Table Of ContentRussia’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
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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.
