Central Committee Guerrilla Organization Instructions for Sabotage Activities

The Central Committee’s instructions for partisan organization and sabotage outline a coordinated campaign against the White regime in Siberia: build an alliance of workers, soldiers, and peasants; connect partisan units across the region; and prepare them for sustained armed struggle. Their importance lies as much in the political dispute they provoke as in their operational detail. Presented at an illegal meeting, the instructions imagine a disciplined, networked movement, while the objections of Liberius and Kuprian Tiverzin reveal disagreement over the authority and composition of that movement.

Political Purpose and Proposed Alliance

The speaker frames the Siberian conflict as a struggle against a regime whose looting, requisitions, violence, shootings, and torture will, he argues, turn the peasantry against it. He calls for the toiling peasantry of Siberia and the Urals to ally with the urban proletariat and soldiers, and also invokes poor Kirghiz and Buriat peasants as part of this proposed coalition. The argument gives the campaign both a social and a military purpose: the alliance is meant to overthrow the authority of hetmans and admirals and establish power through the peasants’ and soldiers’ Soviets.

The instructions portray this change not as a peaceful transfer but as an armed uprising and a full-fledged war against officer and Cossack forces aligned with the bourgeoisie. The speaker warns that the struggle will be long and stubborn. The forecast of protracted conflict makes organization essential to the political project: solidarity is presented as something to be built and maintained through coordinated action, not merely proclaimed.

Regional Coordination and Underground Methods

A central directive is to establish immediate contact with all partisan units operating within the territory of the Party Provincial Committee, so that organization can keep pace with the growing peasant movement. The instructions also address the practical means of clandestine coordination: secret meeting places, passwords, codes, and communications. These requirements turn a general appeal for unity into a plan for linking separate detachments while protecting the links between them.

The campaign is to gather intelligence on White supplies of arms, food, and equipment, as well as large stores of money and the means used to protect them. The proposed operations extend beyond direct engagement with armed opponents. They include sabotage of bridges, railway lines, steamships, barges, stations, workshops and their equipment, telegraph offices, mines, and food supplies. By naming both military resources and transport and communications infrastructure, the instructions define partisan warfare as an effort to disrupt the material systems that sustain White authority.

The plan also assigns organizational questions a place alongside sabotage: detachments are to have commanders and proletarian discipline, maintain conspiratorial work and contact with the outside world, consider their conduct toward local people, and establish revolutionary courts-martial. The breadth of the list reflects an ambition to make irregular forces function as an organized political and military system. It also leaves open a tension between underground secrecy and the movement’s stated need to secure the support of the population among whom it operates.

Dispute over Authority and Membership

The presentation takes place at an illegal meeting in a photographers’ yard, in a cleared space in a large barn screened by a wall of logs. An escape route runs through a trap door into an underground passage leading to an alley behind a monastery. This concealed setting supplies a concrete counterpart to the instructions’ emphasis on secrecy. The speaker reads in a tired, flat voice, but the material he presents is ambitious and comprehensive; Liberius eventually dismisses it as irrelevant and amateurish and objects to accepting it without protest merely to retain Red Army support.

Kuprian Tiverzin’s challenge focuses on a recommendation to include war veterans who belonged to soldiers’ organizations during the revolution, with one or two noncommissioned officers and a military technician on the committee. After confirming that he has recorded the wording correctly, Tiverzin says that the military specialists trouble him: workers who participated in the 1905 revolution, he argues, are not accustomed to trusting army people because counterrevolutionary elements may be among them. His objection exposes a fault line within the proposed alliance. The instructions call for military expertise and cooperation across social groups, but revolutionary suspicion makes the inclusion of army personnel politically contentious.

The exchange does not settle the tension between centrally issued direction and local judgment. When the discussion turns to the proposed committee, Vdovichenko argues that civic institutions should grow from below like seedlings taking root, rather than be driven in from above like fence stakes. His comparison gives the meeting’s resistance a distinct political principle: participation and legitimacy should develop locally, even as the instructions seek to coordinate partisan units across a broad territory.

Scope and Significance

Taken together, the instructions combine a theory of revolutionary alliance with a practical program for clandestine organization, intelligence, discipline, and sabotage. Their attention to commanders, courts-martial, local conduct, communications, and infrastructure shows that the proposed movement is not conceived as a series of isolated attacks. It is meant to become a coordinated force capable of sustaining a long war while contesting political authority.

The meeting also prevents the program from appearing as a consensus document. Liberius’s impatience and Tiverzin’s distrust of military specialists show that unity is disputed at the level of both strategy and institutional design. The proposed alliance depends on bringing together groups whose experience and political suspicions may conflict; the instructions can prescribe coordination, but the arguments around them reveal how difficult that coordination remains.