West Siberian rebellion

Did You Know?

• The abandonment of the Prodrazvyorstka and the adoption of the New Economic Policy (NEP) was key to its submission.
• New anti-communist guerrillas would only emerge with the invasion of Nazi Germany.

Background

In the early 1900s, Russian peasants fought two wars against the state, both sparked by revolutions and both ending with the state reasserting control: 1905–1907 and 1917–1922. These rebellious farmers were consistently hostile to the Whites, who rejected land reforms and sought retribution for the peasants’ seizure of estates in 1917. Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak made a critical error by restoring landowners’ privileges, turning the peasantry against him.

Many Siberian villagers were descendants of Russian and Ukrainian settlers who had escaped serfdom and fiercely valued their independence. Guerrilla fighting started soon after the White government formed, on August 31, 1918, in the countryside around Slavgorod, Altai, and escalated in early 1919. The White Army imposed grain seizures and conscription, but most new soldiers deserted, and numerous uprisings erupted in the rear, fueled by Bolsheviks, anarchists, and left-wing SRs.

Taiga guerrilla bands, often led by deserters and sometimes joined by scattered Red soldiers after the Whites took the region in 1918, ambushed units and disrupted supply lines. Kolchak used terror to try to suppress them. With its rear area weakened by constant guerrilla pressure and forced to divert troops to defend against the peasantry, the White regime could not hold back the 200,000-strong Bolshevik advance, which incorporated local partisans as it moved forward.

By late 1919, when the Siberian government had collapsed, independent bands from Central Siberia to Amur Oblast totaled over 100,000 fighters.

Rebellion

In late January 1921, a rebellion ignited in the Siberian village of Chelnokovskom, in Ishim province. It rapidly expanded into the regions of Tyumen, Akmola, Omsk, Chelyabinsk, Tobolsk, Tomsk, and Yekaterinburg, stripping the Bolsheviks of authority over Western Siberia from Kurgan to Irkutsk. This was the largest green uprising in terms of both rebel numbers and territory, yet it remains poorly studied. The insurgents governed a population of 3.4 million.

The revolt was fueled by aggressive grain seizures carried out by 35,000 prodotriady soldiers stationed in Siberia after Kolchak's defeat, and by Bolshevik rigging of volost elections, which violated local peasant democracy. Key leaders included Semyon Serkov, Václav Puzhevsky, Vasily Zheltovsky, Timoféi Sitnikov, Stepan Danilov, Vladimir Rodin, Piotr Dolin, Grégory Atamanov, Afanasi Afanasiev, and Petr Shevchenko. The Red command in the region consisted of Ivan Smirnov, Vasili Shorin, Chekist Ivan Pavlunovsky, and Makar Vasiliev.

Estimates of peasant fighters range from 30,000 to 150,000; historian Vladimir Shulpyakov suggests 70,000 or 100,000, though the most plausible count is 55,000 to 60,000. Many local Cossacks joined. The rebels held twelve districts, occupied Ishim, Beryozovo, Obdorsk, Barabinsk, Kainsk, Tobolsk, and Petropavlovsk, and controlled the Trans-Siberian Railway from February to March 1921.