Russia's Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914-22: Book 2. The Experience of War and Revolution [3] 0893574260, 9780893574260

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Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22. Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution

Russia’s Great War and Revolution Vol. 1, bk. 1 Murray Frame, Boris Kolonitskii, Steven G. Marks, and Melissa K. Stockdale, eds., Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914–22: Popular Culture, the Arts, and Institutions (2014) Vol. 1, bk. 2 Murray Frame, Boris Kolonitskii, Steven G. Marks, and Melissa K. Stockdale, eds., Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914–22: Political Culture, Identities, Mentalities, and Memory (2014) Vol. 2 Eric Lohr, Vera Tolz, Alexander Semyonov, and Mark von Hagen, eds., The Empire and Nationalism at War (2014) Vol. 3, bk. 1 Sarah Badcock, Liudmila G. Novikova, and Aaron B. Retish, eds., Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22: Russia’s Revolution in Regional Perspective (2015) Vol. 3, bk. 2 Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds., Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22: The Experience of War and Revolution (2015) Series General Editors: Anthony Heywood, David MacLaren McDonald, and John W. Steinberg

Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22 Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution

Edited by Adele Lindenmeyr Christopher Read Peter Waldron

Bloomington, Indiana, 2016

Each contribution © 2016 by its author. All rights reserved. Cover design by Tracey Theriault. Cover: Emilii Ernestovich Sporius, poster urging citizens to donate to homes for wounded soldiers (1914). ISBN: 978-089357-426-0

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 Indiana University 1430 N. Willis Drive Bloomington, IN 47404-2146 USA

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Contents

From the Series Editors ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ix Acknowledgments ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� xvii Adele Lindenmeyr Introduction ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 1 Map of the Russian Empire in 1914 ���������������������������������������������������������������������� 8 The Mobilization of Russian Society Jude C. Richter Philanthropy and Welfare in Russia, 1914–18 �������������������������������������������� 11 Lynn M. Sargeant The People’s House in War and Revolution ������������������������������������������������ 31 Norihiro Naganawa A Civil Society in a Confessional State? Muslim Philanthropy in the Volga-Urals Region ������������������������������������� 59 Polly Zavadivker Fighting “On Our Own Territory”: The Relief, Rescue, and Representation of Jews in Russia during World War I ����������������������������� 79

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Contents

Anastasiya S. Tumanova Learned Societies in Russia during World War I: Creating a “Home Front” ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� 107 Joseph Bradley Associations in Times of Political Turmoil: Science Societies and the Bolshevik Regime, 1917–22 ����������������������������� 137 Eduard I. Kolchinsky World War I and the Transformation of the Imperial Academy of Sciences ������������������������������������������������������������� 173 Yoshiro Ikeda The Homeland’s Bountiful Nature Heals Wounded Soldiers: Nation Building and Russian Health Resorts during the First World War ������������������������������������������������������������������������� 201 Scott M. Kenworthy Monasticism in War and Revolution �������������������������������������������������������� 221 Susan Grant From War to Peace: Russian Nurses, 1917–22 ������������������������������������������ 251 Communities, Family, and Survival in a Continuum of Crisis Matthias Neumann Mobilizing Children: Youth and the Patriotic War Culture in Kiev during World War I ������������������������������������������������ 273 Liudmila Bulgakova The Phenomenon of the Liberated Soldier’s Wife ����������������������������������� 301 Reinhard Nachtigal Germans in Russia during World War I ��������������������������������������������������� 327



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Sharon A. Kowalsky Transforming Society: Criminologists, Violence, and Family in War and Revolution ������������������������������������������������������������������� 343 Christine Ruane The Kitchen Gardening Campaign in World War I Russia ������������������� 365 Igor V. Narsky and Yulia Y. Khmelevskaya Alcohol in Russia as a Means of Social Integration, Cultural Communication, and Survival during World War I and the Revolution ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� 387 Pavel Vasilyev War, Revolution and Drugs: The “Democratization” of Drug Abuse and the Evolution of Drug Policy in Russia, 1914–24 ������������������ 411 Andy Willimott Everyday Revolution: The Making of the Soviet Urban Communes ������������������������������������������ 431 Mark Conliffe Poltava in Revolution and Civil War: From the Diaries of Vladimir Korolenko and Aleksandr Nesvitskii �������������������������������������� 455 Lynne Hartnett Catastrophe Befell Our House: A Famous Family’s Struggle for Survival in the Russian Civil War ��������������������������������������� 475 Joshua A. Sanborn The Zenith of Russian Progressivism: The Home Front during World War I and the Revolution �������������������� 497 Notes on Contributors ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 509

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 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, ix–xv.

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From the Series Editors

dramatic changes of the era led scholars inside and outside the former USSR to re-examine long-held assumptions about the Soviet state and its origins, accompanied by renewed debate over the viability of the Russian Empire as it adapted to the challenges of modernity. As part of this general re-evaluation, Russia’s Great War became a subject of study in its own right. By the early 21st century, the war years came to be seen as what Peter Holquist termed “a continuum of crisis.” Rather than an abrupt rupture between juxtaposed imperial and So­viet orders, the war now appears not just as a powerful force of disruption, but also a period of intense mobilization—as in the other combatant states—that produced the modes and the “gaze” of statecraft, mass culture, and social control often associated with the totalitarian/authoritarian states of the interwar and Cold War years. Such practices include the nationalization of economies, the increasing application of technology to surveillance, reaching farther than before into the “private” sphere, but also such issues as displaced or refugee populations, racialized nationalist ideologies, and the development of such means as mass propaganda in support of building a utopia in our time. All of these contexts have been brought into sharp focus by the centenary of the Great War. This occasion has engendered a great deal of scholarly and popular interest, attested by the gathering stream of books, exhibits, and memorials that will, over the coming years, mark the milestone anniversaries in the conflict’s history: the war’s outbreak in the summer of 1914 and key mo­ ments enshrined in the historical memories of the combatant states. All of the one-time enemies will honor the millions of dead, wounded, incapacitated, and displaced by the first “war to end all wars.” For the first time, Russians will take part in these rites of commemoration. At the end of 2012, the Russian Federation declared 1 August the annual “Day of Remembrance for the Vic­ tims of the First World War” (Den’ pamiati zhertv Pervoi mirovoi voiny), first observed in 2013. Similarly, having long been consigned to the margins of the dominant narratives on the First World War, Russia’s part in and experience of the Great War has become the focus of a substantial body of new scholarship. This series forms part of that new contribution to the international under­ standing of that conflict. If the concept behind Russia’s Great War and Revolution reflects recent trends in the historiography on the war’s meaning for Russian history, its form draws on earlier examples of the sort of international collaboration that have become increasingly possible since the late 1980s. Each of the general editors and many members of the editorial collective had participated in similar partnerships, albeit on a smaller scale. Such projects included two volumes on Russian military history that enlisted the best specialists from the international community. Eric Lohr and Marshall Poe edited The Military and Society in Russia (Brill, 2002), while Reforming the Tsar’s Army (2004), edited by Bruce Menning and David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, appeared with the Woodrow Wilson Inter­national Center and Cambridge University Press in 2004. Other participants in this project had taken part in two other similar



From the Series Editors

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collections. In 2005, Routledge published The Russian Revolution of 1905: Centenary Perspectives, co-edited by Jonathan Smele and Anthony Heywood. That year also saw the publication by Brill of volume 1 of The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero; volume 2 came out two years later. Both were overseen by Menning, Schimmelpenninck, and John W. Steinberg. Each of these collections provided instructive examples of how to organize and produce the broad collaborative effort that has led to the appearance of Russia’s Great War and Revolution. Aims Recognizing both the growing scholarly interest in Russia’s Great War and the occasion presented by the successive centenaries of the First World War and the Russian revolutions, the editors of this collection have sought to assemble the best current international scholarship on the conflict. Ideally, they have oriented this collection toward several audiences. For those in the academy—scholars, undergraduates and graduate students—we offer a series of edited collections, varying in format and approach, that will provide a ”snapshot” of the current state of the field. As a reflection of existing scholarly interests and debate, these materials will by default indicate those topics and issues demanding further attention. Editorial teams agreed on the optimal structure, periodization, and approach taken in their respective volumes. As a consequence, depending on the topic covered, some volumes provide a largely narrative treatment of events—for instance, military operations and engagements—or of developing issues, as occurs in the volume on inter­ national relations. Others, most often dealing with the “home front” or Russia as an empire, will present chapters that examine specific problems, groups, or regions. In addition to addressing our academic communities, the editors seek also to engage non-professional readers in the general public, including secondary school students. To this end, as a supplement to the books in this series, the larger editorial collective have created a dedicated website with such sup­ porting materials as maps, illustrations, sound files, and moving images. Further, the editors plan to house on the web-site special sections devoted to summaries of the published findings and instructional guides to aid teachers in developing school and lesson plans. Finally, alongside its appearance in book form, the series will also be available on the internet through the Project MUSE scholarly database. Readers with access to that platform will be able to conduct searches in and download entire books or individual chapters as they require. In addition to benefiting scholars interested in Russia during the Great War and revolutions, the MUSE edition will provide instructors with a ready trove of materials which can provide specific readings, as well as a valuable research resource for their students.

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From the Series Editors

Conceptualization and Organization The volumes in this collection reflect the current state of scholarship on Russia’s experience of the “long” Great War, spanning the First World War, the revolutions, and the Russian Civil War. Editors have sought to cover all the significant aspects of Russia’s history during 1914–22, so far as current ex­ pertise permits, under a series of thematic rubrics. These cover a wide range of subjects, including the experience of the soldiers involved, as well as of the urban and rural populations on the “home front”; the course of international relations, both formal and non-governmental; the implications of war and revolution for the empire as a polity incorporating a broad variety of national and confessional populations bound to the imperial “center” by distinctive administrative and legal regimes; and the impact of prolonged “total war” on the cultural, religious, and intellectual life of the region. Looking outward beyond the territories of the Russian Empire/USSR themselves, other volumes address the perspectives of the Central Powers during the Great War, the ef­ fects of war and civil war in Siberia and the Far East, the lengthening “arc of revolution” through the peripheries of the former empire and beyond to the global south and New World in the years following 1917, and, finally, the repercussions of total wars and revolution on ideas about and performance of gender, sexuality, and the sphere of intimacy in Russian society. Of course, throughout, the use of the term “Russia” and its inflections connotes, unless otherwise stated, the territory and populations housed within the boundaries of the Russian Empire in 1914. Given the breadth of the subject matter and the renewed interest of historians in Russia’s Great War, this collection does not aspire to offer a comprehensive narrative history of the war, nor is it meant to serve as an encyclopaedia of issues, events, and persons associated with the war and revolutions. Rather, it seeks to provide clear representation of current scholarly interests and debates, while indicating areas in need of more research. Thus, readers will find relatively few articles on the economic history of either the war or the Civil War. Likewise, many areas of international relations remain uncovered, not least the formation of policy-making institutions in the suc­ cessor states to the Russian Empire. Those interested in the revolutionary period will find the “workers’ movement” far less prominent in this collection than would have been the case for much of the late 20th century, while the peasantry and Russia’s regions have begun to receive comparatively greater attention. As noted previously, an underlying aim of this series is to encourage fur­ ther research into areas as yet insufficiently covered in current scholarship. Thus, despite the increasing prevalence of the “imperial turn” in our historiog­ raphy, the impact of the war, revolutions, and Civil War in Russia’s imperial borderlands has only begun recently to command the interest that it warrants. By the same token, like their counterparts for the history of other countries,



From the Series Editors

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specialists on 20th-century Russia have yet to delve deeply into the manifold aspects of religion and religiosity in the wartime Russian Empire, from popu­ lar or folk religion and religious practice, through the high politics of spiritual institutions, to the effects of war and turmoil on currents in theology and religious philosophy that had begun to run so strong during the “Silver Age.” Finally, throughout the long process that led to the appearance of this series, the editorial teams have sought to avoid the imposition of an explicit interpretive agenda, in the interests of conveying a sense of current areas of debate and consensus in our historical literature. Thus, while the periodization of 1914–22—i.e., the years spanning the Russian Empire’s entry into war through two revolutions, civil war, and the formation of the Soviet state— has taken hold with many historians, others continue to maintain that such an approach risks flattening or downplaying the significance of 1917 and its consequences for the area’s subsequent history. In the interest of providing as clear as possible a reflection of the current “state of play,” these volumes house a variety of interpretations and periodizations, inviting readers to draw their own inferences and conclusions from the evidence and arguments on offer. Process From the beginning, editors have viewed Russia’s Great War and Revolution as a truly global project, incorporating perspectives from historians across Europe, North America, Russia, Asia, and Australia. In addition to the subject matter treated in the volumes’ contents, this global approach informed the composition of the editorial teams that oversaw the production of each volume. Each of these groups included members from North America, Russia, and the United Kingdom or continental Europe. Where the contents required it—for instance, in the book dealing with Asia, scholars from elsewhere joined the editorial team. In the interests of reaching the broadest possible international audience, the editors agreed on English as the language for the series, with the intention of publishing a parallel Russian-language edition when feasible. The chapters in these volumes consist both of submissions in response to a widely circulated open call and invited contributions. Papers were selected in a two-stage process involving initial vetting by editorial team-members, then evaluation by the full editorial board. Throughout, editors strove for the greatest possible inclusiveness, with the result that the articles in the series represent a broad variety of scholars, ranging from graduate students through all ranks of the academic cursus honorum. The project and its publication took shape through a series of editorialboard meetings that began at the University of Aberdeen in the summer of 2008. A meeting at the University of Wisconsin-Madison the following sum­ mer resulted in agreement on the thematic areas to be addressed by separate volumes, in addition to provisional topical headings for each volume. At Uppsala University in 2010, board-members refined outlines of desired

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From the Series Editors

contents for each volume, leading to a public call for papers the following autumn. From that point forward, editors pursued submissions, while project representatives participated in the presentation of project overviews and draft articles at the annual conventions of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), the Study Group of the Russian Revolution, the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES), the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies, and the 2010 Stockholm meeting of the International Council for Central and East European Studies (ICCEES). The chapters contained in the volumes comprising Russia’s Great War and Revolution have undergone an intensive multi-stage review process, over­ seen collectively by the 30-odd members of the full editorial board. The publisher also solicited a peer assessment of the project description and design; the resulting review yielded important and helpful sugges­tions, as did consultation with the project’s advisory board. Next, edi­torial teams for individual volumes jointly assessed contributions. To select papers for in­ clusion in individual volumes and to prepare the latter for publication, the editorial board adopted a two-tier review exercise. Editorial teams were paired according to areas of overlapping interest or approach. Each of the teams would read and critique the contents for the other’s volume, followed by a general discussion involving the entire editorial board. Finally, after the completion of revisions, that volume’s editorial team sent it on to the general editors, who solicited anonymous peer reviews for final review. Once the vol­ ume editors addressed any critiques or suggestions from these last reviews, the general editors sub­mitted the volume to the publisher for production. Acknowledgments In the eight years from its origins to the first appearance of its results, this project benefited immeasurably from the support of many people and institutions. The editorial board owes a special debt of gratitude to Alice D. Mortenson from Minneapolis, Minnesota for her unstinting support of and generosity to this undertaking, not least through the Alice D. Mortenson/ Petrovich Chair of Russian History. This resource proved indispensable in making possible several successive editorial meetings. Special thanks are also due to Scott Jacobs of Houston, Texas, who provided significant support to this project for more than five years. His contributions helped ensure the success of the summer editorial meetings at the University of WisconsinMadison in 2012. Both donors also made possible many of the translations in the collection. The editorial board also benefited from the support of several univer­ sities and departments. Significant financial support was provided by the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, through the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy, the College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Principal’s Interdisciplinary Fund to facilitate our inaugural board meeting at Aberdeen



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in 2008 and our fifth full meeting in 2014. The Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison hosted the 2009 and 2012 editorial-board meetings; Nicole Hauge played a key role in arrangements for the visitors to Madison on both occasions. In addition, we benefited from the support of the university’s Anonymous Fund and the office of the Dean of the College of Letters and Science. Our colleagues in the Department of History at Uppsala University in Sweden gave us the use of their facilities and meeting-space in the summer of 2010, providing an excellent and hospitable environment for our discussion. Many of the home institutions of the editorial board also con­ tributed travel costs and meeting-space for the compilation of several volumes in this collection; some helped underwrite some translation costs as well. Several other groups and institutions played an important role in the gestation of this series. The Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Inter­ national Center, particularly Associate Director William Pomeranz, has actively supported the project since its outset. Grants to support our edi­torial meetings were provided by the British Academy, BASEES, and the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. The German Historical Institute in Moscow very kindly sponsored the translation into English of chapters writ­ten in Ger­ man. The Study Group on the Russian Revolution served as an important venue for the development of many of the chapters, particularly from British and European contributors, that appear in these volumes. George Fowler and Vicki Polansky of Slavica Publishers have proven the ideal partners in this lengthy process, offering sage counsel, clear deadlines, exemplary patience, professionalism, and rigor, all of which have made the production process run with an enviable dispatch and smoothness. Finally, the editorial board expresses its heartfelt thanks to more than 200 contributors, who offered their skills, effort, insight, and scholarship to Russia’s Great War and Revolution. At the risk of tautology, it must be said that this series could not have come to fruition without them. Their efforts—and patience with an extended production schedule—allowed us to present our readers with strong evidence for the enduring importance and complexity of this eight-year span in the history of Central and Eastern Europe and Asia, the consequences of which continue to shape our world in ways that we are still witnessing. Anthony Heywood David MacLaren McDonald John W. Steinberg June 2014

Acknowledgments

The idea for Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution was born in the summer of 2008 in Scotland’s “Granite City.” There I first met Russia’s Home Front co­ editors Christopher Read and Peter Waldron, along with the rest of the original editorial collective. The task assigned to Chris, Peter, and me initially seemed as hard as the stone buildings and streets of Aberdeen. Would it be possible to represent the home front experience during 1914–22, with its complex politics, cataclysmic demographic and economic trends, and social upheavals, within the pages of one volume? Eight years later we are pleased to send our four-part volume, of which The Experience of War and Revolution is book 2, out into the world. The efforts and support of many people brought us to this gratifying point. First the coeditors offer their deepest thanks to the other members of the editorial team, and especially to our “Stavka”—Drs. Tony Heywood, David McDonald, and John Steinberg. They maintained absolute faith in the home front project, offered valuable ideas, and helped connect us to potential contributors. Chris, Peter, and I were pleased when Sarah Badcock, Liudmila G. Novikova, and Aaron B. Retish agreed to include their project on Russia’s Revolution in Regional Perspective in the Home Front volume, just published as book 1 of Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution. Their expertise and advice have been very helpful. As we sought contributors we discovered a wealth of new research by historians in Russia, North America, and Europe. To those scholars we owe a special debt of heartfelt gratitude for not losing patience or confidence during the long years we worked on the volume. Summer workshops in Aberdeen, Madison, Wisconsin, and Uppsala, Sweden proved invaluable in advancing the project and building solidarity and purpose; we are grateful to the University of Aberdeen, the Department of History of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the Department of History at Uppsala University for facilitating and supporting those opportunities to meet face to face. Pavel Khazanov, Alex Mokhin, and Kelsey Norris from the University of Pennsylvania assisted in translating the Russian contributions. When Slavica Publishers agreed to take on the entire series, their decision reinvigorated all of us on the editorial team. Slavica has been a pleasure to work with, especially Vicki Polansky, whose knowledge and skill are unmatched. Finally, I thank Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, xvii–xviii.

