Left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks

Anarchists, like the Socialist Revolutionaries, were divided. Some supported the Bolsheviks, holding minor positions in the government,[8] some were neutral, and some actively resisted. Anarchists that supported the Soviet government were referred to as "Soviet anarchists", by anti-Bolshevik anarchists, and were lauded by Lenin in August 1919 as "the most dedicated supporters of Soviet power".[8]

The Union of Regeneration was founded in Moscow in April 1918 as an underground agency organizing democratic resistance to the Bolshevik dictatorship, composed of the Popular Socialists, Right Socialist Revolutionaries, and Defensists, among others. They were tasked with propping up anti-Bolshevik forces and to create a Russian state system based on civil liberties, patriotism, and state-consciousness with the goal to liberate the country from the "Germano-Bolshevik" yoke.[15][16][17]

On May 7, 1918, the Eighth Party Council of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries commenced in Moscow and recognized the Union's leading role, putting aside political ideology and class for the purpose of Russia's salvation. They decided to start an uprising against the Bolsheviks with the goal of reconvening the Russian Constituent Assembly.[15] While preparations were under way, the Czechoslovak Legions overthrew Bolshevik rule in Siberia, the Urals and the Volga region in late May-early June 1918 and the center of SR activity shifted there. On June 8, 1918, five Constituent Assembly members formed the All-Russian Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch) in Samara and declared it the new supreme authority in the country.[18] The Social Revolutionary Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia came to power on June 29, 1918, after the uprising in Vladivostok.

At the 5th All-Russia Congress of Soviets of July 4, 1918, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries had 352 delegates compared to 745 Bolsheviks out of 1132 total. The Left SRs raised disagreements on the suppression of rival parties, the death penalty, and mainly, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Bolsheviks excluded the Right SRs and Mensheviks from the government on 14 June for associating with counterrevolutionaries and seeking to "organize armed attacks against the workers and peasants" (though Mensheviks had not supported them), while the Left SRs advocated forming a government of all socialist parties. The Left SRs agreed with extrajudicial execution of political opponents to stop the counterrevolution, but opposed having the government legally pronouncing death sentences, an unusual position that is best understood within the context of the group's terrorist past. The Left SRs strongly opposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and opposed Trotsky's insistence that no one try to attack German troops in Ukraine.[20]

Socialist Revolutionaries tended to claim to be fighting to restore the February Revolution. Some anarchists used the slogan "Third Revolution". The slogan was later used during the Kronstadt rebellion also.[22]

Lenin sent the telegrams to "introduce mass terror" in Nizhny Novgorod in response to the civilian uprising there, and "crush" peasants in Penza who protested to requisition of their grain by military detachments.[23]

The Black Book of Communism: ""It is quite clear that preparations are being made for a White Guard uprising in Nizhni Novgorod," wrote Lenin in a telegram on 9 August 1918 to the president of the Executive Committee of the Nizhni Novgorod soviet, in response to a report about peasant protests against requisitioning. "Your first response must be to establish a dictatorial troika (i.e., you, Markin, and one other person) and introduce mass terror, shooting or deporting the hundreds of prostitutes who are causing all the soldiers to drink, all the ex-officers, etc. There is not a moment to lose; you must act resolutely, with massive reprisals. Immediate execution for anyone caught in possession of a firearm. Massive deportations of Mensheviks and other suspect elements." The next day Lenin sent a similar telegram to the Central Executive Committee of the Penza soviet:

Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity. The interests of the whole revolution demand such actions, for the final struggle with the kulaks has now begun. You must make an example of these people. (1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers. (2) Publish their names. (3) Seize all their grain. (4) Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday's telegram. Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and that we will continue to do so. Reply saying you have received and carried out these instructions. Yours, Lenin. P.S. Find tougher people.[23]

Vladimir Pchelin's depiction of the assassination attempt on Lenin

In the morning of August 30, 1918, a Social Revolutionary Leonid Kannegisser, who was Boris Savinkov's comrade, killed the chief of the Cheka in Petrograd, Moisei Uritsky, in his office.

On August 30, 1918 Lenin survived an attempted assassination by Fanny Kaplan leaving a bullet in his neck. This contributed to the strokes[24] that prevented him from removing Stalin.

On September 5, 1918 the Cheka gave responsibility for targeting opposing parties on the left such as the Social Revolutionaries and other anti-Bolshevik groups, chiefly the anarchists, by the policy of Red Terror.

