The Empire and Nationalism at War Vera Tolz

The Empire and Nationalism at War
Russias Great War and Revolution
Vol. 1, bk. 1
Murray Frame, Boris Kolonitskii, Steven G. Marks, and Melissa K.
Stockdale, eds., Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 191422:
Popular Culture, the Arts, and Institutions (2014)
Vol. 1, bk. 2
Murray Frame, Boris Kolonitskii, Steven G. Marks, and Melissa K.
Stockdale, eds., Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 191422:
Political Culture, Identities, Mentalities, and Memory (2014)
Vol. 2
Eric Lohr, Vera Tolz, Alexander Semyonov, and Mark von Hagen,
eds., The Empire and Nationalism at War (2014)
Series General Editors: Anthony Heywood, David MacLaren McDonald, and

John W. Steinberg
THE EMPIRE AND NATIONALISM AT WAR
EDITED BY
ERIC LOHR
VERA TOLZ
ALEXANDER SEMYONOV
MARK VON HAGEN
Bloomington, Indiana, 2014

Each contribution 2014 by its author. All rights reserved.
Cover design by Tracey Theriault.
Cover: Artillery Troops in the Caucasus, Istoriia Rossii do 1917 goda, http://
russiahistory.ru/kavkazskij-front-pervaya-mirovaya-vojna/.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The empire and nationalism at war / edited by Eric Lohr, Vera Tolz,
Alexander Semyonov, and Mark von Hagen.
pages cm. -- (Russias Great War and Revolution ; v. 2)
Summary: In this multiauthor collection historians examine the nature,
ambitions, and limitations of empire and the role these played in the
First World War. The volume further analyzes how and why the war
facilitated the rise of national movements across Eastern Europe, bringing
about the downfall of centuries-old monarchies and engendering the
establishment of vulnerable successor states.--Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-89357-425-3
1. World War, 1914-1918--Political aspects. 2. World War,
1914-1918--Diplomatic history. 3. Imperialism--History--20th century. 4.
Nationalism--History--20th century. 5. World War, 1914-1918--Russia. 6.
World War, 1914-1918--Europe. Eastern. 7. Russia--History, Military--20th
century. 8. Europe, Eastern--History, Military--20th century. 9. Russia-
-Politics and government--1894-1917. 10. Europe, Eastern--Politics and
government--20th century. I. Lohr, Eric. II. Tolz, Vera. III. Semyonov,
Alexander. IV. Von Hagen, Mark, 1954-
D523.E55 2014
940.347--dc23
2014036823
Slavica Publishers [Tel.] 1-812-856-4186

Indiana University [Toll-free] 1-877-SLAVICA
1430 N. Willis Drive [Fax] 1-812-856-4187
Bloomington, IN 47404-2146 [Email] slavica@indiana.edu
USA [www] http://www.slavica.com/
Contents
From the Series Editors .........................................................................................vii
Acknowledgments ................................................................................................. xv
Ronald Grigor Suny
Introduction: Bringing Empire Back ............................................................. 1
Mark von Hagen
The Entangled Eastern Front in the First World War .................................. 9
Joshua Sanborn
War of Decolonization: The Russian Empire in the Great War ............... 49
Alexei I. Miller
The Role of the First World War in the Competition between

Ukrainian and All-Russian Nationalism .................................................... 73
Eric Lohr
War Nationalism ............................................................................................. 91

Central Asia (191620): A Kaleidoscope of Local

Revolutions and the Building of the Bolshevik Order .............................109
Andrei Cusco
Nationalism and War in a Contested Borderland:

The Case of Russian Bessarabia (191417) .................................................137
vi CONTENTS
Borislav Chernev
Ukrainization and Its Contradictions in the Context of

the Brest-Litovsk System ...............................................................................163
Ilya V. Gerasimov
What Russian Progressives Expected from the War ................................189
Sergey Glebov
Postwar Russian Eurasianisms Anticolonial Critique

of Eurocentrism and Modernity ..................................................................217
Tomas Balkelis
Memories of the Great War and the Polish-Lithuanian

.....................................................................................241
Vera Tolz
Modern Russian Memory of the Great War, 191420 .............................. 257
Notes on Contributors ......................................................................................... 287

From the Series Editors
Origins of the Project
Since its inception in 2006 Russias Great War and Revolution, 191422 has taken
shape through the collaboration of an international community of historians
interested in the history of World War Is understudied eastern theater. Timed
to coincide with the centenary of the Great Warand, by extension, the revolu-
tions it helped unleashthis series responds to several developments in the
historiography of the Russian Empire, its Soviet successor, and the Great War
as a whole.
During a century of scholarly and popular discussion about the First World

after 1991. In the former USSR, the war stood in the shadow of the revolutions
of 1917 and the subsequent Civil War that resulted in the formation of the So-
viet Union; most of all, it was eclipsed by the apotheosization after 1945 of the

moment in Soviet history. As a result, the First World War appeared as the
the laws of history. Non-Soviet scholars, often hampered by restricted access

to archival collections, downplayed the Russian war experience for other rea-
sons. Specialists in the history of the late empire or early Soviet order tended
Western historians often focused on the war experience of their own states
most often Britain and its imperial possessions, France, or Germanyor on
a welter of issues bequeathed by the outbreak of the war in 1914 and the
peacemaking in the years following 1918. These issues included most notably
the vexed question of Germanys war guilt, encoded in Article 231 of the
Versailles Treaty, which has continued to provoke a lively and contentious
discussion in the intervening 100 years.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union by the end of 1991 cast the history of

particularly for military and international historybecame relatively accessi-
ble to post-Soviet and Western scholars. As important, opportunities opened
quickly for collaboration and dialogue between historians in Russia and their
colleagues abroad, fostering new research and interpretations that would
have been impossible or inconceivable before the late 1980s. Likewise, the
The Empire and Nationalism at War. Eric Lohr, Vera Tolz, Alexander Semyonov, and Mark von
Hagen, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2014, viixiii.
viii FROM THE SERIES EDITORS
dramatic changes of the era led scholars inside and outside the former USSR
to re-examine long-held assumptions about the Soviet state and its origins,
accompanied by renewed debate over the viability of the Russian Empire as it
adapted to the challenges of modernity. As part of this general re-evaluation,
Russias Great War became a subject of study in its own right. By the early
21st century, the war years came to be seen as what Peter Holquist termed
a continuum of crisis. Rather than an abrupt rupture between juxtaposed
imperial and Soviet orders, the war now appears not just as a powerful force of
disruption, but also a period of intense mobilizationas in the other combatant
statesthat produced the modes and the gaze of statecraft, mass culture,
and social control often associated with the totalitarian/authoritarian states of
the interwar and Cold War years. Such practices include the nationalization of
economies, the increasing application of technology to surveillance, reaching
farther than before into the private sphere, but also such issues as displaced
or refugee populations, racialized nationalist ideologies, and the development
of such means as mass propaganda in support of building a utopia in our
time.
All of these contexts have been brought into sharp focus by the centenary
of the Great War. This occasion has engendered a great deal of scholarly and

memorials that will, over the coming years, mark the milestone anniversaries
ments enshrined in the historical memories of the combatant states. All of the
one-time enemies will honor the millions of dead, wounded, incapacitated,

will take part in these rites of commemoration. At the end of 2012, the Russian
Federation declared 1 August the annual Day of Remembrance for the Vic-

observed in 2013. Similarly, having long been consigned to the margins of the
dominant narratives on the First World War, Russias part in and experience of
the Great War has become the focus of a substantial body of new scholarship.
This series forms part of that new contribution to the international under-
If the concept behind Russias Great War and Revolution

trends in the historiography on the wars meaning for Russian history, its
form draws on earlier examples of the sort of international collaboration that
have become increasingly possible since the late 1980s. Each of the general
editors and many members of the editorial collective had participated in
similar partnerships, albeit on a smaller scale. Such projects included two
volumes on Russian military history that enlisted the best specialists from the
international community. Eric Lohr and Marshall Poe edited The Military and
Society in Russia (Brill, 2002), while Reforming the Tsars Army (2004), edited by
Bruce Menning and David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, appeared with
the Woodrow Wilson International Center and Cambridge University Press
in 2004. Other participants in this project had taken part in two other similar
FROM THE SERIES EDITORS ix
collections. In 2005, Routledge published The Russian Revolution of 1905:

Centenary Perspectives, co-edited by Jonathan Smele and Anthony Heywood.
That year also saw the publication by Brill of volume 1 of The Russo-Japanese
War in Global Perspective: World War Zero; volume 2 came out two years later.
Both were overseen by Menning, Schimmelpenninck, and John W. Steinberg.
Each of these collections provided instructive examples of how to organize
Russias Great War and Revolution.
Aims
Recognizing both the growing scholarly interest in Russias Great War and
the occasion presented by the successive centenaries of the First World War
and the Russian revolutions, the editors of this collection have sought to

they have oriented this collection toward several audiences. For those in the
of edited collections, varying in format and approach, that will provide a

interests and debate, these materials will by default indicate those topics and

structure, periodization, and approach taken in their respective volumes.
As a consequence, depending on the topic covered, some volumes provide
a largely narrative treatment of eventsfor instance, military operations
and engagementsor of developing issues, as occurs in the volume on inter-
national relations. Others, most often dealing with the home front or Russia
or regions.
In addition to addressing our academic communities, the editors seek also
to engage non-professional readers in the general public, including secondary
school students. To this end, as a supplement to the books in this series, the
larger editorial collective have created a dedicated website with such sup-

Further, the editors plan to house on the web-site special sections devoted to
in developing school and lesson plans. Finally, alongside its appearance in

book form, the series will also be available on the internet through the Project
MUSE scholarly database. Readers with access to that platform will be able
to conduct searches in and download entire books or individual chapters as

Great War and revolutions, the MUSE edition will provide instructors with
valuable research resource for their students.

x FROM THE SERIES EDITORS
Conceptualization and Organization

Russias experience of the long Great War, spanning the First World War,
the revolutions, and the Russian Civil War. Editors have sought to cover all

pertise permits, under a series of thematic rubrics. These cover a wide range
of subjects, including the experience of the soldiers involved, as well as of the
urban and rural populations on the home front; the course of international
relations, both formal and non-governmental; the implications of war and
revolution for the empire as a polity incorporating a broad variety of national
and confessional populations bound to the imperial center by distinctive
administrative and legal regimes; and the impact of prolonged total war
on the cultural, religious, and intellectual life of the region. Looking outward
beyond the territories of the Russian Empire/USSR themselves, other volumes
address the perspectives of the Central Powers during the Great War, the ef-
fects of war and civil war in Siberia and the Far East, the lengthening arc
of revolution through the peripheries of the former empire and beyond to

repercussions of total wars and revolution on ideas about and performance
of gender, sexuality, and the sphere of intimacy in Russian society. Of course,

otherwise stated, the territory and populations housed within the boundaries
of the Russian Empire in 1914.

comprehensive narrative history of the war, nor is it meant to serve as an
encyclopaedia of issues, events, and persons associated with the war and
revolutions. Rather, it seeks to provide clear representation of current scholarly
interests and debates, while indicating areas in need of more research. Thus,
war or the Civil War. Likewise, many areas of international relations remain
uncovered, not least the formation of policy-making institutions in the suc-
cessor states to the Russian Empire. Those interested in the revolutionary
than would have been the case for much of the late 20th century, while the
peasantry and Russias regions have begun to receive comparatively greater
As noted previously, an underlying aim of this series is to encourage fur-
Thus, despite the increasing prevalence of the imperial turn in our historiog-
raphy, the impact of the war, revolutions, and Civil War in Russias imperial
borderlands has only begun recently to command the interest that it warrants.
By the same token, like their counterparts for the history of other countries,
FROM THE SERIES EDITORS xi
specialists on 20th-century Russia have yet to delve deeply into the manifold
aspects of religion and religiosity in the wartime Russian Empire, from popu-
lar or folk religion and religious practice, through the high politics of spiritual

religious philosophy that had begun to run so strong during the Silver Age.
Finally, throughout the long process that led to the appearance of this
series, the editorial teams have sought to avoid the imposition of an explicit
interpretive agenda, in the interests of conveying a sense of current areas of
debate and consensus in our historical literature. Thus, while the periodization
of 191422i.e., the years spanning the Russian Empires entry into war
through two revolutions, civil war, and the formation of the Soviet state
has taken hold with many historians, others continue to maintain that such
consequences for the areas subsequent history. In the interest of providing as
a variety of interpretations and periodizations, inviting readers to draw their
Process
From the beginning, editors have viewed Russias Great War and Revolution
as a truly global project, incorporating perspectives from historians across
Europe, North America, Russia, Asia, and Australia. In addition to the subject

composition of the editorial teams that oversaw the production of each volume.
Each of these groups included members from North America, Russia, and the
United Kingdom or continental Europe. Where the contents required itfor
instance, in the book dealing with Asia, scholars from elsewhere joined the
editorial team. In the interests of reaching the broadest possible international
audience, the editors agreed on English as the language for the series, with
the intention of publishing a parallel Russian-language edition when feasible.
The chapters in these volumes consist both of submissions in response to a
widely circulated open call and invited contributions. Papers were selected

then evaluation by the full editorial board. Throughout, editors strove for the
greatest possible inclusiveness, with the result that the articles in the series
represent a broad variety of scholars, ranging from graduate students through
all ranks of the academic cursus honorum.
The project and its publication took shape through a series of editorial-
board meetings that began at the University of Aberdeen in the summer of
2008. A meeting at the University of Wisconsin-Madison the following sum-
mer resulted in agreement on the thematic areas to be addressed by separate
volumes, in addition to provisional topical headings for each volume. At

for each volume, leading to a public call for papers the following autumn.
From that point forward, editors pursued submissions, while project
representatives participated in the presentation of project overviews
and draft articles at the annual conventions of the Association for Slavic,
East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), the Study Group of
the Russian Revolution, the British Association for Slavonic and East
European Studies (BASEES), the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies,
and the 2010 Stockholm meeting of the International Council for Central
and East European Studies (ICCEES).
The chapters contained in the volumes comprising Russias Great War
and Revolution have undergone an intensive multi-stage review process,
overseen collectively by the 30-odd members of the full editorial board.
The publisher also solicited a peer assessment of the project description
and design; the resulting review yielded important and helpful sugges-
tions, as did consultation with the projects advisory board. Next, edi-
torial teams for individual volumes jointly assessed contributions. To
for publication, the editorial board adopted a two-tier review exercise.

Editorial teams were paired according to areas of overlapping interest
or approach. Each of the teams would read and critique the contents for
the others volume, followed by a general discussion involving the entire
editorial board. Finally, after the completion of revisions, that volumes
editorial team sent it on to the general editors, who solicited anonymous

critiques or suggestions from these last reviews, the general editors sub-
Acknowledgments
and institutions. The editorial board owes a special debt of gratitude

to Alice D. Mortenson from Minneapolis, Minnesota for her unstinting
support of and generosity to this undertaking, not least through the
Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Chair of Russian History. This resource
proved indispensable in making possible several successive editorial

His contributions helped ensure the success of the summer editorial

meetings at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012. Both donors
also made possible many of the translations in the collection.

the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, through the School of Divinity,
History and Philosophy, the College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the
FROM THE SERIES EDITORS xiii
Principals Interdisciplinary Fund to facilitate our inaugural board meeting

History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison hosted the 2009 and 2012
editorial-board meetings; Nicole Hauge played a key role in arrangements

History at Uppsala University in Sweden gave us the use of their facilities and
meeting-space in the summer of 2010, providing an excellent and hospitable
environment for our discussion. Many of the home institutions of the editorial
board also contributed travel costs and meeting-space for the compilation of
several volumes in this collection; some helped underwrite some translation
costs as well.
Several other groups and institutions played an important role in the
gestation of this series. The Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Inter-
national Center, particularly Associate Director William Pomeranz, has
actively supported the project since its outset. Grants to support our editorial
meetings were provided by the British Academy, BASEES, and the Great
Britain Sasakawa Foundation. The German Historical Institute in Moscow

man. The Study Group on the Russian Revolution served as an important
venue for the development of many of the chapters, particularly from British
and European contributors, that appear in these volumes. George Fowler and
Vicki Polansky of Slavica Publishers have proven the ideal partners in this

professionalism, and rigor, all of which have made the production process run
with an enviable dispatch and smoothness.
Finally, the editorial board expresses its heartfelt thanks to more than

Russias Great War and Revolution. At the risk of tautology, it must be said that

patience with an extended production scheduleallowed us to present our
readers with strong evidence for the enduring importance and complexity of
this eight-year span in the history of Central and Eastern Europe and Asia,
the consequences of which continue to shape our world in ways that we are
still witnessing.
Anthony Heywood
David MacLaren McDonald
John W. Steinberg
June 2014
Acknowledgments
Many cooks made this book. It began with the ambitious initiative of John
Steinberg, Tony Heywood, and not long after, David McDonald. They gener-
ously provided the means and facilities for conferences in Aberdeen and
Madison, where this volume and others took shape. Alexander Semyonov
organized and funded a conference in St. Petersburg with the support of
the Smolnyi Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State Uni-
versity, and National Research University-Higher School of Economics in
St. Petersburg. Thanks to Vera Tolz-Zilitinkevic for her good work on many
fronts. This book has taught us that transnational projects are not easy, even

have built productive new relationships and begun conversations that will
continue in the years to come. I think that this project shows that communities
of Russian and American scholars working on Russian history are coming
together in new and more regular ways. That bodes well for the future of our
Eric Lohr
Washington, DC
Introduction: Bringing Empire Back
Ronald Grigor Suny
Even if one does not buy into the Leninist concept of World War I as an
imperialist war, it appears evident that it was a war of empires. Within each
of the warring empires subject peoples found opportunities to act indepen-
dently, to make choices about loyalties and identities, either with the polities
in which they had lived or following nationalist intellectuals and activists
into uncharted waters. On the Eastern and Caucasian Fronts four empires and
a cluster of smaller nation-states began the war, which concluded with the

had predicted, empires fell apart, and the imperialist war metastasized into
liberals, conservatives, and socialists to hold the old empires together, albeit
with a new political order.
At a macrohistorical level World War I was the moment when interimperial
rivalries led to the collapse of continental empires in Europe. World War II

domesticate nationalism even though they resorted to the most brutal forms of

encouraged the aspirations of ethnicities. NationalitiesJews, Poles, Arme-

nians, Ukrainians, and Romanian-speakersstraddled imperial borders and

Bessarabia, as Andrei Cusco demonstrates, self-styled nation-states like Roma-
nia played the same game of enticing the subjects of rival states to its side.
How imperial authorities constructed nationality, how they imagined and
and how they would treat particular people. Because Bessarabian peasants
were Orthodox, Russian authorities considered them likely to be loyal to the
empire, while Germans, Jews, and intellectuals were suspect.
Hagen, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2014, 17.
2 RONALD GRIGOR SUNY
Following the collapse of empires and the foundation of new nation-

states, the principal explanation for the rapid transformation of European
geography had borrowed from the teleology of the nationalists and depicted
the triumph of nations as an irresistible assertion of a natural process. Na-
tions were modern, empires antiquated, and the two were incompatible,

more recent writings a number of historiansamong them Aviel Roshwald,
Mark von Hagen, Eric Lohr, and Alexei Millerhave shown that rather than
empires consistently repressing nationalist impulses, they often contributed

world war. Empires were not about to give in and give up to nationalism
but were determined to use such sentiments instrumentally to further their

reminds us, The prewar war aims of the future belligerents were in large
measure directed at rearranging imperial borders at the expense of their
rivals. The long disputed and unresolved Eastern Question was a trigger
that unbalanced the balance of power in Europe, and ambitious politicians

that healthier and more vigorous powers could take advantage. Not only
imperial governments but also famished nationalists prepared for what they
hoped would be a banquet of spoils.
At the imperial level the war might be imagined as sibling rivalries, a
brutal contest of cousins, but a slight change of focus from the ministries of

more subterranean processes were at work that would ultimately undermine
the existing state structures. Beyond the walls of diplomatic salons were the
mobile worlds of food supply, labor migration, and the intricate intercon-
nections of what had already become a globalized capitalist economy. All that
was solid was melting into air once again. Some analysts believed that inte-
grated markets would render war impossible, but others, like Lenin and Rosa
Luxemburg, were convinced that the current stage of capitalism would make
The prewar years, and even more so the war years, were moments when
reimagining maps was in the air. Borders were both sacred and manipula-
ble. New homelands were being conceived for nations that were still
cohering around national myths, common languages, and articulated histo-

winner-take-all, zero-sum-game competition. Peoples who were in the way
had to be removedJews, Ajars, and Armeniansand running roughshod
INTRODUCTION 3

races were superior to others. Existing nation-states and stateless nations had
their own ambitionsto expand their territory, regain ancient lands, or even
the capital, Constantinople or Vilnius, of a long-deceased imperial state. On
the Left socialist internationalism collapsed before patriotic concerns, with
notable exceptionsthe martyred Jean Jaures in France, the Bolsheviks and
internationalist Social Democrats in Russia, and the Bulgarian Narrows
who would have to wait until war weariness would resurrect transnational

national boundaries, and coreligionists inspired by God and Country killed
each other with a sense of just cause.
Notoriously empires did not limit their borders to the national composition
of desired territories. They were promiscuous in expanding for whatever rea-
son seemed appropriate. Sometimes strategic concerns were paramount; at
other times consolidation of the nation might be deployed. Russian rulers,

of the Russian people, were anxious (in the words of General Aleksei Bru-
silov) to take back Galicia, which despite its being a constituent part of
Austria-Hungary is a Russian land, populated, after all, by Russian people.
recovery of the territory of its own herrenfolk

their campaigns into Caucasia, discovering the Turkic connection with the
local Tatars (Azerbaijanis). When convenient, however, the imperialist
claims could be made on religious or state security grounds.
The vision of many nationalists that understandably has seen empires

on nation building, which were particularly visible through the 19th and
early 20th centuries. Even more palpable was the generation of nationalisms
by the wartime policies of the great landed empires of Europe. Wilhelmine
Germany and its Austrian allies promoted the fortunes of Ukrainians in a
move to detach the western borderlands of the Romanov empire from the

independent Azerbaijan. The Central Powers recruited prisoners of war as
potential nationalist opponents of imperial Russian rule, while the Russian

into armed units. In a clear case of unintended consequences the formation

of a Czechoslovak Legion under one Russian government led to events a few
years later that helped to initiate the Russian Civil War against another. Future

Tito, served time in Russian military camps.

to exploit the rivalry between Germany and Russia. Poles dreamed of war
between the powers that had partitioned their country over a century
before. Georgian nationalists sought German assistance in their drive for

orientation. Nation-states proliferated late in the war and at its conclusion but,
as Joshua Sanborn points out, not as ethnically homogeneous as proposed in
the slogan of national self-determination but as new multinational states.
One might go as far as to point out that national liberation ended up in the
formation of mini-empires disguised as nation-states. Certainly in postwar
Poland, with its inclusion of vast lands in which Ukrainians, Belorussians,
Germans, and Jews lived, making a Polish nation meant assimilation
of some, e.g., the Slavic peoples, and the exclusion of others, e.g., Jews and
Germans.
War and the undulations of the fronts meant the weakening of state power
in the peripheries of the empire. Precisely where the national composition of
the population was least like that of the central parts of the warring states,
there the imperial powers had the least dominion over their subjects. This was
most evident in the Polish lands and Right-Bank Ukraine, in Galicia, and in
eastern Anatolia. Once the revolution brought down the Romanov empire, the
South Caucasus, Finland, Ukraine, and the Baltic region rapidly slipped from
under central Russian authority.

refugee. Ethnicity could be advantageous in some instances, as when one

other times, for example, when a new occupying power appeared that saw
you as a disloyal foreign national. Eric Lohr proposes that a special, contingent
form of nationalism, which he calls war nationalism, sprung up in the fog

Jews from lands it had occupied and stood by while Cossacks and Poles looted
the stores and homes of Jews. Tens of thousands of Germans living in Russian

more intensely as Germans than as the Russian subjects they had been.
Such permissive violence and enforced discrimination only sharpened the
Russias western borderlands. The lands contested by rival empires had been
were fought over long before they became the Bloodlands that some have
argued were the result of particular dictatorial regimes.
INTRODUCTION 5
Looking at the Great War as an early phase of decolonization, as Joshua

Sanborn suggests, opens the question of how liberating was national self-
determination. Those who proclaimed that right, like Lenin, hoped that the
great imperial state would somehow hang together as the continent moved
from capitalism to socialism. War and revolution, however, led to new forms
of imperial power, and in the vast landscape of Central Asia a colonial coun-

forces that promoted subordination to the center. Tashkent Communists

broken between bandits and Reds, but ultimately Moscow considered the

expedience, opportunity, and physical force than by decisions made by nation-

the Russian Empire, in which they had lived for over a century. In the year of
revolution, 191718, when socialists dominated local politics, national activists
sought autonomy within a federal democratic state. But with the Bolshevik
victory in Petrograd and the collapse of the Russian economy, nationalists
made a desperate choice to unite with the Romanian state. Lithuanians were
torn between a Russian and a German orientation. Their principal enemy, the
Poles, dominated Vilnius and other cities and had ambitions to include the
traditional Lithuanian capital in their resurrected state. After losing Vilnius to
Poland in 1920, Lithuanian nationalism focused on recovering the treasured
city, even though its population was heavily Polish and Jewish. The Soviets
returned Vilnius to Lithuania in 1939, but at a high priceoccupation.
Ukraine, as Boris Chernev shows, secured its independence from Russia
by subordinating the new republic to the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk,

Ukraine, and German and Austrian soldiers guaranteed the countrys limited
sovereignty. Now that the nationalists had a Ukraine, they had to make more
complete Ukrainiansto promote the Ukrainian language and integrate the
Russian-speaking cities into the new Ukrainian state. Under the Ukrainian
parliament, the Rada, as well as under the Hetmanate and the Austrian-
sponsored Red Prince, Wilhelm von Habsburg, moderate programs of
Ukrainization were carried out, laying a foundation for later Soviet indigen-
ization policies. For Chernev the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was a positive step
in the history of Ukrainian state building. For Russian nationalists (and for

Bolshevik regime. The treaty is still seen as proof that European imperialism
has always been anxious to weaken Russia by stripping it of its borderlands.
Before and during the First World War Russian political analysts debated
the future contours of their multinational state. Ilya Gerasimov illustrates the
variations in Russian liberal thought around the question of how imperial
continuity might be reconciled with national self-determination. Liberal
intellectuals, most notably the leader of the Kadet Party, Pavel Miliukov,
generally supported the war aims of the Russian Empire. Miliukov advocated
expansion of the empire to include all of Poland and the eastern provinces

and Armenians under the scepter of the tsar. But he not only linked empire to
nation in his design but also favored Russian conquest of Constantinople and
the Straits as essential for the empires future. Other visions for maintaining
Russia as an empire came from Russians familiarity with British historical
writing on the British Empire. Former Social Democrat turned liberal Petr
Struve was enamored of the British model, as he understood it from his read-
ing of the historian John Robert Seeley. Maksim Kovalevskii, a principal leader
of the Progressive Bloc, also saw the British Empire (or at least a well-scrubbed
idealized version of that empire) as a model for Russia.
The imperialist visions of leading Kadets and Progressives contrasted
with that of the journalist Maksim Slavinskii, who advocated that Russia
develop a nationality policy that recognized the full cultural development of
the peoples within the empire while simultaneously promoting a universal
imperial citizenship for all subjects of the empire. Slavinskiis precocious

and a French-style civic citizenship without any acknowledgment of ethnic-
ity, on the other. The Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevskyi spoke of
Russia as an empire of nations (imperiia narodov) that in the future needed
to grant national-territorial autonomy to the various subject peoples. The

favor of nations as the political form of the future and condemning empires
to historys dustbin. Even with the fall of the tsarist empire and the Bolshevik
proclamation of national self-determination and federalism as the basis for
the Soviet state, Russian theorists continued to imagine forms of imperial

Glebov provides a guide through the thickets of Eurasian thought in the
postwar period. Disempowered migrs proposed a fundamental unity of

INTRODUCTION 7
War, one would think, is indelibly etched in peoples memories. But

Tomas Balkelis reveals that World War I has faded from Lithuanian national
Poland remain vivid. The Great War seems also have been erased from Rus-

constructing historical memory are hard at work in Putins Russia. Victors
in World War II, Russians are seen as victims of World War I and the Russo-

themes of victimhood, always popular means to mobilize a people against
another, to counter accusations that Russians have been perpetrators of
atrocities. To relativize the Polish narrative about the Katyn massacres during

term genocide, which too many journalists and scholars use promiscuously,
has been applied to the case of the POWs in Poland. While the Russian side
implied that Katyn was revenge for the deaths of Russian POWs in 1920, the

people under the Communists were detailed, in the Putin-Medvedev years
(from 2000) the brutalities of Stalinism were de-emphasized. Around 2010 the
Kremlin decided to reinvigorate commemoration of the Great War. By seeing
1914 as the more important point at which Russia stepped on the world stage,
1917 and all that could be pushed into a shallow memory hole. The Putin
government shifted from equating Russia and the USSR to a new narrative
sharply distinguishing the two. A return to the perspectives of the Yeltsin
decade, the light shines again on imperial Russia and leaves the 70 years of
Soviet Power in the dark.
It may be that Lenin will still have the last word. If Struve learned
about empire from J. R. Seeley, Lenin acknowledged that he learned about
imperialism, a newly coined word, from J. A. Hobson. Appalled by the ferocity
as well as the stupidity of the war, he tried desperately to understand it from
his Marxist perspective. The war was imperialistannexationist, predatory,
plunderous, a war for the redivision of the world, the partition and reparation

guinary engagement of empire and nations that brought down centuries-old

monarchies and established vulnerable successor states continues to defy

any longer, but the road to understanding, as this collection shows, requires
a renewed appreciation of the nature, ambitions, and limitations of empire.
The Entangled Eastern Front in the First World War
Mark von Hagen
histoire croise) as
a framework for considering the issues of nation and empire at the core of
the contributions to this volume. My examples mostly come from the zone
of interaction between the Russian, German, and Austrian Empires, but
analogous (and mutually related) developments occurred in the Caucasus,
in Turkestan, in southeastern Europe, and elsewhere. Although the Eastern
and Western Fronts were entangled in themselves, I highlight in this essay
features of the Eastern Front that distinguished it from the Western, both for
the contemporaries who experienced the war and for the outcomes of that

our colleagues, who, instead of entangled, might as readily use the terms
interconnected, intertwined, interrelated (and all those adjectives without the
inter
nections between nations, peoples, states, and within them. Finally, I suggest
that entangled histories can also embrace what I in earlier essays have called
the mobilization, internationalization, and militarization of ethnicity
during the war.1
War and Entangled Histories
The approach of entangled history, which overlaps with transnational and

international history but also can embrace subnational and regional histories,
has mostly been engaged with peacetime cultural and intellectual transfers,
borrowings, adaptations, and other interactions among and between states.2
1

Empire, in
and Jack L. Snyder (London: Routledge, 1998), 3457.
2

notably Michael Werner and Bndicte Zimmermann, Penser lhistoire croise:
Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales 58, 1 (2003): 736; in

10 MARK VON HAGEN
This essay considers some of the possibilities of adapting the entangled

histories approach to a major world war. A focus on war suggests starting
with militaries, but modern warfare had been evolving in the direction of

total war, which for him entailed the fusion of what had been understood
as separate civilian and military spheres in the wake of the industrial rev-
olution and the ways that revolution helped to transform modern warfare.

resources of a warring state, and the First World War came closer to realizing
that military utopia than humanity had ever known; it appears, importantly,
that his vision of total war was at least partly shaped by his own role as chief

regime for territory covering roughly todays Latvia, Lithuania, and parts of

and Hindenburg then adapted the model they felt had worked so well for the
occupation regime back to the German homefront.3 Fearing the overuse of

an entangling of the civilian and the military spheres, which had been kept
relatively more separate in the prior century. All the key developments of the
war proceeded in interaction with the enemy through copying and responding
to challenges. This included advances in military technology from poison gas
to tanks to aerial warfare and trenches, as well as the economic blockade and
propaganda.
Well before the outbreak of hostilities in the summer of 1914, the soon-
to-be-belligerent powers were entangled with one another in myriad ways.
Those entanglements helped shape the unfolding of the war and contributed
to its intensity and destructiveness. I shall focus on developments in imperial

man Empire, and Serbia, as the powers that grappled with each other along
History and Theory 45, 1 (February 2006): 3050. Entangled history has also seen im-
portant gestures from historians of Russia and Germany. See Andreas Kappeler,
(Vienna: Bhlau
Verlag, 2012); and Philipp Ther, The Transnational Paradigm of Historiography and
Its Potential for Ukrainian History, in A Laboratory of Transnational History: Ukraine
and Recent Ukrainian Historiography, ed. Georgiy Kasianov and Ther (Budapest: Cen-
tral European University Press, 2009), 81114; and Ther, Deutsche Geschichte als
transnationale Geschichte: berlegungen zu einer Histoire Croise Deutschlands
Comparativ 13, 4 (2003): 15661.
3
My War Memories, 19141918, 2 vols. (London: Hutchinson,
The Nation at War, trans. A. S. Rappaport (London: Hutchinson,
1936); Martin Kitchen, The Silent Dictatorship: The Politics of the German High Command
(New York: Croom Helm, 1976).

THE ENTANGLED EASTERN FRONT 11
what would become known as the Eastern Front.4 These polyethnic and multi-
confessional empires had become increasingly entangled with the ethnic and
religious minorities of their rival empires in the decades prior to the war; dur-
ing the war the severing of these entanglements often turned violent.5
Of course, these powers were also entangled in various ways with their
western allies and enemies, most notably, Britain, France, Italy, and eventually
the United States. Still, the intensity of relations among the powers of the

odization. Rather than 191418, for most of the societies on the Eastern Front the
state of war extended all the way to 1922/23. When the war in the eastwhich
turned in many places to civil wars fought by and between newly created
statesended, the pressures and constraints of the various entanglements
populations than was the case in the west.
Prewar Military and Diplomatic Entanglements
The four eastern empires, as well as most of the relatively newer nations of
the borderlands of those empires, were created in the process of dynastic
marriages and wars of conquest and annexation that left large national and
confessional minorities in various places in the complex ethno-confessional
demographic structures of these states. Moreover, the borders that these
wars and marriages created left ethnic and confessional communities split
among two and sometimes more empires. Jews, for example, lived primarily

Poles were shared among Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, Ukrainians

Hungary (where they were known as Ruthenians); Armenians were shared

lim peoples on the southern borders of Russia and the northern borders of the
6
4

British and French, and even the American, perspectives, we should remember that
from Petersburg and Moscow, the Eastern Front was, instead, the Southwestern and
Northwestern Fronts.
5
Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and
the Middle East, 19141923 (London: Routledge, 2001).
6

Essay, in Imperial Russian Foreign Policy, ed. Hugh Ragsdale (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), especially 32256.
12 MARK VON HAGEN

19th century by the Holy Alliance and the Concert of Europe, in which the
autocratic emperors sought to contain the threat of liberal and nationalist
revolutions in their colonial frontiers. During the springtime of nations in
Central Europe in 184849, Russian Emperor Nicholas I sent his army to save
the Austro-Hungarian army and the Habsburg dynasty when it crushed a
Hungarian uprising that was calling for revolution in Budapest. Later in the
same century, however, that alliance came unraveled after the Crimean War
and the Congress of Berlin that revised Russias gains during the Russo-

as unreliable allies and even threats to Russian power. The rise of Germany in

then France, but Russia too felt increasingly threatened by a rising Germany
and began to disentangle itself from the Central European monarchies and
signed a new agreement with France. Still, the Romanovs, like most of the

18th century, Catherine II was a German (from Schleswig-Holstein); later tsars
married German princesses, including the last tsarina, baptized Aleksandra,
but born as Alix of Hesse. Whereas obeying a foreign monarch on the throne
was more politically acceptable in the more cosmopolitan 18th century, by the

of treason in the tsarina, her favorites, and the Baltic Germans in the imperial
The prewar war aims of the future belligerents were in large measure
directed at rearranging imperial borders at the expense of their rivals. This
had long been one of the aspects of the Eastern Question, the dragging

derland peoples (Randvlker) longed for liberation from the Russian yoke and
might be expected to form a part of the of German economic and
political dominance that was clearly the preferred alternative and also, coin-
cidentally, part of the medieval Germanic inheritance.7 In this sense, Russia,
in German eyes, was another sick man of Europe waiting to be relieved
of its borderland peoples. But Austria-Hungary might also qualify as yet an-
other sick man awaiting some cataclysmic end; this was the view of many
Czech, Croat, and Hungarian nationalists in the late empire, the view of some
7
, Germanys Aims in the First World War (New York: Norton, 1967), 12226,
13254, and chap. 5.
Austrian Germans, and probably not far from the view of the Russian military
and diplomatic elites.
Although Russia had a treaty of alliance with France, the ties with the
German military remained strong. The Russian military reform of 1874 was
shaped by War Minister Dmitrii Miliutins admiration for the Prussian army,

when the rise of the new German Reich became more and more evident, it

primary enemy in case of the expected war.8 One example of the close though
troubled relationship was the special post of the military plenipotentiary
(Militrbevollmchtigte) to the tsarist court and an equivalent posting to the court
of Kaiser Wilhelm, who had revived this interimperial line of communication

to the Foreign Ministry nor even to the military hierarchy.9
relationship between the imperial highnesses might have averted the war in
1914, but disentanglement ultimately prevailed over entanglement in Russian-
German relations. Another example of the special relationship between the
two imperial cousins, Nicholas and Wilhelm, were their honorary commands
and those of their closest male relatives in the armies, and in particular in the
guards regiments, of the others army. The Russian grand duke and the sov-
ereign wore the uniforms of honorary colonels in German regiments. Kaiser
Wilhelm II was honorary colonel in the Vyborg Regiment. On the eve of the
war, the grand duke Nikolai Nikolaevich visited his cousins in Germany for
the regimental holiday of the imperial German unit in which he was enrolled
as commander. The grand duke participated in this show of German-Russian
dynastic bonds, even though he was a Francophile and despised his German
relatives.10 One further illustration of these Eastern Front entanglements is

luncheon at the Neues Palais in the German capital to honor the birthday of
8
(New York: Free
Press, 1992).
9

(London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 26264.
10
For Faith, Tsar, and Fatherland: The Life of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich
(DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, forthcoming).
14 MARK VON HAGEN
the Russian tsar.11 Militaries also engaged in joint exercises and thereby got to
know their counterparts personally, often forging bonds that would be crucial
once hostilities commenced.
Militaries typically prepare for future wars by seeking to know as much
about their potential rivals as possible and adapting their organizations to
those perceived threats. Each of the great powers had developed intelligence
services that employed hundreds of professionals who tried to penetrate
those areas of states policies that those states most wanted to keep secret
from their rivals.12 The German imperial elites global ambitions put them
primarily in rivalry with their British and French neighbors, but Austria-

was above all directed at Russia and Serbia.13 Russias war games simulated

the eve of war, two of the soon-to-be-rivals mounted trials against spies and

Austro-Hungarian army, shot himself after being charged with passing along
secret plans for wartime deployment to the Russians. A very public charge
of espionage that started in 1912 in Russia ended in the death by hanging of
a Russian colonel, Sergei Nikolaevich Miasoedov, early in the war (1915) on
14
In some sense, diplomats are by their professional training and mission
agents of entanglement, and the diplomatic corps of the four empires that
would soon face each other on the Eastern Front werenot surprisinglyvery
entangled before the outbreak of war. Much of their entanglement focused on
the Balkans, which had engaged foreign ministers, ambassadors, and a whole

War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914, trans. Marian Jackson
11
(New York: Norton, 1975), 402.

12
Knowing Ones Enemies: Intel-
ligence Assessment before the Two World Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1984), especially Norman Stones chapter on Austria-Hungary, 11536; Holger H.
Herwig, Imperial Germany, 6297; and William C. Fuller, Jr., The Russian Empire,
98126. On war plans, see Paul M. Kennedy, ed., The War Plans of the Great Powers,
18801914 (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1979).
13
Planning for War against Russia and Serbia: Austro-Hungarian
and German Military Strategies, 18971914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
14
The Foe Within: Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
a good illustration of entangled relationships, above all with Germany and

embassy to the Vatican. Austria-Hungarys foreign minister at the outbreak of
the war, Count Leopold Berchtold, was summoned back to Vienna to assume
his new post from St. Petersburg, where he had been ambassador since 1906
and had served in the embassy there since 1903. He replaced Alois Lexa von
Aehrenthal, who, similarly, had been ambassador to St. Petersburg in 1899
and was summoned back to Vienna from Russia.15
The Russian foreign minister in 1914 was Sergei Sazonov; he had been
summoned from Rome in 1910, where he served as chief of diplomatic mission
to the Vatican. His predecessor, Aleksandr Izvolskii, had served in the Vatican,
Belgrade, Munich, Tokyo, and Copenhagen before returning to St. Petersburg
in 1906.16 Although the careers of Germanys foreign ministers, known as state

future Eastern Front co-belligerents, there were some similar stories, nota-

1918, but his career is illustrative of several levels of entanglement. He rose

St. Petersburg, was appointed by Kaiser Wilhelm II to the restored position
of Fluegeladjutant, which gave him more direct access to Wilhelm and Nich-
olas II than either the Russian or German ambassadors had. The other
entangled biography among German state secretaries was that of Richard
von Khlmann, who served in 191718 and led the German delegation to the
negotiations in Brest in 1918. Khlmann had been born in Constantinople and
was serving as ambassador there when he was summoned back to Berlin.17 In
short, these biographies remind us that there were many people in decision-
the countries that would soon be their allies or enemies in the oncoming war.
Economic Entanglements

all made for a complex set of prewar border-crossings of goods, people, and
15
Aristocratic Redoubt:

University Press, 1999).
Russia and the Origins of the First World War (New York: St. Martins
16
Press, 1983).
The German Diplomatic Service, 18711914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
17

16 MARK VON HAGEN
technologies. Businesses, too, had their own intelligence services that

also employed thousands of workers in foreign cities and regions who gath-

home companies to help make business decisions about investments. Labor
eastern empires westward. In addition, nearly all the empires experienced

migration of labor from poorer colonial borderlands to urban centers that
contributed to the ethnic and confessional diversity of the major cities in the
borderland regions. In Germany, immediately after the outbreak of war, the
Prussian War Ministry forbade all foreign seasonal farm workers and those
working in German industry from returning home. These foreign workers
were largely Russian and Austrian Poles and fewer Austrian Ruthenians, who
had been migrating to Germany for the last half century. On the eve of the
war, Germany depended on roughly 1.2 million foreign workers, with half a
million in agriculture and 700,000 in industry. Congress Poland was the main
source of such labor, but, with the outbreak of war, was now enemy territory.

labor migration were partially restored; by September 1917 nearly 600,000 for-
eign Polish workers were once again helping to keep the German economy
running, though a new labor force was discovered in prisoners of war, the over-
whelming majority of whom also came from the Russian Empire.18 Similarly,
Austria-Hungary and Russia made use of large populations of foreigners or
outsiders in their labor-short economies, above all prisoners of war and
refugees. In the three imperial capitals, Berlin, Vienna, and Petrograd, these
agricultural labor shortages led to food shortages which became a major factor
in the discrediting of the regimes authority and quickly led to the overthrow
of the monarchies and the liberal regimes that followed.19
18

Poland and Austria-Hungary, see Ulrich Herbert, A History of Foreign Labor in Germany,
18801980: Seasonal Workers, Forced Laborers, Guest Workers, trans. William Templer (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 985; for the armys ban on return, 87. See
also Klaus J. Bade, Vom Auswanderungsland zum Arbeitseinfuhrland: Kontinentale
Zuwanderung und auslnderbeschftigung in Deutschland im spten 19. und frhen
20. Jahrhundert, in

Scripta Mercaturae Verlag, 1984), 2: 45862.
19

The First World War: Germany and

Austria-Hungary, 19141918 (London: Arnold, 1997), 27296; on Berlin, see Belinda J.
Davis,
(Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); on Vienna, see Maureen Healy, Vienna
and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge:
Russias economy on the eve of the war was very tied to the world economy
through extensive foreign trade and investment. In the last two decades of the
old regime, foreign investment made up nearly half of all new capital forma-
tion, and in 1914 foreigners held at least 40 percent of the total nominal capital
of corporations operating in Russia. German capital accounted for 20 percent
with 80.5 million rubles capital were founded under German law and owned
entirely by German subjects. In addition to the foreign investment, Russian

management and administrative positions.20 Already before the war, Russian
merchants and industrialists had begun to complain about the competition
they faced in the foreign involvement in the Russian economy. Beyond the
impressive role of German and Austrian capital in Russia, trade with Germany
made up nearly half of its total foreign trade.
A large part of Russias exports went to their markets through the Black

Russias access to markets was shut down and contributed to calls for the Rus-
sian capture and reconquest of Constantinople as a war aim of not only the

Government that assumed power after the abdication of the tsar in 1917.
Cultural, Religious, and Ideological Entanglements
international scholarly societies and their journals and other media outlets.

but many subjects of the Russian Empire had deep admiration for German
culture and scholarship. That admiration turned to indignation and outrage

World of Culture on 4 October 1914, in which they defended Germanys just
cause in the desperate struggle for existence which has been forced upon the
nation.21
Cambridge University Press, 2004); for Petrograd, see Lars T. Lih,

in Russia, 19141921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Barbara A.
Engel, Not by Bread Alone: Subsistence Riots in Russia during World War I, Journal
of Modern History 69, 4 (1997): 696721.
Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during
20
World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 56.

21
Der Aufruf
An die Kulturwelt! Das Manifest der 93 und die Anfnge der Kriegspropaganda im Ersten
18 MARK VON HAGEN
War and peace were not always at the center of intellectual collaborations.
Germany is thought to have led Europe in its cultivation of militarism,22 with

gary, Serbia, Turkey, and even France were not immune and can be considered
to have nurtured militarist cultures to one degree or another. Paramilitary
youth organizations, on the model of the Boy Scouts or the widely popular
falcon (sokol) movements in Central and Eastern Europe, combined national-
ism, social Darwinism, and other ideas to shape ideals of masculine virtue for
war and empire.
Another type of movement that transcended national borders and was
often seen as a threat to the military and political leadership was a series of
pan-movements, the most important of which were pan-Germanism, pan-
Slavism, and pan-Turkism. Zionism, which had its origins in our entangled
lands, also appealed to Jews across imperial borders and worldwide to address
the question of Jewish minorities and their treatment in the absence of a Jewish
homeland. At another level, however, nearly every new state in Europe, most
of them in the east and southeast, nurtured variants of these larger pan-
movements that expressed dissatisfaction with current international borders
and advocated often irredentist or annexationist politics. The model here was

But such ambitions were clear in Serbia for a greater Serbia, and in Greece,
which felt itself still thwarted in its potential for national greatness, as did
Bulgaria, Romania, and other greater movements.23 These were variants of
nationalism discontented with the current international arrangement of states
and populations.24
In contrast, the peace movement had strong advocates not only among the
major churches, but also among liberal and socialist parties and the emerging
Weltkrieg
Wissenschaft und Militarismus: Der Aufruf der 93 An die Kulturwelt und der
Zusammenbruch der internationalen Gelehrtenrepublik im Ersten Weltkrieg, in
ed. William M. Calder II, Helmut Flasha, and Theodor
Lindken (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985), 649719.
22

politics, see Volker Berghahn,

1979 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1982).
23

1920

Wars, 19121913: Prelude to the First World War (London: Routledge, 2000).
24
Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires.
womens movement.25 Political movements also created international networks

that convened regular congresses to address problems of the working class,
revolution, or imperialism as the source of war.26 Even antiwar and socialist
movements, however, helped shape images of enemies and friends; for exam-

an oppressive autocratic empire, and a major obstacle to European progress.
When war was declared in July 1914, the German Social-Democrats, as did
their counterparts in Vienna, rallied quickly to a defensive war against Rus-
sian aggression.27
If we turn to entanglements in the worlds of religion, the Vatican was an
example of an international organization that also maintained ties to its repre-
with large Catholic populations, including the large minorities in Germany

and Russia, but also the Greek Catholic congregations in Eastern Europe and

rule. The Habsburg emperor continued to insist on his role as protector of
these Christians (and Vienna maintained close ties with the Vatican), as did
the Orthodox Russian tsar in regard to Orthodox Christians. The sultan in
Istanbul, in his role as caliph of the Islamic world, also claimed his role as pro-
tector of Muslim minorities wherever they resided.28

empires were also intertwined with more determined ecumenical projects
of reuniting the Eastern and Western Christian churches under the pope or

25
The History of Peace: A Short Account of the Organised Movements
for International Peace (London, 1931); and Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and a
World without War: The Peace Movement and German Society, 18921914 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1995).
26
International Socialism and the World War (New York: Anchor Books,
1969); Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); and James Joll, The Second International, 18991914
(New York: Harper & Row, 1966).
27
Die Nation

Weltkrieg
28

Wessel, Religion, Politics and the Limits of Imperial IntegrationComparing the

Azmi Ozcan, Imperial Legitimacy and UnityThe Tradition of the Caliphate in the
Comparing Empires: Encounters and Transfers in the
Long Nineteenth Century

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012).
20 MARK VON HAGEN
also developed large followings during these years; one local example of
importance is that of the Greek Catholic metropolitan of Lemberg,29 Andriy
Sheptitskyi, who sought to end the centuries-long division between Rome

Catholicizing Russians. Sheptitskyi, a Polish-Ukrainian nobleman who had a
seat in the Viennese parliament and was a leader of the Ukrainian (Ruthenian)
movement in Austria-Hungary, saw his Greek Catholic Church, itself a hybrid
institution between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, as the natural instrument

his project.
imperial elites is their
treatment of what was emerging as a Ukrainian national movement. The
Austrian authorities in Galicia were much more accommodating to their
Ukrainians, or Ruthenians, than were the Russians; Ruthenians had their own
political parties, but could also vote and run for election in non-Ruthenian
parties at the provincial sejm level and in Vienna at the Reichsrat.30 On their
side, the Russians sought to highlight the injustices done to those Galician
or Carpathian Russians, as the Russians insisted on calling the Ruthenians;
these Ruthenians were at their core part of the tribes of ancient Rus that had
been lost to Polish Catholic and later Austro-Hungarian Catholic conversion
from their true and original Orthodox faith and from the Great Russian
language by the polonization of their culture. These people, again from the
point of view of Russian nationalists, were by no means Ukrainians, but
long-lost Russians who were eagerly awaiting liberation from the yoke of

the Russian side of the border, the Ukrainian language had been banned in
the second half of the 19th century, a ban that was lifted as part of the 1905

language was seen as a dialect of Russian, the region was referred to as the
southwestern provinces, and the only Ukrainians who were recognized were

Russian family and not seeking independence, or even autonomy.
29

referred to the city as Lemberg, the Russian occupying forces redubbed it Lvov; the
Polish national armies restored an earlier Lww, and the Ukrainian republic in 1918
translated it to Lviv.
30
Essays in
Modern Ukrainian History, ed. Peter L. Rudnytsky (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of
Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, 1987), 31552.
In southeastern Europe, the Kingdom of Serbia schemed to realize Serbian

nationalists vision of a Greater Serbia and sought the liberation of their
fellow Serbs and other southern Slavs, notably Croats and Slovenians, from
Habsburg rule. Croatian nationalist activists in the Austro-Hungarian empire

their politics were shaped by Austro-Hungarian ideas and practices. The
Serbian army had a spy network that was linked to terrorists in lands claimed
as part of Greater Serbia. One of those connections, Gavrilo Prinkipo, was in
turn tied to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June
1914.31

sought to rearrange the ethno-demographic borders of their empire by trying
to Turkicize Armenians, Kurds, and Greeks among others.32
Wartime: Coerced Disentanglements, New Entanglements

paigns, and combat, historians often overlook a large part of the experience
of war that involves much more long-term entangling and disentangling than
do moving armies. In a provocative essay on wartime Russia, Joshua Sanborn
urges us to analyze soldiers and civilians on the same plane and proposes
to do so in the social and temporal space of violent migrations. Sanborn
soldiers into an army that reached a total by the end of the war of nearly 15
million men. Sanborn refers to these soldiers as migrants (and acknowledges
that they have rarely been treated as such by historians or sociologists).
Sanborns concept of violent migrations also encompasses occupation
regimes, refugees, and prisoners of war.33 He asserts that these violent mi-

and emboldening the state that helped direct and manage them. Finally, he
argues that the violent migrations of the Great War laid the preconditions for
civil war by producing a toxic combination of a desocialized population and
an ambitious political and military elite.34
31
The Road to Sarajevo (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966).

32
Russian Empires, 19081918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

33
Russia during World War I, Journal of Modern History 77, 3 (June 2005): 294.
34

22 MARK VON HAGEN
Sanborns argument could be made for the other belligerent powers as

well. I label Sanborns violent migrations as forced disentanglements.
Aviel Roshwald highlights an array of wartime spheres of nationalist experi-
mentation and improvisation in military occupation zones in the politics
of exile and in the formation of volunteer legions. These were initially not
the nationalities problems within the imperial polities. But as the imperial
35
The version of entangled histories that I outline here allows us to revisit the
experiences of those who lived through these experiments in comparative
empires, whether as POWs, refugees, exiles, or occupied subjects.
Occupations as Forced Entanglement
Occupations are the mostly unplanned consequences of military operations,

though occasionally they are part of prewar or wartime war aims and the
subject of negotiations to bring an end to war. Occupations on the Eastern
Front were far more expansive geographically and longer in duration than the
German occupations of Belgium and parts of France on the Western Front.36
The German and Austro-Hungarian occupations of large parts of the Russian
Empire and Serbia and the corresponding occupations of parts of Austria-

allies also created the conditions for years of wartime entanglement between
Vejas Liulevicius argues that the experience of German troops and civilian

part of the postwar generation toward the Slavic and Jewish East.37 Ober
Ost was the largest compact area of German occupation; it included parts
of todays Lithuania, Belarus, and territory contested at one time or another
35
Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires, 116.
36
The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914
1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 9. Gumz reminds us that by
1918, the Habsburg Empire had come to occupy nearly 400,000 square kilometers of
territory containing 20 million people.
War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and
37
German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Ober
Ost took its name from the title of the Supreme Commander in the East, Oberbefehls-
haber Ost.
by Poland and Ukraine.38 The German occupation regime was particularly

exploitative of the regions economic resources, above all agriculture and for-
estry. Labor shortages, in part due to the Russian armys forced evacuation
and scorched-earth policies, led to labor conscription for local citizens;
Germans also began using POWs and refugees on military farms and in new
industries that the Germans started. Above all, the military utopia of total war
activity. Verkehrspolitik, a system regulating movement and communication,

stressed documentation; every native over the age of ten was to be issued per-
Of course, it was over a population of Lithuanians, Poles, Belarusians,

Jews, and Baltic Germans that Ober Ost ruled. And it is here that German poli-
cies, in the name of integrating the region into the German political-cultural
realm also institutionalized ethnic identity in Ober Ost to an unprecedented
degree.39 To the East the occupiers brought the 19th-century understanding
of German work and Kulturarbeit, culture work. Non-German nationalities
were encouraged to publish their own newspapers in their native languages.

especially at the primary level. Like most other areas of life, education too
was devastated by the Russian evacuation; whole schools evacuated out of
the invasion zone. Russian teachers especially were suddenly absent, opening
spaces for enterprising native cultural activists who had long wanted to in-
troduce schools in their indigenous languages. The Germans portrayed them-
selves once again as great benefactors and as restoring Kultur to a land bereft
of it thanks to Russian barbarism.
The German administration thereby entered into a very risky area of
ethnic competition. This was donevery consciouslypartly to counter the
former Russian practice of banning or limiting publication and education
in the local minority languages. But it also inadvertently gave rise to ethnic
autonomy. In the end, Liulevicius concludes that the administration was too
small to achieve these ambitious goals. But the German experiment in sup-
porting the nationalist movements in these regions of the Russian Empire
went much further than did the policies of their Austro-Hungarian allies, who,
38

see two excellent recent surveys: Theodore Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial
(DeKalb: Nor-
thern Illinois University Press, 1996); and M. D. Dolbilov and A. I. Miller, eds., Zapadnye
okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006).
War Land on the Eastern Front, 118.
39
24 MARK VON HAGEN
as Gumz argues, wanted to preserve the Habsburg Empire, not revolutionize

their enemies.40
Similar to Liuleviciuss assertion that the Easterners sought to create the
ideal militarized state in Ober Ost that they could never achieve on the home

Habsburg army in Serbia tried to recreate or resurrect, in Gumzs words,
the Empire that it wanted, but at home it could not.41 Indeed, Gumz sees
the occupation as sharpening the contrast between home front and occupied

occupation was the armys protecting Serbia from civilian bureaucrats who
wanted to plunder it to feed the starving home front. Austria-Hungary was

was doing against Russia. Indeed, Gumz contrasts Germany with Austria-
Hungary, which remained hesitant about a fundamental reordering of inter-
national relations in Europe.42
Ultimately, Gumz argues, the Habsburg army was still a largely premodern
and anational institution that, for its own reasons, was also doomed to failure
against the modern forces of nationalism, including German nationalism.
Moreover, the ferocity with which the army went about denationalizing Serbia

moved backward into a bureaucratic-absolutism rooted in the Habsburg
past.43 The army felt it had to wage a war of counterrevolution inside and
outside the Empires borders.44 What this denationalizing involved was
based on an understanding that the Serbian people had been misled by their
radical nationalist political elites; those elites were to be arrested and removed
from society in internment camps; thereby their national politics was to be
eradicated in the name of Habsburg centralization.45
40
Resurrection and Collapse, 36, 3443.

41
42

43

44

45

(New York: Oxford

Russian, German, and Austrian Occupations of Galicia and Ukraine

Durnovo, warned the tsar in a famous memorandum in February 1914 that
the annexation of Galicia would be obviously disadvantageous to us. For
together with a negligible handful of Galicians, Russian in spirit, how
many Poles, Jews, and ukrainized Uniates we would receive! The so-called
Ukrainian, or Mazeppist movement is not a menace to us at present; but in
this movement there undoubtedly lies the seed of an extremely dangerous

quite unexpected proportions.46 One way of reading his advice was to avoid
entanglements in the ethnic minority relations of the Habsburg lands, but his
advice fell on deaf ears when, a few months later, the tsar and grand duke
announced a key war aim to be the emancipation of peoples from foreign
yokes.47

Austria-Hungary. The Ukrainian national movement there was understood

true Ukrainians were those Galician Russophiles who saw their future in
annexation.

lished international law. Austrian courts were allowed to continue working
to enforce Austrian laws, but now in the name of the Russian emperor, in-

out of the Russian treasury. However, this approach did not last long. Nikolai

after all, he noted, prominent Jews, Germans, and Hungarians among these
46
Documents of Russian History, 19141917 (New York: The Century
Company, 1927), 323. Most of this section is adapted from my book, War in a European

University of Washington Press, 2007); see also the more comprehensive study of
Russian policy in occupied lands in two books by A. Iu. Bakhturina, Politika Rossiiskoi
Imperii v Vostochnoi Galitsii v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 2000); and
her Okrainy Rossiiskoi Imperii: Gosudarstvennoe upravlenie i natsionalnaia politika v gody
Pervoi mirovoi voiny (19141917 gg.) (Moscow: , 2004).
47
Documents of Russian History, 1. The commander of the Southwestern Front,

are entering Galicia, which, despite its being a constituent part of Austria-Hungary,
is a Russian land, populated, after all, by Russian people. Brusilovs order is cited in
M. K. Lemke, 250 dnei v tsarskoi Stavke: Vospominaniia, memuary (Minsk: Kharvest,
2003), 199.
26 MARK VON HAGEN
noted that Austrian courts conducted their business in the local languages
of the nationalities, something that departed from Russian practice. When
Ianushkevich insisted that only Russian be used in the courts, Justice Minister
Ivan Shcheglovitov reminded Ianushkevich that most of his proposals would
seriously violate international law; but in the end Ianushkevich got most of what
he wanted. The introduction of the Russian language predictably produced
confusion for the Polish judges, lawyers, and others who dominated the legal
profession. Ianushkevich and other generals were empowered to impose
their occupation policies by the law of 16 July 1914 on military zones. This
law, which set the outlines of martial law, decreed the supremacy of military
commanders over civilian authorities not only in the zones of occupation but
in vast swaths of territory behind the front lines, and including the capitals in
Moscow and Petrograd.48

and thereby confronted the ruling Russian authorities with a dilemma,

help from the civilian bureaucracy of neighboring Russian provinces in the
southwest. The principle that the Russian authorities proclaimed from the

Carpathians to Kamchatka. These were the principles of the Russian nation-
alist parties in late imperial Russia; those parties, including the Nationalist
Party, the Octobrists, and the Union of Russian People, were strongest in the

sians.49

real experience of these ostensibly long-lost lands of Rus for these Russian
nationalists-imperialists. In the occupation regime, then, is another blurring
of imperial boundaries, when the national imperialism of right-bank Ukraine

Ianushkevich, a notorious anti-Semite and Russian nationalist, despite his
ancient Polish lineage; Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich (as commander in

48
Jahrbcher fr Geschichte Osteuropas, N.F., 22, 3 (1974): 390411.

Gentry Politics on the Eve of the Russian Revolution: The Nationalist
49
Party, 19071917 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980).

ern Front, most notably General Brusilov. Also important were Foreign
Minister Sazonov and other ministers in Petrograd, notably Justice Minister
Shcheglovitov and Agriculture Minister Krivoshein; but, like the Habsburg
occupation of Serbia and the German occupation of Ober Ost, so too the Russian
army operated with few civilian limitations; indeed, this occupation regime
might well be seen as the original dual authority that was the context of
imperial government wartime dysfunction. The occupation governor-general,
Count Georgii Bobrinskii, set as his aim the integration of the newly occupied
territories into the Russian state, a policy that was already in violation of

fate of occupied territories and populations. Bobrinskiis occupation regime

and observe Austrian law.50
Spymania was a pervasive feature of the occupation regimes and spread
backward from the front to the interior of Russia. The military authorities
introduced a security regime that was intended to control the movement of
people, goods, and ideas in and out of the military zones with a system of
passessimilar to the Verkehrspolitik of Ober Ost. They claimed broad au-
thority over censorship and detention of suspected spies and other politically
unreliable persons. An extensive system of surveillance was set up to keep
track of large groups of less unreliable persons. The most obvious targets
were Germans and those who might be perceived as harboring sympathies
toward the German and Austrian cause. Soon, the suspicion of German and
Austrian citizens in Russia spread to Russian subjects of German origin, a
dangerous development that cast into doubt the loyalties of not only high-
Aleksandra, a German princess before she married Nicholas II.51 The important

in the Russian high command is a vivid illustration of the transformation of
the prewar dynastic ties into seeking out inner enemies, but also how gen-

enemies.
Jews were another target group in the search for politically unreliable
persons. Galician Jews enjoyed legal equality in the Habsburg empire, so it
was assumed, not without reason, that they would be hostile to Russian rule,
50

See his Otchet vremennogo voennogo general-gubernatora Galitsii po upravleniiu
kraem za vremia s 1-go/IX. 1914 g. po 1-go/VII. 1915 g., Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi
voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv (RGVIA) f. 2003, op. 2, d. 539, ll. 126.
51
Nationalizing the Russian Empire, chaps. 23.
28 MARK VON HAGEN
under which Jews still lacked many rights. Many Galician Jews had indeed

here translated as Ukrainian peasants.52 On the pretext of a threat of wide-
spread espionage on the part of largely Jewish merchants and suppliers to
the military, the commander of the Southwestern Front banned the entry
of any more Jews into the war zone and also banned their movement from

units, especially forts, refusing to accept Jewish soldiers sent as replacements.
Linked to spymania, these open expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment in the
frontline zone and occupation spread back to the rear and the capitals. And

so too Russian Jews were treated similarly to Austrian Jews in Galicia and
later Bukovina.
Other important population groups, primarily Slavic peoples, presented
more complex challenges for the occupation authorities. Because of the grand
dukes proclamation of the possibility of a united Poland under Russian
protection following the victorious outcome of war, the Ministry of Foreign

the civilian population of Galicia, as well as the POWs, many of whom were
Slavs.53 However, the Russian military suspected Poles of espionage and de-
ported thousands of Polish priests and members of Polish political parties out
of the rear zones of the Southwestern Front,
The Galician Ukrainians, or, in the eyes of the Russians, Galician Rus-
sians who had been torn away by decades of pernicious Austrian and Polish
campaigns from their allegedly historic faith and language, were central to

language newspaper, Karpatskaia Rus (Carpathian Rus), that had been closed
by the Austrians. Russian reports indicated that up to 40,000 Ruthenians had
been arrested by the Austrians at the very start of the war for their political
leanings. Moreover, the internment of some 30,000 Ruthenians, or Ukrainians,

cesses of the Russian government. The guards, mostly Hungarian, mistook
52

see the memoirs of S. An-skii, The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey through the Jewish Pale
, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Metropolitan
Books, 2002).
53
Russian Diplomacy and Eastern Europe
19141917, ed. Dallin et al. (New York: Kings Crown Press, 1963), 177.

atrocities against the interned civilians.54
Russophile activists now had the imperial might of the Russian occupation
behind them to begin to enact their vision of the national-imperial order in
Galicia and Bukovyna. General Brusilov assigned Vladimir Bobrinskii, a
cousin of the governor-general of occupied Galicia and leader of the pan-Slav
movement,55 to free all those political prisoners in Austrian jails who had

by the Russian authorities to help monitor Galician organizations for any
separatist proclivities; military censors were also ordered to keep track of
separatist views. This referred above all to the politics of the Greek Catholic,
or Uniate, Church and the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (ULU), a group
of expatriate Ukrainian activists from Russia and their Galician Ukrainophile
allies in Lemberg; on the eve of the war, the Union proclaimed that, in the
event of war, they would cast their lots with the Central Powers in the aim of
liberating Ukraine from Russian despotism. With the outbreak of war, the

in Vienna, from where it waged a propaganda campaign for the Ukrainian
cause in the capitals of the Central Power belligerents as well as in the neutral
states of Europe.56 The entire Ukrainian movement in both Russia and Galicia

traitors.
Repressive measures against the Greek Catholic Church and coerced
conversions to Orthodoxy eventually turned many Galician Russophiles
and potentially neutral Galician peasants against the Russian occupation. In

side, and Moscow and Russian Orthodoxy, on the other, but also involved
54

Talerfgofskii Almanakh: Promaiatnaia kniga avstriiskikh zhestokostei,
izuverstv i nasilii nad karpato-ruskim narodom vo vremia vsemirnoi voiny 19141917 gg.
(Lvov: Izdanie Talergofskogo komiteta, 192434); and Voennye prestupleniia Gabsburg-
skoi monarkhii, 19141917 gg.: Galitskaia Golgofa, bk. 1 (Trumbull, CT: P. S. Hardy, 1964).
55
, ed. T. Manuchina
(Paris: YMCA Press, 1947), 253.
56

thesis, Carleton University, 1993). For the ULUs own report of its propaganda and
subversive activities, see Bericht ber die organisatorische, literarisch-informative
[
SeptemberDezember 1914, Zusammenstellung der Kosten, 16 December 1914, in

, ed.
Theophil Hornykiewicz (Philadelphia: Ferdinand Berger Printing House, 1966), 1:
17089.
30 MARK VON HAGEN
a third important actor: the Polish Catholic Church. The Polish Catholic
hierarchy resisted the autonomy of the Greek Catholics, which they saw as
part of a de-Polonizing measure emanating from late imperial Russia; the
Polish Catholics also fought against the perceived threat of Orthodoxy. The
Austrian authorities had supported the Ukrainophile movement in Galicia
and Bukovyna to counter both the rise of the Polish nationalist movement
and the Old Ruthenian Moscophiles with their supporters in Russia, led by
Vladimir Bobrinskii. Tsar Nicholas II appointed Russian archbishop Evlogii
to supervise the Orthodox population of Galicia. Evlogii had long taken
an interest in the Ukrainian separatists and was a particularly virulent
opponent of the Greek Catholic or Uniate church.57
On the other side was the metropolitan of Galicia and archbishop of
Lemberg, Andriy Sheptitskyi, a leading advocate of the Austrian solution
for Ukraine, who saw the war as a chance to return Russia to its true
Catholic faith. On the outbreak of war, Sheptitskyi delivered a sermon to
the faithful of Galicia in which he declared that Our Emperor is waging
war against the Muscovite tsar. This war is being fought over us, because
the Muscovite tsar cannot bear the fact that we in the Austrian Empire are
free regarding questions of nationality or faith; he wants to deprive us of this
freedom and place us in chains. The Galician governor ordered copies of
the sermon to be posted throughout the province. As Vienna began making
plans to evacuate Galicia, Minister-President Strgkh ordered the army high
command to persuade the clergy to depart with the army, especially Count
Sheptitskyi, because he above all faces a personal threat from the Russian

martyrdom or persecution.58
Just before the Russian armies arrived in Lemberg, Sheptitskyi had a
meeting with a high-ranking representative of the Austrian Foreign Ministry
in which they discussed possible occupation plans. Sheptitskyi drafted a
memorandum to the emperor with plans for the military, social-legal, and
religious aspects of an autonomous Ukraine, with Russian Ukraine annexed
to Austrian Galicia, under the Austrian emperor.59 This document was in-

promised to deliver Sheptitskyi dead or alive to the Ministry of Interior. For
57
Put moei
zhizni.
58
Ereignisse in der Ukraine, 2: 42426.
59

rechtlicher und kirchlicher Hinsicht mit dem Ziel ihrer Loslsung von Russland, in
much of the Russian military and political elite, Sheptitskyi was the lynchpin
of a vast axis of evil that went from the Vatican in Rome, through the emperor
in Vienna to Sheptitskyi in Lemberg/Lvov. General Brusilov accordingly
arrested the metropolitan, together with his entourage, and incarcerated
them in the Russian interior in a penal monastery that held heretics and
schismatics. As soon as military sources learned of Sheptitskyis arrest, the
Austro-Hungarian foreign minister began soliciting the Holy See to intercede
with the Russian authorities to secure the metropolitans release. The Vati-
can went so far as to propose exchanging for the metropolitan a Russian
Orthodox priest who had been found guilty of high treason before the war.

