War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War

250 Pages·2013·3.44 MB·English

by  Robert Gerwarth

War in Peace
Paramilitary Violence in Europe after
the Great War
Edited by
ROBERT GERWARTH AND JOHN HORNE
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ISBN 978—0—19—965491—8
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Acknowledgements
This book is the result of collaborative efforts over a long period. Most of the
authors assembled in this volume met at two themed workshops, held in Dublin
in 2008 and 2010. The editors would like to thank the participants and commen­
tators at these workshops who provided extensive critical input. Over the last three
years, the collaborative project between the Centres for War Studies in Trinity Col­
lege Dublin and University College Dublin that led to this volume has received
generous funding, first from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and
Social Sciences (IRCHSS), then from the European Research Council (ERC). The
editors of this book would like to take this opportunity to record their gratitude to
these funding bodies. On a more personal level, we have benefitted greatly from
working with the postdoctoral fellows affiliated with this project—Julia Eichen-
berg, John Paul Newman, and, more recently, Ugur Umit Ungor, James Kitchen,
and Tomas Balkelis—as well as from the skilled administrative help we received
from Christina Griessler and Suzanne d’Arcy. We would also like to thank Elaine
Cullen for drawing the maps.
Robert Gerwarth and John Horne
Dublin, October 2011

Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
List of Maps x
List of Contributors xi
1. Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War: An Introduction 1
Robert Gerwarth and John Horne
PART I. REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION
2. Paramilitary Violence in Russia’s Civil Wars, 1918-1920 21
William G. Rosenberg
3. Bolshevism as Fantasy: Fear of Revolution and Counter-Revolutionary
Violence, 1917-1923 40
Robert Gerwarth and John Horne
4. Fighting the Red Beast: Counter-Revolutionary Violence in the
Defeated States of Central Europe 52
Robert Gerwarth
5. Revolution, Civil War, and Terror in Finland in 1918 72
Pertti Haapala and Marko Tikka
6. Paramilitary Violence in Italy: The Rationale of Fascism and the
Origins ofTotalitarianism 85
Emilio Gentile
PART II. NATIONS, BORDERLANDS AND
ETHNIC VIOLENCE
7. Bands of Nation Builders? Insurgency and Ideology in the
Ukrainian Civil War 107
Serhy Yekelchyk
8. Turning Citizens into Soldiers: Baltic Paramilitary Movements
after the Great War 126
Tomas Balkelis
9. The Origins, Attributes and Legacies of Paramilitary Violence
in the Balkans 145
John Paul Newman
10. Paramilitary Violence in the Collapsing Ottoman Empire 164
Ugur Umit Ungor
..j Table of Contents
11. Soldiers to Civilians, Civilians to Soldiers: Poland and Ireland
184
after the First World War
Julia Eichenberg
12. The British Culture of Paramilitary Violence in the Irish War
200
of Independence
Anne Dolan
13. Defending Victory: Paramilitary Politics in France, 1918-1926.
216
A Counter-example
John Horne
235
Index
List of Illustrations
1. Red Army soldiers in front of the headquarter building at the Voronezh
front in 1918. Russian State Documentary Film & Foto Archive (RGAKFD),
Moscow. 22
2. ‘France would decline if it allowed Bolshevism to enter’. Poster used during
a French industrialists’ campaign against Bolshevism, 1920. MHC-BDIC, Paris,
by permission. 46
3. ‘Soviet Russia and the Hunger Catastrophe’. German poster of 1921
portrays famine as a key experience of Bolshevism. MHC-BDIC, Paris,
by permission. 47
4. Poster of Rudi Feld: ‘The Danger of Bolshevism’, 1919. MHC-BDIC, Paris,
by permission. 48
5. After the fall of the Munich Councils Republic in 1919, Freikorps soldiers
march off arrested revolutionaries through the streets of Munich.
SZ Photo Archive, Munich. 61
6. Hungarian White militias hang a revolutionary, 1919. Hungarian
National Archives. 64
7. Finnish Red Guards and a Russian sailor pose before the Battle of Pekkala
in February 1918. Courtesy ofVapriikki Photo Archives. 73
8. Victorious White Guards after the end of the Battle of Tampere. Courtesy of
Vapriikki Photo Archives. 83
9. On the eve of the March on Rome Mussolini and his followers in Naples
in October 1922. Private collection of Emilio Gentile. 86
10. Otaman Yukhym Bozhko with his officers and the writer Osyn Makovei,
April 1919. Courtesy of the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine. 108
11. A group of Lithuanian Riflemen posing in 1920. Central State Archive
of Lithuania. 127
12. Jovan Babunski in full Cetnik regalia. Private collection of John Paul Newman. 146
13. Armenian paramilitaries in the South Caucasus, 1919. Private collection of
Ugur Umit Ungor. 165
14. Beat the Bolshevik! Polish Poster during the Russo-Polish War, 1920. 185
15. Polish Insurgents in Upper Silesia, 1920. SZ Photo Archive, Munich. 186
16. Group of three Black and Tans. National Library of Ireland,
Hogan Collection, HOGW 123. Courtesy of National Library of Ireland. 201
17. A ‘culture of victory’ threatened with defeat. Drawing by Maxime Real del
Sarte on the front cover of the journal of The League for the Union of
