text: In March 1932, NU, UP, and UST formally seceded from the NCAA. Led by UP's Candido C. Bartolome, NU's Leon Tirol and UST's Fr. Silvestre Sancho, OP, the move was made to put competitions on equal footing, to increase amateur athletic competitions and to separate the universities from the college members of the league. On April 6, the "Big 3 League" is born. On August 14, the "Big 3" Association is inaugurated with a meet that starts with basketball. Other events were baseball, football, volleyball, relays, track and field, swimming and tennis.


title: University Athletic Association of the Philippines

text: In 1935, UP did not participate in the "Big 3 League" because of mass intramurals at the state university. NU and UST held the meet with FEU (formerly Institute of Accounts) taking UP's place.


text: On September 27, 1938, the University of the Philippines Alumni Association and the Philippine Amateur Athletic Federation (PAAF), then the highest sports body in the country, encouraged the original "Big 3 League" and FEU to form a permanent sports association, thus the University Athletic Association of the Philippines was established. Events included were basketball, baseball, football, women's volleyball, swimming and track and field. UP bagged three titles (baseball, volleyball, track and field). UST was tops in football and swimming and FEU triumphed in basketball.


text: In 1941, the outbreak of World War II hindered the staging of the 1941–42 UAAP with UST failing to complete its term. UAAP competition was not held from 1942 to 1946 due to the Japanese occupation of the country which resulted in the closure of educational institutions. The UAAP competition resumed in 1947.


text: In 1952, University of the East, Adamson University, Manila Central University, and University of Manila were granted two-year probationary membership to the UAAP. After the two-year probationary period, UE and MCU was accepted as a regular member into the league in 1954. MCU remained until its pull-out in 1962. The other two universities (Adamson and UM) were dropped from the UAAP due to their inability to comply with the league requirements.


text: In 1970, Adamson University reapplied for admission to the league with a two-year probationary period and in 1974, Adamson successfully hosted the 1974–75 athletic season paving the way for its permanent membership into the league.


text: In 1978, the UAAP admitted Ateneo de Manila University into the league while De La Salle University joined in 1986.


text: In 2020, the 2019-20 competition was initially intended to end in May that year. However, the competition abruptly ended early in April due to the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. Because of the ongoing pandemic, the planned 2020-21 tournament was cancelled, the first in peacetime. The league resumed the tournament on March 26, 2022 with its 84th season.


text: The previous UAAP logo features the university colors of the eight member-schools of the league in a circular formation. It also bears the year when the league was established, 1938, in the center.


text: The seal changes every season where the university colors of the season host is placed on the very top. Nonetheless, the arrangement of the colors never changes.


text: The colors of University of the Philippines (green and maroon), University of Santo Tomas (gold and white), Far Eastern University (green and gold), and National University (blue and gold) come first, clockwise. These are followed by the colors of Ateneo de Manila University (sky blue and white), De La Salle University (green and white), Adamson University (dark blue and white), and University of the East (red and white).


text: Prior to the start of UAAP Season 84 in March 2022, the league unveiled its new logo on December 17, 2021. The new logo was inspired by the Philippine traditional native sport sipa.


text: Member universities compete in 14 sports. Basketball, being the most popular sport in the Philippines, is the most watched and most supported among all the sports.


text: All of these sports have Men's and Women's divisions, with the exception of baseball, in which only men participate, and softball, which is for women only. The following sports have a high school division, in which the associated high schools of the universities participate: volleyball, table tennis, chess, swimming, fencing, and track and field have Boys' and Girls' divisions. Meanwhile, baseball and football have a Boys' division only. Basketball staged Girls' division competitions starting Season 82 albeit as demo sport only.


text: As of now, only four of the eight member universities participate in all 15 sports, namely the Ateneo de Manila University, the De La Salle University, the University of the Philippines, and the University of Santo Tomas. During a UAAP Board meeting in Season 76 (2013–14), a proposal was made to add golf and gymnastics to the league's sporting events. This was turned down by the Board and instead a resolution was passed encouraging its member-schools to participate in all of the league's events, a goal the organization would like to achieve in the near future.


text: As of Season 82 (2019–20), only five sports in the Collegiate division have a complete roster from the eight member schools. These sports are basketball, indoor and beach volleyball, chess, and football (Men's only). In the High School division, only basketball and table tennis (both in Boys division) have full participation. High School Basketball Girls was added in Season 82.


text: Perennial overall champions UST and La Salle, as well as UP and Ateneo, have teams in all events, thus giving them an advantage for the general championship.


text: Swimming has no participants from FEU in both the men's and women's divisions. NU, which has undergone the biggest buildup particularly in basketball, volleyball and tennis, have yet to take part in judo (men and women), football (women), and fencing (women).


text: In taekwondo, Adamson is not maintaining a men's and women's team; and Adamson and UE, a poomsae squad. FEU also does not have a team in judo.


text: Football, which has gained popularity, also is incomplete. Adamson and UE do not have a women's team. Futsal will be a future event in Seniors and High school, In tennis, there are no Adamson and FEU teams in the men's and no UE, Adamson and FEU in the women's.


text: Fencing has been missing Adamson in the men's, and Adamson and NU in the women's. Softball has seven teams, sans FEU and baseball, six without FEU and UE.


text: With that goal, the UAAP would continue to defer action on the inclusion of other sports until full participation on the present sports is achieved in order to make the league more competitive, especially in the race for the general championship.


text: Beginning Season 78, the league has shifted its sports schedule start from July to September because of the change in the academic calendars of most of its member universities.


text: A rivalry between the Ateneo de Manila University and the University of the Philippines, the country's 2 highest-ranked academic institutions for decades, existed even before the formation of the NCAA and UAAP. Students of UP would troop from Padre Faura to the Ateneo campus in Intramuros to play basketball with the Ateneans, which led to Ateneo forming the first organized cheering squad and pep band in the Philippines and what is now known as the Blue Babble Battalion. This would later become UAAP's "Battle of Katipunan" when both universities transferred to their respective campuses along Katipunan Avenue in Quezon City, and when the two schools began competing in the UAAP.


text: Despite both schools being featured in several UAAP Finals matchups in other events like men's football, the now-dubbed "Battle of Katipunan" garnered nationwide attention for the first time in UAAP history when third-seeded UP Fighting Maroons, after ending a 21-year long drought of Final Four appearance, overcame second-seeded Adamson Soaring Falcons' twice-to-beat advantage to advance to the finals for the first time since their 1986 championship to face defending champions Ateneo Blue Eagles in men's basketball in 2018. Since that season, excluding 2019, Ateneo and UP jointly figured in the championship series in UAAP men's basketball, with UP winning during Season 84 in 2022 via overtime in do-or-die game, and Ateneo winning in 2018 via sweep and Season 85 in 2022 via do-or-die game.


text: The rivalry between Ateneo de Manila University and De La Salle University, widely regarded as Philippines' foremost collegiate rivalry for decades, has resulted in sold-out games (especially in women's volleyball and men's basketball) that attract several public figures in attendance, including politicians, movie stars, and foreign diplomats. It is also the foremost school rivalry in the UAAP since La Salle joined the UAAP from the NCAA in 1986. However, the rivalry dates back to the time when both schools were playing in the National Collegiate Athletic Association from 1924 until Ateneo transferred to the UAAP in 1978.


text: The cheerdance rivalry between University of the Philippines and University of Santo Tomas has been one of the most talked about rivalries in UAAP history. Since the inception of the cheerdance, UP and UST possess the best winning records, dominating the top podium finishes between the 1990s and early 2010s, including consecutive joint podium finishes by both schools from 1999 to 2008. Both schools' pep squads are famous for their stunts and high-energy performances. UST has won 8 cheerdance titles which included 5 straight victories from 2002 to 2006, while UP has won 8 cheerdance titles and completed podium finishes for a total of 20 years, the most for the event. Since 2010, the rivalry turned into a friendly one as both UP and UST supporters cheered their school cheers during the announcement of winners.


text: Although matches between these universities have not reached a rivalry status in sporting events outside of cheerdance, the battle between their respective teams may be referred to as "Separation of Church and State". UST is the sole pontifical university in the country wherein Pope Pius XII gave it the title "The Catholic University of the Philippines". UP, on the other hand, has been declared by the Philippine government as the country's "national university".


text: The popularity of the rivalry between the two universities diminished in the late 2010s in the cheerdance competition as a result of the rise of other pep squads. It gained greater prominence when the two teams competed against each other in the UAAP Season 82 men's basketball semifinals. The Growling Tigers swept the Fighting Maroons, who had the twice-to-beat advantage, to return to the UAAP Finals.


text: Both were known for their numerous basketball championship matches in the 1990s with UST winning four straight titles from 1993 to 1996, the last three of which were at the expense of the Green Archers at the UAAP Finals. In 1997, La Salle eliminated UST in the semifinals to deny the Growling Tigers of a fifth consecutive championship title. In 1999, La Salle defeated the Growling Tigers to win the basketball crown and achieved their own 4-peat championship streak from 1998 to 2001. Their basketball rivalry diminished in latter years because of UST's decline.


text: It became a celebrated rivalry in women's volleyball, as the Lady Spikers and the Tigresses met three times in the championship of the Shakey's V-League tournament. UST won the first and La Salle winning the latter two. The Tigresses have won 5 championships while the Lady Spikers have 3 under their belt.


text: The women's volleyball rivalry was carried over to the UAAP. The DLSU Lady Spikers and the UST Tigresses met in the UAAP Finals for two consecutive seasons – Season 72 (won by UST) and Season 73 (won by La Salle). But, UST struggled in the succeeding seasons. Both schools met in the semifinals in Season 79 (won by La Salle) and Season 81 (won by UST). In Season 81, UST ended La Salle's decade-long streak of finals appearances (running from 2009 to 2018). It was the longest in the Final Four era of UAAP volleyball.


text: The rivalry between Far Eastern University and University of the East started in the 1950s. Tagged as the "Battle of the East", these two schools, along with UST, have the winningest basketball squads in the league (FEU having won 20 basketball championships while UE having won 18 titles).


