism.
The uprising reached its maximum scope by February 1921, when the number of rebels reached 50 thousand people, united in two armies (consisting of 14 infantry, 5 cavalry regiments and 1 separate brigade with 25 machine guns and 5 guns). The rebels defeated 60 state farms, took control of almost the entire Tambov province (only cities remained in the hands of the Bolsheviks), paralyzed traffic along the Ryazan-Ural railway, and successfully repelled attempts by Soviet troops to invade the territory of the uprising, inflicting heavy losses on them. By this time, under the command of A.V. Pavlov, there were 11,602 people. with 136 machine guns and 18 guns. Then, on February 6, 1921, the Plenipotentiary Commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, headed by V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, was sent to the province, which became the highest body in the fight against the uprising. On February 12, 1921, on the basis of the decision of the People's Commissariat of Food, on the territory of the Tambov province, the food distribution was stopped, and in March 1921, the X Congress of the RCP (b) decided to cancel the food distribution, instead of which a fixed food tax was introduced. An amnesty was declared for ordinary rebels (subject to the surrender of weapons and information about the whereabouts of commanders). The measures taken were widely covered in the press and propaganda materials (a total of 77 proclamations, leaflets, posters and brochures were issued), and they played a certain role in revising part of the peasantry of their position towards Soviet power.YouTube video
On February 21, 1921, in order No. 21 for the 1st rebel army, A.S. Antonov notes: "among partisan detachments fighting spirit begins to weaken, shameful cowardice is observed. Nevertheless, the battles continued with varying success: for example, on April 11, 1921, a 5,000-strong Antonov detachment defeated the garrison in Rasskazovo, while an entire battalion of Red Army soldiers was captured. The situation changed dramatically with the end of the Soviet-Polish war and the defeat of the Russian army of Wrangel in the Crimea. This allowed the Bolsheviks to release additional forces of the Red Army against the rebels. In the period from March 21 to April 5, 1921, a "fortnight" of voluntary appearance was announced for ordinary participants in the uprising.guilty.province M. N. Tukhachevsky, his deputy - I. P. Uborevich, chief of staff - N. E. Kakurin. G. I. Kotovsky was also sent to the Tambov region, G. G. Yagoda and V. V. Ulrikh were sent from the Cheka. Tukhachevsky received a directive - to liquidate the Tambov uprising no later than within a month. The number of Soviet troops in the Tambov province increased rapidly and by the end of May 1921 amounted to 43 thousand Red Army soldiers (35 thousand bayonets and 8 thousand sabers with 463 machine guns and 63 artillery pieces). The Central Committee of the RCP (b) additionally mobilized 300 communists from Moscow, Petrograd and Tula to help the Tambov provincial party organization. The workers of the carriage workshops built an “armored gun” consisting of an armored locomotive, three armored cars and two cargo platforms with installed weapons: one 76-mm gun and three machine guns. The "armored train" was at the disposal of the transport Cheka and was used to ensure security along the railway line.
On May 20, 1921, the main command of the partisans, the civil administration and the population of the surrounding villages and villages proclaimed the "Provisional Democratic Republic of the Tambov Partisan Territory" with rights until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. The rebels nominated an active member of the STK and one of the leaders as the head of the republic of the partisan region partisan movement Shendyapin. On May 25, 1921, a separate cavalry brigade of G. I. Kotovsky defeated and dispersed two rebel regiments under the command of Selyansky, who was mortally wounded.
In the battles that lasted from May 28 to June 7, 1921, in the area of Inzhavino station, Soviet troops (G. I. Kotovsky's cavalry brigade, 14th separate cavalry brigade, 15th Siberian cavalry division, 7th Borisoglebsk cavalry courses) under the general command of Uborevich defeated the 2nd army of the rebels (under the command of A. S. Antonov). After that, the 1st rebel army (under the command of A. Boguslavsky) evaded the "general battle". The initiative passed to the Soviet troops.
In total, up to 55 thousand military personnel of the Red Army were involved in the suppression of the Tambov uprising: 37.5 thousand bayonets, 10 thousand sabers, as well as 7 thousand military personnel in nine artillery brigades; 5 armored detachments, 4 armored trains, 6 armored aircraft, 2 air squadrons, cadets of the Moscow and Oryol infantry and Borisoglebsk cavalry courses. Not the last role in the defeat of the peasant revolt in the Tambov region was played by the use of poison gases (instruction of Tukhachevsky) and cruel repressive measures against the rebels, their families and fellow villagers. On June 11, 1921, the Plenipotentiary Commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee issued Order No. 171 "On the beginning of repressive measures against individual bandits and families hiding them."
It is clear that our local authorities are still afraid of this spontaneous outburst of indignation of citizens who are out of obedience, spontaneously destroying the old order. Wherever history is made, no matter what social foundations are broken and replaced by feudal or bourgeois or pseudo-socialist ones, such changes are always based on the interests of citizens and their contradictions, which allow or do not allow reforming the social order without bringing things to an explosion. In the event that those in power, for one reason or another, do not take into account the interests of the population, do not reform obsolete orders, the discontent of citizens accumulates, a movement of the masses begins, from which either a consciously organized revolution or a protest, an explosion, a riot deprived of a “guiding idea” can grow. .
It would be absurd to think that on the example of the Tambov region, when one or the other social order or the political system has become obsolete or has reached a dead end, when the people, the citizens are unbearable, when they are brought to the extreme point of despair, a revolution is necessarily carried out, deliberately sweeping away the obsolete order and establishing new ones, acceptable to the people, for the activated citizens. No, the Tambov story has not so unambiguous logic and not so simple solutions. It can be argued that there are two options, two fundamentally different lines of development, generated by the need and hopelessness of the situation, the despair of the masses. Each of them has logic in one case - spontaneous protest, irreconcilable nihilism and bloody rebellion; in the other, a meaningful confrontation, a liberation struggle and a social revolution.
Tambov abandoned village
Today, so that the extreme need and despair of the masses do not develop into the Antonov uprising, there must still be an understanding of what is happening, a “guiding idea”, there must be an organizing force capable of absorbing and accumulating the growing discontent of the people, ready to direct the spontaneous protest of the masses in the right direction and against the real enemies of progress, which is what the leading party is now trying to do. But not the crowd, but the people of Tambov - the creator of history, their interests, demands and actions determine social progress in our region. Moreover, if they say: “the people demand”, this does not mean at all that the whole people, all the people who make it up, demand. Often those in power hide behind the name of the Tambov people. The difference in the nature of the requirements, in their connection with deep needs community development, with the interests of the vast masses of the population After all, the people are an objective community of people, a decisive part of the population, whose actions are determined by the long-term deep interests of the masses of the population.
