Quiet Kirsanov in the Civil War
More than a hundred years have passed since the end of the Tambov uprising, which was part of history under the name "Antonovshchina". Historians have repeatedly taken this catchy definition apart, and in the end they no longer dispute the almost leading role of Alexander Stepanovich Antonov in those events.
In recent years, many archival documents have been declassified. Archival data materials contain a wide variety of information: reports of the Kirsanov Politburo on the development of the insurgent movement, information from visiting sessions of the Tambov Provincial Cheka, information reports on the political situation and mood of the population.
Extracts from the minutes of meetings, memoirs of former Cheka employees in Kirsanovsky district have also been published... But, analyzing all these documents, even professional historians come to the conclusion that many of them were already falsified at that time.
In the district town of K.
By the early 1920s, the civil war in Russia had finally ended. The country, torn apart by years of bloody battles, was gradually coming to its senses. It seemed that in this peaceful environment, the time had come to calmly restore the destroyed industry and raise agriculture.
In Kirsanov, the big changes at first did not lead to any serious changes in everyday life. But the domestic political situation in the country left much to be desired, and in the end, the district town of Kirsanov, the easternmost railway station in the Tambov province, did not remain on the sidelines.
And the new government, including in such small towns, did not hold on as firmly as it wanted. Even when the White Army had already been routed and defeated, acts of disobedience to the new government continued practically throughout the entire territory of the country.
In Ukraine, for a long time after the Germans left, vast territories were controlled by the "independent" detachments led by the atamans Nestor Makhno and Yuri Tyutyunnik. In Crimea, the "greens" became active, and rebels under the command of General Przhevalsky operated near Novorossiysk. Nationalist resistance movements in Belarus and Georgia were gaining strength...
The Red Terror, which during the civil war was directed primarily against the pro-monarchist, frankly speaking, reactionary part of the population, smoothly switched to the socialist revolutionaries and anarchists who had previously sympathized with the Bolsheviks. And there were reasons for this.
War for bread
The grave food situation in Soviet Russia forced the Council of People's Commissars to introduce the so-called food levy for the peasantry. This simply meant the gratuitous confiscation of surplus grain from the peasantry, whose interests were represented and defended by the Socialist Revolutionaries both before and immediately after the revolution.
Tambov province, much larger in area than the current region, located in the very center of the Russian Black Earth Region, has long been considered one of the main granaries of the country. Unfortunately, the severe drought of 1920 hit this region as well.
However, the food detachments had a specific task - to fulfill the plan for the confiscation of surplus grain. But confiscation threatened the villagers and their families with death by starvation. And people began to defend themselves. Attacks on the supply detachments of the food detachments initially occurred spontaneously. The peasants simply took up pitchforks and defended their grain.
But when similar reprisals occurred in several villages at once, the authorities at the level of police units and special purpose units (ChON) responded to the rebels with repressions. Peasants from numerous villages began heading to Kirsanov, where a detachment had already been formed in the forests, headed by the implacable enemy of the Bolsheviks, Alexander Stepanovich Antonov.
A very "fiery" revolutionary
By the beginning of these events, A. S. Antonov was already a very popular figure among the country's population. He was born in 1889 in Moscow. Then, together with his parents, he moved to his homeland in Kirsanov, where he graduated from a three-year city school. But he never did any real work, devoting himself entirely to revolutionary activity as part of the Tambov cell of the Socialist Revolutionaries.
It must be said that propaganda work was alien to the young man, but he turned out to be a very successful raider, who was engaged in expropriating money from banks to replenish the party coffers. Moreover, the damage from his activities was so great that the tsarist secret police appointed a reward of 1000 rubles for the capture of Antonov - a colossal amount of money at that time.
When he finally fell into the hands of the police, the servants of Themis sentenced Antonov to death. However, given the age of the criminal, the hanging was replaced by life imprisonment. Antonov was released under an amnesty declared by the Provisional Government in 1917, and immediately joined the revolutionary movement.
