TULA - CITY - HERO
This was taken advantage of by the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. Sowing in trade union bodies, they began to spin the lines of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy. On March 21, 1918, the VChK warned the Tula Council about it: the Menshevik militia was disarmed, their newspaper and the newspaper of the Socialist-Revolutionaries were closed. In connection with the serious Menshevik danger, a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Cheka, VL Panyushkin, was appointed extraordinary commissioner in Tula for the meeting of the Council of People's Commissars under Lenin's chairmanship in Tula. Socialist detachments of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee have been sent to help the Tula Bolsheviks.
The counter-revolutionary plans were foiled. But the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries continued their subversive activities. In June 1918, they provoked part of the workers of the weapons and ammunition factories, railway workshops to strike. It did not last long. The Bolsheviks convincingly explained to the workers the meaning of the incendiary speeches of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, hostile to the Soviet government. On the second day of the strike, the general meeting of the workers of the weapons and ammunition factories declared that "strikes at a time of intense struggle against the counter-revolution is a betrayal of the working class."
Taking advantage of the still weak organization of the peasantry, the Socialist-Revolutionaries, relying on the kulaks, organized a whole series of kulak speeches and revolts. Again, in manifesting high proletarian solidarity, the echelon of the revolutionary parts of Moscow participated in suppressing them together with the Tula revolutionary forces.
The repression of the counter-revolution forced on June 10, 1918, to introduce martial law in Tula and the provinces. From the Soviets, right-wing Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were excluded first, and then left-wing Socialist-Revolutionaries. In order to strengthen the work of the Bolshevik organization in August 1918, it was decided to merge the city and provincial committees of the RCP (B). The new provincial committee, chaired by the experienced Bolshevik GN Kaminsky, included the communists AI Kaul, VA Kulnev, SS Kolesnikov, NA Glagolev, II Denisov, V S. Mikheev, NM Nemtsov, SP Ageyev, VP Alekseev, IP Belkin, FS Filin and a number of comrades directed to work in Tula of the Central Committee of the RCP (B.). The reorganization of the gubernia executive committee was also carried out.
But the counter-revolution did not give up. In March-April 1919, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, who had not lost their influence in the trade unions, again provoked, using hunger, workers' fatigue, delays in paying wages, strikes at military factories in Tula and at the railway junction.