Green armies
The Green armies, also known as the Green Army or Greens, were armed peasant groups which fought against all governments in the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1922. The Green armies were semi-organized local militias that opposed the Bolsheviks, Whites, and foreign interventionists, and fought to protect their communities from requisitions or reprisals carried out by third parties. The Green armies were politically and ideologically neutral, but at times associated with the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. The Green armies had at least tacit support throughout much of Russia. However, their primary base, the peasantry, were largely reluctant to wage an active campaign during the Russian Civil War and, with an impending Bolshevik victory, dissolved in 1922.
Background
The Russian peasantry lived through two wars against the Russian state, the product of revolutions that ended with state victory: 1905–1907 and 1917–1922. At the beginning of 1918, the Bolshevik Party only controlled a few cities, "unique Bolshevik islets in the middle of a peasant ocean" unwilling to hand over the fruits of their labor and submit to any external authority.The conflict between the cities and a countryside was one of the main edges of the civil war. This resistance was interpreted by many as a mere expression of the "social anarchy" that existed in the country. The Communist influence on the peasants and workers was negligible. The Bolsheviks controlled some soviets, but without coercive power over the majority of the population, who opposed them in a passive and disorganized way.
Between late 1917 and early 1918, there was no serious opposition to the Bolsheviks, who controlled central Russia, Baku and Tashkent. The only opposition force was the Volunteer Army, barely 3,000 men, still organized in southern Russia. All the White movement's hopes were on winning over the Don and Kuban Cossacks, who were initially more interested in obtaining their own independence. For their part, Ukraine and Finland were in the process of becoming independent, but the Whites refused to recognize their secession. Only the violent Bolshevik repression of the Cossacks in early 1918 made it possible to win them over to the White cause.
After the October Revolution, the new Bolshevik authorities enacted a policy of war communism. This system sought to abolish all private enterprise, maximize state control over distribution and the foreign market, nationalize all heavy industry, requisition agricultural surplus, and impose a universal rationing system to focus the entire economy on supporting the war effort. It was a way of fighting their opponents on the "home front". Among the new measures was the dispatch of officials to the farms of central Russia to collect supplies for the Red Army and start the construction of the socialist economy, by any means necessary. The aim was to requisition grain, cattle and horses, recruit young people to the army, and punish villages suspected of harboring deserters.
The farmers' first reaction was to bury their grain, feed it to cattle, or clandestinely distill it into alcohol. In response, the Bolsheviks organized a 'supply army' of 80,000 men tasked with forcibly requisitioning grain surpluses. Half were unemployed workers from Petrograd who were looking for a fixed salary and to keep some of the loot. The rest were criminals, other unemployed and ex-soldiers. They formed undisciplined troops, known as prodotriady, who did not hesitate to steal vital reserves, seed and other possessions from the peasants. The prodotriady were killed at an increasing rate: 2,000 in 1918, 5,000 in 1919, and 8,000 in 1920. The Bolsheviks retaliated by burning villages, confiscating livestock, and executing peasants by the hundreds. Many were accused of being kulaks but most were poor farmers, the most vulnerable to poor harvests. People fled to the forests with nothing to lose and joined the rebels to defend the "local peasant revolution". Thus, what in most cases began as small revolts against the requisitions, the incompetent and brutal response of the local Communists turned into large rebellions.
The first collectivizations also generated great resistance due to forced transfers and the new ways of life that were imposed. Many units and inspectors exceeded their powers, looting houses and murdering villagers. They harshly repressed any sign of resistance. All of this contributed to widespread resentment against the new regime. The Bolsheviks understood that they had to control the grain supply and, in order not to depend on the small farmers, they tried to found Kolkhoz and Sovkhoz. Another source of the peasantry's rejection of the Bolsheviks was the abolition of the Committees of Poor Peasants or komitety bednoty in December 1918, but Lenin had foreseen fierce resistance and increased both the size of the prodotriady and the tax requirement. The following season, some 242 million pud of grain was requisitioned.
Objectives
At the outbreak of the February Revolution, the most important political parties were the Social Revolutionary Party, Mensheviks, and Kadets. The first two controlled most of the country's soviets, except the ones in Petrograd and Moscow; the third were liberals with the support of moderate sectors who wanted to maintain the freedoms won with the revolution. The Mensheviks quickly lost the support of many soviets, except in the Caucasus, and especially in the Democratic Republic of Georgia, while Bolshevik influence rapidly grew. The peasants were overwhelmingly in favour of the SR. In some cases, as in Western Siberia in 1920–1921, the rebellious peasants began their revolts without any proposal or plan more complex than overthrowing the Bolsheviks. Only as some successful movements became more complex and territorially broad did the Greens present a political program, an adaptation of SR ideas.Russia rapidly polarized during 1917. Very soon, large masses of the population were in favor of smaller and less organized revolutionary groups than the Bolsheviks, the anarchists and Left SRs. The Great War had encouraged the peasants and workers to follow a revolutionary path, so Lenin proposed to turn the "imperialist war" into a "civil war."
