Joshua Sanborn,Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire

In crisp, efficient, even entertaining prose, Joshua Sanborn not only provides us with the most interesting book to date on Russia’s First World War, but also with an original reinterpretation of the revolutions of 1917. This book will challenge specialists to rethink their views, and it engages several broader comparative and European fields.

Sanborn’s core argument takes on deeply ensconced assumptions about imperial collapse, nationalism, and revolution. There is a long tradition in studies of late imperial Russia of identifying tensions in society, culture, and politics, and showing how they grew over time, making revolution more likely. Likewise, the most influential theorists of nationalism over the past decades have explained national movements as rooted in the social and cultural changes brought by modernization. Pressures build inexorably, and it only takes the right circumstance for them to prevail. Sanborn instead puts nearly all the explanatory weight on state failure, which he sees as the primary and indispensible cause, which in turn enables nationalist and revolutionary political entrepreneurs to take the field and, against all odds, win.

So rather than seek the origins of 1917 in long-gestating revolutionary and national movements, he seeks the origins of state collapse and decolonization. His story of decolonization begins in the Balkans and enters the Russian imperial space in the zones of military deployment during the First World War. Historians have long noted the importance of the declaration of military rule over civilians in a broad swathe of territory deep to the interior of the zone of military activity. Sanborn’s insight is that military rule did not bring a more intrusive and controlling form of state oversight, but rather, in many areas, was part of the dramas of decolonization and state collapse. He paints a picture of lawlessness and chaos in the front zone and well into the interior as a kind of regional state failure. Imperial government officials, police, and other representatives of state authority sometimes just packed up and left. After the empire went home, local associations took over. In Polish areas, the nationalist National Democrats took control through local resident committees. The process, he argues, was in essence a form of decolonization throughout the western borderlands of the empire.

Likewise, Sanborn’s account of the central government is one of dysfunction and failure in response to the pressures of 1915–16. Hewing close to the arguments of the liberal opponents of the regime, Sanborn argues that public organizations partly filled the void, especially in the provision of aid to refugees, caring for injured soldiers, and in the organization of defense production. Because the government maintained a mostly hostile attitude toward these groups, their mobilization contributed to weakening the central state.

Sanborn efficiently surveys the multiple contributions to state collapse of the 1917 February revolution and the disastrous decisions to rapidly decentralize authority and dismantle the police and tsarist administration. Waves of crime, soldier mutiny, and national movements for autonomy or independence quickly emerged. Sanborn reframes the Kornilov affair in August 1917 as the first major case of ‘warlordism’ – a phenomenon that would greatly expand after the October 1917 revolution and during the civil war era. The conclusion races through the kaleidoscopic events of empire and state collapse in the months following the October revolution.

In terms of the key arguments about the centrality of state collapse and decolonization, I found the book to be a bit out of balance. Before 1917, the state collapsed in places (at the front, in Central Asia), but one could argue that for most of the country, the state was stronger, more extensive, and more ambitious in its claims by the end of 1916 than it had ever been. While decolonization affected a large chunk of the empire in 1915–16, one could plausibly claim that 90 per cent of state collapse happened after February 1917 – more as a result of revolution than as a direct outcome of the war. Yet the post-February 1917 analysis only accounts for about a fifth of the pages in the book. Certainly the field needs a book that traces the origins of state collapse and decolonization directly to concrete experiences of total war, but in the end perhaps this book swings the pendulum a bit too far and underestimates the weight we should still place on the revolutions of 1917. On the other hand, his book provides an important challenge to the broadly held view that the primary impact of total war is to expand the state’s role, claims, and capacity. This book should inspire scholars of all states at war to look more closely for the ways that total war can also fracture and weaken states (even if they do not ultimately fail).

But this would perhaps be a misreading of the book and its purpose. Sanborn set out as much to write a new, accessible overview of Russia’s experience of the First World War as to defend a single argument. In the former aim, he has succeeded magnificently, producing a book that will challenge specialists and stimulate lively discussion in the classroom. If you need to pick one and only one book to assign about Russia’s First World War I, this is it.