In January 1919, Izvestiia carried a report of a government investigation of a “White Guard kulak” uprising in a village in the province of Kostroma which illustrates what the assault on the village “bourgeoisie” really involved. The investigation revealed that the chairman of the village Executive committee regularly beat peasant petitioners, sometimes with canes. Some of his victims were stripped of their shoes and forced to sit in the snow. So-called food requisitions were really ordinary robberies, in the course of which peasants were pummeled with Cossack Nagaiki.
As it approached a village, the food detachment would open machine gun fire to frighten peasants. Then the beatings would begin. “The peasants had to put on five or more shirts to ward off the blows, but that did not do much good because the whips were laced with wire: after a beating the shirts stuck to the flesh and dried, so they had to be loosened by soaking in warm water.” Members of the detachment urged the soldiers to beat the peasants with whatever they could lay their hands on, “so that they would remember Soviet authority.”
As the government pressed its campaign, the countryside rose in revolt. This was an event unprecedented in Russian history, for the previous uprisings, such as Razin’s or Pugachev’s, had been regional affairs, usually confined to the eastern and southeastern borderlands. Nothing like it had ever occurred in the heartland of Russia. Rural resistance to the Bolsheviks that erupted in the summer of 1918 represented, in both extent and numbers involved, far and away the greatest peasant rebellion that the country had ever experienced.
Source:
Pipes, Richard. "War on the Village." The Russian Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1990. 735. Print.
Original Source Listed:
V. Kerzhentsev in Izvestiia, No. 15/597 (January 22, 1919), I.
Further Reading:
Степа́н Тимофе́евич Ра́зин (Stepan Timofeyevich Razin) / Стенька (Stenka Razin)
Pugachev's Rebellion of 1773-75 / Cossack Rebellion of 1773-75
5 shirts, bleeding and out clogs and you have to get into warm water to peel it off...fuck that. That was standard "we own you" procedure. That really puts things into perspective.