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Acknowledgments

Chris Read and Peter Waldron, who know this period of history as well as anyone, for all that they, along with the other editors, taught me over the years we worked on this project. Adele Lindenmeyr December 2015 Unless otherwise noted, all dates before February 1918 are given in the Old Style (Julian) calendar, which was 13 days behind the New Style (Gregorian) calendar used in the West. The New Style calendar was adopted by the Soviet government in February 1918.

Introduction Adele Lindenmeyr

As the first total war in modern history, the Great War not only mobilized millions of men into mass armies, but also depended on the efforts of innumerable civilians to support the military effort and bear the burdens of war. “Profound, enormous, [and] transcendent of the ordinary” in scale, total war also penetrated into “the smallest, seemingly insignificant everyday practices,” Maureen Healy, historian of the Austrian home front, has written.1 The Great War imposed exceptional demands on civilian populations, while also opening unprecedented opportunities for participation in the war effort to groups such as women and minorities who had been excluded from public affairs. In the Russian Empire, which exceeded all other combatants in World War I in the size of its population and the vast extent of its territory, actual combat between 1914 and 1917 affected only the western borderlands and the Caucasus in the distant southeast.2 Yet with 18 million men mobilized into the army over the course of the war, there was scarcely a single family or community beyond the war’s reach or exempt from its demands for sacrifice and engagement. The English phrase “home front”–vnutrennii or glubokii tyl in Russian— aptly expresses the pervasive effects of World War I on those Russians living not only near the front but also far from the army’s rear. It also conveys the sentiments of the individuals and groups described in this volume who felt that their work on the home front supported and complemented the efforts of soldiers on the front lines to defend the nation in ways no less essential to victory. Writing in 1915, A. K. Iakovleva, the founder and editor of a magazine 1

 Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 183.

2  According to the Ministry of the Interior’s Central Statistical Committee, the pop­ ulation of the entire empire, including the Duchy of Finland, was 178,378,800 as of 1 January 1914. A. M. Anfimov and A. P. Korelin, eds., Rossiia, 1913 god: Statistiko-dokumental´nyi spravochnik (St. Petersburg: BLITs, 1995), 16. Germany’s population in 1914 was about 68 million.

Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 1–7.

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Adele Lindenmeyr

titled Women and War, proclaimed that the war moved women into the “front lines of life” and turned “everyone into fighters.”3 World War I nominally ended for Russia in March 1918, eight months before the Central Powers surrendered to the Allies, when the Soviet government signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany. But in another sense the Great War did not end for another three years for Russians. Socialist revolution transformed the conflict between European nations into a civil war between the Soviet regime and its many opponents, and turned Russia arguably into the largest battlefield of the Great War. Previously mobilized for victory in the war against the Central Powers, Russians now threw their efforts—willingly or unwillingly—into defending or defeating the Bolshevik Revolution. Revolution and civil war prolonged and intensified the sacrifices and burdens on families and communities, and made sheer survival an all-consuming task. The Experience of War and Revolution, the second of four books on Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–1922, presents new research on Russian society during the entire period of crisis, and offers insights into both the continuities and the radical changes in the home front experience that the democratic and socialist revolutions of 1917 and the ensuing civil war produced. While the next two books of Russia’s Home Front examine political events, parties, and movements, the contributions in the present book focus on how war and revolution affected individuals, groups, and organizations that worked far from the front and high politics, and usually did not define themselves as political actors. The Russian home front possessed certain strengths when it first confronted the challenges of total war in 1914. One major asset was a civil society that had grown over the course of the past century from a handful of philanthropic, patriotic, and scientific societies in 1814 into a galaxy of more than 10,000 voluntary associations of all kinds when the war began. Russian men and women joined the war effort on the home front equipped with useful experience in mobilizing volunteers, raising funds, and administering organizations that they had acquired by participating in a broad range of local government bodies, educational and charitable organizations, professional societies, and religious and national associations, among others.4 Historians disagree about the robustness and political significance of Russia’s prewar 3  Quoted in Melissa Stockdale, “’My Death for the Motherland Is Happiness’: Women, Patriotism, and Soldiering in Russia’s Great War, 1914–1917,” American Historical Review 109, 1 (February 2004): 87. 4

 For a comprehensive survey of voluntary associations in the Russian Empire, see A. S. Tumanova, ed., Samoorganizatsiia rossiiskoi obshchestvennosti v poslednei treti XVIII– nachale XX v. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2011).

Introduction

3

civil society.5 But as many of the articles in this volume show, when the war began existing networks of volunteers and organizations were readily reoriented and mobilized in response to the needs created by total war. A second source of strength on the home front was the outpouring of patriotic sentiment, especially among educated members of Russian society, from the moment Germany declared war on Russia on 20 July 1914. Support for the war was weak at best among the peas­antry and working class, and the Russian army did a particularly poor job of explaining to soldiers on the front lines why they were fighting.6 But at least in 1914 and 1915 educated, urban Russians considered their cause to be a righteous one, their war a defense against German and Austrian aggression and threats to the homeland. The Great War quickly came to be known as the “Second Patriotic War,” a reference to Russia’s victorious war against France 100 years before, and many hoped that this war, like the one with Napoleon, would unify the nation and bring together the government and people in a common cause. As a number of the articles in this volume document, this initial outpouring of patriotism inspired educated Russians not only to adapt existing institutions to war needs but also to invent new ones to support soldiers, their families, and the growing population of war victims. Initiatives such as the movement to rehabilitate wounded and disabled soldiers through kitchen gardening or in health resorts previously reserved for the elite illustrate the inventiveness that the war evoked. Women took wide advantage of the chance to engage more fully in public life, while minorities such as Muslims in the Volga region and Jews seized opportunities created by the war to advance their goals for citizenship rights, cultural preservation, or autonomy while supporting the nation. Even children were enlisted on the home front to sew linens for soldiers or visit the wounded. For the most part, the mobilization of civilians was a spontaneous, grass­ roots phenomenon that owed little to the initiative of the Russian government. In the early months of the war the imperial government largely set aside its habitual suspicion that potential political dissent might be harbored in public initiatives. A kind of tentative partnership emerged between the government and society, upon whom it relied to provide essential human and financial resources, knowledge, and expertise in support of the war effort. At the same time, many of the philanthropic, civic, professional, and other organizations, 5  See Adele Lindenmeyr, “Primordial and Gelatinous? Civil Society in Imperial Rus­ sia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, 3 (Summer 2011): 705–20. 6  Josh Sanborn critiques the historiography and evidence on the nature of popular responses to the announcement of war and mobilization in “The Mobilization of 1914 and the Question of the Russian Nation: A Reexamination,” Slavic Review 59, 2 (Summer 2000): 267–89.

4

Adele Lindenmeyr

along with the federations of local governments, the Union of Zemstvos and Union of Towns, relied on funding from the imperial treasury to carry out their work. As the war dragged on and Russian setbacks mounted, however, the spirit of patriotic commitment that characterized the first months of the war ebbed. Women and men who had enthusiastically committed their time, money, and effort to war needs in 1914 grew exhausted and disillusioned. One example is Countess Sof´ia V. Panina (1871–1956), a well-known progressive philanthropist before the war who became a leader in relief efforts for soldiers’ families and refugees in Petrograd. Vacationing at her estate outside Moscow in the summer of 1914, Panina reacted to news of the outbreak of war with a combination of shock and elation. The war “overturned” everything, she wrote a friend; “[i]t seems that everyone and everything have been displaced, have begun to live in a new way, and one has to adapt everything to this dislocation.” She looked forward to returning to the “whirlpool” of public life in the capital, where “I would like to apply myself to work as intensively as possible.”7 Two summers later, however, in a letter to the same friend, this committed social activist looked upon her imminent return to relief work in Petrograd and its “endless winter” with unconcealed dread.8 In Russia as in the other combatant nations, total war strained the resources mobilized by the home front— volunteers, donations, expertise—to the breaking point. As detailed in a number of the articles in this volume, the public commitment to supporting the war effort experienced a substantial if short-lived resurgence after the imperial government and Romanov dynasty fell in early 1917. To its millions of supporters in all social classes the February Revolution seemed to remove the obstacles both to victory and to the effective mobilization of resources on the home front in support of the war, its fighters, and its victims. Organizations such as the Free Economic Society, most of whose operations the imperial government had suspended in early 1915, rededicated themselves to both the war effort and their prewar goals of promoting economic and social progress. The establishment of a democratic republic now seemed to make possible the realization of initiatives such as people’s houses for adult education, or leadership by scientists in developing Russia’s defense capabilities to the fullest. Nurses were able to set up their own union for the first time. Even monasteries were affected by the democratic spirit that swept Russia in 1917.

7

 Letter from Sof´ia Panina to Lidiia Iakovleva dated 7 August 1914, Marfino, in Rossii­ skii institut istorii iskusstv (RIII) f. 32, op. 1, ed. khr. 121, l. 38. 8

 Letter from Sof´ia Panina to Lidiia Iakovleva, 10 August 1916 (ibid., l. 48).

Introduction

5

The February Revolution placed in power many of those who had been leading the efforts to mobilize the home front, especially members of the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) and moderate socialist parties, along with local government activists in the zemstvos and municipalities. The expertise of such specialists as economists, scientists, and statisticians was now recognized and needed as never before. Sof´ia Panina moved from war relief into politics when she joined the Kadet Party and became assistant minister of state welfare in May of 1917, and then assistant minister of education in August. Her fellow Kadet leader Vladimir I. Vernadskii (1863–1945), the eminent geochemist who had contributed to the development of Russia’s defense capabilities as a leader of the Academy of Sciences during the war, joined her as assistant minister of education in the Provisional Government. The momentum generated by the February Revolution did not come to an abrupt halt when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government in October. To be sure, the socialist revolution left no initiative or organization in Soviet-controlled Russia untouched. Welfare initiatives that depended on imperial patronage, government funding, middle-class volunteers, and private donations first foundered, then disappeared. The system of monthly state allowances that supported soldiers’ families during the war collapsed along with the Provisional Government that funded them; at the end of 1917, as the economy and front were disintegrating, the new Soviet government advised local soviets to “resolve the question of allowances in a revolutionary manner”—by seizing the assets of the bourgeoisie. But many organizations that had been mobilized for war in 1914–17, like the Free Economic Society, fought to survive, adapt, and even resist. Others, like the Academy of Sciences and people’s houses, were reshaped to fit the Bolsheviks’ goals of economic modernization, scientific advancement or proletarian empowerment, and absorbed into the new Soviet system. Amidst the turmoil and deprivation that accompanied the revolutions and Civil War, new forces for spontaneous mobilization and self-organization like domestic communes emerged, inspired not by patriotism, as in 1914, or the hopes for political renewal raised by the February Revolution, but by the socialist revolution’s goals of remaking society, culture, and human nature. The Experience of War and Revolution also provides insight into some of the strategies adopted by Russians on the home front to survive the privations, violence, and social disintegration caused by war and revolution. Some found opportunities for self-reinvention, empowerment, or social change, while others experienced threats to social solidarity and their very existence. Russian Germans, the great majority of whom had lived in the empire for generations, faced confiscatory laws and popular hostility that erupted into a deadly pogrom in Moscow in May 1915. Observing children’s war games, parents and

6

Adele Lindenmeyr

teachers expressed grave concerns about the war’s traumatic or coarsening influence on young minds and hearts. Social deviance seemed to increase in the civilian population, and criminologists looked for the causes of an apparent steep rise in crime in the impact of total war on human social psychology. While many sought an escape from brutal realities in alcohol or drugs, the war itself produced notable changes in the country’s drinking culture and in the availability and use of such drugs as cocaine and opiates, turning them into a staple in the criminal world of the revolutionary and Civil War periods. Russians despaired over the breakdown of institutions and social relationships. All the time, effort, and expertise invested by people like Vladimir Korolenko and Aleksandr Nesvitskii in Poltava, for example, into mobilizing the home front for war proved useless in the face of rampant disease, hunger, class conflict, and unrelenting violence. In a 1920 obituary honoring a friend lost to typhus, Panina lamented the indifference to death that the years of war and revolution had instilled in her fellow Russians: “Death in our day has turned into that ‘everyday phenomenon’ which the living hasten to pass by without slowing their pace even for a second,” she wrote.9 By the summer of 1920, as Russia’s Home Front coeditor Christopher Read has written, “one might have expected that the energies of the ordinary population of Soviet Russia would have been completely exhausted” after years of hardship and the apparent destruction of their world as it existed before 1914. Motivated by “self-defense against crisis,” however, some engaged in large and small acts of resistance against Bolshevik authority well into 1921.10 Resistance took myriad forms, ranging from the well-known Tambov and Kronshtadt rebellions to the actions of the sisters of the Ababkovskii Monas­ tery described in one of the contributions in this volume, who refused to reorganize themselves into a collective or work for the state farm that Soviet authorities subsequently imposed on them. Russians also displayed great resilience and persistence. Despite the destructive effects of war and revolution on families and other social relationships, Vera Figner along with countless other men, women, and children managed to survive the years of starvation and disease thanks to networks of family and friends. Some wartime organizations like the Union of Zemstvos and Union of Towns were exported to the emerging émigré colonies of Russia Abroad, where they once again mobilized resources to meet a crisis, this time 9  Handwritten manuscript dated London, 26 July (8 August) 1920, titled “My article about Dr. K. A. Mikhailov, located in Burtsev’s ‘Obshchee Delo’ SP,” in Columbia University, Bakhmetev Archive, S. V. Panina Collection, Box 11, Folder “Minor Manu­ scripts by S. V. Panina.” 10

 Christopher Read, From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and their Revolution, 1917– 1921 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 266.

Introduction

7

to the masses of the refugees fleeing the revolution and Civil War. At home, remnants of the old imperial Red Cross coexisted with the Soviet Red Cross until 1921, and organizations like the Union of Sisters of Mercy, a product of the February Revolution, struggled against obstacles erected by the October Revolution in order to support their members and serve their profession. This one volume with 20 articles can provide only a sampling of the many ways historians may study the experience on Russia’s home front. The editors hope that the innovative work of these authors will encourage other scholars to investigate the social, emotional, and psychological impact of total war and revolution on the home front, and the strategies for survival, adaptation, and invention that ordinary Russians created in response to the immense changes that turned the years from 1914 to 1922 into a period of seemingly unending crisis.

Austria Hungary

Ga

lic

Poland

i

Warsaw

a

Poltava

Kiev

Smolensk

Lugansk

Votkinsk

Viatka

Viatka

Caucasus

Grozny

Stavropol’

Stavropol’

Astrakhan’

Astrakhan’

Saratov

Saratov

Penza

Kazan’

Izhevsk Nizhnii Novgorod Kazan’

Penza

E m p i r e

Simferopol

Crimea

Kharkiv

Voronezh

Tambov

Voronezh Khar’kiv

Black Sea

a

de ss

R iver

C

Perm

Baku

Orenburg

Orenburg

Ufa

Ufa

as

n pia

O t t o m a n

O

Kherson

Minsk

Vilnius

Sergiev

Vo l g a

A r k h a n g e l ’s k Arkhangel’sk

Moscow Posad Smolensk Moscow Nizhegorod

Velikie Luki

Helsingfors Petrograd

Grand Duchy of Finland

White Sea

Arctic Ocean

ns M o u n t a i

G e r m a n y

B

Norwegian Sea

European Russia - 1914

a

Se

alt ic

U ra l

Sea

Pale of Settlement

Notable Town

Provincial Center

Petrograd

0

100 mi

200 km

Tomsk

N

The Mobilization of Russian Society

Philanthropy and Welfare in Russia, 1914–18 Jude C. Richter

World War I wrought profound geographic, economic, and social dislocation on the Russian Empire. During the first two months of the war, Russia sent more than 4 million men into battle. By the end of March 1917, this number had risen to over 13 million.1 Many of these men suffered from disease or from wounds and injuries received in battle. During the course of the war, over 4.8 million sick and wounded men were evacuated from the front.2 By 1 January 1916, hospitals operating under the auspices of the All-Russian Union of Towns had alone treated over 1 million of them.3 On the home front, the well-being of soldiers’ wives, children, and other dependents was threatened when their husbands were mobilized and they lost at least temporarily their principal means of economic support. Russia’s allies and foes faced similar challenges, but in Russia the plight of refugees fleeing the empire’s western provinces added to the burdens that the war imposed. By 20 December 1915, there were The views expressed in this essay are solely those of the author. They do not reflect the views of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I am grateful for a Mellon Endowment Pre-Dissertation Grant from the Russian and East European Institute at Indiana University and a Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Department of History at Indiana University and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University/ Purdue University Indianapolis. Both awards funded research on which this essay is based. I am also grateful to the editors of this volume, and especially Adele Linden­ meyr, for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay. 1

 Stanislas Kohn, “The Vital Statistics of European Russia during the World War, 1914–1917,” in The Cost of the War to Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), 13–14. These numbers do not include those who were serving in the peacetime army. See also Tsentral´noe Statisticheskoe Upravlenie. Otdel Voennoi Statistiki, Rossiia v mirovoi voine 1914–1918 goda (v tsifrakh) (Moscow: Tip. M.K. Kh. imeni F. Ia. Lavrova, 1925), 17. 2

 Rossiia v mirovoi voine, 25.

3

 Nicholas J. Astrov, “The Effects of the War upon the Municipal Government and the All-Russian Union of Towns,” in The War and the Russian Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), 204. Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 11–29.