In November 1918, the Sixth All-Russian Congress of Soviets met. They approved an amnesty, ordering release of those detained by the Cheka who had no definite charges within two weeks of arrest, and of hostages except those needed to guarantee hostages held by their enemies. They also held out an olive branch to the other socialist parties. The Menshevik conference in October 1918 had declared military support to the Soviet Government but still opposed the Cheka and terror. On November 30 the VTsIK annulled the exclusion of the Mensheviks except those who were still allied with enemies.[25]

Noe Zhordania

Mensheviks took power in Georgia and in 1918 the Democratic Republic of Georgia was proclaimed with Noe Zhordania becoming the head. The area was forcefully sovietized by February 25, 1921. Lenin recommended "a policy of concessions in relation to the Georgian intelligentsia and small traders" and "a coalition with Noe Zhordania or similar Georgian Mensheviks". Most Menshevik leaders fled to Paris.[28]

In January 1919 the SR Central Committee decided that the Bolsheviks were the lesser of two evils and gave up armed struggle against them. The SRs opened negotiations with the Bolsheviks and in February 1919 the SR People's Army joined with the Red Army. The VTsIK resolved on February 25, 1919 to reinstate the SRs except those who continued to directly or indirectly support counterrevolution.[29]

In Astrakhan, the strikers and Red Army soldiers who joined them were loaded onto barges and then thrown by the hundreds into the Volga River with stones around their necks. Between 2,000 and 4,000 were shot or drowned from March 12 to 14, 1919. In addition, the repression also claimed the lives of some 600 to 1,000 bourgeoisie. Recently published archival documents indicate this was the largest massacre of workers by the Bolsheviks before the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion.

On March 16, 1919, Cheka stormed the Putilov factory (today the Kirov Plant. More than 900 workers who went to a strike were arrested. More than 200 of them were executed without trial during next few days. Numerous strikes took place in the spring of 1919 in cities of Tula, Orel, Tver, Ivanovo, and Astrakhan. The starving workers sought to obtain food rations matching those of Red Army soldiers. They also demanded the elimination of privileges for Communists, freedom of press, and free elections. All strikes were mercilessly suppressed by Cheka using arrests and executions.

The Bolsheviks let the SR Central Committee re-establish itself in Moscow and start publishing a party newspaper in March 1919.[30] After the defeat of the White Army in Russia, the party tried to reorganise and to re-establish contacts with its provincial organisations; despite numerous requests from party sections in East Russia and by exiled members in Europe, the Central Committee refused to take armed action against the Bolsheviks, and also supported them in the ensuing war against Poland. These decisions were confirmed by the Tenth Party Council in 1920. Despite that, Lenin accused the party of cooperation with counter-revolutionary forces and SR Central Committee members were arrested. Chernov went undercover and eventually was forced to flee Russia and the party was officially banned in 1921, after the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik).

A typical report from a Cheka department stated: "Yaroslavl Province, 23 June 1919. The uprising of deserters in the Petropavlovskaya volost has been put down. The families of the deserters have been taken as hostages. When we started to shoot one person from each family, the Greens began to come out of the woods and surrender. Thirty-four deserters were shot as an example".

The imprisoned SR Central Committee members were put on trial starting June 8, 1922.[31] The trial was the first of the many political trials of Soviet Russia and ended with twelve death sentences and several years of hard labour sentences.

The death sentences were temporarily suspended by the government, despite Lenin's requests to proceed with executions immediately.

However, strikes continued. In January 1920, Lenin sent a telegram to Izhevsk telling that "I am surprised that you are taking the matter so lightly and are not immediately executing large numbers of strikers for the crime of sabotage."[33]

In June 1920, female workers in Tula who refused to work on Sunday were arrested and sent to labor camps.[34]

Alexander Shliapnikov

Alexandra Kollontai

Around 1920 Alexander Shliapnikov, Sergei Medvedev and other trade-unionists of working class origins formed a left-wing faction within the Communist Party that became known as the Workers' Opposition. In 1921 it gained support from Alexandra Kollontai, who published a pamphlet entitled The workers' opposition, as well. The new faction had some similar demands to some of the rebellions, but supported the government and argued peacefully within it rather than resorting to violent uprisings. Instead the Workers Opposition energetically supported the crushing of these rebellions, including volunteering government representatives to participate in the crushing of the Kronstadt Rebellion. After the Kronstadt Rebellion, Lenin argued that the party needed unity at that time because their enemies were trying to exploit disunity. The Workers' Opposition and other factions were dissolved, but the leaders of the two main factions Workers Opposition and Democratic Centralists were included in the new leadership.