text: The rivalry was sparked after the Season 54 Basketball Finals in 1991 when La Salle's final game win was protested by FEU after a Green Archer was admitted into the playing court after being disqualified. The UAAP Board upheld the protest and ordered the replay. The protest was taken up by FIBA, the highest international governing body in basketball. FIBA and the Basketball Association of the Philippines (BAP) supported La Salle's stand on the issue. La Salle did not show up, claiming to have won legitimately, and FEU was awarded the trophy by default. La Salle then had their victory parade pass through all UAAP schools – when they passed through the FEU campus, the motorcade was bombarded with debris.


text: The rivalry between DLSU and FEU has produced several momentous scenes and drama in UAAP Basketball history. FEU and La Salle faced each other in the UAAP Finals in 2004 and 2005, with the Green Archers prevailing in 2004 and FEU winning the year afterwards. However, La Salle's 2004 championship was forfeited and handed to the Tamaraws instead after a controversial ineligibility issue, which also caused DLSU's suspension in 2006.


text: DLSU and FEU has also faced several times in the finals of UAAP women's volleyball, most recently in 2018 when La Salle swept FEU en route to their 11th overall championship, but both teams were ousted in the Final Four by rising contemporary teams such as Ateneo and UST in 2019. La Salle has won 3 crowns over FEU in their head-to-head finals matchups, while FEU, having the most number of volleyball championship titles in the country (with a total of 29 titles in the league), has won 4 crowns over DLSU, most recently in Season 65 (2002). DLSU has the longest ongoing streak of Final Four appearances in UAAP volleyball (since 2009 in the women's division).


text: The rivalry started when Adamson had the twice-to-beat advantage against UP in the UAAP Season 81 men's basketball semifinals. During that season, UP and Adamson were the only remaining schools that had yet to compete in the men's basketball championship round in the UAAP in the 21st century. After losing twice in the elimination rounds, UP defeated Adamson in two games, including the overtime in the do-or-die match, to pose their first appearance in the UAAP Finals in any of the league's marquee events in the 21st century.


text: The Adamson Soaring Falcons and the Ateneo Blue Eagles did not have a well-known rivalry, but Adamson ended a 13-year, 29-match losing streak against Ateneo in the UAAP Season 74 basketball tournaments when they defeated Ateneo in the last game of the elimination round and denied the Blue Eagles of a thrice-to-beat advantage in the semifinals. Their rivalry, also referred to as the "Battle of the Birds", began in 2010, when they met in the finals of the Philippine Collegiate Championship League, a year before Ateneo was defeated once by Adamson in UAAP Season 74.


text: While Adamdon and Ateneo's UAAP men's basketball rivalry was rekindled by their semifinal matchup in UAAP Season 85, both notably competed in the playoffs of women's volleyball in UAAP Seasons 75, 76 and 84, with Ateneo prevailing in all mentioned matchups and, in the latter case, ousting Adamson from contention for the Final Four round.


text: Note: The telecast for RPN and PTV were produced by "Silverstar Sports", a production company founded by Louis Kierulf.


title: Richard Bach

text: Richard David Bach (born June 23, 1936) is an American writer. He has written numerous works of fiction and also non-fiction flight-related titles. His works include "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" (1970) and "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah" (1977), both of which were among the 1970s' biggest sellers.


title: Richard Bach

text: Most of Bach's books have been semi-autobiographical, using actual or fictionalized events from his life to illustrate his philosophy. His books espouse his philosophy that our apparent physical limits and mortality are merely appearance. Bach is noted for his love of aviation and for his books related to flying in a metaphorical context. He has flown as a hobby since the age of 17. In late August 2012, Bach was severely injured when on approach to landing at Friday Harbor, Washington, his aircraft clipped some power lines and crashed upside down in a field.


title: Richard Bach

text: Bach was born in Oak Park, Illinois, to Roland R. and Ruth Shaw Bach. His father was an American Red Cross chapter manager. Bach attended Long Beach State College in 1955.


title: Richard Bach

text: Bach's first airplane flight occurred at age 14, when his mother was campaigning for a seat on the council of Long Beach, California. Her campaign manager, Paul Marcus, mentioned that he flew airplanes and invited Richard on a flight in his Globe Swift.


title: Richard Bach

text: Bach served in the United States Navy Reserve, then in the New Jersey Air National Guard's 108th Fighter Wing, 141st Fighter Squadron (USAF), as a Republic F-84F Thunderstreak fighter pilot. He then worked at a variety of jobs, including as a technical writer for Douglas Aircraft and as a contributing editor for "Flying" magazine. He served in the USAF reserve and was deployed in France in 1960. He later became a barnstormer.


title: Richard Bach

text: During the summer of 1970, Bach and his friend Chris Cagle traveled to Ireland, where they participated in flying sequences for Roger Corman's film "Von Richthofen and Brown". They flew a variety of World War I aircraft of the Blue Max collection owned by ex-RCAF pilot Lynn Garrison. Bach and Garrison first met when Bach wrote articles for "Avian", Garrison's aviation publication.


title: Richard Bach

text: Most of Bach's books involve flight in some way, from the early stories which are purely about flying aircraft, to "Stranger to the Ground", his first book, to his later works, in which he used flight as a philosophical metaphor.


title: Richard Bach

text: Bach's first book, the autobiographical "Stranger to the Ground" (1963) described the deployment to France of his Air National Guard unit and was received favorably, for example, by Edmund Fuller in "The Wall Street Journal".


title: Richard Bach

text: In 1970, "Jonathan Livingston Seagull", a story about a seagull who flew for the love of flying rather than merely to catch food, was released by Macmillan Publishers after the manuscript was turned down by several others. It had first been published in "Soaring", the magazine of the Soaring Society of America. The book, which included photos of seagulls in flight by photographer Russell Munson, became a number-one bestseller. Containing fewer than 10,000 words, the book sold more than one million copies in 1972 alone. The surprise success of the book was widely reported in the media in the early 1970s.


title: Richard Bach

text: In 1973, "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" was adapted into a film of the same name, produced by Paramount Pictures Corporation, with a soundtrack by Neil Diamond. In 1975, Bach was the driving force behind "Nothing by Chance", a documentary film based on his book of the same name. The film centers on modern barnstorming around the United States in the 1970s. Bach recruited a group of his friends who were pilots to recreate the era of the barnstormer.


title: Richard Bach

text: A second novel, "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah", published in 1977, tells of an encounter with a modern-day messiah who has decided to quit.


title: Richard Bach

text: On August 31, 2012, Bach was injured in an aircraft landing accident on San Juan Island in Washington. He was landing a 2008 Easton Gilbert G Searey (N346PE) that he had nicknamed "Puff" at a private airport when the landing gear clipped some power lines. He crashed upside down in a field about two miles from Friday Harbor, taking down two poles and sparking a small grass fire.


title: Richard Bach

text: The day after the accident, Bach was reported to be in serious but stable condition with a head injury and broken shoulder. Bach was hospitalized for four months. He reported that his near-death experience inspired him to finish the fourth part of "Jonathan Livingston Seagull", which had been originally published in three parts.


title: Richard Bach

text: In December 2012, "Publishers Weekly" reported that "Travels with Puff" had been sent to his publisher the day before his accident. "Travels with Puff" was released on March 19, 2013.


title: Richard Bach

text: In 2014, Bach published his sequel to "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah", which he called "". The book incorporates the story of Bach's real-life aircraft crash, with the author imagining he is being visited by the "messiah", Don Shimoda, who helps him through his difficult medical recovery.


title: Richard Bach

text: Bach had six children with his first wife, Bette Jeanne Franks. Also a pilot, she is the author of "Patterns: Tales of Flying and of Life", a book about her life as a pilot and single mother. She typed and edited most of Richard's aviation writing. They divorced in 1970, and Bach spent years without seeing his children.


title: Richard Bach

text: His and Bette's son Jonathan, named after the titular character in Bach's bestseller, "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," is a software engineer and journalist. He wrote the 1993 book "Above the Clouds," about growing up without knowing his father and then later meeting him as a college student. Richard gave his approval, although he noted that it included some personal history he would "rather not see in print."


title: Richard Bach

text: Their other children are Robert, Kristel, James Marcus Bach, Erika, and their youngest daughter, Bethany, who was killed in an accident at the age of 15 in 1985.


title: Richard Bach

text: In 1981, Bach married actress Leslie Parrish, whom he met during the making of the film "Jonathan Livingston Seagull". She featured significantly in two of his subsequent books: "The Bridge Across Forever" and "One", which primarily focused on their relationship and Bach's concept of soulmates. They divorced in 1999.


title: Richard Bach

text: Bach married his third wife, Sabryna Nelson-Alexopoulos, in April 1999. They divorced on April 1, 2011.


title: Multicultural London English

text: Multicultural London English (abbreviated MLE) is a sociolect of English that emerged in the late 20th century. It is spoken mainly by young, working-class people in multicultural parts of London.


title: Multicultural London English

text: As the label suggests, speakers of MLE come from a wide variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and live in diverse neighbourhoods. As a result, it can be regarded as a multiethnolect. One study was unable "to isolate "distinct (discrete)" ethnic styles" in their data on phonetics and quotatives in Hackney and commented that the "differences between ethnicities, where they exist, are quantitative in nature". Linguists have suggested that diversity of friendship groups is a contributing factor to the development of MLE; the more ethnically diverse an adolescent's friendship networks are, the more likely it is that they will speak MLE.


title: Multicultural London English

text: Variants of MLE have emerged in diverse neighbourhoods of other cities, such as Birmingham and Manchester, which fuse elements of MLE with local influences. This has led to some linguists referring to an overarching variety of English known as Multicultural British English (MBE), also known as Multicultural Urban British English (MUBE) or Urban British English (abbreviated UBE), which emerged from and is heavily influenced by MLE.