12

Jude C. Richter

2,706,309 refugees in the empire, not counting those in Transcaucasia, and by 29 May 1916, there were 3,150,126.4 The needs of the war’s victims posed tre­ mendous challenges to the empire’s philanthropic organizations and welfare institutions, and spurred the creation of new ones. As charitable and welfare services expanded, they also became centralized to an unprecedented degree. Both state-sponsored and philanthropic committees operating under the auspices of members of the Romanov dynasty raised and provided funds for these efforts while working to bring greater coordination to them. In this essay, I examine the effects that World War I had on the provision of charity and welfare in Russia. Until the 1990s, historians of Russia devoted little attention to charity and welfare issues during this period. This neglect was due in part to the fact that the war was often overshadowed in Russian historiography by the period of revolution and civil war that followed as well as to an ideological disinterest in charity as a topic of inquiry among Soviet historians.5 Since the end of the Soviet era, however, a number of scholars in Russia and elsewhere have examined various aspects of wartime relief. I. P. Pavlova’s wide-ranging study demonstrates how the war transformed and centralized relief work in Russia. The state assumed a more prominent role in the coordination of relief work and disbursed funds to institutions and organizations carrying that work out.6 David L. Hoffmann has likewise ex­ amined this transformation and placed it within the broader history of Soviet social policies.7 Other recent studies have illuminated particular aspects of the welfare crisis produced by the war, and the response of official and private providers of relief. N. L. Matveeva’s study focuses on the committees established under the aegis of various members of the imperial family. She argues that dynastic patronage of charitable organizations continued to fulfill the twofold purpose of charities sponsored by the Romanovs prior to the war: they helped to encourage local initiative while at least attempting to strengthen the tsar’s

4

 Kohn, “Vital Statistics,” 32–33.

5

  On the historiography of World War I, see William G. Rosenberg, “Introduction,” in Rossiia i Pervaia mirovaia voina (Materialy mezhdunarodnogo nauchnogo kollokviuma), ed. N. N. Smirnov (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999), 9–10. For Soviet historians’ view of the history of charity, see Adele Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 3. 6

 I. P. Pavlova, Sotsial´noe popechenie v Rossii v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (Krasnoiarsk: FGOU VPO Krasnoiarskii gosudarstvennyi agrarnyi universitet, 2003), 35, 147. 7

  David L. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 14–15, 34–47.



Philanthropy and Welfare in Russia, 1914–18

13

authority.8 In her examination of soldiers’ family aid policies from the last years of the tsarist era through the Russian Civil War, Emily Pyle shows that when the war began and the terms of the 5 June 1912 law on assistance to soldiers’ families went into effect, the law’s criteria for eligibility were at odds with the standards by which villagers determined whether a person or family merited assistance.9 Liudmila Bulgakova has also examined assistance provided to soldiers’ families and shown how the war empowered soldiers’ wives.10 In his assessment of efforts to provide relief to refugees, Peter Gatrell demonstrates that the sympathetic and generous responses with which the refugee crisis was greeted initially were sometimes dampened due to fi­ nancial and other considerations when the crisis continued longer than had been anticipated. He also illustrates the conflicts that arose between relief organizations, particularly the Union of Towns and the Union of Zemstvos, on the one hand, and Grand Duchess Tat´iana Nikolaevna’s Committee for the Rendering of Temporary Aid to Those Who Have Suffered from Military Actions (Komitet Ee Imperatorskogo Vysochestva velikoi kniazhny Tat´iany Nikolaevny po okazaniiu vremennoi pomoshchi postradavshim ot voennykh deistvii), on the other.11 This article builds upon these and similar works to analyze the ways in which the war constituted a transformative period for Russian philanthropy and welfare. During the last decades of the imperial era, Russians were some­ times critical of their country’s provisions for the poor and argued that Russia came up short in comparison with other European countries.12 In Russia, charity and welfare had largely been the responsibility of the zemstvos, mu­ nicipal governments, private individuals, and voluntary associations that often depended on their members and other volunteers to direct and carry out their work. As was also the case in France, Great Britain, and Germany, the 8

 N. I. Matveeva, Blagotvoritel´nost´ i imperatorskaia sem´ia v gody Pervoi mirovi voiny (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo Moskovskogo gosudarstvennogo otkrytogo universiteta, 2004), 70, 182. The second half of this book was also published as a separate volume: N. L. Matveeva, Blagotvoritel´naia deiatel´nost´ immenykh komitetov chlenov imperatorskoi sem´i gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo Moskovskogo gosudarstvennogo otkrytogo universiteta, 2004). 9

 Emily E. Pyle, “Village Social Relations and the Reception of Soldiers’ Family Aid Policies in Russia, 1912–1921” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1997), 8–9, 190–96, 414–15. 10

 See her essay in this volume.

11

  Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloom­ ington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 40–43, 58–65, 176–77.

12

 Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice, 227–28.

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Jude C. Richter

war altered the relationship between the state, local governments, and private charity in Russia and changed the role and relative weight accorded to each in the provision of assistance to those in need.13 After World War I began, the state assumed a much greater role in relief work, and provided unprecedented funds to support relief efforts through organizations under the patronage of members of the dynasty and through the Union of Towns and the Union of Zemstvos. These organizations worked to coordinate relief efforts during the war. As the state’s role in welfare activities expanded, those who advocated for a more rational and unified system for the provision of relief had reason to believe that their hopes would come to fruition. Finally, in May 1917, the Provisional Government established the Ministry of State Welfare. The new ministry took over the functions of most of the organizations that had earlier operated under dynastic patronage. In October 1917, the ministry was replaced by the People’s Commissariat of Social Welfare. This study draws upon a rich source base. Charity journals are particularly valuable for the study of philanthropy and welfare in Russia during World War I. The Empress Aleksandra’s Guardianship of Houses of Industry and Work Houses (later the Guardianship of Work Relief) began publishing Trudovaia pomoshch´ (Work Relief) in 1897. Beginning in September 1914, most of each issue was devoted to coverage of war relief in Russia. In addition to monthly reports on aid to soldiers’ families, wounded soldiers, and, later, refugees, the journal also ran articles providing more detailed coverage of specific institutions and issues as well as summaries of proceedings at conferences devoted to welfare issues. Prizrenie i blagotvoritel´nost´ v Rossii (Relief and Charity in Russia) was published by the All-Russian Union of Organizations, Societies, and Activists in Public and Private Relief. Founded in 1908, the union promoted the reform and modernization of relief work. The journal, which first appeared in print a few years before the war began, reflected the union’s reformist position.14 Annual reports from individual organizations demonstrate further how the war transformed their operations as they responded to unprecedented challenges. Finally, the studies by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on the social, political, and economic aspects of the war appeared in print during the 1920s and 1930s. A number of the authors of the Russian series had held prominent positions in late tsarist Russia; Nikolai I. Astrov was an official of the All-Russian Union of Towns, Aleksandr F. Meyendorff served in the Duma, and Tikhon I. Polner 13

 Thierry Bonzon, “Transfer Payments and Social Policy,” in Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919, ed. Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 287.

14

  Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice, 162–63, 174–76.



Philanthropy and Welfare in Russia, 1914–18

15

had worked with the Union of Zemstvos. Their studies combined personal perspectives with qualitative and quantitative analyses of the war’s impact on Russia and the state and the unions’ responses to events as they unfolded. Historians examining welfare in Germany at this time provide a particu­ larly helpful comparative perspective. Civilians in both empires experienced privation and hardship during the war, and neither the Wilhelmine state nor the tsarist regime remained intact at the war’s end. Germany had adopted policies in the 19th century to provide for soldiers’ families in time of war. After World War I began, though, it soon became apparent that these policies were inadequate for meeting the needs of families living under conditions of total war.15 Both the Reich and the governments of individual German states pressed local authorities to establish programs that were separate from prewar local poor relief programs in order to augment the allowances pro­ vided for soldiers’ families; these new programs “provided the impetus for the systematization of prewar social relief programs.”16 In Russia, wartime relief efforts similarly provided proponents of charity reform opportunities to argue for the systematization of charity and welfare and greater coordination between the state, local governments, and private charity. In Russia, activities undertaken to assist those suffering because of the war were often described in patriotic terms that suggested both loyalty to Russia and a sense of debt or gratitude to its soldiers. Polner would later maintain that although the funds paid by the state to soldiers’ families accord­ ing to the terms of the June 1912 law greatly outweighed efforts made by zemstvos and private charities, their “tireless and enthusiastic work for the benefit of soldiers’ families, especially during the first year of the War,” was extremely important. Aid provided by local governments and civil society “raised the morale of the army, while in the interior of Russia, it tended to in­ troduce certain corrections to the official government program of relief and to supplement it.”17 Polner’s observation about relief work’s importance for morale is suggestive of the value that the topic holds for historians. During World War I, charitable activities and relief work served as an expression of solidarity among Russians aiding one another in the face of a common enemy. As one Duma member later recalled, “At first a sort of truce or ‘Union sacrée’ 15

 Ute Daniel, The War from Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World War, trans. Margaret Ries (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 173–74.

16

 Young-Sun Hong, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 1919–1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 31.

17

 Tikhon I. Polner with Prince Vladimir Obolensky and Sergius P. Turin, Russian Local Government during the War and the Union of Zemstvos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), 134–45.

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Jude C. Richter

of all the peoples of Russia produced the impression of a complete unity and solidarity.”18 During the first few months of the war, Kiev’s juvenile judge Valerii M. Levitskii spoke before the Kiev Juridical Society. Ob­serving that the majority of homeless children whom he encountered were the children of soldiers, Levitskii framed their care as a patriotic duty and asserted that “[t]he children of the defenders of our motherland must become our children.”19 The Kiev provincial zemstvo likewise used patriotic and fa­milial language when appealing to the public to help soldiers’ families with their agricultural work. It called upon peasants to assist “the families and farms of our brothers” who had been mobilized “to defend the motherland.”20 As the war continued, however, both the hardships it imposed and grow­ ing frustration with the responses to those hardships eroded that sense of unity. The challenges that Russia faced in meeting the wartime needs of its population undermined the regime’s authority and fostered tensions and resentment among different segments of society. The war not only increased the number of those who needed assistance from existing institutions that focused on helping children, the poor, and other vulnerable groups; it also created new categories of individuals in need of relief. Soldiers’ families, refugees, and wounded soldiers drew resources away from activities that had served Russia’s needy before the war, and therefore sometimes became the objects of resentment. Those engaged in relief work grew increasingly frus­ trated with their inability to meet the demands that the war presented, and public discussion of the needs of the empire’s less privileged subjects became a forum for criticisms that professionals and philanthropists levied against state and society, both of which stood accused of failing to meet the needs of those whose lives the war had disrupted. World War I began only two years after the Duma had enacted legislation making the provision of allowances to soldiers’ dependents an obligation of the state. Crafted to avoid the problems that arose during the Russo-Japanese War, when zemstvos found themselves in debt to the State Treasury because they could not support the families of those peasants who had been sent to war, the 5 June 1912 law stipulated that allowances be paid by the state but administered by local officials. The amount of each allowance was to be 18

 Baron Alexander F. Meyendorff, “Social Cost of the War,” in The Cost of the War to Russia, 163. On Russian responses to the war’s outbreak, see Karen Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 165–98.

19

 V. Levitskii, “Rol´ obshchestva v dele pomoshchi detiam zashchitnikov rodiny,” Trudovaia pomoshch´ 17, 9 (1914): 354.

20

 B. B—v, “Voina, zemstvo, i organizatsiia pomoshchi naseleniiu,” Trudovaia pomoshch´ 18, 3 (1915): 215–16.



Philanthropy and Welfare in Russia, 1914–18

17

determined solely on the basis of military service and without regard to an individual family’s actual need.21 Shortly after World War I began, however, due to the large number of men who were mobilized at the beginning of the war, it became clear that the law’s provisions were insufficient for meeting the needs of so many families. Officials were not always able to pay soldiers’ dependents the sums to which the new law entitled them, and even when they could, the allowances were not always enough to support them.22 As one observer noted, the adequacy of a family’s allowance depended on the family’s size and the other means with which it could support itself. Perhaps stating the obvious, he explained that the allowances were enough for small families with other sources of income, but when large families relied solely on the allowances, they were not.23 From the very beginning of the war, the imperial family played a promi­ nent role in the immense relief work efforts that the war demanded. On 11 August 1914, the Senate issued a decree forming the High Council for the Relief of the Families of Persons Called to War and the Families of Wounded and Fallen Soldiers (Verkhovnyi Sovet po prizreniiu semei lits, prizvannykh na voinu, a takzhe semei ranenykh i pavshikh voinov), presided over by the empress, to unite state, public, and private efforts to aid soldiers’ families. The High Council included representatives from the State Council, the Duma, the Guardianship of Work Relief, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos. The empress’s sister, Elizaveta Fedorovna, and daughter, Grand Duchess Ol´ga Nikolaevna, were named vice-presidents of the High Council, and separate committees were created under their pa­ tronage for Moscow and Petrograd, respectively. In addition, a committee was established in each province and region. The committees created local divisions and commissions responsible for providing cheap or free housing, establishing day nurseries and children’s asylums, and overseeing the delivery of food, household fuel, and other necessities. To clarify the High Council’s role, a meeting was held at the Winter Palace on 18 August. Gathered there were state officials and representatives of charitable institutions. Speaking before those assembled, the empress emphasized the need for unity and cooperation:

21

 Pyle, “Village,” 76–77, 101, 151–54; Polner et al., Russian Local Government, 134–45.

22

 Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 1: The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt (March–April 1917) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 78.

23

 I. Diomidov, “Pomoshch´ sem´iam nizhnikh chinov, nakhodiashchikhsia na deist­ vitel´noi voennoi sluzhbe,” Trudovaia pomoshch´ 19, 6 (1916): 5.

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Worries about families who have been left by their breadwinners who have gone to war are clear and near to the heart of each. Everywhere in the provinces, public forces and individual persons have already been united by a unanimous yearning to deliver from need the families of the valiant defenders of our motherland. To unite and, where necessary, to strengthen further the fruitful work of these persons and institutions, under no condition violating their independence, the High Council has been ordered established under my presidency by the Sovereign Emperor. I know that all here are inspired by the same feelings, and I believe that the Lord will bless our beginning.24 In her speech, the empress acknowledged longstanding concerns held by private organizations and individuals who wished to ensure that their efforts to improve the conditions in which the empire’s poor lived not come under the domination of the state. The empress recognized the desires of local govern­ ments, private organizations, and individuals to retain their autonomy at the same time that the regime attempted to harness their energy and expertise in order to ensure that the families of Russia’s enlisted men would receive the care and support that they needed. Other members of the imperial family also lent their names to wartime relief work. Efforts carried out in their name were focused primarily on helping soldiers and their families; refugees and other civilians whose lives the war disrupted received considerably less attention. The emperor’s sister, Grand Duchess Kseniia Aleksandrovna, oversaw efforts to rehabilitate wounded soldiers and help them find work. Kseniia, the Dowager Empress Mariia Fedorovna, Grand Duchess Mariia Pavlovna, and Grand Duke Georgii Mikhailovich all served on the High Council. Under the patronage of the tsar himself, the Romanov Committee (Romanovskii komitet) provided soldiers’ orphans with allowances, housing, and education in trades and agriculture. On 16 July 1916, the committee created a fund named for Tsarevich Aleksei Nikolaevich to support orphanages for the children of fallen soldiers. By Sep­ tember the fund was supporting institutions in Kherson, Moscow, Perm´, Petrograd, and Taurida provinces.25 During the war, the Russian soldier 24

 “Prizrenie semeistv zapasnykh i ratnikov, prizvannykh na sluzhbu,” Trudovaia pomoshch’ 17, 7 (1914): 129–36. Also in “Zhurnal Verkhovnogo Soveta po prizreniiu semei lits, prizvannykh na voinu, a takzhe semei ranenykh i pavshikh voinov,” Izvestiia Verkhovnogo Soveta po prizreniiu semei lits, prizvannykh na voinu, a takzhe semei ranenykh i pavshikh voinov, no. 1 (November 1914): 25.

25

 A.M., “Pomoshch´ sem´iam zapasnykh i ratnikov,” Trudovaia pomoshch´ 19, 9 (1916): 398–400; “Romanovskii Komitet,” Trudovaia pomoshch´ 17, 7 (1914): 193; “Pomoshch´ sem´iam zapasnykh i ratnikov,” Trudovaia pomoshch´ 19, 7 (1916): 108.



Philanthropy and Welfare in Russia, 1914–18

19

served as “a locus for national unity potentially capable of transcending dif­ ferences of class, region, religion, and nationality.”26 By concentrating on the needs of Russia’s defenders and their dependents, members of the dynasty demonstrated both their commitment and that of the regime not only to the war effort but also to Russia. The involvement of so many Romanov women in relief work was in keeping with longstanding tradition. Until her death in 1828, Emperor Paul’s wife, Mariia Fedorovna, had overseen the administration of Russia’s found­ ling homes and a host of other charitable institutions.27 Following her death, responsibility for the organizations under her patronage was assumed by the newly created Department of the Institutions of the Empress Mariia. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Alexander III’s widow, also called Mariia Fedorovna, acted as patron of the department. The establishment of Empress Aleksandra’s Guardianship for Work Relief in 1895 enabled the new empress to continue this tradition.28 The prominent roles of the emperor and tsarevich as patrons of charitable organizations were not unusual, either. At the beginning of the 20th century, organizations sponsored by the imperial family comprised the third largest group of charitable institutions in Russia after those sponsored by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Orthodox Church in Russia.29 As Adele Lindenmeyr has suggested, Russia’s last tsars saw charity as a way “to prop up the dynasty’s and autocracy’s sagging legiti­ macy” and “as a more effective if archaic expression of autocratic paternalism than legally mandated assistance.”30 During the war, dynastic involvement in relief work was sometimes deployed as a means to strengthen the regime’s prestige. On at least one occasion, a member of the imperial family was cast in the role of a saint. In January 1916, Privy Councilor P. N. Verekh spoke about the work of Grand Duchess Tat´iana’s Committee. He began by telling his audience about the third-century saint Tatiana, who had defended Christians from persecution. “And now,” he continued,” in this difficult time stands

26  Melissa K. Stockdale, “United in Gratitude: Honoring Soldiers and Defining the Nation in Russia’s Great War,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, 3 (Summer 2006): 460. 27

 David L. Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 70. 28

 Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice, 75, 175.

29

 Matveeva, Blagotvoritel´nost´, 181.

30

 Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice, 228.

