This dissertation investigates the Soviet state’s emergence from the crucible of the civil wars (1918-21) through the lens of its interactions with the men who fought in them. Focusing on Tambov Province, site of a major peasant rebellion in 1920-21, it examines the post-war reintegration both of Red Army veterans and of former peasant rebels, as well as those who participated on both sides. It deploys a comparative perspective to demonstrate how post-civil war dynamics familiar from other contexts were refracted through the prism of socialist revolution. The dissertation reveals that, unlike elsewhere in Europe, Soviet demobilization constituted a remobilization, in the form of direct appointments from the Army and through the process of rural elections, which contrary to previous scholarship I interpret as hugely significant instruments of state mobilization and surveillance. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” came to rely on the former peasant conscripts of a notoriously unreliable Army beset by mass desertion and ambiguous loyalties. Civil war enemies were meanwhile systematically rehabilitated – a phenomenon that has largely escaped historians’ attention – in an attempt to reconstitute peasant society as a loyal “laboring peasantry” distinct from “bandits” (the regime’s delegitimizing term for peasant rebels). While most scholars rightly locate the legacies of the civil wars in Soviet repression, I argue that rehabilitation accompanied state violence from the beginning, and that both practices were forged through the experience and exigencies of war. The Soviet Union, I argue, represented an extreme manifestation of a pan-European interwar conjuncture and its interplay of post-war memory, ongoing conflict, and trepidation about the war of the future. The Bolsheviks’ belief in class struggle and an inevitable future showdown with the forces of capitalism supercharged fears around the presence of former enemies and exacerbated the dilemmas of demobilization. In this context their frustrations at the ambiguous results of civil war veterans’ remobilization and reintegration helped set the stage for the violence of Stalinism.