title: Multicultural London English

text: MLE is rooted mostly in the widespread migration from the Caribbean to the UK following World War II, and to a lesser extent the migration from other areas such as South Asia and West Africa. Distinctive Black British slang did not become widely visible until the 1970s (prior to this, influences from African-American slang were slipping into the British lexicon, but they were not home-grown). The popularity of Jamaican music in the UK, such as reggae and ska, led to the emergence of slang rooted in Jamaican patois being used in the UK, setting the foundation for what would later become known as MLE. Research conducted in the early 1980s concluded that adolescents of Afro-Caribbean descent were 'bidialectal', switching between Jamaican creole and London English; while white working class adolescents would occasionally use creole-inspired slang, they retained their accents. In 1985, Smiley Culture, a British musician of Jamaican and Guyanese heritage, released "Cockney Translator", one of the first examples of British 'white slang' and British 'Black slang' appearing side-by-side on a record (however, still distinct from each other). While Smiley Culture was commenting on how the two forms of slang were very distinct from each other and lived side-by-side, more natural fusions would become common in later years. Some hip-hop artists from the late 80s and early 90s, such as London Posse, regularly infused both cockney and patois influenced slang in their music, showcasing how elements of both were becoming very much entwined and influencing each other, reflecting how younger, working-class Londoners were speaking. Such influences were not restricted to persons of a specific racial background. In 1987, Dick Hebdige, a British sociologist, commented that "In some parts of Britain, West Indian patois has become the public language of inner-city youths, irrespective of their racial origin".


title: Multicultural London English

text: By the late 1990s, London was becoming increasingly more multilingual, and residential segregation was less common. Young people from various ethnic backgrounds intermixed and, in Hackney at least, Cockney was no longer the majority-spoken local dialect, resulting in children of various ethnic backgrounds adopting MLE. Linguist Tony Thorne noted that white working-class school kids were using "recreolised lexis". In the following decade, it would become ever more common, showcased prominently in music such as grime and British hip hop, and in films like Kidulthood.


title: Multicultural London English

text: As the media became more aware of MLE in the 2000s, a variety of names emerged to describe it such as "Nang slang", "Blinglish", "Tikkiny", or "Blockney". MLE is sometimes referred to as "Jafaican" (or "Jafaikan"), conveying the idea of "fake Jamaican", because of popular belief that it stems solely from immigrants of Jamaican and Caribbean descent. However, research suggests that the roots of MLE are more varied: two Economic and Social Research Council funded research projects found that MLE has most likely developed as a result of language contact and group second language acquisition. Specifically, it can contain elements from "learners' varieties of English, Englishes from the Indian subcontinent and Africa, Caribbean creoles and Englishes along with their indigenised London versions, local London and south-eastern vernacular varieties of English, local and international youth slang, as well as more levelled and standard-like varieties from various sources."


title: Multicultural London English

text: According to research conducted at Lancaster University and Queen Mary University of London in 2010, "In much of the East End of London the Cockney dialect... will have disappeared within another generation... it will be gone [from the East End] within 30 years... It has been 'transplanted' to... [Essex and Hertfordshire New] towns."


title: Multicultural London English

text: With the worldwide growth of grime and UK drill from the mid-2010s onwards, elements of MLE began to spread internationally along with the genres. Some Australian, Canadian, Dutch, and Irish musicians, such as Onefour, Drake, and 73 De Pijp, for example, have been noted for using slang derivatives of MLE. Kate Burridge and Howard Manns, both Australian linguists, also noted that some MLE phrases (such as 'peng', meaning attractive or good) were being used generally by Australian youth. Similar influences have also been noted in Finnish teenagers.


title: Multicultural London English

text: It has been noted that in other countries, such as Canada, Multicultural Toronto English has developed very strong similarities derived from MLE, which arose independently but with similar cultural influences and origin roots. A Canadian linguist, Derek Denis, has been noting MTE for some of the MLE phrases (such as "mans", meaning a group of guys, "wasteman", meaning someone's a waste of space or a loser, and “yute”, a slang term of Jamaican origin for “youth”, used to refer to a young adult or child), which were commonly used by Torontonian youths.


title: Multicultural London English

text: While older speakers in London today display a vowel and consonant system that matches previously dominant accents such as Cockney, young speakers often display different qualities. The qualities are on the whole not the levelled ones noted in recent studies (such as Williams & Kerswill 1999 and Przedlacka 2002) of teenage speakers in South East England outside London: Milton Keynes, Reading, Luton, Essex, Slough and Ashford. From principles of levelling, it would be expected that younger speakers would show precisely the levelled qualities, with further developments reflecting the innovatory status of London as well as the passage of time. However, evidence, such as Cheshire "et al." (2011) and Cheshire "et al." (2013), contradicts that expectation.


title: Rock opera

text: A rock opera is a collection of rock music songs with lyrics that relate to a common story. Rock operas are typically released as concept albums and are not scripted for acting, which distinguishes them from operas, although several have been adapted as rock musicals. The use of various character roles within the song lyrics is a common storytelling device. The success of the rock opera genre has inspired similar works in other musical styles, such as rap opera.


title: Rock opera

text: A number of rock artists became interested in the idea of creating a rock opera in the 1960s. In an early use of the term, the July 4, 1966, edition of "RPM Magazine" (published in Toronto) reported that "Bruce Cockburn and Mr [William] Hawkins are working on a Rock Opera, operating on the premise that to write you need only 'something to say'." Mark Wirtz explored the idea in a project "A Teenage Opera", from which an early song "Excerpt from A Teenage Opera (Grocer Jack)" recorded by Keith West was released and became a hit song in 1967. However, the album for the rock opera was not released until 1996, and it was only fully realised and staged in 2017.


title: Rock opera

text: Colin Fleming of "The Atlantic" described "The Story of Simon Simopath" (1967) by British psychedelic band Nirvana as an "early foray into the rock opera sub-genre". Neil Strauss of "The New York Times" wrote that "S.F. Sorrow" (1968) by The Pretty Things is "generally acknowledged as the first rock opera".


title: Rock opera

text: Scott Mervis of the "Pittsburgh Post-Gazette" wrote that The Who's 1969 record "Tommy" was the first album to be billed as a rock opera. The album tells the story of Tommy Walker, a "deaf, dumb and blind kid." "Tommy" displays the titular character's experiences with life and his relationship with his family. Although the band's guitarist Pete Townshend denied taking any influence from "S.F. Sorrow", critics have compared "Tommy" to it. The "Tommy" album developed into other media, including a Seattle Opera production in 1971, an orchestral version by Lou Reizner in 1972, a film in 1975, and a Broadway musical in 1992. The original album has sold 20 million copies and has been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. "Tommy" would also go on to influence "On and On", a rap opera by The Fat Boys and "American Idiot", a punk rock opera by Green Day. The Who had previously toyed with the concepts which would lead to the full-blown rock opera with their six-movement 1966 track "A Quick One, While He's Away".


title: Rock opera

text: A rock opera that experienced commercial recording and Broadway success is "Jesus Christ Superstar" (1970), written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, and in respect of which Lloyd Webber said "the piece was written as a rock album from the outset and set out from the start to tell the story through the music itself."


title: Rock opera

text: "The Rocky Horror Show" is a rock musical by Richard O'Brien. A humorous tribute to the science fiction and horror B movies of the 1930s through to the early 1960s, the musical tells the story of a newly engaged couple getting caught in a storm and coming to the home of a mad transvestite scientist, Dr Frank-N-Furter, unveiling his new creation, a sort of Frankenstein-style monster in the form of an artificially made, fully grown, physically perfect muscle man named Rocky. The show was produced and directed by Jim Sharman. The original London production of the musical premiered at the Royal Court Theatre (Upstairs) on 19 June 1973 (after two previews on 16 and 18 June 1973). It later moved to several other locations in London and closed on 13 September 1980. The show ran for a total of 2,960 performances and won the 1973 "Evening Standard" Theatre Award for Best Musical. Various international productions of the musical have since spanned across six continents as well as West End and Broadway revivals and eight UK tours. Actor Tim Curry, who originated the role of Dr. Frank-N-Furter in the original London production, became particularly associated with the musical. The musical was adapted into the 1975 film "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", starring O'Brien as Riff Raff, with Curry also reprising his role; the movie has the longest-running release in cinematic history and is considered one of the most recognizable cult films of all time. In 2016, it was adapted into the television film "".


title: Rock opera

text: "A Night at the Opera" is a studio album by the British rock band Queen, released on 21 November 1975. Produced by Roy Thomas Baker and Queen, it was reportedly the most expensive album ever recorded at the time of its release. Queen employed a complex production that extensively used multitrack recording, and the songs on the album incorporated a wide range of styles, such as ballads, music hall, dixieland, hard rock and progressive rock influences. Aside from their usual equipment, Queen also utilized a diverse range of instruments such as a double bass, harp, ukulele and more, correlating the album's music with that of a typical operatic performance. The album's most famous track, "Bohemian Rhapsody," was referred to by lead singer Freddie Mercury as a "mock opera" that resulted from the combination of three songs he had written. The song parodies elements of opera with bombastic choruses, sarcastic recitative, and distorted Italian operatic phrases. Lyrical references include Scaramouche, the fandango, Galileo Galilei, Figaro, and Beelzebub, with cries of ""Bismillah!""


title: Rock opera

text: "Bat Out of Hell" is an epic rock album by Meat Loaf that remains one of the best-selling albums of all time, having sold over 50 million copies worldwide. It is certified 14× Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). As of June 2019, it has spent 522 weeks in the UK Albums Chart, the second longest chart run by a studio album. "Rolling Stone" ranked it at number 343 on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. based on "Bat Out of Hell", staged by Jay Scheib, opened at the Manchester Opera House in 2017. The album's producer, Jim Steinman, coined the term Wagnerian rock after composer Richard Wagner to describe the genre of the record.