20

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before us the image of the ancient Christian Tatiana in the person of Her Imperial Highness Grand Duchess Tat´iana Nikolaevna.”31 Faced with the shortcomings of state support for soldiers’ families, the regime also turned to local governments and private charity for assistance. In so doing, it redefined what had only recently become an obligation of the state as an obligation of society. The Orthodox Church took action almost imme­ diately; on 20 July 1914, the Holy Synod directed priests to form guardianship councils to ensure that the needs of soldiers’ families in their parishes were met.32 Just as charities received funds from the High Council and other com­ mittees patronized by members of the dynasty, the Union of Towns and the Union of Zemstvos received support from the State Treasury to care for both members of the military and the civilian population. The Union of Zemstvos operated a total of 3,222 hospitals for soldiers during the war. It also supported orphanages and collected donations of cash and goods to supply soldiers’ families with housing and clothing and to run day nurseries.33 The Union of Towns did similar work; during the first year of the war alone, it spent 446,830 rubles just on meals and milk for soldiers’ families. It also provided money to house families and provide them with heat.34 The tsar, his family, and members of his government were concerned to make sure the public knew of both the imperial family’s and the state’s financial contributions to this work. For example, according to Nicholas’s last minister of the interior, Aleksandr D. Protopopov, in October 1916, the empress confirmed to him her desire to see the funds that the State Treasury had given to the Union of Towns and the Union of Zemstvos made public because, she believed, the perception that the unions relied on funds that they themselves had raised strengthened their popularity. When Protopopov presented the proposal to the tsar, he, too, deemed necessary the publication of the state’s support for the Unions.35 31

 Komitet Ee Imperatorskogo Vysochestva velikoi kniazhny Tat´iany Nikolaevny po okazaniiu vremennoi pomoshchi postradavshim ot voennykh deistvii, 14 sentiabria 1914 g.—ianvar´ 1916 g. (Petrograd: Gos. Tip., 1916), 1: 6. 32  S. G. Runkevich, Velikaia otechestvennaia voina i tservkovnaia zhizn´, 1: Rasporiazheniia i deistviia Sviateishego Sinoda v 1914–1915 gg. (Petrograd: n.p., 1916). 33

 Polner et al., Russian Local Government, 89–90, 99, 141–45.

34

 “Pomoshch´ sem´iam zapasnykh i ratnikov,” Trudovaia pomoshch´ 19, 2 (1916): 135– 36.

35

 P. E. Shchegolov, Padenie tsarskogo rezhima (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo, 1925), 4: 114–15. For a recent discussion of the funds that the Council of Ministers allocated for relief work carried out by the Union of Towns, the Union of Zemstvos, and other organizations, see S. V. Kulikov, “Finansovye aspekty deiatel´nosti rossiiskikh blagotvoritel´nykh organizatsii voennogo vremeni (iiul´ 1914–fevral´ 1917 g.),” in



Philanthropy and Welfare in Russia, 1914–18

21

Those who prior to the war had advocated for the reorganization and modernization of Russian giving welcomed greater state involvement in relief work. In particular, they saw the creation of the High Council as an opportunity to demonstrate that centralizing charitable activity would be a worthwhile endeavor. Sergei Konstantinovich Gogel´ was chairman of the All-Russian Union of Organizations, Societies, and Activists in Public and Private Relief. Widely respected for his expertise in criminal law, Gogel’ was also known as a champion of charity reform who had argued for the need to bring a more efficient and rational basis to Russian giving and to facilitate greater coordination among private charities.36 Shortly after the High Council was established, Gogel´ wrote favorably of the legislation that had created it. He noted in particular that uniting state welfare institutions with private ones had never before been “proclaimed so clearly, openly, and fully” in Russian law. He hoped that the High Council would take steps such as recommending the creation of registration bureaus for those receiving aid in the empire’s cities; this, Gogel´ argued, would ensure that recipients of relief were not taking advantage of multiple sources of aid and help to combat “professional begging.” Gogel´ urged the High Council to provide guidance and financial support to private charities. By taking these and other measures, Gogel´ hoped, once the war was over, the High Council and its divisions would leave behind what would become the basis for a modern, rational state welfare system.37 The High Council made relief to soldiers’ families a public effort by calling on individuals and institutions to contribute to this work. The donations that the High Council received were recorded in a ledger and deposited with the treasury of the State Chancellery. Those who wished to make donations could do so at offices of the State Bank and at other financial institutions around the empire.38 Some contributions were also listed in the High Council’s monthly newsletter (Izvestiia Verkhovnogo Soveta po prizreniiu semei lits, prizvannykh na voinu, a takzhe semei ranenykh i pavshikh voinov). During the first months of the Blagotvoritel´nost´ v istorii Rossii: Novye dokumenty i issledovaniia, ed. L. I. Bulgakova (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2008), 369–96. 36

 Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice, 161–64.

37

 S. K. Gogel´, “Verkhovnyi Sovet i Komitet s otdeleniiami po prizreniiu semei lits, prizvannykh na voinu, a takzhe ranenykh i pavshikh voinov,” Prizrenie i blago­ tvoritel’nost’ v Rossii 3, 6–7 (1914): 597, 601–02. See also Gogel´, “Doklad Professora S. K. Gogelia po deviatomu voprosu,” in Trudy soedinennogo sobraniia chlenov Komiteta Ee Imperatorskogo Vysochestva Velikoi kniazhny Tat´iany Nikolaevny s mestnymi predstavi­ teliami: 3–7 maia 1915 goda (n.p., 1915), 81.

38

 Pravila o poriadke priema, khraneniia i raskhodovaniia pozhertvovanii, postupaiu­ shchikh v Verkhovnyi Sovet,” Izvestiia Verkhovnogo Soveta po prizreniiu semei lits, prizvannykh na voinu, a takzhe semei ranenykh i pavshikh voinov, no. 1 (November 1914): 78.

22

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war, for example, teachers at the Emperor Alexander I Men’s Gymnasium in Novgorod donated 30 rubles and 74 kopecks, while officers from the Black Sea Navy donated 2,958 rubles. The emir of Bukhara gave 100,000 rubles. The empress’s gratitude for these and other donations was duly noted.39 The High Council used the funds that it raised to support voluntary associations and charitable organizations performing the day-to-day work of caring for soldiers’ families and others who were in need due to the war. Often with the support of funds from the High Council and other sources, voluntary associations, charitable organizations, and welfare institutions that had been established before the war were able to serve as important sources of relief once hostilities began. Voluntary associations and charitable organi­ zations continued to act within their areas of interest and expertise, pursuing their particular goals while expanding the populations that they served. Drawing upon their experience and expertise, these organizations adapted their efforts to meet the civilian needs that the war created and to serve those whose lives the war had most impacted, most often soldiers’ families and refugees. One such organization was the Russian Society for the Protection of Women (Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin). In 1900, Princess Ev­ geniia Ol´denburgskaia had founded the society in order to provide women and girls with economic, legal, and social assistance to prevent them from becoming prostitutes and support those who wished to return to an “honest life.”40 Perhaps motivated in part by the common image of the soldiers’ wife as a defenseless or immoral woman lacking male supervision, during the war the society began to assist soldiers’ wives, children, and close female rela­ tives.41 In a report issued in November 1914, the society’s secretary, Nikolai K. Di-Sen´i, elaborated on the aid provided to women affected by the war. From the beginning of the war through 15 October 1914, the society’s Kiev division provided shelter for 40 women and 155 children. The Minsk division helped local women as well as those who had come there to find their enlisted 39

 “Spisok pozhertvovanii, postupivshikh v Verkhovnyi Sovet za vremia s 20 oktiabria po 1 noiabria 1914 goda,” Izvestiia Verkhovnogo Soveta po prizreniiu semei lits, prizvannykh na voinu, a takzhe semei ranenykh i pavshikh voinov, no. 2 (December 1914): 46–49.

40

 Laurie Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters: Prostitutes and Their Regulation in Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 204–05.

41

 On the image of the soldier’s wife in 19th-century Russia, see Beatrice Farnsworth, “The Soldatka: Folklore and Court Record,” Slavic Review 49, 1 (Spring 1990): 58. In the early 1890s, between 7.3 and 13 percent of the registered prostitutes in St. Petersburg were soldiers’ wives and daughters. Barbara Alpern Engel, Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work, and Family in Russia, 1861–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 174.



Philanthropy and Welfare in Russia, 1914–18

23

fathers, husbands, and brothers who were receiving medi­cal treatment. In Kiev and Vilnius, the society’s divisions also assisted women and girls who had become refugees.42 In 1915, the empress’s High Council and Grand Duchess Tat´iana’s Com­ mittee both provided the Russian Society for the Defense of Women with funds for its work caring for soldiers’ families and refugees. By this time, the Minsk and Vilnius divisions had ceased operations as the German army advanced eastwards, and aid to refugees had become more important. On 8 January 1915, the High Council gave the society 25,000 rubles to allocate among its divisions for the purpose of supporting soldiers’ families. The Tat´iana Committee provided an even larger sum that year, 36,855 rubles and 81 kopecks, for refugee relief. These sums were by no means insignificant; combined they made up more than half of the 78,932 rubles and 40 kopecks that the society took in that year.43 The fact that female refugees joined sol­ diers’ wives and daughters as beneficiaries of the society is indicative of both the scale of the refugee crisis and the dangers faced by women and girls fleeing the fields of battle.44 (For a 1915 appeal for donations to aid refugees and soldiers’ children, see figure 1 in the gallery of images following page 270.) Organizations created before 1914 to combat infant mortality likewise stepped in to provide wartime assistance. The St. Petersburg Society of the Drop of Milk (Obshchestvo “Kaplia moloka”), for example, founded in 1901 to combat the high rate of infant mortality in the capital, provided workingclass mothers with sterile milk, medical examinations, and advice on infant care.45 During the war, it directed its maternal and infant welfare programs to soldiers’ wives and children. Shortly after the war began, the Petrograd division of the Society for the Battle with Child Mortality (Obshchestvo bor´by s detskoi smertnost´iu) donated 1,000 rubles to spread the activities of the Drop of Milk and open a shelter. The Kiev Society for the Battle with Child Mortality opened an asylum for soldiers’ children, distribution centers where food could be obtained for children up to three years old, and three new Drop of Milk stations. During the first months of the war, the Empress’s Guardianship for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy, which had been founded in 1913, gave 5,000 rubles to the Kiev Drop of Milk Society and an 42

 N. K. Di-Sen´i, “Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin i voina,” Prizrenie i blagotvoritel´nost´ v Rossii 3, 8–10 (1914): 975–77, 979–80.

43  Rossiiskoie obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1915 god (god shestnadtsatyi) (Petrograd: Tip. N. P. Zaidman Pr—ki, 1916), 26–27, 32, 34, 100. 44 45

 Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 120–21.

 Engel, Between the Fields and the City, 219.

24

Jude C. Richter

additional 2,000 to the Kiev Society for the Battle with Child Mortality. By May 1915, the Kiev City Committee of the High Council had opened about ten Drop of Milk stations and thirteen distribution centers, while the Society for the Battle with Child Mortality had opened seven Drop of Milk stations.46 Similar efforts were undertaken in collaboration with the Tat´iana Committee and voluntary associations in Kiev to help feed refugee children.47 Local welfare organs likewise adapted their activities in order to support the war effort. In Petrograd, the city’s guardianships of the poor were reorganized and centralized. One of the guardianships’ stated purposes during the war was to provide public care for children, whether they were in institutions or in the private homes of families in the city.48 Petrograd’s guardianships also opened cafeterias serving inexpensive meals for soldiers’ families and oper­ ated study sessions to help soldiers’ children prepare for lessons every day after school.49 They also operated work bureaus to help soldiers’ dependents find employment. This work had its particular challenges, as some of the men and many of women who turned to the bureaus had precious little in the way of skills and experience to offer potential employers.50 However flexible they may have been in turning their efforts to meet the needs that the war created, institutions and organizations found their work encumbered by growing demand for resources that were in increasingly short supply. In addition to cash and material resources, relief work depended heavily on volunteers who contributed their time and energy. During the war, volunteers were sometimes in short supply. In 1915, for example, Levitskii reported that the war had adversely impacted the juvenile court in Kiev be­ cause it relied on volunteers to serve as guardians for minors who had cases pending before the court. The court had begun to operate in January 1914. In 46

 M., “Pomoshch´ sem´iam zapasnykh i ratnikov,” Trudovaia pomoshch´ 17, 9 (1914): 350; “Prizrenie semeistv,” 130; A.M., “Pomoshch´ sem´iam zapasnykh i ratnikov,” Trudo­ vaia pomoshch´ 18, 5 (1915): 479; “Sostoiashchee pod Avgusteishim pokrovitel´stvom Ee Imperatorskogo Velichestva Gosudaryni Imperatatritsy Aleksandry Fedorovny Vserossiiskoe Popechitel´stvo ob okhrane materinstva i mladenchestva,” Izvestiia Ver­ khovnogo Soveta po prizreniiu semei lits, prizvannykh na voinu, a takzhe semei ranenykh i pavshikh voinov, no. 3 (January 1915): 208. 47

 Komitet Ee Imperatorskogo Vysochestva velikoi kniazhy Tat´iany, 147.

48

 “Prizrenie semeistv,” 119–21. On municipal guardianships, see also Adele Linden­ meyr, “A Russian Experiment in Voluntarism: The Municipal Guardianships of the Poor, 1894–1914,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 30, 3 (1982): 429–51.

49

 “Pomoshch´ sem´iam zapasnykh i ratnikov,” Trudovaia pomoshch´ 19, 10 (1916): 485– 87. 50

 B. B—ov, “Trudovaia pomoshch´ v gorodskikh popechitel´stvakh o bednykh,” Trudovaia pomoshch’ 18, 5 (1915): 436–37.



Philanthropy and Welfare in Russia, 1914–18

25

May 1914, it had thirty volunteer guardians. During the first months of the war, two were drafted and a third was transferred to Galicia. Three more, all physicians, had to turn their time and energy to treating sick and wounded soldiers. The remainder who left court service did so to volunteer in hospitals or to assist soldiers’ families. By the end of the year, only twelve of the original thirty guardians remained. Due to the social dislocations caused by the war, Kiev’s juvenile court had to process twice as many criminal cases as Levitskii had predicted when the court began operations, thus making the loss of the volunteers all the more detrimental to the court’s work.51 These challenges persisted as the war went on. In late 1916, despite frequent appeals to the public for assistance, the Petrograd municipal guardianships were unable to muster the volunteers that they needed to do their work.52 Institutions even experienced difficulty keeping paid staff members due to the war. In December 1916, the Fidler Correctional Colony outside Moscow submitted to the Prison Division of the Moscow Provincial Administration its annual report for 1915, which had been “an extraordinarily difficult year.” In April, the colony’s director, N. Ia. Mezhin, had to leave for military service; he was replaced by one of the teachers, V. I. Nekrasov, but Nekrasov in turn was called up in September and replaced by yet another teacher. The colony also experienced difficulty in finding craftsmen to provide pupils instruction in its workshops. The overburdened staff was unable to keep a close watch over the institution’s pupils, and in 1915, there were over three times as many instances of pupils escaping than there had been during the previous year.53 Frustrated by the difficulties that institutions faced in carrying out their work, experts in the field complained about the lack of public interest in welfare issues that, they argued, had impeded the development of stronger welfare policies and institutions. In 1916, for example, S. Sozonov spoke at the Congress on Questions of Child Care sponsored by the Society of Pri­ mary Education. Sozonov blamed society, not the state, for Russia’s failure to create a better welfare system. He pointed out that, although there were many children still in need, “society has done and is doing a lot” to fulfill its promise to care for the children of “our defenders.” Refuting arguments made before the war that Russia could not provide adequately for its needy children because “we are poor,” Sozonov cited the empire’s ability to go to 51

 V. M. Levitskii, Sud dlia maloletnikh v g. Kieve (Kiev: Tip. I-I arteli pech. dela, 1915), 64–65. 52

 “Pomoshch´ sem´iam zapasnykh i ratnikov,” Trudovaia pomoshch´ 19, 10 (1916): 486.

53

 Tsentral´nyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy f. 474 (Prison Division of the Moscow provincial government), op. 8, d. 231 (annual report for the Fidler Correctional Colony for 1915), l. 21.

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war as proof that it did indeed have the means to implement wider reaching child welfare measures. It was not a shortage of resources, he argued, but the absence of an engaged public that hindered the development of institutions and programs to care for the empire’s impoverished children.54 Sozonov’s as­ sertions echoed complaints made prior to the war about “the indifference of society,” which stood as an obstacle to the development of public institutions for the protection of children.55 World War I resulted in hardship and privation on an unprecedented scale for Russian soldiers and civilians alike. In an effort to meet the needs that the war created, the state directed hitherto unheard of sums to relief work and worked to coordinate the activities of the various organizations—local governments, voluntary associations, and private charities—that turned their efforts and assets toward helping war victims. The expanded financial role of the state and the steps taken to centralize relief work were welcomed by those who promoted a rational, scientific approach to welfare. As the war continued, though, experts and organizers found themselves frustrated by shortages of volunteers and what they saw as insufficient public interest in aiding those in need. In January 1917, shortly before the collapse of the tsarist regime, Gogel´ complained that the relief work was still not sufficiently centralized. The High Council and other committees served primarily to transfer funds from the State Treasury to those institutions and organizations engaged in the day-to-day work of providing relief. According to Gogel´, there was still too little systematization or organization of Russian relief work, which resulted in inefficiency and waste.56 (See figure 2 for a 1916 appeal for assistance to disabled soldiers.) The period immediately following the February Revolution witnessed a renewed interest in civic engagement, including a resurgence in involvement in philanthropic and welfare organizations.57 In Kazan´, for example, on 4 March 1917, Ivan I. Aleksandrov wrote to the mayor on behalf of himself, his brother Petr, and two other wealthy local residents, Pavel P. Nabokov and Ivan 54

 S. Sozonov, “O nekotorykh merakh bor´by s detskoi bezprizornost´iu,” Trudovaia pomoshch´ 19, 7 (1916): 150–51, 153–55.

55

 D. A. Dril´, “Bezuchastnost´ obshchestva i ee sledstviia (Lichnye vpechatleniia ot osmotra nekotorykh vospitatel´no-ispravitel´nykh zavedenii,” pt. 1, Tiuremnyi vestnik 15, 5 (1907): 370–84; and pt. 2, Tiuremnyi vestnik 15, 6 (1907): 461–82. See also Lindenmeyr, “A Russian Experiment,” 443–44. 56

 S. K. Gogel´, “Blizhaishie nuzhdy i zadachi russkoi blagotvoritel´nosti,” Prizrenie i blagotvoritel´nost´ v Rossii 6, 1 (1917): 6–7. 57

 A. S. Tumanova, Deiatel´nost´ Ministerstva vnutrennikh del Rossiiskoi imperii po osu­ shchestvleniiu svobodu soiuzov (Tambov: Izdatel´stvo Tambovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta im G. P. Derzhavina, 2003), 210.