He served in the police, first in Tambov as a department chief, then headed the district police and was appointed chief in Kirsanov. By the way, Aleksandr Stepanovich served well. He fought crime and maintained revolutionary order. He was even awarded the revolutionary weapons - Mauser. The facts alone speak volumes.
The Kirsanov district also took part in a peculiar parade of sovereignties, having declared its secession from Russia and an independent republic. Antonov and his assistant were urgently sent to Kirsanov, where he immediately found himself at a rally of many thousands. Antonov tried to disperse the protesters and arrest all the leaders of the "republic", but they were arrested first, then released as one of their own - a local.
But there was no real power in the district, and on the side of the new arrivals, first of all, there was force - the new chief of police quickly formed several mounted detachments, placing them in key places of the city. The detachments were immediately pulled to the place of any emergency, and this method was later adopted by Tukhachevsky from Antonov - this is how he caught Antonov himself.
Antonov still managed to restore order in the district in six months and arrest the most authoritative bandits and robbers. In the summer of 1918, many rebelled in the Tambov province, and the first were mobilized soldiers, among whom Antonov and his detachment first of all localized the instigators, thwarting all attempts at a coup.
The district became one of the first where state farms were created on the basis of landowners' estates, and peasants stole the property. Antonov and his policemen were also responsible for protecting the state farm property. And the subordinates loved Antonov, a demanding but fair boss, especially since he got them a raise.
When he was given to understand that Antonov himself, as the boss, would receive a salary increase, but his subordinates would not, he replied that until his subordinates’ salaries were increased, he did not need a penny.
Antonov also distinguished himself in disarming Czechoslovak prisoners. The trains passed through Kirsanov to Vladivostok, where they were scheduled to board ships to France. The Czechs, en route, did not hesitate to rob and pillage. They had yet become an organized force – the same corps, but they were well armed.
They were feared at the scene, trying to let the trains through as quickly as possible, but Antonov was not afraid to arrest the Czech commanders. Without their commanders, the prisoners were clearly confused and did not resist when Kirsanov's policemen disarmed them. The weapons were collected, taken away and hidden, and, apparently, later used.
The Destiny That You Choose
The entire short but bright life of Alexander Stepanovich was connected with the district town of Kirsanov. He grew up here, spent his childhood here. He married the local beauty Sofia Bogolyubskaya here, and spent their honeymoon here. His parents lived and were buried here. He went down in history from Kirsanov.
The city has preserved many places associated with his name. This includes the old building of the boarding school on Krasnoarmeyskaya Street, built back in 1900 and belonging to a real school, which was located there in 1908-1918.
House No. 46 on Sovetskaya Street has also been preserved, where the family of one of the city's richest merchants and patrons of the arts, Vasily Stepanovich Sosulnikov, settled before the revolution. After the revolution, the house was nationalized, it was given over to apartments for employees of the new government, and one of the apartments was allocated to Antonov.
After the unsuccessful attempt by the Left Socialist Revolutionaries to raise a rebellion in the country and the subsequent repressions against fellow party members, the member of the Kirsanov District Council of Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies, Alexander Stepanovich Antonov, did not immediately, but went into the Kirsanov forests.
There the first rebel combat unit was created, about 20 people, well armed, with well-chosen commanders and personnel, strict discipline. Having adopted the slogan "Soviets without communists", Antonov began the fight against the new government - all the same expropriations, murders of activists, security officers, attacks on food detachments, distribution of what was taken back to the peasants. But Antonov thought on a larger scale.
Everything changed when, on August 21, 1920, the peasants of the village of Kamenka dealt with one of the food detachments, then disarmed another sent to rescue their "comrades." Antonov decided that his time had come, and responded to the invitation of the peasants from Kamenka and the surrounding villages to lead an uprising against the Bolshevik government.
