What armed resistance between the peasants and the Soviet regime?
Answers
This policy was implemented in March 1921, primarily because massive peasant revolts all over Russia threatened Bolshevik power. The peasants were revolting against war communism, the forcible requisitioning of their produce to feed the army and the cities. War communism was carried out with particular ruthlessness in Tambov province. Lenin had begun this practice in the spring of 1918 (see ch. 2) .
At the same time, there was growing unrest in the towns as well as protest against undemocratic Bolshevik rule. In March 1921, the same "Red sailors" of the naval base on the island of Kronstadt (pron: Kronshtatt, island just outside Leningrad), who had fought for the Bolsheviks in November 1917, now revolted against them. The sailors demanded free and secret elections to the Soviets; freedom of speech and press; the peasants' right to work their own land as they wished; and the legalization of small scale private industry.