The left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks was a series of rebellions, uprisings, and revolts against the Bolsheviks by oppositional left-wing organizations and groups that occurred between the October Revolution of 1917 and the end of the Russian Civil War in 1923. The Bolsheviks' abandonment of council democracy, the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the German Empire, and the Bolsheviks' brutal "war communism" policies (including he banning of strikes, obligatory labor duty by non-working classes, requisitioning of agricultural surplus, and food rationing) led to left-wing organizations such as the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Left SRs, Mensheviks, and anarchists joining forces with the monarchists, social democrats, and liberals of the anti-communist White Army, or engaging in peasant or nationalist revolts against the centralized Soviet state. By 1923, the Bolsheviks were victorious over all their enemies.
History[]
The overthrow of the Russian Empire in the February Revolution of 1917 led to the establishment of the Russian Republic, with the liberal Georgy Lvov and then the social democrat Alexander Kerensky serving as president. This democratic republic was unable to establish its authority due to the formation of workers', peasants', and soldiers' soviets across the former empire, many of which were led by the disloyal, communist Bolsheviks of Vladimir Lenin, who saw the bourgeois revolution of February 1917 as the precursor to a second, proletarian revolution led by the Bolsheviks.
Most Mensheviks and SRs supported the continuation of Russian involvement in World War I to defeat German imperialism and export the Russian Revolution, but the Bolsheviks saw the Great War as an inter-imperialist war and called for the revolutionary defeat of their own government. In the July Days of 1917, the Mensheviks and SRs supported the suppression of the Bolsheviks, who formed part of a rival government in Petrograd, the Petrograd Soviet. The Bolsheviks gained popular support after the spectacular failure of the Kerensky Offensive on the Eastern Front of World War I, as most soldiers' councils refused to engage in offensive warfare, and demoralization spread throughout the Russian ranks. In October 1917, the Bolshevik "October Revolution" toppled Kerensky's government, and a simultaneous election in most prominent soviets brought the Bolsheviks to power.
In November 1917, the Bolsheviks converted the All-Russian Central Executive Committee into an organ of state power, free from the influence of the other soviets, while also creating the Council of People's Commissars to control the economy and establishing the Cheka secret police to murder "counter-revolutionaries". The Mensheviks and SRs walked out of the soviet congress to protest the formation of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, but the majority of SRs split to form the Left SRs and joined the Bolshevik coalition government, supporting land redistribution efforts. Anarchists were split between supporting and opposing the Soviets.
On 25 November 1917, elections were held for the Constituent Assembly, using party lists from before the Left-Right SR split. The anti-Bolshevik Right SRs placed in first with 37.6% of the vote and 324/767 seats in the Assembly, followed by the Bolsheviks with 23.3% and 183 seats, the Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionary Party with 12.7% and 110 seats, the Mensheviks with 3% and 18 seats, the Cossacks with 2% and 17 seats, and the Kadets with 4.65 and 16 seats. Disagreements over the allocation of SR seats to the Left and Right factions caused Vladimir Lenin to grow disillusioned with the Constituent Assembly, threatening to deal with it "by revolutionary means" if it did not accept sovereignty of the Soviet government. In January 1918, the majority of deputies refused to accept the sovereignty of the Soviet government, resulting in the Bolsheviks and Left SRs walking out.
In April 1918, the Popular Socialists, Right SRs, and left-wing nationalists formed the Union of Regeneration to prop up anti-Bolshevik forces and liberate their country from the "Germano-Bolshevik" yoke. From May to June 1918, the Czechoslovak Legion overthrew Bolshevik rule in Siberia, the Urals, and the Volga region, helping the SRs to form opposition governments (such as the Komuch in Samara). In addition, the Bolsheviks' signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the German Empire in March 1918 (under which the Soviets ceded large amounts of territory to the Kaiser) led to the Left SRs leaving the government in protest, believing that the imperialist war should be transformed into a revolutionary war, rather than seeking peace with the Germans. In June 1918, the Bolsheviks excluded the Mensheviks and SRs from the All-Russia Congress of Soviets, resulting in the Left SR uprising. The uprising began with the SR assassination of German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach in Moscow on 6 July 1918, but the assassination failed to provoke a widespread popular uprising as expected, and Left SR insurrections in Petrograd, Vologda, Arzamas, Murom, Yaroslavl, Veliky Ustyug, and Rybinsk were suppressed and the Left SRs destroyed.
From 1920 to 1922, the Soviets' confiscation of grain from peasants in Tambov Governorate led to a massive peasant uprising, the Tambov Rebellion, which was suppressed with chemical weapons in 1921; 15,000 people were killed and another 100,000 arrested for what the Soviets called "banditry". In March 1921, anarchist sailors in the Baltic Fleet demanded the inclusion of socialists and anarchists in newly-elected soviets, decentralized power, economic freedom for peasants and workers, dissolution of the Soviet bureaucracy, and the restoration of civil rights for the working-class; however, Leon Trotsky, who had once lionized the anarchists as "adornment and pride of the revolution," accused them of falling prey to White Army financing and indoctrination while isolated at the Kronstadt naval fortress on Kotlin Island, near Petrograd. The sailors responded with the Kronstadt Rebellion, which was crushed by the Bolsheviks after a close-fought struggle.
At the same time, Menshevik, SR, and left-wing nationalist opposition leaders formed nationalist governments in Georgia, Armenia, Belarus, and Ukraine, but the Soviet Red Army conquered these countries in military invasions. Nestor Makhno's anarchist Black Army took control of most of southern Ukraine and Crimea after its abandonment by the Red Army in 1919, but he broke with the Bolsheviks' due to their dictatorial practices. In 1920, the Bolsheviks cracked down on the Makhnovists, ordering the mass execution of Makhnovist sympathizers; Makhno and the surviving members of his Black Army were forced into exile in August 1921.
By 1923, left-wing resistance to the Bolshevik seizure of power had mostly seized, although the Left SRs continued to operate in small cells until 1925, and the Soviets adopted the New Economic Policy to help rebuild the country through foreign investments and free-market capitalism, as well as to appease lingering socialist and anarchist opposition to the Bolshevik government's excessive power.