The Green Army (RCW)

[The Cheshire Cat]

Hello Everyone,

Who exactly were the Greens? I have read that they were civilians who did not support anyone and were fighting the Reds, Blacks and Whites. But if they were civilians, then were they not the true proletariat? All armies were led by intellectuals and/or capitalists. So while some of the intellectuals might have been fighting to save civilians lives, they were also destroying other civilians, the Greens. So the Greens fought against people who wanted to liberate them. Why?

I can understand that there were civilians who supported the Whites, just as people now support our capitalist system. And I also understand why they were shot when they resisted. But why were the Greens fighting? Were they ultra conservative? Were they lead by local merchants and village elders? I just can't lay my finger on them.

Thanks!

[Ravachol]

The 'greens' refers to a collection of mainly peasant-based unaligned rural movements during the russian civil war. The name originally comes from those who defected from one of the factions and retreated to the vast Russian woods to avoid reprisal.

The 'greens' largely represented no particular political program or ideology save for knowing what they didn't want: The whites, the bolsheviks, etc. There were genuine revolutionary sentiments within the movement as well as vile reactionary ones (pogroms against jews, the pillaging of towns and a hatred for anything that wasn't rural, bands led by defected white warlords, etc.). The greens often associated with the Left-SRs and anarchists, sometimes for ideological reasons, sometimes for purely tactical ones.

There was the matter of the tambov rebellion which was brutally crushed by the Bolsheviks through village burnings. A central figure in the tambov rebellion was Aleksandr Antonov, a former left-sr official who sided with the bolsheviks during the revolution of 1917 but become disillusioned with subsequent bolshevik economic policy. The bolsheviks considered the tambov rebellion, Antonov's armed forces (also called the 'blue army' to make things even more confusing) and the entire green armies as 'anarchic banditry' which they crushed with the use of massive repression, poison gas and cheka liquidations.

Largely the greens operated on the principle of "we don't care about any of this, leave us be" though this sometimes translated into a 'ukraine for the ukrainians' nationalist sentiment (in the case of Greens in the ukraine). I don't know about the actual class composition of the green movement, whether it was largely land-owning farmers or agricultural workers or whatever so saying they are 'proletarians' is hard to say.

I don't think they represent a 'true proletarian' or revolutionary current, rather one of the many antagonisms against the bolsheviks and a mixed expression of proletarian interests, a distaste for remote state interference, reactionary nationalism, petit-bourgeois interests, etc.

Besides, there is no such thing as the 'true proletariat'. All sides rallied sections of the proletariat to their side. The proletariat died by the hundreds under the rain of mortar shells in Flanders during WWI. The proletariat is in and of itself not revolutionary, it is a general condition of dispossesion with the potential of being the revolutionary subject. The condition itself, however, is not something to be applauded or revolutionary. Stakhnovite kitsch portraying them as 'rugged masculine men who wear blue overalls and carry large hammers and never sing and always grunt' only serves the workerist ideological wing of capital. So in short, whether or not a movement is composed of proletarians does not automatically mean it is revolutionary.

[Crux]

Moved to History forum.

[Rafiq]

Weren't they Ukrainian nationalists?

Fuck, nvm. Those were the blues right?

[Ravachol]

Weren't they Ukrainian nationalists?

Fuck, nvm. Those were the blues right?

No, the blues refers to the 'United guerrilla army of the Lands of Tambov' associated with Antonov. As I pointed out in my post, the Greens contained nationalist tendencies (as well as revolutionary ones) but were not an expression of nationalism.

[The Cheshire Cat]

How come that so many men of different beliefs could be united simply by the fact that they had common enemies? Because from what I understand now, there were defectors from the Whites, Reds and Blacks an nationalists. Those ideals are incompatible, and even if they simply fought to keep the things the way they were, there must have been some internal fights as well, especially between the Reds and the Whites.

And I realized that a proletarian movement does not have to be revolutionairy. What I was trying to say is that the Greens were the only 'movement' which solely consisted of the proles, while all other factions, of which some of them were fighting for the proles, also had capitalists, officers, etc. in them. Yet the other factions als fought the Greens. But that was probably because the Greens attacked the other factions to try to stop the war and change, right?

[Blake's Baby]

Why do you think the green armies solely consisted of proletarians? Ravchol has already explained why this is not the case.

Antonov, who was either a 'green' or a 'blue' (or maybe both), was an official from the SRs. 'Prole'? Maybe not. An 'officer' anyway.

The green armies were based on the peasantry. 'Proles'? No, not in the main.

The ideas that the green armies expressed (especially in Ukraine) - a rejection of urbanism, localism, and in some cases racism against Jews, Poles etc, in other words a kind of 'authentic' Ukrainian nationalism 'sprung from the soil' (which also affected the Makhnovists to an extent) - are more hallmarks of the petite-bourgeoisie than the proletariat.

To the extent that they were composed of deserters (who may or may not have been proletarian) I don't have so much of a problem with them, but their ideology (in so far as they have a coherent ideology at all) seems very much a peasant-based 'get off my land, bloody foreigners, and I don't much like those funny people over there with their beards' affair.

So not, in the main, an expression of the proletariat, but of the most reactionary elements of the petite-bourgeoisie which, if they had a 'revolutionary' ideology at all, was more a backwards-looking return to a pre-Lapserian (pre-Polish landlords, pre-Bolshevik big government, pre-Jews) golden age. Not progressive, rather the reverse.

[The Cheshire Cat]

"Why do you think the green armies solely consisted of proletarians? Ravchol has already explained why this is not the case."

Sorry, must have misunderstood it the first time.

[Robespierres Neck]

This is my first time reading/hearing about a 'Green army'. Interesting.