Government released Sheptitskyi and arranged for his evacuation to Sweden,
from where he eventually made his way back to Lviv.60 For Sheptitskyi and
the bishops who were arrested and deported together with him, their prewar
entanglements had become the source of their harsh treatment as enemies of
both the Russian state and the Orthodox hierarchy.
Evlogiii took the elimination of his main rival in Galicia as a signal to
take a much harder line on conversions, thereby adding an intense religious

Russian forces in the summer of 1915 out of fear that they would be persecuted
by the reoccupying Austrian forces or their fellow parishioners.
The German and Austrian Occupation in Ukraine/Galicia
In an ironic restatement of the Russian armys slogans of the summer of 1914,

the German chancellor proclaimed to the Reichstag that we, with our allies,
have liberated almost all Galicia and Poland, we have liberated Lithuania
and Courland from the Russians. After pushing out the Russian army and
thousands of refugees, the Germans and Austrians set up two separate occu-
pation administrations, the German one headquartered in Warsaw and the
Austrian one in Lublin, each occupation regime navigating among its own

some future for Ukrainians/Ruthenians.61 The Austrian ambassador in Berlin
favored a proposal to create a separate crownland made up of East Galicia
60
61

ungarischen Ruthenenpolitik 19141918, Jahrbcher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, N.F., 14
(1966): 53950; Oleh S. Fedyshyn, Germanys Drive to the East and the Ukrainian Revolution
in World War I (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970).
32 MARK VON HAGEN
and Bukovyna that met favor with some Ukrainians. The Austrian Foreign
Minister, however, blocked these plans out of fear of antagonizing the Polish
elites. The Germans were willing to accept an Austrian Poland as long as the
Germans were recognized as the real master of the independent state. The

than the Austrians for their ambitions of statehood. Thus, the Austrians and
Germans were drawn into the nation-building politics of both the Ukrainians
and the Poles.62

borderland peoples from the Russian Empire, were eager to support Ukrainian

German support for the League of Russias Foreign Peoples, which brought
together representatives from Russias Jews, Muslims, Georgians, Poles, Baltic
Germans, Finns, and Ukrainians.63
Although the Germans were deeply involved in occupation policymaking,
they left the 191516 occupation of Ukrainian lands largely in Austrian
hands (in sharp contrast to their domination of the later German-Austrian
occupation of 1918). The new Austrian governor general, Major General
Erich Freiherr von Diller, declared that the Ukrainian language would be

the Ukrainian language. Union for the Liberation of Ukraine activists also
appealed to the Austrians to uphold the international Hague conventions
(in contrast to the recent Russian occupation policy) and to defend religious
freedom and tolerance. They asked for the restoration of the Greek Catholic
Churchwhich the Austrian authorities agreed tothough this proved dif-

parishes under Russian pressure or with Russian encouragement. The Aus-
trian high command ordered the reintroduction of Ukrainian language in
Ukrainian schools. This led to a wave of private school openings with teachers
62

Ukraine 1918: Historischer Kontext. Forschungsstand, wirtschaftliche und soziale Fragen

2008); and Dornik et al., Die Ukraine zwischen Selbstbestimmung und Fremdherrschaft
19171922 (Graz: Leykam, 2011).

63
Deutschlands antirussischem Propagandakrieg unter den fremdvlkern Russlands im ersten

Weltkrieg (Helsinki: Finnische Historische Gesellschaft, 1978). The German Foreign
Ministry assigned a Baltic German, Baron Bernhard von Uexkuell, to organize the
League.
returning to Galicia and Bukovyna from evacuation. The most important goal
of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, a German-Austrian declaration of
support for Ukrainian statehood along the lines of what they had proclaimed
for Poland, was doomed to disappointment. No such proclamation was issued
before the next Russian invasion.

the entanglements also changed over time with the serial deportations, ar-

example, the removal of the entire upper hierarchy of the Greek Catholic

of Poles and other Ukrainians who found themselves on the wrong side with
the new authorities. The arrest of Metropolitan Sheptitskyi helped move the
new pope, Benedict XV, to intercede with the Russian authorities to release
their distinguished prisoner (in vain) but also later to step up the Vaticans
own wartime ambitions of winning back the schismatic churches in the
East. In 1916 he instituted a prayer for such a reunion, and in May 1917 es-
tablished a new organ, the Sacred Congregation of the Oriental Church,
whose jurisdiction included all uniate churches but also the schismatic
or Orthodox churches as well. For the Vatican, a Russian victory portended
the Russian conquest of Constantinople, which they viewed as a dangerous
prospect for the emergence of a Vatican on the Bosphorus, and they found
their interests more than ever closely tied to those of the last Catholic emperor
in Vienna.64

the former Russian viceroy of occupied Galicia, Georgii Bobrinskii, and also
a rethinking of occupation policy in the Foreign Ministry, where a Vatican-
Slavic Department (quickly renamed the Special Political Department) had
been established in 1916.65
acknowledge Ukrainian national spokesmen (and even brought a grudging use
of the work Ukrainian in a reply from the court to a Ukrainian nobleman in

64

The Eastern
Politics of the Vatican (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981).
65
Imperiia
Romanovykh i natsionalizm: Esse po metodologii istoricheskogo issledovaniia (Moscow:
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006), 17389.
34 MARK VON HAGEN

government language, the governor general could also permit the use of
local languages if recognized as necessary.66
This second occupation also overlapped with the outbreak of revolution
in Petrograd. The Provisional Government took the unprecedented act of
appointing an ethnic Ukrainian and spokesman for the Ukrainian move-
ment, Dmytro Doroshenko, as regional commissar for occupied Galicia and
Bukovyna. These new concessions toward the Ukrainian movement did
not, however, guarantee smooth relations with the emerging counter-power
in Kyiv, the Ukrainian Central Rada. But it was the liberals and moderate
socialists in the Provisional Government who also reluctantly approved the
Ukrainianization of the Russian armya dramatic step away from the Old
Regime practices of the autocracy.67
The next German-Austrian occupation came in March 1918 as part of
the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk between the Central Powers and the
Ukrainian delegation from the Rada government, the Ukrainian Peoples Re-
public. For Germany, and especially Austria-Hungary, the Brest Treaty was a
bread peace (), dictated by worsening hunger in Vienna and other
Central European cities. Even the Habsburg occupation involved ruthless
exploitation of the peasants to deliver grain to the front. But the treaty also
brought a dramatic new change in Ukrainian politics with the recognition of
a Ukrainian state by all the Central Powers and several neutral countries as
well.68
Comparing the Russian and German-Austrian occupations of this region

experience in Serbia. But all occupiers became increasingly entangled in the

jected their ambitions across imperial borders, and all the occupations had
their enemies.
66
Politika Rossiiskoi Imperii, 217, 22324.
67

Konstantin Oberuchev in Revolutionary Kyiv, in Tentorium Honorum: Essays
Presented to Frank E. Sysyn on His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Olga A. Andriewsky et al.,
special issue, Journal of Ukrainian Studies 3334 (200809): 17197; and The Russian
Imperial Army and the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement in 1917, The Ukrainian Quar-
terly 54, 34 (FallWinter 1998): 22056.
68

of Ukraines status coming out of the Brest negotiations, Stephan M. Horak, The First
Treaty of World War I: Ukraines Treaty with the Central Powers of February 9, 1918 (Boulder,
CO: East European Monographs, 1988).
Another War Experience: POWs
Thanks to historians and memoirists, we now know more about the experiences

in conditions of hardship and shortages, mutual incomprehension and of-
ten hostility. A comparison of the situation of soldiers and civilians under
occupation with those of two other large groups of displaced personsref-
ugees and prisoners of warcan reveal how new forms of entanglements
shaped their lives over the wartime years and beyond. Germany, Russia,

nitude of the economic, social, and political challenges posed by these large
groups of uprooted humanity. With each additional year of war, the standard
of living of all these groups fell even faster than the already alarming decline
of civilians in the cities and countryside. And whereas soldiers could be heroes
if they fought bravely and were recognized, POWs and refugees were seen
largely as victims whose memory was not deemed worthy of commemoration.
Nowhere were refugees or POWs burial grounds made into sites of national
mourning and pilgrimage. But the experiences of these two populations of
forcibly displaced persons provide further evidence of the working out of pre-

Eastern Front remained highly mobile, this front produced far more refugees

during the war shaped the end of the empires on the Eastern Front and their
transformation into new and remade states forged out of nationalist politics
and new forms of irredentism and expulsions of those deemed to be alien
to the new states. Partly for space reasons, I will omit here a discussion of
refugees, a topic with a still underdeveloped but already very suggestive lit-
erature,69 and focus more on prisoners of war, an area of my own research.
POWs
The largest group outside of the subjects of occupation to live under foreign
rule was prisoners of war. One of every eight veterans to re-enter civilian
society after the war had been a POW, and their story is another prime site of
imperial entanglements. A Russian historian of Russian POWs in German and
69
A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1999). For refugees in Vienna, see Healy, Vienna and
the Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 45, 8, 62 192, 23738; and David Rechter, Galicia in
Vienna: Jewish Refugees in the First World War, Austrian History Yearbook 28 (1997):
11330.
36 MARK VON HAGEN
Austro-Hungarian camps titles her work the other war experience,70 but it
remains one that has not been an integral part of the history of World War
I until relatively recently. An estimated 8.5 million men were taken captive
during the First World War; 6 million of these were captured on the Eastern
Front. As such, captivity was a quintessential experience for soldiers serving
in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian armies. Most POWs were captured dur-
ing the 1915 spring and summer campaigns on the Eastern Front. About 3.4

mobilized); more than 99 percent of those POWs were held in German and

Bulgaria. On the other side, 2.77 million Austro-Hungarians were interned,
accounting for more than one-third of the total number of men mobilized
during 191418.71
All belligerent states used POWs for agricultural and factory labor.72
cers were exempt from such obligations and were supposed to be treated
and status. As with so many other aspects of this war, the POW problem
was not anticipated in its scale and longevity. The sanitary conditions in the
out. Death from disease was the highest cause of mortality in the camps.
In addition to providing labor around the camps, POWs were quickly
called to make up for labor shortages, above all in agriculture, but increasingly

war concluded, By the end, it was impossible to imagine any large-size enter-
prise, either industrial or agricultural, that did not make use of POWs. Ulrich
Herbert also concludes that on the whole, the employment of more than one
million POWs in German agriculture and industry, more and more of whom
were working at skilled jobs, was a substantial economic plus for the Reich
war economy, one that became ever more important as the war went on.
Of those million-plus POWs in German custody in August 1916, 45 percent
70
Drugoi voennyi opyt: Rossiiskie voennoplennye Pervoi mirovoi
voiny v Germanii, 19141922 (Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2010).
71

Kriegsgefangenen in sterreich (19141921), Militrgeschichte und Wehrwissenschaften
7 (Bonn: Bernard & Graefe, 2005); Reinhard Nachtigal, Russland und seine sterreichisch-
ungarischen Kriegsgefangenen (19141918) (Remshalden: Greiner, 2003); Georg Wurzer,

unipress, 2005).

72
POWs were not employed in military production or at the front.

worked in agriculture, 20 percent in industry, another 6 percent worked in

camp service, and 16 percent worked in areas behind the lines.73
All POWs felt the decline in the German and Austrian economies as a
consequence of the naval blockade by Britain and the soaring costs of conti-
nuing the war. Their rations declined weekly, and they were conscripted for
labor with greater frequency. This put them at the mercy of their employers,
some of whom treated them with empathy, but others of whom saw them as
enemies who deserved the worst permissible treatment.
Much of what was true for Germany also held for Russia and Austria-
Hungary, the other two states with large populations of POWs. According
to Rachamimov, During the summer months, when the agricultural season

empty (except for NCOs and invalids who could obtain exemptions) and the
prisoners were sent in small or medium-sized groups to estates and peasants
farms. At the peak of employment, 1.64 million POWs were split 2:1 between
agriculture and industry (mostly road construction and mining).74
The consequence of this large-scale employment of POWs in the economies
of the Eastern Front states was an unprecedented familiarization of the POWs
and their employers with one anothers work cultures, but also with their
cultures more generally. For example, of the more than a million POWs work-
ing in agriculture, nearly one-third worked with peasants on small farms,
where they were often under the supervision of their peasant employer, and

their hopefully temporary home. Many even married local women, and these
couples faced very uncertain futures at the end of the war. Austro-Hungarian

women or intended to do so as a mark of potential disloyalty.75 Russian POWs
likewise became acquainted with, lived with and even married German
women, and had children with them. German nationalists enlisted the church
and police in their campaigns to prevent immoral contacts between Ger-
man women and representatives of enemy states. Women could face arrest
for six months for Russian love. Finally, when Germany signed the Brest
Treaty with Bolshevik Russia, the legal persecution of German women mar-
73

Hitlers Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany under the
Third Reich, trans. William Templer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
1617.
POWs and the Great War: Captivity on the Eastern Front (Oxford:
74
Berg, 2002), 8992, 108.

75

38 MARK VON HAGEN
ried to Russian POWs was temporarily suspended.76 The fate of these tens of
thousands of mixed marriages and their children was the subject of negoti-
ations between the Eastern Front powers for many years after the end of
hostilities. Many women were also abandoned by their POW husbands at the
end of the war, when they returned to their homelands and, in many cases,
their wives and families there. The fear of POWs going native echoed the

Ost, and this predicament is certainly familiar to historians of the British and
French Empires as well.
Nation-Building in POW Camps
In general, it seems to me that our work, despite

great obstacles and the fact that we had before
us an entirely unconscious element, which had
lived under the yoke of spiritual slavery, which
was not without its consequences, still we have
done a lot by this time. Above all, the growth of
national consciousness. The soldiers slang has
more or less given way to the Ukrainian national
language. Now no one, not even our worst
enemy, can not know, as it was at the beginning,
that Ukraine and Ukrainians exist, even if they
have no interest in taking part in [building that

Russian that they will know that this name is
an insult to them.
Dr. Vasyl Symovich, 31 May 191577
Dr. Vasyl Symovich, a Galician professor who evacuated to Vienna after the
outbreak of war, wrote a report after he visited a POW camp in Freistadt,
Lower Austria, that had been specially designated as a Ukrainian camp. His
story is a vivid example of how POWs became enmeshed in the entanglements
76
Drugoi voennyi opyt, 14146.
77
zvit) of Dr. Vasyl Symovich, 20607. This, and several hundred pages of
reports, were photocopied and stored in the archives of the Ukrainian Free Academy
of Arts and Sciences in New York. The title of the manuscript is: Fraishtadtska res-

Freistadt Republic: A Memorial-Book of the Great Days of Struggle in the Years 1914
1918).
of the Eastern Front powers, with one another, and with the ethno-confes-
sional minorities of their enemies through the seemingly contradictory policy
of encouraging and supporting nationalist and separatist movements while
insisting on the continued integrity of their own empires. The most enthu-
siastic of the belligerents in this imperial anticolonialism (directed, of course,
only at the minorities of the enemys empires) was Germany, with Austria-
Hungary always cautious about any further destabilization of the empires
constitutional order that might upset the interethnic peace. Russias elites
warily groped toward this revolutionary nationalist politics in 1917 after the
February Revolution. Russia, Germany, and Austria all separated out enemy
POWs by nationality.

the presumably oppressed peoples of the Russian empire. Germanys For-
eign Ministry supported a host of migr nationalist groups from the Russian

Vienna, Berlin, and Constantinople. The League of Foreign Peoples of Russia
published newspapers to publicize Russian injustices and to call for the libera-
78 These radical visions of
reordering the maps of the world mitigated against the Old World order of the
Hague Conventions.
One outcome of the German gamble with revolution was Vladimir Lenins

is the creation of national POW camps in Germany and Austria-Hungary for
Russian soldiers from the national minorities or, as the Germans called them,
the borderland peoples (Randvlker). With time, the German and Austrian
camps had Polish, Jewish, Tatar, other Turkic, and Georgian national organi-
zations, each of them claimed and led by one or more expatriate associations
who had won the approval of Berlin and Vienna. Among the earliest of these
national POW camps was designated for Ukrainians. The key organization
that promoted this ethnic separation was the Union for the Liberation of
Ukraine, which was made up of Ukrainian activists who were exiles from
Russia in Austrian Galicia as well as Galician Ukrainians who sought the

Symovich was sent to the Freistadt camp by the Vienna leaders of the Union
to set up enlightenment work.
Most POWs spent 34 years in captivity and were overwhelmingly
illiterate and semiliterate peasants aged 2539. Remarkably, the German au-
78
Die Liga der Fremdvlker
Russlands. Most of the documents of this organization were published in French, as
the Ligue des nationalits allognes de Russie.
40 MARK VON HAGEN
thorities and the Ukrainian activists came together in wanting to raise the
cultural level of these semiliterate peasants. The Germans wanted to inculcate

They provided funds for and encouraged educated Germans to organize cul-
tural life in the camps, much as they did in their occupation regime in Ober
Ost. Cultural life was understood to mean reading rooms, theater and musical
troupes, soldier newspapers, sport clubs, and religious services (with prayers
for the tsar and for the two enemy emperors!). The curriculum featured Ger-
man language lessons and lessons in the political and cultural history of
Germany.
Russian and Ukrainian socialists, including the Bolsheviks and Social

war and anti-imperial propaganda against Russia. The tactical alliance with

gling defeatist propaganda into the Russian Empire through the frontline
regions. It also is evidence of entanglements between Lenin and the Union for
the Liberation of Ukraine that the historians and archivists of both sides have
subsequently denied.79
The Ukrainian activists, most of whom were also socialists, imported
their traditions from early 20th-century Russian Ukraine, a network of rural
cooperatives and literacy houses called Prosvita (Enlightenment). These
houses taught the basics of reading and writing, with an admixture of prac-
tical advice for peasants about modern farming methods, but also a full
dose of Ukrainian history and literature in Ukrainian language. Many of the
Ukrainian activists were teachers, so this adult education role was nothing
new for them; others came from careers in journalism, so they were able to

cials also organized physical exercise and some sports teams for the POWs to
A common feature of POW-camp life and another example of the unusual

entanglements that their predicament illustrated was the constant medical
inspections and visits by delegations of nurses from the POWs home countries
but arranged by neutral countries. One of the few regular lines of diplomatic
communication that were maintained after the outbreak of war and the
79

channeled funds to Lenin. See his Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary (Chicago: Henry

Bachynskyi complained about social sections that Russian POWs had formed. He
claimed that these were nothing but a cover for SD [Menshevik] organizations which,

closing of enemy embassies in all the belligerent states was the negotiations,
in neutral Copenhagen and Stockholm, over the fate of POWs.80 These visits
highlighted the entangled relationships between enemy states, their exile na-

January 1916 the Russian Red Cross nurse Romanova visited Freistadt camp
in Lower Austria as a member of the Danish mission. Her visit gave rise to

motives of the nurse: She came less to orient herself about the bodily well-
being of the POWs than to ascertain their disposition and above all to conduct
political propaganda. And, although precautions were taken before her visit
to conceal any blatant evidence of propaganda work, Romanova was ready to

secret of the contempt with which she held all those who allowed themselves

couraged sympathy for Ukrainian separatism. Not a few POWs reacted with
were instructed to indicate whether they were healthy, sick, or wounded

when they were taken captive. They also suspected that the visit of the nurse
was above all to determine who the disloyal POWs were. Everything sug-
gested that Romanovas intention was to intimidate the Ukrainian POWs and
thereby undercut the propaganda work of the Austrians.
In her own report on her visit to the Austro-Hungarian POW camps,
Romanova held fast to her impressions from the Freistadt encounters, where

Russian propaganda in the camps and about the good living conditions of

language was eliminated; lectures were held about Mazepa and newspapers
with revolutionary content were published. Although she acknowledged
some results, she felt they were relatively small.81
National Legions, POWs, and Imperial Anticolonialism

tian POWs were to be granted the right to join special military units and
POWs and the Great War, 123. Peter Pastor, Introduction, in Essays on
80
World War I: Origins and Prisoners of War, ed. Samuel R. Williamson and Pastor (New
York: Social Science Monographs, Brooklyn College Press, 1983), 115.
81
Kriegsgefangenschaft an
der Ostfront 1914 bis 1918: Literaturbericht zu einem neuen Forschungsfeld (Frankfurt am
Main: Peter Lang, 2005), 13537.
42 MARK VON HAGEN
participate in future military operations against Germany and Austria-

Hungary. This idea appears to have been ignored until spring 1917.82 Perhaps
the best-known consequence of this type of thinking was a proposal from
the leaders of the small Czech colony in Russia to create a volunteer Czech
company, the druzina, already in late August 1914. The original idea was to
use the druzina as a reservoir of future administrators who would manage
what would be a future liberated Czech land. This company became a
formal unit of the Russian army. This initiative had the blessing of the tsar

failed to make the expected breakthrough into Hungary and then Bohemia
and Moravia during the Carpathian Winter War, the druzina became a small
intelligence-gathering unit positioned opposite Czech units in the Habsburg
army. Eventually a Czechoslovak Legion was raised in 1917 that would spark
the Russian Civil War in May 1918, when they were making their way home

from Vladivostok in September 1920 and became the core of the Czechoslovak
army.83 Another similar venture undertaken by the Russian authorities was
the organization of a South Slav Legion to liberate their brethren groaning
under the Habsburg yoke.84
Constantinople Mission
The Constantinople Action (as Austrian diplomats dubbed it) provides a last
has called the Ukrainian adventure of the Central Powers and what Aviel
Roshwald might include as one of the new geopolitical frames of reference
and arenas of action for nationalist experiments.85 Although it failed before
it even got launched, the plan envisioned bringing together the POWs in the
Austrian Freistadt POW camp with the recently formed volunteer Ukrainian
82

83
POWs and the Great War, 11520; J. F. N. Bradley, The Czechoslovak
Legion in Russia, 19141920 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1991);
Josef Kalvoda, Czech and Slovak Prisoners of War in Russia during the War and
Revolution, in Essays on World War I, 21538.
84
POWs and the Great War; Ivo Banac, South Slav Prisoners in Revolu-
tion Russia, in Essays on World War I, 11948.
85

gebiet: Konstantinopler Aktion. OktoberNovember 1918, in Ereignisse in der Ukraine,

legion, the Sich Sharpshooters,86 in a plot to join with Turkish soldiers to

liberate the Kuban region from Russian rule. The assembled national legions

summon a revolutionary movement in Ukraine. This came early in the war,
in October and November 1914, and appeared to be largely the instigation of
the Germans and their undersecretary of state, Arthur Zimmermann, one of
the leading revolutionaries in the German Foreign Ministry, whose views
helped to shape those of the revolutionary emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Zimmermann informed the German ambassador in Constantinople, Freiherr

uprising in the Caucasus against Russia. But even the state secretary himself,

revolution in Poland and Ukraine, as a means of warfare against Russia,

tween Russia and Germany and Austria-Hungary.87 On the Austrian side,

This remarkable scheme had one of its multiple origins in a report from
ULU member Oleksandr Skoropys-Zholtukhovskyi, a Russian Ukrainian
exile in Vienna, that 700 Kuban Cossacks had been arrested by Russian

the Central Powers, another Union delegate, Marian Melenevskyi, also a
Russian Ukrainian, had visited Constantinople, where he informed Turkish
political and military circles about the situation in Russia, made contacts with

including a Georgian leader and a veteran of the Georgian legion that took
part in the revolution in Persia. This Georgian came to Austria and visited
the Ukrainian POW camps and began talks with the Union and the Young

Muslim Turkic-Tatar Population of Russia.
The Union delegates came to an agreement with Enver Pasha in
October 1914 and made a request to Vienna to approve the formation of an
expeditionary corps of 500 Ukrainians, of whom 400 were to be recruited from
the Sich Sharpshooters and 100 Russian Ukrainians to be recruited from the
POW camps. This request is part of the Central Powerss decision-making that
led to the separation of Ukrainians from the general camp population. The
86

Ereignisse in der
Ukraine, 12943.
87
Germanys Aims, 12026, 13254. Other German advocates of annexation
and collaboration with Ukrainians included Friedrich von Schwerin, administrative
president of the Prussian district of Frankfurt on the Oder, and Dr. Erich Keup.
44 MARK VON HAGEN
Ukrainian legionnaires were to be recruited in Bukovyna (not under Russian

occupation) and to travel in civilian clothing through Romania (having de-
clared provisional neutrality in the war) to Constantinople. Also part of the
scheme was to foment an insurrection among the sailors of the Russian Black
Sea Fleet.
The Freistadt camp was designated as the primary holding point for
Russian Ukrainian POWs; orders were given to transfer 1,000 POWs from
Hungarian camps to Austria. Special care was advised to select volunteers
who could be trusted to keep the entire mission secret, as well as to select
Austrian and Russian Ukrainians who could get along with one another. A
representative from the Union and one from the Ukrainian National Rada
would be sent to the Bukovyna Commander, Colonel Fischer, to make the
selections from the Sharpshooters.

military action was none other than Count Stanislaw Szepticki, an Austrian

command in Turkey, so that the this terrain is not only left to the Germans.
Szepticki agreed to his appointment. Hoyos also expressed his concern about
pursuing this action and felt under considerable pressure from the Germans;
his own opinion was that any revolution that might bring down the Russian
colossus would only bring unwanted instability in the end (for the Habsburg
Empire as well). He confessed to occasional skepticism about the outcome
of such an adventure, but felt it was his duty to support the German allies.
By mid-November, Hoyos reported to Pallavicini that the German advisor

dispatching 50,000 Turkish troops to the north Caucasus to raise a rebellion
among the Cherkes (Kabardinians) and Kuban Cossacks.
All these schemes came to an abrupt end when Enver Pasha, Liman von
Sanders, and Pallavicini concluded that although all of them were in agree-

mans did not control movement in the Black Sea, meaning the defeat of the

into the war. In the end, the Turks also objected to placing Turkish soldiers
under an Austro-Hungarian commander and had serious misgivings about
Muslim Turks collaborating with Orthodox Christian Kuban Cossacks in
any uprising.88 And so concluded this remarkably entangled scheme to wage
nationalist revolutions in Russia with the help of Ukrainian Sharpshooters
and Russian POWs in Austrian camps.

88
Jahrbcher fr Geschichte Osteuropas, N.F., 14 (1966): 36266.

Legacies of an Entangled Front: Some Concluding Thoughts

acknowledgment of the new Bolshevik state in Russia and the government-
in-temporary exile of the Central Rada in Ukraine by all the Central Powers:

89 The victors
in Versailles could not bring themselves to any similar recognitions of Bolshe-
vik Russia or the next government in Ukraine, that of the Directory, and so

who continued to wage war against Turkey until the Treaty of Lausanne in
1923. What the Versailles peacemakers did achieve, however, was the disen-
tanglement of an independent Poland from its three former imperial masters,
but a Poland that also had undetermined borders to the north, east, and south,

1921 following the Russian-Polish-Ukrainian wars, by which time Moscow
had reconquered much of the Russian Empire, including most of Ukraine
and Belarus. Out of the war on the Eastern Front also came a new Kingdom
of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, carved out of lands of Austria, Hungary,

This postwar outcome of the entanglements of the Eastern Front was vastly

other states, though France and Britain were quite busy creating mandate-
states in the Middle East. Moreover, no other states outside the Eastern Front
were subjected to the minority provisions of the League of Nations, another
90
Other legacies of these Eastern Front entanglements include the large pop-
ulations of prisoners of war and refugees on the Eastern Front, relative again
to the Western Front. The repatriation of both populations and their return
home kept the pariah states of Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bolshevik Russia,
and Turkey entangled as they negotiated conditions for transportation, for re-
lief on the way home, and for legal status. These populations contributed to the
radicalization of politics in their place of forced temporary residence and when
they returned home as well. On the Eastern Front, a series of new states, which
is to say nearly all the states on the Eastern Front, faced the immediate tasks of

First Treaty of World War I;
89
(New York: W. Morrow, 1939).

Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International
90
Minority Protection, 18781938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

46 MARK VON HAGEN

POWs still held in the camps; this was true even for short-lived governments
during the Civil War on the territory of the former Russian Empire; for ex-
ample, the White Army was in competition with Hetman Skoropadskyis
representatives from Ukraine over Russian prisoners of war in German
and Austrian camps. The Bolsheviks, in turn, recruited tens of thousands of

against the forces of international and domestic counterrevolution.

Although Bolshevik Russia was the most radical outcome of the dynamic
of destruction on the Eastern Front, Russian-inspired soviets appeared in
other cities for brief periods in the turmoil of the end of the world war. Already

the social-democratic politics in Germany and the Habsburg Empire, above
all, where the majority Social Democrats faced left-wing splinter groups
that called for a peace without annexations and social and political change
at home. All those cities were major capitals of the entangled Eastern Front:
in Budapest a Hungarian Soviet Republic was declared in March 1919 under
Bla Kun, a former Russian POW; in Munich, a Bavarian Soviet republic, and
workers and soldiers soviets in Berlin and Hamburg; a Western Ukrainian
Soviet republic in Lviv; short-lived soviets in Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki, and
elsewhere. One of the responses to these short-lived victories of the revolu-
tionary left was the mobilization of the radical right. The dynamics of this
right-left civil war varied from country to country but shared, on the right, a
more exclusive nationalism coupled with historic inner enemies, above all
Jews.91 Of course, the war on the Western Front also helped to transform the
societies, economies, and politics of Britain, France, and Belgium, but those
Another important legacy was the prominent role of military heroes and

empires on the Eastern Front. Many of the states that emerged from the rubble
of the war on the Eastern Front had presidents who had been commanders of

Former commanders in the Russian Imperial Army became president of inter-
war Finland (Gustav Mannerheim) and interwar king of the Serbs, Croats,
and Slovenes (Alexandar). Out of the wartime Austro-Hungarian army and
the armed struggle against Bla Kuns Soviet regime in Budapest emerged the
91

Formation in Eastern Europe, 19141923, in Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical
Perspective, ed. Peter J. Potichnyj and Howard Aster, 2nd ed. (Edmonton: Canadian
Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1988); and his War and the Twentieth-Century
State, Daedalus 124, 2 (Spring 1995): 15574.
Hungarian regent, Admiral Horthy. The German generals in charge of Ober

dictatorship from 1916 on, and Hindenburg would be elected president of the

Front, but an Austrian). General Wilhelm Groener, who was the chief German

his emperor, Wilhelm II, to abdicate, much as his Russian counterparts did
with their emperor, Nicholas II, nearly two years earlier. General Alekseev
had overseen the occupation of Austrian Ukraine as commander of the South-
western Front in 191415, a front that was also Groeners temporary home in
1918. Bolshevik Russia represents another twist of this narrative, but Leon
Trotsky, creator of the Red Army and architect of its Civil War victories, also
played a crucial role in creating a militarized Soviet state, culminating in his
advocacy of labor armies in 1920, itself a legacy of widespread wartime labor
conscription of civilians, POWs, and soldiers when deemed necessary. This

France, Britain, or the United States after the war.
So what, can we say, by way of preliminary conclusion, about the value
of the entangled histories approach to the study of the Eastern Front in

social and identity boundaries as well. Modern wars, at least, are the most
violent intrusions of institutions, cultures, and societies in the lives of other
human communities across some perceived and real boundaries. Prewar en-
tanglements help us understand the dynamic of destruction during the war
and the revolutions and civil wars that followed it, but also challenge us to
see alternatives to war in those same prewar entanglements and to do this

modern and cosmopolitan cultures that were one expression of those prewar
entanglements. Here, Habsburg Nostalgie is probably the most pronounced
and persistent such romanticizing, but similar tendencies can be observed

observations about the conservative character of the army might be extended
to another important institution of late imperial Austria-Hungary, namely

the empire together by acknowledging in their social-democratic future cul-
tural concessions to the empires nationalities. It was based on Habsburg
norms of constitutional reform and gradual change, but it likewise tried to
tame nationalism by conceding the appeal of nationalism. These sorts of polit-
ical fantasies and programs lived on after the war as well.
48 MARK VON HAGEN
Without doubt, the prewar entanglements were characterized by con-

siderable tensions, whether economic competitions, military rivalry, national
and international territorial ambitions, or ethnic political mobilization, but

plex, often contradictory (some would say hypocritical) rearrangement of the

Versailles, Brest-Litovsk, Lausanne, and elsewhere that, in the end, appeared
and shaped the interwar conjuncture in profound ways. Finally, entangled

history reminds us to listen to the multiple voices in these empires and na-
choices that were more often than not shaped by others and by historical
networks, connections, and, yes, entanglements. And, to return to an earlier
observation, we as historians can try to make sense of the Great War by
turning to the native comparative imperiologists who lived in and between
the rival empires and other states that fostered imperial ambitions.
War of Decolonization: The Russian Empire in the Great War
Joshua Sanborn
It is a curious fact that we have no term other than revolution to describe the
end of the Russian Empire. When the British Empire collapsed, it was called
decolonization, and the same was true for the French, Dutch, Belgian, and
Portuguese Empires. But that word is almost never used in reference to Russia.1
This is not simply an oversight. Many comparative works on decolonization
endings, especially those of land empires, those that exercised imperial

control over white people, or those that ended before World War II. Thus for
John Springhall, decolonization usually means the taking of measures by
indigenous peoples and/or their white overlords intended eventually to end
external control over overseas
1

Empire in reference to the events surrounding World War I and the Revolution. See
Stephan M. Horak, The First Treaty of World War I: Ukraines Treaty with the Central Powers
of February 9, 1918 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1988), 57. This is not to
say that no one has ever noticed similarities before. For instance: The struggles of
the Eastern European peoples during that period are, however, in many ways similar
to the struggles of the newly emancipated colonial and semicolonial peoples of our
time. M. K. Dziewanowski, (Stan-
ford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1969), ix. Ronald Grigor Suny mentions Soviet
decolonization and argues that for Russian liberals decolonization meant the end
of legal discriminations but not recognition of ethnic distinction or political au-
tonomy. Ronald Grigor Suny, Dont Paint Nationalism Red: National Revolution
and Socialist Anti-Imperialism, in Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then,
ed. Prasenjit Duara (London: Routledge, 2004), 17698. Terry Martin also views the
events surrounding the Great War and Revolution as related to decolonization, as
when he observes that Bolshevik revolutionary strategy was to assume leadership
over what now appeared to be the inevitable process of decolonization. Terry Martin,

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 1. In composing this essay, I have used
material originally published in Joshua A. Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War
and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). It is
reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. For permission to reuse this
material, please visit http://global.oup.com/uk/academic/rights/permissions/.
50 JOSHUA SANBORN
formal political rule by some new kind of relationship.2 Martin Shipway is

dated back to the disastrous loss of the 13 American colonies,3 but he decides
ultimately to locate decolonization precisely at the level of event, or more pre-
cisely in a twenty years crisis (to borrow E. H. Carrs label for the interwar
period) from 1945.4 Similarly, Prasenjit Duara insists that it is necessary to
exclude pre-twentieth century independence movements in the Americas

and Africa. Decolonization, for him, refers to the process whereby colonial
powers transferred institutional and legal control over their territories and
dependencies to indigenously based, formally sovereign, nation-states.5 The
collapse of the Russian Empire is simply missing from the larger literature on
decolonization.
This essay proceeds from the premise that the collapse of the Russian
Empire was, like other imperial collapses, including those of the Habsburgs

further that the destruction of empires was not simply a byproduct of the
peace conference. It was a multistage process that took place over the whole
duration of the war. The Great War was a war of European decolonization.

Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe, and the Middle East, regions in which
the Russian Empire was heavily invested.
2
Decolonization since 1945: The Collapse of European Overseas Empires
(Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2001), 23. Emphasis in original.
3
Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the
Colonial Empires (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 4.
4

5

tieth Century, in Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then, ed. Duara (London:

clude an essay from his University of Chicago colleague Ronald Grigor Suny on
nationalism during the Russian Revolution. Suny, however, did not himself use the
term decolonization in his essay, as his focus was largely on debates within the
Communist Party on nationalities questions. Indeed, he skips over the years 191417
entirely in his presentation. Other than Sunys essay, virtually the only treatment of
decolonization in Russia is one chapter in Muriel Chamberlains work. That chapter
largely treats the end of the Soviet Union. World War I is elided, and only brief mention
is made of the independence of Poland and the Baltic states in the interwar period.
M. E. Chamberlain, Decolonization: The Fall of the European Empires, 2nd ed. (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 1999), 93115.
WAR OF DECOLONIZATION 51
Decolonization is perhaps an awkward term to use for Russia, since

the areas of the empire that ultimately gained independence (Finland, Po-

the middle of the 19th century there was a consistent conceptual distinction
drawn between the Asian parts of the empire (which were understood to be
colonial and colonized in a straightforwardly European sense) and the
European parts, which were seen as ethnically or socially distinct peripheries
or borderlands.6 Thus, we are faced with the apparent problem that the areas
that decolonized by gaining independence were the very regions that were
least considered colonial by Russian imperial administrators. One solution
to the problem of decolonization in a peripheral space would therefore be
to use an ungainly term like de-peripheralization or de-imperialization to describe
the process.
Nevertheless, I believe that the best term to use remains decolonization,
not only for the Russian Empires Asian territories but for its European ones

Authors refer to British decolonization both when the process dealt with

gained independence.7 Western European empires were as diverse in their

8 The Rus-
sian Empire was not sui generis. Neither, we may posit, was the way it ended. It
or empire. Thus, if an empire is a relationship of political control imposed by
6

Never Was but Might Have Been, Slavic Review 69, 1 (Spring 2010): 13839. For a
recent study of an explicit colonization project, see Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Heretics and
Colonizers: Forging Russias Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2005); see also Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland,
eds.,
(London:
Routledge, 2007).
7

Louis, eds.,
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). Anthony Low brings both of these types of
colonies into the same framework in his essay in the volume: Anthony Low, The End
of the British Empire in Africa, in ibid., 36.
8

Slavic
Review
one recent work ran to 119 pages of text (The Ministry of Asiatic Russia, 125 n. 13).
52 JOSHUA SANBORN
9
then decolonization is the process by which that relationship comes to an end,
Likening the decolonization process in Eastern Europe to the processes

described by the slew of scholars working on Africa and Asia does not, of
course, mean that these events were identical. The issue of race, though not en-
tirely absent from developments in Eastern Europe (and certainly not absent
from imperial relationships in the Caucasus and Central Asia), was indeed
less central than it would be during the conjuncture of decolonization that
followed World War II. We can understand why racial issues might be seen as
an essential feature of decolonizing processes for a scholar like Springhall, not
only because of the role race played in strategies of domination, but also be-
cause of the way it linked the wretched of the earth across state boundaries
as they pursued liberationist strategies. As we shall see, when decolonizing
actors reached across borders in Eastern Europe, they did so on the basis of a

well be the case that the psychological trauma experienced by the subaltern

Empire in Europe. At present, though, we cannot be sure, because these cases
of empire, decolonization, and postcolonialism have not been systematically
compared. Bringing the Russian case into the same analytical frame by using
the same analytical terms will allow for exactly this sort of investigation.
Using the term decolonization may also help those focusing on Eastern
European history to see the events during the period of the Great War and

of the recent scholarship on decolonization is that it must be analyzed as a
multiactor and multistage process rather than as a single moment in time. If
we treat Eastern European decolonization in the same way, we will quickly
see that we must look at more than the end of the war and Versailles. This
has not yet been done. For instance, though few historical events have gen-
erated the volume of literature that the events of the summer of 1914 have, no
the Sarajevo assassination or the July Crisis. Indeed, scholars have gener-
ally ignored the dynamic of decolonization even for the later stages of the

process became virtually impossible to miss. Erez Manelas recent book is a

and Asia, which prompts him to link the upsurge of anticolonial rhetoric to
9
Empires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 19, 33.
the Wilsonian Moment in late 1918 and 1919.10 Serbia, Poland, Ukraine, and
Ireland are mostly missing from his story.
These lacunae are particularly striking given the centrality of empire
to the literature on World War I. That debate has focused largely on the dy-
namic of competitive imperialism between the Great Powers. The question

has been paid to developments in Berlin, Paris, and London than to those
in the Balkans, where the crisis developed.11 This shift of focus north and
west was understandable not only for historiographical reasons (having to do
with the pressing demand of assigning blame for the war) but also for good
historical ones. Most statesmen and later historians assumed that a massive
war between the Great Powers would be fundamentally rooted in the massive

would be anything more than that. Thus, European diplomats in July 1914
normally treated the crisis as one between the imperial powers. They declared
war and ordered military mobilizations in August within the context of the
imperial system that had governed their actions for the previous century. But
wars are frequently about many things at once, and great wars are almost by

control as such, not just about which empire would do the controlling. This
aspect of World War I was present from the very beginning of the war, and it
developed rapidly over the following years.
Just as thinking about decolonization in addition to imperialism allows
us to see the events of the war in a new light, so too does this model give us
new insights into developments normally classed as the rise of nationalism
in Eastern Europe. Again, the study of nationalism in Eastern Europe has
long occupied an important part of the war literature. In particular, studies
of the Habsburg Empire in the period before and during the war regularly
discuss the restiveness and political aspirations of particular ethnic groups,
and many conclude that the multiethnic empire was ultimately untenable
10
The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins
of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
11

see Annika Mombauer, The Origins of the First World War: Controversies and Consensus
(Harlow, UK: Longman, 2002).
54 JOSHUA SANBORN
as a modern state.12 In this reading, the rise of nationalism put such intense
pressure on imperial states that those states were forced to take ever more
desperate measures to contain them. The war deferred these aspirations for
independence, but when the imperial states went down to defeat, nationalist
groups deployed Wilsons language of self-determination to gain political rec-
ognition in Paris.
This stress on the agency of nationalist politicians is not so much wrong
as incomplete. It overemphasizes the early formative processes of developing
ethnic consciousness and overvalues the role of the articulate and published
promoters of the national idea. Above all, however, the model of national
liberation is problematic because it is founded on the assumption that the
process is primarily one of moving from colonial dependence to national
sovereignty and that therefore the primary struggle is between the nation
seeking liberation and the empire that seeks to maintain control.
This general framework is not robust enough to explain the complicated
political and military processes that historically have led to independence,
ported co-nationals and by deep engagement with regional and global powers

in the events in Eastern Europe in World War I, where multiple imperial states
supported anti-imperial movements in the borderlands of their enemies.13 The
of national independence. Indeed, the outcome of decolonization in the short

term was not the establishment of ethno-national states, but the creation of
new multinational states. This was the case not only for the Soviet Union but
also (as the names suggest) for Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Serbs,

state of ethnic Poles. It is true that virtually every political movement in-
terested in decolonization over the past century adopted the national idiom,
and this choice of idiom had powerful consequences for political beliefs and
political practices everywhere it was deployed. Nevertheless, it is important
to distinguish between the core political processes of decolonization and the
national ideology that imperfectly structured those political interactions.
12

example, see Robin Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy: From Enlightenment to Eclipse (New
York: St. Martins Press, 2001), vii, 40001.
13

especially Michael A. Reynolds,
and Russian Empires, 19081918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

garding the causes and consequences of the war were established before com-
20th century. Hindsight, as historians know perfectly well, is never actually

20-20. Still, the capacity to take the long view is one of the great advantages
that historians enjoy over the people who lived through historical events,
and it is one that we should employ in this case. Over the course of the 20th
century, we have had ample opportunity to see the emergence of nationalist
movements and the collapse of imperial rule. These historical processes took
place on a continental scale in the wake of World War II, and when discussing
events in Africa and Asia commentators regularly discuss them both in terms
of national liberation and through the lens of decolonization. In the Americas
and Europe, where anti-imperial independence movements took place earlier
in the modern era, however, the concept of decolonization is deployed less
often. It is worth asking, therefore, whether the revolutions and rebellions
of the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the Americas and the rise of new
states in the wake of World War I in Europe were decolonizing movements
before their time.

logic of decolonization. Phase 1 is the imperial challenge stage. In this formative
period of decolonization, certain members of colonized communities build
anti-imperial political movements that have the capacity to grow in their legi-
timacy and authority in the region in question. It helps, but is not necessary,
for a corresponding movement to be developing in the metropole that casts
doubt on the usefulness or morality of the imperial project.14 Nationalism has
historically been a powerful contributor to these calculations of legitimacy
and authority in both the metropole and the periphery in the modern era,
but again it is not logically necessary. It also helps if the imperial state sees a
under its rule, either as a result of economic crisis, military defeat, or some
other event.
Phase 2 is the state failure stage. I use this commonplace political science
term regarding modern nation-states15 a bit against the grain here to remind
us that decolonization necessarily entails the removal, eclipse, withdrawal,

14
Anthony Pagden,

1500c. 1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
15

tors, in State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, ed. Rotberg (Washington,
DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), 125.
56 JOSHUA SANBORN
or failure of the imperial state. Of course, state failure is a phenomenon that

applies well beyond the sphere of imperial states, and it is not conceptually
subordinate to the process of decolonization. Though much of the literature
on failed states concerns nation-states, not empires, it remains useful because
it reminds us of the importance of state capacities, the delivery of public
goods, and the supreme importance of security for the functioning of modern
societies and economies. That literature also reminds us just how complex and
fragile the organism of the modern state really is.16 Revolutionaries frequently
imagine that they can simply take over the apparatus of the state, seize the
the bureaucracies function as they desire. They are always disappointed.

They are also systems of personalized networks of power and of routinized

pacity to legitimate and control violence. As a result, independence requires
the demise of one set of personalized networks, the end of habitual authority
and submission, and the delegitimization and loss of control over violence be-
fore a new state can be built.
Of course, there need be no causal relationship between imperial chal-
lenge and state failure. State failure does not need to be brought on by anti-
imperial revolutionaries. Imperial states can self-destruct, either knowingly
or unintentionally, and they can be destroyed by other empires. So too can
they dissolve among a multitude of competing projects. It is often the case,
as Frederick Cooper has noted in regard to Francophone Africa in the late
1940s, that the political projects pursued by colonized peoples are not those
of independence, but are rather of integration, or of federalism, or of any
16

extensive, varied, and interesting literature on state failure. There are many views

failing, failed, or collapsed state. As we will see below, it was all of these at one
A useful summary of the recent literature that takes proper notice of the regional

Review of International Studies 37, 3 (July 2011): 95172. A reminder that the very notion
of state failure depends on a normative (and contested) view of what constitutes a
state is Stein Sundstl Eriksen, State Failure in Theory and Practice: The Idea of
the State and the Contradictions of State Formation, Review of International Studies
37, 1 (January 2011): 22947. This is particularly useful to keep in mind when dealing
with old empires rather than the younger nation-states that form the bulk of the cases
normally studied by those interested in state failure. On state fragmentation, see Jieli
Li, State Fragmentation: Toward a Theoretical Understanding of the Territorial Power
of the State, Sociological Theory 20, 2 (July 2002): 13956.
number of other permutations of power. We now know that this phase of

accommodation in Africa was rapidly overtaken by events and that full inde-
pendence would come quickly. This was not apparent at the time, however. It
is hard to tell, Cooper writes, whether these African activists knew that their
project of increased integration was a logic whose time would be short.17
Much the same can be said regarding Polish, Finnish, and Ukrainian activists
during the First World War as well.
The outcome of the failure of the imperial state is, if not inevitable, at
least predictable. With the collapse of previous legitimating mechanisms
for violence, the scope for violent entrepreneurship18 is greatly enhanced.
Aspirants for power, wealth, or pleasure can create or utilize organizations of
violence in the period of open and violent competition that accompanies the

tions may be formal military units, but they are just as frequently loosely
organized paramilitary units or even what are best described as gangs. The
since the role of violence in the economy, hidden, legitimated, and routinized
under successful states, now assumes a much more prominent role, tilting
the economic balance towards those expert in violence and away from those
expert in managing capital, engaging in commerce, or performing peaceful
labor. This shift toward non-productive extraction and the crippling of exist-
ing economic systems is never good for general prosperity. At the same time,
the rise of the class of violent entrepreneurs transforms social relations. Fear
and insecurity lead many citizens to withdraw from public spaces and social
interactions and many others to evacuate zones in which conducting a normal
life has become nearly impossible and exceedingly dangerous.
Thus the phase of imperial state failure frequently leads to a social disaster

rapidly dwindling resource base of economic goods and political support. As

poverty spreads and whatever social or state institutions responsible for pro-
viding relief or health care crumble, famine and pestilence often make their
presence felt. These, in turn, destroy social relations even more, as neighbors
hoard food, hospitality carries risk of mortal illness, and desperate people
sever their social ties with their fellow townspeople or villagers in order to
17
Africa since 1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
49.

18
ume on violence in the Russian economy during the 1990s. Vadim Volkov, Violent
Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
58 JOSHUA SANBORN
seek a place where things are not so bad. Unless arrested quickly, this social
disaster phase can lead to an apocalyptic death spiral, as the experience not

places like Congo and Somalia in our own time.
Formal independence most often comes at some point during the state
failure stage, though it may come earlier, even prompting the state failure de-
scribed above. It may also happen later, well into the phase of social disaster.
Independence certainly does not cure all of the ills of the decolonizing
process. Indeed, it frequently makes things worse. As a result, though it makes
independence, I will argue here that we should understand independence

more as an important way station in the course of events than a teleological
conclusion.19
Imperial Challenge

esting dynamic of imperial challenge on the eve of World War I was taking
place in the Balkans. Decolonization there was certainly more advanced than
it was elsewhere on the continent. One may argue that the July Crisis was so
explosive precisely because an aggressive bid for regional hegemony on the
part of a brash young nation coincided with a high-stakes imperial showdown
between the Great Powers. Less potent imperial challenges were occurring
throughout the Russian Empire as well. Showing this process of decolonization
across the entire breadth of the Russian Empire requires more than an article, of
course, especially if one includes Russia proper as one of the areas undergoing
decolonization in those years. I will focus more narrowly here on the regions
of Finland, Poland, and Ukraine, not because Central Asia and the Caucasus
were not participants in the decolonizing process, but precisely because schol-
ars have been more reluctant to see European Russia as a colonial space than
they have been to see Asia in the same way. Decolonization was certainly oc-
curring in Central Asia and the Caucasus during the years of the Great War, as

work described the imperial crisis in Turkestan as part of a more general
imperial crisis that corresponds with the model of decolonization I proposed
above: The break-up of empire everywhere gives rise to the delegitimization
of its institutions and functionaries, to the rise of local powers who are, in
practice, autonomous, to rivalries surrounding these powers, and to sharp
19
Africa since 1940, xi, for a similar argument.
of an economic crisis.20 Just as it was occurring in Turkestan, so too was it

happening in the periphery that constituted Russias European borderlands.
As was the case throughout the empire, the imperial challenge stage in the
western empire had begun prior to the war, but this challenge remained too

In Poland, the empire was challenged from the very moment of the parti-
tions, but the experience of the disastrous 1863 rebellion had transformed
the anti-imperial project. On the one hand, the tepid response of the Polish
peasantry to upper-class calls for revolt led to a growing awareness that
nationalism had to be popularly based in order to succeed. This impulse led
to the establishment of political parties in the 1890s that proclaimed Polish
independence as their main goal and sought to engage Poles of all classes in
the national project.21 On the other hand, the quick and brutal suppression of
ropole and periphery was a political fact of consequence. Romantic calls for
doomed displays of valor in the cause of liberty were looked upon with an
increasingly gimlet eye.
This combination of revolutionary desire and pragmatic patience was

and National Democratic Party, in the text of the Program of the National
League in 1903:
1. The main political goal, resulting from the situation of our nation, is
the gaining of independence and the creation of an independent Polish
state.
2. The present condition and situation of our nation do not provide the
conditions necessary for either an armed or a diplomatic action in the
22

views within the Polish national movement over which circumstances would
warrant a bid for power. Most famously, shortly after the start of the Russo-

20
Revoliutsiia naoborot: Sredniaia Aziia mezhdu padeniem tsarskoi imperii
i obrazovaniem SSSR, translated from Italian by Nikolai Okhotin (2003; repr., Moscow:
Zvenia, 2007), 12.
21

tional Democratic Party in 1897.
Roman Dmowski: Party, Tactics, Ideology, 18951907 (Boul-
22
der, CO: East European Monographs, 1980), 80.

60 JOSHUA SANBORN
Socialist Party to ask for assistance in starting a rebellion. Just as quickly,

Dmowski rushed across three continents to plead with the Japanese to refuse
23
All parties, however, were agreed that the optimal time for open agitation
for Polish independence would be a war between the partitioning powers.24
For Eastern European nationalists, the Great War was a war of decolonization
even before it began; it was a dreamed-of moment that allowed them to hope
that they might see independence in their lifetimes. This was not only a Polish
desire. We can see the same calculation present among Finnish nationalists as
early as 1844:
In order that resistance be soundly based and achieve the results for
which we strive, it must have a political directionit must be a resis-
tance of the sword. If this sort of resistance were now to be employed,
it would inevitably lead to the destruction of Finland, i.e., the opposite

merely as preparation for revolt, not in the sense that we would be

advantage of any opportunity. The Russians will sooner or later come
to blows with the Turks, who will receive support from the Kirghiz,
the Tatars and the whole of the Caucasus. Poland only awaits such an
opportunity to take up arms. At that moment we too will cry destruc-
tion to the Muscovite from the Finnish morasses. But until that time I
believe that we must refrain from all forms of uproar.25
This sentiment did not dissipate with time. Yrj S. Yrj-Koskinen reminded
his colleagues in October 1901 in the midst of the Finnish conscription crisis
that we, despite our rights, are inevitably the weaker party, and that we must
strive for a tolerable compromise if we do not wish to imperil the position,
even the very existence of the Finnish people.26 Needless to say, Finnish
nationalists did not speak with one voice on this or other questions, but the
Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and

23
(DeKalb: Northern Illinois University

Press, 1996), 115.
24
Roman Dmowski, 79.
25
Finland and Russia,
18081920: From Autonomy to Independence. A Selection of Documents, ed. D. G. Kirby
(London: Macmillan, 1975), 40.
26

tion law, in ibid., 88.
specter of imperial suppression loomed large even for those more radical and
activist than Yrj-Koskinen.
The revolution of 1905 gave hope to many of those radicals, in Finland as
elsewhere. On 9 April 1905 a group of oppositionists met in Geneva to call for
constitutional change in the empire. The Finnish Active Resistance Party was
joined by the Socialist Revolutionary Party (Russia), the Polish Socialist Party,
the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, the Georgian Federalist Revolution-
ary Socialist Party, the Latvian Social Democratic Party, and the Belorussian
Socialist Gromada in calling for a constituent assembly to transform the polity
on the basis of democratic and republican principles. Notably, neither Polish
nor Finnish radical nationalists planned to participate in this future assembly,
since they insisted that they should hold their own constituent assemblies to
decide their own (presumably independent) fates.27 Of course the outcome of
the revolution, with its combination of electoral opportunities and savage re-
pression of those who continued to rebel, dashed these hopes entirely.
The prospects for Ukrainian nationalists were even grimmer. As else-
where, activists formed a series of organizations in the 1890s. The radical Taras
Brotherhood was founded in 1891, but the police rolled it up just two years
later. In 1897, the General Ukrainian Non-Party Democratic Organization was

political party in the empire was institutedthe Revolutionary Ukrainian
Party.28 The Revolutionary Ukrainian Party soon split between those who
favored national independence as the primary goal and those who sought
social revolution above all. As the list of signatories to the Geneva Program
and organizations was common in the period throughout Eastern Europe.

Socialist parties such as the Bund (1897) and the Russian Social Democratic
Party (1898) were formed at the exact same time as the nationalist groups
these organizations. As Robin Okey perceptively remarked in his study of

the Habsburg Empire, the overlap was probably greater for citizens than it
was for squabbling revolutionaries: [a]t the popular level nationalism was

possible for the masses of contemporary parlance to prioritise social issues
29 The period
27

A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples, 2nd ed. (Toronto:
28
University of Toronto Press, 2010), 402.

29
The Habsburg Monarchy, 397. See here also Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge
of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA:
62 JOSHUA SANBORN
between 190508 saw many of these socialist/nationalist parties become open
nor the subsequent hesitant engagement with electoral politics demonstrably

strengthened the Ukrainian nationalist movement. As Robert Magocsi has

ing with and educating the population at large in a Ukrainian national spirit,
and they remained on the fringes of politics and society in the Ukrainian
lands as a result.30
Thus, sober calculations of the relative armed might of nationalist groups
and the mighty Russian Empire always ended with the same depressing
result. Nationalists still had years of work to do even to convince their co-
nationals of a shared project, much less the need for a violent uprising. And
even if they succeeded in their cultural work, could they defeat the Russian

proven able to defend itself against independence movements, and both the
Russian state and the Russian military had strengthened in the intervening
years. Nationalists could not achieve their ends on their own. All they could
hope for was a major war between the great empires of Central and Eastern
Europe.
State Failure
Though many nationalists anticipated that the Great War would be a war of
decolonization, none of them foresaw exactly how that process would unfold.
Mainly, they thought that the removal of imperial control would either occur
due to military defeat and the occupation of their lands by another power or
that independence would be won at the negotiating table upon the conclusion
of the war. Their task, as a result, would be to choose the winning side, to
force wartime concessions, and to ensure that promises were kept at the

quered, he also recognized that the partitioning powers would have much
greater power and authority amongst my countrymen than I should.31 He
to win independence by force as to masculinize the Polish public: I wanted

Stanford University Press, 1993).

30
A History of Ukraine, 407. See also Alexei Millers essay in this volume.
The Memories of a Polish
31
Revolutionary and Soldier, trans. and ed. D. R. Gillie (1931; New York: AMS, 1971), 185.
secretly in corners by well brought-up children. I wanted Poland, who had
of her own soldiers.32

his men to Kielce. The response, however, was tepid. The only Poles who
marched with them to serve precisely this purpose. The wise townspeople of
Kielce stayed inside, well away from the dangerous provocation, and Russian
33
It was neither Polish nationalists nor occupying German armies who dealt

Nicholas II, who declared martial law in all territories west of the Dnieper
River and other territories as far east as St. Petersburg on 29 July 1914.34 All

Headquarters (Stavka) rather than to their ministerial chiefs in the capital. The
intent, plainly, was to streamline chains of command in the area and to ensure
that military needs were given priority for the duration of the war. When Nich-
olas signed the decree, he apparently still envisioned taking the top position
at General Headquarters himself, but within days he had bowed to the logic
of appointing his cousin, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, instead. This
as well. The decree immediately gave ultimate authority to a body (General

Headquarters) that did not yet exist. It would be two weeks before General
reported to heads of the regional military districts instead.35 Even when Gen-
the titanic and rapidly developing clashes with the Central Powers rather than

was created under the leadership of Prince N. L. Obolenskii. He was assigned
32

Gods Playground: A History of Poland, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia
33
University Press, 1982), 2: 382.

34

Occupation and Social Unrest: Daily Life in Russian Poland at the Start of World
War I, in
, ed. Golfo

4358.

35
Jahrbcher fr Geschichte Osteuropas 22, 3 (1974): 390.

64 JOSHUA SANBORN

charge of a territorial expanse larger than Germany.36
The replacement of the ministerial structure of the empire with a handful
streamlining to those who believed that the new system would eliminate the
bureaucratic obstacles that could hinder the prosecution of the war. Ultimately,
however, the decision to impose martial law on such a large area appears sim-
ply to have been not thought through carefully. Or rather, it was initiated by
war.37 These men appear to have believed that after the declaration of martial

but ultimately functioning as they had before the war. In some ways and in

not instantly dematerialize in all places at once.
But the decree of martial law had broken the machine of imperial gover-

packed up their things and evacuated to Warsaw. Gendarmes and other

as well, sometimes disguising themselves as women in order to do so.38

civilian administration for another month. It was not local military command-
the war. If they interacted with local towns and villages at all it was with the
purpose of exploitation, not governing. The answer was either that no one
was governing or that local notables, most of them Polish nationalists, took
control.
36

Russia, 1914-1915 (Ph.D. diss., University of Nebraska, 1972), 1114.
37
250 dnei v tsarskoi stavke: Vospominaniia, memuary (Minsk: Kharvest,
2003), 2: 265.

