Abstract
One thing historians of the First World War and of Imperial Russia can collectively agree upon is that the Russian wartime experience is a neglected subject, partly because of the ideologically motivated historiographical boycott of the subject by Soviet historians before 1991.
It must be said, however, that this is a very big topic and the centenary book under review is of moderate length, with not all the text actually devoted to the events of the war. It is not a full-scale history of Russia in the Great War along the lines of Norman Stone’s classic, The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (1975), which remains the definitive account in English. The book will be of limited value to those interested in the military or operational side. The author makes the remarkable (and presumably serious) admission that he ‘came to share the view of many [sic] military historians that accounts of war that ignore combat leave out something essential’ (p. vii). He does provide essential coverage of the campaigns, the volume is well-provided well illustrated with maps.
The treatment of non-military aspects is original. The author includes in his sweep of ambitious intentions that of writing a social history of the war, describing the lives of Russian contemporaries – ‘how Osip and Mariana lost their cows’ (p. vii). The social side has indeed long been neglected, and the more examples of military and civilian experience that can be obtained, especially from newly accessible primary sources, the better. The approach here is refreshingly different from classic accounts of the wartime background to the revolution, centred on Lenin and the Bolsheviks (whether they are taken as a positive or negative force) – although their role is well outlined here. The various aspects of Russia’s ‘home-front’ crisis are not always given the appropriate weighting. The breakdown of order in the western territories (Belorussia and western Ukraine) after the loss of Poland in 1915 was important, but it was not the cause of the revolution. The discussion of prisoners of war and medical provision in chapter 4 is groundbreaking and valuable, but those developments were also not, despite the considerable space devoted to them, central causes of the breakdown of the Tsarist system.
Significantly this volume is part of a series cleverly entitled ‘Greater War’. However, the general argument set out in the lengthy introduction, to the effect that the volume sets its subject in the ‘world-historical process of twentieth century decolonization’ (pp. vii, 5–7), is not altogether convincing. To say that the First World War was primarily caused by imperial rivalry, in the sense of competition for colonies, is hardly new (going back to the Lenin–Hobson theory of imperialism), nor is it a sufficient explanation.
The narrower question is how far this ‘model’ is appropriate for Russia, especially in an introductory text. The Russian crisis was not caused by pressure from its own ‘colonies’ (e.g. Poland and Ukraine). It is certainly true that any assessment of Russia in the First World War needs to take into account the strong ‘Asiatic’ (or Eurasian) dimension. However, it is stretching the argument to suggest, as the author seems to, that the 1916 rebellion in Central Asia was a root cause of the state crisis of the following year (pp. 234–5). But a much larger point is surely that the ‘Russian’ state had recovered most of its peripheral possessions (‘colonies’) by the spring of 1921, and it survived as an ‘imperial’ state (in both an autocratic and a multi-ethnic sense) for another 70 years. So while the scheme presented in the introduction might arguably have a broad relevance to twentieth-century European history, Russia would be the exception rather than the rule. It seems, as a result, unhelpful (or at least confusing) to attempt to look at the Russian experience ‘through the lens of decolonization’.
A questioning of the overall scheme of the book should not, however, be taken as general criticism. In a short volume the author does efficiently outline the major aspects of the wartime situation and he has raised a number of issues neglected in classic – Soviet and Western – accounts of the Russian experience. He does note important links between the world war and the revolution. The book was intended for ‘multiple audiences’, and it deserves to be read widely and with interest.