Philanthropy and Welfare in Russia, 1914–18

27

N. Ovchinnikov. Aleksandrov explained that the four men were “filled with a feeling of deep joy” because recent events had set Russia “on the road to a new, free civic and political life.” The men considered it their “civic duty” to come to the aid of the poor in Kazan´. Toward that end, they made a donation totaling 155,000 rubles.58 A similarly enthusiastic Gogel´ saw in the new political environment an opportunity for Russia to establish at last a more rational system of poor relief. He asserted that social welfare was now finally a “state affair.” In the past, “charity was the domain of private and wealthy people,” but in the new order it would be the obligation of both “the state and the people” to care for those in temporary need as well as those with long-term conditions making them unable to work. Creating a new system of public welfare, Gogel´ argued, would require the creation of a new, central institution.59 On 5 May 1917, the Provisional Government created the Ministry of State Welfare; Dmitrii I. Shakhovskoi was the first minister.60 A week later, the Department of the Institutes of the Empress Mariia was made a part of the new ministry.61 Over the next few months, the operations of a host of other organizations formerly under the patronage of members of the Romanov dynasty, including the Empress’s High Council, the Romanov Committee, and Grand Duchess Ol´ga’s and Grand Duchess Elizaveta’s respective committees, were likewise transferred to the new ministry. Grand Duchess Tat´iana’s Committee was placed instead under the Special Conference of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.62 Gogel´ greeted the creation of the new ministry as a longoverdue step forward in the creation of a more efficient and more modern welfare system.63

58  L. V. Gorokhova, ed., U miloserdiia drevnie korni (Blagotvoritel´nost´ i miloserdie v Kazani v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny, 1914–1917), 2: Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Kazan: Gasyr, 2003), 165–66. 59

 S. Gogel´, “Tsentral´nyi organ obshchestvennogo prizreniia,” Prizrenie i blagotvori­ tel´nost´ v Rossii 6, 2–3 (1917): 101, 103, 108. 60

 “Deistviia Pravitel´stva,” Vestnik Vremennogo Pravitel´stva, no. 49 (95) (6 May 1917): 1.

61

 “Khronika,” Vestnik Vremennogo Pravitel´stva, no. 56 (102) (17 May 1917): 2; “Khronika,” Prizrenie i blagotvoritel´nost´ v Rossii 6, 5 (1917): 453.

62

 S. K. Gogel´, “Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennogo Prizreniia,” Prizrenie i blagotvoritel´­ nost´ v Rossii 6, 6–7 (1917): 489; “Khronika,” Prizrenie i blagotvoritel´nost´ v Rossii 6, 5 (1917): 454; Robert Paul Browder and Alexander F. Kerensky, eds., The Russian Provi­ sional Government: 1917. Documents (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961), 2: 800. See also Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses, 45.

63

 Gogel´, “Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennogo Prizreniia,” 481.

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Jude C. Richter

In June, the new ministry laid out its priorities. Chief among them was providing for soldiers who had become disabled as a result of the war. Toward that end, the ministry planned to establish at the end of the month a committee to be made up of representatives of the ministry, public organizations, and the disabled men themselves. Throughout Russia, local organizations were to establish separate institutions focused on these men’s particular needs. The ministry also planned to focus on child welfare concerns. In particular, it hoped to combat child neglect and homelessness, longstanding problems that the war had exacerbated, through the creation of new asylums and the organization of special courses for professionals working in this area. Finally, the ministry announced its intention to organize state welfare along the lines of what it called “the English type of state welfare.” In this model, local organizations would carry out welfare activities while the registration of aid recipients, the coordination of activities, and financial matters would be the responsibility of a central state institution. Due to the lack of adequate statistical information about those who had received aid in the past, the ministry would need time to determine exactly what resources it would need to carry out its operations.64 In July, Pavel N. Efremov replaced Shakhovskoi as minister.65 Over the next few months, officials at the new ministry worked to toward achieving its goals. In August, for example, it held a conference devoted specifically to discussions of child welfare issues.66 How successful the ministry might have been in achieving its goals is impossible to say; the new ministry existed for less than six months before the Bolsheviks came to power. Russians had long prided themselves on a generosity toward those in need that was rooted in Christian teachings and deemed characteristic of Russian national culture.67 During the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries, though, educated Russians sometimes argued that in place of almsgiving and other traditional forms of giving, a more scientific and rational approach should be taken to address the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable members of society. World War I challenged Russian approaches to charity and wel­ fare and served as a catalyst for their transformation. The war’s outbreak in­ spired acts of generosity to those whose lives had been affected most. It also 64

 “Administrativnye izvestiia,” Vestnik Vremennogo Pravitel´stva, no. 86 (132) (22 June 1917): 4. 65

 Gogel´, “Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennogo Prizreniia,” 483.

66

 Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government, 2: 802; “Soveshchanie po voprosam sotsial´noi pomoshchi detiam pri Ministerstve Gosudarstvennogo Pri­ zreniia,” Prizrenie i blagotvoritel´nost´ v Rossii 6, 6–7 (1917): 563–76. 67

 Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice, 7–25.



Philanthropy and Welfare in Russia, 1914–18

29

raised the hopes of those who saw an opportunity to modernize and reform Russian giving. In the form of the High Council, Grand Duchess Tat´iana’s Committee, and other relief organs, the state supported and coordinated to an unprecedented degree the efforts of philanthropic organizations and welfare institutions working to aid those whose lives the war had disrupted. Once the Provisional Government assumed power, advocates for re­ form welcomed the opportunity to institute a centralized national welfare system that would operate more efficiently. The Ministry of State Welfare was envisioned as a body that would coordinate the work of charity and welfare organizations and provide financial support and training for them. The People’s Commissariat of Social Welfare sought an even greater degree of centralization. On 19 November 1917, the new commissar, Aleksandra Kol­ lontai, liquidated all private and public organizations and institutions that provided relief to disabled soldiers and their families. Their assets were to be handed over immediately to the commissariat’s executive committee of wounded soldiers and to local committees of wounded soldiers throughout the country.68 A few months later, on 31 January 1918, Kollontai issued a decree announcing that all institutions serving children’s needs were to merge into one government organization under the commissariat’s Department for the Protection of Maternity and Childhood.69 Kollontai remained at the head of the commissariat until March 1918.70 In April, it was renamed the People’s Commissariat of Social Security. With few exceptions, most notably the Red Cross, Russia’s charitable organizations were liquidated. Voluntarism, which had been a central component of charity work during the imperial period, was recast in the early Soviet period as subbotniki, when citizens, willingly or unwillingly, spent their Saturdays in unpaid labor on various public projects.71 Until the last years of the Soviet period, private charitable organizations, deemed unnecessary under socialism, were nonexistent.72

68

 Gorokhova, U miloserdiia drevnie korni, 2: 182.

69

 Alexandra Kollontai, Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, trans. Alix Holt (London: Allison and Busby, 1977), 140.

70

 Alexandra Kollontai, The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman, ed. Iring Fetscher, trans. Salvator Attanasio (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 35, 40; A. S. Tumanova, “Blagotvoritel´nye ob˝edineniia: Organizatsionno-pravovye osnovaniia i soderzhanie deiatel´nosti,” in Samoorganizatsiia rossiiskoi obshchestvennosti v poslednei treti XVIII–nachale XX v., ed. Tumanova (Moscow: Rosspen, 2011), 314.

71

 William S. Chase, “Mobilisation and Coercion: Subbotniki 1919–1921,” Soviet Studies 41, 1 (1989): 111–28. 72

 Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice, 3.

The People’s House in War and Revolution Lynn M. Sargeant

By the beginning of World War I, the people’s house (narodnyi dom) was well established as an institution and as an idea in Russia.1 On the surface, a people’s house was a simple establishment. It provided a common roof for a range of services and organizations, among them libraries, tearooms, cafeterias, ama­ teur theater troupes, adult literacy courses, sports and gymnastics groups, and choirs. Even though people’s houses existed in widely varying forms, from grandiose cultural palaces in major cities to rundown shacks in remote villages, they shared a common purpose: to provide an institutional basis for the improvement of the educational, cultural, and social level of Russia’s 1

 Analogous institutions exist in many other countries, including Turkey, the United States, Great Britain, and most of the continental European states from the late 1880s well into the 20th century. Scholarly research, however, has continued to explore these institutions in their national context, rather than from a comparative perspective. On Britain and the London People’s Palace, see Simon Joyce, “Castles in the Air: The People’s Palace, Cultural Reformism, and the East End Working Class,” Victorian Studies 39, 4 (Summer 1996): 513–38. On the Italian variant, see Margaret Kohn, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). In Spain, like Italy, socialist organizations and politics played an important role in the people’s house. See Jean-Louis Guereña, “European Influences in Spanish Popular Education: The Case of the Socialist Casa Del Pueblo of Madrid and the Belgian Model (1897–1929),” History of Education 35, 1 (January 2006): 27–45. The social, cultural, and political role of the people’s house in Republican Turkey has received some sustained attention in recent years. See, for example, Sefa Şimşek, “’People’s Houses’ as a Na­ tionwide Project for Ideological Mobilization in Early Republican Turkey,” Turkish Studies 6, 1 (March 2005): 71–91; and M. Asim Karaömerlioğlu, “The People’s Houses and the Cult of the Peasant in Turkey,” in “Turkey before and after Atatürk: Internal and External Affairs,” special issue, Middle Eastern Studies 34, 4 (October 1998): 67–91. In the United States, the “social center” has been studied as both a political and social artifact of the Progressive Era. See Edward W. Stevens, Jr., “Social Centers, Politics, and Social Efficiency in the Progressive Era,” History of Education Quarterly 12, 1 (Spring 1972): 16–33; as well as Kevin Mattson, Creating a Democratic Republic: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy during the Progressive Era (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), especially chaps. 3, 4, and 6. Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 31–58.

32 Lynn M. Sargeant

working and peasant classes.2 However, a people’s house had the potential to be more than the sum of its components. For its proponents, it was more than just a convenient space for educational and recreational activities. It was a center for local initiative and a prototype for civil society, rather than simply a “building” that housed “under one roof” a variety of useful organizations and institutions.3 It provided a physical location to house their ideals, a fact reflected in the plethora of pamphlets and articles produced to trumpet its “gospel.”4 Most importantly, in theory, and sometimes in practice, the people’s house was an institutionalization of the community as conceived by its members. (For a picture of the Vladivostok people’s house, see figure 3 in the gallery of images following page 270.) The meaning of community and its metaphorical boundaries, however, varied widely for sponsors of the people’s house. The provincial committees of the Guardianship of Popular Sobriety (Popechitel´stvo o narodnoi trez­ vosti) were by far the most important early sponsors of people’s houses.5 Unsurprisingly, the Guardianships’ houses emphasized temperance, both through the substitution of the temptations of culture for the evils of drink and through the direct provision of nutritional, medical, and social support to those in danger of falling victim to alcoholism. Nevertheless, their close association with the tsarist state fatally compromised them in the eyes of lib­ eral reformers, who accused them not only of bureaucratic mismanagement and waste but also of pandering to the desires of well-off urban dwellers for

2   The most significant recent work on the people’s house in Russia is that of Adele Lindenmeyr, including both “The First Soviet Political Trial: Countess Sofia Panina before the Petrograd Revolutionary Tribunal,” Russian Review 60, 4 (October 2001): 505–25; and “Building Civil Society One Brick at a Time: People’s Houses and Workers’ Enlightenment in Late Imperial Russia,” Journal of Modern History 84, 1 (March 2012): 1–39. Lindenmeyr’s interest in the people’s house, however, focuses primarily on a critically important but rather unusual institution, the Ligovskii People’s House in St. Petersburg, which was sponsored by Panina. 3

  “Moskva, 12 aprelia,” Russkie vedomosti, 12 April 1915.

4

  Scholars seeking acquaintance with these materials would be well advised to begin with the work of E. N. Medynskii, one of the leading proponents of adult education and the people’s house. See in particular E. Medynskii and I. Lapshov, Sistematicheskii ukazatel´ knig i statei po vneshkol´nomu obrazovaniiu (Moscow: Nauka, 1916). 5

 Although Patricia Herlihy devotes considerable attention to the people’s house of the St. Petersburg and Moscow city Guardianships, she does not explore the role of provincial Guardianship committees in developing such institutions. Herlihy, The Al­ coholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 17–28.

The People’s House in War and Revolution

33

entertainment, rather than meeting the moral, cultural, and educational needs of the lower classes.6 Other sponsors ranged from city governments, to the Orthodox Church, to voluntary associations such as the Khar´kov, Kiev, and Nizhnii Novgorod Literacy Societies, from wealthy noble philanthropists, such as Countess Sof´ia Panina, to industrialists and entrepreneurs.7 Even local branches of the Union of the Russian People sponsored people’s houses, although these admittedly idiosyncratic institutions adopted the name and some of the components of their more liberal brethren while resolutely rejecting their ethos.8 Despite the ideological differences of their sponsors, these people’s houses shared a com­ mon characteristic: they were provided for the community or constructed on behalf of the community in order to better the community, rather than created by the community itself. In the last few years before the outbreak of the Great War, first the dis­ trict and provincial zemstvos (Russia’s local organs of self-government, estab­ lished in 1864) and then the cooperative movement developed an interest in the people’s house as part of a growing commitment to adult education (vneshkol´noe obrazovanie).9 Educational reformers, most with strong ties to 6

  See, for example, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA) f. 575 (Administration for Unassessed Taxes and State Liquor Sales), op. 3, d. 4303 (materials of the Ministry of the Interior on the reorganization of the Guardianship of Popular Sobriety), ll. 857–59 (“Khodataistva zemskikh uchrezhdenii i gorodskikh obshchestvennykh upravlenii o peredache v ikh vedenia dela popecheniia o narodnoi trezvosti”); and d. 4173 (materials on the transfer of the functions and resources of the Guardianship of Popular Sobriety to the cities, zemstvos, and peasants’ and private societies). See also Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, 15–16, 29–35, for a general discussion of hostility toward the Guardianship. 7   The Orthodox Church worried that the people’s houses might serve to lessen the church’s moral authority and thus argued for parochial control of such institutions. RGIA f. 796 (Chancellery of the Synod), op. 202, 1916, otd. II, st. 2, d. 487 (“Ob uchastii pravoslavnogo dukhovenstva v kul´turnom obrazovanii russkogo naroda i o prikhod­ skikh narodnykh domov”), ll. 1–5, 6. 8

  V. A. Obraztsov, Torzhestvo russkogo ob˝edineniia: Osviashchenie “Narodnogo doma” Eka­ terinoslavskogo otd. Soiuza russkogo naroda 5 okt. 1910 g. (Khar´kov, 1912). 9

  Research on the cooperative movement is central to understanding the people’s houses. After 1913, the cooperative movement became increasingly interested in adult education and the people’s house. This reflected both a grassroots interest in rural community cultural development and the desire by some activists to use the cooperative movement to further their own educational agendas. As Scott Seregny has noted, the period between 1905 and 1914 witnessed a “dramatic growth of rural cooperatives.” These cooperatives, he argued, served as a “kind of surrogate for a small zemstvo unit” and had the potential to “dispel the ‘civic illiteracy’” that prevented the social modernization of rural Russia. Teacher involvement in the co­

34 Lynn M. Sargeant

the zemstvos or the cooperatives, advocated for linked, nested, or networked institutions that would bring culture and education to the whole of Russian society, from the smallest village to the largest industrial center.10 In contrast to earlier people’s house projects, those sponsored by the zemstvos and the cooperatives placed far greater emphasis on local initiative and community involvement and much less emphasis on temperance. In the language of the time, these were to be houses “of the people” rather than “for the people.” Moreover, the zemstvos were actively hostile to the Guardianship of Popular Sobriety and sought to seize its financial resources to support their own educational and cultural projects.11 The onset of the war, and wartime prohibition, provided the zemstvos in particular with an unexpected oppor­ tunity to press their claims to leadership in the people’s house movement and to the funding previously devoted to the Guardianships. Although the zemstvos, cooperatives, and voluntary associations were willing to pay lip service to temperance in order to stake their claim to state funding, their focus remained on education and community development. They presented themselves as ready, willing, and able to efficiently step into the cultural vacuum created by enforced sobriety and provide educational and cultural replacements for traditional alcohol-infused sociability. The solutions they proposed, however, reflected the prewar concerns of these groups with the need to expand and maintain literacy and civic engagement among the peas­ ant and working classes. However, competition for resources, as well as for leadership within the people’s house movement, increased tensions between the zemstvos, the cooperative movement, voluntary associations, and the

operatives, however, was uneven and viewed with suspicion by the state. Scott J. Seregny, “Teachers and Rural Cooperatives: The Politics of Education and Professional Identities in Russia, 1908–1917,” Russian Review 55, 4 (October 1996): 568–69, 589. 10

  Scott Seregny’s work on the changing role of teachers, the school, and adult education after 1905 provides an important context for understanding the place of the people’s house in the Russian community. Seregny argues for a reconsideration of the zemstvo’s effectiveness after the 1905 Revolution. He focuses on the “new zemstvo field of adult education,” which, he argues, was one of the “most ambitious peasant-oriented campaigns” in the history of the zemstvos (“Zemstvos, Peasants, and Citizenship: The Russian Adult Education Movement and World War I,” Slavic Review 59, 2 [Summer 2000]: 293). See also his Russian Teachers and Peasant Revolution: The Politics of Education in 1905 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); and “A Wager on the Peasantry: Anti-Zemstvo Riots, Adult Education and the Russian Village during World War One. Stavropol´ Province,” Slavonic and East European Review 79, 1 (January 2001): 90–126.

11

  RGIA f. 575, op. 3, d. 4303, ll. 857–59; and d. 4173 (“O peredache funktsii i sredstv PoNT gorodam, zemstvam, krest´ianskim i chastnym obshchestvam”).

