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resurgence of Jewish culture and religion, espe-
cially in large urban centers such as Moscow.
eventually defeated the Antonovshchina, as
Antonov's movement became widely known.
With the bulk of his army routed by August
1921, Antonov again went into hiding with a
small group of followers. He was labeled a bandit
by the Soviet government, and the Soviet press
reported that he and his brother, Dmitrii, were
killed in July 1922 in a confrontation with troops
from the Tambov branch of the secret police.
Antonov Uprising
(1919-1921)
The Antonov uprising of 1919-21 in Tambov
province was one of the most brutal and exten-
sive of a series of peasant rebellions that shook
the foundations of the new Soviet state in the
closing months of the Russian civil war. Its
leader, Aleksandr Stepanovich Antonov (1885?-
1922), had been a member of the Socialist Rev-
olutionary Party since 1905. Arrested by the
czarist police after the 1905 Revolution and sen-
tenced to a 12-year term in Siberia, Antonov
returned to Tambov province soon after the
February Revolution and became chief of the
local militia in the town of Kirsanov. One of the
most overpopulated and poverty-stricken pro-
vinces of European Russia, the Tambov region
was a stronghold of the peasant-leaning Social-
ist Revolutionary Party. By 1918 the anti-Bol-
shevik armed peasant bands, also known as
Greens, who had found shelter in the region's
wooded backlands, broke out into open revolt
as the Bolshevik government began to enforce
a policy of forced grain requisitioning (
prodraz-
verstka
). Antonov went underground in August
1920 and provided military leadership while the
Socialist Revolutionary Party provided political
leadership through the Unions of the Toiling
Peasantry, headed by the Provincial Committee,
which exercised civil authority. By January 1921,
Antonov's troops consisted of some 50,000 men,
mainly peasants and deserters from the Red
Army. Close to 2,000 Bolshevik officials were
killed in clashes with Antonov's armies and mer-
ciless peasant violence was met with equally
ruthless Red Terror. A desire to isolate Antonov's
peasant base of support played an important role
in the debates that led up to the adoption of the
New Economic Policy in March 1921, particu-
larly the plank that replaced grain requisitioning
with a food tax. This change and a year of cam-
paigns by regular Red Army detachments under
Mikhail
TUKHACHEVSKY
and Ieronim Uborevich
Apraksin, Feodor Matveevich
(1661-1728)
admiral
A lifelong friend of
PETER I
the Great, Apraksin is
generally credited as the creator of the Russian
navy. He had been close to Peter since 1682,
when he helped him train the Preobrazhenskoe
“play” regiments that would later become Peter's
personal guard. In 1700, as head of the Admi-
ralty and governor of the recently acquired terri-
tory of Azov on the Black Sea, Apraksin was
placed in charge of shipbuilding and the con-
struction of naval installations. During the Great
Northern War (1700-1721) he served with dis-
tinction, first repealing a Swedish attempt to take
St. Petersburg (1708), for which he was made
count, and then leading the Russian navy to its
first victory at the Battle of Hango (1714), which
ended Swedish naval domination in the Baltic
Sea. In 1721 he headed the Russian side in the
negotiations that led to the Treaty of Nystadt with
Sweden to end the Great Northern War. In the
war with Persia of 1722-23, Apraksin com-
manded the Caspian Sea flotilla, and from 1723
to 1726, served as commander of the Baltic fleet.
Prone to financial troubles, he was tried three
times for embezzlement and each time was pun-
ished with heavy fines. After Peter's death,
Apraksin was one of the six members of the
Supreme Privy Council, composed of Peter's
close advisers, which for four years served as
Russia's de facto ruling oligarchy. He did not live
to see the council's selection of
ANNA IVANOVNA
as
empress and her reassertion of imperial authority
over oligarchical rule in 1730. Apraksin's older
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