Revolutionary tribunals in the anti-peasant terror system (1918–1921)

We reveal the forms, methods and features of the participation of revolutionary tribunals in anti-peasant actions carried out by the authorities in 1918–1921, including against the participants in the Antonov revolt. We analyze the significance and role of tribunals as specific types of special courts in the implementation of the authorities’ policy towards the peasantry. It is argued that the revolutionary tribunals occupied their definite place in the system of anti-peasant terror and carried out their specific functions, fulfilling the task of formally legalizing unstructured violence against peasants. We analyze the process of increasing the repressiveness of the tribunals against the background of a sharp increase in anti-Soviet manifestations on the part of the peasantry, which ultimately resulted in anti-peasant terror. The task of the revolutionary tribunals as an institutional instrument of anti-peasant terror was to judicially legalize repression against the peasantry. The role of the tribunals in the prosecution of deserters, the bulk of whom were again peasants, is revealed. It is argued that the revolutionary tribunals were granted the broadest confiscation rights against deserters and the process of their implementation. Considerable attention is paid to the activities of the revolutionary tribunals during the suppression of the peasant revolt in the Tambov region, in particular the Tambov revolutionary military tribunal, which was a parallel structure of the territorial revolutionary tribunal, which was under the jurisdiction of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic.

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