38

Warsaw governor general, 6 August 1914).

the declaration of war and stayed for three weeks. They arrested the captain
of the police and disarmed and dispersed the rest. With the old civilian police
and after the German occupation. Russian military forces did no policing
either. For most of the Polish border region, the only Russian army presence
was a detachment of Cossacks that had 80 kilometers to patrol, and they had
39 In towns spared foreign occupation,

40 The new
bodies of self-governance struggled mightily. Due to prewar repression, they
were overwhelming.41 Still, they did their best to create military hospitals,
42

completely helpless in the face of two marauding armies. Soon, hoping to
coordinate solutions and resources, and also seeing a political opportunity,

war zone.43 Despite reluctance from the imperial authorities, Dmowskis
party led the way in forming this new Polish national body.44 Needless to say,
this transformation was not the result of a long-term nationalist strategy. It
was instead an opportunistic response to the surprising fact that the imperial
border regions.
What of those cities and towns placed under martial law that were not (at

posts, but governance began to change for the worse. Much of the blame here
can be laid upon General Headquarters, which did not pair humility with
the scarce resources it devoted to the task of civilian governance. Instead, it
39

f. 215, op. 1, d. 167, ll. 2122ob.
40

41
governor general, 22 August 1914, GARF f. 215, op. 1, d. 174, ll. 17273.
42

215, op. 1, d. 167, l. 26.
43

44
Gods Playground, 2: 38081.
66 JOSHUA SANBORN

agement by General Headquarters was most obvious in terms of its economic
policies. To be fair, the war quickly generated economic problems that even

of the many areas in which bad policies imposed upon occupied territories
caused equally pernicious results when adopted far from the front lines. This
process started early. On 26 August, the Tarnopol governor (Chartorizhskii)
and unscrupulous raising of prices was forbidden and would be punished

45 On 17
September Count Bobrinskii, the governor general of [occupied] Galicia, pub-
lished a broader economic decree intended to solve some of the problems
mentioned by Chartorizhskii. Among other provisions, Bobrinskii tried to

kopecks for every Austrian crown (a rate that established a much stronger
ruble than the market had done) and by promising punishment for those who

established by municipal authorities.46
would become a familiar feature of wartime life, as this crude mechanism for
deep into the heart of the country as well. This system of price controls was a
failure. It was a recipe for shortages (which soon followed), for the expansion
of a black market (which duly occurred), and for repressive measures to deal
with all of the above.
So we see a rapid process of state weakening in areas threatened by enemy

government further from the lines. The disaster of the Great Retreat in 1915
would accelerate these processes, dramatically and fundamentally in those
regions occupied by the Germans, but also in the regions that formed the new
45

Political and Civilian Administration of the Supreme Commander), op. 1, d. 12, l. 27
(mandatory directive issued by Chartorizhskii, 26 August 1914).
46

1914, RGVIA f. 2005, op. 1, d. 12, l. 16.
martial law zone, as the political system spun wildly about in the last year and
a half of Romanov rule.47
Still, for much of the empire, including Finland and Left Bank Ukraine,
the process of state failure was much less pronounced up until the moment
of the February Revolution, when the imperial state as such collapsed. Some
radical activists had seized upon the war as their long-awaited moment to
strike. Finnish nationalists appealed to the Germans to open a front on Fin-

them to carry out military tasks in the event of an active advance into Finland
or a Finnish uprising.48 This was the preferred mechanism of most of the

groups from enemy empires. The Russians formed a Czech Legion. There
were Polish Legions on both sides of the front. And the same held true for
Ukraine.49
the outcome of the Great War, but they would come to play a more important
role in developing paramilitarism in the cusp years between war and civil
war, and they would later serve as the basis of many national mythologies.
In no way, however, were these legions or the political groups that supported
them strong enough to seriously destabilize the empires they fought against.
Thus Finland shared the political experience of Russia proper in that state
failure was to occur as a result of the Revolution. In this respect it was dis-

Revolution that was the decisive moment of state failure. The governor general

some units went on a marauding binge.50

As elsewhere, the crippling of the imperial state brought violence more
immediately than liberation to the Finnish people. The initial political steps
47

Retreat of 1915 and the Transformation of Russian Society, forthcoming in the volume
of this series dedicated to Russias Home Front.
48
Finland and Russia,
13839.
49

Middle Eastern Studies 34, 4 (1998):
177200; Oleh S. Fedyshyn, Germanys Drive to the East and the Ukrainian Revolution,
19171918 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971), 15.
Finland and the Russian Revolution, 19171922 (Athens: University of
50
Georgia Press, 1958), 13.

68 JOSHUA SANBORN
of Finnish politicians were hesitant. Mostly, they demanded autonomy rather

than independence. As the scale of the Russian collapse became clearer and
the Great Russian obtuseness of the liberal leadership of the Provisional
Government became more frustrating, Finnish revolutionaries became less
restrained. Nevertheless, no forcible measures were taken to assert Finnish
independence until after the Bolshevik Revolution. Even the Law on Supreme

parliamentary democracy than a bid for full independence.51 Still, it would

in 1917. The formal status of independence and of Finnish sovereignty was not
yet resolved, but authority was dwindling away. Strikes turned into violent
clashes not only in the cities but in the countryside as well, where farmers in
some instances were forcibly prevented from milking their cows, and stab-
bings and shootings were commonplace.52

gan with the imposition of martial law, developed over the course of the Great
Retreat, and then culminated in the February Revolution. It was in 1917 that
the crisis of authority and governance already experienced by communities
in frontline areas metastasized into a failure of the state on an empire-wide
scale.
Social Collapse

out the former empire. Families displaced from their homes by the Great

impoverished communities, taking young and old alike. And then there

local and intimate basis throughout the years that followed the Revolution.

and requisitioning teams, and daily acts of brutality came to condition the
Civil War experience. There is plainly no space here to catalog all of these
manifestations of social disaster. What I would like to stress instead is that
the process of decolonization produced conditions ripe for civil war, and that
51
A Concise History of Finland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 159.
52
Finland and the Russian Revolution, 14.
civil wars are precisely those most likely to be accompanied by deep and
lasting social disaster. There is now a substantial political science literature
of social disaster such as mass migration and economic ruin. Most of these
argue that violence and the resulting lack of security cause the catastrophic
53

persuade the Germans to push the Russians out of Finland and then, when

brigades, just as the Polish police in 1914 had been, to avoid suspicion) and

not just from the right but also from the center and even parts of the left.54
At the same time, Red Guard units were created in a parallel fashion to those

support from Germany, while the Red Guard received similar patronage from
the Bolsheviks in Petrograd after the October Revolution. Each side accused
the other of treason to the Finnish people and downplayed its own entangle-
ment with imperial powers. It was the formal establishment of Finnish inde-

place in Viipuri that would quickly escalate into a short but brutal civil war
that brought both German and Russian troops into action before the Whites
emerged victorious.

cation of the tsar, politicians in Kiev, not even to speak of the rest of the
country, had divided into three major groups: those who supported the Provi-
sional Government, those who immediately formed soviets, and those who
established a base of Ukrainian nationalism in the Central Rada.55 These

53
Refugees and the Study of Civil War, Civil Wars 9, 2 (June 2007): 12741; on the
durability of social pathologies after civil war, see Nazih Richani, State Capacity in

Civil Wars 12, 4 (December 2010): 43155.
54
Finland and the Russian Revolution, 16.
55
A History of Ukraine, 501.
70 JOSHUA SANBORN
forces warily engaged with one another until the summer, when the Rada
proclaimed autonomy (not yet independence) on 23 June 1917, spooking the
Provisional Government and, more broadly, Russian liberals not yet ready to
give up on the idea of a Great Russia. To a much greater degree than elsewhere,
the disintegration of the Russian army in the aftermath of the failed Kerensky

was a largely successful push to create ethnic units of Ukrainians, but above

countryside, linked up with peasants looking to seize land and burn manor
houses, and generally made violence the political coin of the day. By the time the
October Revolution came, Ukraine was successfully paramilitarized. Violence

by February, the Red Army had established an upper hand, capturing Kiev
and executing thousands of their enemies.56 At the same time, however, dele-
gates from the Rada were successfully concluding peace negotiations with
the Germans at Brest-Litovsk, which would bring the support of the German
army to bear. These troops pushed out the Bolsheviks, but they stayed only
until the broader armistice in November. Needless to say, political violence on
an even greater scale erupted then.

promised autonomy or independence at the end of the war, but ever since 1915,
it had been subject to military occupation by the Germans. Though formal

informed the German occupation authorities that they should leave Warsaw
before their lives were endangered. The Germans took his advice, but again
the immediate outcome of independence was six wars over the following two

during the process of decolonization.
Conclusion
As the Polish-Ukrainian-Soviet War of 191920 demonstrates, the process of

decolonization in Eastern Europe was marked by the conjuncture of many

colonization shared many of the same features that the African and Asian
56
(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), 73.
decolonizing movements did. Just as Shipway wanted to locate decolonization

at the level of event, so too should historians of the Great War in Europe.
There was obvious cross-fertilization between nationalist movements (and
indeed between imperial states) in the region prior to the war, and the war
itself was an extremely complicated dance between imperial states looking to
destabilize one another and political movements desperate for help but unsure
of the outcome of the war. Germany and Russia were the main imperial actors

as well.
The literature on decolonization was focused for a time on competing
metropolitan and peripheral accounts of the end of empire. One of the
reasons for the popularity of works that focus on process or the event
is surely that this strategy allows historians to work their way out of this
historiographical dead end. It has proven more productive to examine the
interplay between not just the periphery and the metropole, but between
multiple peripheries and metropoles at the moment of imperial crisis.57 Only
this sort of complex account will do justice to the events in Eastern Europe
(and elsewhere, notably the Middle East) in the years of the Great War. It
was a striking conjuncture, not just due to the fact that the lands in ques-
tion were being overrun by a titanic imperial clash, but also because the
rise of radical socialism cut across these national projects, leading some to-
wards internationalism at the same time others were focused on national
prerogatives and boundaries. The success of the Bolsheviks and the survival
of the Soviet project during World War II ensured that when the next great
wave of decolonization came, it too would be marked by a three-dimensional
struggle along nationalist, socialist, and imperialist lines. In this and many
other important ways, the decolonization of Europe was a part of the same
event as the decolonization of Africa and Asia.
57

wide, the sun never set upon its crises. The historian who studies any of these crises
in isolation does so at his peril, for their consequences tended to interlock. Gallagher,
Nationalisms and the Crisis of Empire, 19191922, Modern Asian Studies 15, 3 (1981):
35568.
The Role of the First World War in the Competition between
Ukrainian and All-Russian Nationalism
Alexei I. Miller
The western borderland of the Russian Empire was a laboratory of national-

isms over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was here that the
empire faced its earliest and most powerful challengefrom Polish nation-
alism. It was also here that the empire began to utilize nationalist tools in
its own policy, however haphazardly. Russian nationalism emerged as an
ideological current that was independent yet enmeshed in imperial structures,
in large part as a response to the problems of the western borderlands.1 It
was here that Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian nationalisms emerged
in the crucible of Russian-Polish competition during the second half of the

on a small yet substantive corpus of studies, discusses the situation in the
Ukrainian lands on the eve of the war. The second part deals with the period
of the war itself; it is an essay that aims to address certain queries that have
remained largely overlooked in the scholarly literature. I am merely posing
questions and proposing hypotheses from the perspective of a historian
assumptions, my own included, under scrutiny with the aim of bringing the

ment of the various nationalisms in the western borderlands, it is vital to have
a clear understanding of the circumstances on the eve of the war. However, we
aspects of the situation in the region in question have remained understudied.

Furthermore, there is a strong tendency in national historiographies to over-
emphasize the strength of nationalism in the imperial borderlands.
In their goals and methods Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian na-
tionalisms remained almost exclusively cultural movements until 1905. In the
1
Nationalizing
Empires, ed. Stefan Berger and Miller (Budapest: Central European University Press,
2014), 30968.
74 ALEXEI I. MILLER
wake of the 17 October Manifesto, a number of political parties prioritized

espoused the ideals of a federation. Some of these parties had candidates
elected to the First and Second State Dumas.2 However, the surge of nationalist
party activity from 1905 to 1907 subsided thereafter, partly due to increased
administrative pressure and an inability to mobilize mass support. For ex-
ample, the number of Ukrainian periodicals, although quite large in 1906,
had fallen drastically by 1908.3 The only remaining newspaper, Rada

only thanks to one big sponsor.4

anti-Polish measures the government introduced after the January Uprising
of 1863, but it remained quite important nonetheless. Polish activists failed to
establish lasting cooperation with the Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Lithuanian
national movements. Thus, the Poles remained the quintessential other for
the smaller borderland nationalisms.
After 1907, Russian nationalism developed most actively in the southwest-
ern territories, in the area of present-day Ukraine. The idea of the all-Russian

circles addressed as Mazepists (mazepintsy), variously took the position of
enemy in the southwestern territories, depending on the circumstances.5 The
main struggle for identity in this region was between Russian nationalists

while the peasants favored the term khokhols.6
Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow:

2
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006).

3
in
Rethinking Ukrainian History, ed. Ivan L. Rudnytsky and John-Paul Himka (Edmonton:
Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, 1981).
4

5

M. B. Smolin, ed., Ukrainskii separatizm v Rossii: Ideologiia natsionalnogo raskola (Moscow:
Moskva, 1998); Smolin, ed., Ukrainskaia bolezn russkoi natsii (Moscow: Imperskaia
traditsiia, 2004).
6

arkhii Rossiiskoi imperii, in RossiiaUkraina: Istoriia vzaimootnoshenii, ed. A. I. Miller,
COMPETITION BETWEEN UKRAINIAN AND ALL-RUSSIAN NATIONALISM 75
Governmental organs actively supported Russian nationalists, especially

during the tenure of Petr Stolypin, when the number of such organizations in
the cities and in the countryside rose steadily. For instance, the membership
of the Union of the Russian People in Volhynia far exceeded 100,000 on the

the peasants. Large Russian nationalist organizations that united the well-

alists (KCRN), established in 1908 under the patronage of Stolypin, was

State Dumas. Soon, the KCRN began to lay claim to the overall leadership of
Russian nationalist organizations in the empire, citing, among other things,
its successes in election campaigns. Its leader, Anatolii Savenko, wrote as early
as 1908 that
while Great Russian guberniia

Palace almost exclusively Russian nationalists. While Great Russian
Moscow and St. Petersburg are the mainstays of the revolution, the

movement.7
This point of view was considered perfectly legitimate on the eve of the war.
The memorial to Stolypin unveiled in Kiev in 1913 in front of the opera house,
where he was murdered in 1911, was inscribed with the late prime ministers

the west of Russia will not fade and that it will soon shine on all of Russia.
Combined with tough administrative pressure exercised by the government,
the strong presence of Russian nationalists in the area led to a dramatic drop
in representation for non-Russian nationalists in the Duma.
The recent publication of several important works on the history of Rus-
sian right-wing nationalism notwithstanding, the phenomenon remains
understudied.8 This is especially true of the history of Russian right-wing na-
V. F. Reprintsev, and B. N. Floria (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kultury, 1997); A. Kotenko,

O. Martyniuk, and A. I. Miller, Maloross, in Poniatie o Rossii: K istoricheskoi semantike
imperskogo perioda, ed. Miller, D. Sdvizhkov, and I. Shirle (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe
obozrenie, 2012), 2: 392443.
7
Kievlianin,
16 November 1908.
8
Pravye partii v Rossii, 19111917 (Moscow: R, 2001); S. A. Stepanov,
Chernaia sotnia v Rossii: 19051914 gg. (Moscow: Izd-vo VZPI A/o Rosvuznauka,
76 ALEXEI I. MILLER
Over the course of the entire postrevolutionary period, and especially

after 1907, the Kadets (Constitutional Democrats) had to seek support from the
peripheral nationalists in the borderlands in their struggle against the Russian
nationalist right. An aspect of this tacticin a certain sense the price the
Kadets had to paywas support for the reorganization of the empire accord-
ing to the principle of national autonomy. However, the alliance of Kadets
and borderland nationalists was purely one of convenience. The two sides

refused to countenance federative ideas. In these circumstances, the Kadets

had no realistic chance of implementation.
The tactic employed by Kadets in the Dumadealing with the threat
of radical borderland nationalism by making moderate concessionsfaced
unrelenting opposition from the right. To this end, during a discussion of the
Ukrainian question in February 1914, Kadet leader Pavel Miliukov stated, Be
afraid of Dontsov! If you carry on with this policy, there will be hundreds,
thousands, millions of Dontsovs.9 Kiev Club of Russian Nationalists (KCRN )
leader Savenko, who was Miliukovs main right-wing opponent in this debate,
warned that the Ukrainian movement represented a serious, genuine threat
to the unity of the Russian Empire. On the question of the recognition of
Ukraine as a separate nation, distinct from Russia, Savenko noted: Once a
people is [recognized as] distinct, it should, according to the dominant idea
of the century, enjoy the right to self-determination; it must have its own
cultural-national and political existence. He called for non-interference in
the governments struggle against the Ukrainian movement and insisted

Ukrainian movement as divisive for the one, unitary, 100-million strong
people. He further emphasized that the loss of the non-Orthodox, non-Slavic
(inorodcheskie) borderlands would not be nearly as dangerous to Russia as the
splintering of the Russian nation.10 Right-wing nationalists gladly brought
peasants to the Duma, who criticized Ukrainiandom on behalf of the entire
2005); I. V. Omelianchuk, Chernosotennoe dvizhenie v Rossiiskoi imperii (19011914):

(Kyiv: MAUP, 2009). See also the politically engaged but informative work
by A. D. Stepanov and A. A. Ivanov, eds., Chernaia sotnia: Istoricheskaia entsiklopediia
19001917 (Moscow: Institut russkoi tsivilizatsii, 2008).
9

nationalism.
, pt. 2 (St.
10
Petersburg, 1914), cols. 90115, 92733.


Russian nation.11
In general, the western borderlands were an unstable equilibrium before
the war. Local authorities could not realistically hope to uproot non-Russian
nationalists, yet they were not willing to compromise. In the years before the

pressure with active propaganda. The immediate, existential, and inevitable

ters contemporaneous activist literature. For instance, the key activist of
the Ukrainian movement in Kiev, Yevhen Chikalenko, wrote the following
omoskovleny] to such
an extent that only a small percentage of the population has any interest in
Ukrainiandom whatsoever. All cities and towns in Ukraine are thoroughly
12 He also wrote to his associate Petro Stebnitsky in St. Petersburg:
what we can achieve now with a few thousand [rubles] will be impossible to
13
The widespread idea that the war eliminated barriers for the already
steadfast Ukrainian movement is untenable. In this essay, we cannot assess

Orthodox populations throughout contemporary Ukraine. We can only note
that the struggle between all-Russian and Ukrainian nationalisms (as well as
the even weaker Belarusian version) did not have a predetermined outcome.

favor of all-Russian nationalism, while the non-political, non-national masses
remained an object of this struggle.
11

propaganda because we never have and never will consider ourselves non-Russian.
Regardless of how cleverly the accommodating Miliukovs try to push us towards a

Great Russians, are, for all intents and purposes, Russians. Gosudarstvennaia duma, III
, pt. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1910), col. 3081. We are
Russians, and no one has the right to say otherwise, asserted Matvei S. Andreichuk,
peasant MP from Volhynia.
otchety, pt. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1910), col. 1280.
12
Shchodennik, 1: 19071917 (Kyiv: Tempora, 2004), 4748 and
28182.
Listuvannia, 19011922 roki (Kyiv:
13
Tempora, 2008), 72.

78 ALEXEI I. MILLER
The Beginning of the War

in imperial patriotism and Russian nationalism. The dimensions of mass
political mobilization of the military-patriotic type are still understudied.
politics in general and, in this context, in nationalist sentiment, among rural

as well as urban populations.14

war enhanced the rise of Russian nationalism.

administrative persecution increased sharplymany periodicals and local
centers of the Ukrainian cultural organization Prosvita were shut down,
and several activists, including Mykhailo Hrushevskyi, were sent into exile.
Some national activists sought to demonstrate loyalty to the empire, partly
in the hope of evading repression, partly in order to win concessions from
the government at the end of the war in the event of Russian victory.15 On
the other hand, the war created an atmosphere of grave uncertainty. For the
separatist-minded borderland nationalists, it became not so much an impetus
for increased pragmatic action, as a spur of the imagination that fed fanciful
plans about their respective nations place in the postwar reorganization of
Europe.
In the early autumn of 1914, the Russian army occupied East Galicia, in-
cluding Lvov/Lemberg. The annexation of Galicia had been one of the key
Russian aims before the war, especially for irredentists who described the

same time, Russian nationalists expected the occupation of Galicia to under-
mine the Ukrainian movement. For example, when outlining Russias aims in
the forthcoming war in 1912, Petr Struve emphasized the need to reunify and
reunite within the empire all parts of the Russian people, i.e., annex Rus-
sian Galicia, asserting that the incorporation of Galicia was necessary for
14

Nation: A Reexamination, Slavic Review 59, 2 (Summer 2000): 26789; Sanborn, Drafting
the Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 19051925 (DeKalb:

Citizenship: The Russian Adult Education Movement and the First World War, Slavic
Review 59, 2 (Summer 2000): 290315.
15

ticular preferred loyalty to the empire as the lesser evil.

Russian tribe has created the ugly, so-called Ukrainian question.16
By the time of the Russian occupation, Galicia had already become subject
to harsh Austrian governmental measures. More than 10,000 Ruthenians the
government suspected of pro-Russian sympathies had been deported to the
concentration camp Talerhof. Altogether during the war more than 20,000
people passed through Talerhof and another camp at Teresienstadt, which

were executed.17 Simultaneously, the Austrian government created the

(Ukrainski Sichovi Striltsi), which swore loyalty to Austria-Hungary on 3
September 1914.
In turn, the Russian occupational authorities shut down all Ukrainian
periodicals. They also arrested and deported to Russia a substantial number
of Greek Catholic priests, including Metropolitan Andryi Sheptitskyi.18 Alto-
gether, nearly 2,000 people were subject to administrative deportation to the
central provinces of Russia.19

analyzing present and potential loyalty, imperial structures viewed ethnic
identity as an important, if not paramount, factor. In a situation characterized
by intense competition between various nationalist projects and the simulta-

of identity by all means and bolster loyal ones at the same time.
The Setbacks of 191516 and Their Consequences
The western borderlands of the Russian Empire became the main theater of
military operations on the Eastern Front during the First World War. Following
the German breakthrough at Gorlice-Tarnw in May 1915, the Russian army
Russkaia mysl,
16
no. 1 (1912): 6586.

17
Terezin i Talergof: K 50-letnei godovshchine tragedii galitsko-russkogo naroda
(Moscow: Soft-izdat, 2001).
18

19

the Russian civil administration in Galicia, mentions 1,962 persons who were exiled to
Russia. See A. Iu. Bakhturina, Politika Rossiiskoi Imperii v Vostochnoi Galitsii v gody Pervoi
mirovoi voiny (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 2000), 193.
80 ALEXEI I. MILLER

Galicia, which it had occupied in 1914, but a substantial part of the western
borderlands of the empire as well. These defeats left no trace of the patriotic
fervor of the early days of the war. The sudden shifting of the front eastwards
had important consequences for the development of the nationalisms of the
western borderlands.
Researchers have pointed out several factors that led to the mobilization
of ethnicity during the war.20 Among these, the phenomenon of mass refugees
21 Some people evacuated on their own, while others
were forced against their will. Many Russian nationalists, most importantly

nationalist organizations. Understandably, Austro-German occupation au-
thorities did not leave Russian nationalists much freedom of action. At the

tures emerged among non-Russian refugee groups from the Baltic, which
subsequently played an important role in national movements.
The Central Powers created a new administrative structure in the occupied

control. To this day, there are no in-depth studies of Viennas occupation

policy in this region. Even the latest volume edited by Austrian historians of-
fers virtually nothing on the subject.22 Thanks to Vejas Liulevicius, we know
more about German occupation policy, especially that of Ober Ost, which con-

studied Ober Ost
the development of borderland nationalism. The new administration carried
out an ethnic categorization. Ober Ost civil servants put together an Atlas of
the Division of Peoples of Western Russia, claiming it demonstrated that the
state-structure, which before the war was considered a uniform Great Russian
empire, is to a large extent formed out of territories of independent ethnicities,
who do not stand closer to the Muscovite nature than to us.23
20

Post-
, ed. Barnet R. Rubin and Jack L. Snyder
(London: Routledge, 1998), 3457.
21
ington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
22
Die Ukraine zwischen Selbstbestimmung und Fremdherrschaft
19171922 (Graz: Leykam, 2011).
War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and
23
German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 117.
The German authorities language policy sought primarily to create a

vocabulary of administrative and government terms for the local vernacular.
Schools were organized according to the principle of nationality, i.e., on the
basis of native tongue. However, the Germans soon began introducing German
alist activists to open new schools. In addition, laws entered the books as soon
as they were published in German. The Russian language was excluded from
both the administration and the public sphere generally.

surprised to discover the existence of the Belarusian people and amazed at
the underdeveloped state of Belarusian culture and sense of national iden-
tity. However, the occupation authorities soon came to the conclusion that

identity through cultural policy.24 In general, the Germans tried to play the
role of tutors and leaders of the local peoples in Ober Ost. To this end, they
devised school curricula that were supposed to foster respect for Germany
and German culture as an elder power.
As Liulevicius points out, cultural policy was in fact the military states
nationalities policy, bracketing native cultures in German institutions im-
posed from above: press, schools, and work rooms. The German concept
for education, , was taken to its literal meaning, of forming. As a
and
no one else.25 The Kultur Program of Ober Ost

26 The activity of
the German occupation administration in the western borderlands of the Rus-
sian Empire was an aspect of a new German geopolitical vision of this space as
part of a that would have Germany as its dominant center.27 Local
activists were now trying to adapt their visions of the future to the emerging
geopolitical reality by imagining the place for their groups in German-
24

25

26

27
(Berlin: Reimer, 1915).
82 ALEXEI I. MILLER
dominated Eastern Europe.28 Vienna had its own plans for the resolution of
the Ukrainian question, which are yet to be the subject of a thorough analysis.

transferred to Russian Ukraine. Among other things, they set up schools with
young, educated female teachers that had been recruited from Galicia.
POW policy was another important factor in the rise of nationalism in the
western borderlands. Approximately three and a half million soldiers from
the tsars army had been captured.29 POW camp administration paid special

Ukrainian POWs were located in Rastadt and Salzwedel, and the Austrian
camp was in Freistadt.30 They housed up to 400,000 people. Functionaries

Liberation of Ukraine, conducted propaganda activities, taught the Ukrainian
language, and published Ukrainian periodicals. Approximately 40,000 of
the more responsive POWs were organized in Ukrainian formations with a
special military uniform.
In his forthcoming study based on the archives of the Union for the
Liberation of Ukraine, Mark von Hagen describes, among other things, the

ing to single out Ukrainians among the general mass of POWs, due to the fact
that the term Ukrainian meant nothing to the vast majority.
Propaganda work among POWs also took place in Russia. In 1916, the
authorities established a Special Political Section of the Ministry of Internal

the Austro-Hungarian army.31

stresses the important role of POW camps in the dissolution of the Habsburg

28
prince to become king of Lithuania. See more in Dolbilov and Miller, Zapadnye okrainy
Rossiiskoi imperii, 41516.
29
Voennye usiliia Rossii v mirovoi voine
izdatelei, 1939). Golovins estimate is the highest; alternative estimates come up with
See Rossiia v mirovoi voine 19141918 gg. (v
tsifrakh) (Moscow: Tsentralnoe statisticheskoe upravlenie SSSR, Voenno-statisticheskii
otdel, 1925).
30

the Russian Interior Ministry, Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Imperii (AVPRI) f.
135, op. 474, d. 26.
31

The Romanov Empire and Nationalism: Essays in the Methodology of Historical Research
(Budapest: CEU Press, 2008), chap. 7.
Empire.32
Ukrainian camps in Germany and Austria-Hungary, having correctly assessed
the level of threat they posed to Russian policy in the western borderlands.

camps in Russia, and in Ukrainian camps in Germany and Austria: in Russia,
who had by that time developed national (Czech, Slovak, etc.) identity, while

was on shaping certain national identity.

debated making concessions to the Ukrainian movement in order to bring
some of its leaders over to Russias side. This was a notable development. As the
position of the Ukrainian movement became stronger in the territories under
the control of the Central Powers, Petrograd was forced to acknowledge this
factor in its own policy. This resulted in a number of symbolic concessions to
the Ukrainian movement, which sought to demonstrate the willingness of the
authorities to come to terms with Ukrainian leaders who remained loyal to the

Majest ma donn lordre de vous remercier ainsi que le groupe dUkrainiens
runis en Suisse pour les sentiments expims dans votre tlgramme (His
Majesty has ordered me to thank you as well as Ukrainians gathered in
33 In 1916, there were
plans to open two Ukrainian high schools and organize a visit by the heir to

in case of a new occupation. Draft recommendations for policy towards the
Uniate Church, prepared by the Special Political Department of the Ministry

measures.34 SPO also prepared lists of Ukrainian politicians, including those
in Galicia, who could be induced to come over to the Russian side, if they were
convinced that only Russia could unite all the Ukrainian lands. The support
the Central Powers gave to the Ukrainian movement thus had the knock-

nothing new in this tactic; as early as the 1840s60s, the authorities showed

32
Corps, 18481918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

33

474, d. 27, l. 12.
34
The Romanov Empire and Nationalism, chap. 7.
84 ALEXEI I. MILLER
leniency towards Ukrainian nationalists in order not to drive them over to the
Polish side.35
The years 191516 saw a serious shift in relative strength in the struggle
between the All-Russian and Ukrainian nationalisms. During the evacuation
of Galicia, more than 100,000 locals who had collaborated with the Russian
administration or sympathized with Russia joined the retreating Russian
army.36 Soon, the majority of activists from Russian nationalist organizations
had to leave the part of the western borderlands the Central Powers had occu-
pied. The new occupation authorities dismantled the organizational structure
of Russian nationalism in these territories. At the same time, Berlin and Vienna
oping the organizational structure of the Ukrainian movement. Russian

military setbacks, the retreat of the army, and the measures German and
Austrian occupation authorities took helped undermine the prestige Russia
enjoyed among the non-politicized part of the local population, particularly
the peasantry.
1917: Collapse of the Imperial Center and Nationalization of the Army
With the fall of the monarchy in February 1917, three new and powerful mobi-
lizing factors for borderland nationalists emerged. First, even at this time the
monarchy remained the legitimate imperial center for a substantial part of the
traditionally-minded peasantry, including the 100,000-odd peasant members
of the Union of the Russian People in Volhynia. This conventional source of
legitimacy and loyalty was now lost.
Second, the weak Provisional Government called for the formation of a
new administration in the countryside, without, however, suggesting clear
principles of organization or making its stance on autonomy and/or federation

had been curtailed, this provided regional actors with a new opportunity for
political action.
The Ukrainian Question: The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the

35
Nineteenth Century (Budapest: Central European University Press), 2003.

36

Galicia were concentrated in Volhynia. By autumn 1915, 40,000 Galician refugees were
reported to be in Kursk guberniia. In August 1915 every day 3,000 Galician Ruthenians
were coming to Kiev by train. See I. V. Kuchera, Dobrovilna i prymusova migratsiia
naselennia Schidnoi Galichyny v roky Pershoi svitovoi viiny, vyp. 19 (Kyiv: Gileia, 2009),
1016; O. Serdiuk, Bizenstvo v Ukraini pid chas Pershoi svitovoi viiny, in Problemy
(Kyiv: Instytut Istorii Ukrainy, 2002), 4: 11132.

led the High Command to propose its nationalization. Following an order by
Commander in Chief General Lavr Kornilov, the ukrainization and belarusi-
zation of the army corps commenced. Kornilov hoped that this would shield

measure to the actions of the Central Powers on the Ukrainian and Belarusian

territory, whereas Belarusian ones appeared primarily on the Romanian and

from playing the active role ukrainized units played.
Pavlo Skoropadskyi, the hetman of Ukraine in 1918 and a loyal imperial
general in 1917, recalled in 1919 how he was tasked with the ukrainization of
his corps:
I told Kornilov that I had just been in Kiev, where I observed Ukrainian
activists. They made a negative impression on me. The corps could
potentially become a major factor in the development of Ukrainiandom

towards this issue revealed his lack of knowledge and understanding.

one should treat tactfully and without exploitation the sincere national
sense the Ukrainians possessed.37
Skoropadskyi was convinced that there was no pressing need to take such
a step in the summer of 1917, and he tried to make the danger of ukrainizing
the army evident. However, the disciplined general still carried out Kornilovs
directive, which soon resulted in Skoropadskyi becoming the hetman of
Ukraine under German protection.
The creation of national units had huge consequences for Ukraine,
Belarus, and Bessarabia, especially after the Bolshevik coup. The period of
revolutionary crisis transformed the army from a supporter of the old regime
to an independent actor. In all empires undergoing crisis, the army leadership
uses their units, usually the last organized force, to contain the situation in a
more limited territorial sphere, often in support of the national idea, once they
37
Spohady, kinets 1917hruden 1918 (Kyiv: Institut ukrainskoi

Skoropadskyi recalled the following about his youth and family: We understood
Ukraine as a glorious national past which, however, had nothing to do with the present.
In other words, there were no political plans for the restoration of Ukraine. My whole
family was deeply devoted to the Russian tsars, while also emphasizing that we were

expression went. Skoropadskyi, Moe detstvo na Ukraine, in Spohady, 387.
86 ALEXEI I. MILLER
realize the old regime is beyond salvation.38 This became especially important
after October 1917, when the legitimate center of power in the empire vanished
irretrievably. The considerable number of Russian nationalists of all shades
who collaborated with the government of Hetman Skoropadskyi is the best
In 1918, many desperate anti-Bolshevik Russians were dreaming about the

German occupation of Petrograd as the only possible salvation. The Germans

and Ober Ost
entertained the notion of marching on Petrograd, deposing the Bolsheviks,

and sponsoring a pro-German, conservative Russian government. But they
had managed to occupy the entire Donetsk basin and establish Ukrainian
authorities there.39
At the beginning of the war, the competing governments threw away the
previous conventional limitations. The macrosystem of continental empires in
Europes east had remained internally stable for a long time because they did
not strive to destroy one another. In fact, they needed each other to deal with
the heritage of the partitions of the Polish Commonwealth.40 However, over
the course of the war, which quickly assumed the guise of a life-and-death
struggle, the empires actively played the ethnic card against their adversaries.
They encouraged separatism inside the enemy states and introduced repres-
sive measures against disloyal or suspect ethnic groups among their own sub-
jects. These factors took on a special meaning in Ukraine and Belarus, in the
New Major Playersthe Soviets and Poland
Until 1918, the main question facing political activists in the national border-
lands was ascertaining which country would win the war; and after October
38

army as the glue and solvent of the imperial system. I would qualify this by saying
that the army does not become a force of dissolution as long as there is hope for
the preservation of order on an imperial scale. Having lost this hope, however, the
army takes on the role of organizer of the new regime in the separate regions of the
39
Donetsko-Krivorozhskaia respublika: Rasstreliannaia mechta
(Kharkiv: Folio, 2011).
40

in the History of Contiguous Empires on the European Periphery, in Imperiology: From
Empirical Knowledge to Discussing the Russian Empire, ed. Kimitaka Matsuzato (Sapporo:
Slavic Research Center at Hokkaido University, 2006), 1124.

the framework of German hegemony in Eastern Europe. When it became
evident that Germany, too, would be defeated, national movement leaders
quickly turned to the Entente. Unlike Russia and Germany, the Entente
could not control Eastern Europe directly. However, Entente leaders were in

counting on the fall of the Bolsheviks from power and the restoration of
Russia. Consequently, in 1918 the world war in these spaces was gradually
transformed into a series of civil wars distinguished by their class or ethnic

over territories they considered to be their rightful ethnic patrimony (Lviv/
Lww, Wilna/Vilnius). The same is true of Kiev, which had passed from hand
to hand 14 times during the Great War and revolutionary wars. In 191819 it
was often various Ukrainian warlords who claimed the city. The experience of
the weak and unstable Ukrainian states in the western and central parts of the
country (from the hetman state of Skoropadskyi and Petliuras Directorate to
the West Ukrainian Peoples Republic) shows that the mobilizing potential
and organizational capacity of Ukrainian nationalism was rather limited.
Characteristically, Nestor Makhno was able to win considerable support from
the peasantry without utilizing the Ukrainian theme as a chief ideological
concept. These peculiarities are typical of a situation in which the empire
withdraws from its peripheral territories as a result of the collapse of the

about the development of nation building in the east and south of present-
day Ukrainein the regions of Kharkiv, Donbass, and New Russia during the
period under consideration.
Once in control (1918), the Bolsheviks instituted a reign of terror in Ukraine
against the Russian nationalists.41 It was precisely Russian nationalism and
the social forces behind it that the Bolsheviks considered their main enemy up
to the late 1920s.42 We can say that the all-Russian version of national identity,
which was a key element of Russian nationalism during the imperial period,
became orphaned with the fall of the Russian Empire. Many achievements
logic of the Soviet project of territorialization of ethnicity43 and korenizatsiia

41
42
Post-
23, 2 (2007): 15683.
The Geography of Nationalism in Russia and the USSR (Princeton, NJ:
43
Princeton University Press, 1994).

88 ALEXEI I. MILLER
(indigenization).44
gions in the Caucasus, Steppe, and Central Asia was proclaimed wrong, and

brutal repressions as foes of Soviet power, which the majority of them truly
were. The Orthodox Church and clergy, who were also important elements
of Russian presence in the peripheral regions, remained targets of systematic
repression throughout the interwar period all over the USSR. In the western
borderlands the Bolsheviks completed the dismantling of the legacy of impe-
rial policy and prewar Russian nationalism by discarding the concept of a

45 The
terms Russian and Great Russian became synonymous. The Bolsheviks

of the former Romanov Empire. As a quasi-national state, Soviet Ukraine re-
ceived a national territory, a Soviet Ukrainian national identity, and the
infrastructure of a Ukrainian national culture.
The Polish-Soviet War of 1920 was a struggle for control of Eastern Eu-
rope between two new major players, in which Ukrainian forces played a
strictly subordinate role. We can characterize the interwar period as a cold

principle treated Ukraine as a single element in a vast, geostrategic struggle.46
However, the struggle of large empires for control of Eastern Europe, which
placed particular importance on Ukrainian policy, resumed in 1939.47
The view presented above does not contradict the facts historians already
of the proposed interpretation of events. We can merely formulate the main

theses as questions. Can we consider the situation on the eve of the Great

: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet

44
Union, 19231939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

(Moscow:
45
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010).

46
; Timothy Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War:
A Polish Artists Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2005).
47

1918 und 1941/42

the questionTo what extent was the Ukrainian movement of the First
World War period the product of the policies of warring empires that also
legitimate. Who played the crucial role in the struggle between the Ukrainian
and all-Russian projectslocal nationalist movements or the mighty empires

nations are to a large extent the product of imperial competition during the

War Nationalism
Eric Lohr
The Bolshevik Party seized power and began to implement its vision of

1918, the Bolshevik leaders began to use the term war communism (voennyi
kommunizm) to capture the mix of motives driving their policies. Historians
have argued ever since over the degree to which ideology or the pragmatic
drive to mobilize forces and resources for war was the primary motive for
nationalization, requisitions, monetary policy, and a whole series of crucial
policies and practices that proved to be foundational for the new Bolshevik
state.1 However, there is broad consensus that the two motives were inextric-
ably intertwined in a powerful synthesis, and the term war communism has
proven to be a durable concept that has framed the way we think about the
early Bolshevik state and its policies. The policies of 191821 are almost never

proposes that a comparable term is needed to think about nationalisms in the
Russian Empire during World War I: war nationalism.2
Why War Nationalism?
It is on the face of it somewhat puzzling that war does not have a more central
place in the theoretical literature on nationalism. The two most cited theoretical
works of the last few decades share a bias toward long-term developments that
1

Silvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 19181921 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985).
2

nationalism with adjectives: Russian Economic Nationalism during World War I:
Moscow Merchants and Commercial Diasporas, Nationalities Papers 31, 4 (December
2003): 47184; Politics, Economics and Minorities: Core Nationalism in the Russian
Empire at War, in Comparing Empires: Encounters and Transfers in the Long Nineteenth
Century

Ruprecht, 2010), 52031.
92 ERIC LOHR
create the social, intellectual, and conceptual preconditions for the emergence

nationalism actually emerges and wins. We all know the story according to
Gellner and Anderson. Whether it is maps, censuses, and print capitalism
making it possible to imagine the modern nation or industrialization creating
an imperative for isolated illiterate peasants to communicate in a modern
industrial language, the emphasis is on developments that make the modern
nation conceivable and actionable. This developmental bias was hardly
invented by Gellner and Anderson. Hrochs three-stage approach too sees

culture to demand autonomy or a state. Hroch, Deutsch, and others see the
social changes of modernization and the rise of a middle class as key long-
term preconditions for the rise of nationalism.3
There is a certain parallel to the old story of the origins of communism.
When social forces ripen, when there are enough workers, consciousness will

equal stress on the imperatives of mobilizing for war and thus downgrading
the developmental story of the social origins of revolution. War nationalism
can serve the same heuristic purpose.
Less prominent theories that see nationalism as an event, and nationality
as an external characteristic or ordering principle ascribed to people without
nationalism as the result of long-term developments and nationality as a

category that builds up gradually in peoples psyches and identities. Rogers
Brubaker sees such eventsmost often state collapse and/or waras capable
of bringing a sudden and pervasive nationalization of public and even private
life, and nationality itself as something that suddenly crystallizes rather

precarious frame of vision and basis for individual and collective action rather
than as a relatively stable product of deep developmental trends in economy,
3
Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations
of Nationality
Technology; New York: Wiley, 1953); Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities:
(London: Verso Editions/NLB,
1983); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1983); Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative
Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
WAR NATIONALISM 93
polity or culture.4 In this spirit, Joshua Sanborn has productively called the
Russian Empires World War I a mobilizational event, an unprecedented
mobilization of the economy, army, and ethnic and political communities
within the empire.5
The term war nationalism pushes in these directions, toward thinking
about nationalism (and nationality) not as the natural end result of long-
developing trends, but rather, as contingent upon a sudden rupture. Indeed, a
case could be made for a broader term and concept of sudden nationalism. This
would include the important cases of state and empire collapse, which often
is a result of war, but not always. But this essay limits itself to the narrower,
but still very large, task of making the case for war nationalism. While most
theories of nationalism have focused on the preconditions for the national
moment, the concept of war nationalism brings the focus to the war, to
the moment when nationalism was mobilized. This approach is consonant
with, and is also indebted to the pathbreaking work of Mark von Hagen that
put the war-induced mobilization of ethnicity at the center of analysis of
nationalisms at the end of the imperial era.6
Two key features of war nationalism deserve special note: the spatial
aspect and the institutional aspect. Spatially, the war was focused in the
4
Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the
New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1920. Another important
contribution that puts the dynamics of sudden mobilization of nationalism at the center
of the concept is Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet
State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). In the introduction, Beissinger
discusses deeper problems in nationality studies regarding ex post teleology that priv-
ilege long gestation versus waves of mobilization in extraordinary circumstances. The
growing literature on transnationalism, anationalism, entangled histories, and other
alternatives to the world of national identities also bolsters approaches to nationalism
as contingent upon a mobilizational context. For example, see Tara Zahra, Imagined
Slavic Review 69,
1 (Spring 2010): 93119; Deborah Cohen and Maura OConnor, eds., Comparison and
History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2004); Jrn Leonhard
and Ulrike von Hirschhausen, eds., Comparing Empires: Encounters and Transfers in the
Long Nineteenth Century
5

A Re-Examination, Slavic Review 59, 2 (Summer 2000): 26789. In his essay, Sanborn
stresses that all these mobilizations occurred within a single national framework
that included the entire expanse of the Russian Empire and all its communities. In

empire (and without), often against each other.
6

Empire, in
and Jack L. Snyder (New York: Routledge, 1998), 3497.
94 ERIC LOHR
western borderlands of the empire, and episodically, in occupation zones in

in the western borderlands had been heavy-handed at times, but scholars
rulers who coopted elites, chose sides, and arbited solutions to problems dur-
ing peacetime. When the war came to their region, tools they had not used
became available, and control over those tools and ultimate decision-making
decades of accumulated knowledge and connections with local communities
a war. The result was a quantum leap in the stakes and level of violence to war
nationalism.
Several scholars have recently done excellent work on the operation of
Russian occupation regimes in these regions,7 detailing the multiple ways in
which the military imposed nationality on the populations, stimulated ethnic

and Ukrainians, imposed a radical Russian nationalist regime under Count
Bobrinskii, allowed Archbishop Evlogii to take over the Orthodox hierarchy

schools in Galicia. Whether we call the region the front zone, the area under
military rule, a colonial space (as Sanborn proposes in his article in this
volume), or borrow the concept of war land from Vejas Liuleviciuss study
of German perceptions of the region, it is important to incorporate the spatial
element into the concept of war nationalism. One should not, of course, simply
say that war nationalism happened where the war happened. The mobilizations
for war and the nationalizing impacts of war were felt throughout the entire
empire, but the most violent and extreme expressions of war nationalism were
concentrated in the war zones.8
to another key spatial aspect: the desocializing impact of millions of people
7
Okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii: Gosudarstvennoe upravlenie i natsionalnaia
politika v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny. 19141917 gg. (Moscow: , 2004); and
Bakhturina, Politika Rossiiskoi imperii v Vostochnoi Galitsii v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny
(Moscow: AIRO-XX, 2000); Alexander Prusin,
and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 19141920 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 2005); Mark von Hagen,
Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 19141918
8
War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German
Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Joshua A.

during World War I, Journal of Modern History 77, 2 (June 2005): 290324.
WAR NATIONALISM 95
moving into foreign environments. He complements Peter Gatrells work on

refugees moving to the interior and several works on Russian forces in foreign-
occupied territories by applying the same concept to the army itself, treating
soldiers as migrants. Anecdotally, soldier memoirs are full of references to
the foreignness of the western borderlands and the impressions many had
of crossing into a foreign land when crossing into the lands of Poles, Jews,
Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Belarusians, and others. The intensity of movement
quite free rein from their commanders to loot and intimidate.

Institutionally, one of the key features of war nationalism was the role
of the army in turning nationality issues into violent war issues. Daniel Graf

arrangement on the outbreak of World War I which, in contrast to other
countries, granted the army nearly unlimited control over a vast swath of the
empire. All military circulars, declarations, and orders were made obligatory

territory including Poland, the Caucasus, Petrograd, the Baltic provinces, Fin-
land, and large parts of Central Asia and Siberia.9
At the highest level, army headquarters (stavka) coordinated civilian af-
fairs. By October 1914, it became clear that the tasks of civilian rule were com-
plex and extensive, and a special section of army headquarters was set up to
coordinate policies toward civilians (the Military-Political and Civilian Ad-
ministration of the Commander in Chief). This institution was given wide

had no power to overrule army headquarters unless it gained the support of
the tsar himself to intervene. One of the most important powers over civil-
ians granted to the military was the nearly unlimited authority to deport
spying. No evidence was required for such deportations (not even a military
9

in Western Russia, 19141915 (Ph.D. diss., University of Nebraska, 1972). The in-
troduction to opis 1 in Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv
(RGVIA) f. 2005 (Voenno-politicheskoe i grazhdanskoe upravlenie pri verkhovnom
glavnokomanduiushchem) contains a description of the delineation of army powers
in civilian rule. See also appendix 2 to Polozhenie o polevom upravlenii voisk v voennoe
vremia (Petrograd: Voennaia Tip. Imperatritsy Ekateriny Velikoi, 1914); Vladimir
Rozenberg, Sovremennye pravootnosheniia k nepriiatelskim poddannym: S prilozheniem
uzakonenii po etomu predmetu (Petrograd, 1915); and Iu. N. Danilov, Rossiia v mirovoi
voine 19141915 gg. (Berlin: Slovo, 1924), 103.
96 ERIC LOHR
court order). The army made extensive use of these powers.10 Moreover, the
army exercised broad powers to requisition (demand goods or properties
with payment) and sequester (take properties for state or army use without
formally changing ownership).11 Military rule established a debilitating bi-
rule of law was suspended. We have seen above several ways in which the
imposed national identities on the civilian populations it encountered.

Peter Gatrells work on refugees provides a good example of how the rup-
ture of the war could suddenly transform the landscape of social and national
identities. Gatrell reminds us that social history is not necessarily about evolv-
ing social structures, making the point in a more sophisticated way than
can be summarized in a few sentences that the refugee was a social and
identity category that was suddenly created by the war and for millions of
people trumped all their prior statuses and identities.12 Among other things,
his detailed analysis shows how the event of sudden refugeedom often led
directly to the mobilization of national communities. Displaced Poles were

turned away if they could not prove their Polishness. German farmers from
Ukraine were forced from their homes and found themselves billeted in
Volga German communities thousands of kilometers away who practiced
ferent mutually incomprehensible dialects. Jews from widely disparate back-

grounds were forced to meet and rely upon each other. Millions of refugees
came into physical contact. Mobilized into national communities in their

come the leaders of national movements and new independent states in the
interwar period.13 Whether they wanted to or not, refugees were categorized,
10

that would deprive foreigners of the right to trial if accused of spying. The bill was
discussed in the Duma in June 1914, but was not passed before the war. Rossiiskii
gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA) f. 1276, op. 10, d. 106, ll. 121.
11

12
ington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 14170.

13
and Social Identity, in Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 19141921, ed.
WAR NATIONALISM 97
grouped, and forced to face their hardships with their co-ethnics. In short,
war nationalism hit them after they were displaced. Nationality was for many
of them an unwanted and sudden imposition, ascribed to them from without,
not the realization of their true selves.
For refugees, imposed nationality was largely cultural and ethnic. For
millions of others, war imposed painful choices that few could have desired
regarding nationality in the sense of formal state membership, i.e., citizen-
ship. Quickly after the war began, the Russian Empire (along with most of the
other belligerents) began to intern male enemy subjects who owed military
service in the countries of their citizenship. This straightforward military
action gradually expanded to a massive campaign to permanently root out
enemy subject foreigners from the Russian economy and society. The army
led a series of mass deportations that cleared enemy subject men, women,
and children from the entire area under military rule (both near the front
and from the capital cities). The civilian government, under sharp pressure
from the army command, followed with a comprehensive set of measures to
liquidate the extensive participation of foreign citizens from enemy countries
in the imperial Russian economy. First thousands of small businesses and
partnerships owned in whole or in part by enemy subjects were closed, then
stockholdings in major corporations were liquidated. Lands belonging both to
enemy citizens and to Russian subjects of German descent were expropriated
according to a series of laws beginning in February 1915. These measures
were driven in part by pressure from the army command for action, in part
by a press campaign and popular movement driven by an interesting variant
of what I have elsewhere called Russian core nationalism, but might also be
called war nationalism.14
At the center of this campaign was the idea of using the war as an oppor-
tunity to employ radical tools like mass deportation, nationalization, and popu-
lar violence to bring about a sudden radical shift of ownership and control over
the economy from Germans, Jews, and foreigners to ethnic Russians and other
core groups in the empire. What distinguished this nationalistic campaign
from prewar agitation toward the same end was the radical nature of the tools

of Jewish businesses in the Polish regions of the Russian Empire,15 in 191415,
Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, and William G. Rosenberg (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1997), 55464; and Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, especially
19597.

14
15

des Antisemitismus in Osteuropa (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1981), 10620.
98 ERIC LOHR
the Russian army forced the expulsion of half a million Jews from the region
and tolerated Cossack and local Polish looting and theft of Jewish property

such large corporations as the main electricity supplier to Kiev and Warsaw
16
killing, expelling, and expropriating are war nationalist.
Prior to the war, the Moscow Merchant Society and the Progressist bloc in

and other measures to promote ethnic Russian business, hoping to tilt the
competitive balance toward Russians in the central regions of the country
and away from foreigners and commercial diaspora minorities that were
more prominent in other regions.17 Their proposals were rarely enacted by
a government that put the priority on rapid modernization and usually took
the side of the cosmopolitan free tradeoriented Association of Industry
and Trade.18 During the war, new groups like the Society of 1914, a spe-

foreigners and recently naturalized ethnic Germans.19 Their war nationalist

agitation was a key factor in pushing the government to pass laws forcing the
liquidation of enemy subjectowned businesses. It also spurred one of the
biggest worker actions of the war, a violent three-day riot and strike against
German and foreign businesses in Moscow in May 1915.20 An illustration
16

17

Russian business, see Thomas C. Owen, Capitalism and Politics in Russia: A Social His-
tory of the Moscow Merchants, 18551905 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1981); and Alfred Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
18
Russian Industrialists in an Era of Revolution: The Association of
, ed. Thomas C. Owen (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997).
19
Promyshlennaia Rossiia, a journal that included articles by many leading
liberal and moderate economists with essays on ways to promote an economically
independent Russia during the war years, and the journals Russkaia budushchnost and
. I. Kh. Ozerov, Na
novyi put! K ekonomicheskomu osvobozhdeniiu Rossii (Moscow: Tip. A. I. Mamontova,
1915); Zadachi, programma i deiatelnosti torgovo-promyshlennogo otdela Obshchestva 1914
goda v 1915 godu (Petrograd: Rassvet, 1916).
20
Kritika:
Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, 3 (Summer 2003): 60726; Iu. I. Kirianov,
Maiskie besporiadki 1915 g. v Moskve, Voprosy istorii, no. 12 (1994): 13750.
WAR NATIONALISM 99

nationalism can be seen in one detail. Prior to the war, the Moscow Merchant
Society subsidized the publication of a comprehensive list of all Austrian and
German subjects and immigrants from the two countries who had become
Russian subjects three or fewer generations earlier.21 The purpose was to

the same lists were carried around town and used by the riot organizers to
direct their violence, looting, and destruction, resulting in the most costly
pogrom in Russian history in terms of monetary damages. The government

Feliks Iusupov, showed his sympathy for the rioters and used the argument of
popular demand to push the tsar to expand the program of deportations and
internment of enemy subjects. The government turned in an ever more radical
direction. For decades prior to the war, the government had gone to great

year wartime campaign, by late 1917, it had liquidated 33 major corporations

in the war. 22
The contrast between nationalism and war nationalism is also stark in
the case of the German colonists. There was a long prewar history of nation-
alistic agitation against the rapidly growing share of arable land owned or
leased by German farming communities, especially the ones in Volhynia

Along with credit and loan networks without parallel in neighboring Slavic
communities, these three things combined to create a powerful engine for

allowed the German communities to buy and lease land from less pros-
perous neighbors and rapidly increase the amount of land held by their com-
munitieseven while Germans emigrated in large numbers to the United
States in search of more land. Novoe vremia and a long line of publicists wrote
21

kupecheskoi i remeslennoi uprave na 1914 g. Posviashchaetsia vsem korennym russkim silam
goroda Moskvy (Moscow: Russkaia Pechatnia, 1915), 6.
22
Nationalizing the Russian Empire, 16673.
100 ERIC LOHR
angrily about the need for government intervention.23 Some limits were placed
on German immigration and rights to purchase new lands, but the rules were

acquisitions. Especially after enacting the Stolypin land reforms, the regime

right would move in the opposite direction.24
But add the adjective war to this nationalist agenda, and everything
changed dramatically. Already in December 1914, the Russian army singled
out male German colonists for mass deportation from the ten Polish provinces.
The governor general of Warsaw estimated that 200,000 German men owning
25 But he also encouraged troops
executing the order to facilitate the departure of the families of deportees
since this is desirable for state interests.26 In what way could this facilitate

free up the landholdings of the colonists for redistribution to Russians. This
motive was so strong that, after a bit of internal correspondence, the army
command decided to exempt urban Germans from the mass deportation
orders. Only German colonists were to be forcibly expelled en masse. The
military eventually hit on the idea of preserving these lands as a reward to be
given to soldier heroes at the end of the war, but in the midst of the chaotic
mass expulsions of German colonists from Poland, the Council of Ministers
stepped in with a law that even the most extreme prewar nationalists would
have seen as extreme and unrealistic in peacetime. On 2 February 1915, the
tsar signed a law that declared the expropriation of lands owned or leased by
enemy subjects or by certain categories of Russian-subject Germans within
the ten Polish provinces (Privislenskii krai) and a band of territory extending
160 kilometers to the interior of the empires western and southern borders
Novoe vremia, published as A.

23
Rennikov, Zoloto Reina: O nemtsakh v Rossii (Petrograd: A. S. Suvorin, 1915).

24

(Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1993); Dietmar
Die deutsche Frage im Schwarzmeergebiet und in Wolhynien: Politik, Wirtschaft,

1914)From Privileged to Dispossessed:
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988).
25

26

1915).
WAR NATIONALISM 101
from Finland to the Caspian Sea.27 Later laws extended the zone much deeper
to the interior of the empire. In addition to these formal programs, there is
evidence that Cossacks and locals looted and stole German colonist property
during and after the forced expulsions.28
To the extent that the German colonists had a political role in the late
empire, it was as a small conservative bloc in the State Duma, mostly in the
moderate-conservative Octobrist party. The last thing most German farmers
wanted was a radical nationalization of their lives. Yet, once dispossessed
and displaced, many were driven to politics and emigration to Germany to
join a country that their ancestors had abandoned for the promise of land or
religious freedom in the Russian Empire.29
In many ways, the contrast of prewar and wartime was not so sharp for
Jews as it was for Germans. The waves of pogroms that swept through the
Pale in 188182 and again in 190207 were marked by extreme and increas-
ing brutality. The tsar and government fostered anti-Semitism through dis-
criminatory policies and by allowing or even funding the publication of hate
speech bordering on outright incitement to commit pogroms. The proto-
fascist Union of Russian People received government favor, and perpetrators
of pogrom violence were rarely punished. Yet, there are several important
points of contrast that distinguish the wave of war pogroms from earlier
pogrom waves in ways parallel to the contrast between nationalism and war
nationalism.

sus among scholars in the last couple of decades that high-level government
30 The government
27
, 25.
28

generalizations about the role of violence can be asserted. An eyewitness to the
German deportations from Volhynia claims fairly extensive violence by Cossacks
Die Flchtlinge
von Wolhynien: Der Leidensweg russlanddeutscher Siedler, 19151918 (Plauen: Gnther-

tensive violence: Waldemar Giesbrecht, Die Verbannung der Wolhyniendeutschen,
1915/1916, Wolhynische Hefte 3 (1984): 4397; 4 (1986): 997; 5 (1988): 662.
29

an example of this process. Jakob Stach, Schicksalsjahre der Russlanddeutschen: Erlebnisse
(Bonn: Stiftung Ostdeutscher Kulturrat, 1983).
30

ity for pogroms in the Russian Empire before World War I, see John D. Klier and
Shlomo Lambroza, Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 315.
102 ERIC LOHR
more often saw pogroms as volatile and dangerous expressions of popular

violence, and as such generally tried to restrain or prevent them.31 In contrast,
the wave of pogroms during the war (concentrated in the period of the 1915
retreat of the Russian army) was largely initiated and conducted by Cossack
units in the army. Where pogroms occurred, Cossack army units usually ini-

their power to order expulsions of Jews as a means to loot. In some cases,

them access to carts, and beat and robbed them as they departed. Most im-
portant in creating the framework for the pogrom wave was the armys
extensive program of mass expulsions and deportations of Jews, Germans,
and foreigners from areas under military rule, leaving all these populations
vulnerable to looting.32 The civilian authorities were appalled and spoke

forced mass expulsions, creating a wave of refugees, countless logistical and

But nearly the entire area of legal Jewish residence came under military rule
during the war, and they felt helpless to intervene. 33
The wanton violence of Cossacks and army commanders who allowed
them to loot, murder, and molest Jewish populations at or near the front can
hardly be seen as driven by a coherent nationalist ideology or motive. The
violence was indiscriminate and could also target German-, Polish-, and even
Russian-occupied populations that they came across. To a certain degree, Jews
were simply the most vulnerable and had the longest tradition of becoming
targets of Cossack looting without consequence. That said, a case can be
made that the war powerfully structured the context for pogrom violence,
combining in a volatile mix with patriotic-nationalist mobilization. It can be
31

facilitating pogroms. See Shlomo Lambroza, The Pogroms of 19031906, in Pogroms,
23447.
32

dokumenty o Rossiiskoi Armii i evreiakh vo vremena Pervoi mirovoi voiny, Vestnik
evreiskogo universiteta, no. 8 (26) (Moscow, 2003): 24568. For an important recent study,
see Semion Goldin, Deportation of Jews by the Russian Military Command, 1914
1915, Jews in Eastern Europe 41, 1 (2000): 4073.
33
Prologue to Revolution: Notes of A. N. Iakhontov on the Secret
Meetings of the Council of Ministers, 1915
74;
(Zapisi zasedanii i perepiska) (St. Petersburg: RAN, 1999), 169, 20405, 21112.
WAR NATIONALISM 103
lack of structured meaning characteristic of the prewar pogroms.

The key to explaining this phenomenon is the socioeconomic position of
Jews as a commercial diaspora.34
the realitythat Jews held positions in commerce, banking, industry, small
business, insurance, and trade in numbers far exceeding their proportion in
the population as a whole added a serious socioeconomic dimension to al-

national awareness, the competition of non-Jewish populations for these posi-
tions added a sharp new element to an old problem.
The tensions were by no means simply along a RussianJewish axis. In
fact, they were sharpest in the Polish parts of the empire, where an intense

Democratic Party shortly prior to the war. Similar developments were evident
in the Baltics, Ukraine, and other areas as well.35
well before 1914 and were more closely connected to the pressures of moderni-
zation than war.
The mobilization of the country, however, introduced several new elements
that changed the dynamic. Most importantly, it suddenly transformed the
foreign and German commercial diaspora populations of the empire from
privileged minorities into enemy aliens. While Jews were Russian subjects
and thus not targeted by the laws on enemy subject properties, the perception
that the Jews were the most suspect enemy population in the empire was
well established. Articles in the press, denunciations, petitions, bureaucratic
memos, and the correspondence of army commanders all freely mixed the
language of German dominance (zasile) with that of Jewish dominance.
The very public plan to redistribute the land of deported Germans to core
national groups created a strong sense that the property of the forcibly ex-
pelled minorities in the front zone was unprotected.
The war nationalist mobilization against commercial diasporas created
a new context for pogroms. As a result, while the 1915 pogroms invariably
34

and Commercial Diasporas, Nationalities Papers 31, 4 (December 2003): 47184; Heinz
Dietrich Lwe, Antisemitismus und reaktionre Utopie: Russischer Konservatismus im
Kampf gegen den Wandel von Staat und Gesellschaft, 18901917
Campe Verlag, 1978); Lwe, The Tsars and the Jews: Reform, Reaction and Anti-Semitism
in Imperial Russia, 17721917

and Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
35
From Assimilation to Antisemitism: The Jewish Question in Poland,
18501914 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 16568; Golczewski,
, 10620.
104 ERIC LOHR
started because of Cossack and army presence, they also were more national
and more part of a nationwide mobilizational context than any previous wave

the war context brought to pogroms. They increasingly became conceived as
a means to a larger war nationalist end. The pogroms were closely linked to
the targeted mass expulsions of Jews, Germans, and foreigners from the front

ordered expulsions, gave a sense that the policies in the front zone were more
than temporary expedients or aberrational acts. They appeared to be closer
to a program of permanent demographic change in the region, intended not
only as an expulsion of unreliable populations, but also (most clearly for the

permanently remove them from the population. The wartime pogroms and
radical property redistribution and demographic change in the western bor-

derlands of the empire.

Russian, Ukrainian, and other communities far to the interior of the empire.
The early army orders directed Jews to leave all areas under military rule.
This left only a narrow band of territory in three Ukrainian provinces that
was both within the Pale and outside the area under military rule.36 Those

from the front. In the following year and a half, roughly 40 percent of all Jew-

tense new nationality issue to hundreds of towns and cities throughout the

ethnic violence in several national and historical contexts reveals that violence
tends to be concentrated in areas of large-scale and rapid in-migration. It is
likely no coincidence that some of the worst excesses of the 1919 pogroms that

during the war had been the greatest. The frequent insinuations and open
declarations in the press and from the army that Jews were being expelled as
37
36
RGVIA f. 1759, op. 3, d. 1422, l. 7; RGVIA f. 1932, op. 12, d. 67, ll. 35, 40, 43. This
included only areas east of the Dnieper River in Ekaterinoslav, Mogilev, Chernigov,
Poltava, and Taurida (not including the Crimean Peninsula).
37
See Hans Rogger, Conclusion and Overview, in Pogroms, 314-62. Edward H.
Judge makes a similar point in his Urban Growth and Anti-Semitism in Russian
WAR NATIONALISM 105

authority over prisoners of war and quickly began to use that authority to
pursue war nationalist aims. Early in the war, Slavic, Italian, and Alsatian

facilities in European Russia.38 Already in August 1914, the Russian military
approved the formation of Czech ethnic military units out of Hapsburg POWs
in Russian camps and discussed the formation of South Slav, Slovak, Polish,
Latvian, and Finnish units as well.39 Armenian volunteer units collaborated

the process of actually forming and deploying ethnic units within the Russian

revolution,40
prisoners and targets of sanctions against enemy aliens in the empire. Slavic
and Orthodox groups received full exemptions from internment and most of
these measures. The nationalization of POW policies certainly did not take

policies in Germany, and especially in Austria-Hungary. The Central Powers
early in the war embraced a broad propaganda campaign aimed at stimu-
lating national rebellions against the Russian Empire (accompanied by at-

contacts and spur uprisings).41 Austria led the way in the creation of ethnic
units and allowed the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine to act openly in
the Austrian camps, mobilizing Ukrainians into separate camp communities
and eventually, into military units. These policies were war nationalist. Before
Moldavia, in Modernization and Revolution: Dilemmas of Progress in Late Imperial Russia,

ed. Judge and James Y. Simms, Jr. (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1992),
4357. For a recent review of the pogroms in Ukraine, see Henry Abramson, A Prayer
for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 19171920 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 10940; Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 146;
Cherniavsky, Prologue to Revolution, 5672.
POWs and the Great War: Captivity on the Eastern Front (Oxford:
38
Berg, 2002), 93.

