Russia's Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914-22: Book 3. National Disintegration PDF
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Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22. Book 3: National Disintegration Russia’s Great War and Revolution As we mark the 100th anniversary of the First World War, public attention has turned to the conflict’s significance in shaping human history. Centennial commemorations have inspired researchers to revisit and reflect on the war and its meanings, and have provided a singular opportunity for scholars to engage, educate, and sometimes re-educate general audiences. These opportunities have particular importance for historians of Russia. For most of the 20th century Russia’s Great War was a historical afterthought. Overshadowed by the Bolsheviks’ revolution, Civil War, and consolidation of power, the war took a back seat within professional scholarship as Soviet and Western experts focused their energy on explaining the origins and rise of Russian Communism. But in recent years researchers have begun to re- examine and re-evaluate the significance and meaning of the war for Russia. Buttressed by new archival findings and freed from the ideological baggage of earlier historical debates, they have begun to analyze Russia’s Great War not as a prelude to “Red October,” but as a key phenomenon in its own right, a colossal human catastrophe that plunged Russia into a violent “continuum of crisis” that would last from 1914 to the early 1920s, and, in the longer term, initiated the transformation of Eurasia and much of the world. “Russia’s Great War and Revolution” is a multinational scholarly effort that aims to promote and transform understanding of Russia’s “continuum of crisis” during the years 1914–22. With over 250 contributors worldwide, this project seeks to take stock of the past century of historical research, re- conceptualize core concepts such as the traditional view of the 1917 events as a watershed in Russian and global history, stimulate new directions of research, and enhance scholarly and public awareness of Russia¹s contributions to the history of the 20th century. Series General Editors: Anthony Heywood, David MacLaren McDonald, and John W. Steinberg R ’ H F W R , ussias ome Ront in aR and evolution 1914–22 B 3: n d ook ational isintegRation e dited By C R HRistopHeR ead p W eteR aldRon a l dele indenmeyR Bloomington, Indiana, 2018 Each contribution © 2018 by its author. All rights reserved. Cover design by Tracey Theriault. Cover: Peace to Cottages, War on Palaces, 1919 (w/c on paper), Chagall, Marc (1887–1985) / Chagall ® / © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018/ Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia / Bridgeman Images. ISBN: 978-089357-427-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Russia’s home front in war and revolution, 1914-22 / edited by Sarah Badcock, Liudmila G. Novikova, Aaron B. Retish. pages cm. -- (Russia’s great war and revolution, 1914-1922 ; vol. 3) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-89357-429-1 1. World War, 1914-1918--Soviet Union. 2. World War, 1914-1918--Russia. 3. Soviet Union--History--Revolution, 1917-1921. 4. Russia--Social conditions--1801-1917. 5. Soviet Union--Social conditions--1917-1945. I. Badcock, Sarah, 1974- editor. II. Novikova, Liudmila G., 1973- editor. III. Retish, Aaron B. DK264.8.R88 2015 947.084’1--dc23 2015025721 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] [email protected] USA [www] http://www.slavica.com/ Contents From the Series Editors ......................................................................................... ix Acknowledgments ............................................................................................. xvii Christopher Read Preface ............................................................................................................ xix Peter Waldron Introduction: The End of Tsarism ................................................................. 1 The Russian Economy Mark Harrison and Andrei Markevich Russia’s Home Front, 1914–22: The Economy ............................................ 23 Mark Lawrence Schrad The Revolutionary Implications of Russian Alcohol Prohibition: 1914–25 ........................................................................ 45 Anthony J. Heywood Imperial Russia’s Railways at War, 1914–17: Challenges, Results, Costs, and Legacy ...................................................... 65 Brandon C. Schneider Responding to the People: The Borisov Commission and the (Misnamed) Five-Year Railroad Construction Plan of 1916 ..................... 93 vi Contents Andrey Mamaev The Great War and Revolution in Cities: Russian Self- Government and the Municipal Economy in 1917–18. A Capital and a Provincial City (Moscow and Viatka) ........................... 107 A Land and Population in Crisis Alain Blum Of Populations and Wars ............................................................................ 133 Andy Bruno What Does it Mean to Make a Land Free? Toward an Environmental History of the Russian Revolution ............. 157 Brian Bonhomme Russia’s Forests in War and Revolution: Resources, Impacts, Plans, and Realities ................................................... 179 Elizabeth Brainerd Marriage and Divorce in Revolutionary Russia: A Demographic Analysis ............................................................................ 207 Continuity and Upheaval in Russia’s Social Classes Matthew Rendle The Tsarist Elites in Revolutionary Russia ............................................... 241 Stuart Finkel Intelligentsia Conceptions: Duty and Obshchestvennost´ in War and Revolution ................................ 267 Contents vii Colleen M. Moore Land for Service: Russian Peasant Views of a Postwar Land Settlement during World War I ..................................... 297 Dimitrii Churakov Labor Activism in the Early Period of the Soviet Regime’s Formation .......................................................................... 321 Simon Pirani The Politics of Working-Class Dissent in Early Soviet Russia, 1920–22 ....................................................................... 351 Notes on Contributors ........................................................................................ 373 From the Series Editors Origins of the Project Since its inception in 2006 Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914–22 has taken shape through the collaboration of an international community of historians interested in the history of World War I’s understudied eastern theater. Timed to coincide with the centenary of the Great War—and, by extension, the revolu- tions it helped unleash—this 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 War, the ”Russian” part of the conflict received little sustained attention until 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 Great War of the Fatherland, the victory over Nazi Germany, as the defining moment in Soviet history. As a result, the First World War appeared as the final folly of an outmoded bourgeois-noble autocracy, doomed to collapse by 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 to see the war as either the epilogue to the former or the prologue to the latter. Western historians often focused on the war experience of their own states— most often Britain and its imperial possessions, France, or Germany—or 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 Germany’s “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 the Soviet state and the late empire in a different light. Long-closed archives— particularly for military and international history—became 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 Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 3: National Disintegration. Christopher Read, Peter Waldron, and Adele Lindenmeyr, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2018, ix–xv.
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