Experiencing Russia's Civil War

by Raleigh, Donald J.

• ISBN13: 9780691113203
• ISBN10: 0691113203
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-10-28
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

This book is the only comprehensive history of the total experience of the Russian Civil War. Focusing on the key Volga city of Saratov and the surrounding region, Donald Raleigh is the first historian to fully show how the experience of civil war embedded itself into both the people's and the state's outlook and behavior. He demonstrates how and why the programs and ideals that had propelled the Bolsheviks into power were so quickly lost and the repressive Soviet party-state was born. Experiencing Russia's Civil Waris based on exhaustive use of previously classified local and central archives. It is also bold and ambitious in its breadth of thematic coverage, dealing with all aspects of the war experience from institutional evolution and demographics to survival strategies. Complicating our understanding of this formative period, Raleigh provides compelling evidence that many features of the Soviet system that we associate with the Stalin era were already adumbrated and practiced by the early 1920s, as Bolshevism became closed to real alternatives. Raleigh interprets this as the consequence of a complex dynamic shaped by Russia's political tradition and culture, Bolshevik ideology, and dire political, economic, and military crises starting with World War I and strongly reinforced by the indelible, mythologized experience of survival in the Civil War. Fluidly written, replete with new information, and always engaged with important questions, this is history finely wrought.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
List of Tables	xi
Acknowledgments	xiii
Glossary and Abbreviations Used in Archival Citations	xvii
Introduction: Experiencing Russia's Civil War	1	(14)
PART ONE: POLITICS
Revolution on the Volga	15	(28)
Languages of Power: How the Saratov Bolsheviks Imagined Their Enemies	43	(31)
The Rise and Fall of the Saratov ``Republic''	74	(33)
Cadres Resolve All: The Communists in Power	107	(35)
Co-optation amid Repression: The Revolutionary Communists and Other Socialist Parties in Saratov Province	142	(33)
PART TWO: SOCIETY AND REVOLUTIONARY CULTURE
A Community in Disarray, a Community in the Making	175	(33)
The Cultural Practices of Provincial Communism	208	(38)
Narratives of Self and Other: Saratov's Bourgeoisie	246	(36)
Not Seeing Like a State: The Red Guard Assault on Capital	282	(30)
Peasants in a Workers' Revolution	312	(36)
``Given His Class Position, a Worker Can Be Nothing but a Communist''	348	(31)
A Provincial Kronstadt, Another Tambov?	379	(30)
Conclusion	409	(8)
Bibliographical Essay	417	(8)
Index	425