title: Rock opera

text: Perhaps the archetypal and most famous rock opera is "The Wall", a double album released by Pink Floyd in 1979. "The Wall" chronicles the story of Pink, a character who ultimately constructs an emotional wall to protect himself after being driven into insanity as a result of traumatic life experiences. The album was included in "Rolling Stone"s lists of the greatest albums of all time in 2003, 2012, and 2020. James Guthrie, the album's engineer, won the 1980 Grammy award for Best Engineered Recording (non-classical), and the album was nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. The album was subsequently made into a 1982 film entitled "Pink Floyd – The Wall". An elaborate 1980-1981 concert tour was conducted by the band after the album's release and bassist Roger Waters reincarnated the tour twice; once in Berlin in 1990 to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall and again around the world from 2010-2013, a series of shows that became the highest-grossing tour by a solo musician. Both "The Wall" and the music of Queen inspired the rock band My Chemical Romance to create their own rock opera, the 2006 album "The Black Parade".


title: Rock opera

text: In an effort to appeal to more modern audiences, opera companies have welcomed more pop and rock influences. The resulting rock operas have met varying degrees of success as the worlds of high art and low art mix. In Russian music, the term "zong-opera" (Зонг-опера) is sometimes used, since the first Soviet-Russian rock-opera "Orpheus and Eurydice" was described with this term, though the term "rock-opera" was already known in the Soviet rock music circles.


title: Rock opera

text: According to Fleming, rock operas are more akin to a cantata or suite, because they are not usually acted out. Similarly, Andrew Clements of "The Guardian" called "Tommy" a subversively-labeled musical. Clements states that lyrics drive rock operas, which makes them not a true form of opera. Responding to accusations that rock operas are pretentious and overblown, Pete Townshend wrote that pop music by its very nature rejects such characteristics and is an inherently simple form. Townshend said that the only goal of pop music is to reach audiences, and rock operas are merely one more way to do so. Peter Kiesewalter, on the other hand, said that rock music and opera are "both overblown, massive spectacles" that cover the same themes. Kiesewalter, who was originally not a fan of opera, did not think the two styles would mix well together, but his modernized operas with rock music surprised him with their popularity at the East Village Opera Company.


title: Rock opera

text: The performance of these works on Broadway has also courted controversy; Anne Midgette of "The New York Times" called them musicals with "no more than the addition of a keyboard and a drum set".


title: Rock opera

text: Rock opera albums typically follow themes, a trait similarly held in a concept album. Rock operas may also include a central character to progress the album's tracks via a specific storyline. For example, "Tommy" by The Who follows the life experiences and family relationships with the titular character, "The Wall" by Pink Floyd chronicles the building of a metaphorical wall by the protagonist named Pink and "The Black Parade" by My Chemical Romance tells the tale of "The Patient" struck by cancer.


title: Deacon Jones

text: David D. "Deacon" Jones (December 9, 1938 – June 3, 2013) was an American professional football player who was a defensive end in the National Football League (NFL) for the Los Angeles Rams, San Diego Chargers, and the Washington Redskins. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1980.


title: Deacon Jones

text: Jones specialized in quarterback "sacks", a term that he coined. Nicknamed "the Secretary of Defense", Jones is considered one of the greatest defensive players ever. The "Los Angeles Times" called Jones "most valuable Ram of all time," and former Rams head coach George Allen called him the "greatest defensive end of modern football".


title: Deacon Jones

text: Jones was born in Eatonville, Florida, and lived in a four-bedroom house with his family of ten. Jones attended Hungerford High School, where he played football, baseball, and basketball. During high school, Jones developed a lump in his thigh and learned that it was a tumor; he had surgery to remove it by Dr. Ron Alegria.


title: Deacon Jones

text: Late in life, Jones told "The San Diego Union-Tribune" that when he was 14 years old, he witnessed a carload of white teenagers laughingly hit an elderly black woman with a watermelon. The woman died days later from the injury, and Jones recalls that there was never a police investigation. "Unlike many black people then, I was determined not to be what society said I was," Jones later recounted. "Thank God I had the ability to play a violent game like football. It gave me an outlet for the anger in my heart."


title: Deacon Jones

text: Jones' college football career consisted of a year at South Carolina State University in 1958, followed by a year of inactivity in 1959 and a final season at Mississippi Vocational College, now known as Mississippi Valley State University, in 1960.


title: Deacon Jones

text: South Carolina State revoked Jones' scholarship after they learned that he participated in a protest during the Civil Rights Movement. However, one of the assistant football coaches at South Carolina State was leaving to coach at Mississippi Vocational, and told Jones and some of the other African-American players that he could get them scholarships at the new school. While he was playing at Mississippi Vocational, he and his African-American teammates had to sleep in cots in the opposing team's gym because motels would not take them on numerous occasions.


title: Deacon Jones

text: Due to a lack of television coverage and modern scouting networks, Jones was largely overlooked during his college career. According to an NFL Films interview with writer Ray Didinger, "Deacon was discovered kinda by accident. The Rams were scouting some running backs and they found this defensive tackle who was outrunning the running backs that they were scouting." Jones was drafted in the 14th round of the 1961 NFL Draft by the Los Angeles Rams. He then earned a starting role as a defensive end and teamed with tackle Merlin Olsen to give Los Angeles a perennial All-Pro left side of the defensive line. He became a part of the Fearsome Foursome defensive line of the Rams (along with Lamar Lundy, Rosey Grier, and Olsen), which is now considered to have been one of the best defensive lines of all time.


title: Deacon Jones

text: Jones won consensus All-Pro honors five straight years from 1965 through 1969 and was second-team All-Pro in 1964, 1970, and 1972. He was also in seven straight Pro Bowls, from 1964 to 1970, and was selected to an eighth after the 1972 season with the San Diego Chargers. He was voted the team's Outstanding Defensive Lineman by the Los Angeles Rams Alumni in 1962, '64, '65, and '66. In 1971, Jones suffered a severely sprained arch, which caused him to miss four starts, and he ended the season with 4½ sacks, his career-low to that point.


title: Deacon Jones

text: Jones was traded along with Lee White and Greg Wojcik from the Rams to the San Diego Chargers for Jeff Staggs, a second-rounder in 1972 (30th overall—Jim Bertelsen) and a second and third-rounder in 1973 (31st and 60th overall—Cullen Bryant and Tim Stokes respectively) on January 29, 1972. He was named San Diego's defensive captain and led all Chargers' defensive linemen in tackles and won a berth on the AFC Pro Bowl squad. He concluded his career with the Washington Redskins in 1974. In the final game of his NFL career, the Redskins allowed him to kick the point-after-touchdown for the game's last score. Along the way, Jones was named the Associated Press NFL Defensive Player of the Week four times: week 14, 1967; week 12, 1968; week 11, 1969; and week 10, 1970.


title: Deacon Jones

text: An extremely durable player, Jones missed only six games of a possible 196 regular-season encounters in his 14 National Football League seasons.


title: Deacon Jones

text: Jones was considered by many to revolutionize the position of defensive end. He was credited with coining the phrase "sacking the quarterback". In 1999, Jones provided a "Los Angeles Times" reporter with some detailed imagery about his forte: "You take all the offensive linemen and put them in a burlap bag, and then you take a baseball bat and beat on the bag. You're sacking them, you're bagging them. And that’s what you're doing with a quarterback."


title: Deacon Jones

text: What separated Jones from every other defensive end was his speed and his ability to make tackles from sideline to sideline, which was unheard of in his time. He also was the first pass rusher to use the head slap, a move that he said was, "to give myself an initial head start on the pass rush, in other words an extra step. Because anytime you go upside a man's head … or a woman; they may have a tendency to blink they [sic] eyes or close they eyes. And that's all I needed." "The head slap was not my invention, but Rembrandt, of course, did not invent painting. The quickness of my hands and the length of my arms, it was perfect for me. It was the greatest thing I ever did, and when I left the game, they outlawed it."


title: Deacon Jones

text: "Pro Football Weekly" reported he accumulated sacks over his career, which would be third on the all-time sack list. (Jones would have ranked first all-time at the time of his retirement, and since has been surpassed by two fellow Hall of Famers Bruce Smith and Reggie White.)


title: Deacon Jones

text: In 1967, Jones had sacks in only 14 games; he tallied 22 sacks in 14 games the following year. If official, this would have stood as an NFL record until Harvey Martin's 1977 campaign in which he totaled 23 sacks. This number was also equaled by Al Baker a year later. (The term "sack" had not yet been coined at the time, and official sack statistics were not recorded by the NFL until 1982.)


title: Deacon Jones

text: Jones worked as a television actor, and appeared in numerous TV programs since the 1970s, most often appearing in cameo roles. He appeared in an episode of "The Odd Couple" where he and Oscar were in a television commercial selling shaving products. He appeared on "The Brady Bunch", and in a "Bewitched" episode in 1969, he played a guard to the Giant's castle in "Sam & the Beanstalk". Jones also played himself on an episode of "Wonder Woman" in 1978.


title: Deacon Jones

text: In 1978, he played a Viking named Thall in "The Norseman". Fellow Hall of Famer Fred Biletnikoff joined Jones in the film, also portraying a Norseman. That same year, Jones portrayed a fierce defensive lineman named Gorman in the film "Heaven Can Wait".


title: Deacon Jones

text: In the series "G vs E", he played himself, but as an agent of "The Corps". He also played a role in the hit show, "ALF", where he played a father figure to Alf.


title: Deacon Jones

text: Jones served as a color analyst for Rams broadcasts on KMPC radio in the 1994 season, teaming with Steve Physioc and Jack Snow. In 1998, shortly before Super Bowl XXXII between the Denver Broncos and Green Bay Packers, Jones correctly predicted the Broncos, 11 1/2 point underdogs, would win the game and Terrell Davis would be named MVP of the game.


title: Deacon Jones

text: Jones worked for many companies, including the Miller Brewing Company, Haggar Clothing, Pacific Coast Medical Enterprises, and Epson America, and represented the NFL and Champion Products as spokesman for their Throwback campaigns. Jones was also chairman for AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals in their national hypertension awareness program.


title: Deacon Jones

text: Jones served as the president and CEO of the Deacon Jones Foundation, an organization he founded in 1997 "to assist young people and the communities in which they live with a comprehensive program that includes education, mentoring, corporate internship, and community service."


