Peasant Russia Civil War

Based upon research from various Soviet archives, this work reconstructs the revolutionary experience of the peasantry in the crucial Volga region. The book examines the peasantry's relations with the Reds and the Whites in depth and illustrates the effects of the civil war.

Beginning in the fall of 1920, Aleksandr Antonov led an insurgency that became the largest armed peasant revolt against the Soviets during the civil war. Yet by the summer of 1921, the revolt had been crushed, and popular support for the movement had all but disappeared. Until now, details of this conflict have remained hidden. Erik Landis mines recently opened provincial and central Soviet archives and international collections to provide a depth of detail and historical analysis never before possible in this definitive account of the uprising. Landis examines both sides of the conflict, probing the testimonies of the insurgents, their opponents, and those caught in between. We witness firsthand the frustrations, failures, and internal conflicts of the Bolsheviks and the spirit of rebellion that drove the insurgents and helped drive a localized dispute into a well-organized mass rebellion that struck fear in the hearts of Communist leaders. This political and military threat was influential in bringing about Lenin's conciliatory New Economic Policy, which allowed farmers and villages to sustain themselves in a quasi-market economy. Bandits and Partisans presents a gripping tale of brutality, domination, and revolt, placing readers at the frontlines of the complex and rich history of the Russian civil war and the consolidation of the new Soviet state.

How did peasants experience and help guide Russia's war, revolution, and civil war? Why in the end did most agree to live as part of the Bolshevik regime? Taking the First World War to the end of the Civil War as a unified era of revolution, this book shows how peasant society and peasants' conceptions of themselves as citizens in the nation evolved in a period of total war, mass revolutionary politics, and civil breakdown. Aaron Retish reveals that the fateful decision by individuals to join the Revolution or to accommodate their lifestyle within it gave the Bolsheviks the resources and philosophical foundation on which to build the Soviet experiment and reshape international politics. He argues that peasants wanted more than land from the Revolution; they wanted to be active citizens. This is an important contribution to our understanding of the nature of the Russian Revolution and peasant-state relations.

Often the drama of the October Revolution and the Bolshevik seizure of power overshadow the disastrous Russian-German war that preceded it and the extended, confusing, many-sided civil war between the Reds and the Whites that followed. But Nik Cornishs vivid photographic history gives equal coverage to each of these momentous events and shows how the Russian empire of the Romanovs was transformed into the Soviet dictatorship. Contemporary photographs show the leading characters in the drama Tsar Nicholas II, Kerensky, Lenin and Trotsky and other Bosheviks, and the White commanders Denikin, Kolchak, Wrangel and the rest. But they also record, in an unforgettable way, the ordinary people who were caught up in the surge of events civilian crowds on the city streets, peasant groups in the villages, the faces of common soldiers on all sides who fought on multiple fronts across Russia from Poland, the Baltic states and the White Sea to the Black Sea and Siberia. The scale of the conflict was remarkable, as was the intensity of the experience of those who took part and witnessed it, and this collection of historic photographs gives a poignant insight into the conditions of their time. It is a fascinating introduction to a period that saw a sea change in Russian history.

"The Russian Civil War of 1917-1920, out of which the Soviet Union was born, was one of the most significant events of the twentieth century. The collapse of the Tsarist regime and the failure of the Kerensky Provisional Government nearly led to the complete disintegration of the Russian state. This book, however, is not simply the story of that collapse and the rebellion that accompanied it, but of the painful and costly reconstruction of Russian power under a Soviet regime."--Page 4 of cover.

Based on newly declassified Soviet archives, including secret police reports, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin documents the active history of the vast peasant rebellion against collectivization between 1928-1932. Lynn Viola reveals the manifestation in Stalin's Russia of universal strategies of peasant resistance in what amounted to virtual civil war between state and peasantry.

The Russian Revolution and Civil War in the years 1917 to 1921 is one of the most widely studied periods in history. It is also somewhat inevitably one that has generated a huge flow of literature in the decades that have passed since the events themselves. However, until now, historians of the revolution have had no dedicated bibliography of the period and little claim to bibliographical control over the literature. The Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921offers for the first time a comprehensive bibliographical guide to this crucial and fascinating period of history. The Bibliography focuses on the key years of 1917 to 1921, starting with the February Revolution of 1917 and concluding with the 10th Party Congress of March 1921, and covers all the key events of the intervening years. As such it identifies these crucial years as something more than simply the creation of a communist state.