It must be borne in mind that the reasons that arouse a people to revolution and to revolt are not the same. The popular masses come to the revolutionary movement under the influence of long-term factors - the decline standard of living, the lack of political freedoms, and each participant has his own reasons that led him to the street. And if the enemy is found, there can be no doubt what the action of the rebels will be.
Considering the Antonov uprising, we must immediately note that economic development region is still more deformed than the all-Russian. This gives rise to the feeling that any division of power from above will unleash Pugachevism, that is, uncontrollable disorder. Now the same fear of a peasant revolt, destructive and nihilistic, has seized power. It is no coincidence that our society is now in such a position that these bodies and the main among them - the state power - began to serve the special interests of civil servants. From the servants of society, these organs have become its overlords. Life developed in the Tambov region in such a way that when performing the general functions of management necessary for the life of society, people intended for this formed a special branch of the division of labor within society and, thereby, acquired special interests that were different from the interests of those who authorized them to manage, became independent in relation to them, and under certain conditions rose above the whole society, pursuing their own selfish goals. This is the origin of the Tambov bureaucracy and its fear of popular unrest.
Abandoned Tambov village
Each of us, faced with the Tambov bureaucracy, noticed that this or that official does not show any personal interest in the essence of the matter (say, in the actual solution of housing
problems of citizens, to the issues of privatization of housing by citizens), but, bureaucratically delaying the solution of the issue, he never takes the blame: he always refers to this or that instruction, to these or other real problems of the management process, to the letter and spirit of laws, as a result which makes the bureaucrat's own idleness and indifference look like the soullessness of the state itself.
Other characteristic Tambov bureaucracy and bureaucracy - a negative attitude towards publicity, openness, the desire to monopolize knowledge of the management process, to do their job in secret. It is also very important that bureaucrats value not what is said, but who says it, i.e. not arguments justifying decisions, but the ranks and positions of those who express these decisions and thoughts: authority is the principle of knowledge of the bureaucracy, and the deification of authority is its way of thinking. Neither Marx, nor Lenin, nor modern political scientists saw the full danger of bureaucracy. Therefore, the hopes that after the next social upheaval the state will begin to wither away, and with it the social division of labor between the managers and the ruled, the main source of bureaucracy, will begin to disappear, are not justified.
After the October Revolution, the cancerous tumor of bureaucracy more and more deeply affected first the USSR, and later modern state where the party-state bureaucracy represents a “new class” that has usurped both political power and property. Life testified that the party-state bureaucracy, headed in the Soviet Union by I. Stalin, was advancing step by step to power and successfully entrenched in it now. After the August 1991 coup, when the Soviet party-state bureaucracy tried to restore its omnipotence, but suffered a crushing defeat, the democrats came to power, seeking to negotiate with the nomenklatura, creating their own bureaucratic structures and new problems in the fight against bureaucracy and bureaucracy.
It is the bureaucracy in the same Tambov that invariably represents the dominant force, regardless of the specific form of power. Those who used to be in the CPSU are now in UNITED RUSSIA. The form changes, the positions of the local bureaucracy remain unshakable, playing a role as a relatively autonomous filter and brake on political changes generated by representative democracy. Now, in a representative and parliamentary democracy, power is in the hands of the bureaucracy, which is called the administration.
When a single party simultaneously controls, as in the USSR the CPSU, and now UNITED RUSSIA, both the governing body of an organization and the organization itself, this only leads to the uniformity of speeches and stifles fruitful activity, since decisions are made elsewhere. As a result, people's energy is spent on competition within the party for promotion, which is the only real incentive. Today it is ridiculous to recall that back in 1920, Lenin and Trotsky stigmatized the Soviet bureaucracy, forgetting that they themselves contributed to the strengthening of its position (by placing the activities of all Soviet institutions under the control of the party, outlawing other parties, and then subordinating the parties and the state : their revolution gave rise to a new category of bureaucrats, the so-called apparatchiks. History teaches us nothing...
As we have already mentioned, the local authorities are afraid of any mention of the Antonov uprising. So, on the night of May 1, 2001 in Tambov, the monument to the fallen participants in the popular peasant uprising in the Tambov province was demolished and destroyed. Shortly before this, on the Tambov radio, Chantsev, a deputy of the regional Duma from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, announced that he would make every effort to destroy it. Residents of Tambov filed an application with the Tambov prosecutor's office to open a criminal case, with little hope that proper action would be taken and that the defilers would be found and brought to justice. The history of the installation of this monument began with the opening of a memorial plaque at the same place in 1999, but it stood for less than a month and was taken away by unknown people, who were guarded by the police. Then the inhabitants of Tambov and the region literally collected funds for a penny for a national monument to freedom fighters. The late well-known ophthalmologist surgeon Svyatoslav Fedorov also provided great assistance. He also established the anniversary badge “Alexander Antonov. In commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the peasant uprising in the Tambov province. The monument was opened on June 24, 2000 on the day of the death of A. Antonov. The monument was erected with the permission of the local authorities and consecrated by the Russian Orthodox Church. A lot of people gathered for the opening, despite the rainy day. The pedestal of the monument was literally littered with wreaths and flowers. Ironically, in the same days, the deputies of the State Duma demanded that the monument to Dzerzhinsky be restored in Moscow. Another coincidence was tragic: Svyatoslav Fedorov, having taken off by helicopter from Tambov, died in a plane crash under mysterious circumstances.
At the present moment, there are no monuments to the victims of the Antonov uprising in the Tambov region. At the site of the alleged burial of Antonov himself, a monument to the composer Rachmaninoff was erected. And in the square "Sochi", they installed an incomprehensible popular print man with a sugary physiognomy of the epic Sadko. Why shouldn't the same Karev take the initiative to erect another monument in some region of our region, dedicated to the victims of the uprising? They are trying in every possible way to erase the genetic memory of our ancestors from us, since officials have something to lose.
