Resistance of the rural population of the Astrakhan province to the policy of the Bolsheviks in January – March 1919 (on the example of the Astrakhan district)

Annotation

This article continues the authors' research in the direction of analyzing the causes, main goals, forms and methods of active resistance of the rural population of the Astrakhan province to military mobilization and requisition measures carried out by local authorities during the civil war, a topic that has not been sufficiently studied, and therefore is not presented in the regional historiographic space in full, in a system of substantiated conclusions and generalizations. The authors set as their research objectives the study of the processes of protest actions of the population of the Astrakhan district in January – March 1919 using the example of such a social group as the Lovtsy; the reconstruction of the events of the March uprising of 1919, allowing to identify its causes, characteristics, results, the degree of influence of protest energy on various groups of the population of the Astrakhan province, visibly manifested in various forms of resistance. The March uprising in the provincial center became the apogee of the peasant movement of 1918 – early 1919. Having begun in Astrakhan, the uprising quickly spread to the city's outskirts and further into the depths of the province. In the Astrakhan district alone, protests spread to more than twenty villages. The study of the scientific problem within the chronological and territorial frameworks outlined by the authors seems relevant and significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, due to the need to overcome the attitudes and assessments of an ideological nature reflected in the works of Soviet historians, and secondly, due to the need to supplement and concretize the all-Russian picture of the peasant protest movement with facts extracted and analyzed on the basis of regional-level sources, introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, or presented in a different, authorial interpretation. A systematic approach to the analysis of the aggregate factors of the peasant protest movement facilitates a comprehensive study of the causes, intensity and forms of manifestation of peasant protest in the Astrakhan province in January-March 1919. The article presents the protest movement of the rural population of the Astrakhan district, represented by the Lovets population, from the standpoint of modern methodological approaches. The study was conducted using historical-genetic, historical-typological and historical-comparative methods.

Keywords

• civil war
• Soviet power
• Astrakhan
• Astrakhan Governorate
• Astrakhan County rural population
• peasant protest
• fish catchers
• bolshevik party
• military mobilization policy
• requisition activities
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Contribution of the authors

Timofeeva E. G. – scientific management, research concept, justification of the purpose of the article, writing the draft, the consolidation of data, final conclusions; Tyurin A. O. – work in museums, archives, processing and presentation of statistical data, source materials, follow-on revision of the text; final conclusions; Lebedev S. V. – work in archives, processing and presentation of statistical data, source materials, follow-on revision of the text; final conclusions.

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