Frenchmen Who Have Not Reneged on Victory, 9 March 1924. Private
collection of John Horne. 217
List of Maps
1. Freikorps activity in the ‘shatter zones’ of East Central Europe,
2. Ukraine as imagined by Ukrainian nationalists.
3. The Balkans after the First World War.
4. Turkey and the Caucasus.
List of Contributors
Tomas Balkelis is a European Research Council funded Postdoctoral Fellow at the UCD
Centre for War Studies. After gaining his PhD from the University of Toronto he worked
as a lecturer at the University of Nottingham and as an AHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Man­
chester University. He is the author of The Making of Modern Lithuania (London, 2009)
which was recently translated into Lithuanian. He has published articles in Past and Present
and Contemporary European History. He has a particular interest in the history of national­
ism and violence in Eastern Europe (Baltics, Russia, and Poland).
Anne Dolan lectures in modern Irish history at Trinity College Dublin. She is author of
Commemorating the Irish Civil War: History and Memory, 1922—2000 (Cambridge, 2003),
and, with Cormac O’Malley, is co-editor of ‘No Surrender Here!’: The Civil War Papers of
Ernie O’Malley (Dublin, 2008). She is currently working on a book on violence in post­
war Ireland.
Julia Eichenberg is a DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow at the Humboldt University Berlin. She
has published articles on Irish and Polish paramilitaries and has recently published her first
book on Polish veterans of World War I, Kämpfen für Frieden und Fürsorge: Polnische Veter­
anen des Ersten Weltkriegs und ihre internationalen Kontakte, 1918-1939 (Munich, 2011).
Emilio Gentile is Professor of History at Sapienza University of Rome. He is an inter­
nationally recognized historian of fascism whose books, such as the The Sacralization of Poli­
tics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA, 1996) or Politics as Religion (Princeton, NJ, 2006) have
appeared in various languages.
Robert Gerwarth is Professor of Modern History at University College Dublin and Direc­
tor of UCD’s Centre for War Studies. He is the author and editor of several books on the
history of political violence in twentieth-century Europe, including, most recently, the
biography Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Reinhard Heydrich (New Haven and London,
2011) and (with Donald Bloxham), Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cam­
bridge, 2011).
Pertti Haapala is Professor of Finnish History at the University of Tampere, and Director
of the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Historical Research. He is the author and editor of
several important publications on the Finnish Civil War, most recently of the book Tampere
1918: A Town in a Civil War (Tampere, 2010).
John Home is Professor of Modern European History at Trinity College Dublin and
board member of the Research Centre of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Peronne. He
has published widely on the history of the Great War, most recently (ed.) A Companion to
World War One (Oxford, 2010), and (ed.), Vers la guerre totale: le tournant de 1914-1915
(Paris, 2010).
John Paul Newman is Lecturer in Modern European History at the National University of
Ireland, Maynooth. He works on the social and cultural history of war in the modern Bal­
kans and is currently preparing a monograph on South Slav veterans of the First World War
and their impact on state and society in interwar Yugoslavia.
William G. Rosenberg is Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan. He has published
widely on the Russian Revolution, including the book, Liberals in the Russian Revolution and (with
ü List of Contributors
x
Marilyn B. Young; Princeton, 1974) Transforming Russia and China: Revolutionary Struggle m
the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1982). He is also the editor of Bolshevik Visions: 77*? Cultural Revo­
lution in Soviet Russia (Ann Arbor, 1990).
Marko Tikka is a Lecturer in History at the University of Tampere. He is the author of the
book, Kenttaoikeudet: Valittomdt rankaisutoimet Suomen sisallissodassa 1918 (Court-Martial
without Law: Punitive Measures in the Finnish Civil War of 1918) (Helsinki, 2004).
Ujmr Ümit Üngor received his Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam and is currently
Lecturer in History at Utrecht University and the Center for Holocaust and Genocide
Studies in Amsterdam. His main area of interest is the historical sociology of mass violence
and ethnic conflict. His most recent publications include Confiscation and Destruction: The
Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property (London, 2011), and the award-winning The Mak­
ing of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950 (Oxford, 2011).
Serhy Yekelchyk is an Associate Professor of History at University of Victoria. He is the
author and editor of several acclaimed books on Eastern Europe such as Ukraine: Birth of a
Modern Nation (New York, 2007), Stalins Empire of Memory: Russian-Ukramian Relations
in the Soviet Historical Imagination (Toronto, 2004), and, as co-editor. Europes Last Fron­
tier? Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine between Russia and the European Union (New York,
2008).