A fatal and unexpected blow for the Tambov officials was the filming of the film “Once upon a time there was a woman” by the talented director and world-famous actor Andrei Smirnov about the life of Russia from 1909 to 1921, about the events of the Civil War and the Antonov uprising, shown through the eyes of a Tambov peasant woman. The director has been working on the film since 1987. The picture was released in wide Russian distribution in the fall of 2011. For obvious reasons, local officials could not interfere with the filming of the film. And if they could, they were afraid and they had to make false curtsies to save face. According to A. Smirnov, in terms of plot and characters, "the film was ready 24 years ago." Scenario
was completed in 2004 after several years of work in the archives, studying the dialect and ethnographic features of the Tambov peasantry. “There is not a single district in the Tambov province today that I would not have visited: I lived in the village, and talked with grandmothers, and worked with museum workers,” the director recalls. The fact that the shooting of the film was successful in the Tambov region was greatly facilitated by the fact that such well-known politicians and businessmen as Vladislav Surkov, Viktor Vekselberga, Alfred Kokha, Roman Abramovich, Leonid Gozmana, Anatoly helped find funding for the filming in 2007 Serdyukova and Vladimir Yakunina, also the son-in-law of director Anatoly Chubais. It is noted that “the picture came out just before the elections, and its main (albeit somewhat veiled) message was to expose all the sins of the Soviet government and warn the regional elite. And it is no coincidence that the film was sponsored by influential people from the ruling party in Russia.”
Andrey Smirnov and Yuri Shevchuk
Why at the "funeral" of the Tambov peasantry, the local authorities shine with their complete absence. Why? It is clear - someone is busy, someone is in business, the rest "have a more attractive magnet." There is only one tendency among officials - "there is an indication." Whose? Oh, this painful uncertainty... It is clear that the late Antov and thousands of Tambov peasants do not care. As their descendants - we do not undertake to judge. But everything that concerns such a phenomenon as the peasant Tambov uprising, both during life and after it, still has political overtones. And this underlying reason is clear - the fact of rebellion is objectionable, unreliable! However, it is not a matter of natural bureaucratic ingratitude. Antonov and the uprising - a symbol. The symbol of Freedom, the destruction of bureaucracy, the symbol of the struggle against the corrupt state, the symbol of the real Russian revolution, a symbol of inspired crowds of people and drunken freedom of speech ... And the attitude of the local authorities towards his memory is quite symbolic!
Non-lazy users of the Textsail exchange earn an average of up to 30,000 rubles per month, without leaving home. The average cost per 1,000 characters of text (less than half of a standard A4 page) is $1. You can set the price and more at your discretion. Spit on your boring main job and start getting paid today without getting up from your favorite couch! Or make yourself some extra money in your spare time. This is not a scam, but a real opportunity to make good money without entrance fees. How much I wrote, how much I received. It is a trusted exchange founded over 10 years ago and has a solid reputation. Rejoice - you have received a new job and a prestigious creative position!
Antonov would not put up with the facts when a veteran lives in a crumbling house, a young
mother is driven from work, forests are cut down there, housing and communal services are robbed here ... Where should a Tambov citizen go with all these problems? To the administration? Or maybe in the cozy office of the ruling party? Do not make me laugh! When it was the officials and the party serving them who cared about the people. They remember them on the eve of elections and forget the morning after voting day. They have one goal - to hold out in their chairs as long as possible and have time to make supplies for the entire later life. They need people to approve and not ask unnecessary questions. Why be surprised that the Antonov uprising is like a splinter to them?
Lies do not live long, says the proverb. No matter how you lie, people will still find out the truth. They will ask those who deceived them, who prevented them from changing their lives for the better. And the time is near. Now official local historians say that many participants in the uprising were deceived by the organizers and rebelled on other issues.
The Tambov uprising of 1920-1921 (the so-called "Antonovshchina") is an armed uprising of the peasants of the Tambov and partially Voronezh provinces in 1920-1921 against the policy of "war communism", primarily against the surplus appropriation, i.e. violent (with the help of armed force) expropriation from the peasants of bread and other food necessary for the existence of the Red Army and the urban population, as well as excesses of local party and Soviet authorities in pursuing the class policy of the Soviet state. Preparations for the uprising in the Tambov region have been going on since 1918.
The middle peasants took an active part in the uprising, and partly - representatives of other social groups including the poorest peasantry.
(Military Encyclopedia. Chairman of the Main Editorial Commission S.B. Ivanov. Military Publishing. Moscow. In 8 volumes, 2004. ISBN 520301875-8)
The "bread" Tambov province experienced the brunt of the surplus appraisal. By October 1918, 50 food detachments from Petrograd, Moscow and other cities, numbering up to 5 thousand people, were operating in the province. Not a single province knew such a scale of confiscations. Peasants everywhere were forced to choose between resistance and starvation. To this was added the robbery and closing of churches, which forced the patriarchal Orthodox peasantry to defend their shrines.
The first and most massive form of resistance to the surplus appraisal was the reduction by the peasant of his farm. If in 1918 in the black-earth and “grain” Tambov province, one farm accounted for an average of 4.3 acres of sowing, then in 1920 - 2.8 acres. The fields were sown in the sizes necessary only for personal consumption. The situation in the countryside deteriorated especially sharply in 1920, when the Tambov region was struck by a drought, and the surplus remained extremely high.
The uprising broke out spontaneously in mid-August 1920 in the villages of Khitrovo and Kamenka in the Tambov district, where the peasants refused to hand over their grain and disarmed the food detachment. Within a month, popular indignation engulfed several counties of the province, the number of rebels reached 4,000 armed insurgents and about 10,000 people with pitchforks and scythes. On the territory of Kirsanovsky, Borisoglebsky and Tambov counties, a kind of "peasant republic" was formed with a center in the village of Kamenka.
At the head of the uprising stood the tradesman of the city of Kirsanov, the former volost clerk and people's teacher, the Left Social Revolutionary Alexander Antonov (1889 1922). Since the autumn of 1918, he formed a "combat squad" and began an armed struggle against the Bolsheviks. His detachment became the organizational core of the partisan army.
Under the command of Antonov, the rebel forces grew rapidly. In February 1921, when the insurgency reached its peak, the number of fighters reached 40 thousand people, the army was divided into 21 regiments and a separate brigade. The rebels smashed state farms and communes, spoiled the railways. The uprising began to go beyond the local framework, finding a response in the border districts of the neighboring Voronezh and Saratov provinces.
By cutting the South Eastern Railway, the rebels disrupted the supply of bread to the central regions of the country. The Soviet government was forced to pay the most serious attention to this uprising. In late February - early March 1921, the Plenipotentiary Commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) was formed, headed by Vladimir Antonov Ovseenko, which concentrated all power in the Tambov province in its hands. From graduates fighting Fronts removed large military contingents, equipment, including artillery, armored parts and aircraft. The entire province was divided into six combat areas with field headquarters and emergency authorities - political commissions.
Without waiting for the decisions of the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (RKP(b)) to replace the surplus tax with food tax, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) on February 2, 1921 instructed Nikolai Bukharin, Yevgeny Preobrazhensky and Lev Kamenev "to develop and approve the text of the appeal ... to the peasants of the Tambov province in order to distribute it only in this province, without publishing it in the newspapers.
