The Soviet counterinsurgency doctrine has never been articulated as a counterinsurgency manual, yet Politburo members knew how the Bolsheviks had won the civil war. Facing a nationalist challenge in the borderlands, the Soviet regime responded with a set of political, military, and security measures it had developed during the civil war. Its stick-and-carrot strategy presumed a combination of populist reforms intended to win the hearts of the poorer majority, harsh punitive policies designed to eliminate all actual and potential opponents, and amnesties that would allow all proletarians and their class allies who accidentally found themselves among the Soviet enemies to switch sides. The Soviet leaders viewed insurgency as an inevitable class conflict; therefore, it was vital to involve the borderland poor in the struggle against the resistance, organize them politically and militarily by appointing them to local administrative positions and by raising peasant militia, and lead them against the enemies of the proletarian state. This class struggle was to culminate in a social revolution controlled and directed by the state. Agrarian reform was the major political means with which to instigate a class conflict that would end with the destruction of the resistance by the joint force of the state security agencies, the proletariat, and its allies – peasants. The theory of class conflict, however, was always ambivalent with regard to the peasantry.