39

40
POWs and the Great War, 11522. Rachamimov estimates that
from 191418, 40,000 Czechs and Slovaks volunteered to serve in the Czech Legion,
about 16 percent of the total Czech and Slovak POW population. Three-quarters were
recruited after February 1917.

41
Deutschlands antirussischen propagandakrieg unter den fremdvlkern Russlands im ersten

Weltkrieg, Studia Historica 8 (Helsinki, 1978).
106 ERIC LOHR

either side of the border. Ukrainians began to establish contacts with each
other across the border, and governmentsespecially after the conclusion
of the Franco-Russian alliancebegan to take actions that undermined the
than Polish nationalism). For example, the Russian government sent secret
subsidies to its perceived Rusyn allies in Galicia42 and frequently intervened
in Anatolia on behalf of Christian Armenians and Greeks. But there was a
great deal of constraint and continued cooperation, grounded in a century of
close cooperation and shared interest in preventing nationalism from rising
to challenge imperial legitimacy. The dueling declarations at the outbreak of
war promising autonomy or more to the Poles undermined this from the start
and all the policies discussed above undermined it further. By 1917, imperial
regimes were organizing prisoners by ethnic criteria and giving them guns. The

ethnic units would go on to play crucial roles in their respective drives toward
establishing nation-states. Historians have found some analogies between
national mobilizations of Ukrainian peasants into reading clubs, Czechs and
Latvians into cycling clubs, and other mobilized national communities in the
prewar decades and the creation of mobilized and militarized national move-
ments toward the end of World War I. But without war the most important
element of these nationalisms was missing. When nationalisms burst onto
the scene in 191718, they took violent, militarized forms that had as much to
do with the experience of war as the accumulated experiences of the decades

a martial adjective to the term nationalism.
This essay has proposed a few arguments for deploying the concept of
war nationalism to think about nationalism during World War I. The con-
cept would be even more applicable to the era of the Civil War, when Polish,

Whites, Reds, anarchists, and greensand the mobilization of society for war,
for building communism, and for nationalism went to its furthest extremes.
But that task remains for another day or another author. Likewise, one might
extend the concept of war nationalism in the spirit of Rogers Brubaker and
Josh Sanborn to make a point about national identity being predominantly
a product of the mobilizational context. A good metaphor would be the
POWs who found themselves faced with a stark choice between continued

42
Russia 19041912 (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1991).

WAR NATIONALISM 107
imprisonment or becoming mobilized, armed representatives of a national

movement. There was a degree of voluntarism to that choice, but only within
highly unique circumstances only possible in the context of the war. Likewise,
young Jewish men and women in the western borderlands may have dreamed
about saving money to enter Russian universities and careers, as increasing
numbers were doing on the eve of the war. But instead of moving toward greater
assimilation into imperial Russian society, they found themselves suddenly
43

Poles in the post-1905 order could turn to the Polish circle in the Duma for

the scepter of the tsar, or simply a policy of peaceful development within the
empire. Instead, they found themselves mobilized into ethnic units on both
sides of the front. The examples are legion of the ways in which nationality
was suddenly thrust upon millions of individual lives by the context of war.
In short, I propose that war nationalism and war nationality can help us
overcome the developmental bias in thinking about nationalism and promote
war and extraordinary mobilizational context to at least 50 percent of the
terms and concepts we use to refer to nationalism and nationality during the
43

assimilation and accommodation of ethnic groups in all-imperial society, see Anders
Henriksson, Nationalism, Assimilation and Identity in Late Imperial Russia: The
St. Petersburg Germans, 19061914, Russian Review 52 (July 1993): 34153; Christoph
Gassenschmidt, Jewish Liberal Politics in Tsarist Russia, 190014: The Modernization of
Russian Jewry (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1995); Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews in
the Russian Army, 18271917: Drafted into Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009). If Petrovsky-Shtern is right, the army itself was becoming a means to
Jewish assimilation into a broader imperial society and citizenship; during the war it
became the main instigator of violence against Jews, even as Jewish soldiers continued
to serve in its ranks.
Central Asia (191620): A Kaleidoscope of Local
Revolutions and the Building of the Bolshevik Order
Marco Buttino
This article deals with Central Asia as an internal colony of the former tsarist
empire in the period from the rebellion of 1916 through the end of the Civil

immigrant Russian population and the native inhabitants. A crisis of the
colonial economy led to widespread famine and a desperate struggle for
survival. Chaos, violence, and hunger spread throughout Central Asia. Con-
ditions were worst in the recently annexed southern regions, which formed
Turkestan, where the local populations involvement in the administrative
system and the colonial economy were weakest. I will argue that the revolutions
groups to re-establish order and defend themselves in a situation that was

becoming increasingly threatening. I argue that the principal objective of the
Bolshevik Revolution in Turkestan was to maintain the dominant position of
the Russian colonial minority and prevent decolonization. While the soldiers
who took power in Tashkent proclaimed themselves revolutionaries and were
recognized by the central Bolshevik government, they were, in fact, the per-
petrators of a colonial counterrevolution.
This thesis builds upon widely held views expressed by political leaders
at the time1 and historians writing in the period immediately following the
1

of 1919 as a member of a commission sent by Moscow, argued that in Turkestan
the Revolution was the use of force by the Russian minority seeking to defend its
supremacy in the colony. Apropos of the February Revolution, Safarov wrote that the
Russian Revolution in Turkestan rapidly acquired this fatal colonialist tendency and,
in an analysis of the October Revolution in Tashkent and the direction the Bolsheviks
and revolutionary socialists gave it, he wrote that although it was thanks to them that
the moderates had been defeated, at the same time, politically, this strengthened the
colonizing nature of new Soviet power in Turkestan. Georgii Safarov, Kolonialnaia
revoliutsiia: Opyt Turkestana (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izd-vo, 1921), 62, 70. The Mus-

Safarovs, also felt that the Russian revolutionaries, albeit divided by deep-seated
110 MARCO BUTTINO
Civil War.2

dynamics of imperial collapse re-emerged in the years following the break-
up of the Soviet Union. Adeeb Khalids in-depth analysis of the activities
and positions of Muslim political organizations in Turkestan shows that
the Russian population rallied together to defend its dominance and assert
its supremacy when the food crisis struck.3 Daniel Brower examines the

was continuity between Russian colonialism and early Bolshevik practices.4

spearheaded the Bolshevik Revolution there and how this process was
connected to the struggle for food supplies once shortages occurred.5 I will
build on these arguments to suggest that both the revolution in Tashkent
and the numerous revolutionary power grabs that occurred throughout

rooted in the regions colonial order. To understand the nature of these
that they all were fundamentally reactions to chaos, famine, and the spread
of violence.6
rivalries between them, were united in the defense of their interests, while the local
an end to Russian colonialism. See Turar Ryskulov, Revoliutsiia i korennoe naselenie

Turkestana: Sbornik glavneishikh statei, dokladov, rechei i tezisov (Tashkent: Uzbekskoe
gosudarstvennoe izd-vo, 1925). Even the leaders of the Communist Party in Moscow
understood the positions of the local Communists and in 1919 accused old Com-
munists of chauvinism, taking measures to oust them from the Party.
2

alism caused. P. G. Galuzo, Turkestan-koloniia: Ocherk istorii Turkestana ot zavoevaniia
russkimi do revoliutsii 1917 goda (Moscow: Izd-vo Kommunisticheskogo universiteta
trudiashchikhsia Vostoka, 1929).
3
The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), 24579.
4
Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (London: Routledge, 2003),
15275.
5
(Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2007), 187228.
6
La rivoluzione capovolta: LAsia centrale tra il crollo dellimpero zarista e la
formazione dellUSSR (Naples: Lancora del mediterraneo, 2003), translated into Russian
as Revoliutsiia naoborot: Sredniaia Aziia mezhdu padeniem tsarskoi imperii i obrazovaniem
SSSR (Moscow: Zvenia, 2008).
CENTRAL ASIA (191620) 111

convey the prevalent atmosphere at the time. Readers will thus note that when
groups used the terms revolution and revolutionary to describe themselves, I
follow their lead, even though they would alsooften more accuratelybe
described as colonial or anticolonist or nationalist. It was primarily
among the Russians that the Revolution developed, and it was they who sought
support from Petrograd in the hope that it would be possible to preserve the
unity of the former empire, even on a new basis. During the years of the Civil
War, divisions emerged among the Russian revolutionaries that had formed
the local Bolshevik Party; there was a split between the old guard, now accused
of defending colonialism, and interpreters of Lenins political line. Members
of both factions called themselves revolutionaries. In addition, representatives
of the local Muslim community also joined the Bolshevik Party and became

obtain favors (for example, prisoners of war and Armenian nationalists). Still
otherscolonists who rebelled in the name of a true revolution based on local
sovietsjoined the heterogeneous revolutionary alliance even though they

escape the ambiguity the frequent use of the term revolutionary by all parties
involved is to consider each case in the context in which it occurred.

The detailed analysis of local events will make it possible to identify the
decisions and strategies that might go otherwise unnoticed. I will consider

approach will enable us to avoid the misunderstandings present in the ways
in which the spread of the Revolution through the territory of the former em-
pire has been interpreted.

Central Asia on the basis of whether they supported the Reds or the Whites
in the Civil War. The Revolution considered from above, in Petrograd, by the

that were judged either revolutionary or counterrevolutionary depending on

for actors with conservative purposes to side with the revolutionaries, and
vice versa.
A second misunderstanding involves the meaning of revolutionary ideas.
As the Revolution spread from Petrograd to the far reaches of the empire, the
112 MARCO BUTTINO
Bolsheviks expected their program to retain its original meaning. However,

ings on revolutionary actions and political slogans. Phrases such as all power
to the workers councils or land to those who work it meant one thing in

actors that moved in substantial autonomy on a local level.
It is also necessary to acknowledge that the periodization of the revolu-

focus than one examining regional or empire-wide ones. Historiography, es-
pecially Soviet historiography, often underestimates the importance of these

general level (that of the former empire) or one that is valid for the central
regions (Petrograd and Moscow), in spite of their inconsistency with the
events taking place in peripheral areas. The overthrow of the imperial order
in Central Asia presents an outstanding example. This event did not occur in
October 1917, but in 1916, and was the result of a mass revolt of the regions
native population.
The aim of this paper is to analyze the multiplicity of contrasting local
revolutions that took place in Central Asia; it will focus on the situations
that best illustrate and exemplify this complexity. It will describe revolts and
the local dictatorships that came to power and, after the arrival of the Red
Army in 1920, were incorporated into the Bolshevik Revolution. However, be-
fore dealing with the multiplicity of local situations, we need to relate them to
the wider context in which they unfolded.
The Context of Central Asias Revolts and Revolutions

uprisings of 190507 in European Russia, the need to calm protests and al-
leviate the shortage of land spurred the central government to encourage
mass emigration to the east, even though administrators in Central Asia
advised caution. Administrators initially warned that they would not be
able to negotiate land agreements with the native populations without the

in the Region of the Steppes, while between 1906 and 1915 a further 885,000

mountainous Semireche region bordering on China; in this region alone,
the population of Cossacks and colonists, which in 1897 had been 67,000, had
risen to 225,000 in 1914.7 Administrative warnings about the unsustainability
of further immigration were swept to the side by this wave of colonization.

cities and villages, hoping somehow to gain access to a plot. Abandoned by
the authorities, they sought to obtain the land the local population used for
grazing animals. The situation was most critical in Semireche, where colonists

and blocked their access to streams.8
World War I exacerbated existing tensions, and in 1916 the native popula-
tion revolted. It was this uprising and its repression that marked the end of the
tsarist colonial order, as will be seen in the next section.
The famine that followed was also a consequence of colonization and war.
In the regions of Turkestan inhabited by sedentary populations, in Fergana
a simultaneous drop in the growing of food crops. Native workers were

while the land cultivated by colonists was devoted to growing cereal crops,
especially in the regions of Aulie-Ata and Semireche. The colony was still
unable to grow enough wheat for its needs. Production outstripped de-

areas in Turkestan because there were no rail links. The war had halted the
construction of the TashkentVernyi railway, and the cereal crop from the area
of maximum production was inaccessible. It became increasingly necessary
to have wheat shipped from European Russia and the northern areas of the
Region of the Steppes, which were also colonized by Slav peasants. During
the war, Petrograd needed grain supplies for the army and reduced shipments
to the colony in 1917; beginning in the autumn of the same year, no further
goods arrived in Turkestan, and famine began to spread through the region.
In November 1917, the Cossacks in Orenburg severed the railway lines
that crossed the Region of the Steppes and reached Tashkent. With only brief
7
Statistiko-ekonomicheskii obzor Kirgiz-
skoi SSR (Orenburg, 1923), 228; Selsko-khoziaistvennyi obzor Semirechenskoi oblasti za 1914
g. (Vernyi, 1915), 109; P. G. Galuzo,
gg. (Alma-Ata: Nauka, 1965), 226; I. I. Mainov, Materialy po zemelnomy voprosu v aziatskoi
Rossii, 3: Semireche (Petrograd, 1918), 2223.
8
Stalinismo di
frontiera: Colonizzazione agricola, sterminio dei nomadi e costruzione statale in Asia central,
(Rome: Viella, 2009), 3386.
114 MARCO BUTTINO
exceptions, there would be no rail connections for the next two years. The
railway that ran from the Caucasus to Turkestan was also blocked. Turkestan
no longer had any hope of obtaining aid from outside. Food shortages became

1920, there was a 25 percent drop in population, from 7.1 million to 5.3 million
people. The nearly 2 million people who died were all members of the native
population, mostly seminomadic Kazakhs and Kirghiz.9
The Nomad Revolt of 191610
At the beginning of the summer of 1916 a prikaz (command) the tsar sent to

instructed to conscript members of the local population, formerly exempt from
military service, drafting all men between the ages of 19 and 43 to serve in the
11 About 390,000 people were subject to conscription.12
The prikaz had been issued at the worst possible moment, the beginning

volost
(administrative district)
not compile lists of eligible conscripts. When their petitions were not met,

stop the revolts, which continued for one month. The seminomadic Kazakh
and Kirghiz tribes in the Region of the Steppes also revolted. Their revolt was
more radical and violent, and lasted until the end of the summer.
The rebels strength depended in part on the relative weakness of the
colonists villages, where, in the months before the uprising, nearly all arms
had been requisitioned for use by the army and most of the men had been
drafted and sent to the front.13 In many of the recently established villages,

9

and Depopulation in Turkestan, 19171920, Central Asian Survey 9, 4 (1990): 5974.
10
Russias First World War:
A Social and Economic History (New York: Pearson/Longman, 2005), 188, 192.
11
prikaz, see A. V. Piaskovskii and S. G. Agadzhanov, eds., Vosstanie
(Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii
nauk SSSR, 1960), 2526.
12
Prichiny, kharak-
ter, dvizhushchie sily (Alma-Ata: Izd-vo Nauka Kazakhskoi, 1977), 73.
Tashkent v period trekh revoliutsii (Tashkent: Gosudarstvennoe izd-
13
vo UzSSR, 1957), 125.

to work their farms. The Cossack stanitsy

situation and less at risk. Their farmsteads were more solid, and their loyalty
to the empire had been rewarded with less onerous conscription. They were
therefore able to defend themselves from the nomads and in some cases even
then expropriated for themselves.

The epicenter of the clashes was Semireche. At this time, it was inhabited
by seminomadic Kirghiz tribes and a substantial Russian immigrant popu-
lation. After several of them were killed by the rebels, Turkestan-born admin-
istrators were cowed by the spread of the protests and chose not to cooperate
in compiling lists of draft-eligible men. Grounds for cooperation with the
colonial administration no longer existed. Kirghiz farmhands working for

stock with them, and returned to their auls (encampments), where they would
be protected by fellow tribesmen.14 Repression ensued. The task fell to General
Aleksei Kuropatkin, the new governor of Turkestan, who had arrived in Tash-
kent at the beginning of August 1916. Kuropatkin believed that to restore
order the government had to arm the colonists; create Cossack, reservist, and
conscript military units from Semireche; send in military reinforcements
from Tashkent; intimidate the Kirghiz; requisition the crops of those Kirghiz

to cross the border into China.15 In Semireche, Kuropatkin mobilized soldiers,
integrated divisions with volunteers, gave the troops arms stored in army

of bearing arms were organized in druzhiny (detachments), while the farmers
16 What transpired

Russian high command, and in part driven by the independent actions of the

sought safety by heading into the mountains to escape to China.17
Krasnyi arkhiv, no. 16 (1926): 63, 72.

14
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

15
University Press, 1954), 11517.

16
375. .
: Dokumenty i materialy
17
(Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe sotsialno-ekonomicheskoe izd-vo, 1937), 10330; Sokol,

12937.
116 MARCO BUTTINO
The revolt, and to an even greater degree its repression, left the population
weary and exhausted. Colonists losses in Semireche alone numbered 2,000,

stated, and wheat yields plummeted, which meant that there was a drastic
drop in surpluses that could be sold in city markets. Losses among the semi-
nomadic population were one hundred times higher (over 200,000), and most
of their livestock was lost.18
This was the outcome of Central Asias great revolt. It marked the end of
Russian colonialism as it had existed until this time, but with the defeat of the
rebels the path was cleared for the new and more aggressive colonialism that
developed between 1917 and 1920, the years of the Civil War and famine.
3. Tashkent: The Russians Revolution
Russian colonial society was the protagonist of a revolutionif we wish to

ulations revolution; in fact, it was opposed to it. To understand why and how
this situation emerged, we will focus on the colonys most important city,
Tashkent.
The majority of Russian immigrants to cities in Central Asia were soldiers,

in the new city districts, in a world apart from that of the local populations,
whose customs they barely understood and whose language they were unable
to speak, but with whom they were in constant contact. Indigenous workers
had constructed the buildings in the new city and were the household help in

also included representatives of the local population. Relations between the
Russians and the citys local population began to deteriorate in the early
months of World War I, due to a steep rise in the cost of living accompanied
by an increase in food prices. Russian families, the group that bore the brunt
of conscription into the army, were impoverished, and their mistrust of Sart
18

in several sources: Tsentralnyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Respubliki Uzbekistana
(TsGARUz) f. i-1044, op. 1, d. 5, l. 248; Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii
arkhiv (RGVIA) f. 400, op. 1, d. 4546, ll. 380380ob.; Piaskovskii and Agadzhanov,
8890, 41516; Galuzo, Agrarnye ot-
nosheniia, 157; I. Chekaninskii, Vosstanie kirgiz-kazakov i kara-kirgiz v Dzhetysuiskom
(Kzyl-Orda, 1926), 11519, 123; T. R.
Ryskulov, (Kzyl-Orda, 1927), 6162; Sokol,
159.
and Uzbek bazaar merchants turned into sharp open social tensions. Early

protest against the merchants, groups of Russian women went into bazaars
in Tashkent and overturned and looted stalls. The women were soon backed
by their husbands; the disorders spread and lasted several days. The city
authorities, including the governor general himself, intervened to calm the
protestors and managed to stop the violence, but only provisionally. The
revolts of the women (babi bunty) of Tashkent were not isolated episodes;
analogous events occurred in other cities along the railways.19
After the tsars abdication, the Provisional Government entrusted the task

Muslims. It seemed as though the future being built for Turkestan would not
be colonial.

Duma in Tashkent. The Russian inhabitants of the city were alarmed by the
governments openness towards the Muslims, which many considered a
dangerous surrender, and they were concerned about the increasing activism
of Muslim political organizations. When elections were held at the end of July,
the local population voted for political groups formed by local people. The
Slavs, a numerical minority, were defeated, and the Jadids (moderate Muslim
reformers who had shown their willingness to work with the Provisional

was less active in the narrowly political sphere, triumphed. The administration
of Tashkent thus came under the control of the representatives of the local
population.20

the Russians, apart from the economic crisis, was the Muslim majority in the
local administration and the unwillingness of the government in Petrograd to
support them. Meanwhile, the Constituent Assembly elections were approach-
the city Duma elections. The colonists feared that this would signal the end of
Russian domination, and, perhaps, even of a Russian presence in the colony.

trading still going on was in the hands of local merchants. On 10 September,
the day Muslims were celebrating the Kurban Ait (one of their most important
19

49, 5055ob; f. I-461, op. 1, d. 1796, ll. 4, 66ob.; Turkestanskii kurer (Tashkent), 3 and 13
March 1916; Turkestanskie vedomosti (Tashkent), 3, 6, and 12 March 1916.
The Politics of
20
Muslim Cultural ReformLa rivoluzione capovolta, 18590.

118 MARCO BUTTINO

alleged Muslim speculators hiding food supplies. Thousands of soldiers then

zation would assume power, and forced government representatives to leave

avant garde: Petrograd would have to wait another two months.
In fact, the revolutionaries had to backtrack when military divisions loyal
to the Provisional Government arrived from Russia. When the revolution tri-
umphed in Petrograd, a Revolutionary Soviet took power in Tashkent, led by
an ad hoc Bolshevik and Maximalist faction (the Bolsheviks of Turkestan
did not have a party organization of their own yet), and the Council of
Peoples Commissars (Sovnarkom) of Turkestan was founded. The Tashkent
revolutionaries followed the model of the Soviet government in Petrograd
and asked to be recognized by the Party as the local Soviet power. The

sian revolutionaries and that they would not accept representatives of the
indigenous population because they had no proletarian organizations. The
revolution restored power to a Russian minority dictatorship.21 A few
months later, in February 1918, the revolutionary powers demonstrated
their might with a military expedition against the city of Kokand, where an
autonomous Muslim government backed by politically moderate Russian
groups had been formed.
The Moderate Muslim Revolutions
The new Tashkent government established itself as the defender of the cen-
tralizing revolutionary dictatorship. In contrast, Muslim political forces gen-

Governments program, the empire would become a democratic federation.
The autonomous government in Kokand was an expression of this position. It
represented an alternative to revolutionary power in Turkestan, a coalition of
Muslim political forces open to the moderate Russian parties that continued
to back democratic elections for the Constituent Assembly.22 On 13 December,
the day Muhammads birthday was being celebrated, a mass demonstration
in Tashkent cheered the announcement that an autonomous government had
21
Kolonialnaia revoliutsiia, 6970.
22

government of Kokand, and the internal debate in this government are analyzed
by Paul Bergne, The Kokand Autonomy, 191718: Political Background, Aims and
Reason for Failure, in Central Asia: Aspects of Transition, ed.
(London: Routledge, 2003), 3044.

been formed. The vast majority of the demonstrators were Tashkent Muslims,
but with them there were several thousand Russians who had decided not to
back the local Russian revolutionaries. The autonomous government shunned
nationalist rhetoric, was open to the participation of Russians opposed to the
power of the Tashkent Sovnarkom, and wanted to avoid the danger of an

nated between two members of Alash Orda, the largest party in the Region
of the Steppes. In the late imperial period, Alash Orda leaders studied in
Petrograd or Moscow and had close ties with the Russian Kadets. It is not
surprising that their government was open to the participation of liberally
inclined Russians.

Muslims and the Cossacks took center stage. Alash Orda represented the edu-
cated Kazakhs from families of the nomad aristocracy active in commerce and
dealings with Russia. They formed an elite united in the conviction that their
peoples future depended on their becoming sedentary, abandoning nomadic
tribal social organization, learning modern ways of living, and acquiring

to encourage a return to some kind of state orderno longer an empire but
a federation. In the short term, their only viable option was to build local

territories.
A pan-Kazakh congress, held in Orenburg in December 1917 (at the same
time as Turkestans autonomy was being proclaimed in Kokand) voted in favor
of creating an autonomous Kazakh region that was to be called Alash. The
principal question discussed both in Orenburg and Kokand was a possible
alliance with the Cossacks, who were clashing with the self-proclaimed revolu-
tionary governments that had come to power in Tashkent and Orenburg. It

had illegally seized immediately before, during, and after the 1916 revolt.
The Cossacks were therefore seen not as colonists but as potential allies. In
Kokand, too, the autonomous government decided that this was the course

who in Orenburg had proclaimed himself military governor of Siberia, and
Annenkov, the ataman who ruled the region of Akmolinsk. The two atamans
were on the verge of taking control of the entire northern part of the Region
of the Steppes.23
The Kazakhs (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1987), 12956;

23
Tomohiko Uyama, The Alash Ordas Relations with Siberia, the Urals, and Turkestan:
The Kazakh National Movement and the Russian Imperial Legacy, in Asiatic Russia:
120 MARCO BUTTINO

divisions in Alash, the opening of negotiations with the Bolsheviks and their
promise that minorities would be granted self-determination, and the dif-

establish that Alash, like the autonomous government in Kokand, acted in
keeping with the policies of the Provisional Government and on the basis of
a plan to overcome the old colonial dependency and deal with the chaos that
had followed in its wake. Alash supported territorial autonomy, but did not
support an anticolonial revolution; its focus was on an emergency--the threat
of Russian revolutionaries and the spread of famine.
Alash was a prisoner of its alliances until the very end of the Civil War,
while the government in Kokand and its political program fell much earlier. In
February 1918, Red Guards from Tashkent sacked and razed Kokand, quash-
ing the autonomous government. The same military divisions then moved
towards Bukhara to bring the revolution to the Emirate. This time, however,
they did not succeed.24
The Armenian and the War Prisoner Revolutions
The Tashkent revolutionaries allied with a small Russian revolutionary

itary garrison. When the empire collapsed, they backed the Provisional Gov-
ernment, and when this also fell, they proclaimed themselves supporters
of the Bolshevik Revolution but remained isolated in this Muslim city. The
Armenians were a minority that had existed in Kokand for some time; a wave

Kokand in 1915 and rallied the local community. The Armenians in Kokand
saw the Russians as protectors and, like the Russians, tended to view the
Muslims and their government as a threat. When the Red Guards arrived,
Armenian druzhiny (armed bands) went from house to house, massacring the
citys inhabitants. After Kokand had been destroyed and the Red Guards had

the city. The Armenians had their own national party, the Dashnaksutiun, but
Imperial Power in Regional and International Contexts, ed. Tomohiko Uyama (London:
Routledge, 2012), 27187.
24

Rforme et rvolution chez les musulmans de lEmpire russe, 2nd

ed. (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1981), 23338;
E. Kozlovskii, Za krasnyi Turkestan (Tashkent, 1926), 11; Obshchestvennye nauki v
Uzbekistane, no. 7 (1990): 34.
also supported the predominantly Russian Red Guards in Tashkent in order

25
Prisoners of war arrived in large numbers from Tashkent.26 Approximately
30,000 prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian army were still held in
Turkestan in 1918, while nearly 200,000 had been interned in the region since
the beginning of the war. Most of them were living in detention camps where
hunger and epidemics were rife. Some had been allowed to leave the camps to
work outside, but they rarely found civilian employment, and many of these

the Red Guards, fought against Dutov in Orenburg at the beginning of 1918,

they were allowed to join the Bolshevik Party. In 1919 the prisoners joined the
early Russian revolutionaries (discussed above) and Muslim Communists (to
be discussed shortly) to comprise the three sections of the Party. Most POWs

their homelands. Thus, in 1919, when the Orenburg railway was reopened,
albeit for a brief period, most of them left. Of those who remained, some
were sent to the Trans-Caspian in the ranks of the Red Guards, where they

Red Guards with English support. This once more made it possible for the
POWs to reach their homeland. Clearly, there were numerous ways and many
reasons why people became revolutionaries or counterrevolutionaries.27
The story of the Czechoslovak Legion, whose members were also prison-

sheviks in the spring of 1918, they backed the White Russians and gained
control over a large part of the northern Region of the Steppes and Siberia.

Vladivostok.

Whites changed allegiance when it was to their advantage. This also happened

25
La rivoluzione capovolta, 292301. The armed units of Armenians would
be disbanded the following year on the orders of the Musbiuro, the Partys Muslim
section, headed by Turar Ryskulov, as will be seen in the section that follows (ibid.,
35861).
26

see Gatrell, Russias First World War, 18386; and Eric Lohr, Russian Citizenship from
Empire to Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 13638.
27
La rivoluzione capovolta, 34148.
122 MARCO BUTTINO
switched support from one side to the other to obtain food. The immigrant
Europeans were divided, despite their common interest in defending colonial
supremacy and excluding Muslims.
The Russian Colonists Revolt
Given food shortages in Turkestan, the question for the citizens and their
Soviet government was how the meager supplies should be collected and dis-
tributed, and to whom. For the farmers who grew the food, the question was
instead how to keep possession of what they had and avoid starvation.
The colonists were initially favorable to the revolutionary government of
Turkestan when it was formed in Tashkent. Their satisfaction was even greater
they worked. This Decree on Land, which the Bolsheviks in Petrograd issued
and the revolutionary government of Turkestan adopted, was seen in the
colony as recognition of the colonists right to obtain land.

devastating increase in tensions in rural areas. In the colony, the Revolution

to be recognized as poor farmers with the right to land, while the indigenous
population was to be excluded. The colonists, especially the most recent

at risk of starvation. However, it was entirely possible that this tranfer of land

food supplies in the regions cities.
The policies on procuring provisions were initially cautious, and sending
food to the cities was seen as an exchange of goods between the countryside
and the city. The goods the city gave people in the country in exchange for
wheat were requisitioned from the citys merchants. This meant that the
consequences of securing supplies weighed most heavily on Muslims, who
controlled commerce. It took only a few months for the system to break down,
which happened when there was nothing left in the city to requisition. The
revolutionaries had no choice but to follow the directives sent from Petrograd
and begin to forcibly collect wheat from growers. The farmers were obviously
not happy about this turn of events. In the districts of Aulie-Ata and Cherniaev,
and in Semireche, which together made up the region of Turkestan where

for the decree on land ownership quickly disappeared. When it became clear
the country, the farmers defended themselves by countering the citys power
with that of the vlast na mestakh (local-level power) of their soviets. The revolt,
which began in the spring of 1918, continued unabated until the summer, when
the rural soviets proclaimed their autonomy from the revolutionary govern-
ment of Tashkent. At this point, the army was dispatched from Tashkent and

olution had turned on itself.28
The farmers movement was not only directed against the city. It had
other targets as well. The vlast na mestakh was in fact a means of imposing a

into the army and were now returning to their villages from the front with
guns, were the movements armed wing: they forced the Kazakhs, who were
already weak from hunger, to hand over food supplies, retaliated in response
to their alleged livestock thefts, and drove away the starving people roaming
the countryside. Their actions were dictated by hunger in a war for survival.
The indigenous population had no means of defending itself: in 1918, a large
part of the regions Kazakhs died of starvation.29
In Semireche the Cossackswho had both weapons and wheatwere
concerned only with stopping the spread of chaos and violence. As early as
November 1917, they created a military council and reached an agreement
with a council of Kirghiz associated with Alash Orda. Their stated objective
was to defend themselves from the actions of Bolshevik thugs, who were
none other than the armed farmers.30 When they were defeated in May 1918
by troops dispatched from Tashkent, they continued their opposition in the
northern part of Semireche and in alliance with Alash.
28
., 25761.
29

described below, spoke out against what was happening, alerting the authorities to
the fact that in some regions of Turkestan half the population had died of hunger.

most in the famine (Ryskulov, Revoliutsiia i korennoe naselenie Turkestana, 3537). In fact,
by the beginning of the year, in the country areas around the city, Kazakhs were
dying of hunger and famine threatened to spread to the city itself. In March about 50
people in the city died of hunger every day; the following month, there were 26,000
deaths among the Kazakhs in areas around the city. Kazakhs employed by Russian
colonists, who therefore occupied a relatively privileged position, were not spared: in
the autumn of the same year it was found that a third of them had died. Conditions
La rivoluzione
capovolta, 25861.
30
Semirechenskie oblastnye vedomosti (Vernyi), no. 18 (1918): 3.
124 MARCO BUTTINO
The Revolt in Turkestans Cotton-Growing Regions: The Basmachi Movement
Although indigenous opposition to the dictatorship of the Red Guards in

Kokand continued, the form it took changed profoundly: the Muslim politi-

roots were local. It organized armed bands that came to be known as basmachi
(a term meaning bandits, used by the Soviets to indicate anyone who em-
ployed arms to oppose the Russian Revolution). The basmachi movement is
and politics. In contrast, my interest lies in examining the relationship of the

basmachi with their territory in order to understand how local power was
vlast
na mestakh
The most important basmachi kurbashi (com-
ing, protect resources, and stem the spread of famine. Their principal adver-
saries were the Red Guard and armed divisions who proclaimed themselves
revolutionaries and supporters of the revolutionary council in Tashkent but
were actually acting autonomously. Threatened by the spread of chaos, the

from colonial order and from revolutionary disorder.
For example, we will take a closer look at two kurbashi who controlled the
territory of the Fergana valley from 1918 to 1920: Irgashbai and Muhammad-
Amin-Akhmet-Bek, also called Madamin Bek. Before becoming bandits,
they had both been division heads in the militsiia, in charge of military
divisions responsible for policing the territory. Irgashbai was born in Bachkir,
a kishlak (village) in the uezd (administrative district) of Kokand, and in 1917
became the kurbashi of the city militsiia. He already had his own men, but
the local authorities. He thus began to exercise his power over the city and
the entire uezd, and suppressed other bands that had formed in the period
of social breakdown.31 Irgashbais role did not change when the leaders of the
Muslim national movement decided to create the autonomous government

organizing its defense. Irgashbai was forced to retreat from the city and with
the men under his command escaped to his native kishlak, which became his
Krestianskoe vosstanie v Fergane (Tashkent: Izd-vo Akts. O-va

31
Tashkent, 1927), 2225.

base of operations. He was well regarded because he respected and practiced

Islam and did not seek compromises with the Russians.32
Madamin Bek, born in a kishlak in the uezd of Staryi Margelan, moved to
the city in 1917 and became the president of a Muslim workers union.33 At the
beginning of 1918, he did not let himself be drawn into what was happening
in Kokand. Ignoring Irgashbais request, he made no move to defend the
city and did not take a stand against the Tashkent revolutionaries and their
government, all of whose members were Europeans. He accepted the position
of kurbashi of the militsiia of Staryi Margelan when a local soviet ran the citys
government but the Tashkent revolutionaries had not yet consolidated their
control. His relations with the Russians were good.34 He resigned his position,
probably late in the autumn of 1918, when the situation was becoming less
secure, and withdrew to his kishlak, located on the outskirts of the city. Some
members of the militsiia dzhigit
in his band.35

faithful to their cities administrations rather than bandits. Their strength
derived from the men and arms that they received from these administrations.

and thereby undermine their control over rural areas. Many men, left without
work when their village economy had broken down, joined small bands. Their
ranks swelled as conditions grew worse. Irgashbai and Madamin Bek became
the most powerful leaders and imposed their command on the other kurbashi.
Since the fundamental issue was control of the territory and access to
food, the basmachi not only fought the Soviets but also negotiated with them.
Especially during the winter months, some kurbashi sought compromises
with the Soviet military garrisons of the cities. They also occasionally switched
sides and obtained arms from them. Then, when the circumstances changed,

32

op. 3, d. 923, ll. 99ob.
33

34
Ibid.
Ibid.
35
126 MARCO BUTTINO
A few months after the destruction of Kokand, Irgashbai had about 30

kurbashi under his command. Some of them were leaders of small bands with
about 15 men, while others had as many as 200. The bands were stationed
entire uezd
Margelan. Command of the bands enabled Irgashbai to gain control over his
territory: the dzhigit kept an eye on peoples movements, made it impossible

violence and hinder the formation of autonomous basmachi bands.36
Madamin Bek was able to build a local power base in a comparable way,
and he consolidated his authority throughout 1919. At the end of the summer,
Bek had an army of over 2,000 men and a bodyguard of 200. By the end of
the year, he appears to have had between 4,000 and 5,000 men armed with

exception of the territory controlled by Irgashbai. The head of Madamin Beks

in such a way that together they made up a network that covered the entire
kishlak. Madamin, more cautious than Irgashbai, who had concentrated most
of his forces in his own kishlak, preferred his troops to remain mobile within
their district. He had a system of protection and a widespread, well-organized
and had spies hidden both in the uezdy and the cities who could keep an eye
on all the Red Armys movements. His administration of the territory was
organized along lines similar to those of the local administration in tsarist
times, but was subject to no external power. It supervised tax collection and
ensured that the bands were supplied with food. Farm crops and animals
were taken from farmers, but it appears that they were given payment in re-
turn. Stealing from the population was forbidden. The bands had weapons, as
well as workshops that repaired them and manufactured cartridges. Members
received payment. Farmers could also be involved in operations, but only
when needed for defense.37
In the eastern part of the Fergana Valley, it was not only the kurbashi
who had military organizations. As early as 1918 the colonists had been ac-
tively organizing armed units with the power to defend their wheat stores.
36
Central Asian Survey
6, 1 (1987): 23; Sh. A. Shamagdiev, Ocherki istorii grazhdanskoi voiny v ferganskoi doline
(Tashkent: Akademiia nauk Uzbekskoi SSR, 1961), 6062.
37

110, op. 3, d. 73, ll. 14ob.
They created an autonomous local power, as had happened in Aulie-Ata and

Cherniaev. When the presence of the basmachi began to be felt and there
were clashes with Madamin Bek, the revolutionary government in Tashkent
decided to recognize these armed colonists as part of the Red Army, furnish
them with weapons, and grant them a status that guaranteed their autonomy.

Abad, in the easternmost part of the Fergana plain, agreed to mobilize men
between the ages of 17 and 50. This was the birth of the Peasant Army, headed
by a military council composed of representatives elected by the villages,
which was divided into 10 military units based on territorial divisions.38 The
of their enemy, the kurbashi. However, while the Peasant Army was composed
of farmers who wanted to defend their stores of grain, the men in the bands of
the kurbashi were hunger-stricken Muslim farmers who had been left without
The alliance between the Peasant Army and the revolutionaries did
not last long. In May 1919, Tashkent ordered the army to dissolve its elected
military council and subordinate its units to the command of the Red Army

sponse, a congress called by the colonists declared that the Peasant Army
would recognize only the authority of its own commanders, its soldiers would
not hand over their weapons to the Red Army, and they did not intend to take

between the Communists and the White Russians.39 In June and July, Mon-
strov, the military head of the Peasant Army, met with Madamin Bek, and
the two negotiated a truce. When the colonists broke with the Soviets, they
stipulated a political and military agreement with Bek.40 While remaining the
armed wing of local power and continuing to defend their wheat storesin
other words, without in the least changing the objectives of their mobilization
or the means used to reach themthe colonists went from the Soviet camp to
that of their adversaries.
The agreement between Madamin Bek and Monstrov was based on a
blueprint for a new government of Turkestan that would widen the Muslims

ship. At the end of the year, the alliance led to the formation of the Provisional
38
Krestianskoe vosstanie v Fergane, 2125.

39

40
op. 2, d. 45, ll. 35455ob.

128 MARCO BUTTINO
Government of Fergana, with Madamin Bek as president and Monstrov one

41
The alliance between the basmachi and the colonists, who until then had
been armed rivals in the struggle for the territory and its resources, rested on
the fact that the territorial power of the principal kurbashi and the colonists
vlast na mestakh were analogous phenomena. They were means of local de-
control over the territory of Central Asia and the rest of Russia. Their alliance

became a member of the Communist Party and the revolutionary government
of Tashkent. We must therefore return to Tashkent to understand how the
overall political picture was changing. We will encounter a new political
revolution.
The Muslim Communists Anti-Colonial Revolution
In March 1919, taking advantage of a short-lived reopening of the railway to

Orenburg, the political commissar Petr A. Kobozev traveled from Russia to
Tashkent. Party members in Moscow were worried by the fragility of Tash-
kents revolutionary dictatorship and felt that its colonialist leanings could
have dangerous political fallout, alienating the Muslim political organizations
throughout Russia with which the Bolsheviks urgently needed to build coop-
eration. Kobozev met with strong resistance from local Communists but
managed to impose shifts in policy. The Communist Party of Turkestan was
reorganized in three sections: Russian immigrant Communists, prisoners of
war, and Muslims. The third of these internal sections is the one that now

was Turar Ryskulov, a Kazakh who had marginally taken part in the 1916
revolt and had then worked for the Soviets organizing shipments of supplies
to Aulie-Ata, where he had backed the repressive measure taken against
colonists who had opposed grain requisitions. When chosen to head the
Musbiuro, Ryskulov was the president of a commission whose mission was
to get aid to the starving Kazakhs and Kirghiz.42 Kobozevs support enabled
Ryskulov to strengthen his position and take a stand against colonialism de-
spite the open opposition of the local Communists old guard. A cardinal point
in the Musbiuros policies was the demand that the administrative soviets
be reestablished with proportional representation for the local population.
41
Krestianskoe vosstanie v Fergane, 52101; RGVA f. 25859, op. 2, d. 11, l.
133; RGASPI f. 122, op. 1, d. 251, ll. 3740.
42
Revoliutsiia i korennoe naselenie Turkestana, 7078.
In July 1919, Moscow issued a decree that prescribed, exactly as demanded,

proportional participation by Muslims (approximately 95 percent of the popu-
lation of Turkestan) in the local administration. To help put an end to the Rus-
sian revolutionaries isolation, Moscow appeared to be willing to take real
steps to end colonialism. It soon became apparent that its intentions were far

crisis. At the end of the year, the Musbiuro prevailed upon the government

by Kirghiz during the revolt and guaranteed the restitution of lands colonists
had illegally taken from them. A special commission was created for the paci-

in the Jadid movement formerly involved in the government in Kokand and at
this time a member of the Musbiuro, was given the task of directing it.43
Equally drastic measures were taken regarding Fergana, where a com-
mission headed by another Jadid, Tursun Khodzhaev, had been sent in April.
On the advice of the Musbiuro, the government of Turkestan amnestied
the Fergana kurbashi and all the men that had been part of their bands.44
In July, as mentioned above, Irgashbai went over to the Soviets. His bands
became divisions of the Red Army. In the same period, the agreement be-
tween Madamin Bek and Monstrov was being worked out. In the autumn,

implementation of the decree on proportional Muslim participation in local
administrative soviets was applied in the region. Nezametdin Khodzhaev,
director of the Musbiuro and a former supporter of Kokands autonomous
government, was chosen to head it. The political shift created a new context
.
In November 1919, the Musbiuro, through President of the Fergana revkom

with Madamin Bek. Meetings with the kurbashi lasted several months, until

Soviet government, but the kurbashi turned him down and asked instead
that 95 percent of the arms in possession of the Soviets be handed over to
him, as the representative of the Muslims, and that the Soviets recognize the
autonomy of the districts in the Fergana Valley. Madamin Bek was willing to
43

44
Turkestanskii kommunist (Tashkent), 4 May 1919; Izvestiia Ferganskogo Sovdepa
(Kokand), 7 May 1919; Musbiuro R. K. P. (b) v Turkestane (Tashkent: Turkestanskoe
Gosudarstvennoe izd-vo, 1922), 6569; Ryskulov, Revoliutsiia i korennoe naselenie Turke-
stana, 9395; TsGARUz f. r-17, op. 1, d. 699, ll. 44ob.; f. 36, op. 1, d. 17, ll. 21718.
130 MARCO BUTTINO
recognize Soviet power on the condition that Soviet power recognize the
sharia, that his Muslim army remain intact in Fergana and not be stationed
in Staryi Margelan. The Soviet representatives accepted his demands, stating,
however, that there was no place in the army for autonomous divisions and

peared that there had been a complete political about-face in comparison with
the Soviet past: the Muslim population had obtained recognition of the sharia
and the restitution of its land and livestock. Thousands demonstrated in the
streets of Staryi Margelan in favor of the agreement and the end of the war.45
While negotiations with Madamin Bek were proceeding, the Musbiuro
drew up a political platform of its own, one that seemed to challenge all of
Moscows centralistic objectives.46 It contemplated the formation of a Com-
munist Party of the Turkic Peoples, the majority of whose members would
be representatives of the local population. Ryskulov argued that the Party in
Turkestan could not have a class character because the people of Central Asia
were not divided into social classes and together constituted a proletarian
to reassure everyone, arguing that he did not want a sliding toward the
Constituent Assembly and stating that the principle of a revolutionary
dictatorship was safe. The Musbiuro then sought to reassure the central
Partys representatives and approved a statute that safeguarded the unity of
the Russian Communist Party (RKP), i.e., the Russian Federations Party.47
The Communist Party of the Turkic Peoples was established and began
operations, although formally it found itself straitjacketed within Moscows
one-party system. This compromise was inevitable, in perfect synchrony with
Sultan Galiev, who in Moscow and Kazan was advocating Muslim national
Communism and working for the creation of a Muslim army.48 In Ryskulovs
proposal, Turkestan emerges as a State of the Turkic Peoples, defended by its
own armed forces that could become a point of reference and political aggre-
gation for much of the Soviet Muslim world.49 This is the myth of ancient
Turan, dear to Central Asias nationalist movement, the hope that all Muslims
of the former empire could be united in a single state.
45

245, ll. 2627, 4748; ibid., d. 251, ll. 1717ob., 5356ob., 6474; ibid., d. 279, ll. 1622ob.,
24, 2947, 4851ob., 5760, 6363ob., 7576, 7883ob., 10001; ibid., d. 919, ll. 84-86.
46
Kolonialnaia revoliutsiia, 109; Musbiuro R.K.P. (b.) v Turkestane, 7392.
47
Izvestiia (Tashkent), 25 January 1920.
48
Sultan Galiev, Le pre de la
rvolution tiers-mondiste (Paris: Fayard, 1986).
49
Izvestiia, 5 February 1920.
The Party conference closed with the election of an Interim Central

presented as the Turkestan Partys sole leadership, was composed of nine
Muslims (two of whom were naturally Ryskulov and Nezametdin Khodzhaev)
and six Europeans.50
Turkkomissiias presence at the two conferences in Tashkent seemed to
indicate a tacit acceptance of Ryskulovs policy shift by Moscow. The Turan
program had been approved for the future, while in the immediate present a
Muslim army needed to be created. Later, it could be understood whether this
would be limited to being part of the sole Red Army and subject to the orders
or could become an instrument for a true anticolonial revolution.51
The Red Armys Revolution
By January 1920, the Musbiuro understood that for a number of reasonsmost

importantly the fact that Red Army divisions from Russia were approaching
Turkestanit urgently needed to make its positions explicit. In the Region of
the Steppes, conditions had already changed profoundly. In the spring of 1919,
the Red Army, commanded by Frunze, had captured Orenburg, thanks to its
military strength and to the divisions that had developed between Alash Orda
and the White Russian forces. Admiral Kolchaks White Army had shown so

pull out of the alliance and open negotiations with Frunze. Alash switched
to the opposing political camp without renouncing its autonomist goals. The
political shift in the Region of the Steppes took place only a few days before
the Musbiuros conference in Tashkent. In March the Red Army made further
advances into the Region of the Steppes, and in April captured Semireche,
put down Cossack resistance, and forced Ataman Annenkov to surrender and
Dutov to escape to China. Frunze arrived in Turkestan as the head of a strong,

of the Orenburg rail lines, and with it, the promise of an imminent wheat
delivery. The Turkkomissiia thus found itself in a new position: it no longer
needed to reach compromises to play for time; the moment had come for it to
make its positions, worded as orders, clear to Moscow, whose intentions were
to bring Turkestan back under its control rather than abandon it to the local
populations representatives, deemed unreliable at best.
50
Pravda of Turkestan, 6 February 1920.
51
Musbiuro R.K.P. (b.) v Turkestane, 9192.
132 MARCO BUTTINO
On the eve of the signing of the agreement with Madamin Bek, the Turk-
komissiia turned to Moscow and obtained, only a few days later, a Statute
for Turkestan Autonomy that failed entirely to take the Muslim Communist
proposals into account. In the Statute, the Communist Party of Turkestan was
considered to be merely a local organ of the larger single Party of the entire
Russian Federation, and only limited power was granted to the government in
Tashkent: defense, foreign relations, railways, postal and telegraph services,

to enjoy what was euphemistically called Soviet autonomy; contrary to the

Federation.52 However, it was not only the Russian leadership that was against
making agreements with the basmachi. As can easily be imagined, the majority
of the Russian population of Tashkent, namely those who saw a return to the
colonial order as the only way out of the Civil War, also supported this policy.
At the 1 May celebrations in Tashkent, there were demonstrations by Russians
against the Turkkomissiias ambiguity and Madamin Beks expected arrival
in the city.53 In Fergana, too, many political authorities and army leaders op-
posed making concessions to the basmachi, and some openly advocated that
all basmachi be shot and that anyone who supported them deserved a similar
fate.54

the Turkkomissiia and the
went to Moscow and met the Partys top leadership to discuss autonomy for

The Bolshevik was by now convinced that Turan was nothing more than the
dream of a group of nationalistic Muslims who were enemies of the Soviet
state. Meanwhile, in Fergana, Madamin Bek had signed the agreement with
the Soviets. He was persuaded to sign because he believed that Moscow was
moving in the direction indicated by Ryskulov and Khodzhaev, and because
Ryskulov had just issued a decree in Turkestan providing for the restitution of
Muslim land and livestock that had been requisitioned in 1916. Two days after
the signature of the agreement by Madamin, it was announced in Moscow
that Ryskulovs project for the autonomy of Turkestan had been rejected. The
decree that established land restitution was suspended.
Although it had been envisaged that Madamin Bek and his men would
publicly celebrate his submission to Soviet power and his role as the head of
the Muslim Army in Tashkent, he never arrived. It seems that the idea had
52
Izvestiia, 24 March 1920.
53

54

been vetoed by Frunze. Two months later, Madamin was killed in mysterious
circumstances.

former basmachi should be moved out of the region.55
bashi and unleashed the army against unarmed civilians. In the summer of
1920, Red Army divisions began to take hostages in the kishlaks, threatening
to shoot them if the basmachi failed to release Russian prisoners within a few
hours.56 Following this, negotiations, threats, and violence resumed. The Red
Army sought to create and exploit divisions between the Muslims, playing
one faction against another, reaching temporary agreements with some, and

them of existing rivalries between Kirghiz animal herders and the sedentary
Uzbek population, and pass on information about divisions between the kur-
bashi, so the army could ally with some and violently suppress others. 57

58 Divisions of Turkmen from Khiva and
Bukhara, as well as Tatar, Kirghiz, and Sart soldiers from the Fergana Valley,
participated in the campaign.59 The Bolsheviks had by this point understood

took it upon itself to involve the Young Bukharans, i.e., local Jadids, in the

55

56

57

the early years of the kurbashis resistance in Fergana and the local dimensions of
their actions. Mentions of this period and this region can be found in J. Castagn,
(Paris: Ed. Leroux, 1925); Baymirza Hayit,
Kampf Turkestans in den Jahren 1917 bis 1934 (Cologne: Dreisam Verlag, 1992); G. Frazer,
Basmachi I, Central Asian Survey 6, 1 (1987): 173; and Basmachi II, Central Asian
Survey 6, 2 (1987): 742. For a study of political developments in 1920, see Hassan
Blent Paksoy, Basmachi Movement from Within: Account of Zeki Velidi Togan,
Nationalities Papers 23, 2 (1995): 37399. Approaching the subject at the local level is
indispensible for studying the basmachi, as it makes it possible to understand their
local methods of organization, and therefore their relationship with the population, as
well as their negotiations with the Soviets and the Soviets repressive actions against
them. There is a wealth of archival documents on these aspects that has as yet not
been fully explored.
58

talnaia khronika (Moscow: Tsentr strategicheskikh i politicheskikh issledovanii, 2001).
59

134 MARCO BUTTINO
port for a revolt by members of the emirates Muslim population. The Jadid
movement in Bukhara accepted this role because it had long been seeking
Russian aid to depose the emir. However, it found itself allied with people
who had blocked the programs and reforms sought by the Musbiuro, some of
whose members were Jadids. The progressive Muslim movement emerged in
shreds, while the Muslims national revolution was subsequently abandoned
when it failed to win the approval of Soviets in Tashkent and Moscow.
The capture of Khiva followed. The Turkkomissiia took over the political
leadership of the military action and indicated when it was expedient to
involve Muslims. In the Khanate of Khiva, the Red Army exploited the con-

Uzbeks, and when the Turkmen tribes rebelled, the army intervened, burning

desert to Persia.60

lines were reopened, and wheat began to arrive from Russia; the Fergana

reestablished. In Semireche, repressive measures were taken against colonists

a short period in Turkestan fears and expectations surrounded the possible
end of Russian colonialism. It looked as if the authorities now intended to
activate Ryskulovs decree on land restitution. But the reform of land and

Soviet territory and Moscow was oriented to overcome the confrontation with
peasants, including the colonists of Turkestan.
In the mid-1920s, Turkestan was divided into national republics, whose
borders now divide independent countries. The cooptation of members by
their majority nationality groups into the newly created republics power
structures served to consolidate the regime.
Conclusion
The local rebellions, revolutions, and counterrevolutions investigated in this

essay took place in a context in which the colonial order no longer existed
and no new order had yet taken its place. The war had caused famine and ex-
acerbated social tensions to such a point that, with the collapse of the empire,
against one another: immigrants against the autochthonous population, food-

60

283ob.; f. 670, op. 1, d. 52, l. 15.

without. Local competing interests prevailed. In the struggle to survive, those
who were strong enough took control of territories and their resources; but
local power, beset by the chaos that reigned in the region, remained fragile.
Everyone was threatened and everyones hopes were pinned on a new order,
The revolutionary government of Tashkent, which was supported by

Petrograd and had more soldiers and arms than others, was further strength-
ened by its capacity to rally members of threatened minorities to its defense.
This is what occurred when the Armenian minority in Kokand sided with the
Red Guard and when prisoners of war joined the Bolshevik Party and were

the empire.61
The colonial nature of Central Asia and the presence of an immigrant

However, the possibility of comparing events in Central Asia with those in
other regions of the former empire goes beyond the questions of the Russians
position, nationalism, and the instrumental use of threatened minorities. The
ways the Revolution spread throughout the territory of the former empire
are similar, and comparing them is essential for reconstructing, in all their
complexity, the changes that took place in those years of crisis and the re-
founding of the state on a new basis.
61

Here, too, it was famine that exacerbated tensions and created division so that the
three principal components of the populationRussians, Armenians, and Muslims
armed themselves. The transfer of power to the Soviets was achieved with the use
of arms and was supported by Russians and Armenians. They took the city by

Armenians went through the districts and massacred the inhabitants. This was in
April 1918, only a few days after the violence in Kokand, and the similarities in the

out reprisals against Muslim villages. The mobilization of the Armenians in both
Kokand and Baku was in reaction to the 1915 massacre of Armenians in Anatolia. See
Ronald Grigor Suny,
Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 20433.
136
Nationalism and War in a Contested Borderland:
The Case of Russian Bessarabia (191417)
Andrei Cusco
This essay will explore the impact of World War I on Bessarabias image within
the Russian and Romanian public sphere, as well as the broader consequences
of wartime developments on the mobilization of ethnicity in the local context.
The narrative will follow a twofold, sequential structure. On the one hand,
the Bessarabian case will be analyzed in the context of the major policy shifts
initiated by the Russian central government and military authorities follow-
ing the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914. On the other hand, World
War I triggered an upsurge of interest in the Bessarabian problem in the
Romanian Kingdom. The central argument of the essay is that World War
I changed the nature of imperial policies towards the western borderlands.
The increasingly insecure imperial regime at the center introduced a radical
transformation of Bessarabian politics and society that accelerated with the
imperial collapse in 1917 but really got under way during World War I. I argue
that the combined pressures of war, imperial collapse, geopolitics, symbolic
competition, and local identity politics accounted for the unexpected outcome
that became the only available option in 1918: the uneasy and problematic
integration of Bessarabia into Greater Romania.
Bessarabia within the Nationalizing Russian Empire (191416)
Aside from the dilemmas linked to the radical shift in population politics
and the growing intervention of the state in the economic and social spheres,1
1
Nationalizing the
Russian Empire: The Campaign Against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Lohr, The Russian Army and the Jews: Mass
Deportation, Hostages, and Violence during World War I, Russian Review 60, 3 (July

Violence, 19051921, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, 3 (Summer
2003): 62752; Holquist, La socit contre lEtat, la socit conduisant lEtat: La socit
cultive et le pouvoir dEtat en Russie, 19141921, Le mouvement social, no. 196 (July
September 2001): 2140.
138 ANDREI CUSCO
after the outbreak of World War I the Russian government also faced the
challenge of domesticating nationalism and channeling its potential to

Russian Empires population in the initial phase of the war thus acquires

context is interimperial competition. The role of this kind of rivalry has
been recently explored, among others, by Alexei Miller, who advanced the
view that the collapse of the macrosystem of Eurasian continental empires
2 The elites of the

consciously breaching the former conventions of interstate relations in the
region and as trespassing the boundaries of their rational behavior in the
process. Dating the origins of this transformation from the disruption of the
European concert during the Crimean War, Miller insists that it was World

than following the traditional paradigm, which emphasized the subversive
potential of national movements per se, Miller argues that the manipulation of
polities. The presence of ethnically related transborder communities in all

the concerned parties warrants further investigation along these lines. In any
case, there is plenty of empirical evidence on the creation of national military
order to undermine the internal stability and to counter the propaganda of

enemy powers.3
dangers even in border provinces that were not strictly part of the war zone.4

to interimperial rather than imperial/nation-state rivalry,5 his point that the
2

tory of the Russian Empire) is developed in Aleksei Miller, Between Local and
Inter-Imperial: Russian Imperial History in Search of Scope and Paradigm, Kritika:
Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, 1 (Winter 2004): 726, especially 1820.
Discussion of the reasons for the collapse of this macrosystem can be found in Aleksei
Miller, Pochemu vse kontinentalnye imperii raspalis posle Pervoi Mirovoi voiny, available at
http://www.polit.ru/article/2006/04/11/miller2/ (accessed 16 October 2014).
3

The Ukrainian case is, of course, even more interesting.
4
Pochemu vse kontinentalnye imperii raspalis posle Pervoi Mirovoi voiny.

5
with the irredentist claims not of a fellow-imperial but rather of a national state.
NATIONALISM AND WAR IN A CONTESTED BORDERLAND 139
imperial framework was crucial for the development and consolidation of

ethnic nationalisms must be retained.
The degree of nationalization of the Russian masses by the summer

The predominantly rural nature of the empires population, as well as the

weak impact of national motives on most Russian subjects self-awareness.
In any case, even if the war is usually viewed as a formative period in terms

Sanborn recently argued for a reconsideration of the question of the Russian
nation in wartime, asserting that the national political form does not require
agreement or loyalty, either between segments of the population or between
of contestation.6 The author then relies on Rogers Brubakers model of

nationness as event to argue that nationness is both an event that suddenly
crystallizes and one that is the product of deep developmental trends.7 Despite

allowing for a preliminary buildup of potential energy, his conclusion remains
somewhat disconcerting. His insistence on the fallacy of the link between
the emerging of nationness and the urban environment should be taken
into account, but I believe he is overstating the case for a peculiar peasant
nationalism. The national framework that the peasants used in their public
dealings with the government might as well be a classical case of discursive

point that provided the conditions for activating the potential energies of

bureaucracy. Thus, one could agree with the argument that the real barriers

national political structures whenever they could.8 However, even such an
However, the processes at work might be very similar, and thus Millers thesis should
not be, in itself, discarded.
6

Reexamination, Slavic Review 59, 2 (Summer 2000): 26789, quotation on 282.
7

8

140 ANDREI CUSCO
interpretation presupposes the existence of a measure of coherence within the

lated to the much deeper division on the question of the nature and spatial

during the last decades of the imperial regime. Kuropatkins position towards
the Russian nationalist project was itself far from coherent. Thus, during his

he argued against the annexation of East Prussia and Galicia to the Russian
Empire, viewing these regions as a sort of East European Alsace-Lorraine.
During World War I, however, his opinion changed completely. In a report

the annexation to Russia of Eastern Galicia and of those parts of Hungary and
Bukovina with a majority Russian population. His main argument on this
plemia].9 Kuropatkins
ostensible complaint concerning the crisis of traditional legitimizing criteria
(devotion to the Tsar and Fatherland) referred not so much to the pre-
national, dynastic overtones of these notions, but primarily to their nationalist
10 This is one of Sanborns
main failings in his otherwise fruitful discussion of the emerging problem
of integrating Russian subjects into a modern community during wartime.

(in the sense of rehabilitating the peasantry as a subject as well as an object of
potential nation-building), this focus on the Russian peasantry ignores the
horizontal fault lines between ethnic groups in the imperial borderlands
that were activated after 1914. The picture becomes even more complex once
we accept the observation of one of Sanborns critics, who argued that the
author underestimate[d] the degree to which nation, empire, and class pulled
along the lines of discrete and opposed political languages.11 In fact, such

starting from the Great Retreat of the Russian armies in the summer of 1915,
and are thus a general feature of the whole period.
9
Okrainy Rossiiskoi Imperii: Gosudarstvennoe upravlenie i natsionalnaia
politika v gody Pervoi Mirovoi voiny (19141917 gg.) (Moscow: , 2004), 12324.
10

11

Merchants and Commercial Diasporas, Nationalities Papers 31, 4 (December 2003):
47184, quotation on 471.
The extent to which the government and the public were trying to forge
or by creating a cult of heroes and exceptional feats remains a contentious

issue. Recent investigations have argued that Russia equaled its cobelligerents
in constructing a whole infrastructure of memory and commemoration in
order to foster a feeling of common belonging and state cohesion among the
population.12 The author remarks that honoring, rewarding, and commemo-

multinational state and bring all together on common ground.13 This com-

participation of the peasant masses in the Great War. Far from perceiving the
soldiers in the Russian army as (potential) citizens, some of the highly placed

for Russia.14 Despite the unprecedented scale of the publics involvement in
wartime developments and the huge impact of mass population movements
on destabilizing the social fabric of the empire, the bulk of the population
concerned was indeed relegated by the central authorities to a passive and
subordinate role. The incapacity of the imperial state to impose its integrative
projects upon a restive population (and its success in promoting highly exclu-
sionary practices of ethnic discrimination) proved ultimately fateful for the
survival of the imperial regime and for the upheavals that plunged the empire
(and especially its borderlands) into a maelstrom of confusion and violence.
12

Nation in Russias Great War, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, 3
(Summer 2006): 45985.
13

Problem of Social Cohesion, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, 3

Rieber concludes that many problems remain in developing the idea that the Russian

14

General Nikolai
Ianushkevich and Minister of Agriculture Aleksandr Krivoshein. While Ianushkevich
expressed his deep skepticism with regard to the existence of any national feeling
among the peasant conscripts and soldiers, Krivoshein, joined by the other ministers,
strongly objected. Disagreement on such fundamental issues is symptomatic. See
Stockdale, United in Gratitude, 47274. Ianushkevichs xenophobic nationalism
purely material incentives.

