Green armies + impacts of civil war + poland

Question 1

Green armies - reasons for fighting - requisitioning

Answer 1

• In Samara province, for example, the worst-hit region of the famine crisis, the amount of grain requisitioned during 1919—20 exceeded the actual harvest surplus by 30 per cent with the result that the average peasant household lost 118 kg of food, fodder and seed from its basic stores
• Bolsheviks had deliberately set their food levies higher than the estimated harvest surplus on the grounds that the peasants would hide up to one-third of their actual food surplus
• German Volga region 42 per cent of the paltry 1920 harvest was seized and shipped off to the hungry north.

Question 2

Green armies - challenge to the Reds

Answer 2

• Reds could travel thirty miles a day the rebels could travel up to a hundred miles.
• some brigades numbered as high as 50,000
• rebel armies held up trains. In the Donbass region such holdups were said to be ‘almost a daily occurrence’ during the spring of 1921.

Question 3

Blue armies - Tambov rebellion

Answer 3

• In 1920, the requisitions were increased from 18 million to 27 million poods in the region.
• The revolt began on 19 August 1920 in a small town of Khitrovo where a military requisitioning detachment of the Red Army appropriated everything they could and “beat up elderly men of seventy in full view of the public”
• The rebel militia was highly effective and infiltrated even the Tambov Cheka
• numbered 70,000 at peak
• Seven concentration camps were set up. At least 50,000 people were interned, mostly women, children, and the elderly, some of them sent there as hostages. The mortality rate in the camps was 15-20 percent a month

Question 4

Impacts of civil war - economic for the workers

Answer 4

• The death rate in Petrograd reached an estimated eighty per thousand in 1919.
• The average worker was consuming fewer than 2,000 calories a day
• Compared with the pre-war years, hardly themselves a golden age, he was eating half the amount of bread and one-third the amount of meat.
• In 1918 the real value of the average worker’s wage was 24 per cent of its value in 1913; and by the end of 1919 its value was as low as 2 per cent.
• a million workers were unemployed by the spring of 1918.

Question 5

Impacts of civil war - Bolshevik supporters

Answer 5

• Bolsheviks in Petrograd fell from 50,000 to a mere 13,000. The Bolshevik Party, in the words of Shliapnikov, was becoming ‘the vanguard of a non-existent class’
• Bols painted workers who left cities as class-cosncious = declassing = those who stayed are petty-bourgeois = strikes are by them

Question 6

Impacts of civil war - ideology

Answer 6

The Civil War was a formative experience for the Bolsheviks. It became their model of success, the ‘heroic period’ of the revolution when ‘any fortress could be stormed’. It shaped their political habits for a generation (Figes)
- Nothing did more to shape the ruling attitudes of the Bolsheviks than the experience of the civil war.