The appeal announcing the abolition of the surplus and the permission of the local trade exchange of agricultural products began to be distributed on February 9th.
With the abolition of the surplus and the introduction of a new economic policy(NEP) the working peasantry joined the fight against "Antonovshchina".
On April 27, 1921, at the suggestion of Lenin, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) adopted a resolution "On the liquidation of Antonov's gangs in the Tambov province", according to which Mikhail Tukhachevsky was appointed commander of the operation. The number of Red Army soldiers increased to 100 thousand people.
On May 28, 1921, Soviet troops launched a decisive offensive. Under their onslaught in mid-June, the rebel army (1st partisan army) left the Tambov region and retreated to the territory of the Voronezh province. On June 20, in the battle near Uryupinsk, the remnants of it were defeated.
In late June - early July, the remnants of the rebel combat detachments divided into groups and hid in the forests. The uprising broke up into isolated pockets. Separate disparate detachments of the rebels were destroyed by mid-July.
On July 16, 1921, Tukhachevsky reported to Moscow on the suppression of the Tambov uprising.
Antonov and his group were destroyed in June 1922.
In battles with Soviet troops The rebels lost more than 11 thousand people killed and wounded. More than 2,000 Soviet and party workers died at the hands of the rebels during the Tambov uprising.
The Tambov uprising is one of the largest armed uprisings of the peasantry against the Bolshevik dictatorship at the final stage of the Civil War. Its most important political outcome was the awareness by the leadership of the Soviet Republic of the need to move from the policy of "war communism" to the "new economic policy".
The material was prepared by the editors of RIA Novosti on the basis of open sources
Tambov uprising 1920-1921 is considered one of the largest uprisings during the civil war in Russia and the largest among the uprisings against the power of the Soviets. This uprising is sometimes referred to as "Antonovism" - according to the name of one of the leaders of the uprising - Alexander Antonov. He was the head of the second insurgent army, as well as a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. Antonov is credited with a leading role in organizing the uprising.
In fact, the head of the uprising is Petr Tokmakov, commander of the United Partisan Army, chairman of the Union of Labor Peasantry. The uprising in the Tambov region is the only case of the use of chemical weapons by the Bolsheviks against the rebels. In addition, this is the only case in world history when a government used chemical weapons against its own people. Chemical shells used in May-June 1921 killed both the rebels and the civilian population: the elderly, children, women.
Events leading up to the uprising
In June 1920, in the process of holding a meeting of commanders of local self-defense units and partisan groups, it was decided to unite all forces into two armies - the first and second rebels. This was done to improve coordination of actions.
In 1920, a drought occurred in the Tambov region, after which only 12 million poods of bread were harvested. However, the surplus was not reduced and amounted to 11.5 ml. pounds.
How did the uprising start?
On August 19, 1920, an uprising broke out. It was due to the fact that in several villages at once - Khitrovo and Kamenka of the Tambov district, Tugolukovo of the Borisoglebsky district - the peasants refused to hand over their bread and, not without the help of the partisans, destroyed the sub-detachments of local communists and security officers. On the same day, several rebel groups united. The fire of the peasant war with the Bolsheviks spread very quickly and the whole Tambov province was under it. The uprising also affected the counties of the Voronezh and Saratov provinces.
The peasants liquidated the Bolshevik authorities, and also destroyed all representatives of this type of government. The Bolsheviks gradually lost control over the province. On August 31, the chairman of the Tambov provincial executive committee, A.G. Shlikhter, led a punitive detachment against the rebels. But after a clash with the rebels, he fled to Tambov. The uprising dragged on.
On November 14, 1920, the rebels united all their forces under one command. They created the United Partisan Army of the Tambov Territory, headed by Pyotr Tokmakov. Now the rebels had the 1st, 2nd and 3rd armies at their disposal. The rebels also organized their own political agencies on the basis of the remaining SR organizations. They also founded their own political organization called the Union of the Working Peasantry. The basis of the political program was a democratic basis under the slogans of overthrowing the Bolshevik dictatorship and convening a Constituent Assembly. The restoration of economic and political freedoms was also included in this program.
The uprising peaked in 1921, while the number of rebels and local self-defense units amounted to 70 thousand people. By this time, almost the entire Tambov province was under the control of the rebels. Traffic on the Ryazan-Ural railway was also paralyzed. The punitive detachments suffered heavy losses.
On May 21, 1921, the main command of the partisans, the population of the surrounding villages, as well as the civil administration proclaimed the "Provisional Democratic Republic of the Tambov Partisan Territory." Shendyapin was nominated for the post of head of the republic of the partisan region.
Crucial moment
At the end of the Soviet-Polish war and with the defeat of Wrangel's Russian army in the Crimea, things changed dramatically. Thanks to this, the main forces of the regular Red Army were sent to the rebels. Since February 1921, the highest body in the fight against the Tambov uprising was the Plenipotentiary Commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee under the leadership of V.A. Antonova-Ovseenko.
On April 27, 1921, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) instructed M.N. Tukhachevsky to suppress the uprising. N.E. were also to come to the Tambov region. Kaurin, G.I. Kotovsky, I.P. Uborevich. Punitive authorities also sent G.G. Yagoda, V.V. Ulrikh. Tukhachevsky was instructed to liquidate the uprising and meet the deadline within a month. By the end of May 1921, the number of Bolshevik troops in the Tambov region exceeded 100,000 Red Army soldiers.
Suppression of the uprising
The basis of Tukhachevsky's operation was the creation of a strict regime of occupation and terror against the population in the Tambov region. This was accompanied by the taking of hostages, mass executions, the destruction of villages and villages, the creation of concentration camps.
Artillery fire completely destroyed Koptevo, Khitrovo, Verkhnespasskoye, Tambov uyezd. The rebels became especially violent because of the hostage system. The response was the taking hostage of the Red Army. As Tukhachevsky noted, executions were the only way to crush the uprising. An execution in one village in no way influenced another village, as long as the execution was not carried out in the village.
On June 23, 1921, Antonov-Ovseenko, together with Tukhachevsky, issued Decree No. 116, according to which an occupation regime was introduced in the Tambov region. Hostages are being taken from such strata of society as priests, teachers, doctors, etc. After that, a volost meeting is convened, at which orders No. 130 and 171 are announced and the verdict of this volost is carried out. All residents of the volost are given 2 hours to give out weapons and hiding bandits and their families. The population was informed that in case of refusal the hostages would be shot. If, after 2 hours, weapons and participants in the uprising were not issued, then the gathering gathered again, and in front of all its participants, the hostages were executed.