142 ANDREI CUSCO
In the initial period of the war, the nationalizing trends in central poli-
cies led to certain shifts in the local hierarchy of ethnicity in Bessarabia. This
applied not only to the German colonists of southern Bessarabia, who were
unequivocally included into the category of enemy aliens alongside other
ethnic German communities of the same type in southern Russia, but also
to the Romanian-speaking peasants and (partially) intellectuals who were
suspected of harboring pro-Romanian sentiment. However, the case of the
Bessarabian Romanians was peculiar in comparison with other collectively

the local population in terms of loyalty and its potential for separatism. That
is, they believed that various social groups among the Bessarabian Romanian-

the empire. The authorities found only a small group of local intelligentsia
to be prone to separatism. At the same time, the peasant masses and most
of the local landowners were considered quite reliable imperial subjects.
This complex heterogeneous perception of the local population contrasts

pire (particularly, the Ruthenians/Ukrainians). In these cases a much more
essentialist and homogenous perception of these ethnic/linguistic/cultural
groups was present.
Thus, the gradual imposition of nationalizing categories upon the sub-
jects of the Russian Empire was neither smooth nor straightforward in
the Bessarabian case. The local population was traditionally regarded as
staunchly loyal to the throne and the Russian state, while its closeness to the
Great Russians was derived from its adherence to the Orthodox Church and
15 The peasant
masses also seemed to be willing recipients of and recruits for the right-wing
15

nationality policies of the Russian Empire during World War I. This factor clearly
played a central role in the policies of the Russian occupation authorities in Galicia,

Despite the predominant national framework and the rhetoric of restoring national
unity and reaching Russias natural ethnographic borders, the practical problem
posed by the strength of the Uniate Church became a sore point for the Russian

of the military authorities and the interventionist strategy pursued by Archbishop
Evlogii. For a detailed discussion of the confessional policy of the Russian Empire
in occupied Eastern Galicia, see Bakhturina, Okrainy Rossiiskoi Imperii, 167208. On
the war of faiths and the respective roles of Archbishop Evlogii and Metropolitan
Sheptitskyi during the Russian occupation of Galicia, see Mark von Hagen, War in a

ideologies espoused by pro-monarchist and extremist organizations (e.g., the

numbers of peasant activists in its ranks). In connection with the weakening
of the traditional bases for legitimacy stressing dynastic motives, a growing
feeling of uneasiness and apprehension gripped the Russian authorities in

only sporadically throughout the prewar years (for example, during the
186364 Polish revolt), now acquired an immediacy that was hardly conceiv-
able before. This was obviously the case before Romanias alignment with
the Entente powers, when Bessarabia became vulnerable militarily and was
included in the zone administered directly by the Russian army. The ex-
ceptional status of the province placed the Russian administration under
strain, which was complicated by the massive presence in the region of other
obvious candidates for enemy alien status: the Germans and the Jews.
Thus, Bessarabia became the object of a nationalizing policy that transcended

borderlands.
The link between internal political agendas and foreign policy priorities
was of course obvious in other borderlands (or temporarily occupied terri-
tories) as well. One of the cases in point concerned Northern Bukovina, a part
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire directly bordering on Bessarabia. The eth-
nic makeup of this province (featuring Ukrainians, Romanians, Germans,
Jews, Hungarians, etc.) confronted the Russian authorities with yet another
nationality policy conundrum. Although Northern Bukovina, like (Eastern)
Galicia, was included in the ideal map of Russian national expansion due
to its large Ukrainian-speaking population, the actual policies of the Russian
military authorities during the shortlived occupation of the territory in the

towards the provincial hierarchy of the Orthodox Church and by relying
on certain representatives of the local Romanian public as administrators

Romanian). Moreover, the envoy of the Russian Foreign Ministry in Bukovina
advocated the transfer of power to elected representatives of the local Roman-
ian population following the likely Russian retreat from the region. Thus,
Russian nationality policy in the region was subordinated to the wider

population was, on the whole, hostile towards the Russian Empire, the tempo-
144 ANDREI CUSCO
rary Russian authorities pursued a pragmatic policy motivated by their inter-

16
Following the declaration of war in late July 1914, Bessarabia immediately
entered the sphere of the military administration. This temporary shift in the

toward the presence of certain unreliable individuals in the province. The

eyes was not comparable to that of more directly targeted ethnic groups,
like Jews or Germans. Nevertheless, the accusation of Romanophilia bore
much more serious consequences during the years of Romanias neutrality
and uncertain military allegiance than during the immediate prewar period.
An important change in the authorities perception of internal subversion
concerned the spreading of false or pernicious rumors among the civil popu-
lation of the province and, especially, among the reservists at the time of
mobilization. The role of rumors as the most widespread and uncontrollable
atmosphere of war paranoia and suspicion of foreign espionage.17 One of

the most interesting individual examples of such a tendency involves the case
of Elena Alistar, a Bessarabian-born activist in the Romanian womens rights
movement who was, at the time, a student at the University of Iasi.18 Alistar
was accused of spreading rumors about an impending Russian-Romanian
war among young reservists who were recruited from her native village. The
16
Okrainy Rossiiskoi Imperii, 15657.
17

to Romania was a constant source of worry for the local authorities even prior to
1914. For example, a rumor appeared during the Russo-Japanese War referring to
a mysterious delegation of Bessarabians which purportedly went to the Romanian
king, Carol I, and asked him to have the Romanian troops ready in order to occupy

Moldova (ANRM) f. 297, op. 1, d. 98, l. 182. Another revealing example is cited by the

Bessarabia during 1912 and 1913 and who registered a rumor about the planned
marriage of the Romanian prince Charles (the future Carol II) to a Russian Grand
Duchess. According to this rumor, Bessarabia would be returned to Romania as a
dowry for the young couple. The source was mentioned by the above-cited report,
which annexed an article from the Romanian newspaper Universul of 28 January 1914.
See Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. 529, op. 1, d. 26, l. 12. The
issue of the impact of such collective intoxications is worth investigating further.

18
prominent member of Romanias womens organizations coming from Bessarabia. She

was also the head of the Bessarabian section of the Society of Romanian Women.

to prove the charges of subversive antiwar propaganda, he recommended
Alistars expulsion from Bessarabia and other border provinces for the
duration of the war on the grounds of her being a convinced and extreme
Romanophile.19 Alistars activities seemed even more troubling because of
her association with a Romanian citizen arrested for suspected military espi-
onage.20 Apparently, this was not the only example, since later in the war a
similar decision was issued in the case of Daniil Ciugurean, one of the most

government of the Moldavian Democratic Republic in late 1917 and early
1918.21 The insistence of military authorities on applying radical repressive
and rejected the decision of the chief of gendarmes. This demonstrates how

could lead to unforeseen outcomes even in the security-obsessed atmosphere
of the war.
By late 1915, the specter of an emerging national movement in Bessa-

Romanias position in the war was still doubtful (despite the growing pro-

Romania remained real. In this context, the chief of gendarmes emphasized
the peculiarity of the Bessarabian provincenamely, the national Moldavian
tion, since the population of this nationality is considered to be rather loyal.

This is undoubtedly true.22 He described the peasant masses as inert, not

the Russian Empire, which guaranteed greater material well-being compared
to its Romanian rival. Nordberg astutely remarked on the crucial role of the
events of 1905 and the 1912 anniversary in the nurturing, among the local
intelligentsia, of a group that strive towards the cultural self-consciousness

19
September 1914. See ANRM f. 297, op. 1, d. 520, ll. 3133, here l. 33.
20

21

both in revolutionary and nationalist propaganda was far more compelling. See
ibid., d. 358, ll. 1718.
22

1915. Ibid., d. 312, ll. 6, 9, here l. 9.
146 ANDREI CUSCO
of the Moldavians, or, as they call them more often nowadays, Romanians.23
The novel development that provoked Nordbergs apprehension consisted in

of a separatist character among these rebellious intellectuals.24 Commenting

25 Thus, the nationalizing logic was
compelling the Russian authorities to view the Bessarabian developments
increasingly in terms of a borderland question. The threat of separatism or
Romanian irredentism was mostly a mental construct of insecure imperial

longer be perceived in premodern terms. The weak but growing articulation
of local educated society also created the premises for the extrapolation of
the rather moderate, culturally oriented grievances of the Moldavian intelli-

from inside Bessarabia as from the Romanian kingdom, where anti-Russian
rhetoric exploited the Bessarabian question in internal political struggles.

when Romanias foreign policy options were still open.
The Bessarabian Question in the Romanian Kingdom (191416)
Prior to 1914, Romanian educated society and the political establishment showed

by the Russian monarchy elicited a response from Romania. Aside from the
polemics sparked by the 1912 anniversary of the Russian annexation of Bes-
sarabia, the 1905 Revolution provides a good example, though the intensity of
the Romanian reaction was much weaker. The situation changed completely
after 1914, when the war altered the context of the Bessarabian question and
transformed it into a pressing geopolitical issue. Romanias membership in
the Triple Alliance of the Central Powers became increasingly challenged in

the part of the Hungarian state, leading to growing tensions in Transylvania;

phase of the Balkan wars; changes in the leadership of both major Romanian
23

24

25

political parties; and the concurrent growth of Francophile tendencies among

the political establishment all constituted major obstacles to the continuation
of the previous foreign policy course. Though the Conservative government of
Titu Maiorescu and Take Ionescu renewed the alliance treaty with the Central
Powers in 1913, Berlin and Vienna were aware that Romania had become an
unreliable partner. More ominously, direct negotiations between Hungarian
Prime Minister Count Tisza and the leaders of the Romanian national parties
in Transylvania failed in early 1914. These negotiations were supported both

wake of the Balkan Wars. Parallel to these developments, there was a gradual
change in Russian-Romanian relations. This change should be analyzed in the
context of the overall normalization of Russias image in Western Europe
just before World War I.26 Romanian Francophilia and the pro-Western stance
of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov provided a congenial atmosphere

before the Sarajevo murder, when the Romanian king, Carol I, met Nicholas II
27 The uncertainty that dominated Bucharest governing circles

international position. At the Crown Council held on 3 August 1914, the
overwhelming majority of the countrys active politicians summoned for the
occasion rejected the kings proposal to join the Central Powers and opted
instead for strict neutrality. In fact, this decision signaled the beginning of a
hectic diplomatic campaign that went hand in hand with an intense polemics
over the countrys future course in the war. Following the kings death in
September 1914, the supporters of the Central Powers began to lose ground

campaign and support from both the governing Liberals and the opposition
Conservatives. The government chaired (since January 1914) by the Liberal
leader Ion I. C. Bratianu hesitated for two more years before bringing Romania
into the war on the Entente side in August 1916. This interlude witnessed an
open competition of national priorities, and it is in this context that the Bes-
sarabian question suddenly acquired a reality and immediacy unknown in
the past.

26
Mausoleum (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 237).
[The Great Powers and Ro-
27
mania (18561947)] (Bucharest: Albatros, 1996), 15556.

148 ANDREI CUSCO
The regions marginality within Romanian national discourse was over-

come on several levels. First, Bessarabia became a potential object of diplomatic

elites to the region as a potential compensation for Romanias adherence
to the bloc of the Central Powers. Second, the polemics around Romanias
entry into the war produced several consistent accounts of the importance
of the Bessarabian question for the Romanian establishment. This kind of
literature could be subdivided into three main categories: 1) policy analyses,
assessing the economic, strategic, and demographic importance of Bessarabia
for the Romanian nation-state from a pragmatic point of view; 2) political de-
bates and parliamentary discourses that acquired a wide resonance due to
their programmatic nature or to the prominence of the personalities involved
(the most visible cases of such publications are the printed versions of the
speeches given by Constantin Stere,28 Petre Carp,29 and Take Ionescu in late
1915 and early 1916, as the controversy over Romanias neutrality came to its
apex); 3) travelogues and general accounts of the Bessarabian situation (from
the Romanian point of view), in the tradition inaugurated by Nicolae Iorga30
31 and Vasile D. Moisiu.32 The
agenda on the part of the authors in question. Another feature distinguishing

irredentist activities of the Cultural League and the appearance of other
organizations dedicated to reclaiming Bessarabian territory. The human and
scholarly resources for such endeavors were mostly provided by Bessarabian-
born migrs.33 However, this period also witnessed an open split between
28

Discursul D-lui Take Ionescu: Studiu critic [Mr. Take
Marele
[The Great War and Romanias policy] (Bucharest: Lumina,
1918).
[Romanias foreign policy] (Iasi:
29

30
[The Romanian nation in Bessarabia],

199597).
31
[From Bessarabia] (Iasi, 1908).
k [News from todays Bessarabia], with a
32
preface by Dumitru Furtuna (Bucharest: C. Sfetea, 1915).

33
prominent role in the ranks of the Bessarabian group and contributed to the anti-
the Transylvanian and Bessarabian factions within the national-cultural

movement. Epitomized by the staunchly pro-Entente Nicolae Iorga and the
equally uncompromising Germanophile Constantin Stere, the competition
of the war.34
The Bessarabian question was debated in the contemporary polemical
literature mainly from three intertwined points of view. These perspectives
may be subsumed under the labels of the economic, geopolitical, and
national arguments. The economic argument emphasized the commercial
and practical importance of Bessarabias acquisition for Romanias position on
the Black Sea. In this sense, direct competition with the Russian Empire in the
Russia appeared as Romanias chief competitor for these raw materials on the
Western European market. Conquest of Bessarabia would end Russian control
over the mouth of the Danube. The second, geopolitical component of the
Bessarabian nexus was based on the assumption of Russian designs for
the control of the Straits and of Constantinople. Aside from the traditional
apprehensions of the Romanian establishment, this fear was enhanced
in the initial period of World War I due to information concerning secret

compensations for the Allied powers. The apparent readiness of the French
and British governments to recognize the primacy of Russian interests re-
garding the Straits and the enthusiasm of the Russian public for the conquest
of Constantinople were frequently cited as proof of the danger of a Russian
victory for the Romanian state. This geopolitical vision was also built on the
assumption of the greatest relative danger represented by the Romanov
Empire in comparison with the Austrian or German monarchies. In the view
of the pro-German authors, neither of the Central Powers was interested in
weakening Romania. Russia, on the other hand, purportedly viewed Ro-

third dimension of the Bessarabian problem referred to the question of
national priorities. The pro-Entente faction insisted on Transylvanias greater
Russian polemics with the brochure (Bessarabias Liberation), pub-

[Greater Romania] (Bucharest:

34

between the pro-Entente and pro-German positions within the Romanian political
faction), see Lucian Boia,

[The Germanophiles: The Romanian intellectual elite during World
War I] (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2009).
150 ANDREI CUSCO

for the importance of the two provinces in the image of the ideal fatherland
left the Bessarabian faction in the minority. Its representatives sought to
counter this argument by invoking the integrity of the national body as the
only possible premise of a viable foreign policy. As Steres case showed, this
competition also involved two opposing visions of Romanian nationalism.
What I have called the pro-Bessarabian faction was in fact a loose

foreign policy preferences. Thus, the core of this group was formed, on the
one hand, by the old leaders of the Conservative Party (P. P. Carp and Titu
Maiorescu) and, on the other hand, by the group headed by Constantin Stere
(which included the bulk of the kingdom-based Bessarabian migrs). The
most consistent writings of this group were published under the aegis of the
League for Bessarabias Liberation, which acted as a coordinating center
for the promotion of the Bessarabian problem in the public sphere. An-
other publishing avenue was the newspaper Minerva

represented by short brochures structured along the lines presented above
and propagating either staunch neutrality or immediately joining the Central
Powers.35
The polemics over Romanias position in the war were not limited to the
level of pamphlets and poor quality nationalist propaganda. One of the central
policy proposals in this respect was drafted by Stere, who became one of the
most convincing critics of the majority pro-Entente position during 1915 and
early 1916. Steres arguments, reiterated with only slight changes of emphasis
throughout his involvement in the polemics, could be grouped under several
headings that structured his agenda: 1) the geopolitical dimension, which
insisted on the direct interest of the Russian Empire in the destruction of the
Romanian state due to the irrepressible drive to the south; 2) the national
dimension, which emphasized the priority of national consolidation and
was based on the concept of the integral national ideal; 3) the economic
35

Germany against Russia and insisting on Bessarabias annexation are Historicus, De

[Romanias foreign policy

C. Arbore, [Bessarabias liberation] (Bucharest: Editura Ligei pentru
Liberarea Basarabiei, 1915). For a polemical answer, see R. Dinu,

[A reply to the brochure Why we need Bessarabia
by Historicus] (Bucharest: Universala Graphics, 1916). A more balanced approach,

dimension (less important, but including the familiar motive of economic

dimension, which constructed an irreconcilable opposition between Russia,
as the embodiment of a hollow Oriental despotism, and Germany, as the
representative of European civilization (both politically and culturally); 5)
the pragmatic dimension, focusing on Romanias relative gains in the case
of either of the two military camps prevailing.
The invocation of Steres example brings us to the international dimension
of the Bessarabian Question in the context of World War I. Bessarabia did not

However, Bessarabia did surface occasionally in contemporary debates either

as a potential base for military operations against Russia or as one of the
national peripheries whose emancipation might be of interest to Russias

German circles, but also by anti-Russian migr organizations. Ukrainian anti-
Russian migrs were particularly active in Romania during the neutrality
period and entered into direct contact with the pro-German elements
grouped around the Bessarabian community in Bucharest. The Union for the
Liberation of Ukraine (ULU), created in Lviv in August 1914 with the aim of
seizing control of Russian Ukraine with the assistance of the Central Powers,
very soon extended its operations to Romania. After the Russian occupation of
Galicia in the fall of 1914, this organization (comprising prominent Ukrainian
nationalists both from the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires) moved its

abroad, conducting its activity through its two main bases in Bucharest and
Constantinople. In September 1914, the Bucharest branch of the ULU was in-
Manifesto, which called for a common struggle
of the Ukrainian and Romanian peoples against Russian autocracy. The mem-
orandum was introduced by an Appeal to the Romanian People and was

This was not surprising, given the social-democratic political orientation
of most ULU members and Arbores links with revolutionary circles in the
Russian Empire.36 One of the most interesting cases in this respect pertains

half of the war. The Constantinople branch of the ULU envisaged a common
36
C
[Between tsarist Russia and Wilhelmine Germany: An unpublished Bes-

1996), 60, 99.
152 ANDREI CUSCO

that would land simultaneously near Odessa and in the Kuban with the hope
of inciting a revolt among the local population.37 Though nothing came of
this, an abortive landing operation of much smaller proportions took place

cavalrymen in southern Bessarabia (near Akkerman). These were supposed
to reach Romania after destroying a part of the Russian infrastructure in
Bessarabia. The actual landing took place on Serpent Island, at the mouth of
the Danube, and was unsuccessful, since the detachment was immediately
captured by Russian forces.38 Bessarabias military vulnerability thus drew
The mutual propaganda war did leave an important testimony re-

lating to Bessarabia that I will discuss presently. The document in question
represented a memorandum drafted by the well-known Bessarabian writer

Romanian-language newspaper in Bessarabia during 190607 and was also
editor of the moderate Kadet-oriented daily since 1903.
He moved to Romania after 1912 and became associated with Steres circle in

Bessarabian war context, its wider implications should be examined. Nours
memorandum is a striking example of the mutually subversive propaganda
that the belligerent empires used in order to undermine the internal stability
of their rivals. In this sense, the thesis of the trespassing of rational behavior

The extent to which the Entente and the Central Powers used secret services and
their diplomatic missions in neutral countries for espionage and propaganda
purposes was unprecedented.39 The national question, especially salient
in the case of the multiethnic Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, was
understandably exploited by the war rivals for purposes of destabilizing

diplomatic front. Germanys ostensible war goals, aiming at the eventual

37

Middle Eastern Studies 34, 4 (October

during World War I, see also the excellent book by Michael A. Reynolds,
(New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 13334.
38

39
World War, Soviet Studies 20, 2 (October 1968): 24248.

western borderlands, presupposed the elaboration of detailed plans for fo-

menting internal sedition among Russias ethnic groups. One of the earliest
and most comprehensive designs of such a plan belonged to the Finnish-

and the Caucasus, if well coordinated, would lead to an armed insurrection
in Ukraine and thus, eventually, to a revolutionary upsurge throughout the
Russian Empire. The author insisted that assistance in the liberation struggle
of these peoples is much more important than winning the alliance of a
certain state, such as, for instance, Romania, through which Russias power
will certainly be weakened but will never be completely destroyed.40 The
relationship of the disgruntled national activists who emigrated from the
Russian Empire after 1914 with the networks of military and diplomatic in-
stitutions supervising Germanys anti-Russian propaganda campaign was
ambiguous. Most of these migrs (with the partial exception of the Poles)

pragmatically advantageous relationship with the Berlin authorities, who pro-
vided the resources for various publishing and institutional projects. Such
was the case with the so-called League of the Alien Peoples of Russia (Liga der
Fremdvlker Rulands), which was created in April 1916 and operated from

nationalist orientation emerged as a result of the fusion of an earlier Union
of Nationalities led by the notorious Lithuanian journalist and writer Juozas
Gabrys, and of a smaller migr group headed by the Baltic German Baron
Friedrich von Ropp. It was supported and funded by the German Foreign
Ministry and became one of the centers of anti-Russian propaganda.41 The

June 1916 Lausanne Nationalities Conference, which brought together repre-
sentatives of the Finnish, Lithuanian, Baltic German, Ukrainian, Polish, and
other migr groups in a common project intended to weaken Russia by co-
ordinating their nationalist aspirations. The Leagues activity was short-lived
and peaked with an appeal to US President Woodrow Wilson calling for the
liberation of Russias oppressed peoples. The practical impact of the Leagues
C , 91. For a general presentation of

40
Germanys espionage activity and propaganda campaign against Russia, see 8593.

41
Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, Georgians, and Tatars.

154 ANDREI CUSCO
few contacts in their homelands.42

The immediate impulse for the elaboration of Alexis Nours memorandum
came from a manifesto issued by the League in March 1916 that called for
the publication of a collective volume on the national question in Russia
that would include a presentation of the major nationalities of the Romanov
Empire in a comparative perspective. The planned volume was to be pub-
lished in the major international languages and distributed in the capitals of
the belligerent powers. Ostensibly devoted to the goal of informing European
public opinion about the plight of the non-Russian ethnic groups in the
Romanov Empire, the resulting publication had a barely dissimulated pro-

then by its translation into German and French.43 Nours memorandum
was included as one of the chapters of this collective work and, as such, put
Bessarabia on the map of international wartime polemics.
The German ambassador to Romania sent the memorandum, dated 15
May 1916, to the German chancellor a month later.44 The relevance of this
document stems from two main factors. First, it represented an exceptional
example of the internationalization of the Bessarabian question before the
fall of the Russian imperial regime. After 1917, Bessarabia received an in-

controversy. However, the 1916 memorandum apparently was the precedent
that pointed to Bessarabia as one of the problematic peripheries of the Russian
Empire. Second, it is one of the few examples of the articulation of an image of
Bessarabias future within the context of the war transcending the narrowly
Romanian context. This was obvious on two levels. On the one hand, Nours
memorandum should be analyzed in the framework of the controversy over
the chances for a restructuring of the empire on a federal basis. On the other
hand, Nour intended his text to be an ideological appeal for a Romanian-
Ukrainian alliance against the Russian imperial regime. This, of course, de-
pended on long-term German military hegemony in the region, which still
42
Die

Propagandakrieg unter den Fremdvlkern Russlands im ersten Weltkrieg (Helsinki: Studia
Historica, 1978).
43
C

used as one of the documentary sources at the Peace Conference, including on the
Bessarabian question.
44

appeared rather plausible in the spring of 1916. It was also predicated upon
Romanias alliance with the Central Powers, the possibility of which was not
ruled out until the late summer of 1916. Nours position on the question of
federalism as a possible alternative to the unitary structure of the Russian
Empire is doubly ambiguous. The federalist option was rather popular among
the majority of the politically active Bessarabians, who were mostly integrated
into the Russian left. This became clear during 1917, when the Romanian na-
tional option was in the minority and was not seriously envisaged until the
collapse of the local authorities in Bessarabia in January 1918. Federalism also
had its supporters in Romania, especially within the group of pro-Central
Powers intellectuals centered around Stere.45 Nour, however, rejected this
option completely, believing that the collapse of the Russian Empire was im-
minent and that the only conceivable future for its nationalities would be the

46
The 1916 memorandum was essentially a product of the war context and
appeared as a result of the intertwining of external pressures and internal
polemics. Nour emphasized the strategic importance of Bessarabia for Roma-
nian nation building, since acquiring this region secured our [Romanian]
future on the Black Sea.47 Following the tradition of his nationally minded

the Romanian educated public, invoking the absence of any active symbolic
opposition on the part of Romanian intellectuals to the occasion of the 1912

surrounding the events of 1912 with the much more vigorous reaction to a
similar ceremony held by the Austrian authorities in Bukovina. The author
remarked that in 1912, the Bessarabians were not meant to be in Bukovinas
situation of 1875 We, the Bessarabians ourselves, could not produce any
45

from the Great Austrian doctrine propagated by the Transylvanian Aurel C. Popo-
vici (envisaging a transformation of the Habsburg Monarchy into a federation along
national lines) to a much looser conception of a Danubian Confederation with the
monarchy favored, at one point, by Stere himself.
46
in 1915, Nour
insisted upon the necessity of an alliance with the Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian
national movements. He also rejected the persistent accusation that Bessarabia had
been transformed into the Alsace-Lorraine of Russian-Romanian relations, arguing
for the legitimacy of the right to national self-determination. See Pavel, ntre Rusia
, 7178.

47
Lorraine], 10, 4 (April 1915): 117.

156 ANDREI CUSCO

it, no one could or knew how to do it!48 Nour thus became one of the more
prominent writers on the national question in Bessarabia after 1912. The 1916
memorandum, though intended for a foreign audience, can also be regarded
as a synthetic expression of an emerging current within Bessarabian political
circles that chose nationalism rather than social reformism or federalism as
their political credo.
The memorandum consisted of nine chapters that dealt with various
aspects of Bessarabias geography, ancient and modern history, ethnographic
makeup, economic situation, political problems, and the prospects for the
provinces future following the world war. The text was partially a narrative
presentation of the essential data on the province and partially a policy
paper outlining the authors vision of Bessarabias overall situation in the Rus-
sian Empire and the perspectives on Bessarabias relationship to a reformed

dimension that put the provinces evolution under Russian rule in the context
of the policy of the neighboring empires and of other non-Russian peripheries

Bessarabias future in the postwar context. Recognizing the usefulness of Rus-
sian high culture for the emergence of a well-educated local intelligentsia,
Nour advocated a parting of ways with the Russian heartland during the
foreseeable social upheavals. He based his argument on the priority of spe-

instead of participating in the reconstruction of a federal Russian state whose
governing principles on the national question would be indistinguishable
from those of the autocracy.
The distinguishing feature of the 1916 memorandum was the emphatically
pragmatic character of the argument and the policy proposals the author
advanced. This was as much a conscious authorial choice as a necessary adap-
tation to the requirements of the war context. The populist overtones that
were to be expected, given the intellectual environment of the memorandums
elaboration, were not altogether absent (e.g., the topics of the urban-rural
opposition and the extolling of the peasantrys instinctive ethnic vitality).
However, they were moderated both by the authors political preferences and
by the immediate propaganda aims of the document. The memorandum lost
its immediate relevance following Romanias entry into the war in August
1916 on the side of the Entente. The Bessarabian question temporarily re-
ceded from public view, but it was soon to re-emerge in more dramatic circum-
stances. Reacting against the Russian imperial narrative, Nours version of

48
Bessarabia: Bessarabia since 1912], 9, 79 (JulySeptember 1914): 265.

Bessarabian Romanian nationalism, though still in the minority at the time of

the texts publication, was to prevail due to the complex intertwining of war
and revolution during late 1917 and early 1918.
(\[VUVT`-LKLYHSPZTVY5H[PVUHS<UPJH[PVU&)LZZHYHIPHPU
The collapse of the imperial regime in March 1917 and the new opportunities
created by the opening of the political space throughout the former empire

this time concerned the priority of the national or social aspect of the rev-
olutionary transformation. As in other borderlands of the Russian Empire and
with a much greater intensity than was the case in 1905, the clash between
the nationalizing and socializing agendas determined the broad lines of the

various emerging groups of activists and ideologues that could openly compete
on the local political arena following the collapse of the imperial regime. The
main actors claiming the allegiance of the potential (mostly peasant) con-
stituencies could be conventionally divided into the following categories: 1)
The revolutionary tendency, represented by the local organizations of the
Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, which emphasized the agrarian

of the combination of long-standing peasant grievances and the concerted
propaganda of socializing agents was felt in the massive eruption of peasant
of land ownership, which later had an important impact upon the terms of the
agrarian reform in Bessarabia. 2) The national activists, grouped around the
periodical and, later, the Moldavian National Party (MNP),

was far from unitary in its designs on the provinces future. Thus, if the more
nationally conscious wing (headed by Pan Halippa and Ion Pelivan) insisted
from the outset upon the preeminence of the national-cultural aspect and
partial political emancipation, the Petrograd group (based in the Russian
capital and directly participating in the revolutionary events there) was much
more reluctant to sever its links with the central government and upheld the
primacy of social reforms (its main representatives who returned to Bessarabia

monarchist currents, which were marginalized during the revolutionary pe-

war context changed the locus of social power but also how dependent these
organizations were on state support.
158 ANDREI CUSCO

postimperial space mostly used the language of autonomy. This topos

in early April 1917, the program of the Moldavian National Party (the most
outspoken organization on the subject of national grievances) claimed the
broadest autonomy for Bessarabia in the administrative, judiciary, ecclesi-

gions new status stemmed from the precedent of the early 19th-century
autonomist experiment but also invoked the principle of national self-
determination.49 The claim of a Moldovan historian that the leaders of the
Moldavian National Party evolved from a confederative scenario towards a
much more limited vision of national-regional autonomy seems doubtful, at
best.50 In fact, the leaders of this organization oscillated between competing
models of relationship to central power for the whole of 1917. If anything, the
radicalization of the initially moderate autonomist program derived from the
uncontrollable dynamics of the Russian political scene. It can be argued that,
as long as the hope of the restoration and consolidation of a stable government
at the center persisted, local Bessarabian leaders were securely anchored in
the realm of the imagined space of the Russian state. This did not mean that
the impact of federalist thought and a contamination by the mental models
of restructuring of political space devised in the Habsburg Monarchy was
negligible. In fact, the federalist model was, apparently, dominant among
Moldavian politicians at the time. The criteria for the future organization of
the federal relationship were, however, hotly debated. A compromise had to
be reached between the ethno-national principles promoted by the former
and the territorial criteria preferred by the representatives of the other ethnic
groups, who feared the potential transformation of multiethnic Bessarabia
into a Moldavian nation-state. Thus, during the discussions preceding the
o
optation of the representatives of local institutions, professional corporations,
and estates, one of the former employees of the Russian imperial administration
asserted: I know that you [Moldavian separatists] desire to create a nation-
state in Bessarabia. This is the dream of the whole 19th century, but it failed
in Great Russia, and you want to institute a nation-state here, in Bessarabia,
49

19171918
nau: Hyperion, 1995), 26.
50
o [The tsarist
regime and the national movement of the Romanians from Bessarabia] (Chisinau:
Prut International, 2000), 83.
which is so similar to Russia from the ethnographic point of view.51 Here the
clash between the vision of unitary Russian statehood and the restructuring
of the former empire along ethno-national lines seems obvious. Still, such an
opposition would be quite misleading. The local nationalism was anything
but assertive and did not fundamentally challenge Bessarabias belonging to
the symbolic sphere of the Russian space. The process of nationalization
of a part of the Bessarabian intellectuals was fraught with ambiguities until
the very eve of the decisive events of 1918 leading to the regions integration

o
provides an eloquent example in this sense. This foundational document
of Bessarabian autonomy ended by solemnly evoking the common mother
of all of usthe Great Russian Democratic Republic (an already fanciful
project by the time the declaration was issued).52 Ironically, just three and
a half months after the event, the same assembly solemnly proclaimed the
perpetual union of Bessarabia with its mother-country, Romania. What

Three main factors accounted for this momentous shift in the local
political landscape. First, the prominent role played by Moldavian military
units in the nationalization of local politics should be considered. Partly as a
result of the policy, promoted by the Provisional Government, of introducing
national units in the Russian army, and partly as a consequence of the self-
throughout the Romanian Front, the political awareness of the Bessarabian-

Imperial Army provided the hitherto absent environment for mass political in-

the Austro-Hungarian units, a lively campaign among Bessarabian soldiers
stationed in Kiev and Odessa got under way. In this respect, developments
in Bessarabia are similar to those in the Ukrainian case, where the increasing
nationalization of the troops and the creation of national army units were
pursued by both the Russian Empire and the Central Powers. As in Ukraine,
51

52
, 120.
160 ANDREI CUSCO
these forces proved fateful for the outcome of the political struggle after the
collapse of the imperial regime.53
The impact of the politicization of the military soon became clear in

formulated at earlier assemblies of the cooperative movement, the peasants
and the local teachers, during April and May 1917, the decisive steps for the
o
taken during the Moldavian Military Congress, held in Chisinau on 2027
October 1917. On this occasion, the profound rifts between the nationalizing

promise between the rival factions, declared Bessarabias allegiance to the
project of a Russian federative democratic republic of which the territory
was to be a constituent part. The concrete terms of Bessarabias political and
territorial autonomy were to be deferred until the convocation of the Russian
Constituent Assembly. Thus, the framework for political legitimacy still had
its source in the presumable organ of a renewed and democratic Russian
statehood.

declaration of autonomy and then independence of the Ukrainian state. The
relations of the local Bessarabian administration and political circles with
the Ukrainian Rada were rather tense due to the territorial claims that the

Ruthenians were a sizable part of the population) and then to the whole
Bessarabian territory. The rejection of these demands had the consensus of all
of autonomy in December 1917. Moreover, the existence of a Ukrainian political

entity meant the severing of all direct links with the Petrograd government,

realities. The second and decisive factor was linked to the disappearance
of any legitimate government in the eyes of the Bessarabian elites after the
Bolshevik seizure of power. Other than the local Bolsheviks, no part of the
politically active Bessarabian population recognized the new government.
Though the summoning of Romanian troops to Bessarabia in January 1918

by the propertied elements (who addressed a petition to the Romanian king,
Ferdinand, already in January 1918) and by the members of the local assembly,
53

changing political regimes in Ukraine during 1917 and 1918 can be found in Von
Hagen, 87114.
most of them belonging to the political left. Though the Romanian state was
obviously wanting from the point of view of its social policies and political

Russian social and political space. The discourse of Romanian cultural and
political unity was not absent in 1917 and early 1918. It was promoted both by

the Transylvanian-born writer and journalist Onisifor Ghibu, whose memoirs
and polemical writings convey one of the fullest and most compelling pictures
of the Bessarabian reality of the period). This discourse, however, was as
marginal for political action as before 1917, until the evolution of international
politics prompted the Bessarabian elites to negotiate a compromise with the
Romanian government in March 1918.
The Act of Union voted on 27 March 1918 represented, in fact, such a com-
promise. The 11 conditions stipulated in the document (guaranteeing extensive
local self-government, the speedy application of radical agrarian reform, and

seem to indicate that Bessarabian politicians envisaged a sort of federalist
arrangement between the province and the center. Though the chances for
the realization of this scenario were minimal (given the structure of the Ro-
manian political system and the Bessarabian leaders limited maneuvering
space), it is revealing for the sphere of their political imaginary. Far from
being the predominant strand in the local politics of the period, the motive

became the preferred option only in early 1918. The incongruence between
the sphere of discourse and that of political action, so characteristic for the
Bessarabian case, was especially visible during 191718. The Bessarabian
elites horizon of expectations was much more indebted to immediate social
concerns sparked by the revolutionary upheaval than to a coherent national

Russian and Romanian discourses that claimed their loyalty. By the end of
o
abolition of the conditions for the union, on 27 November 1918. Several days
later, Greater Romania, a most improbable creation of the complex web of in-
ternational politics after World War I, became a reality. Bessarabia was thus
wholly included in the Romanian nation-building project.
Conclusion
The role of the 191416 period in the transformation of the collective image

162 ANDREI CUSCO
multiethnic character of Bessarabia. The declaration of war and the radical

Bessarabia to the fullest extent, set the stage for the gradual politicization of
the masses that would erupt in social upheavals and political clashes after
the February Revolution. Following the general trend of connecting ethnicity
directly to state loyalty, pursued by certain groups in the central bureaucracy
and, especially, the Imperial Army, the Bessarabian Romanians tended to be
viewed as a collectively suspect group. Bessarabias position as a contested
territory was also enhanced by the 191416 polemics in Romania, which put
the province on the intellectual map of the kingdom with a hitherto unknown
urgency. Though the marginality of the Russian-controlled region within the
Romanian national discourse was not overcome, it acquired a new substance
and was openly represented as a part of the hierarchy of national priorities.
Finally, the propaganda war led to certain Bessarabian initiatives to place
the area on the new geopolitical map that would appear in the aftermath
of the war. After the collapse of the imperial state in 1917, a growing tension
litical landscape. Although the social dimension held the upper hand and
to the opening up of the Bessarabian political space and, by extension, to an

unprecedented display of local initiative in the sphere of social transformations
and identity politics. The national factor played a limited role throughout the
heated political debates of 1917, expressed in the language of autonomy and
federalism within a future restored Russian state. However, the increasing
relevance of ethnicity and ethnic hierarchies during the war created some
possibilities for the ultimate success of the previously marginal agenda of
pan-Romanianism.
Ukrainization and Its Contradictions in the
Context of the Brest-Litovsk System
Borislav Chernev
Introduction
Over the last decade and a half, scholars have become increasingly interested
in the relationship between the Great War and the rise of nationalism in the
multinational, entangled spaces of Central and Eastern Europe, exploring
the ways in which the complicated dynamics of imperial goals, nationalist
ments. Aviel Roshwald has suggested that the clash of the dynastic empires

liberation movements that had previously limited their demands to cultural
autonomy, often by providing an opportunity for small, highly motivated
groups of nationalist mavericks to form exile organizations and volunteer

causes.1 Eric Lohr has demonstrated the nationalizing tendencies of imperial
of undesirable ethnic groups in order to bolster imperial rule.2 Mark von

Hagen has emphasized the ways in which imperial regimes sought to mobilize
the disputed borderlands populated by Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Jews,
Ukraine played an important role in the crystallization of national identities

and the radicalization of nationalist agendas.3 These and other studies have
1
Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia, and
the Middle East, 19141923 (London: Routledge, 2001), 219. Research for this chapter
was made possible by a Pre-Dissertation Fellowship from the Council for European
Studies at Columbia University.
Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during
2
World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

3

Empire, in
164 BORISLAV CHERNEV
helped bring back empire into the study of nationalism during the Great War
and helped trace the origins of many postwar nationalizing states in Central
and Eastern Europe.

emerged as an often unwanted byproduct of migr politics, imperial state
and elite policies, and occupation regimes, there has been less emphasis on the
nationalizing policies of the nascent states emerging from imperial collapse
in Russia in 191718, while the war was still ongoing. There are several good
reasons for this, chief among which the relatively short life span and dubious
juridical status of most of these self-proclaimed entities (the Belarusian Peo-
ples Republic, the Kuban Peoples Republic, the Don Republic) and their ap-
parent discontinuity with the early nationality policy of the Soviet Union,
which ultimately succeeded in reincorporating them. In contrast, the policies
of nationalizing states in interwar Central and Eastern Europe (Poland,
4 The Ukrainian
Peoples Republic occupies a middle position between these two types of
states, which makes it a particularly interesting object of examination. On

navigating between Germany and Bolshevik Russia. On the other hand,
it succumbed to Bolshevism after a brief existence of just over three years.
Scholars of the Ukrainian Revolution typically examine state building sepa-
rately from international relations, considering the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and
new Ukrainian state.5 The one earlier scholar who studied the conjunction
between the Central Powers intervention in Ukraine and Ukrainian state

policies.6 In contrast, recent German-language studies of the Central Powers
and Jack L. Snyder (London: Routledge, 1998), 3457; Mark von Hagen, War in a Euro-

ies, University of Washington, 2007); on nationalism and refugees, see Peter Gatrell,
A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana
4

and external homelands, see Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and
the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
5

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); O.
S. Pidhainy, The Formation of the Ukrainian Republic (Toronto: New Review Books, 1966).
6
Germanys Drive to the East and the Ukrainian Revolution, 19171918
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971).
UKRAINIZATION AND ITS CONTRADICTIONS 165
intervention in Ukraine and its relations to Ukrainian state building, often

based at least in part on sources found in the Austrian military and political
archives, have raised important questions about the periodization of the First
World War in the east, the course of Soviet history between 1917 and 1922, and
the international implications of Ukrainian statehood.7
This chapter aims to build on the recent resurgence of interest in the
war in the eastthe Brest-Litovsk peace conference between the Central Pow-
ers, Bolshevik Russia, and Ukraineand the origins of Ukrainian national
statehood. It argues that the diplomatic, political, and economic arrangements
the peace conference established in the southwestern parts of the former Russian
Empire (what I refer to collectively as the Brest-Litovsk system) provided the
framework for the ukrainization policies carried out by a succession of actual
and would-be Ukrainian governments between the spring and autumn of 1918.
The Brest-Litovsk system both enabled and constrained these policies but did
not determine them, as it cannot be reduced to a simple occupation. Ukrainian
elites, imperial legacies, and revolutionary developments all combined to shape
multiple, at times competing, ukrainization policies and their limitations.
These policies involved imperial professionals and Ukrainian functionaries
from both sides of the old Habsburg-Russian border, a Habsburg prince and
a former tsarist general, and a socialist republic and a conservative monarchy
national and imperial at a time of total war and revolution. In spite of their

linguistic policy, and cultural nationalization. They also utilized a concept

of nationality tied to ideological and economic factors. In these vital aspects,
they anticipated early Soviet indigenization (korenizatsiia) policy.
The pre-Bolshevik origins of Soviet nationality policy have been subject
to considerable scholarly interest. Historians have discovered that imperial
experts and the specialized knowledge they created, and local elites with
their own national agendas were important factors in the policys formation.
Thus, Adeeb Khalid has emphasized the role Jadidist reformers played in
Central Asia, while Francine Hirsch has singled out the agency of imperial
7
Die Ukraine zwischen Selbstbestimmung und Fremdherrschaft
19171922 (Graz: Leykam, 2011); Wolfram Dornik and Stefan Karner, eds.,
der Ukraine 1918: Historischer Kontext, Forschungsstand, Wirtschaftliche und soziale Folgen

2008); Caroline Milow, Die ukrainische Frage 19171923 im Spannungsfeld der europischen
Diplomatie

ethnographers.8 Building on Hirschs work, Vera Tolz has studied the impact
of imperial Russian Orientalists and their research of non-Slavic inorodtsy in
Siberia and elsewhere on Bolshevik ideas about the less developed nation-
alities of the east.9 Charles Steinwedel has examined the conceptual and lin-

10 This chapter will
how the experience of revolutionary Ukraine in 1918 was part of a larger

utilizing Austrian archival records, it will also demonstrate the ways in which
the Brest-Litovsk system helped shape the Ukrainian experience.11
Ukrainized Foreign Policy and the Brest-Litovsk System
The representatives of the Central Powers did not arrive in Brest-Litovsk in

early December 1917 expecting to negotiate with Ukraine. Their eyes were

8
The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998); Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic
Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2005).
9
Russias Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late
Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
10

rial Russian Politics, 18611917, in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, ed.

in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union (18971939), Ab Imperio, no. 4 (October 2002):

at the End of the Russian Empire (18971917), Russian Review 64, 3 (July 2005): 44055.
11

relied primarily on German records. A greater emphasis on Austrian sources presents

long historical relationship with Ukrainians (in Galicia and Bukovina), as well as a
long and complicated experience with national aspirations in an imperial context.
2) The Austrians had fewer troops in the country and were less likely to become

3) The provinces (gubernias) comprising the Austrian operational sphere were more
ethnically diverse than the ones the Germans occupied. Hence, Austrian observers
were more likely to note the contradictions of ukrainization policies and of the Central
Powers own Ukrainian policy.
where. There was also disagreement among the Ukrainian leadership on

the subject of sending delegates to the peace conference; after all, the Third
Universal, issued on 20 November, had proclaimed a new Ukrainian Peoples
Republic as part of an all-Russian federation. However, the quickly escalating

the Socialist Revolutionary (SR)dominated Central Rada (council) to send a
separate delegation to Brest-Litovsk in the early days of January 1918. This

uncertain. It is worth noting that, like much else in the new state, foreign pol-
icy had to be ukrainized, since the Ukrainian Peoples Republic in no way
shared the geopolitical prerogatives of the old Russian Empire or those of

middle course between the delegations of the Central Powers and the Russian
delegation, holding preliminary meetings with both sides. Ultimately, this en-
deavor failed, as the goals of Petrograd and Kiev (world revolution versus
national statehood) proved impossible to reconcile.12

to Russian foreign policy. In his memoirs, Volodimir Vynnychenko,
prime minister of the Ukrainian Peoples Republic throughout most of the
negotiations, contrasted the Ukrainian delegations proper, peaceful, and

Bolshevik Russia, Ukraine did not believe in world revolution; in fact, it actively
sought the support of the Great Powers necessary to bolster its statehood.13 A
second important tenet of Ukrainian foreign policy was the incorporation of
all territories inhabited by Ukrainian speakers into the Ukrainian Peoples
Republic.
Vynnychenko himself would have preferred the support of Britain and
France, but the Ententes lukewarm reaction to Ukrainian independence left

quickly recognized the advantages of separate negotiations with the Ukrain-
ians, especially in the context of the endless propagandizing, dilatory tactics,
and general irreverence of the Bolshevik delegates. Unlike the Russians, the
Ukrainians seemed willing to conclude peace. In addition, while Petrograd
had nothing to export but revolution, Ukraine appeared to have plenty of food
supplies, which was of particular importance to Germany and (especially)
Austria-Hungary. By mid-January, Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister

The First Treaty of World War I: Ukraines Treaty with the Central
12
Powers of February 9, 1918 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1988), 3536.
13
Vidrozhdennia natsii (Kiev: Dzvin, 1920), 2: 20203.
was much more important than peace with Russia, in case the Central Powers
could not achieve both.14
In spite of the mutual willingness to come to an agreement, the Central

stemmed from the Radas desire to bring all Ukrainian-inhabited territories
into the new Ukrainian state. There were about three million Ukrainians in
the Habsburg Empire, mostly in East Galicia and Northern Bukovina. The
Ukrainian delegation sensibly dropped its initial demand for an outright
transfer of these territories to the Ukrainian Peoples Republic, as continued
insistence would have resulted in the breakdown of negotiations. However,
they succeeded in obtaining a secret pledge from the reluctant Austrians
to create an autonomous Habsburg crownland comprising all Ukrainian-
speaking territories in Austria. Ukraine also secured the incorporation of the
disputed region of Kholm, previously part of Congress Poland, with a mixed
Polish-Ukrainian population. These were notable advantages for Ukrainian
foreign policy, and it is not entirely correct to claim, as Wlodzimierz Medrzecki
does, that the Ukrainian delegation that returned to the second round of
negotiations came no longer in the guise of a partner but more as a petitioner
to Germany,15 since the Ukrainians held their ground surprisingly well, to
the dismay of the Austrians in particular.
The Ukrainian obsession with borders might seem ill-advised given the
extremely shaky situation in which the Central Rada found itself in the second
half of January, when the victorious advance of Bolshevik forces from the north
and east put the independent existence of the Ukrainian Peoples Republic in
serious doubt. However, this was an important tenet of ukrainized foreign
policy. Political borders are of vital importance to successful nation-state
imaginary national community, which blurred especially dangerously (from

the perspective of nationalist leaders) in the multiethnic, multiconfessional
borderlands of Central and Eastern Europe. Habsburg Ukrainian leaders,
whose constant clashes with Polish nationalists in Galicia had made them fully
aware of this, had been campaigning for the creation of a separate Ukrainian
political entity within Austria for some time, fearing that they might come
under increasing Polish domination if Galicia were united with Congress
Poland in case of the successful implementation of the Austro-Polish Solution.
14

Staatsarchiv, Politisches Archiv XL: Interna, Karton 262: Telegramme an Grafen
Demblin (191718).
15

Litovsk Peace Talks and Hetman Skoropadskyis Coup, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 23,
1/2 (June 1999): 49.
In late December 1917, the Ukrainian Parliamentary Club even sent a statement
for publication in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet that outlined the
case for the recreation of the medieval kingdom of Halych-Volhynia within
the Dual Monarchy.16 Albeit ultimately fruitless, the secret Habsburg pledge
in the treaty to do just that, which quickly became common knowledge, legiti-
mized Ukrainian national claims in the area. As Austrian Prime Minister
Ernst von Seidler rationalized the question of Ukraines western borders in a
speech in Parliament, the Ukrainians have the same right as other peoples
when it comes to the alteration of their state belonging.17 Ultimately, this
contributed to the creation of a second Ukrainian nation-state, the so-called
West Ukrainian Peoples Republic, in the autumn of 1918.18 The emphasis
on border making in the Kholm and East Galician regions necessitated the
delineation of a Ukrainian national space that was clearly separate from its
more powerful and potentially dangerous Polish and Russian neighbors.19
This process continued, mutatis mutandis, during the early Soviet period.
As Francine Hirsch has demonstrated, the delimitation of the borders of the
union republics of the Soviet Union (including Ukraine) played an important
role in the formation of Soviet national identities in the 1920s and 1930s.20
The treaty between the Central Powers and Ukraine, signed on 9 February
1918, provided the legal basis for the Brest-Litovsk system. First, it bolstered
the Ukrainian Peoples Republics juridical claim to independent statehood.
Second, it established subordinate relations between Ukraine in the Central

16
die Friedensverhandlungen. HHStA, PA I, K 1041-2 Krieg 58: Angelegenheiten der

Ukraine (1918.011918.10)
17

sterreichischen Reichsrates, XXII. Session, III. Band. 19 February 1918, in Ereignisse

, ed. Theophil
Hornykiewicz (Philadelphia: Ferdinand Berger Printing House, 1966), 1: 290.
18
Western Ukraine
(Edmonton: Canadian Institute of
Ukrainian Studies, 2009); Vasyl Rasevych, Die westukrainische Volksrepublik von
1918/19, in Die Ukraine zwischen Selbstbestimmung und Fremdherrschaft, 181200.
19

Sahlins, (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1989); on the importance of borders and borderlands for foreign
policy, see Emily S. Rosenberg, Considering Borders, in Explaining the History of
American Foreign Relations, ed. Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson, 2nd ed.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 17693; and Nathan J. Citino, The
Global Frontier: Comparative History and the Frontier-Borderlands Approach, in
Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 194211.
20

Empire of Nations, 14586.
Powers, by specifying that Ukraine was obliged to deliver at least 1 million

cation of the treaty by Germany and Austria-Hungary was actually made
contingent upon Ukrainian deliveries. The Ukrainian delegation agreed with
this proviso but asked that it not be made public, as it would be impossible
to carry through Parliament.21 The amount of grain Ukraine had promised
to deliver to the Central Powers (1 million tons or 60 million poods) might
seem excessive, but the Ukrainians had already estimated that they would be
able to send nearly four times as much grain (220 million poods) to European
Russia and the front.22 The breakdown of relations with Petrograd meant that
Kiev was no longer bound by this obligation and could dispense of this grain

tral Powers necessitated equally close political relations.
The close economic and political relationship the treaty stipulated re-
quired Austro-German military intervention on behalf of the Central Rada,
which lacked the military power to drive back the advancing Bolshevik forces.
This came after the leaders of the Rada issued identical appeals to the people
of Germany and to the peoples of Austria-Hungary on 17 February.23 The
German and Austrian High Commands instructed their troops not to treat
Ukraine as occupied territory.24 By late March, Bolshevik troops had been
completely driven out of the territories claimed by the Ukrainian Peoples
Republic, and the two High Commands divided the vast territory into two
operation zones. The Austrian zone in southern Ukraine included the south-
western part of Volhynia, as well as Podolia, Kherson, and Ekaterinoslav
provinces, with Odessa as headquarters. The larger German zone extended
over northern and eastern Ukraine and included the capital, Kiev. In spite of
having separate zones, Germany and Austria-Hungary agreed to cooperate in
25
21

[

7 February 1918. HHStA, PA I: Allgemeines, K 1082: Brester Kanzlei.
22

23

Staaten (19171918).
24

25

29 March 1918. Ibid.
In its existence from March to November 1918, the Brest-Litovsk system

created an independent Ukrainian nation-state that was guaranteed by the
presence of Austro-German troops and was economically and politically
linked with Central Europe rather than the rest of the former Russian Empire

the subversion of the Rada by Pavlo Skoropadskyi and the German military
authorities in Kiev on 30 April, which transformed Ukraine from a socialist
republic to a conservative monarchy (Hetmanate), demonstrates the refutation
of the Ukrainian Republics foreign policy priorities.26 However, the actual
form of government was of less importance to Ukrainian statehood than its
continued existence, due to the fact that neither the Rada nor the Hetmanate
was strong enough to alter the Brest-Litovsk system singlehandedly.
National in Form, Agrarian-Socialist in Content: Ukrainization under the Rada
In his analysis of Soviet indigenization policy in the 1920s and 1930s, Terry
Martin has expanded Miroslav Hrochs celebrated three-phase model of the
development of nationalist movements among stateless, small peoples in
Central and Eastern Europe by adding an additional Phase D, in which the
Soviet state imposed formal institutions of nationhood and a new state lan-
guage from above.27 At the same time, Soviet authorities remained vigilant
against what they referred to as bourgeois nationalist deviations, promoting
cultures that were national in form, socialist in content instead.
The Central Radas ukrainization policy anticipated this approach in sev-
eral ways. First, it pursued the introduction of the Ukrainian language in gov-
ernment and education in place of Russian. Russian was both the imperial
language of state administration and the language of the national group that
appeared to pose the biggest threat to independent Ukrainian statehood,

state institutions in place of the partly destroyed, partly inadequate imperial
ones. As the Rada leadership saw it, Ukrainian national statehood (natsionalno-
26

rady (Moscow: Izd-vo Evropa, 2007).
27

Union, 19231939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). The three phases of
Hrochs original model are: non-political scholarly interest in language, folk customs,
and traditions (Phase A); the formation of a nationalist elite (Phase B); and the rise of
a mass national movement (Phase C). Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National
Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups
among the Smaller European Nations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
ukrainska derzhavnist) meant that all organs of state rule should henceforth
be created in Ukraine.28 Unlike the Grand Duchy of Finland, Ukraine had
never constituted a single administrative entity within the Russian Empire
and did not possess ready-made administrative organs which could smooth
its path to full statehood. Therefore, Ukrainian national statehood entailed
not merely the reform of existing state structures or the introduction of new
civil servants, but the creation of entirely new ones. Third, the SR-dominated

an agrarian-socialist one. This was partly due to the change in demographics
which late 19thearly 20-century industrialization had brought to Ukraine.

comprised the bulk of the population in the main industrial urban centers.

existence alongside Polish and Russian landlords. This created a situation
in which, as Steven L. Guthier has asserted, class and ethnic cleavages
were closely related.29 Therefore, the Radas ukrainization policy aimed to
strengthen the rural, ethnic Ukrainian element at the expense of the urban,
industrial element deemed suspicious on the basis of its alien nationality or
cosmopolitan tendencies. Unlike the Soviet state of the 1920s and 1930s, how-
ever, the Ukrainian Peoples Republic of 1918 did not possess a reliable police
force, a standing army, or an experienced bureaucracy, which severely limited
its ability to exercise power and almost institutionalized its reliance on the
military support of the Central Powers. If we apply the Hroch-Martin model,
we would have to place it at an intermediate stage between Phase C and Phase
D.
Linguistic ukrainization meant that the old imperial bureaucracy, which

one in the Habsburg Empire, which had allowed linguistic particularism at

business in Bohemia was carried out in Czech as well as in German, for in-
stance, meant that at the time of the empires collapse there already existed
a large body of trained, Czech-speaking civil servants who had no trouble
transferring their loyalties to the new Czechoslovak state. In contrast, imperial

language they considered to be an uneducated dialect of Russian at best and
an insidious creation of Austrian professors at worst.
28
Vidrozhdennia natsii, 1: 255.
Slavic
29
Review 38, 1 (Spring 1979): 32.

Who would replace the professional civil servants, then, was far from
clear. The Radas supporters were overwhelmingly students and intellectuals
ery and were ill-suited for the job. Before the war, there had been plenty of
Ukrainian civil servants employed in the central bureaucracy in St. Petersburg
and Moscow and, as one Ukrainian informer working for Austrian intelligence
pointed out, they might have been willing to return to Ukraine and become

return of the expatriate Ukrainian intelligentsia in the mistaken belief that
it was made-up of counterrevolutionary bourgeois.30 The cosmopolitan at-
mosphere of St. Petersburg in particular might also have led to accusations
that they were nationally suspect. Unable or unwilling to utilize this valuable
asset, the Rada had no other option but to rely on the youthful socialist intelli-
gentsia, whose inexperience meant that lack of coordination and confusion
were typically the order of the day.
An additional hindrance to linguistic ukrainization was the lack of popu-

understanding of the policy. Amid revolutionary chaos, foreign invasions,

perfectly in an article published in the Nova Rada on 26 March:

should be taken away in a free, democratic country; everybody should
speak whatever he fancies. These actions of the Ukrainian government
will not win it any friends. Or has the government already established

31
30

435, 19 June 1918, Bericht ber die ukrainische Verhltnisse. HHStA, PA X, K 153:
Entwicklung des russischen Reiches zu einer Pluralitt von Staaten (19171918).
31

und wirtschaftliche Zustnde in den an Galizien und die Bukowina angrenzenden
ukrainischen und bessarabischen Gebieten. HHStA, PA X, K 152.
Faced with such opposition, the Rada was eventually forced to take a step
32
The pursuit of agrarian-socialist Ukrainian national statehood was even
more important to the Radas fortunes than the imposition of language and the
creation of an administrative apparatus. The agricultural revolution, which
began throughout the former Russian Empire in the summer of 1917, was in
many ways the most important aspect of what one scholar has described as
revolutions in collision.33 By the spring of 1918, it had already gathered tre-
mendous pace, with peasants throughout Ukraine and Russia seizing large
34 This process had an
additional national aspect in Ukraine, since most landlords were of Polish and

war between Polish landlords and armed peasants, with the local authorities
35 As representatives of a peasant party par excellence, the
Ukrainian SRs who dominated the Rada endorsed the socialization of land.

question to their main constituency. As the German publicist Colin Ross, who
traveled with the advancing German troops in March, wrote in a report for

The peasants are mainly interested in the question of dividing the land;
they will follow the Rada if it does not shy away from distributing the
landlords estates among them. But if the Rada alters anything in the
Third and Fourth Universals, which promised the expropriation of
[landlords] land in favor of the peasantry, the peasants will support
the Bolsheviks.36
Since many peasants still practiced outdated methods of land cultivation,

the socialization of land had the predictable outcome of diminishing gross
agricultural output. Whatever supplies of grain the peasants had they refused
to sell on the market, as the scarcity of manufactured goods meant they had
32

33
From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and Their Revolution, 1917
1921 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
The Ukraine, 19171921:
34
A Study in Revolution, ed. Taras Hunczak (Cambridge, MA: Distributed by Harvard

University Press for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1977), 24771.
35

36

o polozhenii del na Ukraine v marte 1918 goda, Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii 20 (1928): 288.
nothing to spend their money on. Instead, they preferred to make spirits and
keep the remaining grain as a kind of insurance against future adversity.
All this put the Rada in an awkward position. Curtailing the move towards
socialization of the land would have amounted to political suicide. Going
along with it meant antagonizing the Central Powers, whose primary reason

nothing and observe passively from the sideline. Meanwhile, local commissars

military authorities had purchased and delaying their transportation across
the border.37 This was the last straw. From early April on, the German military
began looking for a replacement for the unruly Rada and eventually found it
in Pavlo Skoropadskyi. The former tsarist general overthrew the government
on 30 April in a nearly bloodless coup, as the German military authorities in
Kiev looked on approvingly. The Germans did not replace the Rada because

independent internal policy which was very often contradictory to the expec-
tations of the Central Powers, as one scholar has suggested.38 Agrarian social-
ism of the Ukrainian variety was a completely alien concept to the conservative
Habsburg and Hohenzollern monarchies, as one anonymous Austrian writer
pointed out.39 It made much more sense to back a conservative regime, and

Central Powers, the Rada also had to confront a lack of popularity in large ur-
ban centers. Cities like Kiev and Odessa were microcosms of imperial Russian
society. By 1913, they had become large, cosmopolitan, bustling, commercial
centers with a growing middle class, a developing public sphere, and a nascent
civil society.40 Largely immune to nationalist propaganda, their diverse popu-
lations were primarily interested in promoting the rule of law and their
commercial interests, which were often at odds with the policies of economic
ukrainization that the Rada favored. The case of Odessa is particularly infor-
mative. Out of a population that had increased from 800,000 to one million
37

152.
38

39
Politik in der Ukraine, in Ereignisse in der Ukraine, 1: 32226.

40
Russia in 1913 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press,
2010), especially 90190.
during the war, only about 10 percent were Ukrainian speakers.41 There was a
single Ukrainian-language daily newspaper, compared to 20 in various other
languages. The City Duma, dominated by Social Democrats (SDs), Jewish
entrepreneurs, and industrialists, was the most important political factor. It
refused to recognize the Rada, pursuing a policy that aimed to transform
Odessa into a Free City; this was particularly popular in industrial circles. In
addition to the largely Jewish middle class and the largely Jewish and Russian
working class, there were small but well organized Polish, Georgian, Tatar,
and German communities. All of these had military detachments of their own
and often opposed both the Rada and the City Duma. Ukrainization by force
was out of the question.
The powerlessness of the Radas representatives, who often risked their
lives by remaining in Odessa, underlined the central governments hopeless

Kiev had sent to the city the previous autumn had survived by the spring
of 1918. The other seven had been murdered, and new functionaries had to
take their place. General Commissar Komornyi, who had arrived with big
words and even bigger intentions, met determined opposition and eventually
left for Kiev at the end of March, not planning to return. However, Prime
Minister Vsevolod Holubovych refused to accept his resignation and sent
him back to Odessa with the promise of a substantial sum of 70 million
rubles, currently printed in Leipzig, for administrative purposes.42 However,
no money appeared to be forthcoming, and a desperate Komornyi told
Austro-Hungarian military authorities he would give his notice again, as he
considered his position untenable. In private conversations with Habsburg

Powers and the taking up of administration by the higher military authorities
41

military commander in Odessa, Count Kirchbach, and another by the Bulgarian repre-

Arz to Czernin, no. 1329, 30 April 1918. HHStA, PA X, K 152; Shtab na Deistvuiushtata
Armiia, Otdel operativen, Otdelenie vunshno-politichesko, Sektsiia adm-stopanska,
no. 1604, 10 April 1918. Prepis ot donesenieto na bulgarskiia predstavitel pri Shtaba na
Grupata Makenzen po obshtoto politichesko polozhenie v iuzhna Rusiia sled idvaneto

42

level government clerks around 810.5 rubles. For a detailed discussion of prices
and wages in revolutionary Ukraine, see Velychenko,
Ukraine, 30516.
could restore order and normal economic life.43 Their hands full elsewhere,

stitute a fully functioning occupation regime like the ones they had in Poland,
Romania, and Serbia. Hence, they turned to Skoropadskyi.
The Conservative Turn: Skoropadskyi and the Hetmanate
Between May and October 1918, two competing views of ukrainization, one
embodied by the new ruler of Ukraine, Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi, and the
other by the Habsburg prince Wilhelm (alias Vasyl Vyshyvanyi), who aspired
to replace him, dominated the political landscape. The change of government
in Kiev at the end of April 1918 did not alter the fundamental bases of the
Brest-Litovsk system, as Skoropadskyis ascent to power was conditional on
his assuming all responsibilities laid out in the peace treaty. In fact, the Central

for over a month, waiting to see whether this experiment was worthwhile.

Austro-Hungarian ambassadors in Kiev on 2 June, a festive Skoropadskyi
was quick to assure Berlin and Vienna that the Ukrainian State (Ukrainska

Central Powers.44 This was largely borne out by his subsequent track record,
leading to both contemporary (by Austro-Hungarian Ambassador Count

of Skoropadskyi as a tool of German policy. Skoropadskyis memoirs paint
a more complicated portrait of a man aware of his limitations, who tried to
conduct an independent internal policy but was ultimately constrained by the
prevailing circumstances.45 Oleh S. Fedyshyn also provides a more balanced
account, suggesting that the hetmans control gradually increased over time,
while Taras Hunczak emphasizes that it would be erroneous to believe
that during Skoropadskyis rule no constructive contribution was made to
Ukrainian statehood.46

43
April 1918. HHStA, PA X, K 152.

44

45
Spohady: Kinets 1917hruden 1918, ed. Jaroslav Pelenski

Philadelphia: Skhidnoi evropeiskyi doslidnyi in-t im. V. K. Lypynskoho, 1995).

Germanys Drive to the East, 13384; Taras Hunczak, The Ukraine Under
46
Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi, in The Ukraine, 19171921, 74.

With the approval of the Central Powers, the hetmans domestic policy

replacement of the radical Ukrainian youth which, as Skoropadskyi saw it,
had demonstrated its administrative incapability during the previous gov-
ernment, with the old imperial civil servants. This involved accusations of

ministers publicly proclaimed their adherence to the independent existence
of the Ukrainian state, many of their functionaries made no secret of the fact
that their allegiances lay elsewhere. In a particularly revealing case, the newly
appointed starosta (provincial governor) of Kharkiv, a former general in the
Imperial Army, wasted no time in explaining to the local civil servants that
they should not forget they were servants of a united Russia. To the embar-
rassment of the government, his remarks made their way to the local dailies.
Queried by the Austro-Hungarian ambassador on the subject, the hetman
explained there would be an investigation of the starosta, who would be
removed from his post if the allegations were true.47
However, not all former imperial servants were opponents of Ukrainian
statehood. The memoirs of Aleksei Tatishchev, a Russian-born civil servant
who worked as a secretary in the Ukrainian states Council of Ministers
from the end of May 1918 until the fall of the Hetmanate in mid-December,
describe a rather more complex dynamic. Although Foreign Minister Dmytro

ate, the Russian ministers tried to act like Ukrainian nationalists in working
on the consolidation of the state.48 In an outstanding example, the minister of

ministry.49 The main problem, as Tatishchev saw it, was precisely this language
policy. Tatishchev himself spoke some Ukrainian, which he had learned in
his childhood, and he considered administrative Ukrainian to be a perfectly
acceptable chancellery language developed from local dialects. However, he

many bureaucrats did not actually understand it. Such people would often
write in Russian, adding Ukrainian endings.50 Needless to say, this created
confusion and slowed down the pace of government work considerably.

civil servants were indispensable to his ukrainization policy, as he told the
47

48
(Moscow: Russkii put, 2001), 301.