In January 1921, the largest uprising[35] in Russia since the civil war broke out. Insurgents blocked the railway, occupied Tobolsk, Surgut, Berezovo, and Salekhard, stormed Ishim, and came within four km of Tyumen. Both sides fought a battle of unprecedented savagery. Regular Red Army units using armored trains, warships, and other means took part in suppressing the uprising, which was finally crushed only in 1922.

Simon Karetnik, Batko Makhno (Nestor Makhno), and Fedir Szczus (Fedor Shchus)

The Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine or Anarchist Black Army led by anarchist and former Red Army leader Nestor Makhno took control of most of the southern Ukraine and Crimea after its abandonment by Red Army troops in 1919. Makhno's forces fought on the side of the Bolsheviks and played an important role in the eventual defeat of the White Armies. However, they were at odds with the Bolshevik view of a unitary Bolshevik dominated political movement. Occasionally Makhno's Black Army troops fought Red Army forces, whom the Ukrainian anarchists had viewed with mistrust after Chekist and Red Army raids on anarchist centers, including arrests, detentions, and executions commencing in May 1918.

For his part, Makhno stated his support for "free worker-peasant soviets"[36] independent of centralized control by Moscow. Makhno, a rural anarchist, viewed the Bolsheviks as urban dictators out-of-touch with the people, opposing the Bolshevik-controlled "Cheka [secret police]... and similar compulsory authoritative and disciplinary institutions". He called for "[f]reedom of speech, press, assembly, unions and the like".[36] In practice, Makhno's Anarchist Black Army, the Anarchist Revolutionary Military Council, and the Ukrainian anarchists' political arm, the Congress of the Confederation of Anarchists Groups (NABAT) formed an overall government over the area they controlled, though they did permit local self-governing autonomous committees of peasants. Like the Red Army, they used forced conscription and summary executions, though as a relatively popular native Ukrainian movement, these measures were not used on the same scale as that of the Bolshevik Red Army.[37] In the areas under his military control, the Anarchist Revolutionary Military Council banned all opposition parties[36](,[37] 119), and like the Bolsheviks, used two secret police counter-intelligence forces: the Razedka and the Kommissiya Protivmakhnovskikh Del.[38]

Some members of the Bolshevik Central Committees considered allowing an independent area for Makhno's libertarian experiment,[37] an idea fiercely opposed by both Lenin and Leon Trotsky, War Commissar of the Red Army. After each successful repulse of White Army forces, Trotsky ordered fresh attacks against Makhno and the Anarchist Black Army, halting only when White forces threatened to once again defeat the Red Army in the field. At the instructions of Moscow, the Cheka sent two agents to assassinate Makhno in 1920. After repudiation of two military alliances, and the final defeat of White General Wrangel in the Crimea, Trotsky ordered the mass executions of Makhnovist sympathizers, followed by the liquidation of many of Makhno's subordinate commanders and his entire headquarters staff at a "joint planning conference" in November 1920. By August 1921, Makhno and the remainder of the Anarchist Black Army had been forced into exile.

SRs were among the main leaders of the uprisings of the Tambov Rebellion and the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921. Protests against grain requisitioning of the peasantry were a major component of these uprisings and Lenin's New Economic Program was introduced as a concession.

The Kronstadt rebellion was led by (,[39] 95) Social-Revolutionary Stepan Maximovich Petrichenko. He initiated the change from a protest to an open rebellion by spreading a false rumor that the Bolsheviks were coming to arrest everyone(,[22] 85). The rebels called for free elections to regional councils (soviets) and an end to grain requisitioning.

Sailors of the battleship Petropavlovsk in Helsinki; black flag calls for "death to the bourgeoisie".

Despite protests from notorious anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, the revolt was suppressed by Bolsheviks.

Numerous attacks and assassinations occurred frequently until these rebellions finally petered out in 1922. Anarchists participated in almost all of the attacks the Left SR's organized, and carried out many on their own initiative. The most celebrated figures of these rebellions, Lev Chernyi and Fanya Baron were both Anarchists.

The end result of these rebellions was the suppression of rival socialist parties and anarchists, and economic concessions from the Bolsheviks with the New Economic Policy.

Menshevism were suppressed after the Kronstadt Uprising and the forceful sovietization of Menshevik Georgia. A number of prominent Mensheviks emigrated thereafter. Julius Martov who was suffering from ill health at this time went to Weimar Republic.

The Left SRs collapsed as a party by 1922 and existed as small cells through 1925.