Everything had to start over and continue until those in question were extradited. The rest are passed through polling commissions. Those who refused to give her information. Shot on the spot. At this time, entry and exit from the parish was prohibited.
In addition to brutal repressions, the entire force of the Red Army was sent to the rebels: artillery, armored vehicles, aircraft, and even chemical weapons, which were directed against the peasants in accordance with Tukhachevsky's decree of June 12, 1921.
In addition to punitive measures, the concession made by Lenin, the abolition of the food dictatorship, had a special impact on stopping the built resistance of the peasants.
June 24, 1922 in the village of Nizhny Shibriai, Tambov province, died leader of the last peasant uprising in Russia - Alexander Antonov. Tormented by bouts of malaria, with his right hand dried up from a wound, Antonov, together with his brother Dmitry, overturned a detachment of nine policemen and security officers who had come to arrest them, but was killed in a shootout. By that time, the uprising in the Tambov region was brutally suppressed. Suffice it to say that on the orders of Tukhachevsky, the positions of the Antonovites were fired from howitzers with poisonous mustard gas. But the rebels achieved something: the Bolsheviks abolished the surplus appraisal throughout Russia, which doomed the peasants to starvation.
Soviet propaganda turned Antonov into a sadist, bandit and murderer. What was it really life path folk hero, tells Tambov local historian Andrey Litovsky.
"SP": - Andrey, what preceded the day when Antonov became the head of the peasant uprising, who was he?
- Alexander Stepanovich Antonov was born on July 30, 1889 in Moscow, in the Rogozhskaya Sloboda. He was baptized in the church of St. Sergius of Radonezh. His father, Stepan Gavrilovich, was a native of Tambov, and his mother, Natalya Ivanovna Sokolova, was a native Muscovite. A few years later they move to Tambov - Antonov's father, a sergeant major, retires. From there they go further, to the county town of Kirsanov, where Antonov's childhood passes.
In Kirsanov, Antonov enters a three-year vocational school. The children entered there as adults, at the age of 13-14. It was at this time that the flowering of social democratic and Bolshevik ideas in Russia took place. Many school teachers shared revolutionary views, were members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. Apparently, Antonov, with his youthful mind, had heard enough there, in a three-year school, of Socialist-Revolutionary ideas, and was imbued with boyish revolutionary romanticism.
Immediately after graduating from college, at the age of 16-17, Antonov became close to the Socialist-Revolutionaries. And since he was a desperate guy, ready for action, the Socialist-Revolutionaries notice him and include him in the so-called group of Tambov Independent Socialist-Revolutionaries. In fact, it was the fighting branch of the party, which was engaged in special operations: elimination of objectionable persons, expropriations.
The organization, of course, was led by the Tambov Social Revolutionaries themselves. And in the combat group, the most prominent representative was a certain Rogue. He made daring expropriations and was credited with several murders. He also liked to take a walk, spent some of the money of the Socialist-Revolutionaries on us. Then, by the way, many of the acts of Negodyaev were blamed on Antonov. Antonov himself then acted in the Kirsanov and Borisoglebsk districts, and slowly learned from major militants.
SP: What exactly did he do?
- Antonov, despite all his desperation, was a very humane person. No one was physically harmed during his expropriations. The authorities noticed Antonov precisely because he did not particularly stain himself with anything - neither by murders, nor by embezzlement of money. In addition, it so happened that all his operations were successful. Antonov was called to Tambov to be transferred to a more responsible job.
But things ended badly. When he arrived in Tambov, general arrests began among the local Social Revolutionaries. Since Antonov was a desperate guy, only he managed to avoid arrest. When trying to detain him, he wounded a policeman, then a forester, and miraculously escaped from the city.
After the defeat of the Tambov group, Antonov leaves for Saratov - to the Volga Region Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, to which the Tambov organization was subordinate. In the committee, the SRs are thinking about killing the Kazan governor-general Sandetsky. In the end, they entrusted the action to Antonov, but they did not give the money - they say, you will get it yourself.
On reflection, Antonov went to Tambov. He robs the Inzhavino station - takes the cash register there, and acts like a romantic revolutionary. Having taken the money, Antonov, together with the head of the station, counted them, and drew up a receipt with a personal signature that he, Alexander Antonov, would expropriate such and such an amount for the needs of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. This receipt, after a handwriting examination, formed the basis of the charges against Antonov, and appeared in court as one of the main pieces of evidence. Tellingly, the head of the station himself, who sobbed under Antonov, - they say, they will fire me if you do not write a receipt - and counted the money from the cash desk, shortchanged Antonov by several rubles.
After that, Antonov with the money goes to the Volga region. Behind him is a police tail. As it turned out, the conspiracy against the Governor-General Sandetsky was betrayed by an Okhrana agent and the head of the Fighting Group of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionaries Yevno Azef, the king of provocateurs. An outstanding investigator, Martynov, was summoned from Moscow, and he slowly unraveled the case. Antonov rushes from Samara to Saratov, where Martynov carefully arrests him and sends him to Tambov. They took Antonov right on the street - they slowly surrounded him and grabbed him so quickly that he did not even have time to get his hands out of his pockets.
Antonov, of course, is tried by two courts - military and civil. Separately tried for robberies, trying to hang something else. In court, Antonov refuses to testify, he does not repent of anything. In 1910 he was sentenced to death penalty. He did not appeal for clemency. But then they also played humanism: they saw that the boy was young, and, in the end, the report about Antonov fell on the table to Stolypin. Stolypin replaced the death penalty with life imprisonment. By the way, when Antonov was arrested in 1909, he was 20 years old - he was still a minor under tsarist laws (the age of majority came at 21).
"SP": - What did hard labor look like in his case?
- Antonov was shackled, but he managed to make two escapes from the Tambov prison. It must be said that his comrades treated him unfairly. He passed word from prison to the will that he developed an escape plan and agreed with the guards. It was necessary that he be given 700 rubles to escape. But the Socialist-Revolutionaries decided that escape was impossible, and they did not give the money. Then Antonov for the first time was offended by the Socialist-Revolutionaries: he did so much for them, but in the end he was thrown in prison.
And you equally Antonov made two escapes. He sawed through the shackles, and ran once from the cell, and the second - from the punishment cell, where he dismantled the ceiling. In Tambov, the gendarmes were tired of the restless prisoner, and the young Social Revolutionary was sent to the Vladimir Central.