The People’s House in War and Revolution

35

state as each of these groups advocated a different conception of com­munity and, accordingly, a different role for the people’s house within it.12 Proponents of the people’s house viewed it as the key to building the Rus­ sia of the future. The Great War provided them with the opportunity to raise awareness of the benefits of the institution in educated society and the tsarist state, and convince them of the critical importance of the people’s house. In this, they succeeded to a remarkable extent. The devastating economic and so­ cial toll of the war, however, prevented the realization of their ambitious goals to create a network of community cultural institutions. Ironically, it would be the Soviet state that would bring this dream into being, albeit under a new name and a new ethos. The People’s House from Peace to War to Revolution On the eve of World War I, the people’s house was a well-established insti­ tution in Russia’s cities and had begun to take root in provincial towns and villages. In Moscow, the Guardianship of Popular Sobriety had developed a coherent network of people’s houses that emphasized first nutrition and then entertainment, but devoted little attention to education. In addition, several factory owners and voluntary associations sponsored people’s houses in the city. St. Petersburg, similarly, could boast of several major institutions, in­ cluding the Ligovskii People’s House and the E. L. Nobel People’s House at the Liudvig Nobel factory, that were sponsored by leading citizens or voluntary associations.13 In addition, the Guardianship for Popular Sobriety sponsored the grandiose Nicholas II People’s House, which, however, was often derided as a “people’s house without the People,” or a “people’s house for the drunken.”14 As important as these institutions were, they diverged in essential ways from the broader people’s house movement that was developing in Russia’s 12

 Such issues inflamed debates between representatives from cooperatives, voluntary associations, and zemstvos at the 1915 All-Zemstvo Congress on Enlightenment Measures held in the provincial city of Iaroslavl´. Trudy obshchezemskogo soveshchaniia o prosvetitel’nykh meropriiatiiakh, sozvannogo Iaroslavskoi gubernskoi zemskoi upravoi v g. Iaroslavle (3–7 avgusta 1915 g.): Zhurnaly zasedanii soveshchaniia s prilozheniem materialov soveshchaniia (Iaroslavl´, 1915), 16–17, 20–24, 27–28, and 49–61.

13 14

  Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, 120.

  For a particularly lurid example of the seedy reputation of the Nicholas II People’s House, see Tainy v S.-Peterburgskom narodnom dome (St. Petersburg, 1905), 4–5. A less hysterical, but no less important attack on the Nicholas II House emerged from the musical press, which questioned whether the large amounts spent on the institution achieved the goal of “enlightening” the working classes. “Nuzhno-li subsidirovat´ narodnyi dom?” Russkaia muzykal´naia gazeta, no. 4 (1915): 96.

36 Lynn M. Sargeant

provinces where the emphasis lay in adult education, not temperance, and the development of a local social and cultural infrastructure, not social control. Both the city of Khar´kov and its surrounding province played a critical part in defining and disseminating the idea of the people’s house throughout the Russian Empire. Khar´kov achieved this prominence because of the dynamism and persistence of a key voluntary association, the Khar´kov Literacy Society (Khar´kovskoe obshchestvo gramotnosti), which was founded in 1869.15 The organization became much broader in significance with the opening of the Khar´kov People’s House in 1903, which became a model for other cities.16 It not only served as a powerful architectural reminder of the potency of organized voluntary associations, it also inscribed in brick and mortar the evangelizing cultural ethos of the adult education movement. More importantly, the Khar´kov People’s House became a node for the broader dissemination of both the core institutions and the central ideas of the adult education movement.17 Support for the people’s house as an essential cultural institution spread from the Literacy Society to local society more generally, and from the city of Khar´kov to the province as a whole, as the Khar´kov provincial and district zemstvos attempted to construct an entire network of such houses. Its influence, and that of the Khar´kov Literacy Society, reached its peak in 1915, when a local conference on “rational recreation” (razumnye razvlecheniia) developed national significance.18 The Khar´kov Literacy Society had dreamt of a substantial building of its own for years. By 1898, the society was actively seeking both moral and financial support from any conceivable source of funds, whether at the local, the provincial, or the national level. Once the society decided to pursue the construction of a people’s house, it embarked on a concerted campaign to publicize the project both in the newspapers and in local halls of power. The rhetoric it employed to persuade local educated society amounted to a declaration of principles for the people’s house movement. The “recognition 15

  For a brief history of the society, see A. Didrikhson, Istoricheskii obzor deiatel´nosti Khar´kovskogo obshchestva rasprostraneniia v narode gramotnosti, 1869–1909 (Moscow, 1911). 16

  On the Khar´kov People’s House, see Khar´kovskoe ob-vo rasprostraneniia v narode gramotnosti, Narodnyi dom, Desiatiletie narodnogo doma Khar´kovskogo ob-va gramotnosti, 1903–1913 (Khar´kov, 1913).

17  V. Ia. Danilevskii’s writings were particularly influential. See, as an example, both his Narodnyi dom, ego zadacha i obshchestvennoe znachenie (Khar´kov, 1915); and his ear­ lier work, Narodnyi dom i ego obshchestvenno-vospitatel´noe znachenie (Khar´kov, 1898). 18

  The proceedings of the conference were published as Trudy sozvannogo Khar´kovskim obshchestvom gramotnosti 7–12 iiunia 1915 g.: S˝ezd po voprosam organizatsii razumnykh razvlechenii dlia naseleniia Khar´kovskoi gub., 2 vols. (Khar´kov, 1915).

The People’s House in War and Revolution

37

of the need to raise the moral and intellectual level of the simple people” was “one of the defining characteristics” of the age. “The state, social institutions, and private individuals” were “all in agreement” on the issue. Earlier efforts at cultural development had opened up “new horizons,” and it was no longer possible to be satisfied with just the dissemination of “literacy alone.” “The people” (narod), having become acquainted with “more cultured” ways of life, had begun to “make new demands” that better corresponded to their “changing circumstances.” Workers needed a new kind of recreation that would not only allow them to recover their physical strength, but also their “spiritual vigor.” The people’s house was defined as a “type of popular club” in which “people of the most various ages, characters, and professions” could gather together and find relaxation with a glass of tea, a good book, lively conversation, or with a concert, theatrical performance, or lecture. The people’s house drew the working classes away from the taverns, “thus preventing disorderly conduct, fighting, and possibly even crime.”19 Such institutional prophylactics against the evils of the modern age did not come cheap, but cities large and small rushed to build such institutions, believing them to be both “nursery and breeding ground” for education and enlightenment.20 They also satisfied the cultural vanity of provincial cities. The new people’s house emphasized the rapid growth and increasing prominence of Khar´kov as a city; in 1898, when the Literacy Society began soliciting funds for the project, the city had a population of “almost 200,000.”21 A city of such size and prominence, the Literacy Society argued, required a large and elaborate institution, one with a price tag of “no less than one hundred thousand rubles” (the final cost was considerably more).22 Despite the cost, the Khar´kov People’s House fulfilled its promise; the house quickly grew into a substantial cultural institution that provided a focal point for local community life. Both the people’s house and its sponsor, the Khar´kov Lit­ eracy Society, were held in high regard by local educated society.23 19

  Derzhavnii arkhiv Kharkivs´koi oblasti (DAKhO) f. 200, op. 1, d. 195 (materials of the commission for the organization and construction of the people’s house), ll. 6–7ob. (1 December 1898) and 36–37 (19 September 1898).

20

  Ibid.

21

  According to the 1897 census, the population of Khar´kov was 173,949. “The First General Census of the Russian Empire of 1897: Khar´kov District—the city of Khar´­ kov,” http://demoscope.ru/weekly/ssp/rus_lan_97_uezd_eng.php?reg=1604 (3 November 2013).

22 23

  DAKhO f. 200, op. 1, d. 195, ll. 36–37.

  Local approval of the Literacy Society’s administration of the Khar´kov People’s House played a key role in the Ministry of Finance’s final rejection of the protracted effort by the Ministry of Internal Affairs to seize control of the people’s house. The

38 Lynn M. Sargeant

The success of the Khar´kov People’s House and similar institutions in other cities highlighted their potential as incubators of Russia’s social, cultural, and educational development. In the wake of the 1911 Zemstvo Education Conference and the 1913 All-Russian Cooperative Conference, both the zemstvos and the cooperative movement emphasized the development of people’s houses. A number of zemstvos made significant commitments to develop networks of people’s houses at the provincial, district, and township (volost´) level, with the Perm´ and Ufa zemstvos’ projects serving as models for other initiatives.24 In contrast to the Perm´ zemstvo’s approach, which emphasized local initiative, the Ufa zemstvo sought to control costs and increase efficiency by retaining authority over the project. It proposed a clear institutional hierarchy, with more and less sophisticated variations on the people’s house mapped out at the provincial, district, and township level. Most notably, the township house was imagined not only as a center for cultural and community life but also as the administrative nucleus for a future township zemstvo.25 pretext for this attempted land grab was the fact that the charter of the Literacy Society did not give it the right to own real estate. The underlying motive, however, was the hostility of I. M. Obolenskii, then newly appointed as provincial governor, toward the Literacy Society, which he saw as an unfair competitor, rather than a working partner, to the provincial committee of the Guardianship of Popular Sobriety. RGIA f. 575, op. 3, d. 4026 (on financial aid for the construction of a people’s house in Khar´kov), ll. 202–202ob., 203–09, and 210–12. 24

 The township (volost´) was a small administrative unit usually comprising several villages. The projects developed by the Perm´ and Ufa provincial zemstvos became standard models that were adopted or adapted by other zemstvos as they also began to invest in adult education, community development, and rational recreation. The Perm´ and Ufa projects outlined two substantially different, although not contradic­ tory, conceptions of the relationship between local communities and local authorities. While the Ufa project emphasized centralized decision making for the devel­opment of a rationally distributed network of institutions, the Perm´ zemstvo insisted that people’s houses must be a product of direct local initiative. The Perm´ provincial zemstvo began to seriously consider the question of promoting and funding the construction of people’s houses in the province in 1910. See Permskoe gubernskoe zemstvo, Doklad Permskim gubernskim zemskim sobraniiam: XLI ocherednoi sessii. Po po­ vodu oznamenovaniia predstoiashchego 50-ti letiia osvobozhdeniia krest´ian (o planomernoi sisteme meropriiatii po vneshkol´nomu obrazovaniiu, v tom chisle i o narodnykh domakh) (Perm´, 1910), especially 7–13.

25

  Ufimskoe gubernskoe zemstvo, Plan deiatel´nosti gubernskogo zemstva po narodnomu obrazovaniiu, utverzhdennyi gubernskim zemskim sobraniem ocherednoi sessii 1912 g. (Ufa, 1913), 39–40, 49–50. The Ufa plan for the development of people’s houses was an ex­ tension of a broader plan for the development of adult education, which initially fo­ cused on the building of freestanding libraries (Seregny, “Zemstvos, Peasants, and Citizenship,” 298–301).

The People’s House in War and Revolution

39

Because of the increasing interest in adult education and the people’s house after 1911, many zemstvos began recruiting or training specialists in the field shortly before the war. These experts seized the opportunity presented by wartime prohibition to attempt to replace the tavern with people’s houses as the central institution of Russian community cultural life and economic devel­ opment. For adult education specialists within the cooperatives and zemstvos, the war seemed to present an unprecedented opportunity to restructure the priorities of the state, particularly in terms of how it funded provincial efforts at social and educational development. Their professional authority also gave weight to broader wartime debates over the need for “rational recreation” and the institutions that housed them (i.e., the people’s houses). Many social reformers and educational activists viewed “rational recreation” as a way to solve one of Russia’s most persistent problems: drunkenness. They viewed ra­ tional recreation as the “psychological equivalent” of alcohol and believed that they could successfully substitute one for the other. Although critics derided this notion, pointing out that it was based on the self-serving assumptions of the intelligentsia rather than on any real data, it gave the people’s houses, and adult education more generally, new and widespread legitimacy.26 Such was the proponents’ enthusiasm for rational recreation that they refused to be deterred by the occasional irrationality of their proposals. In 1915, at the height of wartime enthusiasm for cultural intervention, the Tetiushskoe district zemstvo board sought to take steps to further the cultural development of the local population, although they remained nervous about the cost of such endeavors. The committee they appointed to oversee the project consisted primarily of representatives from local cooperatives, which virtually ensured robust debate. The original instigator of the entire discussion, K. Solov´ev, vigorously promoted both the people’s house and zemstvo leadership in adult education. Some members of the committee received his proposals enthusiastically, but others greeted them with deep and understandable skepticism. The chair of the zemstvo board, A. N. Plotnikov, bluntly asked committee members whether “at the current moment” it was more important to “feed the starving” or “give the population rational recreation.” In a stunning display of the war-driven enthusiasm for rational recreation, the response to this rather reasonable query was, if you will, a split decision. One committee member agreed that it would be best to focus on feeding the hungry, but another insisted that education and culture were more important, while a third wanted to have things both ways, with available funds split between these two needs. Ultimately, the committee recommended that the board ask the zemstvo assembly for 1,000 rubles to fund cooperative efforts 26

  V. Bystrenin, “Golos iz derevni,” Petrogradskie vedomosti, 16 June 1915.

40 Lynn M. Sargeant

at adult education. That body pushed the issue further, accepting this recommendation and approving a bolder request to approach the Guardianship of Popular Sobriety for 30,000 rubles to support the organization of rational recreation in the district.27 In many ways, the Tetiushskoe zemstvo’s decisions were typical of those made during the war. On the one hand, enthusiasm for education and culture as a means to cure Russia’s alcohol-based social ills was widespread among educated society, even if in most cases they simply took the supposed effec­ tiveness of these endeavors as an article of faith. On the other hand, the ability to implement such initiatives on the ground was often doubtful. In this case, the project soon foundered. The district zemstvo’s petitions were rejected by both the provincial zemstvo and the Guardianship of Popular Sobriety. How­ ever, we should not immediately cast either of these two bodies in the role of villain. The district zemstvo’s own report noted that few local cooperatives actively engaged in cultural work. Nevertheless, despite the reluctance of higher authorities to commit funds, the Tetiushskoe district zemstvo was now fully convinced of the legitimacy of the people’s house, adult education, and rational recreation, citing the significant financial commitment of other zemstvos.28 As the Tetiushskoe example suggests, enthusiasm for rational recreation and people’s houses in the press and publicity surrounding successful proj­ ects put pressure on zemstvos to intensify their efforts at adult education. Yet, new demands did not imply the availability of additional funds. The Tetiush­ skoe district zemstvo, like many of its peers, confronted a fundamental problem: where should it invest its scarce financial and cultural resources? Should the priorities, the zemstvo board asked, “[be] libraries or lectures and readings, movie screenings, or concerts? Some may answer: all of these are unquestionably necessary. But what should come first?”29 In many ways, 1915 was the high point of the people’s house movement in Russia. The true cost and extent of the Great War were yet unknown. At all levels, from the penny press to ministerial offices, debates over adult edu­cation and rational recreation raged throughout 1915 and 1916. The state’s initiatives, 27

  RGIA f. 1288, op. 14 (1915), d. 139, ll. 156–58, 159–60ob.

28

 Ibid., ll. 162–64, “Doklad no. 9 Tetiushskoi uezdnoi zemskoi upravy… ‘Po voprosu o vneshkol´nom obrazovanii i ob uchrezhdenii dolzhnosti zaveduiushchego otdelom narodnogo obrazovaniia.’” 29

  Ultimately, the district zemstvo hedged its bets. It decided to research the issue more fully, to commit to developing a plan for adult education and cultural development in the province, and to hire a specialist to serve as the director of a district-level depart­ ment of education. The post would require a higher education and pay 2,400 rubles annually (ibid., ll. 164, 165–165ob.).

The People’s House in War and Revolution

41

to be discussed below, were still new and promising, while the zemstvos, cooperatives, and voluntary associations had all seized the opportu­ nity presented by wartime prohibition to press ahead with ambitious projects. By early 1915, the Khar´kov provincial zemstvo was firmly in support of both people’s houses and adult education more generally. In May, the provin­ cial zemstvo organized a conference to explore both its legitimate interest in the people’s house as a mechanism for cultural and educational reform in the countryside, and the very real limitations on its ability to create a fully functional network of such institutions in the province. Although discussions were sometimes contentious, the conference effectively “signed on” to the resolutions on adult education proposed at the 1911 Moscow All-Zemstvo Congress on Education, which emphasized the people’s house as the central institution in the development of adult education.30 As it pursued its project, the Khar´kov provincial zemstvo sought to gather information from other provinces about existing people’s houses, their organization and patterns of development, and their effectiveness. In particu­ lar, they sought information regarding cooperation between the zemstvo, local cooperatives, and other social institutions.31 The replies the zemstvo received must have been disappointing. Most district zemstvos indicated that they had no information, or no people’s houses, or no existing cultural efforts to fight alcoholism, or some combi­ nation of these responses. A few zemstvos referred to the work of the Guardi­ anships of Popular Sobriety, but as often with disapproval as with favor. The Astrakhan´ district zemstvo board noted that although the Guardianships claimed to operate two people’s houses in the district, one had closed entirely while the other barely clung to life.32 Others responded more positively. The Vologodskii district zemstvo board drew attention to the work of the Com­ mercial Department of the Vologda Agricultural Society, while the Slav­ ianoserbskii district zemstvo in Ekaterinoslav province noted that the NovoSvetlovskoe Credit Cooperative had requested a 5,000-ruble loan to build a people’s house.33 The Ekaterinoslav provincial zemstvo reported on its efforts 30

  DAKhO f. 304, op. 1, d. 3039 (resolutions regarding adult education), ll. 17ob.– 19ob. On the contents of the resolutions proposed at the Moscow Conference, which identified the people’s house as the “basic local institution of adult education,” see “Pervyi obshchezemskii s˝ezd po narodnomu obrazovaniiu 1911 goda,” Zhurnaly zase­ danii sektsii s˝ezda (Moscow, 1912), 252–53.

31   DAKhO f. 304, op. 1, d. 3041 (report to the Khar´kov provincial zemstvo board about the organization of people’s houses in the province), l. 1 (letter dated 2 April 1915). 32

  Ibid., ll. 6–6ob.

33

  Ibid., ll. 69, 86–86ob.

42 Lynn M. Sargeant

to develop people’s houses in coordination with the cooperative movement by providing no-interest loans of up to 5,000 rubles.34 The deliberate and thoughtful approach of the Khar´kov zemstvo under­ scores its commitment to a network of people’s houses as the best opportunity to develop a robust cultural infrastructure for the province. Inadequate finan­ cial resources, more than anything else, forced the Khar´kov zemstvo to find creative solutions to support its project. Faced with difficulty in securing suf­ ficient funds to make construction loans, the provincial zemstvo pressed the province’s cooperatives to follow the idealistic rhetoric of the 1913 Cooperative Conference with action. They first asked the province’s small credit associations (kassy melkogo kredita) to devise a scheme through which to issue low-interest loans for the construction of people’s houses.35 By the end of 1916, they were all but demanding that local cooperatives join with the zemstvo in creating a substantial network of people’s houses for the province. Irrespective of where the money came from, the zemstvo insisted, the people’s house movement would only be successful if “local social organizations” that were “interested in raising the cultural level of the population” actively participated.36 The increased interest of the Khar´kov zemstvo in people’s houses was shared by other zemstvos, the cooperatives, and educated society more gen­ erally. In response to this interest, Scott Seregny reports, a “staggering number” of conferences and congresses took place throughout the spring and summer of 1915. These meetings brought educational and cultural leaders from the zemstvos, cooperatives, and voluntary associations together to discuss “the future of adult education” and construct elaborate plans to create a cultural infrastructure for Russia’s future.37 The most important of these meetings was undoubtedly the Khar´kov Conference on Rational Recreation, which was sponsored by the Khar´kov Literacy Society. Through this conference, the Literacy Society and its people’s house acquired national prominence and authority.38 Early discussions 34

  Ibid., ll. 81–82. The province’s plan to develop people’s houses was approved at the provincial zemstvo assembly during its regular session of 1914.