title: Deacon Jones

text: Jones was one of the many former L.A. Rams players who disliked the team's controversial relocation to St. Louis in 1995. He was adamant in interviews and appearances that he played for Los Angeles, not St. Louis, and considered the Rams franchise there a different team that should have a different name. He participated in many grassroots efforts to bring NFL football back to L.A. and also voiced support on many new stadium proposals . The Rams eventually returned to Los Angeles in 2016 after Jones had died.


title: Deacon Jones

text: He was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility in 1980, and was named to the NFL's 75th Anniversary All-Time Team in 1994. In 1999, he was ranked number 13 on "The Sporting News" list of the 100 Greatest Football Players, the highest-ranked player to have played for the Rams franchise, the highest-ranked defensive end, and the second-ranked defensive lineman behind Bob Lilly. The same year, he was named by "Sports Illustrated" as the "Defensive End of the Century". In 2010, he was named to the inaugural class of the Black College Football Hall of Fame.


title: Deacon Jones

text: Jones stated that he gave himself the nickname Deacon after joining the Rams because too many David Joneses were in the local phone book. "Football is a violent world and Deacon has a religious connotation," he told the "Los Angeles Times" in 1980. "I thought a name like that would be remembered."


title: Deacon Jones

text: Deacon Jones's wife Elizabeth is the chief operating and financial officer of the Deacon Jones Foundation, based in Anaheim Hills, California, the community in which the couple lived.


title: Deacon Jones

text: Jones was a rhythm and blues singer during his football days, and was backed by the band Nightshift, which later became the group War. Jones sang onstage with Ray Charles, performed on "The Hollywood Palace" in 1967 and 1968, and on "The Merv Griffin Show" in 1970. Jones was the inspiration for the name of the 1977 song "Deacon Blues" by Steely Dan.


title: Deacon Jones

text: On June 3, 2013, Jones died at 74 of natural causes after suffering from lung cancer and heart disease at his home in Anaheim Hills, California. Jones's death left Rosey Grier as the last surviving member of the Fearsome Foursome, the L.A. Rams defensive line which is widely considered the best such unit in the history of the NFL. Of the former defensive standout, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said, "Even with his fellow Hall of Famers, Deacon Jones held a special status. He was an icon among the icons." Washington Redskins General Manager Bruce Allen, son of Jones's longtime coach George Allen, called him "one of the greatest players in NFL history. Off the field... a true giant." "Sports Illustrated" columnist Peter King noted at his death that Jones had a profound effect on the way defense was played in the NFL and cited the influence on such later NFL stars as Lawrence Taylor, Deion Sanders, and Michael Strahan. As a tribute to Jones, the NFL created the Deacon Jones Award, which will be given annually to the league leader in sacks.


title: Capital ship

text: The capital ships of a navy are its most important warships; they are generally the larger ships when compared to other warships in their respective fleet. A capital ship is generally a leading or a primary ship in a naval fleet.


title: Capital ship

text: There is usually no formal criterion for the classification, but it is a useful concept in naval strategy; for example, it permits comparisons between relative naval strengths in a theatre of operations without the need for considering specific details of tonnage or gun diameters.


title: Capital ship

text: A notable example of this is the Mahanian doctrine, which was applied in the planning of the defence of Singapore in World War II, where the Royal Navy had to decide the allocation of its battleships and battlecruisers between the Atlantic and Pacific theatres. The Mahanian doctrine was also applied by the Imperial Japanese Navy, leading to its preventive move to attack Pearl Harbor and the battleships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. The naval nature of the Pacific Theater of Operations, more commonly referred to as the Pacific War, necessitated the United States Navy mostly deploying its battleships and aircraft carriers in the Pacific. The war in Europe was primarily a land war; consequently, Germany's surface fleet was small, and the escort ships used in the Battle of the Atlantic were mostly destroyers and destroyer escorts to counter the U-boat threat.


title: Capital ship

text: Before the advent of the all-steel navy in the late 19th century, a capital ship during the Age of Sail was generally understood as a ship that conformed to the Royal Navy's rating system of a ship of the line as being of the first, second, third or fourth rates:


title: Capital ship

text: Frigates were ships of the fifth rate; sixth rates comprised small frigates and corvettes. Towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars and into the late 19th century, some larger and more powerful frigates were classified as fourth rates.


title: Capital ship

text: The term "capital ship" was first coined in 1909 and formally defined in the limitation treaties of the 1920s and 1930s in the Washington Naval Treaty, London Naval Treaty, and Second London Naval Treaty. This applied mainly to ships resulting from the dreadnought revolution; dreadnought battleships (also known first as dreadnoughts and later as battleships) and battlecruisers.


title: Capital ship

text: In the 20th century, especially in World Wars I and II, typical capital ships would be battleships and battlecruisers. All of the above ships were close to 20,000 tons displacement or heavier, with large caliber guns and heavy armor protection.


title: Capital ship

text: Cruisers, despite being important ships, were not considered capital ships. An exception to the above in World War II was the . Though this class was technically similar to a heavy cruiser, albeit slower but with considerably heavier guns, they were regarded by some as capital ships (hence the British label "Pocket battleship") since they were one of the few heavy surface units of the Kriegsmarine. The American , Dutch Design 1047 battlecruiser and the Japanese Design B-65 cruiser, planned specifically to counter the heavy cruisers being built by their naval rivals, have been described as "super cruisers", "large cruisers" or even "unrestricted cruisers", with some advocating that they even be considered as battlecruisers, however they were never classified as capital ships.


title: Capital ship

text: During the Cold War, a Soviet large missile cruiser had a displacement great enough to rival World War II-era battleships and battlecruisers, perhaps defining a new capital ship for that era. In regard to technical design, however, the "Kirov" is simply a supersized guided-missile cruiser with nuclear propulsion.


title: Capital ship

text: It took until late 1942 for aircraft carriers to be universally considered capital ships. Only full-size fleet carriers (whether purpose built, or converted from battleship/battlecruiser hulls) were regarded as capital ships, while light carriers (often using cruiser hulls) and escort carriers (often using merchant ship hulls) were not. The U.S. Navy was forced to rely primarily on its aircraft carriers after the attack on Pearl Harbor sank or damaged eight of its Pacific-fleet battleships.


title: Capital ship

text: In the 21st century, the aircraft carrier is the last remaining capital ship, with capability defined in decks available and aircraft per deck rather than in guns and calibers. The United States possesses supremacy in both contemporary categories of aircraft carriers, possessing 11 active duty supercarriers each capable of carrying and launching nearly 100 tactical aircraft, and nine amphibious assault ships which are equivalent in the "Sea Control Ship" configuration to the light VSTOL carriers operated by other nations.


title: Capital ship

text: Ballistic missile submarines (or "boomers"), while important ships and similar in tonnage to early battleships, are usually counted as part of a nation's nuclear deterrent force and do not share the sea control mission of traditional capital ships. Nevertheless, many navies, including the Royal Navy and the United States Navy, consider these ships to be capital ships and have given some of them names previously used for battleships, e.g. "Dreadnought" and "Vanguard".


title: Capital ship

text: Some navies reserve specific names for their capital ships. Names reserved for capital ships include chiefs of state (e.g. ), important places, historically important naval officers or admiralty (e.g. ), historical events or objects (e.g. ), and traditional names (e.g. ). However, there are some exceptions to the rule.


title: Capital ship

text: Beginning with (the first U.S. battleship), U.S. capital ships were traditionally named after U.S. states. Cruisers are typically named after U.S. territories (e.g. Alaska-class cruisers just before and during World War II) or U.S. cities. Prior to and during World War II, the Imperial Japanese Navy also followed the practice of naming battleships after provinces (e.g. ).


title: Capital ship

text: Despite their significance to modern fleets, the U.S. Navy has never named aircraft carriers after U.S. states. Today, U.S. aircraft carriers are usually named after politicians and other individuals notable in US naval history such as Gerald R. Ford and Chester W. Nimitz.


title: Capital ship

text: Beginning with the first class of Trident-equipped ballistic missile submarines (i.e. the ), state names have been applied to U.S. nuclear submarines. Previous ballistic missile submarines (e.g. Poseidon missile-equipped submarines) had not been named for states. After the completion of the last "Ohio"-class ballistic missile submarine, state names were also applied to attack submarines (e.g. ). Earlier attack submarines had usually been named for marine animals or, commencing with the ), cities and towns.


title: Green armies

text: The Green armies (), also known as the Green Army (Зелёная Армия) or Greens (Зелёные), were armed peasant groups which fought against all governments in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922. The Green armies were semi-organized local militias that opposed the Bolsheviks, Whites, and foreign interventionists, and fought to protect their communities from requisitions or reprisals carried out by third parties. The Green armies were politically and ideologically neutral, but at times associated with the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. The Green armies had at least tacit support throughout much of Russia. However, their primary base, the peasantry, were largely reluctant to wage an active campaign during the Russian Civil War and eventually dissolved following Bolshevik victory in 1922.


title: Green armies

text: The Russian peasantry lived through two wars against the Russian state, the product of revolutions that ended with state victory: 1905-1907 and 1917-1922. At the beginning of 1918 the Bolshevik Party only controlled a few cities, "unique Bolshevik islets in the middle of a peasant ocean" unwilling to hand over the fruits of their labor and submit to any external authority.


title: Green armies

text: The conflict between the cities and a countryside was one of the main edges of the civil war. This resistance was interpreted by many as a mere expression of the "social anarchy" that existed in the country. The communist influence on the peasants and workers was negligible. They controlled some soviets but without coercive power over the majority of the population, who opposed them in a passive and disorganized way.


title: Green armies

text: Between late 1917 and early 1918 there was no serious opposition to the Communists, who controlled central Russia, Baku and Tashkent. The only opposition force was the Volunteer Army (Russian: " Добровольческая армия "), barely 3,000 men, still organized in southern Russia. All the White hopes were on winning over the Don and Kuban Cossacks, initially more interested in obtaining their own independence. For their part, Ukraine and Finland were in the process of becoming independent, but the Whites would never recognize their secession, in order to win over those populations. Only the violent Bolshevik repression against the Cossacks in early 1918 made it possible to win them over to their cause.


