It is difficult to speak of a Green Movement during the Civil War because it really was a very heterogeneous movement, even by the standards of the Russian Civil War. Although Civil War era discourse often talks of a "Green Army", there was no such unified entity in the sense there were White or Red armies. In some cases, self-described Greens were bands of deserters from either the Red Army or the White forces that wanted to keep apart from the fighting. Other Green groups were more explicit in their political agenda wanting to preserve the gains of the "Black Partitions" and rejecting the Bolsheviks' usurpation of the Revolution and had more formal structures like the Union of Toiling Peasants in the Tambov region.

Speaking very generally, the Greens were largely a peasant movement that incorporated both deserters from the armies and various left-wing political groups that found little role after the October Revolution. Both anarchists and the SRs sometimes gravitated towards the Greens not only because they would not be subordinated to the Bolsheviks, but also due to long-standing romanticization of the Russian peasantry among these groups prior to 1917. The presence of SR leaders in some Green groups led some among both the Reds and Whites to castigate the Greens as a left-wing opposition to the Bolsheviks, yet the many of these SRs were late-comers to the Greens and many Green policies had little to do with SR ideology. The biggest immediate grievances of the Greens was the forced food requisitions by both sides in the Civil War. Taking this food amounted to famine in many areas of the former empire and overall breakdown of the economy made the peasantry acutely aware of any disruption to their food supply. Many Russian villages had a flood of refugees not only from war zones, but from the cities which also could not feed themselves. One of the tools used to defang Greenism in the countryside, aside from stepped-up violence, was for the Red Army to be more flexible in its requisition policies. Centralized and regular policies for food requisition as well as a more-organized Red Army put an end to the Greens in Tambov despite the Green's more organized structure.

The overall impact of the Greens on the course of the Russian Civil War was multifaceted. On one hand, the spectre of Greenism made it easier for the Bolsheviks to justify a much more brutal policy towards the Russian peasantry during the early stages of the Civil War. In the eyes of a number of Red Army commissars, the Greens were not peasants simply looking to keep from starving the next season, but heterodox political thinkers who have drifted towards counter-revolution. Conversely, the idea that Greenism was a discrete political movement also forced the Bolsheviks to deal with the peasant issue more constructively during the closing stages of the Civil War. The Greens were also a sign of the diversity of political opinions during the Revolution and Civil War. Try as they might to monopolize the narrative of 1917, the presence of many peasant groups who self-identified as Greens showed that there were different visions of what 1917 meant for Russia. The Green slogan "for Soviets, against Communists" shows that while a large segment of the peasant population may have supported the February Revolution, they had considerable qualms about the Bolsheviks' seizure of power in the October Revolution. The Greens emerged as something of a road not taken in the post-Civil War period among various left-wing and right-wing emigres who romanticized the peasantry's rejection of Bolshevism. The Greens themselves were a very diverse lot and this retroactive projection by exiles made them appear more homogenized than they were in real life. Finally, the emergence of so many Greens exemplifies the realities of the Civil War. Neither the Red nor the White armies could control the vast hinterlands of Russia, and this led to a destruction of authority and a power vacuum. The Greens show a degree of self-mobilization and involvement in the politics of 1917 by the peasantry which was often talked about in the decades before that fateful year, but seldom directly involved in the various schemes to radically rearrange the body politic of the Russian Empire.

Sources

Brovkin, Vladimir N. Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918-1922. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Landis, Erik C. Bandits and Partisans: The Antonov Movement in the Russian Civil War. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008.

_. "Who Were the “Greens”? Rumor and Collective Identity in the Russian Civil War." The Russian Review 69, no. 1 (2010): 30-46.