35

  In 1915, the provincial zemstvo assembly (sobranie) approved the use of profits from the kassy and from credit cooperatives to fund cultural and educational endeavors (ibid., d. 3058 [circular to provincial boards of credit cooperatives asking them to take part in the organization of people’s houses in the province], ll. 10–10ob.).

36

  Ibid., ll. 18–18ob.

37

  Seregny, “Zemstvos, Peasants, and Citizenship,” 297.

38

  See DAKhO f. 200, op. 1, d. 444, especially ll. 35–36ob.; and d. 445, ll. 23–24ob., 131– 131ob., and 132 for details on the composition of the conference. Numerous requests for additional information, as well as for the published accounts of the conference,

The People’s House in War and Revolution

43

within the board of the Khar´kov Literacy Society in January and February 1915 balanced the desire to further the agenda of adult education with the re­ sources available. In particular, the idea to host an all-Russian congress, rather than a local or provincial conference, provoked resistance among the most prominent members of the board, particularly S. A. Raevskii, who noted that in addition to the cost and effort involved in organizing such an ambitious meeting, it would be very difficult to secure permission to hold it.39 The Khar´kov provincial zemstvo reached out to the cooperatives on behalf of the conference, convinced that their participation was critical to the success of the meeting. The zemstvo even offered financial support to cooperatives that could not afford to send a representative.40 As it turned out, interest in attending the conference was extremely high, and not just on the part of local cooperatives. Ultimately, it attracted “the best and most competent experts on adult education from all corners of Russia,” which gave it the “character of an all-Russian congress on adult education,” regardless of its official designation as a local meeting.41 The Khar´kov Literacy Society received letters of inquiry from all across the empire, which created unexpected difficulties. Because it was both proposed and approved as a local conference, the only nonresidents permitted to attend were those actually delivering speeches.42 Despite these restrictions, the wide public interest in the conference and the broad dissem­ ination of its proceedings gave the meeting national significance. By late April, key individuals in St. Petersburg, including Countess Sof´ia Panina, the noble sponsor of the Ligovskii People’s House, and D. D. Protopopov, editor of

further testify to the importance and influence of the Khar´kov meeting. See ibid., ll. 200, 203–203ob.; d. 453, ll. 1–95; and d. 471, ll. 1–53. 39

  Ibid., d. 444 (“Doklad o vozniknovenii voprosa o sozyve s˝ezda i podgotovitel´nye raboty k nemu”), ll. 16–33, especially the minutes of the board meetings of 13 January, 18 January, and the general meeting of 7 February 1915. The decision to have the focus of the conference on “rational recreation,” rather than adult education, was also made for reasons of political expediency. The Literacy Society feared that the term “adult education” was too politicized and would lead to a refusal of permission to hold the conference. See ibid., d. 541, ll. 22–22ob. (letter to Narkompros from the Khar´kov Lit­ eracy Society, 20 June 1920).

40

  DAKhO f. 304, op. 1, d. 3040 (materials regarding the organization of a conference on “rational recreation” in Khar’kov), ll. 2–2ob.

41

  DAKhO f. 200, op. 1, d. 541, ll. 22–22ob.

42

  Ibid., d. 445 (correspondence regarding the conference on “rational recreation” in Khar’kov), ll. 131–131ob., 132.

44 Lynn M. Sargeant

the journal Gorodskoe delo (Municipal Affairs), had expressed their enthusiasm and had begun to promote the conference.43 Interest in the conference was certainly sparked by wartime concerns about the state of Russian society, but it was fueled by the Literacy Society’s determination to foster a broad discussion on adult education, community social development, and culture.44 They sought to bring together “not only representatives of [local] government and cultural organizations of various types,” but also a wide range of interested local figures, including “teachers, priests, doctors, agronomists, magistrates, district leaders, excise officers, [and] representatives of industrial enterprises.” Yet, the society was dependent on the state not only for funding, but also for permission to hold the conference. Consequently, its appeals to the Ministry of Finance for financial support re­ flected the state’s priorities, particularly the desire to encourage acceptance of wartime prohibition and foster temperance among workers and peasants. By claiming that the goals of the conference would be “purely practical,” and implying that the primary focus would be on temperance, the society sought to justify the inclusion of an unusually broad range of participants in the con­ ference, whose “work on behalf of the people” focused more on education, social organization, and civic development than it did on temperance per se.45 The conference brought together more than 450 representatives of a wide range of educational, social, and cooperative organizations. The concerns of the zemstvos and cooperatives dominated the congress, particularly in direct discussions of the people’s houses. The conference resolutions further emphasized the fundamental importance of the cooperatives as “reliable sources of support for the development of culture,” and as the foundation for “all cultural measures implemented by the state, the zemstvos,” and other organizations. The “people’s house,” however, reigned supreme as “the most perfect” institution for the pursuit of cultural development.46 In the wake of the conference, even the tsarist state acknowledged its significance. The minister of education turned to S. A. Raevskii for information, 43   Personal letter from E. Ponomareva to S. A. Raevskii, 23 April 1915 (ibid., ll. 23– 24ob.). 44

  Ibid., d. 453, ll. 1–95, and d. 471, ll. 1–53, contain requests for the conference pro­ ceedings and other materials from individuals, educational organizations, voluntary associations, cooperative societies, schools, district and provincial zemstvos, the Imperial Russian Theatrical Society, and the Guardianship of Popular Sobriety.

45

  Ibid., d. 445, ll. 6–6ob.

46

  Trudy sozvannogo Khar´kovskim obshchestvom gramotnosti s˝ezda po voprosam organizatsii razumnykh razvlechenii dlia naseleniia Khar´kovskoi gub., 7–12 iiunia 1915 g. v g. Khar´kove, 2: Postanovleniia i doklady (Khar´kov, 1915), 1–2.

The People’s House in War and Revolution

45

asking him to send the conference resolutions and all other available printed material to him to facilitate the ministry’s own efforts to develop an adult education program. Perhaps more productive in the long run, however, was the response of cooperative societies, such as the Babaevskii Credit Association, which approached the Khar´kov Literacy Society in an ungrammatical but undeniably enthusiastic letter for assistance in developing a people’s house.47 Later conferences, such as the All-Zemstvo Congress on Adult Education held in Iaroslavl´ in August 1915, were direct responses to the Khar´kov confer­ ence and, in many ways, continuations of it.48 The planning of the Iaroslavl´ conference revealed that the zemstvos had fully accepted the people’s house as the fundamental institution of adult education and cultural development.49 As the agenda for the congress developed, it grew to include not just a discussion of people’s houses but also the “district-wide organization of adult education in provinces,” the “mutual relationship of provincial and district zemstvos,” and the “attitude of the zemstvo” toward the participation of local “social and economic organizations,” i.e., the cooperatives, in adult education.50 As the war continued, the ambitious plans of sponsors of people’s houses began to falter, falling victim not only to the fatigue caused by a protracted war, but also to the state’s inability to effectively support popular initiatives for adult education. In general, the state and its ministries seem passive and indecisive, particularly when viewed in comparison to the dynamic and bold efforts by the zemstvos and the cooperatives. Prior to the beginning of the war, the state did not so much reject an active role in adult education as overlook opportunities to become involved. Limited funding for people’s houses was provided through the Ministry of Finance’s support of the Guardianship of Popular Sobriety, which channeled some of its funds to provincial projects, but funding for adult education per se was almost nonexistent, as the Ministry of Education did not consider it a priority. With the onset of the war and wartime prohibition, the state, like the rest of Russian educated society, began to take a greater interest in people’s houses, but the cost of the war greatly limited 47

  DAKhO f. 200, op. 1, d. 445, ll. 200, 203–203ob.

48

  The Nizhnii Novgorod Literacy Society, for example, asked the Khar´kov Literacy Society for information as it sought to organize an analogous conference for fall 1915 (ibid., ll. 37–37ob.).

49

  DAKhO f. 304, op. 1, d. 3040, l. 1. The initial proposal was to have the conference in Moscow in late spring or summer, but this was changed in part because Moscow re­ fused to host the conference, citing a shortage of financial, organizational, and human resources due to the war, as well as due to poor timing and conflicts with the Khar´kov Conference on Rational Recreation (ll. 57–57ob.).

50

  Ibid., ll. 50–50ob.

46 Lynn M. Sargeant

the state’s ability to provide financial support for new educational initiatives. Moreover, it was less about the state taking a leadership role and more about the conversion of key individuals, including rather unlikely champions of civil society such as Minister of Internal Affairs N. A. Maklakov. Predictably enough, the state’s wartime efforts to define the people’s house sparked controversy. Under Maklakov’s leadership, the Ministry of Internal Affairs drew praise for demonstrating that the state was finally taking an in­ terest, however limited, in cultural development and adult education. It also drew condemnation for its idiosyncratic definition of the people’s house, its attempt to micromanage affairs, and its effort to limit the involvement of zemstvos and cooperatives. Such problems prompted one commentator, writing in Vestnik Olonetskogo gubernskogo zemstva in April 1915, to attempt to defend the people’s house from the state’s efforts to discipline or constrain it.51 Efforts by the state to subordinate people’s houses to its authority, in part by forcing them to accept the standard and very restrictive state-imposed catalogs for library books and theatrical repertoire, were perceived as excessively con­ trolling and received with anger. Not only did such proposals undermine the ability of the people’s house to foster local activity, they also increased the likelihood that the mistakes of the Guardianships of Popular Sobriety would be replicated.52 Commentators similarly derided the insistence of the Ministry of Internal Affairs that state-sponsored people’s houses include atypical ele­ ments, such as night shelters and stables for travelers. They argued that the state’s proposals revealed at best its misunderstanding of the purpose of the people’s house, and at worst a desire to dilute the institution’s social role by turning it into a kind of hotel, rather than a social or community center.53 Rather than implementing Maklakov’s proposal, the Council of Ministers established an interministerial commission led by Prince N. B. Shcherbatov, the newest minister of internal affairs, to develop processes and practices to foster adult education and to oversee the allocation of funds.54 In typical 51

 S. A. L-ii, “Trezvost´ i organizatsiia narodnogo dosuga,” Vestnik Olonetskogo gubern­ skogo zemstva, no. 8 (30 April 1915): 1–6, in RGIA f. 1288, op. 14 (1915), d. 152, ll. 1–23ob. 52

 Ibid. See also “Khar´kov, 10-go aprelia 1915 goda: Zaboty ministerstva vnutrennikh del o kul´turnykh narodnykh razvlecheniiakh,” Iuzhnyi krai, 10 April 1915, which also makes the point that the centralization and standardization of people’s houses called for in the plan of the Ministry of Internal Affairs includes an implied Russification of the content of the culture offered to “the people.”

53

 B. Veselovskii, “Trezvost´ i kul´turnye meropriiatiia,” Russkoe slovo, 16 April 1915.

54

  The initial meetings of the commission under Prince N. B. Shcherbatov of the MVD resolved little. The state declared large-scale efforts to improve adult education and other cultural measures inopportune during the war, although it called for information sharing and cooperation among the ministries with regard to anti-alcohol measures.

The People’s House in War and Revolution

47

bureaucratic fashion, the various ministries were unable to agree on guiding principles, the delegation of tasks, the division of authority, and so on. Consequently, the permanent committee intended to oversee adult education was still awaiting approval in February 1917. This created enormous prob­ lems for those seeking funding for people’s houses. Funds previously avail­ able through the Guardianship of Popular Sobriety dried up as that organi­ zation was downsized and restructured. The new commission on adult education was not yet functional and could not approve the allocation of any funding.55 As a result of the state’s dithering, many ambitious people’s house projects languished on the drawing boards and were, at best, only partially implemented, thereby frustrating the plans of zemstvos and cooperatives for the development of a robust social and cultural infrastructure for provincial Russia. Although the Ministry of Internal Affairs ultimately declared its com­ mitment to “adult education in localities,” the ruinous cost of the war coupled with bureaucratic inertia had crippled the state’s ability to support cultural development.56 In an effort to better understand the situation on the ground, the ministry polled provincial governors and city administrators, asking for detailed in­ formation regarding local measures for instilling or reinforcing sobriety.57 The responses from the provinces ranged from terse statements that “nothing is being done” to detailed reports outlining determined efforts to turn very modest sums into practical mechanisms for bringing culture and education to provincial Russia. The tug of war between the state and society can be clearly seen in the debates of the Vel´skoe district zemstvo over provisions for adult education. The district zemstvo assembly accepted with few reservations the popular assertion that the people’s house was the ideal institutional mecha­ nism for cultural development. Nevertheless, it expressed grave doubts about its ability to achieve results in the absence of substantial financial support from the state. A “real” people’s house with space for cooperatives, meetings, a library and reading room, and a performance hall, the members of the assembly noted, was an expensive undertaking in the best of times, with a construction cost of more than 10,000 rubles—not to mention the costs to equip and maintain its facilities. Moreover, like other zemstvos, Vel´skoe had accepted the need to develop a cultural infrastructure through networked institutions. They insisted that it was not just a matter of constructing and 55

 M. Mironov, “Pravitel´stvennaia programma ukrepleniia trezvosti,” Birzhevye vedo­ mosti (morning edition), 14 January 1917, in RGIA f. 1288, op. 14 (1915), d. 139, ll. 11–11ob.

56

 Ibid.

57

 Ibid., l. 20, circular dated February 1915. A request for updated information was sent out on 4 November 1916 (ll. 39, 40).

48 Lynn M. Sargeant

equipping a building. They argued that in “our large district we would need many such houses.” Although not in a financial position to commit to the development of people’s houses, the Vel´skoe zemstvo was nonetheless un­ willing to simply carry on as before. Instead, they insisted that the project of developing people’s houses, and by extension the project of transforming Russia, could only be accomplished if “the population, the zemstvos, and the government” combined forces.58 Unfortunately, the state proved unable to develop the structures and processes needed to support adult education and cultural development. The zemstvos and the cooperatives recognized the need for partnership with the state, not least because of their own severe financial limitations. The state, however, proved far more reluctant to enter into a partnership with society. The state’s view, insofar as first Maklakov and then the interministerial commission articulated it, seemed to contradict the ethos of community in­ volvement and grassroots organizing inherent in the people’s house as an institution. The state’s half-hearted efforts to create standardized people’s houses in order to centralize authority over them not only reflected its op­ position to the democratic vision of Russian society implicit in zemstvos and cooperative efforts to develop the people’s house as a nucleus for civil society, but also revealed its inability to mount an effective cultural defense of autocracy. In any case, the ambitious plans of the zemstvos and cooperatives to create community and civil society through networks of people’s houses were rarely if ever realized in full. They often remained strictly on paper as they succumbed to inadequate funding, bureaucratic obstructionism, poor lead­ ership, and, especially, the hardships created by the war. A report from the town of Lepsinsk, in Semirechenskaia oblast´, at the end of December 1916 offered a dose of hard reality to counter the utopian enthusiasm displayed by proponents of the people’s houses: With regard to your query of 16 December … the city has not taken any measures for the establishment of various entertainments for the population. Only soldiers’ wives, the elderly, and small children remain in the city, and those who are in a fit condition to work spend all summer in the fields … and in the winter everyone focuses on staying warm, in addition to which because of the increase in prices for basic foodstuffs, everyone is worrying not about entertainments but about 58   Ibid., ll. 109–17. They were, at least, somewhat willing to commit funds to their principles; they proposed that the district zemstvo allocate 2,000 rubles annually for the support of people’s houses (ll. 111ob.–12). The 2,000-ruble allocation was subsequently approved by the zemstvo assembly (l. 119).

The People’s House in War and Revolution

49

the essentials of life. In 1915 and 1916 amateurs presented several plays and children’s entertainments on major holidays, but only the local intelligentsia attended these. Even the local cinema had closed in 1915, with its owner, an entrepreneur from Siberia, forced to pack up and return home due to poor attendance.59 Even in Khar´kov, where the people’s house was thoroughly rooted in local cultural life, the Literacy Society struggled to continue its business as usual. The war both disrupted the work of the people’s house and highlighted its social importance. As both Anthony Swift and Gary Thurston have dis­ cussed at length, the people’s houses provided a crucial location for Russian popular theater.60 Theater remained a cornerstone of the cultural activity of the Khar´kov People’s House throughout both the war and the revolutions of 1917. Nevertheless, unexpected disruptions, such as the temporary billeting of soldiers in the people’s house, led to the loss of more than two months out of the theater season, although ticket sales remained very strong.61 As the war dragged on, the fortunes of the Khar´kov People’s House, along with all other social and cultural institutions, increasingly degraded. Fund­ ing sources grew ever more precarious. By 1916, the people’s house, which had enjoyed varied and substantial support from the state, the zemstvo, the city, and the Guardianships of Popular Sobriety, struggled to cope as all of these sources of funding were threatened. Meanwhile, wartime inflation eroded the ability of the people’s house to make ends meet, as costs for wages, utilities, and other essentials inexorably rose. Although the relatively well-todo administrators of the people’s house initially compensated by digging in their own pockets, such generosity could not be counted on to continue, par­ ticularly as there seemed to be no end in sight. There was a real possibility, by 1916, that the people’s house would be forced to reduce its activity, despite both its past successes in meeting the cultural and social needs of the city’s working-class population and new demands for information about both the war and the domestic political situation.62 As historians have noted, the war led to an enormous hunger for news in Russia’s provincial towns and villages. The wartime expansion of adult education initiatives by the zemstvos and cooperatives was, at least in part, 59

 Ibid., ll. 708–708ob.

60

  E. Anthony Swift, Popular Theater and Society in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and Gary Thurston, The Popular Theatre Movement in Russia, 1862–1919 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998). 61

  DAKhO f. 200, op. 1, d. 444, l. 17.

62

  Ibid., d. 468, ll. 85ob., 86–86ob.