First of all, in order to break his will, he was thrown into a cell with criminals. But Antonov in this cell managed to knock on the head of the leader of the criminals. Because of this, Antonov was respected - both politically and criminally. In the central prison, Antonov sometimes organized something like strikes in the cell, demanding better food and smoking. Antonov spent half of his imprisonment in the central prison in a punishment cell, and he spent two more years in shackles than expected (they had to be removed after some time, most often after three years of imprisonment).
In 1917, Antonov was released from prison as a political prisoner according to the manifesto of the Provisional Government on amnesty. For comparison, Grigory Kotovsky was not released in 1917, because he was convicted under criminal articles: he even had tattoos on his eyelids, since Kotovsky was a pure criminal ... Antonov was released - and he returned to Tambov.
"SP": - And he began to build a career under the new government?
- In Tambov, then, militia bodies and other institutions were actively created. Antonov, as an active person, ends up in the police. His position is small - he is an assistant to the head of one of the regional departments. Antonov and in this position begins to show courage and recklessness. At that time, the Kirsanovsky district of the Tambov province declared itself an independent republic, and seceded from Russia. Antonov and his assistant were sent there to investigate. Arriving in Kirsanov, a city of many thousands, Antonov simply arrested the entire top of the "republic". Naturally, he was not allowed to take out the arrested, he was surrounded, and then he himself was arrested, but this episode emphasizes Antonov's recklessness. On the second attempt, however, the leadership of the republic managed to be locked up.
Antonov was noticed at the Kirsanov operation, and was appointed head of the Kirsanov district police. God knows what was going on in the county, there was no power. Antonov created several mobile cavalry units, placed them in certain villages. If something happened, the detachments immediately pulled together to the place of emergency. Then Tukhachevsky used the same tactics when he caught Antonov himself.
As head of the Kirsanov militia, Antonov managed to arrest the most authoritative horse thieves and robbers of the county. In just six months, he brought order to his territory. And when in the summer of 1918 the Tambov province was shaken by anti-Bolshevik uprisings, and unrest of the mobilized began in Kirsanov, Antonov with his detachment penetrated the crowd, localized the instigators, and thwarted the coup.
Antonov was going to serve the Soviet government to the end, carried out all its orders. For example, the Soviets began to create state farms on the basis of landowners' estates, and the peasants plundered property. Antonov was instructed to organize the protection of state farm goods, which he conscientiously carried out.
Antonov's subordinates loved him. He was a demanding but fair boss. The policemen had a small salary, and Antonov turned to the authorities with a request to increase the salaries of employees. To which he was told that Antonov himself, as the boss, would receive a salary increase, but not for his subordinates. Antonov replied that until they raise the salary of his subordinates, he does not need a penny.
Antonov also showed courage in disarming the Czechoslovak echelon. It came from Vladivostok - a corps was created there from former Czech prisoners of war who went over to the side of the Entente. From Vladivostok they were supposed to sail by ships to France. But the Czechs did not want to sail, they went by train through revolutionary Russia. Along the way, they robbed cities, looted. They did not represent a special force, but they were well armed. The local Bolsheviks were afraid of them.
But Antonov was reckless. At a meeting in Tambov, where the authorities of the Czech echelon were summoned, Antonov arrested them. Then he rushed to the echelon, and very quickly arrested the entire corps. The Czechs were so taken aback by surprise that they did not use weapons. Antonov took away this weapon, took it out by order of the Soviet authorities and hid it. He later used part of this arsenal himself: the Bolsheviks foolishly shot everyone who knew about this weapon. As a result, it turned out that only one Antonov had information about the secret warehouse.
It so happened that a Bolshevik worked for Antonov in the police (both Bolsheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries worked in the police) - a dark alcoholic. Antonov kicked him out, and he got a job in the Cheka. The security officers did not like Antonov with his violent activities and they fabricated a bunch of documents, as if he was preparing a conspiracy and a coup in Kirsanov. Allegedly, Antonov wants to hand over Kirsanov to the Czechs, whom he disarmed.
"SP": - What was Antonov doing at that time?
- He was on vacation. In 1917, Antonov married, right during the October Revolution, Sophia Bogolyubskaya. In some documents, she is called Solomonida Bogolyubskaya - perhaps she was Jewish. He spent his holidays with her. When he was informed that several of his men from the police had been arrested, and therefore it was better not to return there, Antonov spat, and never returned to the authorities. I left for my beloved Volga region, I thought something would work out there. But at that time, the Volga Region Committee of the Constituent Assembly, which Antonov was guided by, was practically defeated. Therefore, Antonov slowly returned to the Tambov province, and at first he lived in secret.
And the Bolsheviks at this time hang on him, who disappeared to no one knows where, all the dogs - in particular, all the reprisals of the bandits against the communists. From such a betrayal by the Bolsheviks, for whom he worked, Antonov is shocked. He creates a team of several supporters, and begins a fight with the Bolsheviks. He destroys the most active - those who are presumptuous, who rob.
At the same time, Antonov does not leave attempts to go over to the side of the Soviets: he writes letters that he is ready to serve the Soviet government further if he is accepted. The Bolsheviks answer that they do not want to have anything to do with him, a bandit, and put Antonov on a par with the inveterate murderer, the leader of the gang, Berbeshkin. Berbeshkim earned himself the reputation of an elusive bandit, a pure criminal. Antonov finds him in a few days, slaughters the entire gang, buries the bodies by the road, and writes a letter to the Cheka: there you can find the corpse of Berbeshkin and his associates, with whom you compare me.
Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks sentenced Antonov to death. But in the end, Antonov kills everyone who sentenced him to death one by one himself. He liquidated visiting sessions of the court of the Cheka in the villages, destroyed the food detachments, and by 1919 he had a strong, close-knit detachment of about 150 soldiers (the Bolsheviks inflated its number to 500 people), which captured large volost villages. Legends begin to circulate about Antonov among the peasants, such as the fact that he is elusive, that he comes out alive from all conceivable alterations, and all his enemies die. Some say that he can turn into a dog and follow the trail of enemies.
"SP": - That is, from that moment on, his paths with the Reds finally diverged?
- In 1919, Antonov was engaged in the fight against the Bolsheviks, and by this he was gaining authority among the peasants. In parallel, he creates underground organizations of the Union of the working peasantry - his own, personal. He places agents in each village, establishes reconnaissance and communications. Probably still not really understanding why all this is necessary. Socialist-Revolutionaries disown him - both the right and the left: they say that he kills the Bolsheviks, organizes terror. In response, Antonov calls himself a "true" Socialist-Revolutionary - not right and not left.