49
, 109.
50
Zemli i liudi, 30406.
Austro-Hungarian ambassador repeatedly. The government had proved

its credentials by decreeing the obligatory use of Ukrainian in all schools,
in the bureaucracy, and in the justice system. There were plans to establish
a Ukrainian university, a Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences, and
other institutes of higher education which would help swell the ranks of the
Ukrainian national intelligentsia.51 In due course, this would have enabled
the government to replace the Russian-speaking imperial bureaucrats with
fully capable Ukrainian ones. Seen from this perspective, Skoropadskyis ap-
proach is not dissimilar from that of the Bolsheviks who, in the absence of a

in their pursuit of korenizatsiia.52 In the short term, however, the presence of

also pushed for further ukrainization. On 27 June, Ambassador Mumm

ukrainization of the Kiev government. German Councilor von Berchen had

Ukrainophile.53
personnel, however, there was slow but steady progress. By autumn 1918 a
bureaucracy had been established which was functioning reasonably well,
Stephen Velychenko has concluded.54
Similar personnel problems blighted the Skoropadskyi regimes main
ukrainization projectthe creation of a Ukrainian army. In choosing the title

a successor of the Cossack hetmans of the early modern era, whose authority
rested on their endeavors as military commanders. By creating a modern
Ukrainian army, he could claim to be reestablishing these military traditions
and, through them, an ideological connection with the Cossack Hetmanate.
51

und seiner Regierung in der Frage der Ukrainisierung sowie ber die sehr schwierige
Lage des Hetmans in Anbetracht eines immer akuter werdenden Kampfes zwischen
Ereignisse in der Ukraine,
3: 14147.
52

Early Soviet Russia, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, 2 (Spring
2009): 26190; Hirsch, Empire of Nations.

53
Abteilung, Vertrauliche Nachrichte (no. 554a). HHStA, PA X, K 152.

54
, 107.
In addition, the Radas lack of military support had made it easy to dispense
of, and Skoropadskyi was acutely aware of the importance of an army to his
government. The Central Powers were initially opposed to the formation of a

Italian Fronts and the general instability in the countryside convinced them

bode well for Ukrainian national statehood. As one Austrian report explained,

Ukrainian administrators, they were in fact Russians and made no secret of

a Ukrainian army. The majority did not consider themselves Ukrainian

mained in charge, hoped to serve Russia as best they could in Ukraine. To

organizations like the Black Hundreds; one Austrian informer witnessed a

there existed no such thing as a Ukrainian people or a Ukrainian state. To
them, the Ukrainians were the same traitors to Russia as the Bolsheviks and

one. Both have betrayed the fatherland. It would be ludicrous to expect that
such people would organize a Ukrainian army capable of defending Ukraine
against a non-Bolshevik Russia, concluded the report.55 In contrast to the of-

from the time of the Rada.56 This ideological chasm made a concerted, joint

event, no Ukrainian army to speak of emerged, the governments endeavors
notwithstanding.
If the Radas vision of Ukrainian national statehood had revolved around
agrarian socialism, Skoropadskyis was based on the restoration of private
property, with a view towards winning the support of the propertied classes.

the agrarian revolution and restore the landlords to their agricultural estates.
This resulted in numerous peasant rebellions and general unrest throughout
the countryside. Both the Ukrainian government and Austro-German mili-
55

435, 19 June 1918, Bericht ber die ukrainische Verhltnisse. HHStA, PA X, K 153.
56
Zemli i liudi, 312.
tary authorities responded with energetic actions against the agitation and
istrative and police organization of the Ukrainian authorities and the passive

Habsburg troops.57 By early June, German and Habsburg forces faced full-
scale rebellions in Zvenihorod and Elisavethrad, which required the trans-
58

in sabotage activities and brigandage, the situation deteriorated quickly. By
early August, an increasingly nervous Skoropadskyi had decided to send his
family to Germany and was making succession plans in case he were assas-
sinated, citing insecurity in Kiev and the political uncertainty of the two
Brest-Litovsk treaties, which constituted the basis of the Ukrainian state. The
German ambassador told his Austro-Hungarian colleague that he, too, was
planning to go on extended leave and hoped never to return to Ukraine.59
The hetman continued to harbor thoughts of ukrainization of his government,
now conveniently paired with democratization, throughout the autumn. He

national statehood.60 The withdrawal of the Central Powers from Ukraine in
late Octoberearly November precipitated the dissolution of the Brest-Litovsk
system; the Hetmanate followed soon after in mid-December.
Habsburg Ukrainization? Wilhelm von Habsburg/Vasyl Vyshyvanyi
There was a fundamental contradiction at the center of the Brest-Litovsk

system. On the one hand, the system condemned imperial dynasticism in
Eastern Europe by supporting the creation of nation-states like Ukraine. On
the other hand, it sought to preserve imperial dynasticism in Central Europe.
The ukrainization policy of Wilhelm von Habsburg sought to address this
contradiction and reconcile imperial rule and the nation-state. Although
ultimately unsuccessful, it represents an important chapter of early Ukrainian
national statehood, which points out the possibilities the Brest-Litovsk system

57
Unruhen auf dem Lande und Proteste dagegen. HHStA, PA X, K 152.

58
Ministry, no. 549, 11 June 1918. Ibid.

59

60

engendered.
Groomed from an early age to become a future king of Poland by his ambi-
tious father, Archduke Stefan, Wilhelm came from a generation of Habsburg

Timothy Snyder has put it in his recent political biography of Wilhelm, they
did so not with a sense of historical inevitability, with the premonition that
nations had to come and to conquer, that empires had to shudder and fall.
They thought that freedom for Poland and Ukraine could be reconciled to
the expansion of Habsburg rule in Europe.61 Wilhelm eventually rebelled
against his fathers Polish orientation and decided to throw in his lot with the
Ukrainians. After graduating from the military academy in Vienna in January
1915, he asked for and received a command post of a Ukrainian detachment
in the Habsburg army. It was at this time that he acquired his nickname, the
Red prince, as a result of his close relationship with his Ukrainian troops,
whom the higher military authorities considered politically suspect.62 Also
around this time, Wilhelms penchant for wearing an embroidered blue and
yellow shirt gave him his Ukrainian alias, Vyshyvanyi (embroidered). His
Ukrainophile tendencies quickly became known in important political circles.
The young prince was particularly active during the course of the Brest-Litovsk
negotiations. He met Count Czernin, the leader of the Habsburg delegation,

He was also in touch with Ukrainian delegates, informing them about the
63
Wilhelm got his big chance soon after Brest-Litovsk. In March 1918 Em-
peror Karl, whose tendency to pursue informal policy with the help of family

to become the emperors eyes and ears in Ukraine.64 Most of the troops

famous Ukrainian Sich Sharpshooters (USS, Ukrainski Sichovi Striltsi), an
all-Ukrainian auxiliary corps created in the autumn of 1914 in Galicia to
The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (New York:
61
Basic Books, 2008), 5.

62

http://www.
WHYHHVYN\HIPISPV[LRHPZ[VYP`HTV]H\RYHQPUZR`QWH[YPV[PaKÙHZ[PQPOHIZI\YOP]KVR\TLU[`
memuary-ertshertsoha-vilhelma-habsburha-lotrinhena/ (accessed 15 August 2014).
63

Polkovnik Vasyl Vyshyvanyi (Winnipeg: D. Mykytiuk, 1956), 13.
64
The Red Prince, 10102.
combat the Russians. Wilhelm would rely heavily on these loyal troops in the
implementation of his ukrainization policy.

city of Oleksandrivsk, not far from the celebrated Cossack fortress of Sich,
where it established its headquarters and quickly became engaged in nation-
building activities. The USS took the lead, often acting in concert with the
local administrators the Rada had appointed. They opened a national theater
and staged plays every day. They performed music numbers in the town park,
where the local intelligentsia used to gather. They helped start a periodical,
Sich
the countryside with local Cossack forces.65 Wilhelm considered the policy
of cultural ukrainization indispensable to the independent existence of the
young state. There are only two possibilities: either an opponent will be able
to send me away and russify, or I will be able to remain and ukrainize, he is
reputed to have said on the subject.66

were replaced, often by Russians who tried to clamp down on Ukrainian na-
tionalist activities. However, it also presented opportunities, as Wilhelms
headquarters in Oleksandrivsk quickly became the focal point of opposition
to Skoropadskyis regime.
German, and Habsburg troops to curb the agrarian revolution and return
the land to the landlords, the peasants started arming themselves and resist-
ing. The USS were sent to pacify a certain district but refused to shoot at the
peasants. This was tantamount to high treason, but Wilhelm used his author-
ity to protect them from punishment. This incident became widely known
among the peasants, leading to the steady growth of Wilhelms popularity in
the countryside.67 Unlike Skoropadskyis, Wilhelms view of ukrainization
involved the peasantry and the socialization of land. He was a Red prince in-
deed. My troops and I tried to protect the local population from some of the
excesses of the Austrian military occupation, wrote Wilhelm of his actions.
Many Ukrainian nationalist activists came to us, as they knew we would
protect them.68

65
Avstrii, in Polkovnik Vasyl Vyshyvanyi, 49.

66
The Red Prince, 104.
67

Polkovnik Vasyl Vyshyvanyi, 17.
68

51.
As news of the archdukes pro-Ukrainian actions spread, rumors of a

possible Habsburg regency under Wilhelm began circulating.69 Subsequently,

duke Wilhelm in Ukraine in conversation with a representative of the For-

Ukrainian throne. The German High Command also made inquiries about
Wilhelms activities.70 Tentative plans for a coup did, in fact, exist, as certain
socialist politicians in Odessa came up with the idea to proclaim Wilhelm
hetman in opposition to Skoropadskyi. One of the atamans of the USS took
this proposal to the archduke in Oleksandrivsk. Wilhelm thought it over and
replied that he would not decline the post if that was the will of the Ukrainian
people. At a conference in Kiev, however, the leaders of the Ukrainian SDs and
SRs voted down the proposal as too dangerous.71 Although this plan came to
nothing, it is demonstrative of Wilhelms growing popularity in Ukrainian
political circles, where his candidacy was seriously considered. Apparently,
there were at least two subsequent occasions when Cossack troops crowned
Wilhelm king of Ukraine.72
Skoropadskyi also became concerned with Wilhelms perceived
aspirations and spoke several times with Austro-Hungarian Ambassador

thanks to Wilhelms actions, Oleksandrivsk had become the destination of

73 Habsburg civilian and military authorities became
convinced that Wilhelm should be recalled from Ukraine, but as long as he
had the emperors ear, he was untouchable. The commander of the Habsburg
Eastern Army stationed in Ukraine, General Alfred Krauss, told Ambassador

emperor.74 Eventually, he succeeded in relocating Wilhelm and his troops to

69
Armeeoberkommando, Nachrichten Abteilung, no. 13,078, Zuknftige Gestaltung in

der Ukraina. Standort am 6.Juni 1918. HHStA, PA X, K 152.
70

eine Thronkandidatur Erzherzog Wilhelms. HHStA, PA X, K 154-1-2 8): Ttigkeit
Erzherzog Wilhelms in der Ukraine und seine Abberufung, 1918.061918.10.
71

Polkovnik Vasyl Vyshyvanyi, 1923.
72

73

74
Elisavethrad, after about a month and a half in Oleksandrivsk.75 However, the

performances twice a week, in a village nearby. These were often accompanied
by dances, at which the USS lads would dance with the local girls, thereby
establishing connections with the local population. Wilhelm also sent many

to open Ukrainian schools and spread literacy.76 Recognizing the need for
more functionaries, he began recruiting local Ukrainians into the USS, which
roughly doubled in size.77
Habsburg and especially German military authorities in Ukraine
opposed Wilhelms ukrainization policy, primarily because it favored the
socialist-leaning peasantry and undermined the authority of Skoropadskyis

explanation. Emperor Karl decided that a personal visit from the archduke
78 Wilhelm decided to use the opportunity to solicit the kaisers

support for his candidacy to the Ukrainian throne. Having arrived at General
Headquarters in Spa at the beginning of August, he raised the subject with

told the archduke not to mention his wish to the kaiser, as the kaiser could

Emperor Karl nor Kaiser Wilhelm appeared to be aware of the archdukes
plans; Karl even dismissed the whole thing as a malicious rumor. However,

archduke in which he allegedly put himself forward as the most adequate
candidate for the Ukrainian throne. He did not want to force himself, but if
the people were to choose him, he would be ready.79 The reception itself was
friendly, and Wilhelm assured the kaiser he had no political aspirations. The
kaiser took to the young archduke and awarded him the Iron Cross.
75

51.
76

77

78

HHStA, PA I, K 523: Liasse XLVII/12d, Beziehungen Erzherzog Wilhelms zu
ukrainischen Notabilitten (1918.05).

79
August 1918. HHStA, PA I, K 154.

After his visit to Spa, Wilhelm returned to Ukraine and resumed his
ukrainization policy. The Austro-Hungarian High Command continued
to receive reports that accused Wilhelm and his troops of supporting the
peasants in their opposition to current relations in Ukraine, of spreading
Bolshevik ideas among the population, and of conducting activities against
landlords and Jews, including open propaganda for partitioning the land.80
More importantly, Wilhelms behavior began to alarm Emperor Karl, who

which turn events in Ukraine would take and whether the Hetmanate would
last, stated the emperor. If Skoropadskyis regime were to fall, it would be of
no consequence to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The situation would be
emperors consent. In this case, the monarchy would undoubtedly support

such a regime. However, the candidacy of a Habsburg archduke for the post

the monarchy. Although professing himself happy with the friendly relations
with various Ukrainian elements which Wilhelm had promoted, the emperor
asked him to cease any further activities in that direction for the time being.81
By early September, Karl had agreed to have Wilhelm and his Ukrainian
troops recalled from Ukraine.82 On 9 October, they left for Bukovina. By the
end of the month, the USS had become actively involved in the creation of the
West Ukrainian Peoples Republic, which took place in the formerly Habsburg
town of Lemberg/Lviv in East Galicia.
Archduke Wilhelms ukrainization policy represents an important stage
of early Ukrainian national statehood. A typically Brest-Litovsk program, it
tried to reconcile the nation-state with continued Habsburg rule in Europe
by creating a populist monarchy under a Habsburg red prince. Wilhelm
promoted cultural ukrainization as well as the socialization of land, which
was the main issue for the majority of Ukrainian peasants throughout the

more inclusive and tolerant version of Ukrainian nationalism. In a way, the
archduke embodied successful ukrainization. His career demonstrated that
Wilhelm von Habsburg, an imperial prince who had only learned to speak
Ukrainian in his adolescence, could become Vasyl Vyshyvanyi, prospective
leader of the Ukrainian national movement who had support among the radi-
80

81
Wilhelm. HHStA, PA I, K 523.

82

cal intelligentsia and the revolutionary peasantry. Ukrainian nationalism

could adapt to changing circumstances and meet the demands of war and
revolution.
Conclusion
In his examination of the emergence of the notion of ethnicity in late imperial

Bashkiria, Charles Steinwedel writes that the Tsarist regime provided con-
cepts and important precedents for the ethnic organization of educational,
spiritual, and political institutions. With the destruction of the Tsarist regime
the new Soviet regime systematized the language of ethnicity and built
upon the foundations laid by its predecessor.83 While a similar connection
also existed in Ukraine, the Ukrainian experience with nationalization policies
in 1918 provided an even more important context of concepts and important
precedents for subsequent Soviet nationality policy. This was due to the
fact that, in the eight months following the Brest-Litovsk peace conference, a
part of the Russian Empire. Between March and November 1918, this system
promoted the existence of an ostensibly independent Ukrainian state sup-
ported by Austro-German troops, which was nevertheless economically and

the emergence of nation-states with continued imperial rule, the Brest-Litovsk
system thus highlighted the complexity of the relationship between national
and imperial at the time.

to bolster Ukrainian national statehood. The Austro-German military pres-
factor. Ukrainian agency, revolutionary conditions, and imperial legacies were

all important factors in the shaping of ukrainization policies. The policies of
the Rada, Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi, and the Red Prince Wilhelm von

form of government and the nature of socioeconomic relations in the state, but
they had two things in common. They were nationality policies which shared
economic and ideological program tied to the notion of nationality. For the
Rada, it was agrarian-socialist ukrainization under a revolutionary republican
government. For Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi, it was a conservative monarchy
based on the restoration of private property and the support of a Ukrainian

83
army. For Archduke Wilhelm, it was a populist monarchy under Habsburg

suzerainty which prioritized the cultural ukrainization of the peasantry as
well as the socialization of the land economy. It is perhaps impossible for any
nationality policy to be completely devoid of an ideological aspect, but in
establishing a clear relationship between the two, the various ukrainization

indigenization policy in the 1920s and 1930s.
What Russian Progressives Expected from the War
Ilya V. Gerasimov
In August 1915, just as the German General August von Mackensens Ninth
Army was forcing Russian troops out of Poland and interparty negotiations in
the State Duma were about to unite 56 percent of the deputies in the Progres-
sive Bloc, the Petrograd publishing house Prometheus prepared the second
edition of the collection What Russia Expects from the War
issued in March, had already sold out.1 The success of the book was due to its
clear agenda and its presentation of Russia as an important actor in this his-
toric clash, rather than as a passive victim of diabolic German militarism.2
This active constructivist stance sets this work apart from a number of other
book projects that appeared at about the same time in Russia, often featur-
ing many of the same contributors, commenting mainly on the events or
3
What Russia Expects from the War was the most important public statement of
Russian progressives on the war, and it marked the moment when Russian
intellectuals claimed prominent positions for themselves in societys war

which supported the actions of their respective governments, politicians, and
1
Chego zhdet Rossiia ot voiny: Sbornik statei, ed. R. Streltsov,
2nd ed. (Petrograd: Prometei, 1915), 5.
2

same publisher, in the same style produced the collection What Germany Expects from
the War, which was a translation of interviews by Spanish journalist Carlos Ibaez

de Paris in March 1915. This publication compensated for the then absent similarly

the Russian collection of articles. See R. Streltsov, ed., Chego zhdet Germaniia ot voiny
(Petrograd: Prometei, after April 1915).
3
Voprosy mirovoi voiny (Petrograd: Pravo, 1915);
P. Kudriashov, ed., Ideinye gorizonty mirovoi voiny (Moscow: Trud, 1915); Voina i Polsha
(Polskii vopros v russkoi i polskoi pechati) (Moscow: Knigoizdatelstvo pisatelei, 1914);
L. S. Kozlovskii, ed., Voina: Sbornik statei (Paris: Ideal, 1915).
190 ILYA V. GERASIMOV
militaries.4 Now the time had come for the intellectuals to reconsider their
unequivocal support for the government and articulate their own visions of the
What Russia Expects
from the War and the motives of the disparate progressives who contributed
to the publication. It argues that this publication was much broader than a
narrow liberal Kadet Party publication, that it brought together a group as di-
verse as the Progressive Bloc in the Duma. Thus, this case study supports my
broader claim that progressivism was more than a tactical alliance; it was a
and values.
Who were these Russian intellectuals that set out to formulate Russias re-

broad spectrum, including university professors in the humanities, social, and
Incidentally, both a British collection of essays under a very similar title that
appeared in September 1914 (apparently serving as an example to the Russians)5
and a comparable German collection published after May 19156 were edited
and penned by professional historians. Although British historians used their
skills in a more direct way (reconstructing the socioeconomic and political
developments that had led to the war),7 while their German colleagues were
more concerned with outlining the desired world order of the future (deriving
from either teleological conclusions of the past or structural predispositions
of German geography and culture),8 they all looked to the past for answers.
Unlike them, the contributors to the Russian programmatic collection took
Russias present condition and needs as the point of departure. To use the
4

obshchestvo i Pervaia mirovaia voina, in Intelligentsiia v istorii: Obrazovannyi chelovek
v sotsialnykh predstavleniiakh i deistvitelnosti, ed. D. A. Sdvizhkov (Moscow: IVI RAN,
2001), 296335.
5

Legg, and F. Morgan, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1914).
6
Deutschland und der Weltkrieg

and Hermann Schumacher (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1915), dated by the reference on p.
278.
7

of historic evidence, and we have endeavored to treat this subject historically. C. R. L.
Fletcher et al., Why We Are at War, 5.
8
German Anglophobia
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 6366.
WHAT RUSSIAN PROGRESSIVES EXPECTED FROM THE WAR 191
archetypal Russian tropes, this was more about what is to be done than
who is to blame.
If the contributors to What Russia Expects from the War were not united

in June 1915, he called it a Kadet collection,9 and this characteristic became
an orthodoxy of Soviet historiography,10 still resurfacing occasionally on the
periphery of the profession in Russia.11 Today, the authors of that 1915 collec-
tion are usually referred to (more cautiously) as liberals.12 Both of these char-
acteristics are misleading: of the thirteen contributors to the collection, only

Kareev, mineralogist Vladimir Vernadskii, physician Andrei Shingarev, and,

utionary concept of liberalism (politically represented by Kadets on the

center-left, and Octobrists on the center-right) can by no means be applied to
contributors to the collection such as the poet Zinaida Gippius or to Tugan-
Baranovskii, to chemist and art historian Vladimir Kurbatov, or to physician
and womens rights activist Poliksena Shishkina-Iavein.
Besides members of the Kadet Party and proponents of liberalism, at
least four authors of the collection were Freemasons (Shingarev, Gippius,
journalist Maksim Slavinskii, and pedagogue Sergei Znamenskii)which, of
course, does not make the collection masonic either. In short, What Russia
Expects from the War featured Kadets, Octobrists, and Masons, as well as
idealist philosophers, economists, and ideologues of cooperative socialism.
Conventionally, these groups are treated as distinct entities, but I would
argue that they shared a broad intellectual unity forged in part by the fact
that Russian political parties constituted just a tiny fraction of educated soci-
9

Collected Works (Moscow: Progress, 1964), 21: 266. Kadet was the nickname for the
Constitutional Democratic Party, based on its Russian initials K and Dit had no
military connotation.
Russkaia burzhuaziia i tsarizm v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny (Leningrad:
10
Nauka, 1967), 50; S. L. Tikhvinskii, (Moscow:

Nauka, 1988), 113; N. G. Dumova and V. Ia. Laverychev, Kadetskaia partiia v period
mirovoi voiny i Fevralskoi revoliutsii (Moscow: Nauka, 1988), 19.
11
Otechestvennaia istoriia: Posobie k izucheniiu razdela distsipliny Rossiia
v Pervoi mirovoi voine (Moscow: MGTU GA, 2003), 22.
12
Liberalnaia model pereustroistva Rossii (Moscow: R, 1996),
218; V. Iu. Cherniaev, Pervaia mirovaia voina i perspektivy demokraticheskogo
preobrazovaniia Rossiiskoi Imperii, in Rossiia i Pervaia mirovaia voina (Materialy nauch-
nogo kollokviuma) (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999), 191.
ety in the early 1910s. In real life, disparate individuals often crossed over
political partisan lines for ventures like this collected volume. By doing so,
they contributed to a more general rearrangement of educated society after
the outbreak of the Great War, a development that I would suggest directly
led to the February Revolution. I argue that this volume spanned as much of
the political spectrum as the Progressive Bloc, and that both were more than
coalitions of convenience; progressivism had a coherent unity and mindset.
To reconstruct this general mindset, let us take a closer look at the indi-
vidual contributions to What Russia Expects from the War. The idea for such a

after the publication of the collection ,
by Oxford historians.13 Streltsov joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor
Party in 1900, and soon thereafter moved to Germany, returning to Russia
only in 1914. He published extensively in German periodicals of various polit-
ical leaning, mostly Social Democratic,14 but also in Critical Pages for All of
the Social Sciences, edited by notorious conservatives such as Othmar Spann
and Hanns Dorn.15 Initially, he sided with the Mensheviks, but he gradually
drifted away from party politics.
The leader of the Russian Constitutional Democrats, Pavel Miliukov,
outlined his imperialist vision of the future world map in his chapter, The
Territorial Gains of Russia. Compared to the grand design of his German
colleagues in similar collections, his aspirations are relatively modest, and,
line of the tsarist government. Writing before the great retreat of Russian
troops from Galicia in the spring of 1915, Miliukov took it for granted that
Galicia should be annexed by Russia. Poland should be restored within
its ethnographic border, although under the scepter of the Russian tsar,
annexing territories from Austria and Germany. Russia should occupy Con-
stantinople and the Straits, along with the adjacent hinterland. Several vilayets

13
on 31 October 1914, in the Arkhiv Rossiiskoi akademii nauk (ARAN) f. 518 (V. I.
Vernadskii), op. 3, d. 1583, ll. 12.
14

Party of Germany, Sozialistische Monatshefte alone. See www.digitalisiertedrucke.de/
search?p=Streltzow%2C+Roman&f=author.
15
Kritische
2, 4 (1906): 18183. The article itself was but
a bibliographic survey of the Russian post-1905 intellectual book market, noting the
abundance of books by German authors (Marx, Lassalle, Engels, Kautsky, Sombart,
and others).

create an ethnographic Armenia under a Russian protectorate.16
Streltsov contradicted many of Miliukovs arguments in his chapter at
the end of the volume. He declared from the start that any foreign policy
strategy would be necessarily expansionist and aggressive and that Russia
had only one goal in the war: German militarism must be weakened and
rendered harmless.17 Apparently not daring to voice his opposition to the
imperialist mainstream explicitly, he cautiously mentioned that on the ques-
tion of Constantinople and the Straits he entirely sided with the position
General Kuropatkin expressed in his 1910 book Russia for the Russians.18 The
evocation of the name of the notorious Russian chauvinist and of his book
with such a suggestive title could be easily misinterpreted; in fact, in chapter
28 of the book, Kuropatkin argued that Russia did not need Constantinople,
the Dardanelles, or any territories in the Balkans. Her sole interest was

the Bosporus be in either Turkish or Russian hands, and that there was no
urgency in dealing with this question whatsoever.19 Streltsov just added that
the cost of the territorial expansion would be too high. He concluded:
Thus, in all directions, we can have only peaceful tasks. Russia does
not need occupations: it has enough land resources even without them.
In the realm of foreign policy it needs calm, and only calm. All the
energy is needed for internal construction. The best foreign policy for
Russia is a good internal policy.20

recommendations should not obscure a fundamental similarity of their initial
intentions. Not unlike Streltsov, Miliukov was preoccupied with the rational

Chego zhdet Rossiia ot voiny,

16
5366.
17
Chego zhdet Rossiia ot voiny, 225.
18

Rossiia dlia russkikh: Zadachi russkoi armii (St. Petersburg: V. A.
19
Berezovskii, 1910), 2: 52526.

20


justice, that is, with drawing an ethnographic border most closely to
21
Any territorial claims (with the important exception of the Straits) Miliukov
made were on behalf of nationalities struggling for their rights within the
Russian Empire: Ukrainians (to be reunited with their brethren in Galicia),
Poles, and Armenians. Once these peoples were promised accommodation
within the Russian Empire on the ethnographic principle, any state borders
could be violated. Miliukov proposed replacing old legitimist principles
with maps drawn according to ethnonational and linguistic majorities.
In application, this was often quite an arbitrary exercise, and it provided a
shaky foundation for his envisioned new foreign policy.22 We see the same
logic in the approach of the Woodrow Wilsonled US delegation at the Paris

Central Europe.23
with ones political stance.

economist of the older essentialist type, preoccupied with the question of the
true nature of theoretical concepts such as value,24 along with more construc-
His chapter, The War and National Economy, opened the collection and
production in the semi-autarkic situation of the war, and the distribution of

meaningful conclusions. On Russian economic interests in the war, Tugan-
Baranovskii repeated the nationalist mantra about the prewar economic de-
pendency of Russia on Germany. He concluded in rather vague terms that
no territorial gains in Europe promised any economic advantage to Russia
21

22

23

Inquiry and the Mapping of East Central Europe in 1919, Ab Imperio 7, 4 (2006): 271
300.
Osnovy politicheskoi ekonomii (Petrograd:
24
Pravo, 1917).
(although the accomplishment of Russian historical tasks in the Near East

did).25
Tugan-Baranovskiis chapter was followed by The War and Finances,

Born to a Jewish family in Siberian Tomsk, Fridman was a rising star of

Fridmans article is very focused, informative, and analytical. At the same

beginning that even the most righteous and victorious war ruins the national
economy.26 Not only did Fridman renounce annexations and contributions
from the enemy, he even doubted that imposing any substantial contribution
on the Central Powers would be possible after the devastating war.27 Instead,
he recommended improving productivity, increasing industrial output, and
introducing economic reforms.28
Two equally modern Russian economists with internationally recog-

on his expertise in the Russian economy as the point of departure, which

erupted. Tugan-Baranovskii drew from very general schemes that did not have
a direct correlation with the political and economic realities of the day. His

war did not challenge his theoretical expectations (he continued discussing
the economic situation in terms of capitalist crises or their absence), and there-
fore he had no special point of view on the war. Tugan-Baranovskii could
be very biased (even intellectually unscrupulous) when it came to defending
ideas close to his heart (such as socialism or cooperatives).29 His belief in the
semicolonial dependency of Russia on the German economy (which was a
value judgment rather than a result of any complex analysis) could become a
worked for Miliukov.
25
Chego zhdet Rossiia ot
voiny, 21, 27.
26
27

28

29
Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia: Rural Profes-
(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 267.
An even deeper mutual disagreement characterizes the articles about

was a successful professor at St. Petersburg Technical Institute and expert on
the Russian chemical industry, working for the Russian Ministry of Agricul-

self-taught specialists in pre-Petrine architecture, a member of the World of Art
(Mir iskusstva
nized authority in the history of park architecture. It should be added that

academic appointments, from Commissar of Parks and Gardens to deputy of
the Leningrad City Soviet. He was arrested in 1938 but released in 1939, and
later decorated with the highest Soviet orders.
In general, Kurbatov embodied the type of intellectual that, according to
some historians, embraced the Bolshevik Revolution for its alleged modernism
and contributed to the development of the early Soviet project as a bourgeois
specialist. However, contrary to the premises of this model, it is unlikely that
Kurbatov was frustrated by the old regimes presumed under-appreciation
of modern experts: he successfully achieved self-realization in state service,
business, and scholarship, rising from poverty to the ranks of the elite.
Whatever his reasons were for embracing the Soviet regime after 1917, his
enthusiasm about the war with Germany was highly (if entirely implausibly)
motivated. Kurbatov dedicated his entire chapter, characteristically titled
The Dangers of German Artistic Culture, to proving the eternal (at least
since the early Middle Ages) lack of creativity and originality of German archi-
tecture and arts. Luckily, his artistic expertise ideally matched the foreign
policy priorities of Russia, which had quite recently radically changed: It is
important that Russia turn to the true fount of culture, that is, France and
England.30 Interestingly, Kurbatov criticized German culture for precisely
what would become the foundations of Soviet culture: catering to plebeian
tastes, submission of creative individuality to the faceless masses, and favoring
technology over the creativity of individual craftsmen.

embodiment of the modernism of Russias Silver Age. Her contribution to the
collection, War, Literature, Theater, could be summarized by the proverb,
in times of war the muses fall silent. Although Gippius supported radical
revolutionaries and terrorists after the 1905 Revolution, she perceived the
global European war with disgust. War, in her mind, was not only destructive,
Chego zhdet
30
Rossiia ot voiny, 142.

but totally incapable of producing any stimuli for culture.31 She did not put

with obvious confusion, commenting on the similarity of the ideology of pre-
war futurism and the spirit of total war: One thing surprises me: futurists
originated in Italy, but were implemented in Germany.32 Thus, nothing in
Gippiuss prior intensive engagement with European culture had prepared
her for the inevitability of a war between Russia, Germany, and Austria.
Like Gippius, it seems that Kurbatov did not anticipate military clash
between the founts of culture and barbaric Germany.33 Was it his pro-

scholarship and technologies before the war, as Tugan-Baranovskii com-
plained)34
fundamental foreignness of art to nationalizing politics that made the cultural
argument so ambivalent: it could dismiss the very validity of war as a cultural
experience (Gippius), or celebrate it as the triumph of a superior culture over

many biographical parallels, their articles were close in argument, sometimes
repeating the same thesis almost verbatim. Historian Nikolai Kareev

member of the Constitutional Democratic Party, contributed his Thoughts
about Russian Science Concerning the Current War. Natural scientist Vladi-

The War and the Progress of Science. Both authors forcefully argued in
chauvinism of their German colleagues, and protested against the analogous

ered the roots of German militarism in German classical philosophy, of
Krupp in Kant (apparently, this was neo-Slavophile philosopher Vladimir
35
31
32

33
Zodchii, no.
35 (1908): 32527.
34

35
Chego zhdet
Rossiia ot voiny, 85. Ern presented his paper From Kant to Krupp on 6 October 1914,
to the Religious-Philosophical Society, which was founded back in 1907 by the nearest
More concerned with the organization of science, Vernadskii predicted
ously played by Germany, would be transferred to the United States in the

future.36 Pointing to the example of the United States after the Civil War,
Vernadskii insisted that a comprehensive survey of Russian natural resources
was an urgent task for Russia.37 Incidentally, at about the same time that he
wrote this article, on 21 January 1915, Vernadskii came out with a proposal for

Natural Productive Forces (KEPS). In August 1915, when the second edition
38
With their unanimous antimilitarism and internationalism, Kareev
and Vernadskii did not stand for the entire Russian academic community,
particularly the younger generation, which had not had a comparable experi-
ence of international academic socialization, and was more susceptible to
nationalized social imaginary (like Vladimir Kurbatov).39 Kareev argued that,
paradoxically, the most zealous advocates of all things Russian were them-
selves former uncritical partisans of German thought, who began as economic
materialists but soon evolved from Marxism to idealism, only to begin later
on turning into the Russian manner the German Deutschland, Deutschland
ber alles.40
Both Marxism and metaphysical philosophy (of the kind preached by
Vladimir Ern), were quite popular among the younger generation of Russian
intellectuals. And yet, it was the tier of senior scholars like Kareev and Vernad-

While they acknowledged the inevitability and even desirability of greater self-

of a Soviet-type ideal of intellectual autarky: We wish for Russian science
to be the least nationally exclusive, the most universal [obshchechelovecheskaia]
intellectual circle of Zinaida Gippius. See V. Ern, Ot Kanta k Kruppu, Russkaia mysl,
no. 12 (1914): 11624.
36

37
38
Sozdanie i deiatelnost Komissii po izucheniiu estestven-
nykh proizvoditelnykh sil Rossii, 19151930 (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1999).
39

mirovaia voina, Grazhdanskaia voina i izobretenie bolshoi nauki, in Vlast i nauka,
uchenye i vlast: 1880-e-nachalo 1920-kh godov (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003),
87111.
40

contributing its own original [content] to the common treasury of human

knowledge.41 Thus, the main impact of the war on people like Vernadskii

compete with German science.42
Other contributors to the collection were even more introverted in their
orientation. A representative of the same age cohort as Vernadskii and Kareev,

and the Health of the Population of Russia. He was not interested in the sup-

themes of the epoch. He was mostly concerned with practical measures in
volvement of the Zemstvo Union.43 With great enthusiasm and at great length,
Bekhterev endorsed the prohibition of alcohol in Russia, which promised
remarkable moral and physical improvement of the nation (at a cost of losing
0.7 billion rubles in annual revenues to the budget, which became a major
44 Andrei Shingarev

zemstvo (local self-government headed by the nobility), ignored the military
[i]deas of emancipation of oppressed nationalities, elimination of

armed violence, [and imposition of] the principles of law and justice
this is what the war has stirred up with the long-unseen force, and this
ideological content of the war seeks to guide and improve international
relations. But the very same ideas, with even greater breadth and
depth, are seeking their realization in the internal life of states.45
Shingarev dedicated his entire lengthy chapter in the collection to the dis-
cussion of urgent and radical reform of the zemstvo institutions of self-
government in Russia, aimed at spreading zemstvo institutions to all regions

41
42

43
Chego zhdet Rossiia ot voiny,
179.
44

45
Sergei Znamenskii (1878 to later than 1927), son of the protopresbyter

(dean) of St. Isaacs Cathedral in St. Petersburg, abandoned his graduate studies
in history at St. Petersburg University to become a popular school teacher
and authority on the newest pedagogical methods. In his chapter, Main
Tasks in the Field of Education, he concentrated entirely on the problem of
comprehensive school reform in Russia with no regard for the examples of
Germany, Austria, France, Britain, and the United States.46 Advocating the
introduction of universal free schooling in Russia, decentralization of the edu-
cational system, and a radical overhaul of the curriculum, he contrasted the
future state of Russian education not to any foreign enemy, but to the inert
current system of education in Russia. This radical position, however, did
not make Znamenskii an enthusiastic collaborator of Bolsheviks such as the
fevered patriot Kurbatov.47

the Womens Medical Institute in St. Petersburg in 1904, cofounder and leader
of the feminist Russian League for Womens Equal Rights (since 1907), was a
48 A known crusader against prostitution,
she could be reasonably expected to use the metaphor of the female body as a
social entity to call for the defense of the motherland against foreign aggres-
sion and occupation. Instead, in her brief but energetic essay, The War and
the Woman, she turned her rage against all shades of militarism, blaming
male chauvinist governments for the irresponsible foreign policies that had
led to the war. Shishkina-Iavein saw the global task of acquiring full civic

more elevated forms, so that the presently existing contradiction between
46
Chego zhdet Rossiia
ot voiny, 15253, 164.
47

in the Taurida Palace. After the Bolshevik coup he made his way to the Far East, and
upon takeover of the region by Soviet troops, worked as an economist in the local
railway administration, was arrested in 1927 and, probably, exiled to Uzbekistan. See
A. B. Nikolaev, Gosudarstvennaia duma v Fevralskoi revoliutsii: Ocherki istorii (Riazan:
Modern and Contemporary Russian History: Documents and Monographs, 2002), 278.
48

ary of Womens Movements and Feminisms in Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe:
19th and 20th Centuries

(Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006), 51013.
the notion of patriotism and a large, broad, and bright notion of love to all
humankind will disappear.49

(some of them even showing militarist zeal), but the majority of them were
concerned mainly with righting the wrongs that had led to the war, rather than

main threat to Russia in her own unresolved internal problems, they believed
that the key to victory was to be found on the home front: in the structural
transformation of the economy, science, culture, and, it was implied, politics.
Journalist and public intellectual Maksim Slavinskii fully explained the
paradox of reforming Russia as the main way of winning the war with the
external enemy in the chapter War and the National Question. As explicitly
as was possible under the eye of wartime censorship, Slavinskii formulated
the position shared by the majority of contributors to the collection: the
main enemy of Russia was not the Kaiserreich or the Dual Monarchy, but
the internal Germany within. This Russian Germanness embodied
all reactionary tendencies: nationalism and male chauvinism, the spirit
of exclusiveness in the arts and sciences, and social segregation sustained
through discrimination in the system of education and the political system.
The example of Germany is a negative argument demonstrating how

national policy within a state should not be conducted. Analogous
examples are endless, and all of them refer to that stage of the states

between the notion of the state and that of the nation. All states have
known this stage.50
It is implied that Russia, too, had gone through the stage of equating
aphorism: there should be as many states as nations, but actual government

practice turned it upside down, namely: if there are several nations in
the state, they should all be denationalized in the interests of the main na-
tion.51 However, now only the most backward states like Germany and
Hungary continued to act as repressive nationalizing states, while in the
Russian Empire, as in a giant laboratory, one can observe all forms and kinds
of national blossoming from the initial national ovary to astounding
49
50
51

growth.52 Russia had to choose a way of handling its remarkable national

diversity, and Slavinskii implied that the backward German scenario was a
sure path to defeat in war.53
In this spirit, well acknowledging the role of structural factors such as
international economic competition or colonial rivalry at the beginning of the
Great War, most contributors to the 1915 collection focused on Russian domes-
tic problems as the main source of truly irreconcilable contradictions. To
Kareev, the main enemy was the German within, represented by dogmatic
intellectuals who completely misunderstood the spirit of our vanguard ob-
shchestvennost and became alien to the traditions of Russian progressive
thought.54
colors of ultra-patriotism with servility, and saw it as the main obstacle to

discussion of conscious citizens).55 Bekhterev was much more emotional
about the fatal impact of alcohol on Russian society than about the German
armed forces. Slavinskii himself was well known as a proponent of the Rus-
sian imperial political nation as a common single interface for numerous

distinctive Walloon and Flemish communities, or the Swiss with their four
nationalities). He opposed this vision to both the archaic German (and
Russian nationalist) ideal of the monoethnic state, and to the Austrian (and
Ukrainian or Caucasian) federalist model:
Theoretically, Austria has found an ideal way to solve the national ques-
tion: her constitution secured the right of complete self-determination
for all nationalities. But this was jus nudum [i.e., an empty right].

their demands by force. The nationalities of Austria [thus] became clas-

national rivalry has permeated all pores of the state organism.56
Slavinskii advocated a multitiered system of bilingual loyalties and
sion, and traditions) integrated into the universal pan-imperial political public
52

53

54

55

56

sphere. Essentially, this was a new scenario of imperial citizenship: universal,

the existing discriminative old regime subjecthood and various forms of
modern citizenship insensitive to national distinctions.57 The ultimate ideal
for Russia, in his view, was the British Empire and Commonwealth, seen by
Slavinskii as a commonwealth of the political nation in creation (tvorimaia
natsiia),58 a voluntary civic union of former colonies and conquered territories.
Russia, just as England, is a nation in creation. We have an Ireland

of our ownPoland We have our own Russian internal national

and Welsh. Both Russia and England have produced the powerful
intelligentsia, democratic in its core. [Ideals] elaborated by the
intelligentsia of the principal nationality in the state are becoming
available to the intelligentsias of the other nationalities of the empire.59
Thus, Russia was siding with Britain in the war against Germany because
it was choosing the multicultural, democratic commonwealth over the repres-
sive nationalizing nation-state. In the same logic, the collections editor,
Streltsov, explained Germanys involvement in the war by the internal strife
between the homogenizing nationalists (the party of war) and advocates of
local and group solidarities (southern Lnder or Social-Democrats), with the
former seeking in the war a way not to strengthen the international positions
of Germany, but to strengthen their supremacy in their own country.60 To
these Russians, any considerations of international politics or economic

between adversary forces within the countries that, unable to solve domestic
problems, opted for a world war.
WX
The analysis of the contributions and contributors to What Russia Expects from
the War thus far has displayed substantial diversity within a common political
57

ersboth within and outside state borderssee Eric Lohr, Russian Citizenship: From
Empire to Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), especially
chap. 5.
58

59

60
Chego zhdet Germaniia ot voiny, 18.
discourse with a few important shared themes. Each contributors intent was
tensions. Whether motivated by cultural Slavophilism, Russian ethnic nation-

alism, economic isolationism or expansionism, all agreed on the need to
overcome German aspects of Russian economy and society. More funda-
mentally, I would argue that they thought of the domestic struggle as not
to the central challenge of modernity: how to reconcile the fundamental and

multilayered heterogeneity of the old regime and the ideal of the single

became a common denominator in Russia for a broad spectrum of public forces
seeking social reforms without a radical revolutionary upheaval. Scholars do
not fully realize how widespread and persistent the ethos of progressivism in
Russia was; well beyond the ranks of the namesake Progressive Party, factions
of reform-minded progressives appeared in city councils in Moscow and
St. Petersburg and, after August 1915, the dominant Progressive Bloc in the
Duma. In the remainder of this essay, I will make the case that the striking
unity of the progressives during World War I was not simply a product of a
wartime alliance of convenience, but was rather the end product of a much
deeper and richer tradition of Russian progressivism than most scholars
have thought existed. I will focus on the prewar ideas and wartime writings
of one of the most important Russian progressives, Maksim Maksimovich
Kovalevskii.
Kovalevskii was undergoing his seasonal treatment in Karlsbad, in the
Habsburg Empire, when World War I broke out. He was allowed to return
to Russia only in February 1915, under pressure from scholars from neutral
countries. He did not arrive in time to contribute to Streltsovs collection
published in March, but he wrote for a similar collection, Questions of the
World War, edited by Tugan-Baranovskii later that year, along with some of
Streltsovs authors: Tugan-Baranovskii, Kareev, Fridman, Miliukov, and
Bekhterev. Noticeably less coherent than Streltsovs collection, Questions of
the World War nevertheless was united by a common focus on the national
question. Kovalevskii himself penned a chapter, The National Question
and Imperialism, which was a rather unusual topic for him.61 The chapter
took whole paragraphs from a longer manuscript that Kovalevskii had been
Voprosy mirovoi voiny,

61
ed. M. I. Tugan-Baranovskii (St. Petersburg: Pravo, 1915), 54961.

writing during his involuntary stay in Austria, and cannot be fully understood
without this longer text.62

been driven by nationalism, a desire to unite the entire nationality within
common political borders. In 1914, nationalism was replaced in the politics of
the Central Powers by a new phenomenon designated by the term borrowed
from England: imperialism.63 Kovalevskii, well read in the German-lan-
guage literature of the war period, explained that according to the views of
German imperialists, small nationalities did not have a chance to form their
own nation state, and were destined to receive recognition only within large
imperial agglomerations.64 These plans envisioned the dismembering of the
Russian Empire, whose national territoriesstarting with Finland, Poland,
and Ukrainewould have acquired semi-independent status under the new
world order. Because of this, Kovalevskii deduced, rather illogically, that the
nationalities of the Russian Empire were not interested in the victory of the
Central Powers. Instead, he believed that the ethnic components would unite
to defend Russia. Russian progressive parties support of the autonomy of
the borderlands and triumph over the ancient enemy of the Slavs should,
he believed, have brought about the political self-determination of big and
small political units in the Slavic family.65
This text left the impression that the Germans had just borrowed impe-
rialism from the British, and thus it remained unclear why one nations style

the Russian response to the challenge of German imperialism was outlined in
fuzzy and highly abstract terms. In his brief essay Kovalevskii did not explicate
a very important idea that was present in his Austrian notes, although even
there, it was not fully elaborated:

propriate wordimperialismto designate the movement toward
establishing greater cohesion among Great Britains possessions.
One can only regret this choice [of word]. The concept of empire is
tied as much to the notion of autocratic authority as to the notion of
62

skogo naroda vo vremia voiny, in Kovalevskii, Moia zhizn, 44183.
63

64

65
political centralization. In reality, the movement for greater Britain

[velikoangliiskoe dvizhenie] does not pursue any of these.66
Kovalevskii communicates his understanding of British imperialism as, es-

sentially, a confederation of politically independent territories with a strong
sense of common cultural and historical identity. This British commonwealth
was a distorted and misinterpreted copy of German imperialism. The Ger-
man scenario was fatal for Russia even if adapted for her own needs. In con-
trast, the British network polity, physically divided by seas but united by
legal system and culture, was seen by Kovalevskii as an ideal for Russia.
Essentially, Kovalevskii endorsed Maksim Slavinskiis position expressed in
Streltsovs collection, even though he could not even have read the draft of

bad on the hundredth day of the war, Kovalevskii envisioned the future of
Ukraine under the shelter of the Russian state, enjoying equal rights with
the rest of the empires population, and acquiring, in the native language, the
67 Compared
to Slavinskiis, this was a moderate version of the application of that same
Greater Britain (commonwealth) model to Russia.

Greater Britain from Charles Dilke,68 and Slavinskii, who, most likely, was
introduced to the concept by his friend Petr Struve in John Robert Seeleys
version,69
federalists and federalists. In the words of a contemporary scholar,

alists such as Seeley was often one of temperance and tactics. The anti-
federalist proponents of Greater Britain were more optimistic about
the strength of the already existing ties binding the empire. They saw

structures.70
66

67
Moia zhizn, 440.

68
, 2
vols. (London: Macmillan, 1868).
69
Ab Imperio, no.
1 (2008): 193204.
70

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 13.
Books by Dilke and Seeley had already been around for several decades, but
they became popular in Russia with the rise of progressivism. It is possible to
chronologically identify the moment when Russian intellectuals discovered an
alternative to the nation-centered narrative that paradoxically had dominated
in the heterogeneous empire since the Napoleonic Wars. Back in 1901, when
Maksim Kovalevskii sought an explanation for the remarkable success of
the United States in accommodating its numerous minorities, he concluded
that the key factor was the desire of minorities to assimilate. In order to live
in America, foreigners must become Americanized. They must send their
children to American schools.71 Russian-language (and Russocentric) ob-
shchestvennost was traditionally blind in both its disgust for discrimination
against ethnically non-Russians and contempt for nationalist claims. The
language of ethnocultural emancipation invariably was translated into a lan-
guage of sociopolitical and economic liberation: both constitutionalists and
radical socialists believed that the just future order would cure any national
injustices.
Growing understanding of the problematic nature of the multiethnic
Russian Empire was documented in the landmark collection of essays Forms
of National Movement in Modern States: Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Germany.

most part throughout 1908, was published only in 1910. Besides technical dif-
half a dozen languages,72 there was also the problem that the very initiative
of publishing this collection came from someone permanently living abroad.
The collections editor, Abram
student at the turn of the century (just as St reltsov had), and apparently never
returned to Russia. There he joined the left wing of Zionists, becoming an
associate of Chaim Weizmann, future president of the Zionist Organization

moved to Palestine himself.73 However, in 1907 he still had enough contacts in
71
Chicago Daily Tribune, 28 July 1901, 8; corroborated
in Kovalevskii, Moia zhizn, 320.
72
Formy natsionalnogo dvizheniia v sovremennykh
gosudarstvakh: Avstro-Vengriia, Rossiia i Germaniia, ed. Kastelianskii (St. Petersburg: Ob-
shchestvennaia polza, 1910), i.
73

Nationalism 18971917, 21 (1976): 117;
; ed. Gedalia Yogev (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1980), 10; Historischen Lexikon der Schweiz, http://www.hls-dhs-
dss.ch/textes/f/F31024.php (accessed 11 September 2014); 4, 740 (11

ambitious project.
The novel idea of presenting Russia, along with neighboring contiguous
empires, as a nexus of multiple national movements did not yield particularly
original results. Kastelianskii announced that nationality had become the
dominant form of political organization, extensively illustrating his point by
referring to the United States and the normative assimilationist discourse of
Theodore Roosevelt (quite in line with the earlier conclusions of Kovalevskii).74
Demonstrating statistically that an ethnically homogeneous national state

dominant nation in the state to suppress and oppress rival nationalisms and
acquire hegemony. To him, there was nothing special about Great Britain:
The Anglo-Saxon Britannia rules the waves, the Great Russian [veliko-
russkii] Great Russia and similar slogans of hegemonic peoples

and intellectual domination, denationalization and decapitalization
of the subjugated rival [nationalities] constitute the supreme state
principle.75
In this classic nation-centered model of the world, the bad imperial interests
of the hegemonic people were contrasted to the just national and social
interests of non-ruling nationalities.76
A contributor to the volume, renowned Ukrainian historian and national
activist Mykhailo Hrushevskyi, cast this vision in a catchy formula by pro-
nouncing Russia an empire of nations (imperiia narodov).77 He advocated
the principle of national-territorial autonomy for the Ukrainians and other

self-organization, cultural autonomy, and the status of protected minorities.78
April 1927): 1; Dr. Kastelianskii, 54, is Dead in Tel Aviv, Jewish Telegraphic Agency (2
November 1934).

74
75

76

77

Formy natsionalnogo dvizheniia v
sovremennykh gosudarstvakh, 321.

78
guage with Miliukov (from Streltsovs collection), while his declaration of the Black
Sea as Ukraines own sea (ibid., 321; here prioritizing economic considerations over
Incidentally, toward the end of his chapter, Hrushevskyi found it necessary

to release his wrath upon the all-Russians of Ukrainian descent (obshcherusy
ukrainskogo proiskhozhdeniia) from the ranks of progressive circles,79 those
who acknowledged their Ukrainianness but denied Ukrainians the right
to a special political arrangement. Obviously, Maksim Kovalevskii was an
archetypal example of such a progressive turncoat, along with Ivan Ianzhul,
Vladimir Vernadskii, and a whole cohort of members of the pan-Russian
obshchestvennost with Ukrainian roots. It is possible that Maksim Slavinskii,
who wholly subscribed to the nation-centered paradigm of Kastelianskii and
Hrushevskyi in his programmatic contribution to the volume on The Na-
tional Structure of Russia and the Great Russians,80 risked being placed on
the list of all-Russians of Ukrainian descent in 1915, when he came out with
the idea of the all-Russian nation in creation and praised Greater Britain as
a model for Greater Russia. On the other hand, criticizing Austrian territorial
grade (depending on their rights to a territory and political representation),

Slavinskii in fact criticized Hrushevskyi, whom he had supported back in
1910.
Slavinskiis unique understanding of Russias imperial situation may have
been inspired by a 1910 publication. As if responding to the nation-centered,
minorities-oriented Forms of National Movement in Modern States, structured
as a comprehensive scholarly compendium (featuring almost 30 authors),
Great Russia stood out as a pretentiously clad expression of empireness,
with just seven explicitly policy-oriented chapters. The editor and publisher

cally) of the political consolidation of Russian progressives since at least

1907, a cofounder of the Progressive Party in 1912, and the publisher of the
party newspaper Utro Rossii and Molva.81 The title of the collection refers to
the 1907 bombastic speech of Prime Minister Petr Stolypin, which described
the boundaries of a historical region), and a two-tier hierarchy of nationalities into

territorial peoples and minorities directly anticipated the early Soviet national
arrangement.
79

80
Formy natsionalnogo
dvizheniia v sovremennykh gosudarstvakh, 277302.
81

skii Circle, in
in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and West (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 4256.
Russian greatness as a synonym of glorious.82 The main motivation of the

publisher and editor of the collection was the explication of a dramatic gap
between the declared status of Russia as a great power and the actual neglect
of its military strength both by the government and educated society, which
were traditionally disinterested in foreign policy and military problems.83
However, by the second volume, the focus of the collection had somewhat
changed, and Petr Struve, who inspired Riabushinskii for this publication and
contributed himself to the second volume, explained, what it would take to
build a true Great Russia:
This is a spirit of national Europeanism, the spirit of conscious and self-

assured nation-building upon a universal human basis [na obshchelo-
vecheskikh nachalakh]. The old Russian Imperium [sic] was created by
means of serfdom; the new one can be built only by free people, on
free soil, in the healthy competition of all living forces.84
Thus, between 1910 and 1915, the two extreme poles of Russian public
opinion had evolved and achieved a compromise: an agreement about the
possibility of the internal decolonization of Russia on the model of Greater
Britain. The new Imperium was envisioned as a commonwealth of local
ethnocultural communities bound together by the pan-imperial political
loyalty and Russian-language universal public sphere, fully acknowledging
the parallel existence of local circuits of national cultures and loyalties. This
vision was neither universally accepted nor fully elaborated upon to the
extent of becoming a distinctive political program. Still, the very idea of a

protecting their rights dramatically broadened the spectrum of imaginable
possibilities. As such, it could now be debated by intellectuals and activists,
and it entered the political arena.
This compromise became possible as social reformers of varied political

Readings in Russian Civilization, ed.

82
Thomas Riha (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 1: 45664.

83
Velikaia Rossiia: Sbornik statei po voennym
obshchestvennym voprosam, ed. Riabushinskii (Moscow: V. P. Riabushinskii, 1910), 1: vii.
84
Velikaia Rossiia, 2: 153
54. In this chapter, Struve further developed his articles dedicated to Great Russia as
a great power in international politics published in 1908. See Struve, Velikaia Rossiia:
Iz razmyshlenii o probleme russkogo mogushchestva, Russkaia mysl, no. 1 (1908):
14357; Struve, K sporu o Velikoi Rossii, Russkaia mysl, no. 3 (1908): 21013.
advanced a variety of moral, social, economic, and political reforms, partially

overlapping or even mutually contradictive. There were people, like Kareev
and Kovalevskii, who could not even envision the possibility of a major Euro-
pean war, while others, like Riabushinskii and Struve, anticipated it. Only
a special study can show whether the correlation between epistemological
positivism and progressivism was as direct as Kareev (and, less forcefully,
Kovalevskii) claimed, accusing German-trained idealists of too easily falling
Indeed,
nations, as embodiments of single and spiritual entities that could easily be

presented as being in a state of either Hobbesian or Hegelian war with other
entities-monads. But sworn positivists such as Miliukov or Hrushevskyi
demonstrated an equal essentialization by using statistics to construct no
less homogeneous national-territorial entities, even more imminently fraught
85 And although many progressives were too
integrated into the culture of transatlantic progressivism and too rational to
accept the very idea of war, there were open militarists among them such
as Riabushinskii and Struve. Thus, ideologically, progressivism was no less
and no more inclined toward military confrontation than neo-Slavophilism
or conservative monarchism.
A conscious position regarding the desirability or possibility of war was

for the Social Democratic or Octobrist party program. There was, however, a
more fundamental factor that predetermined the position of Russian progres-
sivism vis--vis the war in general. The structurally introverted orientation
of progressivism, with its primary focus on domestic problems, made the
war the least important and relevant instrument for achieving the political
and social goals on their list of priorities. This is not to say that Russian pro-

choice for those wishing to sober the country, curb prostitution, develop
new economic thinking among peasants, protect the rights of Ukrainians,
or push for constitutional reform. These people were not even necessarily
against the warit was just not part of their social imagery. That is, among the
Russian progressives, even the vanguard idea of a Greater Russia was more
developed and widespread than the seemingly self-evident and fundamental
notion of war. Whatever ones personal views on foreign policy, it was very
85

mates. See Grushevskii, Ukraintsy, 327.

Riabushinskii and Struve in 1910) resulted from a very special type of pro-
gressive social thinking. However, when it was applied to self-mobilization

unpredictable.
The very success of progressive-type apolitical politics worldwide be-
came the greatest challenge to the original premises of the movement. Its
independence from existing political institutions (deemed corrupt and inef-

could not be sustained for more than several years for any individual cause,
and there was an urgent need to rely on some self-regulated machine of
human resources mobilization in order to sustain the determination and
enthusiasm of the followers above and beyond any ideological allegiances.

needs, and began seeking an alliance with the state inasmuch as the system
became more and more willing to accommodate their ideas and their leaders.
Already on the eve of World War I, a book with the telling title Progressivism
and After was published as an early warning of the coming new epoch.86 Its

handful of American members of the British Fabian Society,87 argued that the
time had come to take the next logical stepfrom progressivism to state so-

to the social mobilization of the world war period and the rise of the inter-
ventionist state and state social policies. The case of Walling is important as
proof that this evolution was inherent to progressivism itself, even without
the wartime emergency. Progressivism had created the public opinion and
political momentum that favored a reconciliation of the public movement for
the reform priorities.

Russian progressivism had to oppose a much more hostile political re-
gime. On the eve of the war, progressives had all but harnessed the zemstvo
network of rural self-government and began encroaching on a number of
major municipal councils, but this was as much access to institutionalized
86
Progressivismand After (New York: Macmillan, 1914).
Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge,
87
MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 66.


gressives with the self-organized and self-mobilized politically conscious
public (obshchestvennost) remained. Then, the war began, and we see from
the collection put together by Streltsov, that leading Russian progressives
suddenly began endorsing the state from which they had been carefully dis-
tancing themselves only several months earlier. The transformation of an
adamant critic of the imperial state, Maksim Slavinskii, seemed particularly
strange. He declared in March 1915:
The paths of the Russian intelligentsia and the Russian state have
crossed, and all the peoples of Russia have come to this intersection. A

the visions of law and justice.88
These words might sound like exalted exaggeration, but a similar statement
by another progressive, the no titler Sergei Prokopovich, explains this un-
expected enthusiasm for the state. One year later, in February 1916, at the

Prokopovich declared:

[vlastin its institutionalized connotation]. Not with the government
that rules now and leads society toward trouble but with the govern-
ment that society has been calling for and demanding since long ago,
the real government. When we speak of unity with the government,
we are speaking of this particular government, and it is with this
government that we will have to arrange the application of all of the
healthy, already organized elements of the country. Only through this

(Applause)89
One year later, the wishful thinking of Slavinskii and the explicit political
claim of Prokopovich became reality. The mobilized society at last received a
government willing to acknowledge and accommodate its demandsif only
at the cost of changing the regime. For progressivism, this was a Pyrrhic vic-
tory. The Provisional Government was provisional in more than one sense:
88

89

goda (Petrograd: Tsentralnyi voenno-promyshlennyi komitet, 1916), 1: 226.
the multifaceted coalition of progressives could be very productive as a

lobbying group within an established political system but lacked the legiti-
macy to monopolize supreme authority in the country, and did not have a
political machine of its own to rely upon in governing the society. By its very
nature, progressivism was incompatible with revolution, as a movement of
piecemeal social reformism (also known in Russia under the names of peace-
ful renovation, democratic reforms, or even no titlers pursuing the
program of small deeds). Arguably, its coming to power in February 1917

movement and the state apparatus as competing mechanisms of social and
themselves.
Paradoxically, progressivism became a much stronger revolutionary
force than the most radical revolutionary parties: theirs was the politics of
the future, hypothetical socialism, and abstract ideals, with a very narrow
potential constituency sharply divided over nuances of ideological programs.
Progressivism was about achieving immediate practical results, through
broad nonpartisan cooperation, easy to grasp and support.
As to the state apparatus, it demonstrated suicidal absenteeism and inco-
herence in responding to the challenge of societal self-organization. Although

together, the authorities chose instead to enter the legal gray zone of ad

for Army Supplies (coordinating all nongovernment chains of procurement)

conducted in a legal void, with the government refusing to formalize its re-
lationships with its subcontractors.90
When Russian progressivism went to war, it began doing what it did best:

municipal reform movements was used to establish the Union of Zemstvos and
the Union of Towns (later merged into Zemgor) as the institutional framework

out of private conferences held by progressive Moscow entrepreneurs of Ria-
dustry. It was not about acting for or against the state, but rather beyond it,
which was consistent with the progressive approach. In response, the gov-
ernment de facto surrendered many of its key responsibilities in the rear to
the organized public mind (a progressive formula coined by Alexander
90
Poltora goda raboty Glavnogo po snabzheniiu armii komiteta Vserossiiskikh
Zemskogo i Gorodskogo soiuzov. Iiul 1915 g.fevral 1917 g. (Moscow: T-vo skoropechatni
A. A. Levensona, 1917), 6771.
Chaianov), while having virtually no control over the territories controlled by

the army. The few key functions that still remained the sole responsibility of
the government included food procurement and regulation of transport, and
the public consensus was that the government had failed miserably on both

and self-mobilized society, in accordance with the archetypal progressive
worldview. The ultimate obstacles on the path to peace and victory were not
the German and Austrian troops but those internal enemies that sabotaged the

imperial nation of the would-be Greater Russia simply did not need the
kind of rulers that headed the countryfor all practical purposes, not be-
cause of some political disagreement. The redundancy of Nicholas II and his
ministers was so obvious that their stubborn sabotage of the nations war

asked Miliukov on 1 November 1916, eight months after the Second Congress

warning to the government. Apparently, it was the former: Nicholas dared to

Progressive Bloc as the shadow cabinet, with devastating consequences for
himself and, eventually, for the progressive nation.
Postwar Russian Eurasianisms Anticolonial Critique of
Eurocentrism and Modernity
Sergey Glebov
The war has washed away the ceruse and rouge

from humanist Romano-Germanic civilization.
Nikolai S. Trubetskoi
Although the First World War was a universally destructive experience, the
extent of ruptures and interruptions in Russian intellectual life in the decade
following the opening of hostilities in Europe may have been unprecedented.
As a result of the Bolshevik takeover in October 1917 and the subsequent Civil
War, many intellectuals of the former Russian Empire became migrs and
continued their activities in the capitals of Russia Abroad, without their
usual audiences.1 Inside Soviet Russia, arrests, imprisonment, deportations,
and abysmal living conditions continued to put pressure on intellectual
expression.2 Many intellectuals prominent in late imperial Russia found
themselves in the unlikely position of leaders of scholarly and intellectual
life in the former imperial borderlands. For instance, Vladimir Vernadskii
(18631945), one of the most prominent scientists and philosophers of late
imperial Russia, left Petrograd and Moscow to establish, and become the

of Tavrida University in the Crimea under the White general Petr Vrangel.3
A new generation of thinkers and writers came to dominate the scene in the
early Soviet period, many of them arriving in the Soviet capitals from the
periphery (such as, for instance, the writers of the famous Southwestern
1
Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 19191939
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
2
Russian Academicians and the Revolution: Combining Pro-
fessionalism and Politics (New York: St. Martins Press, 1997); and Stuart Finkel, On the
Ideological Front: The Russian Intelligentsia and the Making of the Soviet Public Sphere (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
3
Science and Russian Culture in an Age of Revolutions: V. I. Vernadsky
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Lev

Gumilevskii, Vernadskii, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1967); V. I. Vernadskii
et al., Dnevniki: 19171921. Oktiabr 1917ianvar 1920 (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1994).
218 SERGEY GLEBOV
school of Russian writing). In some cases, these newcomers were directly

involved in the process of Russian military disintegration in the late months
of the war: Viktor Shklovskii, for example, served as the commissar of the
Provisional Government in charge of evacuating Russian troops from Persia,
a story that the great formalist incorporated in his key text.4
On the other hand, one can also detect certain continuities of themes and
interests across the divide of war and revolution. Thinkers such as Nikolai
Berdiaev, Father Sergei (Bulgakov), Anton Kartashev, or Petr Struve, all
prominent in the religious and philosophical renaissance of late imperial
Russia, continued their work in emigration.5 They still focused on Orthodox
religiosity and nationalist thought, but in the condition of exile they often

4
Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1981); Carol Joyce Any, (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); I. Iu. Svetlikova, Istoki russkogo formalizma:
Traditsiia psikhologizma i formalnaia shkola (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie,
2005); Viktor Shklovskii, A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 19171922 (Normal, IL:
Dalkey Archive Press, 2004).
5

in a New Key (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000); Michel Alexander Vallon, An Apostle of
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1960);
N. K. Dmitrieva and A. P. Moiseeva,
tvorchestvo (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1993); Donald A. Lowrie, Rebellious Prophet: A
(London: V. Gollancz, 1960); A. V. Vadimov,
Rossiia, Modern Russian Literature and Culture, Studies and Texts 29 (Oakland, CA:
Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1993); S. N. Bulgakov, (Paris:
YMCA-Press, 1946); Bulgakov, Dela i dni: Stati 19031944, memuarnaia i dnevnikovaia
proza, ed. O. S. Figurnova and M. V. Figurnova (Moscow: Sobranie, 2008); Igumen
Gennadii (Elkalovich), (San-
Francisco: s.n., 1980); Catherine Evtuhov,
Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Richard
Pipes, Struve, 2: Liberal on the Right, 19051944, Russian Research Center Studies 80
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); N. P. Poltoratskii,
politicheskii myslitel (London, ON: Zaria, 1981); O. A. Zhukova and V. N. Kantor, eds.,
(Moscow: R, 2012); E. A. Gollerbakh, Dukhovnye

Zapiski russkoi akademicheskoi
gruppy v SShA 29 (1980): 10740. On the religious and philosophical renaissance, see M.
Kolerov,
18871947 (Moscow: OGI, 2000); Christopher Read, Religion, Revolution and the Russian
(London:
Macmillan, 1979); Natalia Samover, Gallipoliiskaia mistika A. V. Kartasheva, in
Issledovaniia po istorii russkoi mysli: Ezhegodnik 2, ed. M. A. Kolerov (Moscow: OGI, 1998),
33496.
POSTWAR RUSSIAN EURASIANISMS ANTICOLONIAL CRITIQUE 219
and dialog between Anglicans and Orthodox migrs.6 Similarly, Russian

writers and publicists interacted with the literary milieus of European soci-
ety.7 Nikolai Berdiaev established lasting relations with Jacques Maritain
and even integrated his salon at Clamart with that of Meudon in search
of a new Christian personalism.8 At the other end of the spectrum, Russian
interest in the problems of language and phenomenology blossomed into new
developments with the rise of formalism in early Soviet Russia, as well as
structuralist studies of language in emigration.9
Although these two lines of Russian thoughtthe neo-Kantian, religious,
and liberal-nationalist philosophy of the last decade of imperial Russia and
the Husserlian, phenomenological ideas of formalism and structuralism
preferences, they sometimes overlapped in unexpected and fascinating ways.