title: Green armies

text: After the October Revolution the new Bolshevik authorities established war communism. This system sought to abolish all private enterprise, maximize state control over distribution and the foreign market, nationalize all heavy industry, requisition agricultural surplus, and impose a universal rationing system to focus the entire economy on supporting the war effort. It was a way of fighting their opponents on the "home front". Among the new measures was the dispatch of officials to the farms of central Russia to collect supplies for the Red Army and start the construction of the socialist economy, by any means necessary. The aim was to requisition grain, cattle and horses, recruit young people to the army, and punish villages suspected of harboring deserters. The farmers' first reaction was to bury their grain, feed it to cattle, or clandestinely distill it into alcohol. In response, the Communists organized a veritable 'supply army' of 80,000 men tasked with forcibly requisitioning grain surpluses. Half were unemployed workers from Petrograd who were looking for a fixed salary and to keep some of the loot. The rest were criminals, other unemployed and ex-soldiers. They formed undisciplined troops, known as "prodotriady" (), who did not hesitate to steal vital reserves, seed and other possessions from the peasants. The requisition policy was called "Prodrazvyorstka" () and was part of war communism. The "prodotriady" saw an increase in the number of their murdered members: 2,000 in 1918, 5,000 in 1919 and 8,000 in 1920. The Bolsheviks retaliated by burning villages, confiscating livestock and executing peasants by the hundreds. Many were accused of being "kulaks" but most were poor farmers, the most vulnerable to a poor harvest. Populations fled to the forests with nothing to lose and joined the rebels to defend the "local peasant revolution". Thus, what in most cases began as small revolts against the requisitions, the incompetent and brutal response of the local communists turned into large rebellions.


title: Green armies

text: The first collectivizations also generated great resistance due to forced transfers and the new ways of life that were imposed on the populations, already with serious difficulties to survive. Many units and inspectors exceeded their powers, looting houses and murdering villagers. They harshly repressed any sign of discomfort. All of this contributed to widespread resentment against the new regime. The Bolsheviks understood that they had to control the grain supply. In order not to depend on the small farmers, they tried to found Kolkhoz (cooperatives) and Sovkhoz (state farms). Another source of the peasantry's rejection of the Bolsheviks was the abolition of the Committees of Poor Peasants or " komitety bednoty " () in December 1918, but Lenin had foreseen a fierce resistance and increased the size of the "prodotriady" and increase the tax requirement. In the following season, some 242 million "pud" in grain was requisitioned.


title: Green armies

text: At the outbreak of the February Revolution, the most important political parties were the Social Revolutionary Party, Mensheviks and Kadets . The first two controlled most of the country's soviets, except the ones in Petrograd and Moscow; the third were liberals with the support of moderate sectors who wanted to maintain the freedoms won with the revolution. The Mensheviks quickly lost the support of many Soviets, except in the Caucasus, and especially in the Democratic Republic of Georgia, while Bolshevik influence rapidly grew. Meanwhile, the peasants were overwhelmingly favorable to the SR postulates. In some cases, as in Western Siberia in 1920–1921, the rebellious peasants began their revolts without any proposal or plan more complex than overthrowing the Bolsheviks (consequently, Bolsheviks who fell into their hands were assassinated and government or Party buildings razed). Only as some successful movements became more complex and territorially broad did the Greens present a political program, an adaptation of SR ideas.


title: Green armies

text: Russia rapidly polarized during 1917. Very soon, large masses of the population were in favor of even more extremist but smaller and less organized revolutionary groups than the Bolsheviks, the anarchists and Left SRs, whom Lenin would soon repress: "The country of the workers and poor peasants is a thousand times more to the left than the Chernov and the Tsereteli, and a hundred times more to the left than us." The Great War had only encouraged the peasants and workers to follow a revolutionary path, for the same reason, one of Lenin's proposals was to turn the "imperialist war" into a "civil war."


title: Green armies

text: The greens were driven by the ideal of the SR "black division", "a division of all lands according to the number of mouths to be fed in each family", not for the broader nationalization and collectivization of the lands as presented by the Bolsheviks. In Lenin's eyes there was nothing socialist about this measure, believing the plan of the SRs would be to establish capitalism in the countryside. This was seen as avoiding concrete Socialist policy, instituting basic programs such as improvements to peasant quality of life and an end to slavery. According to him, it was no more than a bourgeois slogan, just like "land and liberty", to appeal to the desperate peasantry of rural Russia. Another source of opposition from the population towards the Bolsheviks was the "way of life Communist leaders' feudal system,” with the excesses of Bolshevik leaders in contrast to the horrors of the civil war producing resentment from the impoverished and war-torn peasantry.


title: Green armies

text: The ideology of the Greens was very uniform, representing the common aspirations and goals of peasant revolutions in Russia and Ukraine. They wanted to regain the self-government maintained until 1918, seize the nobility's lands, maintain rural market-economies and govern their communities with soviets chosen by them. The peasants rejected the growing authority that the new state was gaining. Four years after the Revolution they watched as the Soviet state centralized, with the autonomy of their Soviets integrated into the growing organs of the state. Their own small agricultural holdings were replaced by large state collectivizations, with the product produced on their farms requisitioned and the land promised to them in the Revolution occupied by the State. With these worries and concerns growing, they began to accept the SR proposals: the end of Bolshevik rule, land redistribution and an end to the civil war. Their opposition to the Bolsheviks was due to, rather than a political plan or national alternative, a desire to protect and preserve their communal land. Interested in defending local interests, these movements took a defensive stance: incapable and unwilling to march on Moscow, they hoped to remove the Bolshevik state's central influence.


title: Green armies

text: The greens were always hostile to the Whites, which is why their uprisings against the reds only became massive after ensuring the defeat of the Whites. Many White officers were members of the former Tsarist Nobility, and they had or could inherit in the peasant revolution of 1917. With deeply entrenched classism against the peasants they once ruled over, the Whites sought to turn back time and take revenge against every symbol of change. They would never recognize new national realities or the attempts at agrarian revolution.


title: Green armies

text: One of the main causes of the White defeat was being identified by the people with the restoration of the old regime, signaled by the treatment that their officers and officials gave to the peasants. With their deeply reactionary positions desire to restore the old Tsarist social and economic order aggressive repression and rejection of the Peasant base and refusal to carry out even basic reforms demanded by the circumstances The Whites could not take advantage of the countryside's hesitance towards the Reds and win it for their cause. They refused to reform land ownership, stoking the fears of the rural majority against the prior regime and failing to take the possibly decisive advantage of rural support. That is why many peasants feared that the Whites would restore the rights of the rural nobility to the land, destroying the autonomy and local representation that they'd won in the Revolution of 1917. Faced with this fear, many peasants joined the reds when the Whites advanced on the districts of Orel and Moscow in 1919. They had through their efforts been the ones who had secured the most land from the nobility. According to SR politicians, if Alexander Kolchak had not restored the rights of landowners, he would have won greater support of farmers in the Urals and the Volga.


title: Green armies

text: The robberies and massacres at the hands of the Cossack cavalry also contributed to turning the countryside against the White advance in 1919. Denikin proved unable to contain the violence. The best White troops were from the Kuban, the Don and the Caucasus, as the Cossacks were the main a source of men and resources for the Whites. When they realized that Denikin was defeated, they wanted to return to their homes en masse, seeing greater benefit in negotiating their own autonomy with the communists. Despite everything, Denikin cracked down on the rights of the unions and returned the factories to their former owners, sparking the hatred and resistance of the workers. The Whites, unable to effectively contain the unrest, resorted to greater repression and terror. Like Kolchak, Denikin failed to create his own local government structure, resorting to repression to try to mobilize the population and its resources under his control. With these being something decisive in any modern civil or total war, he attempted to tap into these possible resources but the terror proved not to be enough to spurn the territories they held. Alongside this, it was unable to counteract the critical waste and bleed of already present supply. When the Military aid from their western allies was reduced, White soldiers had to loot for supplies, only further stoking the rage and fear of the local populace.


title: Green armies

text: Finally, they failed to properly capitalize on the propaganda front. To the Whites, the peasants had a duty to serve in their armies, based primarily on the old structure of the Tsarist regime. Due to this, they saw no reason in convincing or aligning those they conscripted. On the other hand, the Bolsheviks knew how to use the symbolism of the revolution, proclaiming themselves the defenders of peasantry and smaller farmers. Paradoxically, many White commanders waited for a popular uprising against the Bolsheviks to obtain victory, but usually most of the population was hostile to both sides and indifferent to who won the war. Wrangel was the only White general to realize the mistake. He knew that the war would not be won without successfully winning over the peasants, workers and national minorities to their side. Despite this, his subordinates in Crimea behaved like an occupying army, perpetrating all manner of arbitrariness and institutionalizing corruption.


title: Green armies

text: The Greens collaborated several times with other opposition groups, such as anarchists and SRs, in a more strategic than ideological effort against the Reds. White deserters joined their cause and came to lead bands of peasants, which served as a pretext for the Bolsheviks to exaggerate the relations between the two elements. More likely to follow aggressive rhetoric and promises of violent revenge, peasants tended to reject leaders with purely political or more moderate goals, that is, any close to the Russian Provisional Government of 1917. "They prefer to fight a desperate and lonely war on their own, rather than to help the oppressors of the past [the Whites] defeat the oppressors of the present [the reds].”


title: Green armies

text: A union network emerged in the villages, replacing the Soviets and helping provide supplies to the rebels. Each village was responsible for mobilizing, feeding and equipping their own units. The Church and the local SRs, mainly from the left, were key in the organization of the movements. For example, in West Siberia the SRs led the revolts and although there was a central authority in Tobolsk, it had little to no control of the Bolshevik-free territory. Because of this, essentially every "volost" was self-governed. In contrast, the Siberian movement demonstrated a high level of organization and even installed an administration in the cities it captured (the guerrillas of Tambov were unable to seize cities but also created a complex administrative network in the countryside); on the contrary, the Makhnovists were present in both countryside and cities, maintaining a loose and autonomous administration in line with Anarchist ideology.


