Among the variety of terms that we use when talking about the world around us, there is one that was born during the Civil War and has survived to this day, but has received a completely different meaning. This is the green movement. In ancient times, this was the name given to the insurrectionary actions of peasants who defended their rights with weapons in their hands. Today, this is the name given to communities of people who protect the rights of the nature around us.
Russian peasantry in the post-revolutionary years
The "Green" movement during the years of the Civil War is the mass protests of the peasants against the main contenders for the seizure of power in the country - the Bolsheviks, White Guards and foreign interventionists. As a rule, they saw free councils as the governing bodies of the state, formed as a result of the independent expression of the will of all citizens and alien to any form of appointment.top.
The "Green" movement was of great importance during the war, just because its main force - the peasants - made up the majority of the country's population. The course of the Civil War as a whole often depended on which of the warring parties they would support. This was well understood by all the participants in the hostilities and, to the best of their ability, they tried to win over the many millions of peasant masses to their side. However, this was not always successful, and then the confrontation took extreme forms.
Negative attitude of the villagers towards both the Bolsheviks and the Whites
So, for example, in the Central part of Russia, the attitude of the peasants towards the Bolsheviks was ambivalent. On the one hand, they supported them after the well-known decree on land, which assigned landowners' land to the peasants, on the other hand, we althy peasants and most of the middle peasants opposed the food policy of the Bolsheviks and the forced seizure of agricultural products. This duality was reflected during the Civil War.
Socially alien to the peasants, the White Guard movement also rarely found support from them. Despite the fact that many villagers served in the ranks of the White Army, most of them were recruited by force. This is evidenced by numerous memoirs of participants in those events. In addition, the White Guards often forced the peasants to perform various household duties, without compensating for the time and effort expended. This also caused discontent.
Peasant uprisings caused by the surplus appraisal
The "Green" movement in the Civil War, directed against the Bolsheviks, as already mentioned, was caused mainly by dissatisfaction with the policy of the surplus appropriation, which doomed thousands of peasant families to starvation. It is no coincidence that the main intensity of passions fell on 1919-1920, when the forced seizure of agricultural products took on the widest scale.
Among the most active protests against the Bolsheviks, one can name the movement of the "greens" in Stavropol, which began in April 1918, and the mass uprising of peasants in the Volga region that followed a year later. According to some reports, up to 180,000 people took part in it. In general, in the first half of 1019, there were 340 armed uprisings, covering more than twenty provinces.
SRs and their Third Way program
The "Green" movement during the years of the Civil War tried to use representatives of the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties for their political purposes. They worked out a joint tactic of struggle aimed at two fronts. They declared their opponents both the Bolsheviks and the leaders of the white movement A. V. Kolchak and A. I. Denikin. This program was called "Third Way" and was, in their words, a struggle against reaction from the left and right. However, the Social Revolutionaries, far from the peasant masses, were unable to unite significant forces around them.
Nestor Makhno's Peasant Army
The slogan proclaiming the "third way" was most popular in Ukraine, where the peasant rebel army under the command of N. I. Makhno fought for a long time. It is noted that its main backbone was made up of we althy peasants who were successfully engaged in agriculture and traded in bread.
They were actively involved in the redistribution of the landlords' land and had high hopes for it. As a result, it was their farms that became the objects of numerous requisitions carried out alternately by the Bolsheviks, the White Guards and the interventionists. The "green" movement, which spontaneously arose in Ukraine, was a reaction to such lawlessness.
The special character of Makhno's army was given by anarchism, the adherents of which were both the commander-in-chief himself and most of his commanders. In this idea, the most attractive was the theory of "social" revolution, which destroys all state power and thus eliminates the main instrument of violence against the individual. The main provision of the program of Old Man Makhno was people's self-government and the rejection of any form of dictate.
Popular movement led by A. S. Antonov
No less powerful and large-scale movement of the "greens" was observed in the Tambov province and in the Volga region. By the name of its leader, it received the name "Antonovshchina". As early as September 1917, the peasants in these areas took control of the landowners' lands and began to actively develop them. Accordingly, their standard of living rose, and ahead openedfavorable outlook. When a large-scale surplus appropriation began in 1919, and people began to be deprived of the fruits of their labor, this caused the sharpest reaction and forced the peasants to take up arms. They had something to protect.
The struggle took on a special intensity in 1920, when a severe drought occurred in the Tambov region, which destroyed most of the crop. In these difficult conditions, what nevertheless managed to be collected was seized in favor of the Red Army and the townspeople. As a result of such actions of the authorities, a popular uprising broke out that engulfed several counties. About 4,000 armed peasants and more than 10,000 people with pitchforks and scythes took part in it. A. S. Antonov, a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, became the leader and inspirer of the popular movement.
The defeat of Antonovshchina
He, like other leaders of the "green" movement, put forward clear and simple slogans understandable to every villager. Chief among them was the call to fight the communists in order to build a free peasant republic. His commanding abilities and ability to conduct a flexible guerrilla war should be given credit.
As a result, the uprising soon spread to other areas and took on an even larger scale. It cost the Bolshevik government great efforts to suppress it in 1921. For this purpose, units removed from the Denikin Front, led by M. N. Tukhachevsky and G. I. Kotovsky, were sent to the Tambov region.
Modern social movement "The Greens"
The battles of the Civil War died down, and the events that were told about are gonehigher. Much of that era has sunk into oblivion forever, but an amazing thing is that the term “Green Movement” has been preserved in our everyday life, although it has acquired a completely different meaning. If at the beginning of the last century this phrase meant a struggle for the interests of those who cultivated the land, today the participants in the movement are fighting for the preservation of the land itself with all its natural we alth.
"Green" - the environmental movement of our time, which opposes the harmful effects of negative factors of technological progress on the environment. In our country, they appeared in the mid-eighties of the last century and have gone through several stages of development in their history. According to data published at the end of last year, the number of environmental groups included in the all-Russian movement reaches thirty thousand.
Major NGO
Among the most famous are the movement "Green Russia", "Motherland", "Green Patrol" and a number of other organizations. Each of them has its own characteristics, but all of them are united by a common task and the mass enthusiasm that is inherent in their members. In general, this sector of society exists in the form of a non-governmental organization. It is a kind of third sector, not related to either government agencies or private business.
The political platform of representatives of modern "green" movements is based on a constructive approach to restructuring the economic policy of the state in order to harmoniously combine the interests of people and the environmenttheir nature. There can be no compromises in such issues, since not only the material well-being of people, but also their he alth and life depend on their solution.
