Victors Against the People

CHAPTER 11 · 1920–1922 · The Russian Revolution, 1905–1924

The Reds won the civil war and immediately faced a new enemy: the people they had freed. With the Whites gone, the peasants had no more reason to tolerate the grain requisitions of War Communism — and they rose. In Tambov province a vast peasant war blazed through 1920–21; the Red command crushed it with artillery, hostage-taking, concentration camps for families, and — by written order — poison gas in the forests where the rebels hid. It is remembered here soberly, a memorial to what the victors did to the countryside that had fed their war.

The turn: The New Economic Policy, March 1921.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.