title: Green armies

text: At the beginning of 1920, when the Red victory was practically assured after the defeat of the armies of Anton Denikin, Nikolai Yudenich and Aleksandr Kolchak, continued requisitioning came to be viewed as more and more unjustifiable. Numerous contingents of peasant soldiers, usually having connections and sympathy with the Peasantry, refused to repress the green uprisings and defected, forming their own "green" guerrillas in the forests. In 1919-1921 most of the guerrillas were deserters, including the leaders, with many in positions of leadership being veterans of the fight against the Whites. Alongside this, White Holdouts described as "little White dabbling" continued to fight until 1922, however were described to be "more like a permanent hindrance than a real threat.” Officially two and a half million soldiers were demobilized in 1921, with many returning to their homes and joining the Greens, worsening the situation for the central government -there were two hundred and fifty thousand only in Tambov.


title: Green armies

text: However, by that time both Greens and Blacks could only dream of damaging the Red Army, with its experience and size making it a true "military giant", although their armed forces (undermined by desertions) never reached official figures. They claimed; the Bolsheviks had tried to realize the French revolutionary ideal of a "nation in arms" and failed. There were just over a million red soldiers at the end of 1918, three million in 1919, five in millions at the end of 1920, and six million in 1921. They were mainly forcibly recruited peasants. There was resistance among the Communists to the massive recruitment of peasants. For many, their army of loyal workers would become a force largely made up of an element that was alien and hostile to them, a possible enemy. According to the British historian Orlando Figes, at the climax of the civil war Lenin played pragmatically into the Red Army's advantages, in the form of a better organized but smaller army. Optimally disciplined, equipped and supplied, the force exerted less pressure on Rural areas by demanding less requisitions or levies and causing fewer peasant rebellions. They would also put less pressure on factory workers. Furthermore, it would not be made up mainly of peasants but rather workers, more loyal and motivated to fight for the reds.


title: Green armies

text: The massive desertion as a phenomenon that affected the entire Red Army indicates that the peasantry were hesitant to serve in it. With many still having rural farms or villages to return to, many deserted during periods of Harvest, with spikes in desertion being indicated by season. During 1918 more than a million soldiers deserted, the following year the figure increased to two million, and in 1921 there were almost four million. Between 1919 and 1920 three million men deserted. In 1919, these fugitive "green deserters" numbered more than one million in the territory under Bolshevik control alone, and although trace amounts went on to serve with the Whites, most fought in heavily wooded areas near their own homes against Authorities from both sides. Detachments were sent to villages near the battlefront and families suspected of harboring deserters were punished with fines, confiscation of livestock and land, the seizure of hostages, executing community leaders and even burning whole villages to the ground. The special commissions ordered by the Cheka with pursuing them captured five hundred thousand deserters in 1919 and six hundred to eight hundred thousand in 1920. Thousands were shot and their families deported, but 1.5 to 2 million avoided capture.


title: Green armies

text: The mass desertions started much earlier. From the Kerensky Offensive to the October Revolution two million soldiers abandoned their positions and returned to their homes. The tsarist army of ten million strong had been defeated by shattered morale in its ranks and the weakness of its institutions, with millions returned to their farms. That same year, 1917, a massive demobilization was decreed. Many of these deserters were peasants, "the Imperial Army was a peasant army", who called themselves Marxists, despite lacking knowledge or understanding of the ideology. Their ""trenches Bolshevism" reflected above all an aspiration for peace, shared by the combatants of all the countries involved for three years in the most deadly and total wars.” More than two million of their comrades had perished fighting the Central Empires. Many supported the Bolsheviks in 1917 because they promised an assured peace, but due to the outbreak of the civil war, the peasants were very reluctant to be recruited. During the civil war, the desire for peace in the face of devastation led many communities to declare themselves "neutral republics" to prevent the red or White armies from entering their territories.


title: Green armies

text: It's possible that the Reds never gathered more than half a million "equipped soldiers" at any one time. After capturing Kazan in a five-day struggle, the Bolsheviks stopped retreating and began to reap successes thanks to the cemented centralization of command and a mass wave of recruits. It quickly had to face mass desertions between June 1919 and June 1920. Two million seven hundred thousand men were recruited, with almost all of this figure deserting except sixty thousand troops. In August 1920, the Reds had no more than seven hundred thousand combatants, less than five hundred thousand active, with two million two hundred and fifty thousand as reservists in training, three hundred ninety-one thousand in reserve units and one hundred and fifty-nine thousand in labor units, wounded, sick or deserters. The greens were always more numerous than the Whites. In concrete figures, Yudenich commanded 30,000 Whites, Kolchak 120,000 and Denikin around 150,000; by comparison, the Greens numbered over half a million during 1919. According to Western intelligence services, in September of that year the Bolsheviks were holding out with 120,000 soldiers in the Urals (eastern front), 180,000 in the "Chernozem" region (southern front), 35,000 in Pskov (northern front) and 130,000 in Belarus (western front). In July 1918, there were 40 to 50 thousand "international combatants", made up of Chinese, Romanian, Polish, Czech and Austro-Hungarian leftists, not including the Latvian Rifles.


title: Green armies

text: The Bolshevik forces were militarily fragile, as proven after the Battle of Warsaw, where Lenin's project to expand the revolution to Berlin or Budapest and then further west by military invasion was ultimately fruitless. Westerners wanted to surround Russia with a belt that prevented the further spread of Marxist and Leftist fervor, with a strong independent Poland being key in that plan and acting as one of the causes of the Polish-Soviet war: first encouraging Polish expansionism to the east, after stoking the Russian nationalism that the Bolsheviks knew how to take advantage of, and finally motivating Lenin to try to break this belt and overwhelm the new order founded in Versailles. The red soldiers were unable to defeat the newborn Polish army, ensuring that they would be unable to compete with the established and powerful industrial countries of central and western Europe. The failure to spread the Revolution across Europe would spurn on internal debate within the Bolsheviks, with Bukharin and Stalin later formulating the dominant theory of socialism in one country.


title: Green armies

text: Within this Red Army, the special units of the Cheka and the "internal defense troops of the Republic" stood out, with two hundred thousand members in 1921. In the wake of the Revolution, they were the main repressive organs of the fledgling Soviet State. Due to the small number of regular soldiers at the disposal of all sides, the armies that were in the Russian battlefields were very small - tens of thousands in the largest battles - compared to those used in the World War I. Volunteers were scarce and undisciplined, forcing Soviet commanders to recruit peasants, a social group that Soviet military leadership considered unreliable. This was coupled with increased pressure towards requisitions, which only contributed to the formation of new peasant guerrillas.


title: Green armies

text: Besides Soviet records of their oppositional activity, there is very little personal information about the Green leaders, described as "men who acted and wrote not" due to the widespread illiteracy and spontaneous nature of their movement (85% of the population was illiterate in 1917). In order to build substantial forces, a motivated individual would lead a group of soldiers through the countryside, enlisting village inhabitants and deserters from the Red Army along the way. The leaders would enter a village and make an announcement, employing simple messages and vague, reactionary goals in their rhetoric to rouse enthusiasm. They often exaggerated Bolshevik weakness and opposition victories as a means to convince listeners to join. By keeping the objectives simple, the recruitment indiscriminate, and the mood optimistic, Green leaders succeeded in provoking a sense among the peasants that they could make a significant dent in Bolshevik power. They also drew support from disillusioned urban and railroad workers, who had "fled back to the villages" and informed the peasants about the horrendous working conditions of developing industry. Among these atamans were Aleksandr Antonov, Nykyfor Hryhoriv, Danylo Terpylo and Nestor Makhno.


title: Green armies

text: Despite Soviet attempts to associate the Green armies with White leadership, such a designation overemphasizes the political aspects of the movement. In a broad sense, the Green armies were spontaneous manifestations of peasant discontent rather than of any specific ideology. By 1920, the Bolsheviks had secured victory over the Whites. The peasant soldiers of the Red Army, outraged at the prospect of continuing to violently oppress their own class in the interest of the new government, deserted and consolidated in groups in the forests, eventually leading to their "Green" designation. While these groups primarily opposed the Bolsheviks, they often did so without a plan or alternative form of government in mind; rather, they simply wanted to rid the countryside of Bolshevik influence by any means necessary.


title: Green armies

text: The revolts varied greatly from one another, however, the Soviets tended to classify them into two main categories: "bunt", a specific, brief revolt with few participants; and "vostante ", an insurrection of thousands of peasants, capable of conquering cities and giving themselves a coherent political program, usually of a social-revolutionary type, as in Tambov, or anarchist, like the peasant armies of Makhno.


title: Green armies

text: Among the initial movements would be the Livny rebellion, easily put down during August 1918. Also included is the Izhevsk–Votkinsk Uprising of that year and what is considered the first true "vostante", the Chapan rebellion, which broke out on the banks of the Volga, in the districts of Karsun, Syzran, Sengilei and Stavropol in 1919.


title: Green armies

text: It should be mentioned that the Kuban and Don Cossacks and the tribes of Caucasus rose up in 1920, forming their own peasant guerrillas. The latter reached more than 30,000 rebels in arms. They remained very active until the summer of the following year, when they will be definitively defeated, although small green parties in Kuban, Don and Western Siberia remained active until 1923. Later, in 1924, there would be a last revolt n of the field georgia no. It was quickly and harshly repressed.


title: Green armies

text: Danylo Ilkovych Terpylo led a Ukrainian nationalist peasant uprising characterized by anti-semitic pogroms. He came to control the countryside of the Kiev province, but not the big cities, and had 20,000 armed followers.


title: Green armies

text: Another green movement was the brief rebellion of Nykyfor Hryhoriv, ataman of Kherson, and Yuriy Tyutyunnyk. Hryhoriv was an opportunistic leader who knew how to switch sides when it suited him.


