Green Armies - Bolshevik Response

Bolshevik Response

The Soviet government tried to build an anti-revolutionary, anti-Communist image for the Green armies. After all, in suppressing Green forces, the Bolsheviks killed countless peasants, soldiers, and workers – members of classes which they were supposedly saving from the bourgeoisie; Vladimir Lenin had to justify his suppression of the populace in order to maintain his ideological integrity, for, despite their military superiority, the Bolsheviks still had much of the population to convert to their cause. Provincial Communist officials announced to locals that the Green armies were a subsection of the apparently villainous White movement, despite the fact that Green armies were generally just as hostile to the Whites as they were to the Reds. The Bolsheviks also exaggerated the influence of the kulaks in Green armies, who were certainly involved but hardly the driving force of the movement.

The Communists initially believed that they could easily defeat the Greens, treating the force as a hopeless cause both in their propaganda and in their military strategies. Instead of focusing armed attention on the Greens as a whole, the Reds treated each peasant army as a specific instance of unrest, suppressing harshly and further angering the peasant population. By the time that Lenin and the Bolsheviks realized the strength of the Green movement, it had grown into a serious social and military threat to Bolshevik power. Some scholars credit the Green movement with indirectly forcing the Communist Party to change its economic strategy in 1921 (see New Economic Policy), and yet, while the Greens certainly contributed to changes in Soviet policy, the extent of their influence is open to debate. It is far less contestable that the NEP – along with increased rainfall – quelled the Green movement by improving rural conditions and thus damaged the armies’ foundation for successful recruitment – peasant discontent. By the summer of 1922, the Green armies had all but disappeared.