Perhaps the most original and controversial synthesis was the ideology of
Eurasianismarguably, also the most original product of Russian intellectual
history in the postWorld War I period. Following the disintegration of the

new concerns of Russian intellectuals. It continued with the Russian tradition
of inventing an indigenous modernity separate from the perceived Western
norm. It also articulated in a new and unprecedented way Russian anxieties
about the fate of the country in the age of the rise of the former colonial peo-
ples and the perceived possibility of Russias colonization by the West. In
this essay, I will focus on one particular aspect of Eurasianism: its fervent

as a colonial country. The anticolonial rhetoric of the Eurasianists raises an
important question about the impact the disruption of war and revolution
had on Russian intellectuals. As Vera Tolz has recently demonstrated, Russian

6
Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans: Diplomacy, Theology, and the Politics of
Interwar Ecumenism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).
7
How It Was Done in Paris: Russian migr Literature and French Modernism
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).
8

Esprits Interpretation of Communism, Canadian Journal of History 30, 1 (April 1995):
29.
9

allemand) du formalisme russe, Cahiers du monde russe 43, 2/3 (2002): 42340; Petre
Petrov, Otkrytaia struktura: IakobsonBakhtinLotmanGasparov, Kritika:
Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13, 3 (Summer 2012): 75262; Jindrich
Toman,
Linguistic Circle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
220 SERGEY GLEBOV
and criticized its condescending and hierarchical views of non-European

peoples well before World War I.10 Tolz rightly sees Russian Orientologists

remains: the scholars of the Rosen School never unequivocally equated
Russia with the colonial world. They by and large continued to see Russia

views of Eastern peoples. This
argue below, was only possible as founders of the Eurasianist movement
experienced the disintegration of the Russian Empire in the period of extra-
ordinary turmoil and violence caused by war and revolution and found them-
selves in the midst of European societies as exiles.
WX
Eurasianism incorporated a complex set of ideas. As Patrick Seriot noted, it

of Russian imperialism based on neo-Platonic thought.11 This essay argues
that one can add to this list of peculiar traits a fervent critique of colonialism
in Europe) and the illiberal juncture of communism and fascism in interbellum

Europe. Eurasianisms impact on scholarship, the arts, and literature in inter-

received from historians.12
10
Russias Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late
Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Lidologie eurasiste russe, ou, Comment penser lEmpire, by
11

12

(Munich: BIOS, 1962). The author of the monograph had limited access to primary
sources on Eurasianism and provided no background information on the movements
Lidologie eurasiste
russe, ou, Comment penser lEmpire.
analysis and disregards the historical background of the movement. In the 1960s70s
several articles were published by Nicholas Riasanovsky, and they remain a valuable
source of information: Nicholas Riasanovsky, Prince N. S. Trubetskois Europe and
Mankind, Jahrbcher fr Geschichte Osteuropas 13 (1964): 20720; Riasanovsky, The
Emergence Of Eurasianism, California Slavic Studies 4 (1967): 3972; Riasanovsky,
Asia through Russian Eyes, in
Peoples, ed. Wayne S. Vuchinich (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1972), 329.
The founders of the doctrine were four Russian intellectuals who had
barely entered their adult lives on the eve of the Revolution of 1917. These
young intellectuals were Prince Nikolai Trubetskoi, eventually a famous lin-
guist and the founder of structuralist phonology, Petr Suvchinskii, who on the
eve of the Revolution published Russias leading musical journal and was a
lifelong friend of Igor Stravinskii and Sergei Prokofev, Georgii Florovskii, an
Orthodox thinker and church historian, and Petr Savitskii, a geographer and
economist. Eurasianism was founded on a number of dogmas of a historical,
ethnographical, and political nature. Building upon the tradition of cultural
and historical types (in particular as it was developed by Nikolai Danilevskii),
the Eurasianists argued that Russia was a world of its own, separate from both
Europe and Asia, while Russians, unlike Poles or Czechs, had experienced
an intense impact of the Turanians (the nomadic peoples of the steppes
of Asia). These peoples played an essential role in creating the Russian state
and culture. The Russian state, in its pre-Petrine form, was the heir of the

European culture that emerged in Eurasia. The Europeanizing reforms, the
Eurasianists believed, violated the organic correspondence between that state
and the underlying culture, and created a cleavage between Russias Euro-
peanized elite and its Eurasian masses of population. The result was the mili-
taristic rule of the tsarist regime and the terror of the bureaucracy, which col-

turmoil and a class war, but also as an uprising of colonized Eurasians against
the alien Europeanized regime.
Distancing themselves from those Russian writers who subscribed to
the common European orientalization of Asian peoples, the Eurasianists
insisted on the intrinsic wholeness of Eurasian civilization, thus salvaging
the unity of the Russian Empire from modern nationalism. In order to prove
the indivisible nature of Eurasia, they utilized arguments that ranged from
theology to modern linguistics. Eurasia was a whole as a union of languages
(Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetskoi elaborated the concept of the Sprach-
bund), as an ethnographic mixture of peoples, as a common civilization, and as
a federation of peoples. Such a federation was recreated by the state instinct
of the Bolsheviks, whom the Eurasianists welcomed as saviors of the Russian

as representatives of European atheist and materialist culture.

ists were, in fact, quite consistent. The Eurasianists own conception of history
argued that revolutions were nothing more than the replacement of the
ruling layer [of the population] with a new class formed by a powerful idea,
an interpretation put forward by Lev Karsavin, a philosopher who joined the
222 SERGEY GLEBOV
movement in 1925.13 The Bolsheviks, by emancipating Russia from its old elite,
cleared the way for this new ruling class. It was this class that was predestined
to create a true ideocratic state. The concept of the ideocratic state, ruled
by a single ideology, was elaborated by Nikolai Trubetskoi under the direct
Stndestaat: Trubetskoi met Spann
in Vienna and discussed Eurasianist ideas with him.14 Such a state would
preserve the Soviet demotic nature, yet it would get rid of Marxist theory and
replace it with Eurasianism. The Eurasianists vision of the ideocratic state
and their search for a third way between socialism and capitalism dem-
onstrate their sensitivity to the intellectual climate of interwar Europe, with
its predominance of protofascist ideologies.
The ideology of the third way found a remarkable parallel in the aesthetics

chinskii, who corresponded actively not only with representatives of the

Suvchinskii argued in favor of combining the artistic avant-garde and its for-
malist experiment with religious, Orthodox foundations and tried to steer the
Eurasianist vision of art and creativity onto a path between Russian formalism
and Soviet Marxism.15

state into political practice. The four founders of the Eurasianist movement
(Trubetskoi, Suvchinskii, Florovskii, and Savitskii) were joined in 1922 by a

and Baron Aleksandr V. Meller-Zakomelskii were prominent. Arapov

military circles of the Russian emigration and closely connected to the or-
ganization of General Kutepov. This injection stimulated the protofascist in-
clinations of the Eurasianists, and the movement quickly developed from a
purely ideological venture into a clandestine political organization, whose
aim was to convert as many people as possible, both in the emigration and
in the USSR, to Eurasianism. As the Eurasianists believed, the converted
members of the Soviet leadership would help transform the USSR into a true
13
Evraziiskii vremennik 5 (1927): 2874.
14
Ab
Imperio 3, 2 (2003): 31921; on Othmar Spann, see Klaus-Jrg Siegfried, Universalismus
und Faschismus: Das Gesellschaftsbild Othmar Spanns. Zur politischen Funktion seiner
Gesellschaftslehre und Stndestaatskonzeption (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1974).
15

of Russian Intellectual Life in the 1920s, Die Welt der Slaven 48, 2 (2003): 35982; Sergei
Glebov, The Mongol-Bolshevik Revolution: Eurasianist Ideology in Search for an
Ideal Past, Journal of Eurasian Studies 2, 2 (July 2011): 10314.
ideocratic state based on the principles of Eurasianism. To that end, in late

1923 the Eurasianists established contacts with the underground monarchist

community.16 Agents of Trest crept into the movement and totally controlled
the smuggling of Eurasianist literature and visits by the Eurasianists to
the USSR until spring 1927, when the real nature of Trest became widely
known among migrs. Eurasianism became part of a large network that
united the Soviet-organized Trest and the General Kutepov-led military
counterrevolutionary organization of the Russian migrs. Even at that point,
the Eurasianists continued to hold that their teaching had the potential to

to propagate their ideas in the USSR. Moreover, the Eurasianist leaders
conducted negotiations with representatives of the Soviet Union abroad (such
negotiations were conducted, for instance, with G. L. Piatakov, who was the
Soviet trade representative in Paris in 1927) and cherished hopes of turning
their movement into a laboratory of thought at the service of the Soviet
opposition.17
Through the Shattered Empire: Exiles from the Silver Age
In a recent biography of Sergei Bulgakov, Catherine Evtuhov convincingly

studies to history.18 Silver Age generally refers to the Russian version of
high modernism, and covers the period, roughly, from the 1890s to the 1920s.

particular) in late imperial Russia, and distinguishes that period from the
16
Trest: Vospominaniia i dokumenty (London, ON:
Zaria, 1974). A more recent work that focuses on the impact of Trest on the migr
press is Lazar Fleishman, V tiskakh provokatsii: Operatsiia Trest i russkaia zarubezhnaia
pechat (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003).
17

Ab Imperio 3, 2 (2003): 32930. Although protocols of interrogations of the former
Eurasianists by the Soviet secret services remain an unreliable historical source, they
demonstrate that Karsavin and Petr Sviatopolk-Mirskii claimed that Suvchinskii
entertained ideas of linking Eurasianism to the Soviet party opposition. See Iz proto-
kola doprosa L. P. Karsavina 8 avgusta 1949 g., in , no. 2 (1992): 8587;
Arest, doprosy i reabilitatsiia S.-Mirskogo, in D. P. Sviatopolk-Mirskii, Poety i Rossiia:
Stati, retsenzii, portrety, nekrologi, ed. V. V. Perkhin (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2002). See a
note by an NKVD agent in which it is stated that Mirskii took part in the negotiations
between the Eurasianists and the then Soviet trade representative in France, G. L.
Piatakov (ibid.).
18
The Cross & the Sickle.
224 SERGEY GLEBOV
Golden Age of Russian literature in the 19th century (marked by such names
as Aleksandr Pushkin, Lev Tolstoi, or Fedor Dostoevskii). However, the period
between 1890s and 1920s saw more than just the rise in cultural creativity
and the export of Russian cultural products to Europe. It also witnessed rapid
industrialization, urbanization, the blurring of estate lines and the rise of
new urban classes, the formation of political parties and the arrival of mass
politics, including the renewal of political terrorism. Following the revolution
of 1905, the Russian Empire acquired a parliament, however limited and un-
representative it might have been. The period was also characterized by the
fervent critique of bourgeois philistinism, in particular by such renowned
individuals as the poet Aleksandr Blok, and by the search for models of
cultural and political organization of the imperial space in the era of modern
nationalism.
It was during this most normal and modern period of Russian history
that the founders of the Eurasianist movement (and many other intellectuals
who lived through World War I and the Revolution) were born and raised.
In contrast to previous generations of the Russian intelligentsia, for them
a critical stance towards the existing regime did not necessarily translate
into radical socialist policies. As the lives of the founders of the Eurasianist
movement demonstrate, they became professionals and, using their families
economic, social, and symbolic capital launched highly successful careers.
Trubetskoi, a scion of a Moscow princely family with medieval roots, and,
somewhat unusually for Moscow aristocracy, with academic ties (his
father, Sergei Nikolaevich, and uncle, Evgenii Nikolaevich, were prominent
neo-Slavophile and liberal professors, respectively), by 1917 had studied
linguistics at Moscow University, spent the 191314 academic year taking
courses in Germany with leading linguists, and in 1916 passed his magister
(Masters degree) exams and became a privat-dotsent (Ph.D. with teaching
responsibilities) at Moscow University. His close friend and associate in the
Eurasianist movement, Suvchinskii, was also born into the life of privilege.
His father, Petr E. Suvchinskii, was a wealthy Ukrainian landowner and
businessman who presided over an oil company. P. P. Suvchinskii graduated
from the prestigious and very progressive Tenishev School in Petrograd
(where Osip Mandelshtam, Vladimir Nabokov, and Mikhail Zhirmunskii
were also educated), and dedicated himself to music. He funded and coedited
one of Russias leading music journals, Muzykalnyi sovremennik, together

between the ancients and the moderns in Russian music were fought, and
where the names of Stravinskii and Prokofev became known. Savitskii,
also of Ukrainian origin, was the son of a Chernigov noble landowner and
eventually a member of the State Council. Savitskii enrolled in the Polytechnic
Institute in Petrograd, where he became a student of Petr Struve, Russias

leading liberal politician with an interest in the problems of empire. Between
1915 and 1916, Savitskii published several articles in Struves Russkaia mysl on
the economic aspects of empire and the role of Ukraine.19 After graduating
from the institute, Savitskii entered state service and was assigned to the
Russian trade mission in Christiania, Norway, where he worked under the
well-known diplomat Konstantin N. Gulkevich.
The collapse of the imperial regime in the spring of 1917 did not necessarily
mean the disintegration of the life of Russian intellectuals and professionals,
but the fall of the Provisional Government in October 1917 and the beginning
of the Civil War did. For the founders of Eurasianism it inaugurated two years
of extraordinary displacement and turmoil. The birth of Eurasianism as an
Time of Troubles, processes of disintegration and reintegration of the very

fabric of Russian society.20 According to the curriculum vitae dated 22 June

employment,
in the fall of 1917 I received sick leave and departed for Kislovodsk in
the Terskaia oblast. However, the beginning of the Civil War prevented
me from returning to Moscow. It was only in the fall of 1918 that I
managed to get out of Kislovodsk and to become a privat-dotsent of the
Don University.21 From the spring of 1919 I was a permanent faculty
member of the Don University and (temporarily) occupied the vacant
chair of comparative linguistics. At the same time I was a lecturer at the
Rostov Higher Womens Courses and, in the spring of 1919, a lecturer
at the Novocherkassk Teachers Institute. On 19 December (Old Style)
1919, when Rostov-on-Don was evacuated, I arrived in Yalta, then on
Russkaia
19
mysl 36, 1 (1915): 5177, and 36, 2 (1915): 5677; Savitskii, K voprosu o razvitii
proizvoditelnykh sil, Russkaia mysl 37, 3 (1916): 41.
20

Twentieth-Century Russia, in Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explora-
tions in Social History, ed. Diane P. Koenker, William G. Rosenberg, and Ronald Grigor
Suny (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 24.
21

course of 1918. Apparently, he spent the winter of 191718 in these cities, leaving Baku
for Kislovodsk after March 1918 and Kislovodsk for Rostov in the fall of 1918.
226 SERGEY GLEBOV
27 February (Old Style) 1920 I departed for Tsargrad [Constantinople].

I remained in Tsargrad from that time until today.22
Trubetskois stay in the war-stricken South of Russia allowed him to

Jakobson, Trubetskoi recalled that during my wanderings in the Caucasus I
once came to Baku in March 1918, exactly during the Muslim uprising against
the Soviet power, or, more precisely, during this short period of time when
the Armenians were slaughtering the Tatars.23
Caucasus, similar to the March Days in Baku in 1918, which Trubetskoi wit-
nessed, undoubtedly colored his perception of the nationalist movements in
the former Russian Empire.24 On the other hand, Trubetskoi, like many other
participants and witnesses of the Civil War in the South of Russia, recognized
the importance of the borderland or colonial peoples and took note of their
entrance into the world stage.25
Petr Suvchinskii stayed in Petrograd and even worked for the Music
Department of the Narkompros (Peoples Commissariat of Enlightenment)
under the composer Arthur Vincent Lurie, but in the spring of 1918 he left
the capital and went to Kiev. He spent the winter of 191819 in Kiev, where he
witnessed the vaudeville-like changes of government. In late 1919, he arrived

Norway to Chernigov in Ukraine. This is how he described his experiences:
I saw the regime of the Central Rada; for three months, by force of word

my Chernigov estate from the Bolshevik gangs; I was liberated from
this siege by the Germans and was a witness to their seven-month-long
regime; as a subaltern I fought in the ranks of the Russian Corps, which
defended Kiev from Petliura, and I lived through the fall of the city;

22
Rusistika, no. 2 (1976): 43.

23
Notes (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 4.

24

a Muslim uprising against Soviet power, a view shared by the Soviet historical
profession. Russian migr and Western scholars tended to emphasize the nationalist
and ethnic component of these events, where leading Armenian and Muslim parties,
including the Dashnaktsutiun and the Musawat parties, clashed. See Ronald Grigor
Suny,
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 21433.
25


saw and touched the French in Odessa and waited long enough to see

the whirls of the Russian White Sovdepia, the Russian South, which
was just liberated from the Bolsheviks. I spent several weeks at the
frontline and I lived in the cities and villages of Kharkov and Poltava.
Then I moved to Rostov26
In the fall of 1919 Savitskii began work for the foreign service of the White
governments of the South of Russia. In particular, he was a member of the
delegation that General Denikin sent to the United States to seek support for
the White cause. The delegation was delayed in Paris, and Savitskii went back
to the Crimea to discuss its prospects with General Vrangel. From Crimea, he
was evacuated to Istanbul.

counter brought together young peoplethe oldest of them, Trubetskoi, was
30, while the youngest, Savitskii, had recently turned 25who had shared
a common experience of losing their life worlds, which they had hardly
begun to build on the eve of the World War and the Revolution. They also
had similar experiences of observing the collapse of the Russian Empire in
Ukraine, in the Caucasus, and in Crimea, which imbued them with both fear
of smaller nationalisms and a sense of the importance of the peripheral or
colonial peoples in Russias life. They saw the anarchy of the revolutionary
upheaval and were ready to assign the Russian Revolution the status of an

beyond Russias boundaries. Their personal loss was reinforced by the fact
that their country was apparently ruined. It was no longer a member of the
civilized nations club and it did not sit at the Paris Conference table. In their
new residences in exile they often felt deprived and insulted by local nation-
alisms. The Revolution appeared to them not only as the collapse of the Russian
Empire but also as the climax of modernity, as the epitome of the wrongs of
modern civilization. The Eurasianists entry into adult life coincided with the
with this beginning was marked by a sharp sense of the profound crisis that
had struck the modern world.

26
Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. r-5783, op. 2, d. 323, ll. 13.

228 SERGEY GLEBOV
Russia as a Colonial Country

the world in the aftermath of World War I.27 At exactly the same time, a
former Austrian aristocrat, Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, elaborated a
Habsburg-nostalgic conception of the United States of Europe and suggested
that future the pan-Europe would exclude Britain and Russia, as two imperial
powers looking outward from Europe, as well as include parts of colonial
Africa, necessary to provide Europe with raw materials and labor.28 Similar
ideas were expressed by Belgian socialists, who imagined a Euro-Africa, a
project of uniting European powers for the purpose of exploiting the Black
Continent.29 In Soviet Russia, Lenin and Stalin re-established the imperial
space on the new foundations of Marxist evolutionism, while some Bolshevik
intellectuals challenged that vision with the idea of proletarian nations.30
It was in this context of the mental remapping of the world following the
war and revolutionary turmoil that the founders of the Eurasianist movement

civilization as a predator in search of colonial markets. The key text that
outlined the basics of the Eurasianist critique of Eurocentrism was Nikolai
Trubetskois Europe and Mankind
poorly in the 20th century. It was published in Bulgaria in Russian, at a time
when very few Europeans could read Russian. In the 1920s it was translated
into two languagesGerman and Japaneseperhaps not surprisingly, given
Eurasianisms later political orientations. The German translation was done by
Sergei Jakobson, the great linguists brother, and published with a foreword
Macro-Nationalisms: A History of the Pan-Movements (Westport, CT:

27
Greenwood Press, 1984).

28
Kommen die Vereinigten Staaten von Europa? (Glarus:

Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi, Founder of the Pan-European Union, and the Birth
of New Europe, in Europe in Crisis: Intellectuals and the European Idea, 19171957, ed.

29
de lentre-deux-guerres, Revue dHistoire Moderne et Contemporaine 22, 3 (1975): 44675.

30

Union, 19231939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Francine Hirsch, Empire
of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2005); Alexandre A. Bennigsen, Muslim National Communism in the
Soviet Union: A Revolutionary Strategy for the Colonial World (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980).

Ostforschung (initially,
Oswald Spengler was asked to write the introduction, but he declined). The
Japanese translation was prepared by Shimano Saburo, who was a founder of
Japanese Soviet studies and, apparently, used Eurasianist ideas to propagate
his own vision of pan-Asianism.31 Following Trubetskois early death in 1938
and many dislocations of his primary interlocutor and propagator of his
legacy, Roman Jakobson, perhaps it is not so strange that Europe and Mankind

when discussions of Orientalism and postcolonialism were introduced into
US Russian studies in the 1990s was Trubetskois work recalled, translated,
and read.32
Even today, though, interpretations of the meaning of Europe and Mankind
are lacking. In the 1960s, Nicholas Riasanovsky limited himself to suggest-
ing that the text was an important Russian contribution to the debate on
colonialism.33 In 1972 Roman Jakobson, who sponsored an Italian translation

of scholarly innovation. The same year Jakobson fondly and somewhat cum-

his critique of European cultural imperialism as informed by his search for
innovation in the humanities: The negative position of this platform (which
was further developed by the authors ideology) essentially corresponds to the
pathos of fundamental revision of the foundations of traditional linguistics,
an alteration that Trubetskoi had feverishly elaborated since 1917 despite all
external troubles.34 As I have suggested elsewhere, Trubetskois ideas could
be interpreted as a strategy to endow Russia-Eurasia with cultural content
and autarky, thus shielding it from what he perceived as the destructive force
of European modernity.35
In Europe and Mankind
a critical picture of European cultural colonialism and to suggest new
31

Activities, Ab Imperio, no. 3 (July 2010): 22743.

32

Russian Vision, Slavic and East European Journal 41, 2 (1997): 32126.
33
Jahr-
bcher fr Geschichte Osteuropas 13 (1964): 20720; Riasanovsky, The Emergence of
Eurasianism, 3972; Riasanovsky, Asia through Russian Eyes, 329.
34

i chelovechestvo (manuscript).
35

i teoriia kulturnykh tipov v evraziistve, Ab Imperio, no. 2 (2003): 26791.
230 SERGEY GLEBOV
perspectives on how to map the globes cultures. Trubetskoi maintained that

all views of national identity can be divided into two approaches: chauvinism

put the center [of their worldview] within themselves.36 Cosmopolitanism,
or belief in a universal human civilization, was in fact a misrepresentation.
Trubetskoi insisted that cosmopolitanism cannot be seen but as a myth in-

Romano-Germans. Since nations, Trubetskoi argued, were but abstractions
not be surprising that a group of European nations abstracted some of

their cultural traits to construct cosmopolitan culture. This cosmopolitan

the legacy of the Roman Empire, the Germanic ethnic element, and Latin
Christendom. Correspondingly, those parts of Europe that did not experience

this cosmopolitan culture was absolutely alien. For the Romano-Germanic
peoples, though, such cosmopolitan culture coincided largely with their
own. Hence, when people speak of a cosmopolitan culture of Europe, they
related peoples, the Romano-Germans. It is unnatural and even harmful for

nonRomano-Germans to aspire to accept the Romano-Germanic pseudo-
cosmopolitan culture.37
Unlike for Spengler, for Trubetskoi, cosmopolitanism was not an inno-
cent invention of the Romano-Germans or a sign of Europes decline. He
perceived European culture as aggressive, dangerous, and imperialist and al-
ways on the hunt for colonial markets, raw materials, and cheap labor. In an
essay he published in 1922 in the second Eurasianist collection, Trubetskoi
elaborated this view with respect to Russias recent historical experience. In
order to reconstruct the countrys economy and secure the liberation of Rus-
sia from the Bolsheviks, Trubetskoi argued, the help of foreigners would be
indispensable. But these foreigners would be representatives of
those very great powers that had conducted the World War. By now,
we know who they [truly] are. The war has washed away the ceruse
and the rouge from the humanist Romano-Germanic civilization, and
now the descendants of the ancient Gauls and Germans have shown

with its teeth. This predator needs prey and food and if you wont
36
Evropa i chelovechestvo

37
give it to it, the beast will take it itself, for it has technology, culture, and
38
ment, reminiscent of colonial governments in Bukhara, Siam, or Cambodia.39

be left to ethnographers to deal with.40
Although many representatives of Eurasianism celebrated the Bolsheviks
restoration of Russias statehood, Trubetskoi did not take much solace in
the expectation of a world revolution according to the communist scenario.
Borrowing almost verbatim from Bakunins polemics with Marx, Trubetskoi
declared in his essay On the Russian Problem that the Russian Revolution
was, in fact, irrelevant for the countrys fate: Without this revolution, Russia
would have been a colony of bourgeois Romano-Germanic nations, and after
that revolution she will be a colony of communist Europe. The page of history

and forever. From now on Russia has entered its new phase of development,
the phase of the loss of independence. The future Russia is a colonial country,
similar to India, Egypt, or Morocco.41
Trubetskoi utilized anticolonialist rhetoric to chart a new path of world-

status following the war. Prepared by the Bolsheviks propaganda, the colonial
peoples of the world associated Russia with ideas of national liberation:

of national liberation, with the protest against the Romano-Germans
and European civilization. They see Russia in this way in Turkey, in
Persia, in Afghanistan, and in India, to some extent also in China and
in other countries of Eastern Asia. This view lays the ground for the
future role of Russia not as a great European power but as an enormous
colonial country which leads her Asian sisters in their common
struggle against the Romano-Germans and European civilization. In
the victorious outcome of this struggle is the only hope for Russias
salvation. In times past, when Russia was still a great European power,
38
Na putiakh (Berlin: Gelikon, 1922), 29697.
39
., 298.
40

41
232 SERGEY GLEBOV
it still made sense to say that her interests coincided or collided with
that of another European state. Now such discussions are senseless.
From now on her interests are inseparably connected to the interests
of Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, India, maybe of China and other Asian
countries.42

Russia with the colonial worldcoming as it was from a European intellec-
tual, indeed a European aristocratwas unprecedented. While some scholars
have pointed to the anticolonial propaganda of the Bolsheviks and Woodrow
Wilsons views of national self-determination to explain Trubetskois ideas,43
we need to understand the epistemological background of Trubetskois views.
Trubetskoi was an heir to the Romantic tradition, which saw modern civilization
as utilitarian, materialist, and, much more importantly, standardizing.44 Tru-
betskois most fundamental premise was based on what Arthur Lovejoy called
diversitarianism: an assertion of the absolute necessity of diversity of human
aesthetic experience.45
the emergence of meaning, and, therefore, the condition for the spiritual life
of human beings. Similarly, in Trubetskois phonology, a phoneme acquires
phonological analysis, is determined by a series of acoustic oppositions that

endow it with meaning.46 Without the opposition, the phoneme is just a
mechanical sound.

religious in nature. When in 1922 the Eurasianists commissioned a linguistic
article from Trubetskoi, he responded to Petr Suvchinskii with a brief outline
of the piece:
42
., 30506.
43
Classical Eurasianism and the Geopolitics of Russian Identity, Ab
Imperio, no. 2 (2003): 25767.
44
Zivilisation and Kultur in the German
context, where Zivilisation
Zivilisation, Kultur, in

sozialen Sprache in Deutschland

45

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 29394.
46
Grundzge der Phonologie (Prague, 1939).
I have a plan for a home-bred theological substantiation of the idea

of nationally delimited cultures. The article will be called The
Tower of Babel and the Division of Languages. These are my theses:
International culture eo ipso is godless and leads only to the con-
struction of the Tower of Babel; the plurality of languages (and
cultures) is established by God in order to prevent the new Tower of

cultural values can be created only by a nationally delimited culture;
Christianity is above cultures and can sanctify any national culture
by transforming it without decreasing its originality; as soon as the
spirit of internationalism begins to spread in Christianity, it ceases to
be true.47
Trubetskoi saw modern European civilization as the standardizing and

historical process of decline, which began with the Renaissance and gradually
meaning to human spiritual life but are also fundamental to the existence
of the human notion of beauty. In the same year, 1923, Trubetskoi debated
with Suvchinskii modernist styles in art. He admonished his friend for his
fascination with futurism with the following words:
When a futurist who rebelled against beauty paints or describes the

European culture of plants and factories, this hideous and perverted
creation of human hands, this abominable Tower of Babel, such a
futurist is in his element, for savoring and enjoying deformity is a re-

is exactly in this savoring and celebration of the machine-gas-concrete

its adepts.48
Although Trubetskois ideas were building on the Russian diversitarian

tradition, and the legacy of Konstantin Leontev in particular, we should
also note that Trubetskoi connected this destructive force of modernity to
Jews. His anti-Semitism, combined with a rejection of European modernity,
brought his ideas very close to certain intellectual trends in interwar Germany
47

48

234 SERGEY GLEBOV
dislocations of interbellum Europe. It is not surprising, then, that Eurasianist

anticolonialism went hand in hand with antidemocratic politics, as the
movement propagated a vision of the state based on a powerful idea. Russias
association with the colonial world was meant to escape the perceived crisis of
godless Europe rather than to emancipate the colonial peoples.
Nevertheless, it is striking to what extent Trubetskois critique of Euro-
pean cultural colonialism reminds one of the work of Edward Said on Ori-
entalism.49 For Trubetskoi, the aggressive domination of Europe over the
world was sustained primarily by notions of supremacy encoded in culture
in general, and in disciplinary knowledge in particular. Trubetskoi saw the
major task of the educated classes in a radical transformation of thinking:
We have to pitilessly overthrow and crush the idols of all those societal
ideals and prejudices that we borrowed from the West and which governed
the thinking of our intelligentsia.50 For Trubetskoi, European culture was
an ideological tool of European colonialism, for it propagated the supremacy
of Europe over all humanity and sought to dictate to the peoples of the world
their ways of life. Such propaganda was nothing but a tool that facilitated
Europes colonialist exploitation of the world.
The destruction of the idols, according to Trubetskoi, had to be complete.
In a dramatic and radical mode that would not make its way into Western
scholarship for half a century, Trubetskoi suggested that European science
and culture were permeated by domination and hierarchy, encoded by various
branches of knowledge. In a passage that linked European imperialism and
colonialism with knowledge, Trubetskoi demanded that
The moment of evaluative judgment [has to] be purged once and

forever from ethnography and history of culture, as well as from all
evolutionary disciplines in general, for evaluative judgment is al-
ways based upon egocentrism. There are no superior and inferior

simply unintelligent. European evolutionary disciplines, in particular
ethnography, anthropology, and history of culture can become real

rooted superstition and will expunge its consequences from their very
49
Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Said, Culture and
Imperialism (New York: Random House, 1993).
50
Russkaia problema, 314.
methods and conclusions. Until this is done, they remain in the best
case a means to fool people and to justify in the eyes of the Romano-
Germans and their accomplices the imperialist colonial policies and
the vandalistic Kulturtrgerschaft of the great powers of Europe and
America.51
Russia and Ukraine: Reverse Orientalism
How, then, should these new ideas have been implemented to understand the

Slavdom that belonged to the former Russian Empire, the Eurasianists sensed

question was the Ukrainian one: the Ukrainians had very well organized
migr groups, while in the USSR, Ukraine had become a separate republic
with its own language and political institutions. At the same time, very few

people rather than a branch of the Russian nation.52 Of the four founding
members of the Eurasianist movement, threeSavitskii, Suvchinskii, and
Florovskiihad Ukrainian backgrounds. Savitskii actually spoke Ukrainian,
and both he and Suvchinskii maintained interest in Ukrainian art, history,
and poetry throughout their lives. How, then, can this growing distancing
between the Russians and the Ukrainians be explained in the context of the

Evraziiskii
vremennik, the annual almanac of the movement. The title of the polemical
article was On the Ukrainian Problem.53 In this article Trubetskoi argued
that the Petrine transformation of Russia was not as radical a change as of-
ten perceived. In fact, the cultural transformation of Russia had begun in
the mid-17th century, when as a result of the incorporation of Ukraine the
traditions, the Western Russian and the Eastern Russian. The government
chose the side of the Ukrainian version of Russian culture and promoted it
51
Evropa i chelovechestvo, 4243.
52

Ukraine and Ukrainians in Russian Political Thought, 18601945, Acta Slavica Iaponica
16 (1998): 129; A. I. Miller, Ukrainskii vopros v politike vlastei i russkom obshchestvennom
(St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2000), especially the chapter
Proekt bolshoi russkoi natsii.
53
Evraziiskii vremennik 5 (1927): 16584.
236 SERGEY GLEBOV
through its church reforms under Nikon, thus pushing the old Great Russian
tradition into the underground of the Raskol.54 According to Trubetskoi, by
the beginning of the 18th century the Western Russian cultural tradition,
which came from Ukraine, had become the dominant culture for the educated

remnants of the Great Russian, or Muscovite, tradition of Russian culture,
whereas for the Western Russian, or Ukrainian culture, these reforms were

the Europeanizing pathos of Peter the Great, in contrast to the Great Russian
tradition, Europhobic and self-contained. As Trubetskoi put it, Peter at-
tempted to root out and to annihilate the Great Russian tradition of Russian
culture and has made the Ukrainian one the point of departure for further
development.55 Therefore, the entire Russian culture of the post-Petrine pe-
riod was an organic and immediate continuation not of the Muscovite, but
of the Kievan, Ukrainian version [of Russian culture].56 The very view of an
old Great Russian culture, widespread during the period following Peter the
Great, was inherited from the Ukrainians, who considered the Muscovites to
be backward and illiterate. This view, Trubetskoi argued, has persisted until
his own day.57
Thus, at the turn of the 18th century, the Muscovite version of Russian culture
was abolished, and Russian culture became united and Ukrainianized. Its
center moved to St. Petersburg as the capital of the all-Russian state, and it lost
some of its provincial features as it became the culture of a great European
power.58 As a result of this process, this formerly Ukrainian culture lost its

character. It turned out to be an abstract and Petersburg Russian culture,
unable to establish contact with the popular masses either in Ukraine or Great
Russia.59 Russian society (by which Trubetskoi clearly meant both Russian
and Ukrainian societies) began to experience diverse forms of protest and
many began to search for particularly national features. Of necessity, such a
54

55

56

57

58

59

Ukrainian, Belorussian, Siberian, or Cossack. These searchesSlavophilism,

literary return to folklore, democratic traits, populism, and even the famous
going to the peoplehad all occurred in all regions of Russia. There was a
striking parallelism between these processes in Great Russia, Ukraine, and
elsewhere.60 It was an all-Russian phenomenon because the very roots of this
phenomenon, the abstract character of culture, had an all-Russian presence.
Thus, the problem that faced the educated classes of Ukraine, Russia, and
other Russian parts of the former empire was a common one: how to create
a culture where the upper levels will grow organically from the lower
levels.61
The problem of separation between the educated classes and the people
was common to the entire Russian people, Trubetskoi maintained. The
Ukrainians at times sharply felt that the Petersburg culture was alien to them,
but so did the Great Russians. In the Petersburg version of Russian culture,
62 It was
the peoplein Ukraine, in Russia, or in Siberiawho felt that this culture
did not correspond to its ethnic nature. Imagine, Trubetskoi asked, what
would happen should a common Russian culture be replaced in Ukraine

common people might opt for it because it would correspond to its ideals.
However, the best of the Ukrainian intelligentsia was unlikely to integrate
into such a culture and would always opt for a common Russian one, as it

be built on anti-Russian sentiment and would become a tool of bad, angry,
and chauvinistic politics.63
national individuality but a copy of those cultures that are hastily created
by the younger peoples, the supernumeraries of the League of Nations.64
For Trubetskoi, the only feasible solution lay in a common Russian culture
for the intelligentsia and local, regional Russian culturesthe Ukrainian, the
Belorussian, the Siberian, and the Cossackfor the people. He did not believe
that there could be a strict division between the upper and lower levels of
culture. Yet, a distinction was still valid for him, and the Russian culture for

60

61
intelligentsia
62
understanding by historians. He meant educated classes.

63
K ukrainskoi probleme, 17778.
64

238 SERGEY GLEBOV
whereas the upper layers of culture had to be common for the entire Russian
space. In order for this construction to be valid, Trubetskoi believed that a
common organizing principle had to be found, and it had to be acceptable
for all groups of the Russian people. Such a principle could only be found

culture to reintegrate in the 17th century, and it was the fascination with
the secular, anti-Christian European culture that undermined the foundation

Russian nation.65 One cannot but take note of the paradoxical thinking of
Trubetskoi: in his anticolonialist critique he deplored European civilization

dealings with the Ukrainian question, he saw the same modern European
civilization as the main cause for the emergence of national centrifugal forces
that pulled the imperial space apart.
Trubetskois article provoked an interesting rebuke from Professor Dmytro
Doroshenko (18821951), a moderate Ukrainian nationalist who had served

Pavlo Skoropadskyi.66 Doroshenko criticized Trubetskois assumptions about

the existence of a common Russian culture in the 17th century and insisted

embrace even in the face of the competition of the Russian and the Polish

separate Ukrainian culture had become a reality.67
However, the most interesting part of the exchange between Doroshenko
and Trubetskoi concerned their ideas about civilization and Europeanness.
Doroshenko, who saw himself as the representative of a people oppressed
by the Russian Empire and deprived of an independent statehood, argued
that the Russians were the Orientals, and that the Russian despotic tradition
had its roots in the Tatar yoke over Muscovy, whereas Ukraine was part of
the European tradition with developed schooling and scholarship that dated
back to the 14th century. In response Nikolai Trubetskoi, the representative
of the imperial center, proudly proclaimed that for him the Tatars also pos-
sessed a civilization not less valuable than the European, and that he saw the
historical role of the Ukrainian people not in the defense of Europe against
Asian barbarism, but in the centuries-long tradition of resistance to Polish
65

66
Moi spomyny pro nedavne mynule (1914
1920), 2nd ed. (Munich: Ukrainske vydavstvo, 1969).
67

in N. S. Trubetskoi, Istoriia. Kultura. Iazyk (Moscow: Progress, 1995), 38092.
68 This exchange demonstrates that in

the Russian Empire traditional connections between the imperial center and
Orientalism were at times turned upside down, and that in the case of the
Eurasianists it was the representatives of the imperial center who utilized a
critique of Orientalism in order to argue for the preservation of the common
imperial space. The defenders of the Russian imperial space had to argue
against a strong orientalizing discourse which was central in many centrifugal
nationalist movements.
WX
During the decade following the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Russian
intellectuals experienced disruptions of their lives on an unprecedented level.
Unlike other belligerent powers, Russia did not just take part in a terribly
destructive war or, like Germany and Austria-Hungary, fall apart in the Rev-
olution. It was thrown onto the unlikely path of building socialism. The new
regime in Russia itself made exiles from many of the intellectuals, who began

of great power status and the disintegration of the Russian imperial state,
capitals through the war-stricken borderlands. The result of these encounters

was an unprecedented critique of European cultural colonialism and the asso-
ciation of Russia with the colonial world. In a paradoxical way peculiar to the
Russian case, it was often the representatives of national minorities, such as
the Ukrainians, who articulated a discourse orientalizing the imperial center,
while those who defended the integrity of the imperial space, such as the
Eurasianists, relied on a critique of Eurocentrism. At the same time, Russian
intellectuals reacted to the new milieus in which they had to build their lives
and joined the chorus of postWorld War I European intellectual movements
critical of the bourgeois order in Europe. While many of these intellectual
trends were detectable in preWorld War I Russia, it was the experience of
Europes most destructive war to datein the Russian case multiplied by the
experience of the Revolution and the new regimethat sharpened these ideas.
Evraziiskaia khronika 10 (1928): 5159.

68
Memories of the Great War and the
7VSPZO3P[O\HUPHU*VUPJ[PU3P[O\HUPH
Tomas Balkelis
In a recent lecture given on Lithuanian national radio, historian Algis Kas-

inadequate place in the collective memory of Lithuanians because this mem-
ory barely makes a link between the war and the emergence of an independent
state on 16 February 1918. There is almost no space for the Great War in the
historical imagination of Lithuanians, he pointed out, since it was subsumed
cauldron of the postwar years.1 Bearing in mind that Lithuania had been ex-
posed to military mobilizations, marching armies, mass evacuations, and war
violence from as early as 1914, this may seem surprising. Overall, more than
64,000 Lithuanians were drafted into the imperial Russian army (of those
11,000 were killed in action), and another several thousand were called into
the German army.2 Moreover, Lithuania spent most of the war under German
occupation. However, the harshest calamity came in the form of the mass
displacement of almost half a million civilians to Russia during 191518.3 One
might expect that events of such monumental nature should occupy a sig-
However, the November 1918 conclusion of the Great War did not bring any
peace to Lithuania. In the short period between December 1918 and December
1919, Lithuania had to turn back the advance of the Red Army, which occupied
more than half of its territory. To make things even more chaotic, between July
and December 1919, it also had to defend against an invasion of the German-
White Russian troops of General Pavel Rafalovich Bermondt-Avalov. Finally,
1
LRT
, 12 February 2013.
2
(Vilnius: Lietuvos Respublikos
vietimo ir mokslo ministerijos Leidybos centras, 1998), 19.
3
Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in Eastern
Europe and Russia, 19181924 (London: Anthem Press, 2004), 7476.
242 TOMAS BALKELIS
in August 1920, the Poles, in pursuit of the retreating Red Army, launched an

The scale of destruction in Lithuania was much greater during the Great

). The Lithuanian

To compare, tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians were killed and dis-
placed during the Great War; and there were only 232 military casualties in
the Polish-Lithuanian War of 191920.4
commemorated and remembered in Lithuania to a far greater degree than
World War I.
This chapter argues that in Lithuania, as in the other newly created Eastern

a major commemorative event because Lithuanian elites did not believe that it

alization of the memory of the Great War and various transformations of the

Today, the legacy of the postwar years is part of the national mythology
of contemporary Lithuania, although its cultural memory is overshadowed
by that of other mid- and late-20th-century events.5 Yet, the Polish-Lithuanian
War of 191920, and particularly the Polish capture of Vilniusare still seen
as cornerstones of the collective Lithuanian ethos. Their memory was con-
structed and popularized, particularly during the interwar period. It was the
new state that led the process of formation and transmission of this national
memory. The Lithuanian political elite consciously constructed the memory

and internal mobilization. Even today, it continues to function as one of Lithu-
anias major national myths.
4
1 (Kaunas:

5
cultural memory as utilized by Jan Assmann to
describe long-term memory that connects an individual to his native culture through
a variety of institutionalized rituals. See Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedchtnis:
Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identitt in frhen Hochkulturen (Munich: C. H. Beck,

Building Nationalism: Monuments, Museums, and the Politics of War Memory in
Interwar Lithuania, Nordost Archiv 22, 27 (2008): 23034.
MEMORIES OF THE GREAT WAR AND THE POLISH-LITHUANIAN CONFLICT IN LITHUANIA 243
The Memory of the Great War in Lithuania
The Great War did not become the cornerstone of the collective memory be-
cause Lithuanian elites, like their Polish counterparts, were sharply divided
in their support for the Allies and Central Powers. If the left parties favored
the idea of an independent (or autonomous) Lithuania within a federal Russia,
the right parties sought independence under the wing of German protection.
Lithuanian leaders had not anticipated that the Great War would topple both
the Russian and German empires, or that they would have to maneuver
through a postwar labyrinth of diplomacy and armed struggle to gain
independence.6
This willful process of memory construction should not mean there was
no public remembering of the Great War in Lithuania. Karen Petrone dem-
onstrates how in the Soviet Union WWI memory was decentred, rather than
7
A typical view of the memory of the Great War was expressed by inter-
war Lithuanian historian Petras Ruseckas, who, in 1939, published one of
a very few books on Lithuania in World War I. In his edited collection of
war memoirs, he described the war as one of the most horrible events in
our history.8 The book included testimonies of civilians from all over the
country describing/elaborating on the destructive impact it had on their lives.
Economic exploitation, military requisitions, forced labor, and sexual violence

publication. However, Ruseckas point was that all these troubles did not

decisive struggle for independence.9

rative by the interwar political elites and society, historian Adolfas apoka
6
The
Emergence of Modern Lithuania (Ann Arbor: Greenwood Press, 1975), 1820. See also
Vejas Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German
Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
7
The Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2011), 8.
8

9

244 TOMAS BALKELIS
described the Great War experience of Lithuanians only as the historical

context in which national mobilization took place. In his chapter on the Great
War, he focused on the early activities of the Lithuanian Council (Taryba) and
those patriots who had to spend their war years in Russia. Clearly, the war
actions of national activists.10

Following the mass repatriation of war refugees from Russia to Lithuania
(191821), their cultural, relief, and educational societies that had been estab-
lished in Russia during the exile mostly ceased to exist. The memory of this war
exodus was barely cultivated during the interwar period, as the state actively
weeded out returning refugees with suspect political loyalties or undesirable
ethnic backgrounds.11 Meanwhile, there were no monuments built for the sol-
diers who died in the Great War, and no World War I veteran organizations

patriotic activities of a veteran society of wars of independence captivated
the public imagination.12
As in many other European countries, postwar novels, including the works
of Henri Barbusse, Jaroslav Haek, and Erich Maria Remarque, were widely
circulated throughout Lithuania.13 Remarques most famous piece, All Quiet
on the Western Front
Lithuanian and published in two editions the same year. Moreover, the writer
Antanas Skripkauskas was described by his literary critics as the Lithuanian
Remarque for following in the footsteps of his famous German predecessor.14
In his antiwar novel entitled A Novel without a Woman: An Episode from the Time
of the Great War (1932), the main hero is brutalized by his experience of oc-
cupation, refugeedom, and foreign captivity. He turns into an Ernst Jnger

its weak style and pornographic qualities, since it contained several scenes
iLietuvos istorija i
10
komisijos leidinys, 1936), 53246.

11

Poles, see Tomas Balkelis, Nation Building and WWI Refugees in Lithuania, Journal
34, 4 (2003): 43256.

12

Under the Fire was published in Lithuanian in 1928. Haeks The Good
13
Soldier vejk and His Fortunes in the World War was translated in 1932.
Romanas be
14
(iauliai: Viltis, 1932), 194.

of sexual violence. Although it failed to capture public awareness, it showed a

certain sensitivity to the remembrance of the Great War in interwar Lithuania.
It is important to note that this remembrance remained grounded within the

perience of the war.
In the past ten years, there has been a small revival of the remembrance
of World War I in Lithuania. However, it occurred only within a minute part

cial memory narratives did. The most typical example of this revival is the
activities of various small NGOs such as the Military Heritage Center, Institute
of War Heritage, and National Society for the Preservation of Burial Places of

involved in research, preservation and commemoration of various World

these small organizations are led by individual historians or enthusiasts of
military history who are also occasionally involved in educational work. For
example, one of the goals of the Military Heritage Center is to discover ways

conservation projects worth 100,000 litai (29,000 euros) funded by private
sponsors and state agencies.15 Since 2010, Russias soft power organization
The Russian World has also been organizing events commemorating World
War I victims in Lithuania, targeting mostly the ethnic Russian minority.16

called the Society for

National Society for the Preservation of Burial Places of German Soldiers),
several WWI and WWII cemeteries of German soldiers were renovated in Vil-

projects were symbolically supported by the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense
and the army.17 However, their public visibility and impact on the dominant
collective memory remain quite limited.
15

http://www.karopaveldas.lt/about/?lang=en (accessed 12 March 2013).
16

17
diena, http://www.lrv.lt/naujienos/?nid=5574 (accessed 12 March 2013).

246 TOMAS BALKELIS
;OL4LTVY`VM[OL7VSPZO3P[O\HUPHU*VUPJ[
In contrast to the memory of the Great War, the Polish-Lithuanian war became
one of the most powerful myths of Lithuanian nation building. The local elite
did not have to create a new cultural discourse. In fact, one of the reasons
why the war with Poland became such an integral part of Lithuanian interwar
politics was that it was interpreted as a culmination of the old Polish-Lithuanian

Polish stance became a central focus of the newly born Lithuanian-speaking
intelligentsia and the whole national movement.18 Thus, the memory of the
war with Poland built on the legacy of the old Polish-Lithuanian dispute, at

While Poland claimed the city as a center of Polish culture, for Lithuania it
was nothing less than its historical capital. The Polish capturing of Vilnius in
April 1919, and again in October 1920, was a source of historical trauma for the
Lithuanian political elite. Arguably, it became the central issue that shaped
not only foreign policy but also domestic politics in Lithuania throughout
the entire interwar period.19 During the interwar years, the elite managed to
project this traumatic sensibility to the whole Lithuanian society. The mem-
ory of the Polish-Lithuanian War was subsumed into the Vilnius dispute,
which was responsible for the collapse of diplomatic relations between the
two states (resumed only in March 1938 after Polands threat of invasion). The

soldiers.20Monument to the Fallen Soldiers in the Wars of

Independence by Juozas Zikaras, erected in Kaunas in 1921, which resembled
the Gediminas Castle in Vilnius. Beginning in 1927, the newly established

komisija) began taking care of military cemeteries and burial places.21 The
central role in this early process of memorialization was played by the War
Museum in Kaunas, established in February 1921, which according to some
18
The Making of Modern Lithuania (London: Routledge, 2009), 123.

19
dines kampanijas 20 a. Lietuvoje, Inter-studia humanitatis, no. 9 (2009): 121.

20

kultas tarpukario Lietuvoje, in Nacionalizmas ir emocijos

21
Karys, no. 5152 (1927): 487.
critics resembled a whole ceremonial complex and nationalist pantheon.22

This memorial site contained numerous references to the recent Polish-

the Lithuanian-Polish struggle.23

perished in the Great War.
Thus, the commemoration of the loss of Vilnius became a key part of the
broader process of war memorialization. The ninth of October was declared by

day of mourning commemorating the Polish takeover of Vilnius on 9 October
1920.24 By 1937, this society had 27,000 members and 358 branches throughout
the country and was the spearhead of the Vilnius liberation campaignthe
most successful propaganda project of the Lithuanian government during the
interwar period.25
of Vilnius became not only a political but also a cultural and existential issue
for the elite and broad sections of society.26

have to cherish this ideal [of liberation] because it educates us. If there were
no issue of Vilnius, we would have had to invent it.27
The Vilnius liberation and commemoration campaign permeated all seg-
ments of Lithuanian society. Contemporaries noted that the VVS song We

interwar Lithuania.28 The VVS was also highly successful not only in printing
hundreds of propaganda publications and giving thousands of lectures but
also in distributing the so-called Vilnius passports (Vilniaus pasai). By 1936,
more than 80 percent of schoolchildren had them in the Alytus district alone
22

23
, Karo muziejus (Kaunas: Menas, 1930), 2021.
Lietuva, 29 April 1925,
24
45.
25

26

27
no. 10 (1929): 376.
28
Lietuvos aidas, 10 October 1930, 5.
248 TOMAS BALKELIS
something that entitled them and their families (including dead relatives) to
become symbolic citizens of Vilnius.29
Unsurprisingly, this campaign eagerly built on the negative image of the
enemythe Polesand on the miserable plight of those Lithuanians who
remained in the occupied zone. It also helped instill a widespread fear that
Vilnius could be used by Poland to occupy the rest of the country.30 From its
early days, the cult of the fallen soldiers was closely connected with the image
of the Poles as eternal enemies of Lithuanians. The interwar Lithuanian

on the dilapidated state of Vilnius under the Polish occupation, to a series
of caricatures ridiculing the Polish elite. Meanwhile, those Lithuanians who
were persecuted by the Polish authorities in the Vilnius region were hailed as
national martyrs. Thus, the memory of the Polish-Lithuanian war was soon
channeled into the ongoing Vilnius liberation campaign.
In the temporary capital Kaunas, several streets, including the former
Polish Street, were renamed after soldiers who had died in the Polish-
Lithuanian War.31 Schoolchildren were encouraged to paint the Vilnius Cathe-
dral, the landmark of the city, and to build medieval replicas of the Gediminas
Castle Hill, a key symbol of pre-Christian Lithuanian heritage. Soon wooden
replicas of the castle were erected all over the country.32 The Vilnius libera-
anniversary of the death of the Grand Duke Vytautas (13501430), one of

nius became part of this new commemoration as a historic capital of the for-
mer Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the seat of Vytautas. The symbolic link
between the medieval and modern memories was also established by the
33 The core
component that united both was a theme of victimhood, which is common to
many nationalist historical narratives: from the local perspective, the cunning
Poles deceived Vytautas by preventing his coronation in 1430; they also robbed
Lithuania of its capital in 1920.
29

30

Lietuva, 15 April 1923, 3.
31

Acta humanitarica universitetas Saulensis
9 (2009): 238.
32

33

(Vilnius: Aidai, 2002), 1540.
As a result of these activities, between 1929 and 1931 there was a consider-
able shift in the cultural memory of Lithuanian society. While the early

movement, from the 1930s it turned towards the commemoration of pre-
Christian symbols of Lithuanian statehood.34 This shift was largely due to the

but strengthened it with the medieval myth of Lithuanian statehood. Thus,
the demolition of the War Museum and the erection in its place of the new
Vytautas Magnus Museum in 1936 was seen as a development of the same
memory site.35
Paradoxically, the claim to Vilnius also implied the Lithuanization of a city
that historically was multiethnic. The Lithuanian public was euphoric after
the Soviets, having invaded eastern Poland, transferred Vilnius to Lithuania
in October 1939, even if this meant that from now on Soviet troops would
remain stationed inside the country. The transfer allowed the government to

Smetona himself refused to move to Vilnius regained at such a high price.36

in late 1939. On the one hand, their long-term dream of reclaiming Vilnius had
become a reality. On the other hand, they had discovered their capital popu-
of about 30,000 Polish war refugees
from occupied Poland to the Vilnius region forced the government to give in
to pressure from Britain and France and help them. This somewhat tamed
the governments ambitions of quick assimilation. Meanwhile, the acquisition
of the city had become a serious economic challenge for a Lithuania already
34

23940, 243.
35

in
(Vilnius: Lietuvos
istorijos institutas, 2011), 154.
36
Antanas Smetona ir jo aplinka
leidybos centras, 2012), 372.
250 TOMAS BALKELIS
shaken by the Nazi takeover of Klaipda in March 1939.37 In spite of all of this,
the Lithuanian march to Vilnius in 1939 was presented to the public as a
victory of the regime. As excited crowds in Kaunas cheered the event, it soon
38

(Vilnius is ours, but we belong to the Russians) became an ironic catchword

in June 1940. These developments dealt a severe blow to the interwar myth
of Vilnius. It never regained its prewar strength after World War II, which
brought new challenges and traumas to the Lithuanians: Soviet deportations,
the Holocaust, displacement, armed resistance, and forced collectivization.
On the whole, during World War II Polish-Lithuanian relations saw the
balance of power swing to the side of Lithuanians, with both Nazis and
Soviets supporting their case in the Vilnius region. Under the Nazis, Lithu-
anians continued their penetration into city life. The military clashes between

auspices, and the Polish resistance movement in eastern Lithuania in 1944,
did not change the power equilibrium as much as the destruction of the Polish
Home Army (Armia Krajowa) by the Soviets in the summer of 1944 and the
massive displacement of more than 196,000 Poles from Soviet Lithuania to
Poland in 194546 did.39
munity but somewhat tamed the nationalist Lithuanization ambitions of the
Soviet Lithuanian government. Like prewar nationalists, this government
was more than happy to see the local Poles leave.
After World War II, the Communist regime supported a Soviet Lithuanian
version of historical memory which was based on the notion that Vilnius was
the old historical capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Poles were
newcomers in the city. The regime eschewed any references to the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth and instead promoted a pre-Christian narrative
of Lithuanian history which was traditionally hostile to Poles.40 The transfer
37

19391940, Contemporary European History 16, 4 (2007): 462.
38
, no. 232 (Fall 1939): 1, 3.
Redrawing Nations: Ethnic
39
Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 19441948, ed. Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak (Lanham,

40
i (Vilnius: Aidai, 2004), 15860.
of Vilnius to Lithuania in 1939 was seen as a brotherly gift of the Soviet peo-
ple to the Lithuanian nation.

memories in shaping their domestic and foreign policies, in particular to-
wards Russia.41 Fortunately, however, during the last 20 years the memory

diplomatic relations of Poland and Lithuania, and this new development
needs explanation
The popular movement of the 1990s revived some of the old tensions
between Poland and Lithuania. Timothy Snyder argues that rising popular

its rights to Vilnius.42 Yet, this tension was short-lived and was quelled by

themselves as political allies rather than opponents. The diplomatic process
of reconciliation was launched in 1992 with the signing of the Declaration on

cooperation agreement.43
issue of the Vilnius occupation was left out of the agreement and relegated

Lithuania. In addition, both sides joined in supporting each others successful

to the diplomatic needs of both states and largely depoliticized.

would become secondary to the issue of European integration. Among these

was an unprecedented agreement signed by the veterans of the Polish Home
44

former hostility behind them and come to peace more than 60 years after the
41

45989.
42

Lithuania and Ukraine, 19391999, in Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies
in the Presence of the Past, ed. Jan Werner-Mller (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 54.
43
+
+
44
, no.
7 (2006): 1.
252 TOMAS BALKELIS

Constitution of 3 May 1791. A similar reconciliation also occurred between
liberal camps of Polish and Lithuanian intellectuals, who organized a number
of joint history conferences and public debates.45 One of the notable examples
of this cooperation was the joint conference Polish-Lithuanian Relations in
the Course of Centuries, which took place in Vilnius in 2006 to commemorate
the 15th anniversary of the re-establishment of Polish-Lithuanian diplomatic

greatly desensitized the traditionally stormy relationship between two states.
There is still debate as to whether this diplomatic turnabout should be
considered a genuine reconciliation. Some argue that instead of an open pub-
lic debate both sides chose simply not to discuss the most painful episodes
of their mid-20th-century relationship publicly, in particular, the Polish take-
over in 1920 and the Soviet transfer of Vilnius to Lithuania in 1939. In short,
critics say, for political reasons they prefer a certain form of historical amnesia,
which is typically expressed as history should be left to historians.46

gained the importance in national cultural memory that it did in Lithuania;

Lithuanians as irreconcilable enemies of Poland (although this perspective

was much more common among Lithuanian Poles than those living in
central Poland).47 The essence of this anti-Lithuanian vision was that the his-
torical harmony that existed between Poles and Lithuanians for centuries
had been destroyed by the Lithuanian betrayal of the common cause and a
foreign conspiracy (either of German or Soviet type). However, according to
Krzystof Buchowski, in Poland this negative anti-Lithuanian mood survived
for the most part only during the interwar and WWII years.48 In the course
of the 20th century, the Polish historical memory merged the quarrel with
Lithuanians with its other struggles over Polands eastern borderlands.
45

(Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2009).

46
objektas, in 484.
47

(Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2012), 230.
48

Although it contributed to the birth of the myth of the lost Polish borderland
paradise (kresy
of many episodes in the epic postwar struggles and gradually lost its early

part of a romanticized cultural nostalgia for the glorious historical past of the
Commonwealth. And there are fewer than ever voices who continue looking
49
Perhaps few would deny the positive impact that this diplomatic
rapprochement has had on the traditionally hostile Polish-Lithuanian
relations. In Lithuania this impact can be observed at least on several levels.
Although a motley crew of political extremists on both sides occasionally

popular impact is limited. The radical Lithuanian wing is represented by a
small group of intellectuals (such as former popular movement leader Romu-

demics (Algirdas Liekis and Kazimieras Garva). Many of them belong to the
Vilnija society, established in the 1990s, whose key aim is safeguarding the
interests of ethnic Lithuanians in the Vilnius region. In April 2011, Vilnija of-

annexation of the Vilnius region by Poland in 1920. The request was simply
ignored by the parliament. Moreover, their activities were publicly rebuked

priest Julius Sasnauskas.50
Paradoxically, the positive impact of the reconciliation could be observed
even in the most recent dispute between Poland and Lithuania (September

rights.51 It began after Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski rebuked the
Lithuanian government for not keeping the promises made by previous

exchanges, though the Lithuanians tended to downplay the dispute. Soon
it spilled over to the general public, providing local radicals with a new
49

50

11 April 2011, http://www.balsas.lt/naujiena/533535/
intelektualai-kaip-galesime-svesti-velykas-pirma-nesusitaike-su-broliais (accessed 7 September
2012).
51

Dispute Spills Over, Transitions Online, 16 February 2012, http://www.tol.org/client/
article/22999-polish-lithuanian-education-dispute-spills-over.html (accessed 7 September 2012).
254 TOMAS BALKELIS
opportunity to gain some currency in both countries.52

negotiate their dispute as European Union partners, not as historical enemies.
This brings hope that the memory of stormy Polish-Lithuanian relations will
remain only a distant reminiscence.53
Finally, most recent sociological surveys of cultural memory in Lithuania

contemporary Lithuanian society.54 In all three polls, between 32 and 35 per-
cent of interviewees pointed out that the interwar period remains the third
most remembered historical period. It is preceded by the events of the early
1990s and the Soviet era.55 Moreover, a 2006 survey showed that more than
53 percent of the Lithuanian population considers Poland a friendly state.56
Hopefully, this tendency shows that the elite-led reconciliation is having a
positive impact on public perceptions.
However, this reconciliation should also be seen as a part of the general
post-Soviet transition of Lithuania. Overall, during 200106 there was another
noticeable change in the cultural memory of Lithuanian society.57 The memory
52
Gazeta Wyborcza and the con-
servative Rzeczpospolita,
the liberals rebuked his short-sighted policy and even questioned whether Poland
should apologize to Lithuania for the capture of Vilnius in 1920. For the debate, see
Gazeta Wyborcza
29 March 2012, O[[W!^^^KLSS[UL^ZKHPS`SP[O\HUPHNHaL[H^ÌVYJaH
apzvalgininkas-siulo-lenkijai-atsiprasyti-lietuvos-uz-vilniaus-krasto-atemima.d?id=57471887
(accessed 7 September 2012).

53
Nuo
355.
54

market research, Vilmorus Ltd., which interviewed 1,003 people. All three surveys
included similar numbers of respondents and took place in the same environment.
i
, ed.