One of his operations of that time was the assassination in 1919 of the chairman of the Tambov provincial executive committee, Chichkanov. By that time, Chichkanov was temporarily removed from his leadership position for surrendering Tambov to the Cossacks of Mamontov. (Chichkanov fled from Tambov, unable to organize the defense. In principle, it was not his fault: in Tambov, the Bolsheviks had 200 guards, and Mamontov’s corps consisted of several thousand people. But this failure had to be blamed on someone, and the Bolsheviks suspended Chichkanov for the duration of the investigation). Mikhail Chichkanov goes hunting on Lake Ilmen, and falls into the hands of Antonov. He sentences Chichkanov to death and carries out the sentence.
And in 1920, a peasant uprising broke out in the Tambov region. It began because of the surplus appropriation - such a surplus appraisal was assigned to the Tambov province that after its implementation, by the new year 1921, the peasants had to run out of bread. The Bolshevik terror was strong: everything was taken away from the peasants, they used torture, rape, burned houses - by any means they carried out surplus appropriation. In Tambov, there was a crop failure, the bread ripened two times less than planned. Prodrazverstka was carried out not only among the kulaks, but also among the middle peasants and the poor. The kulaks, by the way, could fulfill the surplus, but the rest were really threatened with death from starvation.
The uprising that broke out spontaneously had separate leaders - for example, Grigory Naumovich Pluzhnikov, a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. The peasants in the village of Kamenka disarmed one of the food detachments, defeated the other, which came to his aid. On August 21, 1920, the inhabitants of Kamenka and the surrounding villages announced the beginning of an uprising against the Soviet regime.
"SP": - How did Antonov get involved in the uprising?
- The peasants did not have weapons: the Tambov province is not Ukraine, somewhere German troops lodging, then Petlyura. The Tambov peasants have one rifle for ten people, and a pitchfork. Therefore, they decide to send a courier to the famous Antonov to help them. Antonov arrives on August 24 with his detachment. The peasants of the surrounding villages hold a general meeting, and with the whole gathering, like Boris Godunov to the kingdom, they persuade him to accept the uprising.
Antonov is very flattered by this. He associated himself with the defender of the peasants Stenka Razin, and his favorite song was the song from the time of the Anglo-Boer War “Transvaal, Transvaal, my country, you are all on fire ...”, - Antonov was a romantic. In a word, he takes over the leadership of the uprising, takes the most active members out of Kamenka, and they simply disappear.
Red troops are sent to the Kamenka area, but when they arrive, there is no one, it is empty. And just a week later, at the end of August, the whole Tambov region broke out. Soviet power in the province collapsed literally in one day - it remained only at railway stations and in large cities. Particularly zealous communists were expelled, some were shot. But, basically, in the volost Antonov Soviets, half of the employees from those who worked there under the Bolsheviks - they went over to his side.
Antonov's fighting went on with varying degrees of success. Antonov seizes the weapon. In one of the villages, for example, he speaks from the carriage of a cannon recaptured from the Bolsheviks, as Lenin once did from an armored car. Antonov loves beautiful gestures. He fights on a white horse, he has a white cloak, a white hat. It is not difficult for the Bolsheviks to determine in battle where Antonov is - he is immediately visible.
There is a special legend about Antonov's white horse. Allegedly, Tsar Nicholas decided to give the Czech king a thoroughbred horse in a silver harness. The Czechs took this horse with them, but when Antonov disarmed the train, he got this horse. The horse was not given to anyone, but Antonov knew how to get along well with people and animals. Therefore, the horse approached him, and it was believed that while the horse was with him, neither a bullet nor a checker should have taken him.
Indeed, the horse carried him out of all the alterations. Antonov personally led his regiments on the attack. The Bolsheviks themselves wrote about Antonov that he was an energetic partisan, brave, that he himself was the first to rush to the offensive. Therefore, the Antonovites, who did not have strong weapons, succeeded in quite loud victories.
Antonov's army has grown. By December 1920, he organized the main operational headquarters to lead the uprising, and he himself became chief of staff. The headquarters is entrusted with all the military and political power to lead the uprising. Antonov splits the army first into one army, then into two. The armies have their own headquarters, but there they are purely military.
The political goals of the uprising were the usual: Soviet power, but without the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks. A multi-party system, a constituent assembly, which must decide for itself whether Russia should become a parliamentary republic or a presidential one. In principle, Antonov took the slogans of the Socialist-Revolutionary program, with which he was familiar.
"SP": - In Soviet history, Antonov is stubbornly called a bandit. This is true?
- There were different people in Antonov's regiments. The core consisted of 2 to 7 thousand people who were directly with Antonov. There was strict discipline, military courts. Antonovtsy did not engage in reprisals against the Reds. They had a temporary charter that forbade the robbery of the local population, reprisals against prisoners and members of their families. But the province was flooded with various bandit gangs, even Tukhachevsky wrote that Antonov had 10 thousand active fighters, and the remaining 40 thousand were in bandit and semi-bandit gangs. For ideological reasons, all the bandits were attributed to Antonov. It was very convenient to accuse him of banditry.
Antonov himself, I repeat, was not engaged in banditry. After a preventive conversation, his prisoners were released, far from all the red commanders were executed, even the communists. In the memoirs of those who fought against Antonov, there is such a situation: the Antonovites arrested the food detachment and locked it up, and the next morning the Reds came and released ... If Antonov was that sadist, as Soviet propaganda painted him, he should have shot the prisoners on the very first evening. He left them until the trial, so that they would be condemned by the people's assembly.
"SP": - How do they react to Antonovism in Moscow?
- Thanks to the Antonov uprising, the surplus appraisal was canceled in Russia. The Bolsheviks realized that the situation had reached a dead end. Lenin himself said that peasant uprisings were worse than Denikin, Wrangel and Kolchak put together. There were 90% of peasants in the country, and Ilyich understood: if it goes on like this, there will be no Soviet power. Lenin canceled the surplus appraisal, and in the Tambov province a month earlier than in the rest of Russia.
The Bolsheviks also make other political decisions: they renounce the practice of mass executions, announce appearances for voluntary surrender, conduct agitation in which they attribute to Antonov the acts of bandit gangs. In addition, the Bolsheviks distribute troops at key points, as Antonov did in his time. And gradually by 1921 the initiative passed to them.
"SP": - That is, since 1921, the sunset begins for the peasant uprising?
— Antonov is trying to expand his uprising to neighboring provinces. In his personal presence, everyone supports him, but when Antonov's detachment leaves, the peasants take a wait-and-see attitude. In Tambov, preparations for the uprising were carried out for a long time, and in the neighboring provinces the soil for it turned out to be unprepared: there were no bases, underground cells of the Union of the Working Peasantry.
