Bandits and Bolsheviks

Rebuilding the revolutionary movement was a slow and painful process. The Shaanxi provincial leadership was a small group of committed Bolsheviks who struggled in vain to mobilize a proletarian revolution in a region without an industrial base. The real work of making revolution fell to guerrilla bands operating along the Shaanxi-Gansu border, organizing bandits, soldiers, and some poor peasants in the sparsely populated hills of the north. The provincial party was wary of the scruffy composition of these guerrilla gangs. It sought to transform them into a more disciplined Red Army by linking them to the party’s early rural strongholds in Sanyuan and the Wei River valley. When this effort failed, the new Twenty-Sixth Red Army was ordered south of the Wei to the site of early activism in the Weinan-Hua-xian area. The result was a disastrous military defeat, and in 1933 the Shaanxi revolutionary movement again faced extinction. The only ground for hope came when arrests and defections eliminated most of the provincial leadership, liberating the guerrillas to develop their own strategy.1