55
i309.
56

(Vilnius: Versus Aureus, 2007), 29.
57

245.
that dominated in the 1990s and was built largely around the historical sym-
bols of the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania was gradually replaced with
the traumatic memory of World War II and the Soviet occupations (in particu-
lar, of deportations and anti-Soviet resistance). It seems that this shift came

decade of this century on painful issues, such as local collaboration with the
Nazi and Soviet regimes, the participation of Lithuanians in the Holocaust,
and the legacy of armed anti-Soviet resistance.58 Since 2008, there has been

the crimes of the Nazis. The key initiative in this direction (wholeheartedly
supported by Lithuania and some other Eastern European states) was the so-
called Prague Declaration of 3 June 2008, which called for an all-European
understanding that both the Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes
should be considered to be the main disasters, which blighted the 20th
century.59
In Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian rapprochement was also facilitated
of property, partial lustration, compensation to the victims of the Nazi and

Soviet regimes, and a great expansion of commemoration initiatives, including
through education and public debates.60 As a result of these processes, the
memories of World War II and the Soviet period assumed a dominant role in
the local public realm. The state played a crucial role in this transformation,
as opposed to the grassroots explosion of memory politics that occurred in the
early 1990s. Between 2001 and 2006, there was also a substantial transformation
of public opinion, which accepted the state-oriented measures of transitional
justice that endorsed various commemoration initiatives related to mid-
and late 20-century historical events.61 All these developments provided a
58
Jews, Lithuanians
and the Holocaust (Vilnius: Versus Aureus, 2003); Mindaugas Pocius, Kita
(Vilnius: Lietuvos istorijos
instituto leidykla, 2009); and Sigitas Parulskis, Tamsa ir partneriai (Vilnius: Alma Litera,
2012).
59

Conscience and Communism, http://www.praguedeclaration.eu (accessed 7 September
2012).
60

Totalitarian Regimes Is Dealt with in Lithuania. Report for Directorate General for Justice,
Freedom and Security of the European Commission (Vilnius: Directorate General for Jus-
tice, Freedom and Security of the European Commission, 2009).
61

256 TOMAS BALKELIS
context in which the process of desensitizing the painful memory of Polish-

Disputed narratives are still used to claim victim status vis--vis other na-
tional groups (in particular against local Jews, but also Poles) and to shape
antagonistic foreign policy (in particular vis--vis Russia, which refuses to
recognize the period of Soviet rule in Lithuania as occupation). There is no

important, yet no longer dominant, role in the contemporary cultural mem-
ory of Lithuanian society. Today, it functions alongside other major historical
memories that help to maintain a modern Lithuanian identity. Its survival and
historical transformation testify to the critical role political elites continue to
play in using it in local and inter-state politics. Meanwhile, even at the time

its life in the shadow of the more dominant memory narratives of the 20th
century.
23 September, the National Memorial Day for the Genocide of the Lithuanian Jews.
The Defenders of Freedom Day on 13 January commemorates those who were killed
by the Soviet armed forces while defending the Lithuanian Parliament and TV tower
in Vilnius in January 1991.
Modern Russian Memory of the Great War, 191420
Vera Tolz
Speaking at the Council of the Russian Federation on 27 June 2012, recently

re-elected President V. V. Putin claimed that Russias defeat in the First World
War was a result of the national betrayal by the Bolshevik leadership.
According to Putin, it was because the Bolsheviks were afraid to admit that
the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty had been a mistake that they called
the First World War imperialist and refrained from commemorating the
heroism of the Russian army. The president promised to allocate money for
the maintenance of Europes largest burial site for those who fell in the Great
War, in Belgrade, where 124 generals of the tsarist army and numerous rank-
1 In December 2012, Putin approved

commemoration day of those who died in the Great War. The president criti-
cized the absence of such state-sponsored commemorations to date as an
unjust consequence of certain political [and] ideological considerations.2
The Kremlins endorsement of the public commemoration of a previously
neglected historical event was one element in a broader government-
led project of constructing a usable past for the purpose of national con-

The instrumental and selective utilization of the past for the purpose of
addressing current societal or political issues, which was so strikingly evident

ferred to in scholarly literature as the politics of memory and politics of
1

one of its patriotic projects. Russkii nekropol v Belgrade budet vosstanovlen, on
the website of Rossotrudnichestvo: Federalnoe agentstvo po delam Sodruzhestva
Nezavisimykh Gosudarstv, sootechestvennikov, prozhivaiushchikh za rubezhom, i
po mezhdunarodnomu gumanitarnomu sotrudnichestvu, http://old.rs.gov.ru/node/31556
(accessed 29 June 2012).
2

2012, http://lenta.ru/news/2012/12/31/wwone/ (accessed 13 January 2013).
258 VERA TOLZ
history.3 Both terms, which are often used interchangeably, presuppose the
understanding of collective memory as a social construct and a present-oriented
system of discourses, symbols, and social practices.4 However, whereas the
term politics of memory tends to embrace activities undertaken by a wide

the outset referred more narrowly to activities aimed at promoting particular

interpretations of the past, above all, by, or with the support of, the countrys
political leadership.5 It is analytically useful to maintain this distinction. The
examples of the construction of public narratives about the past discussed in
or the historical mythmaking managed by national political elites, relates to

the existence (or lack) of various types of memory, including mass personal
memory,6 as well as to works which are presented as historical research.
3
Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence
of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); A. Miller and M. Lipman,
eds., (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2012);
Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu, eds., The Politics of Memory
in Postwar Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); and The Political
Currency of the Past: History, Memory, and Identity, special issue, The Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 617, 1 (2008).
4

Denial, History and Memory 5, 2 (FallWinter 1993): 148; Kerwin Lee Klein, On the
Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse, Representations, no. 69 (2000): 139.
5
Istori-
, which notes that the term Geschichtspolitik (the politics of

Helmut Kohls initiatives to encourage a revision of interpretations of Germanys past
(7). The term, coined by Kohls critics, was then revived in 2004 by right-wing historians
and politicians in Poland, again in reference to state-sponsored initiatives to promote
a particular interpretation of the past. For this group of politicians the expression

the term the politics of history, see Martin O. Heisler, Introduction: The Political
Currency of the Past. History, Memory, and Identity, in The Political Currency of
the Past, 16.
6

Lithuania and Ukraine, in Memory and Power in Post-War Europe, 39 and 50, makes
a useful distinction between two types of memory. One is mass personal memory,
took part, and the other is national memory, understood as the organizational prin-
ciple, or set of myths by which nationally conscious individuals understand the past
and its demands on the present. See also Ewa Ochman, Soviet War Memorials and
the Reconstruction of National and Local Identities in Post-Communist Poland,
Nationalities Papers 38, 4 (2010): 50930.
MODERN RUSSIAN MEMORY OF THE GREAT WAR, 191420 259
Until 2010, the Great Warif one adheres to its conventional dates of 1914
18was marginalized in the state-sponsored narratives of Russian national
history. This marginalization, which began as soon as the war ended, has set
Soviet and post-Soviet Russia apart from West European states, where the
memory of the First World War has been widely cultivated, including at state
level. At the same time, the Soviet/Russian approach to the memory of the
Great War has been in line with its treatment in Eastern Europe. The roots

situation in the region at the time the war ended. In the east of Europe the Great
War triggered imperial collapse, the emergence of nationalizing states, and the

states required new foundation myths of the kind the Great War was unable

vision of imperial space, the drawing of new state borders, and, in the Soviet
case, also the October Revolution of 1917 that the East European political elites
would come to utilize for their mythmaking.7 Soviet propaganda habitually
called the Great War illegitimate and imperialist, as Putin pointed out in his
2012 statement. Later on, the importance of the Second World War for citizens
of the Soviet Union and intensive state-sponsored commemoration projects
around that war further overshadowed the Great War in public consciousness.8
Even if we accept Karen Petrones argument that the marginalization of
Great War memory in the Soviet state did not mean its complete absence,9 it
is clear that by the time the USSR collapsed, the Great War did not feature
in Russias collective memory. In this context, it comes as no surprise to
learn that for almost two decades after the collapse of the Communist re-

Soviet narrative about the war itself and that it continued to be criticized as
imperialist in history textbooks. The period did, however, witness a change

representations of the Whites appeared, and the Soviet-Polish War of 1919
20 began to feature prominently in newly articulated historical narratives

ticular episode from that war, the plight of Red Army soldiers who died in
Polish detention camps, became a widely used tool of the politics of history.
Yet, as we will see in this article, another turn in the politics of history
occurred in 2010. In that year the Kremlin virtually stopped using the plight
of the Red Army POWs as a major example of Russian victimhood, choosing

7
Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia (London: Granta
Books, 1999), 100; Karen Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2011).
8
Night of Stone, 100.
9
Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory.
260 VERA TOLZ

not only with the approaching centennial of the Great War, but with a broader
revision of the Kremlin-sponsored historical narrative about the Soviet
in response to particular domestic and international developments.

in fact, been closely linked. The Moscow-based nationalist think tank the
Historical Perspective Foundation articulated an interpretation tying to-

the Great War concluded not in 1918 but in 1920, with the end of the Soviet-
Polish War. Before this interpretation was put forward in 2010, the founda-
tion actively contributed to publicizing the plight of the Soviet POWs in Po-
land as an important example of Russian victimhood; and, moreover, the
incorporation of the Soviet-Polish War in the foundations representation
of the Great War was made at a time when the exploitation of the Soviet

current political importance, ceased to enjoy the Kremlins support.10
This article analyzes the ways that the state-sponsored narratives about
the Soviet-Polish War and the Great War have been conceived and dissemi-
nated; it also accounts for the, at times distinct, role of non-state actors in

ideology, the role of the public intellectual, and the balance between historical
writings and other types of memory in Kremlin-sponsored memory projects.
The historical projects discussed here also allow us to explore the origins

of the new millennium. Putins policies, often described by his critics as neo-
imperial, as well as his confrontational stance towards the West, are commonly

sia, on the one hand, and other post-Communist states, on the other.11 In con-
trast, Aleksei Miller has emphasized the reactive aspect of Putins politics of

by steps taken by the Russian elites in response to various initiatives of East
European neighbors and within the context of the deterioration of Russias
relations with the United States.12 A close scrutiny of the two interlinked
memory projects allows us to test the validity of these interpretations.
10
Soiuznoe
gosudarstvo: Obshchestvenno-politicheskii zhurnal, www.soyuzgos.ru/2009/37/37_30_nn.html
(accessed 13 January 2013).
Pamiat strogogo rezhima: Istoriia i politika v Rossii
11
(Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2011), 229.

12
Istoricheskaia politika
, 333.
The article is structured chronologically, starting with the developments

that took place between 1990 and 2009, when the narrative about the plight

memory war with Poland. It will then turn to analyzing the changes
that crystallized in 2010 when, in the context of the overall revision of the
Kremlin-sponsored interpretation of 20th-century Russian history, the First
World War became the subject of a state-sponsored commemorative project.
The Politics of History (19902009): The Case of Soviet POWs in Poland
The Soviet-Polish War of 191920 hardly featured in public consciousness

during the Soviet period. The only time that the episode was utilized in
Soviet propaganda was 1939, when it was evoked to justify the Red Army
invasion of eastern Poland. Scholarly research into the Soviet-Polish War
was not explicitly banned, but its neglect by Soviet historians was due
to the absence of state-sponsored demand for such research.13 As for the

of the Russian migr press, which cited extremely high mortality rates
in Polish POW camps, labeling them death camps.14 Yet, no long-term
memory tradition around this episode ever formed in Russia abroad.

and an important element of the memory of Russian/Soviet victimhood date
back no further than 1990. This was a period when, within the context of

politics of history and of memory began in earnest in the USSR and it became
apparent that both the politics of history and the politics of memory had
the power to legitimize and delegitimize political actors and positions. The

Soviet regime contributed to the overall delegitimization of Communist Party
rule.15 The impact of such acknowledgments on the USSRs internal situation
and international relations was, however, of concern to Mikhail Gorbachevs
leadership. The myth surrounding the treatment of Red Army POWs was an

Poland to the Katyn massacre, in which, in 1940, on the order of the top So-

13

Nosovym, Novaia Polsha, no. 11 (2000), http://www.novpol.ru/index.php?id=353 (accessed
13 September 2011).

14
Warsaw-based newspaper Svoboda, 19 October 1921.

15
R. W. Davies, Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era (New York: St. Martins Press, 1997).
262 VERA TOLZ
executed by the Soviet NKVD. Reportedly it was Gorbachev who, at the time of
the Soviet governments acknowledgment of Soviet responsibility for Katyn,

General of the USSR, the USSR Ministry of Defense, and the USSR State Security

to the history of Soviet-Polish bilateral relations which would demonstrate

data should be used, if necessary, in negotiations with the Polish side.16
This is how and why the story about high death rates among Soviet
POWs in Poland was discovered in Russia and suddenly endowed

Union soon collapsed, and in the early post-Communist period top
political leaders did not promote the construction of a new, coherent
narrative about the past, partly because it was impossible to reach a
modicum of consensus about complex and painful historical issues and
partly because community-building initiatives were neglected overall.

sphere of post-Communist nation building, and identity formation more
broadly, particularly given the extent to which public discussions about the

regime.17

is not surprising, however. At the time, Yeltsins position was resolutely anti-
Communist. The main government-led political exploitation of historical
issues in that period was connected with the Trial of the CPSU conducted
by the Russian Constitutional Court in 1992, during which the government

rather than to present East European governments with counterclaims
about their historical guilt vis--vis Russia.18 And so, during most of
the 1990s, the plight of Soviet POWs in Poland was exploited largely by
a small group of pro-Communist military historians, who dramatized
Novaia
16
Polsha, no. 10 (2005), http://www.novpol.ru/index.php?id=498 (accessed 5 May 2012).

17

historical narrative, which could help consolidate society around the new government,

Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics and Memory during the
18
Yeltsin Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 1129.

the episode.19 Negative responses to such publications also appeared in

Russia; these criticized exaggerated claims about the mortality rate among
the POWs and emphasized that the prisoners had tended to die of ill-
nesses and the poor conditions which were generally prevalent in war-
devastated Poland, rather than being killed on the order of the authorities.20
A growing interest in identity politics on the part of the Russian
political establishment and the accompanying use of history for political

search for the so-called Russian idea. Indeed, as Miller argues, it was in
the late 1990s that a particular narrative about the Soviet past, one which
would be consistently promoted by the Kremlin under Putin, had begun to
take shape.21

the Polish side conduct an investigation into the plight of the Red Army

reach back to the late Yeltsin period. A number of articles about the Polish
Katyn for the Russians simultaneously appeared in the Russian press.22
What could be called a full-scale government-orchestrated media campaign
around the issue of the Soviet POWs began in the spring of 2000, at the time of the
60th anniversary of the Katyn massacre. In 1999, Timothy Snyder argued that in

in Poland, learned to put aside the mental habit of treating international poli-
19

Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 12 (1993): 2226; Iu. V. Ivanov and M. V. Filimoshin,
Vse plennye byli paralizovany uzhasami, Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 5 (1995):
6567; I. V. Mikhutina, Polsko-sovetskaia voina, 19191920 gg. (Moscow: Slavianskaia
letopis, 1994); and Mikhutina, Tak skolko zhe sovetskikh voennoplennykh pogiblo
Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 3 (1995): 6469. A statement

comparable to those of Stalin, because his concentration camps for the Soviet POWs
allegedly claimed 60,000 lives, was most likely Shardakovs initiative, rather than
an action sanctioned by Moscow. In some of the Polish media, however, the consuls
statement was interpreted as a manifestation of the Russian governmentsponsored
campaign aimed at neutralizing the impact of the revelations about Katyn. See such an
interpretation in A. V. Torkunov and A. D. Rotfeld, eds.,
Slozhnye voprosy v rossiisko-polskikh otnosheniiakh (Moscow: Aspekt Press, 2010), 68.
20
Nezavisimaia gazeta, 9 November 1994.
21
Rossiia v globalnoi politike, 11 June
2011, http://www.globalaffairs.ru/print/number/Labirinty-istoricheskoi-politiki-15219 (accessed 13
September 2011).
22

Moskovskii komsomolets, 27 January 1999; N. S. Raiskii, Polsko-sovetskaia voina 1919
1920 godov i sudba voennoplennykh, internirovannykh, zalozhnikov i bezhentsev (Moscow:
Meplena, 1999), http://www.fedy-diary.ru/?page_id=5957 (accessed 29 June 2012).
264 VERA TOLZ
tics as a means of rectifying the national past.23 Yet in the last years of the
20th century there appeared signs of a nationalist turn in both Russian and
Polish politics, giving a sense that Snyders optimism had been premature.24

divisions on the Polish political scene. On the one hand, the two chambers of
the Polish Parliament, on the initiative of right-wing politicians who eventu-

adopted resolutions on Katyn that equated Nazi with Communist crimes of

ishment of those perpetrators who were still alive. Vague references were
made to legal liability (presumably of contemporary Russia) for Stalins
crimes. Overall, the resolutions did not clearly distinguish between the
Soviet Union and Russia. The extent to which Soviet culpability had been ac-
knowledged by Gorbachevs and Yeltsins governments was not fully spelled
out in the documents.25 On the other hand, Polish president Aleksander

the Poles should reject reckoning with the past, delivered a commemoration

by the Russian people, but by the system of which Russians and other Soviet
citizens were themselves victims: in fact, Poles and Russians shared in the

26
As we will see, this plurality of views was not recognized in Russia.
The most vocal actors in the Russian counter-Katyn campaign were
pro-Communist middle-ranking politicians, as well as various authors of
alternative histories, who have produced accounts which view historical
events through the prism of conspiracy theories.27
ever, that the Kremlin had a hand in the orchestration of the campaign, as
23

24

decommunization in Poland, right-wing politicians instrumentally used history in
order to achieve current political goals. See Ewa Ochman, Post-Communist Poland
Contested Pasts and Future Identities (London: Routledge, 2013), 1721, 16164.
25

Monitor Polski

Monitor Polski, no. 12 (2000): 241.
26

2000, http://www.prezydent.pl/archiwum/archiwum-aktualnosci/rok-2000-i-starsze/art,158,1699,
WYLa`KLU[aSVa`SOVSKVHYVTaIYVKUPRH[ÙZRPLQO[TS (accessed 26 June 2012).
27
Nezavisimaia gazeta, 6 October 2000; and P.
Pokrovskii, Morozom i sablei, Parlamentskaia gazeta, no. 4 (2000). On the proliferation
of alternative history publications based on a conspiratorial view of the word in
in June 2000 at a meeting of historians in the State Archive of the Russian

Federation in Moscow it was announced that the government had allocated
funding for a special commission that would study the plight of the Soviet
POWs. Historians were told that Russian/Soviet history more broadly should
be presented in a more positive light than had been the case in the 1990s.28 In
December 2000, the directors of the State Archives of Poland and Russia signed
an agreement on the conducting of joint research into the plight of the POWs.
A vigorous media campaign in 2000 around the Soviet POW issue, in

sode in the memory war between Russia and Poland; this would greatly
intensify between 2004 and 2009.29 The debates about the plight of the
Soviet POWs broadcast by the Russian media as early as 2000 shed light on

pean memory wars. Looking at the period from the early 2000s onwards,
and particularly at the period of Lech Kaczynskis presidency in Poland,
Miller notes the reactive nature of Putins history politics and argues
that various moves by the Russian side were often taken in response to pro-
nouncements about Russia and the Soviet past made in Eastern Europe.30
The 2000 Russian campaign around the Soviet POWs indicates that, in its
very origins, Putins history politics was indeed reactive. To some degree,
the Russian campaign around the Soviet POWs, which began in April, was
a response to the Katyn commemorations in Poland. However, the response
was not to the actual dynamics of political developments in Poland, marked by
pluralism of opinions. Instead, Russian politicians and the media had constructed

then aimed. In this construction, positions held by right-wing politicians were

At the same time, it is clear that the Russian media campaign also
had roots in Russias domestic situation. The key point of reference for
the Putin government decision on how to use history for political pur-
poses does not seem to have been the situation in Poland, even though the
Russian elites certainly took into account the ways in which other post-
Communist states framed discourses about their history and identity.

his goal as rectifying the problems created under the previous leadership.
Here again, rather than addressing the full complexity of the developments

struction of Yeltsins legacy. In a highly selective reading of this legacy, a
post-Communist Russia, see Marlene Maruelle, Conspiracy and Alternate History in

Russian Review 71, 4 (2012): 56580.
28

.
29
30

266 VERA TOLZ
failure to build a sense of national community and common identity was

highlighted as a major problem that brought Russia to the verge of collapse.31

which included the introduction of new national holidays, commemorative
events, state symbols and the national anthem, and the articulation of sharp
responses to critical representations of Russia in neighboring states. The po-

issues in the media and the teaching of history in schools.32 Unsurprisingly

included both references to victorious achievements and examples of vic-
timhood. These narratives have been constructed not only in response
to trends common to Eastern Europe as a whole, but also to a particular
reading by Russian elites of the internal situation in their own country.
The role played by narratives of victimhood in consolidating community
crease in the sheer number and impact of such narratives in Europe and North
America since at least the 1970s.33
this upsurge of memory was due to the failure of future-oriented ideological
master narratives (e.g., about the triumph of Western civilization, the nation-
supposed to be remembered in societies where genuine local memories (often

preserved by peasant communities) were no longer alive.34 This reading of
the situation in Western Europe in the 1970s and the 1980s applies well to

been disappointed with the initial post-Communist future-oriented master
narratives. For elites, national community consolidation has emerged as a
high priority in response to the deep social fragmentation of the 1990s and,
in a number of East European states, there is a sense of erosion of national

a broader context of the production and circulation of narratives of victimhood
in Europe as a whole and in former communist countries, in particular.35
31
Nezavisimaia gazeta, 30 December
1999, 4.
32

Restructuring Post-Communist Russia

33
Discourse.

Memory
34
and Counter-Memory, special issue, Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 724.

35
Historical Policy and International Politics in Post-1989 Eastern Europe, Global Society

tives at the time. According to Serguei Oushakine, the Putin governments
exploitation of Russian nationalist narratives was a result of a particular
reading of the public mood. To some extent, the government felt the need
to articulate a response to personal experiences of loss and feelings of vic-
timhood among many people across Russia, following the demise of the
USSR and within the context of the economic hardships of the 1990s.36
In fact, as they were responsible for vigorously intensifying history politics

some problems with the perceived societal need to represent Russians as vic-
tims. The elevation of the memory of the Second World War to the status of
the foundation myth of Putins Russia helped promote the image of Russians

Stalin were systematically marginalized. This very much narrowed the choice
of powerful historical narratives of Russian victimhood that politicians could

as such an example, at the twilight of the Soviet period, but which Yeltsins
government largely had refrained from exploiting, was unsurprising.
There were two sites for the discussion of the Soviet POW issue in
Russiathe internet and the press, particularly the newspaper Nezavisimaia
gazeta, by then a largely pro-Kremlin outlet, yet with a title which asserted
its independence from the government.37 Despite the occasional appearance
of treating the issue in a balanced manner, for instance, by publishing an
article by the main Polish expert on the subject, Zbigniew Karpus, in the
course of 2000, Nezavisimaia gazeta tended to feature highly biased accounts,
which put the death toll of the Soviet POWs at 80,000 (as opposed to Karpuss
estimate of 16,00018,000). Revealing the main purpose of the campaign to
be the promotion of a distinct narrative of Russian victimhood, the media

Russians. These publications tended to portray the Soviet-Polish War as a
result of Polish imperialism towards the regions populated by Ukrainians,
24, 1 (2010): 5170.

The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia (Ithaca,
36
NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).

37

narratives viewing history through the prism of conspiracy theories, Vladislav Shved,
also authored a number of publications on the case of the Soviet POWs. See, for instance,
http://gorod.tomsk.ru/index-1270713741.php
(accessed 2 February 2012). The POW case has also been extensively covered on the
website of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) (see, for instance,
kprf.ru/international/91396.html [accessed 2 February 2012]); on the websites of extreme
Russian nationalist groups, and on the so-called alternative history sites, e.g., http://
alternathistory.org.ua/istoriya-prestuplenii-protiv-chelovechnosti-v-polshe-20-40-e-goda-khkh-
veka and http://voprosik.net/genocid-russkix-v-polshe/ (accessed 2 February 2012).
268 VERA TOLZ
Belarusians, and Lithuanians, and of Polish nationalism, which was both

anti-Russian and anti-Semitic. The representation of the plight of the Soviet
POWs as the Russian Katyn permeated the coverage. At times the accounts

expected the Polish side to admit its responsibility for the crime.38 Some

39
This campaign of 2000 displays all the main elements of the historical

In this discourse, contemporary Russia was depicted as the heir to the Soviet
state, and the brutality of Stalins regime was relativized.40 The West was
presented as Russias eternal enemy. (In relation to the Soviet-Polish War,
it was argued that the Polish victory was only made possible by the huge
support of the Western powers).41 Countering accusations against Russia for
not taking responsibility for the impact of Communist rule on Eastern Europe,
the dominant narrative about the Soviet POWs juxtaposed Gorbachevs and
Yeltsins admission of Soviet responsibility for Katyn with what was de-
scribed as Polands refusal to take responsibility for a similar crime.42
Yet what was at times missed by Eastern European observers of the
Russian scene was that in Russia the national political elites could no longer
control the production of publicly disseminated historical narratives.43 In
fact, as we will see, even under Putin, a considerable degree of pluralism
has been evident in public discussions. Neither memory politics nor his-
tory politics in Russia have been immune from the global trend which
scholars have termed the cosmopolitanization of memory, that is, the
38
Nezavisimaia gazeta, 26 April
2000; A. Beloglazova and I. Napreenko, Rossiia chtit pamiat nevinno ubiennykh,
Nezavisimaia gazeta, 1 August 2000; Tuleev, Pravda o Katyni; V. Daines, Rossiia-
Polsha, Nezavisimaia gazeta
Nezavisimaia gazeta, 13 January 2001.
39
Polska Zbrojna, 21 March 2011, http://polska-zbrojna.
pl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12164:anty-katy&catid=150:historia&Item
id=191 (accessed 26 June 2012).
40

Polsko-sovetskaia voina 19191920 godov, 50.
41
42

43
Russian Historical Propaganda in 20042009
(Warsaw: Polands National Security Bureau, 16 September 2009), which seems to
assume that all discussions of historical issues in the Russian media are fully con-
trolled by the Kremlin.

challenge the narratives and interpretations promoted by national elites.44
The debate took a further sharp turn in a nationalistic direction when a
new wave of publications about the Soviet POWs appeared in 200405, at a
time of marked deterioration in Russian-Polish relations in the context of the
Orange Revolution in Ukraine and amidst the struggle between ultimately
incompatible historical narratives of the Second World War articulated in
Russia and Eastern Europe on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the
war. The election of Lech
panying escalation of history politics in Poland, based on the stepped-up
mobilization of memories of victimhood alongside the representation of
Russia as Polands main Other and as a threat to Europe,45
Russias propagandistic exploitation of the Soviet POW issue. By the time

the European Union, so EU democratic conditionality could no longer pre-
vent an intensive political exploitation of historical issues, the avoidance of
which by the East European elites in the 1990s Snyder had described as such

and the instrumental use of complex historical issues, already apparent in

history politics should be understood against this international background.
46 this second Rus-

the Katyn massacre as
Stalins revenge for the deaths of Soviet POWs had already been made in 2000;
now they became more systematic.47 The application of the term genocide to the
44

Sciences: A Research Agenda, 57, 1 (2006): 123. One example
of such a cosmopolitan memory project of relevance to the Soviet POW case may be
seen in an issue of the Russian-language monthly Novaia Polsha published in 2000.
This issue (no. 11, 2000) contained a range of articles by Russian and Polish authors
who had joined forces to challenge the POW narrative dominating the Russian media
at the time.
45

deliver on 10 April 2010, http://www.president.pl/en/news/news/art,125,freedom-and-truth.html
Russian Historical Propaganda in 20042009, depicted the new wave of
46
publications in Russia about the Soviet POW case, which started in 2004, as a major
new development.
47

associated with the CPRF or producers of alternative histories began denying
270 VERA TOLZ
death of the POWs48 continued a trend that had been already apparent in 2000,
when the Polish POW camps had been compared with Nazi extermination
camps.49 In the one balanced publication to appear during the second cam-
paign, Red Army Soldiers in Polish Captivity, 19191920 (Krasnoarmeitsy v pol-
skom plenu, 19191920), a Polish-Russian collection of archival documents on
the plight of the POWs, Polish and Russian contributors roughly agreed on
the mortality rates and reasons for the deaths of the POWs. However, this
remained largely unnoticed in wider media discussions in Russia; other

were also marginalized.50 Instead, the Russian press continued to demand
that the Polish side disclose allegedly concealed evidence on the issue.51
A third turn in the history politics around the POW issue started with

Soviet responsibility for the Katyn massacre altogether. At times, such authors rep-
resented not just Gorbachev and Yeltsin but also Putin as being in cahoots with
various Polish and Western forces in continuing Goebbels propaganda aimed at
absolving the Nazis of responsibility for Katyn. See, for instance, http://katyn.ru/index.
php?go=Pages&in=view&id=947 and http://www.hrono.ru/libris/lib_sh/shwed00.php (accessed 5
May 2012).
48
http://www.pokon21.narod.ru/Istoriya/
genotsid_russkih_v_polshe/; and Genotsid russkikh v panskoi Polshe, http://vkpb-nsk.
ru/blog/90_letie_genocida_russkikh_v_panskoj_polshe_adresa_smerti_stshalkov_shhipjurno_
chetyre_lagerja_v_brestskoj_kreposti_tukhol/2011-05-05-150 (accessed 13 September 2011).
Izvestiia and Rossiiskaia gazeta: M. Margelov, Nas zastavliaiut

49
kaiatsia za Stalina, Izvestiia, 10 December 2004; A. Tuleev, Poliaki khotiat dobitsia ot

Izvestiia, 22 December 2004; and the interview
with the deputy secretary of the Security Council of Russia, Nikolai Spasskii,
Rossiiskaia gazeta, 5 October 2005.
Krasnoarmeitsy v polskom plenu 19191922 gg.: Sbornik doku-
50
mentov i materialov (MoscowSt. Petersburg: Letnii sad, 2004).

51

ot nikh pokaianiia za Stalkov i Tuhol, Nezavisimaia gazeta
to challenge the dominant narrative, see L. K. Ostrovskii, Polskie voennoplennye
v Sibiri (19041920 gg.), Istoriia, 10 April 2008, http://sun.tsu.ru/mminfo/000063105/316/
image/316-088.pdf (accessed 5 May 2012). In Poland, a particularly strong reaction was
provoked by comments by the Moscow historian Aleksandr Danilov, who headed a
group of authors responsible for the production of a controversial school textbook on

about how this historical period should be covered, Danilov suggested that the Katyn
massacre should be interpreted as a historical revenge for the deaths of tens of thou-
sands of Soviet POWs in Poland in 191920. See Kontseptsiia kursa Istoriia Rossii.
19001945, http://www.prosv.ru/umk/ist-obsh/info.aspx?ob_no=15378 (accessed 13 September
2011).
accompanied by the publication of an article of his in the Polish newspaper

Gazeta Wyborcza. Whereas Putins article was well received by many Polish
intellectuals and politicians (apart from the PiS Party), the speech was widely

the article and the speech were arguably more moderate than could have been
expected from the tone of the propaganda campaign in the Russian media on
the eve of the anniversary.52 Yet Putins interpretations of historical events
53

Soviet POWs, he reproduced the widely repeated argument that the deaths
of the POWs were directly comparable to Katyn, suggesting that both events
should become symbols of common sorrow and mutual forgiveness.54

mirrored the approach of members of the Russian political establishment
with regard to how history could be put to current political use. Above all,

pretation of historical events, however complex, was possible. In his words:
There is only one truth. We, Poles, have the right to know the truth about
tragic issues for our nation and we can never leave them behind. Echoing
the way in which the Russian media had represented Polands policies in

during the Soviet-Polish War, as well as in the 1940s, were both imperialist

tional behavior that determined the policies of a country in the international
arena. A comparison between Soviet and contemporary Russia was implicitly

to neoimperialistic tendencies if it wanted to avoid the mistakes of the 1930s
and 1940s. Furthermore, Kaczynski evoked another mythical linkage between
the Soviet-Polish War and Katyn. He argued that it was because of revenge
52

politiki. For a summary of the reaction to Putins article and speech in Poland, see
Gazeta Wyborcza, 31 August 2009, http://
wyborcza.pl/1,76842,6984515,Reakcje_na_list_Putina_do_Polakow.html (accessed 20 May
2013).
53

unequivocally condemned Stalins repressions. See D. Medvedev, Pamiat o natsio-
nalnykh tragediiakh tak zhe sviashchenna, kak pamiat o pobedakh, http://blog.
kremlin.ru/post/35/trascript (accessed 3 January 2012).
54
http://www.aif.ru/pobeda/article/29091 (accessed 2
February 2012). For a detailed discussion of the politics of history around Katyn in
Russia, see Alexander Etkind and Rory Finnin et al., Remembering Katyn (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2012), 99131.
272 VERA TOLZ
for the year 1920, for the fact that Poland managed to repulse the aggression
55

a collision of two state-sponsored memory projects that were in many ways
similarly structured. Polands PiS Party rejected the inevitability of contestation
around memory in a democratic society. The Kremlin-endorsed approach not

of history.56 At the same time, in disputes over history with East European
neighbors, the Russian side also manipulatively used the fact that complex
historical events were open to contested interpretations; this was done to
normalize Stalinism and relativize the atrocities of the Soviet regime
(e.g., the equation of the Katyn massacre and the deaths of Soviet POWs).
In 2010, the signs of change in history politics in Russia became un-

plane crash en route to Russia, and against the backdrop of improved
Russian relations with the United States and a number of other countries
and Putins constructive relationship with his Polish counterpart Donald

began criticizing the Kremlins approach to Soviet history as damaging
to Russias international image.57 Yet again, the treatment of the Soviet

the same time as it indicated that the changes of 2010 had their limits.
Putins speech at a commemorative ceremony in Katyn on 7 April 2010
marked a departure from the previous Kremlin-endorsed line of consistently
relativizing Stalins terror. The Russian prime minister distanced contemporary
Russia from Stalins Soviet Union; condemned Stalins policies more strongly
than ever before; and compared Katyn not with the plight of the Soviet POWs,
but with the sites of memory of Stalins terror against Soviet citizens.58 A number
55

the Outbreak of World War II, 1 September 2009, http://www.prezydent.pl/archiwum/
archiwum-strony-lecha-kaczynskiego/wypowiedzi-prezydenta/wystapienia/art,671,przemowienie-
prezydenta-na-obchodach-70-rocznicy-wybuchu-ii-wojny-swiatowej.html (accessed 27 June
2012).
56

Detriment of Russias Interests, which existed between 2009 and 2012, was a prime
57

58

Russias diminishing status as the main exporter of natural gas in Europe. For a
balanced discussion of the reasons for the improvement in Russian-Polish relations,
see an interview of 6 December 2010 with an expert from the Moscow Center of the
Carnegie Foundation, Nikolai Petrov: Andrei Polunin, Sergei Orlov, and Nikolai
of articles in the Russian press published in the wake of Putins speech spelled
out what had been obscured during the previous campaigns, namely, that

rather than being executed on a government order. These publications
also criticized earlier comparisons made in the Russian media between
Polish POW camps and Nazi death factories.59 Yet, at a press conference
on 15 April, Putin again linked the issue of the Soviet POWs with Katyn by
60

[Historical] Issues, containing articles on the key episodes in 20th-century
Polish-Russian/Soviet relations, included the coverage of the plight of the
Soviet POWs.61 Without drawing any direct links with Katyn, the introduction
by the Polish and Russian co-chairmen of the commission urged that com-
memorating services be held at the burial sites of the Soviet POWs.62 The
Polish-Russian War received substantial coverage in the volume, highlighting

a substantial politicization of both narratives. The Russian contribution repre-

Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Lithuanians. In contrast, Polish contributors
interpreted the same policies as an
after being exploited by Russian tsarism, now strove for independence.63
It would be erroneous to conclude that Putins public condemnation of

Soviet responsibility for Katyn.64 As for the plight of the Soviet POWs, the
Petrov, Nazvat Katyn prestupleniem pomog slantsevyi kamen, 6 December 2010.

The article is posted on the Moscow branch of the Carnegie Foundations website,
http://carnegie.ru/publications/?fa=42082 (accessed 13 September 2010).
59
Vedomosti, 16 April 2010, 1; Aleksandr Volevodz, Problema voenno-
plennykh voiny 19191920 godov v svete natsionalnogo i mezhdunarodnogo prava,
Vostochnaia Evropa: Perspektivy, no. 2 (2011): 5357.
60

bers of the commission in 2010 estimated the death toll among the Soviet POWs at
25,00028,000. See Torkunov and Rotfeld, , 43.
.
61
62

63

acknowledged elsewhere in the volume by a Polish author, who also agreed that his
eastern project would inevitably have led to war with Russia (see pp. 5657).
64

with no visible reason, the Kremlin shut down the activity of the Katyn deniers, which
it encouraged in 2009. Paper delivered at the Memory at War Inaugural Workshop,
274 VERA TOLZ

2010 resolution on Katyn, condemning the massacre as one of the most hide-
ous crimes of Stalins regime, which was adopted despite its rejection by the
CPRF faction, continued to imply the comparability of Katyn and the death
of the Soviet POWs. The resolution persisted in representing the portrayal
of the Soviet POW case as a major example of 20th-century Russian/Soviet
65 At the same time, some of the champions of
the plight of the Soviet POWs now turned their criticism onto the Kremlin,
implying that the Soviet and Russian governments from Gorbachev to
Putin and Medvedev had been involved in a conspiracy to prevent the in-
vestigation into the deaths of the POWs and of German responsibility for
Katyn.66

Memory and history politics always entail both remembering and forget-
ting. In the case of the Russian campaign around the plight of the Soviet

realize a national communitybuilding goal through the articulation of a
narrative of victimhood (remembering), the POW story was also expected to

Kings College, Cambridge, June 2010, http://www.memoryatwar.org/pdf/Etkind%20Katyn%20

in%20Russia%202010.pdf (accessed 2 February 2012).
65

the issue of the Soviet POWs. See Medvedev napomnil poliakam o pogibshikh
krasnoarmeitsakh, 6 December 2010, http://www.regnum.ru/news/polit/1353831.
html#ixzz1Y87xBPmB (accessed 5 May 2012).
66

Nezavisimaia gazeta, 21 May
2010. See also a similar position being expressed during debates in the Duma by the
Communist deputy Viktor Iliukhin, Otkrytoe pismo Viktora Iliukhina prezidentu,
http://www.newsland.ru/news/detail/id/597763
on Poland in connection with the POW case, see A. Rokossovskaia, Promakhnulis
s tablichkoi, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 17 May 2011; Poliaki ne priznaiut svoi grekhi,
Argumenty nedeli, 18 May 2011; and G. Zotov, Russkie plennye pokoiatsia v Polshe
mezhdu tsementnym zavodom i kanalizatsionnymi stokami, Argumenty i fakty, 11
May 2011. On 24 May 2011, the main state-controlled Russian TV channel, Pervyi
Kanal, featured in its evening news bulletin an item on the Soviet POWs, which while

Waldemar Rezmers, critical remarks regarding the Russian media treatment of the

and current position on the issue. V Polshe v bratskikh mogilakh pokoiatsia tysiachi
krasnoarmeitsev, http://www.1tv.ru/news/social/177234 (accessed 13 January 2013).
This replacement memory is common in narratives of victimhood, as they

tend to justify the avoidance of a critical assessment of ones own past.67
History Politics since 2010: From the Imperialist to the Great War
Recognition that the approach to using history for political purposes turned
out to be damaging for Russias international prestige occurred within the
context of the Kremlins broader acknowledgment of Russias failure to realize
its potential in exercising soft power68 in the international arena. Soft

cultural and other non-coercive resources.69 In the new millennium, Chinas

power projects, many of which are supported by the government, has been the
communities of Russian speakers beyond the borders of the Russian Federation.70
sootechestvenniki] abroad,
have been a focus of Russian government policy since the early 1990s. During
this period the term compatriots started to be used by the Russian leadership

of the Russian Federation, could be viewed as having special ties with the
Russian state because of their origin and/or knowledge of and interest in
Russian culture and language. Whereas in the 1990s, the term sootechestvenniki
was reserved largely for Russian speakers in the newly independent states
of the former Soviet Union, in the new millennium the category has been
broadened to include migrs from Russia and the Soviet Union and their

of the Russian nation to have been promoted by Russian governments since
the early 1990s, one conceives of the nation as including these compatriots
irrespective of their place of residence and citizenship. Putins government
sees the cultivation of close ties with the compatriots as an essential soft
power tool, as it is believed that compatriots could be instrumental
in projecting a favorable image of Russia on the international arena and
67

68
miag-
kaia sila.
Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public
69

70

March 2011, http://www.chathamhouse.org/research/russia-eurasia/current-projects/means-and-
LUKZY\ZZPHUPU\LUJLHIYVHK (accessed 13 January 2013).
276 VERA TOLZ
advancing Russias interests in their own states.71 Consequently, the number,

range, and geography of state-sponsored projects aimed at reaching out to
the communities of compatriots have increased as compared to the 1990s.72
The cultivation of memory of the First World War has obvious potential
as a soft-power project aimed at compatriots. Whereas under the Soviet
regime memory of the war was systematically marginalized, its annual com-
memoration became a key feature in the tradition of myth-making among
Russian migrs in Europe, playing an important role in consolidating
community identity in opposition to the Bolsheviks.73
the Soviet period, as well as in the 1990s, local activists inside Russia had
noticed that this aspect of Great War memory could invest it with political
and internal Russian narratives about the past had a chance to converge. A
commemorative complex in Moscows Memorial Park near the Sokol metro
station, developed in the 1990s on the site of a 1915 cemetery for the fallen

integration. However, two important occasionsthe opening of a memorial
chapel in the park in 1998 and of a large memorial complex in 2004were
ignored by leading national politicians, who at the time did not regard
the cultivation of Great War memory as a worthy history politics project.74

memorating the Great War at top state level, was signaled by a major inter-
national conference. Organized by the Russian World Foundation (Fond
Russkii mir) in December 2010, this was supported by the Russian Presi-
dential Administration, the State Duma, and the Council of Federation.

wide community of people united by their love of Russian culture. The
foundation bearing this name was established in the same year by the

exercising Russias soft power through programmes that supported the
teaching of the Russian language and publicized Russian culture abroad.75
71

Europe-Asia Studies 63, 2 (2011): 179202.
72

73

tion and the Soviet Union, Slavic Review 62, 1 (2003): 6986.
Novye izvestiia, 30 July
74
2004, http://www.newizv.ru/society/2004-07-30/8713-zapozdaloe-pokajanie.html (accessed 26

August 2014).
75
http://www.russkiymir.ru/russkiymir/ru/fund/about

Foundation at the forefront of championing the memory of the Great War.
Opening the conference, the head of the Presidential Administration, S.

gether two parts of the Russian world [at home and abroad], whereas
the executive director of the Russian World Foundation, V. A. Nikonov,
dwelled on how the Great War should be reintegrated into the na-
76
One particular individual from the leadership of the Russian World
Foundation has played an especially noteworthy role in making the case for the

Russias political leaders to this historical event.77 This is N. A. Narochnitskaia,
a nationalist public intellectual, former Duma deputy, and, between 2009 and

Falsify History to the Detriment of Russias Interests. Narochnitskaia also
heads the Moscow-based Historical Perspective Foundation and a research
center, the Paris-based Institute for Democracy and Cooperation. While both
institutions position themselves as independent public organizations, they are
known to have close ties to the Kremlin and see their aim as the articulation
of a Russian counterperspective to the US soft-power agendas of the Carnegie
Endowment and the Heritage Foundation.78 Finally, Narochnitskaia is closely
involved with various Moscow Patriarchate outreach programs, and her in-
terpretation of Russian history is informed by the perceived centrality of
Orthodoxy and empire to Russias cultural and political development. While
Narochnitskaia regards Russia as a European nation, she also claims that it

sents as inherently hostile towards Russia and morally inferior to it. Her
public activities and numerous publications are informed by her conviction
that the past always shapes the present. Even though she is not a professional
historian by training, her publications are regularly concerned with historical
issues, which are, however, invariably interpreted in accordance with their
76

website of Fond Russkii mir, http://www.russkiymir.ru/russkiymir/ru/news/fund/news0471.
html (accessed 27 June 2012).
77

trustees. On Narochnitskaia, see Jardar stb, The New Third Rome: Readings of a
Russian Nationalist Myth (Ph.D. diss., University of Bergen, 2011), 16290.
78

O[[W!PWY\HUKO[[W!^^^PKJL\YVWLVYNY\--- (ac-
cessed 13 January 2013).
278 VERA TOLZ
relevance to the present, as Narochnitskaia sees it.79 These broader premises

of Narochnitskaias worldview inform her interpretation of the Great War.
As early as 2008, the Historical Perspective Foundation and the Institute
for Democracy and Cooperation initiated a series of commemorative proj-

society to the memory of the First World War. These included the opening
of memorials to Russian heroes of the Great War in Russia and in France

80

day, Narochnitskaia complains.81 Rather than being based on an analysis

lasting popular template for interpreting Russias relations with the West.
According to this template various events from the Mongol invasion of

in defense of Europe from various destructive forces. It is argued that
the ungrateful West is unwilling to recognize Russias contribution.

World War and a deliberate distortion by West Europeans of the Russian
contribution to the Ententes victory were central to Narochnitskaias emotional
presentation at the above-mentioned 2010 Russian World conference. In it she
further argued for the importance of the war for Russian and European 20th-
century history. In turn, another representative of the Historical Perspective

of the thirty-year patriotic war that ended only in 1945.82 The status of the First
World War in Russian collective memory was thus to be enhanced by linking
it to the myth of the Second World War, the foundation myth of Putins Russia.
Narochnitskaias own presentation developed another argument,
which would become central to the revised Russian national historical
narrative, supported by the Kremlin since 2010. In addition to criticizing
79

istorii (Moscow: AJRIS-Press, 2007); Narochnitskaia, Russkii mir (St. Petersburg:
Aleteiia, 2007); and her Rossiia i russkie v sovremennom mire (Moscow: Algoritm, 2009).
80
http://sr.fondedin.ru/new/fullnews_
arch_to.php?subaction=showfull&id=1296316292&archive=1296316573&start_from=&ucat=14&.
(accessed 14 January 2013).
81

82
Strategiia, no. 1 (2011), http://sr.fondedin.
ru/new/fullnews_arch_to.php?subaction=showfull&id=1296316151&archive=1296316573&start_
from=&ucat=14& (accessed 10 August 2014).
the Bolsheviks and the West for obscuring Russian heroism during the

as unpatriotic in the past as they were today. In her account, liberals con-
tributed to bringing about the revolutions, the collapse of the state, and the
Civil War by constantly criticizing the tsarist government and the army.
She drew direct parallels between the events of 1917 and the activities
of the liberal opposition to Putins regime in contemporary Russia.83
Narochnitskaias complaints about the distortions of war memory
were echoed by a number of other speakers. Some of them insisted that
society required a single historical narrative and that a plurality of opin-
ions about the past was to be avoided. According to this position, it was
up to the government to take charge of ensuring that the Russian inter-
84 And yet the
conferences very own proceedings were marked by a plurality of opin-
ions. Rather than juxtaposing Russia to the West, other speakers saw the
emerging interest in the Great War as a way of underscoring Russias
European identity in the past, as well as today. The rehabilitation of the
name the Great War in public discourse was a sign of Russias incipient
reintegration into the pan-European commemorative space, it was noted.85
At the conference the leaders of the Russian World Foundation agreed
to launch a series of commemorative events and to set up an international
Society for the [Preservation] of the Memory of World War I. In most events
that have subsequently taken place, Narochnitskaias Historical Perspec-
tive Foundation and the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation have also
participated as co-organizers. These events, which have included commemo-
rative ceremonies, the erection of monuments, and the organization of
conferences and roundtable discussions, have taken place across Europe, in-
cluding in Belarus, Lithuania, and Poland, on whose territories the Russian
army fought during the war, as well as in France, Latvia, and Serbia.86
83

84

85
86
http://wap.1914.borda.
ru/?1-2-80-00000644-000-10001-0 (accessed 14 January 2013). On various commemorative
events, see Pamiat o pavshikh v Pervoi Mirovoi voine pochtili v Litve, 14 September
2011, http://www.russkiymir.ru/russkiymir/ru/news/fund/news0688.html; Alena Polskikh,
Istoriki obsudili v Vilnuse neobkhodimost vosstanovleniia istoricheskoi pravdy
o Pervoi Mirovoi voine, 12 November 2012, http://www.russkiymir.ru/russkiymir/ru/news/
common/news34647.html; Ivan Krylov, Pamiat russkikh geroev Pervoi mirovoi pochtili
v Belorussii, 13 November 2011, http://www.russkiymir.ru/russkiymir/ru/news/common/
news24440.html; Olga Zdebskaia, Kruglyi stol o Pervoi Mirovoi voine v sudbe Rossii
proveli v Latvii, 8 February 2011, http://www.russkiymir.ru/russkiymir/ru/news/common/
news16059.html; and Novosti, the list of activities of the Vilnius-based Institute of
280 VERA TOLZ
The geography of the foundations commemorative initiatives to a large

extent has been determined by the current political priorities of the Russian
state, and it somewhat contradicts the foundations narrative about the role of
the Great War in the contemporary collective memory of the imagined Rus-
sian world community. The Russian Worlds claim that its Great War memory
project helps unite two Russiasthe Russian Federation and Russia abroad,
where the memory of World War I has been part of a continuous living tradi-

activities.87 Most of these activities target Russian speakers in the Baltic states
(Latvia and Lithuania), the countries where Russia is keen to increase its soft-
power impact. The personal connections of these people to the region, in most
cases, date from the post-1945 period, and any sense of belonging to Russia

them as it does for the majority of the population within the Russian Federa-
tion. So, the Russian World memory project constitutes an invention of a
new tradition, rather than a continuation of an existing one, as it is claimed.
Alongside references to a living memory of the war in Russia abroad,
participants in the Russian Worlds commemorative events have articulated two
other reasons why, they claim, the legacy of the Great War is still so important
for the Baltic region. First, it is emphasized that it was during the time of the
Great War that the primacy of ethnicity in national community building fully
crystallized in the region, and that this development continues to inform the
88 The
second argument is related to the perception of the importance of the Baltic
region to Russias relationship with the West. Narochnitskaia has elaborated

War for the Past, Present, and Future, broadcast by the Russian television
channel Kultura in February 2011.89 Focusing on the relevance of the lessons
Military Heritage to commemorate the events of World War I in the Baltic states and
in Russia between May 2011 and May 2014, http://www.militaryheritage.eu/novosti (all
accessed 14 January 2013).
87

v sudbakh Russkogo mira, Fond Russkii mir, http://www.russkiymir.ru/russkiymir/ru/
analytics/article/news0025.html (accessed 14 January 2013).
88

Rossii proveli v Latvii, organized by the Russian World Foundation on 8 February
2011, http://www.russkiymir.ru/russkiymir/ru/news/common/news16059.html (accessed 14 Janu-
ary 2013).
89

nastoiashchego i budushchego, broadcast on 2 and 3 February 2011, http://tvkultura.ru/
video/show/brand_id/20898/video_id/156451 and http://tvkultura.ru/video/show/brand_id/20898/
of the Great War to the present, she talked about the allegedly unchanging
geopolitical aims of Western powers, particularly Britain, in relation to Russia
since the time of Peter the Great, the key being to deprive Russia of its control

the expansion of NATO into the region in 2004. Narochnitskaia claims to have
uncovered through her study of international politics around the Baltic region

should be taken into account in the formation of Russian foreign policy today.
In Narochnitskaias view, the foreign policies of the Western powers,
particularly those of a state such as Britain, have been unfailingly immoral
and self-serving. Russias position is contrasted to this immorality, and
both positions are explained by reference to what Narochnitskaia believes

Overall, Narochnitskaias narrative about Russias involvement in the war
has been informed by the view that a viable Russian national identity can
only be framed by the imperial state, and that there is a close connection
between Russias territorial size and its ability to control non-Russian impe-
rial borderlands, on the one hand, and Russias status as a great power, on
the other. The West understands this connection and thus, historically,
including during the Great War, has targeted Russias imperial peripheries.
The interpretation of the Great War advanced by Narochnitskaia has

the Russian World Foundation. A statement about the war placed on the
foundations website in connection with its 2011 proposal to commemorate
war victims on 1 August, and issued in the name of the foundation by the
head of its Analytic Department, in fact, reproduced, practically word for
word, the key points of Narochnitskaias televised lectures. When insti-
tuting the day of commemoration, as suggested by the foundation, Putin
echoed Narochnitskaias representation of the Brest-Litovsk treaty as an
90
One particular argument of Narrachnitskaias narrative has had an espe-
cially far-reaching impact. This is the argument that draws parallels between
video_id/156450 (accessed 14 January 2013). The foundation Historical Perspective

published an edited collection on World War I under the same title as Narochnitskaias
lectures: E. N. Rudaia, ed., Zabytaia voina i predannye geroi (Moscow: Veche, 2011).

whose stated aim is to publicize the ideas of the greatest scientists and scholars of
today.
90

founding congress of the Russian Military-Historical Society, Vstrecha Vladimira

obshchestva, 20 March 2013, http://echo.msk.ru/blog/echomsk/1035290-echo/ (accessed 23
March 2013).
282 VERA TOLZ
the behavior of unpatriotic liberals and revolutionaries during the Great War,
on the one hand, and the activities of the anti-Putin opposition today, on the
other. She warns that the collapse of the state and the civil war experienced by
Russia in the early 20th century could be repeated today if opposition forces are
not kept in check. Narochnitskaia is not the only proponent of this idea, but she is
one of the most vocal. This line of argument was relentlessly pursued during the
2012 presidential election campaign by the two main state-controlled Russian
television channels.91 (It should be noted that in this campaign Narochnitskaia
acted as Putins authorized representative (doverennoe litso) and proudly
claimed that the main presidential candidate found my views appealing.92)
At the same time, the positions of particular public intellectuals, however

instance, was opposed to the Kremlins 2012 decision to dissolve the Presi-

Russias Interests; she also continues to maintain that the evidence regarding
Soviet responsibility for Katyn is not conclusive, even though the Kremlin
now explicitly acknowledges this responsibility.93 In turn, statements by top

and interpretations advanced by various public intellectuals; and the choice
of references and their combinations vary depending on the demands of the

On the surface, the new narrative of Russian history, which started to
enjoy the Kremlins support in 2010 and in which the Great War, rather than the
October Revolution, becomes the event determining Russian and world history
the deaths of Soviet POWs in Polish detention camps constituted a prominent

example of Russian victimhood. Most importantly, this earlier narrative

of the Soviet regime. The new narrative is explicitly critical of many Bolshevik
91

the two state-controlled Russian television channels, Rossiia and Channel 1, within
the framework of the project Russian Television Coverage of Inter-Ethnic Cohesion

Humanities Research Council and directed by Stephen Hutchings and Vera Tolz at the
University of Manchester, UK, in 201013.
92

the presidential election candidates, V. V. Zhirinovskii, in which Putins side was
represented by Narochnitskaia. http://www.1tv.ru/news/election/198450 (accessed 9
January 2013).
93
http://narochnitskaia.ru/commission-on-antifraud-stories/v-fevrale-2012-goda-ukazom-
WYLaPKLU[HYVZZPPI`PSHWYLRYHZOOLUHKL`H[LSUVZ[RVTPZZPPWVWYV[P]VKL`Z[]P`\MHSZPRH[ZPPPZ[VYPP
v-ushherb-interesam-rossii.html; http://www.kp.ru/daily/24350.3/538016/; http://narochnitskaia.ru/
news/voyna-za-velikuyu-otechestvennuyu.html?view=full (accessed 9 January 2013).
policies, which are now represented as operating against the interests of the
Russian people. The earlier narrative was informed by the equation of Russia
and the Soviet Union, whereas the current one entails a clearer separation
between the two. The new narrative is also clearer about Russias identity as

Russian national history. And yet, there are also striking similarities between
the two narratives, which are related to the fact that the set of broad ideological
frameworks through which historical events are understood remains the
same. Both narratives represent the West as a long-term foe of Russia, aim-
ing to undermine it with the help of internal enemies and by targeting Russias
borderland regions; this West is equated above all with the Anglo-Saxon

Europe is maintained. In the new narrative, Russian identity continues to
be closely linked to its imperial past, even if in this narrative tsarist Russia
constitutes a more important point of reference in the construction of the
historical pedigree of the contemporary Russian state than the Soviet Union.
Conclusions
During most of the 1990s top political leaders in Eastern Europe and Russia
refrained from systematically exploiting history for political purposes. This
proved to be only a temporary development; it was followed by vicious

and Eastern Europe came to the conclusion that history could and should
be used systematically to address current political issues, both domestic,
in order to facilitate national consolidation of societies and to delegitimize
political competitors, and in foreign policy, with the aim of achieving greater

munist leaders were also not particularly keen to dwell on problematic pages
in their nations histories; this tendency was particularly striking in the case

First signs of a departure from the situation of the early post-Communist
period, when the instrumental use of history was not a particularly important
tool of foreign and domestic policies, started to be visible already at the very

perception of how domestic problems, including those of community and
identity building, should be addressed in societies which had been experi-
encing far-reaching and often traumatic social and economic changes. Under
the circumstances, negative images of the Other again appeared to be in
demand. For the Russian side, this was the West, to which ungrateful East
European neighbors, now joining Western political structures, were added.
For East European states the role of the Other was played by Russia. In these
284 VERA TOLZ
representations of the Other, any distinctions between past and present often
were suspended and deemed irrelevant for understanding the current situation.
The Russian campaign around Soviet POWs from 2000 onwards, while

narratives of victimhood, was also a response to the fact that right-wing
politicians in Poland, who in 2001 founded the PiS Party, already in the
last years of the 1990s overtly began to use history for political purposes.
The pluralism of opinion in Poland at the time was overlooked; instead the
right-wing stance was represented as the dominant one by the Russian side.

memory politics in Russia and Poland increased. Particularly radical pro-
nouncements, including the exaggerated rhetoric of genocide on both sides,
were interpreted in the media of each country as inevitably representing the

representatives of the political elites insisted that only a single interpretation

politics around particular historical episodes. At the same time, each side
accused the other of acting according to the practices associated with the
historical ills of modern Europeimperialism and ethnic chauvinism. The
clash of the Russian and Polish memory projects was further exacerbated
by the fact that Russian political elites also referred to the complexity of
the situation in Europe in the 20th century in order to normalize Stalinism.

since 2010 by the very top of the Russian political establishment, display

POWs, in which, it appears, the Kremlin lost interest at precisely that time.

could have a negative impact on Russias international image. The new state-
sponsored Great War project aims instead to create a positive image of Russia
on the European international scene, using soft power tools and strategies.
The project aims to promote Russias image as a leading European power
and to build bridges with various communities outside Russias borders. An
integral element of the campaign is the dissociation of contemporary Russia
from the Soviet Union; and so the Bolshevik regime is criticized for dis-
torting the legacy of the war and acting against Russian national interests.
And yet the two Russian memory projects also have similarities, indicating
that the changes in Russias history politics since 2010 have limits. Champions of
Great War memory from the Russian World Foundation and some think tanks
with ties to the Kremlin continue to depict the West as Russias historical
adversary and see Russias greatness as inseparable from its legacy of impe-
rial domination. In both projects history and memory are deliberately

Kremlin and the state-controlled media promote, represent their memory

retrieving activities as objective historical research. In these narratives
temporality and space are collapsed; events from the past (related to tsarist
and Soviet times) become part of the present, in which the nation, equated
with the imagined Russian world around the globe, is, as ever, under threat.
Most importantly, both memory projects discussed here indicate that
the Kremlins own position on history politics and on the role of historical
narratives in the formation of collective identities has been shaped by a
consistent overestimation of the potential impact of top-down campaigns
and the power of a national government to shape collective memories. It is
in fact hardly surprising that crude, overtly far-fetched campaigns around
the plight of Soviet POWs, about which no continuity of national collective
memory exists and about which mass personal memory is also absent,
have failed to create a viable site of memory, as they have not solicited any
wider public interest. This is also likely to be a problem with the project of
making the memory of the Great War itself an important element not just
of a Kremlin-supported politics of history, but also of a broader memory

to those whom the Russian state calls compatriots abroad. Even here,
however, the main target audience of current commemorative initiatives
(Russian speakers in the Baltic states) does not possess a living memory

Notes on Contributors
Tomas Balkelis is Senior Research Fellow in History at Vilnius University,

Lithuania.

Borislav Chernev is Teaching Fellow in Russian History at the University of

Newcastle, UK.
Andrei Cusco is a Research Associate at the Department of History and

Philosophy of the State University of Moldova and a Lecturer at the
Department of History and Geography of the Moldova State Pedagogical
University, Chisinau, Moldova.
Ilya Gerasimov is Executive Editor of Ab Imperio Quarterly.
Sergey Glebov is Assistant Professor of History at Smith College and Amherst

Mark von Hagen is Professor of History and Global Studies and Director of

University, Tempe, Arizona, USA.
Eric Lohr is Professor and Susan Carmel Lehrman Chair of Russian History
and Culture at American University, Washington, DC, USA.
Anthony Heywood is a Professor of History at the University of Aberdeen.
David MacLaren McDonald is the Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Professor of

Russian History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Alexei Miller is Professor of History at the European University, St. Petersburg,

Russia, and recurrent Visiting Professor at the Central European University,
Budapest, Hungary.
288 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

USA.
Alexander M. Semyonov is Professor of History at the National Research

University-Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, Russia.
John W. Steinberg is a Professor of History at Austin Peay State University,

Tennessee.
Ronald G. Suny is Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political

History at the University of Michigan, USA; Senior Research Fellow at the
National Research University-Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia;
and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of
Chicago, USA.
Vera Tolz is Sir William Mather Professor of Russian Studies at the University
of Manchester, UK.

The Empire and Nationalism at War Vera Tolz

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The Empire and Nationalism at War

Russias Great War and Revolution

Series General Editors: Anthony Heywood, David MacLaren McDonald, and

Bloomington, Indiana, 2014

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Slavica Publishers [Tel.] 1-812-856-4186

From the Series Editors .........................................................................................vii

Ronald Grigor Suny

Introduction: Bringing Empire Back ............................................................. 1

Mark von Hagen

The Entangled Eastern Front in the First World War .................................. 9

War of Decolonization: The Russian Empire in the Great War ............... 49

The Role of the First World War in the Competition between

War Nationalism ............................................................................................. 91

Central Asia (191620): A Kaleidoscope of Local

Nationalism and War in a Contested Borderland:

Ukrainization and Its Contradictions in the Context of

What Russian Progressives Expected from the War ................................189

Postwar Russian Eurasianisms Anticolonial Critique

Memories of the Great War and the Polish-Lithuanian

Modern Russian Memory of the Great War, 191420 .............................. 257

Notes on Contributors ......................................................................................... 287

Origins of the Project

the laws of history. Non-Soviet scholars, often hampered by restricted access

If the concept behind Russias Great War and Revolution

collections. In 2005, Routledge published The Russian Revolution of 1905:

Russias Great War and Revolution.

of edited collections, varying in format and approach, that will provide a

in developing school and lesson plans. Finally, alongside its appearance in

valuable research resource for their students.

Conceptualization and Organization

As noted previously, an underlying aim of this series is to encourage fur-

consequences for the areas subsequent history. In the interest of providing as

a variety of interpretations and periodizations, inviting readers to draw their

for publication, the editorial board adopted a two-tier review exercise.

and institutions. The editorial board owes a special debt of gratitude

His contributions helped ensure the success of the summer editorial

Principals Interdisciplinary Fund to facilitate our inaugural board meeting

Ronald Grigor Suny

encouraged the aspirations of ethnicities. NationalitiesJews, Poles, Arme-

Following the collapse of empires and the foundation of new nation-

recovery of the territory of its own herrenfolk

into armed units. In a clear case of unintended consequences the formation

refugee. Ethnicity could be advantageous in some instances, as when one

Looking at the Great War as an early phase of decolonization, as Joshua

War, one would think, is indelibly etched in peoples memories. But

guinary engagement of empire and nations that brought down centuries-old

Mark von Hagen

War and Entangled Histories

The approach of entangled history, which overlaps with transnational and

This essay considers some of the possibilities of adapting the entangled

 (New York: Croom Helm, 1976).

populations than was the case in the west.

Prewar Military and Diplomatic Entanglements

(New York: Norton, 1975), 402.

a good illustration of entangled relationships, above all with Germany and

University Press, 1976).

technologies. Businesses, too, had their own intelligence services that

eastern empires westward. In addition, nearly all the empires experienced

The First World War: Germany and

Cultural, Religious, and Ideological Entanglements

Cambridge University Press, 2004); for Petrograd, see Lars T. Lih,

World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 56.

womens movement.25 Political movements also created international networks

recovery of the territory of its own herrenfolk

(New York: Croom Helm, 1976).

(New York: Oxford

Jahrbcher fr Geschichte Osteuropas, N.F., 22, 3 (1974): 390411.

Jahrbcher fr Geschichte Osteuropas, N.F., 14 (1966): 36266.

(New York: W. Morrow, 1939).

Anthony Pagden,

Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and

(DeKalb: Northern Illinois University

Jahrbcher fr Geschichte Osteuropas 22, 3 (1974): 390.