title: Green armies

text: Admiral Kolchak made the fatal mistake of winning the animosity of peasants eager for agricultural reform by restoring the rights of landowners. The problem worsened in early 1919. Kolchak resorted to terror to appease them. With his rear weakened by the wear and tear of the guerrillas, the White regime could not stop the Bolshevik advance, which on the other hand, knew how to add local partisans to its forces wherever it advanced.


title: Green armies

text: At the beginning of 1920 the "Pitchfork uprising" broke out, led by the "Army of Black Eagles" and spread through the fields of Kazan, Simbirsk and Ufa. However, the rapid Bolshevik reaction brought their annihilation the following month.


title: Green armies

text: Between the beginning of 1921 and the end of 1922, the West Siberian rebellion took place, the largest green uprising, and perhaps the least studied, both in number of rebels and in size geographic.


title: Green armies

text: One of the best known and most organized of these movements was the Makhnovist Revolution led by the Ukrainian anarchists Nestor Makhno, Fedir Shchus and Semen Karetnyk. Its movement was only comparable to that of Tambov due to its magnitude and organization. In a few years the Makhnovist partisans fought against Germans and Austro-Hungarians, Petliura nationalists, a French-led intervention in Berdyansk, and were targets of Denikin, Wrangel and Bolsheviks.


title: Green armies

text: Probably the best known green movement is the rebellion that broke out on August 19, 1920 in the small town of Khitrovo, as a rejection of food requisitions in the Tambov Oblast and quickly spread to Penza, Saratov and Voronezh. This was defeated in June 1922 with the death of its leader, Aleksandr Antonov.


title: Green armies

text: While it can be difficult to distinguish Green armies from other forms of peasant unrest, they were marked by concentrated leadership and distinct units, displaying a higher level of organization than most peasant uprisings. For instance, Aleksandr Antonov's Green army in Tambov had a medical staff, reinforcement brigades, and a complex system of communication and intelligence that employed women, children, and the elderly. Notable Green movements also developed in the regions of Novgorod, Tula, Ryazan, Tver, Voronezh, Kostroma, Syzran, Gomel, Kursk, Bryansk and Oryol, among many others. Estimations of Green forces ranged from a few hundred to fifty-thousand fighters. Apart from the weapons that Red deserters brought with them, the Greens stole war material from defeated Bolshevik soldiers, from Bolshevik supply buildings, and from abandoned garrisons of the former Imperial Russian Army. They incited armed resistance to Bolshevik institutions in nearby villages and towns, bragging of peasant victories and recruiting new soldiers, sometimes by force. They formed guerrilla bands, which conducted highly mobile guerrilla warfare, attacking Bolshevik communication systems, mills, railways and factories. They also organized detachments numerically comparable to the Reds, in West Siberia they were even capable of facing them in the open field. The peasants were permanently in need of modern rifles and machine guns, decisive for the war, being forced to obtain them anyway. Crowds stormed the cities, looting and burning the Party offices, the local Soviet, police posts, courts, and propaganda centers. The collective farms were destroyed. Tools, livestock, requisitioned grain, mills, factories, breweries, and bakeries were redistributed. This claim of popular property served the Greens to gain the support of the population. If the peasants successfully overwhelmed Bolsheviks, they cruelly punished soldiers and officials, often mutilating bodies, torturing families or burying victims alive.


title: Green armies

text: No more than 6,000 men, evenly distributed, fought in the first battles between the Whites of Lavr Kornilov and the Reds of Rudolf Sivers. Because of the small number of men involved and the tiny territory affected, it is difficult to call this even a civil war. During the entire first year of the war there were only skirmishes and artillery duels with small armies or partisan forces, more concerned with obtaining supplies. Territory continually changed hands, there were no front lines or fixed positions. In the decisive battles of 1919, they mobilized the peasantry by force, to fight in large armies with hundreds of thousands of men facing each other on fronts of hundreds of kilometers and supported with heavy weapons.


title: Green armies

text: Their favored activities included blowing up bridges, cutting telegraph lines and raising railways in an attempt to paralyze communications and movements of the Reds. They preferred to prowl during the day, keeping watch over his enemies and attacking at night. They permanently refused to fight in the open, hiding in hills and forests to ambush and retreat quickly. Their greater mobility made up for their total absence of artillery. In Western Siberia and Central Russia, their guerilla tactics were aided by the wooded terrain of the taiga. When they were defeated they mixed with the civil population or fled on horses provided by the locals.


title: Green armies

text: The Greens formed multitudes of peasants with clogs made of linden bark, they armed themselves with what they found: sticks, pitchforks, tridents, pikes, hoes, axes and clubs. To a lesser extent, also firearms such as shotguns, carbines, hunting rifles, pistols and rifles. Also many greens fought under red flags, symbols of the revolution later appropriated by the communists.


title: Green armies

text: The first small units sent by the Bolsheviks to subdue them were easily defeated and practically did nothing more than give them more weapons. Many Bolshevik units, especially in 1918, lacked training and discipline, dispersing after the first shots. For every Red soldier in combat, another eight were inactive due to illness or lack of training, clothing or ammunition. Whites were more disciplined and numerous and better trained. When the Bolsheviks were forced to withdraw from a region by guerrilla harassment they tended to take hostages in towns and cities and execute them once they were safe in territory under their rule. On the other hand, the Reds did not hesitate to suppress them with machine guns, tanks, armored cars, armored trains, heavy cannons, observation airplanes and poison gases leftovers from the arsenals of the Great War. In addition to flooding rebel areas with troops and propaganda. Quickly, the communists learned that: "Conventional armies, however well armed, are ill equipped to fight against a well supported peasant army." A lesson they would learn again much later in Afghanistan.


title: Green armies

text: The Bolshevik government tried to build an anti-revolutionary, anti-communist image for the Green armies. Provincial Communist officials announced to locals that the Green armies were a subsection of the villainous White movement, despite the fact that Green armies were generally just as hostile to the Whites as they were to the Reds. The Bolsheviks also exaggerated the influence of the kulaks in Green armies, who were undoubtedly involved, but hardly the driving force of the movement.


title: Green armies

text: These massive uprisings, which shook Soviet power in Eastern Ukraine, Tambov, and Siberia in 1919-1921, involved more than 100,000 guerrillas and millions of peasant supporters. In the words of Vladimir Lenin, it was a "great internal political crisis", the first in Soviet history. These rebellions were recognized by Lenin as "far more dangerous than all the forces of Denikin, Yudenich and Kolchak combined," as he proclaimed on March 8, 1921, in his opening speech at the 10th Party Congress.


title: Green armies

text: The Bolsheviks initially believed that they could easily defeat the Greens, treating them as a hopeless cause both in their propaganda and in their military strategies. Instead of focusing armed attention on the Greens as a whole, the Reds treated each peasant army as a specific instance of unrest, suppressing harshly and further angering the peasant population. By the time that Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks realized the strength of the Green movement, it had grown into a serious social and military threat to Bolshevik power. The small units sent to subdue them many times defected demoralized, so they were replaced by a combination of mass terror, propaganda and flooding rebel areas with troops. Some scholars credit the Green movement with indirectly forcing the Communist Party to change its economic strategy in 1921 (see New Economic Policy), and yet, while the Greens certainly contributed to changes in Bolshevik policy, the extent of their influence is open to debate. It is far less contestable that the New Economic Policy – along with increased rainfall – quelled the Green movement by improving rural conditions and thus damaged the Green armies’ foundation for successful recruitment – peasant discontent. By the summer of 1922, as the Bolsheviks were securing their victory in the civil war, the Green troops had all but disappeared. The demise of these movements was in large part caused by the famine of 1921-1922, which affected 29 million people in total and killed about five million, being the main weapon of the regime to regain control over many provinces. Ruthless terror played its part in suppressing the revolts, but the main weapon was hunger.


title: Green armies

text: In the opinion of the anarchists: "The basic psychological trait of Bolshevism is the realization of its will by means of the violent elimination of all other wills, the absolute destruction of all individuality, to the point where it becomes an inanimate object." Many local communist officials saw that the requisition orders starved their own people to death, but "The good comrade did the what was said to him; he was pleased to leave all critical thinking to the Central Committee." That was the discipline the Party advocated. Ironically, many Bolshevik officers were the children of peasants educated in Tsarist military schools. With their minds open when leaving the narrow rural world, they rejected the mentality of their parents and grandparents and did not hesitate to repress their own people.


title: Green armies

text: The resistance of the Cossacks led to a fierce campaign of decossackization, from 1919 to 1920, in which they were repressed with the clear intention of eliminating them "as a social group" -the first of many repressions in Soviet history. Men were shot, women and children deported, their homes burned and their lands repopulated with non-Cossack settlers. During the Lenin and Stalin governments, to economically develop territories and punish potentially separatist peoples, numerous communities were starved, deported and replaced by Russian settlers. Hence, the resistance and genocide of the Cossacks were called by the Bolshevik leaders themselves as the "Soviet Vendée." Lenin admitted to imitating the tactics devised by François Babeuf, inventor of modern communism, who planned the "populicide" of Vendée, which found its climax in the "infernal columns".


title: Green armies

text: The Red Terror was much more systematic, widespread and effective than the White Terror. Any opposition, real or potential, was mercilessly repressed, setting the tone for future civil wars of the 20th century. The prison population of the Chekas were "a reduced version of society itself", they included all kinds of people and there was no family that had not suffered the arrest or disappearance of a member. Terror against the workers had begun in 1918 and reached its climax in 1921, with the subjugation of Kronstadt. According to several of the Bolshevik leaders, the terror started by Lenin was the natural consequence of the violent seizure of power and his rejection of democracy. The only allies of the Bolsheviks were the left SRs, although only at the beginning because later they were also repressed following the Left SR Uprising. According to the anarchists, both sought to subjugate the people through the state.


title: Green armies

text: Lenin also ordered the Bolshevik Party itself to be purged to get rid of potentially unfair or useless elements. In parallel there was an exorbitant growth of the Party, distancing the bases from its leaders. The first purge took place in the summer of 1918, the second in the spring of 1919, and the third in the summer of 1920, focusing on comrades of peasant or non-Russian origin. The Party did not inspire loyalty and people voluntarily left it in waves.