This is what they decided at a general meeting, where they were worried about the fact that they had almost no weapons. Tambov province, unlike Ukraine, where German troops and Petliura were sometimes present, was still quite quiet: the peasants had pitchforks, some had hunting rifles or a rifle from the front - so you can't even go against the police.
On August 24, Antonov arrived in the village with a detachment, and the peasants, as if Boris Godunov had come to power, persuaded him to accept the uprising. Antonov did not refuse – he compared himself to the people's ataman Stenka Razin and began singing his favorite song from the Anglo-Boer War, "Transvaal, Transvaal, my country, you are all burning in flames."
The battle with the Red Army is still far away - it is busy at the front, but for now it is possible to remove the chairman of the Tambov provincial executive committee, comrade Chichkanov. Especially since the Bolsheviks removed him from his leadership position for surrendering Tambov to Mamontov's Cossacks.
Going against the cavalry corps with two hundred guards in 1919 was tantamount to suicide, and Chichkanov had to flee Tambov, and then the Bolsheviks. He went hunting on Lake Ilmen and fell into Antonov's hands. And Antonov, already a sort of Tambov leader, sentenced Chichkanov to death and gave the order to carry out the sentence.
Tambov leader
The Soviet government simply did not have the opportunity to seriously engage in the fight against Antonov for a long time. Especially since he enjoyed the support and sympathy of the peasants, who were the main part of the province's population, and he defended their interests.
The detachment, already numbering one hundred and fifty people, was rapidly growing. By the autumn of 1920, it already numbered more than 6 thousand personnel. Antonov's military actions, severely limited in scale, since there was almost no one to fight, were carried out with varying success.
The rebels are capturing more and more weapons, and Antonov is showing off. In the village of Gusevka, for example, he speaks to all the people from the gun carriage of a cannon captured from the Reds, just like Lenin did from an armored car. The Tambov leader loves beautiful gestures. He fights on a white horse, has a white burka, a white papakha.
Moscow eventually responded by sending regular troops freed up at the front into the rebellious region with orders not to stand on ceremony. And so it began!
In the villages that were declared "bandit", all grain and other food was confiscated. Houses were burned, and men were sent to concentration camps for forced labor. The same Kirsanov and Kirsanov district were divided into military sectors. And in Golynshchina, the largest concentration camp for a thousand people was organized.
Not only participants and sympathizers of the uprising were kept there, but also hostages – civilians: old people, women, teenagers, small children. These measures were partly effective. But at the same time, they contributed to an increase in the number of rebels.
As a result, in November 1920, a "congress of free peasantry" took place, at which all previously disparate detachments united into the United Partisan Army of the Tambov Region. Now the rebels had the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd armies, consisting of 14 infantry, 5 cavalry regiments, and 1 separate brigade with 25 machine guns and 5 guns.
The rebels also organized their own political bodies on the basis of the remaining Socialist Revolutionary organizations. At the same time, a single body of civil self-government was formed – the Union of Working Peasants (STK). Its political program sounded like this: the overthrow of the Bolshevik government and the convocation of the Constituent Assembly.
The army was reformed in accordance with military regulations, with a staff structure, making the regiment the main combat unit. It was already a full-fledged army, numbering more than 50 thousand fighters, with its artillery, rear, medical service, tribunal, intelligence and counterintelligence. The senior and middle command staff were awarded the appropriate military ranks.
In fairness, it should be noted that A. S. Antonov himself held the position of Chief of Staff of the 2nd Insurgent Army, but at the same time, it was he who actually remained the organizer and inspirer of the uprising. Pyotr Mikhailovich Tokmakov, a lieutenant in the tsarist army, a full Knight of the Cross of St. George, a participant in the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War, and, by the way, a native of the village of Inzhavino, Kirsanovsky District, Tambov Governorate, was appointed commander of the United Army.
The ending should ...
Co-authors: Vladimir Polyansky, Kirsanov - Smolensk
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