In March 1921, both Antonov's armies were defeated. Antonov himself goes to the north: it was impossible to take Tambov from the eastern and southern sides - they interfere Railway and the river. Then he decides to take Tambov from the north side. Antonov is joined by local authority Vaska Karas, who says that everything is under his control, and he knows everything in the district. Meanwhile, Karas is not particularly respected, he is a semi-gangster guy. His reconnaissance is not established, and it turns out that Antonov's army is surrounded.
Antonov breaks out, but one of his army is badly battered, and the other is defeated - he leaves for the Voronezh province. And Antonov decides to take a desperate step - to capture the large village of Rasskazovo. It must be said that Rasskazovo was the proletarian center of the Tambov province. There were cloth and leather enterprises that were engaged in the supply of uniforms for the Red Army. In Rasskazovo, Aseev's factory alone employed more workers than in all of Tambov: this factory was the largest cloth factory in the Russian Empire.
Lenin was repeatedly reported that Antonov was either killed or defeated. And then a telegram landed on Lenin's desk: Rasskazovo was captured by Antonov, the Bolshevik headquarters, which was stationed there, were destroyed, and so were the factories.
Lenin is furious. He urgently sends Antonov-Ovseenko to Tambov, who was appointed plenipotentiary of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks to crush the peasant uprising, and Tukhachevsky, who recently distinguished himself in suppressing the Kronstadt rebellion. It is still unclear which of them was the most important. An indescribable number of troops are being drawn into the Tambov province. In terms of manpower, they exceed Antonov's army 10 times, in terms of weapons and ammunition - 100 times. And Antonovites sell a horse for 50 rounds.
Tukhachevsky is given a month to eliminate Antonovism, but he, of course, cannot cope in a month. He also overestimates his strength, and underestimates Antonov. At the end of May-June 1921, Antonov left the Tambov province, retreated to the Penza and Saratov provinces, but there one defeat followed another. By June 6, 1921, Antonov had a detachment of a thousand people. With him, Antonov tries to break through to the Tambov region, gets hit by the Reds, gets wounded in the head. By the way, he was wounded twice in the head and once in the arm.
Nevertheless, the Antonovites break out of the hands of the Reds, but at the meeting Antonov releases his brother Dmitry and the color of his army, 150 people. He himself remains with a large convoy of five hundred people with the wounded. Antonov is a people's leader, he cannot leave the wounded. His brother Dmitry leaves, and Antonov himself, with a convoy, is ambushed by the Reds on June 7th. The Reds kill almost everyone, but Antonov's comrades-in-arms are taken out.
Antonov in the forest. There is a meeting, and the wounded Antonov is taken to some camp. He is recovering from his wounds, and is trying to re-form his defeated armies. But none of this works for him: there are a lot of Reds, they captured most of the settlements. Antonov, in order to save the remnants of his army, orders to stop the open struggle: go to a conspiratorial position, bury weapons, and hide until better times. He himself goes underground to pre-prepared bases. Not everyone obeys his last order, someone continues the fight.
"SP": - How did Antonov die?
- Antonov is hiding on the river Vorone near Lake Kipets. At the end of July 1921, the Bolsheviks found out where he was, and in early August they began an assault. They made three day and one night attacks, but were repulsed. Then Antonov's positions were hit by an air strike, an artillery strike, and then the positions were fired at by shells with poisonous chemicals. After that, the moral and psychological spirit of the Antonovites was broken, and the Bolsheviks began combing the area.
Antonov ties his horse to a tree, and he hides in a swamp with his supporters for several days. Then he goes into the reeds, dives under the water, orders several comrades-in-arms to surrender to the Reds and say that he is dead. They do so. Some corpse was identified as the body of Antonov, and the Bolsheviks curtail the operation.
Antonov is illegal. Part of his troops continues to resist, degenerates into bandit gangs. Antonov does not lead them, he hides in the underground, he has a small network of his own. He hides for a whole year, and only by the summer of 1922 the Bolsheviks manage to find out where he is. For the last two months, Antonov has been hiding in the village of Nizhny Shibriai.
No regiment was created there at one time - neither red nor Antonov, therefore it is calm in the village. Many residents know that Antonov is hiding there, they respect him and help him - they supply him with food, go to Uvarovo for medicines. Antonov is sick, after everything he has experienced, he has malaria, his right hand is drying up from a bullet wound, he is learning to do everything with his left.
Antonov is hiding with Natalya Ivanovna Katasonova. Strictly speaking, local residents claim that the miller Ivanov hid it, and Katasonova helped the miller with the housework. There she met Antonov, they had an affair, she became pregnant.
The Bolsheviks arrive in Nizhny Shibriai on June 24, 1922, and at 8 pm they begin the operation to capture Antonov. They surround the house where Antonov is hiding with his brother Dmitry and the locals. Katasonova comes out of the house, trying to say that there is no one in the house. Neighbor Ivan Mikhailovich Lomakin runs out of the house - his great-grandson still lives in Nizhny Shibriai. As the Bolsheviks try to enter, the Antonovs shoot through the door.
There were nine attackers - they outnumbered the defenders five times. The team was made up of former Antonovites who wanted to earn forgiveness, policemen and security officers. They throw a grenade at the house, but the grenade explodes in the street, nearly injuring the Reds. The Antonov brothers shoot back from the roof, so the Chekists decide to set fire to the house. The house is set on fire, but Antonov, a desperate man, breaks out of the burning house and attacks a detachment of nine opponents. And so fortunately that one of the enemies jumps over the fence, the other crawls into the bushes - in short, everyone fled. Antonov was once surrounded in this way, but he blasted his way through the Bolsheviks with grenades and escaped. Then he was wounded in the arm, it was in 1920.
Antonov leaves the burning house, but is shot in the chin. locals they say that he ran through the streets with a bloody face and shouted: where the communists ran, I will shoot them now! Gradually, the Antonov brothers retreat to the forest. Dmitry is wounded in the leg, he limps, Antonov drags him on himself. The Bolsheviks take advantage of the fact that the brothers are moving slowly: they run ahead through the neighboring yard, open fire, and the Antonovs are killed.
"SP": - Do they remember Antonov in the Tambov region today?
There are legends about Antonov among old people. According to one of them, one of the Antonovs, when they retreated, was seriously wounded - most likely, Alexander himself. And that he allegedly asked his brother Dmitry to shoot him, not to leave the Bolsheviks. His brother shot him, and then he shot himself. This is a local legend, Shibryai. And according to another legend, the Bolsheviks caught Antonov's white horse, but he ran away from them. The horse allegedly still appears in those places in the fog. And the one to whom it will be given into the hands will be able to lead a new peasant uprising.
Loading...