It is clear that there was insufficient political support for a radical reorientation of the food supply policy at the start of 1920. However, the political situation changed dramatically over the next twelve months, as the material costs of the continuation of the razverstka policy mounted in step with popular anxieties about the future, and gave rise to unprecedented levels of violence in the countryside when preparations were being made for another major grain procurement campaign in the autumn of that year.
When Trotsky was submitting his proposals to the Central Committee, Communist Party officials in the provinces were already engaged in a campaign of their own to try to arrest the degeneration of popular attitudes towards the party and Soviet government in the countryside. In Samara province, which had been the host of repeated outbreaks of violence between village communities and state agents, party activists received briefing papers on the most common anti-government slogans - number one on the list: 'Up with free trade!' - with instructions of how to counter these as they put across the party's message.30 The officials charged with monitoring the correspondence to and from
Red Army soldiers produced numerous excerpts from letters they had opened and examined, which referred to the continuing requisitions that left households with less and less to eat, and diminishing levels of seed to sow the fields for the next harvest.31 As the summer of 1920 progressed, anxieties grew as poor rainfall and high winds in certain regions produced early indications of drought and crop damage.32 When the food requisition squads descended on the villages, protests by peasant farmers and local soviet officials were dismissed, taken only as evidence of 'kulak sabotage' and 'parochialism'.33 Dismissing letters of appeal against the announced targets for grain collection sent by village communities and local (village and district) soviets in the weeks before the harvest was to commence, the county food commissar in Lebedian (Tambov province) declared to his colleagues in the county administration that these appeals 'only amount to pitiful kulak whining'. 'Is it not well known by now,' he explained,
that the peasants continue to distil vodka, that they sell their grain on the black market, that they bury it in the ground ? It is about time that you all understood that the requisitions are carried out according to the official razverstka target, which is established on the basis of government statistics. If the peasants do not have the necessary amount of grain, then that is their fault, and not ours.34
Such was the extent of the breakdown in relations between the central government and the periphery, broadly defined, that armed requisition squads expected resistance from locals and took it as confirmation of sabotage, carrying out the business as agents of the 'Centre', and bypassing local officials. The Cheka organisation in Penza province reported in August 1920 that
[t]he peasants are protesting against the violence and humiliation they suffer at the hand of the requisitioning squads, which in some cases does occur on account of misunderstandings and misinterpretations of their orders from the centre. The centre is proposing to extract grain surpluses to an inhuman degree, and some of the requisition squads do not spare the whip in trying to fulfil these orders. Amidst all of this there has been outright criminal behaviour by squads that behave as if they have some sort of axe to grind.35
Reports such as this indicate that the atmosphere that surrounded the grain procurement campaign, in which hundreds of armed squads descended upon the countryside to collect designated targets from villages, was one that combined a measure of desperation among the farming peasantry with a strong measure of despondence that characterised local administration and even many local Communist Party members.
The importance of this was most spectacularly demonstrated in Tambov, an agricultural province in central Russia that had been one of the main focal points of Soviet food supply efforts, having remained under Soviet control very nearly throughout the Civil War period. Like other provinces in Soviet Russia, Tambov had experienced waves of violent resistance from villagers as the state sought to collect grain and conscript men into the Red Army. When requisitioning began in August 1920 in Tambov, the anticipated clashes with farming households were dealt with firmly by the armed squads, but for the first time this violent defiance proved to be more durable. Making examples of individual villages that fought requisition squads - either by taking hostages, performing public executions, or even burning individual houses and even whole villages - proved ineffective, as it emerged that armed 'bandit' gangs were fighting alongside the villagers, working to sustain the resistance to requisition squads and state officials. Under the wave of violence, Communist Party members in the countryside rapidly took flight, fearing for their lives, and the soviet administration melted away as rebellion spread. Over the course of the next several weeks, the makings of a rebel army formed in the densely populated, agriculturally rich southern part of Tambov, effectively ending the campaign to requisition grain, and complicating the efforts of the Soviet state to secure food in the region, more generally, as important rail lines connecting the cities of the north of Soviet Russia to the traditional grain-growing regions passed through the province. By the end of the year, Soviet authority in Tambov was effectively isolated in the provincial capital city, and the administrative centres of the counties, while still holding out against the rebellion, were vulnerable and nearly overcome by fatalism and panic. Over the winter months of 1920-21, the 'Partisan Army' in Tambov took shape, incorporating a number of regiments and keeping some 30,000 men under arms. At the same time, the rebellion worked to implant an alternative government for the territory creating its own civilian network of village-based 'unions of the labouring peasantry', which numbered in the hundreds.36
The rebellion in Tambov at the time was unique in the Soviet Republic in its size and level of organisation. In several other regions, what predominated was termed 'raiding banditry' - rebels who carried out hit-and-run attacks targeting state agents and official institutions, but who did not attempt to cultivate institutions of their own.37 The disruption to the Soviet state, however, was considerable. Grain procurement had virtually come to a halt in Tambov province by October/November 1920, but complications were experienced in several other agricultural provinces, both contiguous to Tambov and further afield, that left the regime facing a renewed crisis just as the formal military fronts of the Civil War had all but disappeared. A survey of the situation produced by the Cheka in mid December 1920 illustrated the manner in which 'banditry', such as that found in Tambov, was an extensive phenomenon, detailing its manifestation from western Ukraine and Belorussia to the Caucasus and through to Kazakhstan and Siberia. Emphasising the mainsprings of such disorder in each of these regions, the report nevertheless underlined that the violence was a consequence of the economic breakdown that the republic was suffering after so many years of conflict, and as such could be understood as inevitable. In that it threatened to form linkages across regions, however, the Cheka report insisted that a coordinated strategy was required to end the wave of banditry and bring the Civil War to an end.38