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The Bolsheviks expelled the opposition, seized control, and subsequently brutally repressed the Tambov region after local organs turned against party directives.
The fate of the Soviet and the Tambov region followed a chronology of political subjugation and military violence:
• Expulsion and Purges (1918): Shortly after the October Revolution of 1917, the Tambov region—a stronghold of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR)—resisted Bolshevik centralization. In March 1918, following the ratification of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, local Bolshevik delegates were even expelled from the Tambov soviet. In response, the Bolshevik central government used force and the secret police (Cheka) to dissolve the rebellious soviets, purging Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary members to impose a strictly Bolshevik-led party dictatorship.
• The Tambov Uprising (1920–1921): With the local soviet completely subjugated by Moscow's control, the Bolsheviks implemented "War Communism." The policy included the violent and compulsory requisition of grain ( prodrazvyorstka ), which drained food from local peasants and generated extreme famine. This culminated in the Tambov Uprising (led by Alexander Antonov), one of the largest peasant rebellions against the Soviet regime.
• Bloody Repression: To crush the armed revolt demanding an end to the Bolshevik monopoly and the return of peasant autonomy, Moscow sent the Red Army under the command of Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Georgy Zhukov. The repression was merciless: the Bolsheviks used chemical weapons (poison gas) against the rebels in the forests, created concentration camps for the families of suspects, and executed thousands of hostages and peasants.
Although the resistance was militarily crushed in mid-1921, the violence of the uprising in Tambov shocked the leadership in Moscow, forcing Lenin to retreat economically and abolish War Communism, replacing it with the New Economic Policy (NEP).