Agricultural distribution
The greens were driven by the ideal of the SR "black division", "a division of all lands according to the number of mouths to be fed in each family", not for the broader nationalization and collectivization of the lands as presented by the Bolsheviks. In Lenin's eyes there was nothing socialist about this measure, believing the plan of the SRs would be to establish capitalism in the countryside. This was seen as avoiding concrete Socialist policy, instituting basic programs such as improvements to peasant quality of life and an end to slavery. According to him, it was no more than a bourgeois slogan, just like "land and liberty", to appeal to the desperate peasantry of rural Russia. Another source of opposition from the population towards the Bolsheviks was the "way of life Communist leaders' feudal system,” with the excesses of Bolshevik leaders in contrast to the horrors of the civil war producing resentment from the impoverished and war-torn peasantry.The ideology of the Greens was very uniform, representing the common aspirations and goals of peasant revolutions in Russia and Ukraine. They wanted to regain the self-government maintained until 1918, seize the nobility's lands, maintain rural market-economies and govern their communities with soviets chosen by them. The peasants rejected the growing authority that the new state was gaining. Four years after the Revolution they watched as the Soviet state centralized, with the autonomy of their Soviets integrated into the growing organs of the state. Their own small agricultural holdings were replaced by large state collectivizations, with the product produced on their farms requisitioned and the land promised to them in the Revolution occupied by the State. With these worries and concerns growing, they began to accept the SR proposals: the end of Bolshevik rule, land redistribution and an end to the civil war. Their opposition to the Bolsheviks was due to, rather than a political plan or national alternative, a desire to protect and preserve their communal land. Interested in defending local interests, these movements took a defensive stance: incapable and unwilling to march on Moscow, they hoped to remove the Bolshevik state's central influence.
Rejection of the Whites
The greens were always hostile to the Whites, which is why their uprisings against the reds only became massive after ensuring the defeat of the Whites. Many White officers were members of the former Tsarist Nobility, and had lost the land they had or could inherit in the peasant revolution of 1917. With deeply entrenched classism against the peasants they once ruled over, the Whites sought to turn back time and take revenge against every symbol of change. They would never recognize new national realities or the attempts at agrarian revolution.One of the main causes of the White defeat was being identified by the people with the restoration of the old regime, signaled by the treatment that their officers and officials gave to the peasants. With their deeply reactionary positions desire to restore the old Tsarist social and economic order aggressive repression and rejection of the Peasant base and refusal to carry out even basic reforms demanded by the circumstances The Whites could not take advantage of the countryside's hesitance towards the Reds and win it for their cause. They refused to reform land ownership, stoking the fears of the rural majority against the prior regime and failing to take the possibly decisive advantage of rural support. That is why many peasants feared that the Whites would restore the rights of the rural nobility to the land, destroying the autonomy and local representation that they'd won in the Revolution of 1917. Faced with this fear, many peasants joined the reds when the Whites advanced on the districts of Orel and Moscow in 1919. They had through their efforts been the ones who had secured the most land from the nobility. According to SR politicians, if Alexander Kolchak had not restored the rights of landowners, he would have won greater support of farmers in the Urals and the Volga.
The robberies and massacres at the hands of the Cossack cavalry also contributed to turning the countryside against the White advance in 1919. Denikin proved unable to contain the violence. The best White troops were from the Kuban, the Don and the Caucasus, as the Cossacks were the main a source of men and resources for the Whites. When they realized that Denikin was defeated, they wanted to return to their homes en masse, seeing greater benefit in negotiating their own autonomy with the Communists. Despite everything, Denikin cracked down on the rights of the unions and returned the factories to their former owners, sparking the hatred and resistance of the workers. The Whites, unable to effectively contain the unrest, resorted to greater repression and terror. Like Kolchak, Denikin failed to create his own local government structure, resorting to repression to try to mobilize the population and its resources under his control. With these being something decisive in any modern civil or total war, he attempted to tap into these possible resources but the terror proved not to be enough to spurn the territories they held. Alongside this, it was unable to counteract the critical waste and bleed of already present supply. When the Military aid from their western allies was reduced, White soldiers had to loot for supplies, only further stoking the rage and fear of the local populace.
Finally, they failed to properly capitalize on the propaganda front. To the Whites, the peasants had a duty to serve in their armies, based primarily on the old structure of the Tsarist regime. Due to this, they saw no reason in convincing or aligning those they conscripted. On the other hand, the Bolsheviks knew how to use the symbolism of the revolution, proclaiming themselves the defenders of peasantry and smaller farmers. Paradoxically, many White commanders waited for a popular uprising against the Bolsheviks to obtain victory, but usually most of the population was hostile to both sides and indifferent to who won the war. Wrangel was the only White general to realize the mistake. He knew that the war would not be won without successfully winning over the peasants, workers and national minorities to their side. Despite this, his subordinates in Crimea behaved like an occupying army, perpetrating all manner of arbitrariness and institutionalizing corruption.