Facing great difficulties in central Russia, the Volga region and further south, the Soviet regime turned its attentions to the grain- growing regions of the Urals, the very places that Trotsky had visited at the start of 1920.39 As in Tambov and the agricultural provinces of central Russia, the effort to procure grain in western Siberia was conducted like a military campaign, although in the case of the latter this was on account of its relatively recent 'liberation', rather than owing to a fundamental mistrust of 'localist' soviet administration.40 Seeing in western Siberia a source of relief from the mounting crisis in food supply, procurement squads were despatched in great numbers (more than 25,000 were mobilised for procurement work in the vast region), with literally 'hungry' workers from the northern cities of European Russia deployed to ensure that the commitment to the task of procurement was beyond question.41 Little had improved, however, in the state of agricultural production since Trotsky's diagnosis of the situation in the region one year earlier, and the demands for grain made at gunpoint inspired much the same resistance and violence as had been seen in regions of European Russia.
The province of Tiumen, which was the principal focus of grain collection efforts in Siberia, became the epicentre of a wider regional rebellion that took in parts of Ekaterinburg and Cheliabinsk provinces, as well as northern Kazakhstan. The resistance to the Soviet state there assumed a more organised character, as it had in Tambov. Requisition squads and other government agents found themselves under attack by units of the 'People's Insurgent Army', whose most important actors were former Red partisans who had been instrumental in sustaining grassroots resistance to Kolchak and the Whites in 1919. Now, in 1920-21, they emerged as the prime movers in defending the village population from what were perceived as unjust and threatening demands by state requisition squads. Although unable to create the same coherent organisation of command and administration as had been achieved in the much more compact space of southern Tambov province, the rebels in western Siberia mobilised tens of thousands of local men, occupied significant regional towns (even briefly issuing their own newspaper), and made Soviet state administration and grain requisitioning virtually impossible in the first three months of 1921. With their prominent slogan of 'Soviets without Communists!', the People's Insurgent Army of western Siberia, like its counterpart in Tambov, sought to project its struggle as one of regime change rather than 'merely' protest against the policies and practices of the ruling Communist Party.
Such ambitions aside, and in acknowledgement of the fact that many of these anti-Soviet rebels wanted - sometimes desperately - to believe that they were part of a wider movement that had a strong chance to topple the Soviet government, these rebellions stood little chance of success on those terms. While in the midst of preparations to begin demobilising the Red Army at the end of 1920 - an army that had grown to several million men by the end of the Civil War - the situation in the grain-growing regions of the republic necessitated the redeployment of hundreds of thousands of those soldiers for counter- insurgency operations against, for the most part, Russian peasants. By the summer of 1921, the territory most affected by the rebellion in Tambov would be occupied by more than 100,000 Red Army troops, a force that would stay in place until the end of the year to prevent a renewal of the 'banditry' that had raged in the province over the previous twelve months. In western Siberia, regular Red Army divisions were sent to suppress the insurgency, joined by special armed units of the Cheka and Communist Party.
At these particular fronts, and elsewhere in Soviet Russia, special camps were created to imprison captured rebels, as well as to intern the neighbours and family of suspected rebels, kept as hostages, under threat of execution, to encourage the surrender of anti-Soviet insurgents. Villages were bombarded with heavy artillery and from aircraft, the Red Army experimented with using poisonous gas to 'smoke out' rebels hiding in the forests, and 'troikas' of state, party and military officials moved from village to village and carried out hasty investigations of the locals' involvement in the resistance, carrying out swift justice to demonstrate the resolve and power of the Soviet state. Throughout this process of mounting state repressions, villagers lived in fear of reprisals, either from state forces or those of the remaining rebel groups, both of which could be merciless in punishing collaboration. It is impossible to know the number of victims of the wave of violence that began in the autumn of 1920, and extended for well over a year in certain parts of Soviet territory, but the count certainly runs into the tens of thousands. As with any civil war, civilians were overwhelmingly the largest group to fall victim in this final phase of the conflict.
The combined effect of the disturbances that infected the grain- growing regions of the Soviet Republic, as well as the desperate attempts by the state to requisition as much as possible of the farmers' harvests over the course of 1920-21, left many of those same regions in an exceptionally vulnerable position. Already subject to the pressures identified by Trotsky and many other critics of the food supply policy of the Soviet government, a harvest failure in the preceding year meant that the seed grain of farmers fell subject to state requisitions, and the ensuing harvest was nothing short of disastrous, leaving the communities of the Volga region, as well as the southern Urals and parts of Ukraine, facing famine. While a massive relief effort was eventually spearheaded by the American government in 1921, the famine claimed the lives of more than five million persons between 1921 and 1923.42 The crisis in food supply in the Soviet Republic, then, left victims in the cities and the villages, in the traditionally 'grain-deficit' regions of the north of European Russia, and in the so-called 'grain-rich' provinces of central Russia, Ukraine and western Siberia. 'I'll believe you are starving when I start to see mothers eating their children,' one Soviet official was reported to have told a group of protesting villagers in the province ofVoronezh in early 1921. Such evidence was in abundance in the traditional grain-growing regions of Russia only a short time later.43
The decision to persist with the razverstka in 1920 - that is, with the policy of the armed requisitioning of grain as per the needs of the state - clearly had significant consequences for the Soviet Republic and its people. At a time when the policy's justification as an emergency wartime measure was being legitimately questioned in light of the increasingly favourable political and military situation, and with a growing appreciation within the Communist Party of the policy's political consequences and questionable sustainability, the dismissal of the opportunity to alter the path of official policy on food supply is a moment that effectively extended the Civil War and helped create the famine that claimed the lives of millions of Soviet citizens.