It began in August 1920 with resistance to the forced confiscation of grain and developed into a guerrilla war against the Red Army, Cheka units and the Soviet Russian authorities.

In 1904, Alexander Antonov was sentenced to twenty years in prison for blowing up a train, but received an amnesty from the Russian Provisional Government following the February Revolution and returned to his native Tambov, where he served in the local militia in Kirsanov.

[14] The peasants of Tambov largely supported the October Revolution, since Vladimir Lenin's Decree on Land legalized the expropriation of property.

[15] Unlike in the cities, the Bolsheviks had hardly any supporters in the rural regions, where in the elections of 1917 the Socialist Revolutionary Party had won large majorities.

Instead, commissions gave a rough estimate based on pre-war production, so that devastation, crop failures, and population decline were not included.

On the basis of these figures, which did not include the dislocations of the civil war in the countryside, a high target for the procurement of grain was set.

[16] The peasants often responded by reducing their acreage, as they no longer had the economic incentive to produce surpluses, which made the confiscations ordered from above hit them even harder.

[14] This is how the first anti-Bolshevik guerrilla movements arose, made up of Red Army deserters, Socialist-Revolutionaries and peasants who resisted the searches in the forests.

[19] They killed more than 200 government grain collectors and over the next year their forces grew steadily, growing from an initial 150 to 6,000 by early summer 1920,[19] but that would have to wait until after the defeat of Anton Denikin's White movement for there to be a real mass uprising.

[21] On 19 August 1920, a revolt broke out in the small town of Khitrovo, where a military requisitioning detachment of the Red Army had appropriated everything they could and "beat up elderly men of seventy in full view of the public".

He demanded that the free trade and movement of goods should be allowed, that the grain requisitions should be ended and the Soviet administration and the Cheka dissolved.

[32] By the end of the month, the rebels numbered six groups, each totaling 4,000 men with a dozen machine guns and several artillery pieces.

[33] As the Bolshevik authorities were busy with the Polish-Soviet War and Pyotr Wrangel's offensive in northern Tavria,[34] they only had 3,000 unreliable troops in Tambov province.

[16] By October 1920, the Bolsheviks had completely lost control of the rural territory of the governorate, dominating only the city of Tambov itself and a number of smaller urban settlements.

[30] On 5 November, two to six thousand rebels, mostly on horseback, attacked the railway station at Sampur in two coordinated groups, capturing an artillery cannon, some machine guns, and numerous revolvers and rifles.

[20] Because of this, most of their actions were impulsive assaults orchestrated by each band against the Bolshevik detachments in charge of requisitioning grain or repressing the villagers.

[30] Their use of guerrilla warfare was based on the old tactic of launching surprise attacks and fleeing immediately afterwards, thanks to their superior knowledge of the terrain and the mobility of their cavalry.

On the contrary, being too closed in on themselves prevented them from seeking allies in other peasant movements or marching against the big cities, the control of which was what the Bolsheviks worried about because their source of support was the industrial proletariat.

[49] By the end of the year the greens had achieved one of the main objectives, the reds had stopped sending units to their territories to requisition grain.

In fact the military circles of the Red command had decided to concentrate on a great campaign of pacification of Tambov: as soon as their troops flooded the province the movement would soon be finished.

In addition, it was increasingly difficult to help them because their main communication links, the armored trains, were continuously attacked in the area.

[16] To win over the population, Nikolai Bukharin was commissioned to draw up "non-coercive measures", in which he recommended that the required grain quotas be lowered.

[53] In response, on 2 February 1921, the Soviet leadership announced the end of the "prodrazvyorstka", and issued a special decree directed at peasants from the region implementing the "prodnalog" policy.

[61] The garrison consisted of a company of infantrymen, a unit of Bolshevik militants, a machine gun platoon, the Volga Infantry Brigade (which had arrived in January from Saratov), and the 2nd Cheka regiment,[60] and it quickly collapsed.

[71] On 31 May, seven armored vehicles commanded by General Ivan Fedko surprised 3,000 rebels in the village of Dve Sestritsy and dispersed them with heavy casualties.

[74] On the dawn of 1 June, Fedko with three vehicles armed with machine guns, Kotovski's horsemen and the brigade of Siberian cavalry of M. D. Kovalev launched a surprise attack against Antonov and the 3,000 partisans with whom he occupied Elan [ru].

[82] The Antonov brothers and several of their last followers were killed in combat against a Red detachment on 24 June 1922[70] in the village of Nizhni Shibriai [ru], where they hid their few personal possessions.

[96] The activities of the Cheka, the incorporation of thousands of locals into the Communist Party (with the benefits that it implied) and the concessions of the New Economic Policy helped the Bolsheviks in the spring of 1921 to defuse the situation, especially the end of grain requisitions.

[97] The uprising made the Soviet leadership aware of its failure to manage relations with the peasants and is seen as one of the factors that prompted Lenin to initiate the New Economic Policy.

[82] In the military field it is mentioned that the Soviet Army Commander Mikhail Frunze was impressed by the guerillas' resistance to regular forces.