50 Lynn M. Sargeant

an effort to meet the demand for information with a greater supply of books, newspapers, lectures, and public readings.63 The lecture series the Khar´kov Literacy Society developed to meet such demands got off to a slow start. As a result of shortages of brochures and other hiccups, the vast majority of the readings it sponsored took place in early 1917, rather than in 1916 as planned. The collapse of the tsarist regime in early 1917 further challenged the people’s houses. They were called on to fulfill new political roles, as well as meet their cultural obligations, in the midst of unrelenting social and eco­ nomic disruption. After the February Revolution, unsurprisingly, lecturers increasingly focused on political topics, such as the Constituent Assembly, civil rights, and land reform. However, their ability to reach their audience— literally—sharply deteriorated as travel by road and rail became increasingly difficult.64 The inability of lecturers from the city to reach the villages prompted the society to change its focus to assisting the “village intelligentsia” in presenting readings and leading discussions on social and political topics. The Literacy Society created brochures and courses on political issues for teachers, physicians’ assistants (fel´dshers), and other members of the socalled third element.65 Its Lecture Commission sought both to emphasize the organization’s loyalty to the new regime and assert its political neutrality. In the process, it sought to protect the educational and cultural activities of the Literacy Society from being coopted by any group for an ideological purpose. The guidelines issued in May 1917 by the commission insisted that the primary focus of lectures was “cultural and educational.” “The activities of lecturers in political terms” were “expected to conform to the ideas of the democratic and socialist parties,” while lecturers themselves were expected to express support for the Provisional Government, not least by “explaining the challenges faced by the Constituent Assembly” and demonstrating their own opposition to “disruptive social actions.” Although lecturers were expected to be objective, they were allowed “the opportunity to defend the political program of the party to which [they] belonged.”66 Despite the difficulties that the people’s houses experienced in maintaining their cultural programming during the Great War and the revolutions, the unstable situation challenged them to more effectively fulfill another of their roles, that of local civic center, where pressing political, economic, and so­ 63

  Seregny, “Zemstvos, Peasants, and Citizenship,” 301–09.

64

  DAKhO f. 200, op. 1, d. 510, ll. 3–3ob.

65

  Ibid., ll. 4–4ob.

66

  Ibid., d. 445, ll. 3–3ob. See also ibid., d. 496 (Questionnaires from popular lectures in Khar’kov and its surrounding districts), l. 1.

The People’s House in War and Revolution

51

cial issues could be openly debated.67 Many people’s houses responded by attempting to make their work more politically relevant. In Moscow in May of 1917, for example, the people’s house of the Emil´ Tsindel´ factory published a series of pamphlets to accompany political lectures. Such publications highlight the changing mission, and thus the changing meaning, of the people’s houses. Although many of their most vocal proponents continued to emphasize these institutions as sites of culture, increasingly they served as sites of political engagement.68 Audience response to both the lecturers themselves and the content of their lectures is difficult to ascertain. Although the Literacy Society asked lec­ turers to comment on the receptiveness of their audiences and, in some cases, to distribute and collect questionnaires, responses were highly uneven. Thus, a lecture on “The Attitude toward the War” in the village of Volokhov-Iar at the end of April 1917 drew 200 listeners (170 men, 30 women). The lecturer claimed that audience members asked many questions on such topics as the current situation at the front and the status of deserters, and noted more generally that the population of the village “clearly understood” the need to “continue the war” and “support the Provisional Government.”69 Another speaker reported that his lectures in the village of Mizherich, Lebedinskii district (uezd), in September 1917, on topics such as “Class Consciousness,” “About Parties,” and “On the Elections to the Constituent Assembly,” drew some 350 listeners (335 men, 15 women), despite the fact that the sessions dragged on for some three hours. In this case, audience members’ comments and questions reflected a keen interest in both local and national politics; they raised questions about “mistakes during the elections to the township [volost´] zemstvo,” and asked for a public debate between “agitators from all of the 67

  Sarah Badcock has thoughtfully explored the role of the people’s house as a location for political, rather than cultural, activity during the revolutions of 1917. However, because she focuses only on 1917, she does not successfully place the politicization of “cultural enlightenment” activities in the longer-term context of the development of the people’s houses and adult education. Badcock, “Talking to the People and Shaping Revolution: The Drive for Enlightenment in Revolutionary Russia,” Russian Review 65, 4 (October 2006): 621–23. 68

 See, for example, L. B. Granovskii, Gorodskie vybory i rabochii klass: Lektsiia, prochit. 16 maia 1917 g. v auditorii pri f-ke E. Tsindel´ v Moskve; P. N. Kolokol´nikov, Chego budut trebovat´ sotsial-demokraty v uchreditel´nom sobranii: Doklad, 4 maia 1917 g. v auditorii pri f-ke E. Tsindel´ v Moskve; and M. I. Gol´dman-Liber, Zadachi rabochego klassa v russkoi revoliutsii: Rech´, proiznesennaia 9 maia 1917 goda na narodnom sobranii v Moskve, all of which were published as part of the series “Lektsii i besedy ‘dlia rabochego kluba i narodnogo doma’” (Moscow, 1917). 69

  DAKhO f. 200, op. 1, d. 496, l. 31.

52 Lynn M. Sargeant

parties, in order to clarify which party is the best.”70 Other lecturers, how­ ever, revealed that they struggled to reach their audience. In June 1917, in the village of Slavgorod, Akhtyrskii district, one lecturer attempted to discuss the question “To Whom Does Power Belong and to Whom Does It Pass?” with an audience of some 250 listeners, approximately 85 percent of whom were men. “Antagonism between the peasantry and the working proletariat” quickly “became apparent.” “Some worker from the Khar´kov Locomotive Works delivered a speech condemning the bourgeoisie and calling on the peasantry to [take] action against them. However, his speech provoked ob­ jections, which exploded into a violent argument.” The speaker attempted to calm things down by calling on “peasants and workers to work jointly” without “exploitation of one class by another” and, in particular, without the exploitation of “the peasantry by the proletariat.”71 The politicization of the content of activities shifted the meaning of the people’s house as an institution as it was appropriated as a site for intense debates over Russia’s political, cul­ tural, and economic future. The triumph of the Bolsheviks lead to further reshaping and reimagining of the people’s house. Although the underlying ethos of the Khar´kov Literacy Society and its makeup of membership was essentially bourgeois, adult educa­ tion as its primary activity was embraced by the Bolsheviks, not least because Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, had long-standing ties to the movement. The Bolsheviks’ conflicted relationship to people’s houses dates at least to the contentious first All-Russian Conference of People’s Universities held in St. Petersburg in 1908, where an ideological fault line opened with the community of adult education activists and institutions. On one side, there were people’s houses, with their largely liberal sponsorship. On the other side, there were workers’ clubs and similar organizations with an explicitly socialist agenda.72 At issue was the question of whether people’s universities, people’s houses, and a whole array of similar educational and cultural institutions should have a “popular,” i.e., above class, or a “class” character.73 70

  Ibid., l. 32.

71

  Ibid., l. 72.

72

 For details of the debates, see Trudy pervogo vserossiiskogo s˝ezda deiatelei obshchestv narodnykh universitetov i drugikh prosvetitel´nykh uchrezhdenii chastnoi initsiativy, S-Peterburg 3–7 ianvaria 1908 g. (St. Petersburg, 1908). For an early Soviet discussion of the tension between the workers’ clubs, people’s universities, and people’s houses, see I. D. Levin, Rabochie kluby v dorevoliutsionnom Peterburge: Iz istorii rabochego dvizheniia 1907–1914 gg. (Moscow, 1926).

73

  Not only was the conference held in St. Petersburg, it was dominated by highly politicized St. Petersburg-based activists, whose uncompromising positions provoked heated arguments among the delegates. The loud voices of local activists, such as Alek­

The People’s House in War and Revolution

53

In the wake of the October Revolution, prerevolutionary-era people’s houses and their proponents struggled to accommodate to new political realities. In theory, people’s houses fit nicely under the broad umbrella of a reconceived adult education movement that now emphasized the cultural and political enlightenment of workers and peasants and their socialization as Soviet citizens. In practice, the association of people’s houses with bourgeois voluntary associations, cooperatives, and zemstvos meant that, after several years of indecision, the people’s house lost out to more “Bolshevik” institutions, such as workers’ clubs and “palaces” of culture and labor. The leaders of the adult education movement, including key theorists of the people’s houses, struggled to adapt to Bolshevik educational and political values, with varying degrees of success.74 The ideological baggage of the people’s house as an oldregime institution that was both insufficiently class-based and lacking in rev­ olutionary élan increasingly threatened its survival. After the February Revolution, the city of Moscow established a special commission to oversee its people’s houses. The commission soon found itself adjudicating disputes between the professional (and bourgeois) leadership of several of the city’s people’s houses and representatives of local workers’ organizations, who demanded the right to use these facilities for their meetings. The dispute quickly grew as the workers’ organizations demanded not only that the director of the Preobrazhenskii district people’s house be replaced with a candidate of their choosing and that the institution be handed over to the control of local social organizations, but also that the city continue to provide financial subsidies. In reality, the workers’ organizations had already seized control and installed their preferred leadership.75 The commission also struggled to reorganize the people’s houses of the Guardianships of Popular Sobriety. At particular issue in this local reimagining of people’s houses was the relationship between the institution, the leadership, and the local commu­ nity. The leadership of the city’s houses, the commission suggested, should be “entrusted to a collective” whose membership would be drawn from repre­ sandra Kollontai, not only set the tone for the 1908 conference but also established the idea of an ideological divide between the club and the people’s house. For a somewhat partisan “play by play” review of the conference, see B. I. Syromiatnikov, Pervyi vserossiiskii s˝ezd deiatelei obshchestv narodnykh universitetov i drugikh prosvetitel´nykh uchrezhdenii chastnoi initsiativy (reprinted from Vestnik vospitaniia, c. 1908). 74

 Some, such as Medynskii, learned to sway with the political winds. For an example, see his later works, such as Klassovaia bor´ba i vospitanie (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe uchebno-pedagogicheskoe izdatel´stvo, 1931).

75

  TsIAM f. 179, op. 11, ed. khr. 1157 (materials on the city’s people’s houses), ll. 77–78 (“Zhurnal zasedaniia komissii po zavedyvaniiu gorodskimi narodnymi domami, 1 maia 1917 g.”).

54 Lynn M. Sargeant

sentatives of the city government, the employees of the houses, the local work­ ing population, and workers’ organizations.76 This far-reaching attempt to reshape the people’s house, in part by devolving control over it to the people as defined as the working classes, unsurprisingly provoked resistance from the old guard, which insisted on the need for continuing leadership by the educated classes.77 The history of the Khar´kov People’s House from 1917 illustrates the challenges faced by the movement in the wake of war, revolution, and severe economic and social dislocation. Although the annual report for 1918 claimed that the various departments of the people’s house “continued their typical activity,” it also noted the numerous obstacles that increasingly threatened the house’s ability to function. Only about a third of planned popular readings were held, largely because shortages of electricity made it impossible to present slide shows. The high cost of printing made posters and placards prohibitively expensive; the lack of advertising significantly reduced audiences for lectures. Theater proved more successful, with 71 performances “enthusiastically” attended by the public. However, poor street lighting created problems once winter set in. After one of the performers was robbed on the way home from the theater, the actors refused to go to the people’s house at night, which forced the cancellation of many performances. The people’s house also hosted five dances, attracting a total audience of more than 3,000, as well as summer soirees on weekends and holidays, and activities for children. By the end of the year, however, the house had abandoned efforts to maintain its kindergarten, which had enrolled 40 children, in part because of the lack of heat in the building. The “absence of lighting, and even more the absence of heating,” as well as a crippling shortage of funds threatened to “completely paralyze” the people’s house.78 A letter to the [Khar´kov] Commission on Adult Education in February 1919 demonstrated the effective impossibility, irrespective of the enthusiasm 76   Ibid., ll. 92, 93ob. (c. 23 or 26 August 1917). Each individual district people’s house would similarly have a council (Sovet narodnogo doma) that would represent the interests of the city, the workers within the house, and the local working-class population. 77

  Ibid., ll. 90–91 (“Doklad chlena uprava [S.] Shatskii, ‘Osnovnye polozheniia v dele organizatsii upravleniia narodnymi domami’”). Shatskii argued for a central govern­ ing body for the city’s people’s houses that would be dominated by members of edu­ cated society, particularly educational and cultural specialists, representatives of voluntary organizations, and other “competent individuals,” and made no allowances for workers’ representation.

78

  DAKhO f. 200, op. 1, d. 510, ll. 48–50ob. (“Kratkii ocherk o deiatel´nosti uchrezhdenii Khar´kovskogo obshchestva rasprostraneniia v narode gramotnosti za 1918 god”).

The People’s House in War and Revolution

55

of activists, to expand the availability of adult education. In this case, ongoing fighting forestalled an effort to combine forces with the “Itinerant University” to expand adult education in the region. The letter’s author had traveled at the behest of the Itinerant University to the Donetsk Basin in an attempt to organize lectures, but his route took him into areas of active conflict, prompt­ ing his quick return to Khar´kov.79 Nevertheless, demand for culture and education remained high, as a letter from the “communist youth” of the town of Valok makes clear, although it also highlights the rapidly shifting cul­ tural terrain between 1917 and 1921. The letter writer asked for all “possible assistance in the acquisition of the programs of parties, of political literature, guidelines for the staging of dramas, comedies, and other works, a guide for the development of popular readings, [magic lantern projector] slides, the music for revolutionary songs, and all [other] necessary materials.”80 The Khar´kov People’s House was formally incorporated into the Soviet educational system in spring 1919. In January 1920, the Literacy Society complained that its people’s house had “already been occupied” by Soviet au­ thorities. Nevertheless, the simple fact that its administration remained largely in place and that the society was still clinging to life underscored the society’s institutional strength and its ability to adapt.81 The society struggled to learn, or at least mimic, the Soviet interpretation of adult education and cultural development as articulated in Moscow. The pronouncements received by the society from the central government, and especially from Proletkult, the artistic organization that wanted to create a new revolutionary culture for the working class, likely did little to alleviate their fears. In announcing planned courses for instructors, Moscow Proletkult addressed “comrade workers,” declaring that the development of proletarian culture created a need for lead­ ers and instructors, who could “only be workers themselves.”82 The bourgeois Khar´kov Literacy Society had already, in 1918, spawned a more socialist offshoot, the Club of Adult Education Workers, whose rather impotent efforts to adapt to the postrevolutionary political situation revealed, nevertheless, the broader challenges confronting the people’s houses. Mem­ bers planned to “report on the impact of the revolution on clubs and people’s houses” and define “the essence of the people’s house and the club as centers of 79

  Ibid., d. 535 (correspondence on the work of the Commission on Adult Education), ll. 13–13ob. (letter dated 19 February 1919).

80

  Ibid., l. 21 (letter dated by another hand as March 1919).

81

  Ibid., d. 541, ll. 2–2ob. (minutes of the board of the Literacy Society, 19 January 1920), and ll. 9–9ob.

82

  Ibid., d. 515 (announcements, programs, and other materials regarding adult edu­ cation courses in Khar´kov and elsewhere), l. 1.

56 Lynn M. Sargeant

educational activity and public initiative.” More broadly, the club’s members focused on the cultural and political strategies needed to expand “the sphere of influence” of people’s houses and workers’ clubs, as well as “reasonable and unreasonable” and “permissible and impermissible methods of recruitment.” Tactics, including the intriguing but ill-defined “tactics of the buffet,” occupied their attention, as did methods of advertising and communication, particularly with the “apathetic and skeptical.” They worried over how to adapt to the “tastes” of their clients and wondered where the “borders” of “initiative” lay. Above all, they recognized the problem of limited resources and believed that people’s houses and workers’ clubs needed to band together. The creation of “networks of people’s houses and clubs” would allow for the “concentration of educational effect,” but had to be balanced against “territorial accessibility.”83 Organizational questions, particularly the issue of whether people’s houses and workers’ clubs would be established “from above or from below, according to a plan” or based on local demand, remained important and, apparently, unsettled as a philosophical question, despite the many debates on these issues prior to 1917. Moreover, the efforts these young enthusiasts made to grasp the “concept of the club and the People’s House,” the “difference between the club and the People’s House,” the “origin of clubs and People’s Houses,” and the “history of them both abroad and in Russia,” mimicked a similar discussion taking place at more rarified levels among the Bolshevik cultural leadership in Moscow.84 In May 1919, the fortunes of the people’s house as the preferred institution for cultural development took a decided turn for the worse. The First AllRussian Congress on Adult Education represented a major turning point in early Soviet thinking. Although the congress’s resolutions reaffirmed the people’s houses as both the fundamental institutional element of adult education and the “center of local social life,” they were now charged with the responsibility to “assist with the reconstruction of [our] common way of life based on communist principles.”85 Moreover, in broader discussions, 83

  Ibid., d. 534 (materials on adult education work, proposed course for adult education work, and correspondence from Club of Adult Education members), ll. 33–36. 84

  Ibid. Debates over adult education came to a head with the First All-Russian Conference on Adult Education held in Moscow in May 1919. For details on the discussion of the people’s houses at the congress, see “Protokol plenarnogo zasedaniia s˝ezda (vechernee),” in Pervyi vserossiiskii s˝ezd po vneshkol´nomu obrazovaniiu, 6–19 maia 1919 goda: Dokumenty i materialy v dvukh knigakh, 2, pt. 2 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi respublikanskii tsentr russkogo fol´klora, 1993), 137–63, especially 140–42. 85

  See “Pervyi Vserossiiskoii s˝ezd po vneshkol´nomu obrazovaniiu, Moskva, 6–19 maia 1919 goda,” section 7, “O Narodnykh Domakh,” in N. N. Iaroshenko, Stanovlenie

The People’s House in War and Revolution

57

the people’s houses came under fire both for their association with liberal voluntary associations and for their emphasis on culture per se, rather than political indoctrination and propaganda. After 1919, the increasing desire for centralized control over culture and education made people’s houses even more vulnerable because of their long alliance with local government and local institutions, primarily the zemstvos and the cooperatives.86 The language of the discussion shifted from extra-school education (vneshkol´noe obrazovanie) to “political enlightenment” (politprosvet).87 Even the term narodnyi dom, with its connotations of civil society and community was gradually abandoned. In hindsight, it was the submergence of the adult education department of the Commissariat of Education (Narkompros) into the Main Administration for Political Education (Glavpolitprosvet) in 1920 that fatally eroded the stature of the people’s house.88 The new, and sometimes merely relabeled, Soviet institutions of cultural development, whether they were a House of Culture or a Palace of Labor, limited access to workers at a particular plant, residents of a particular district, or members of a professional union.89 The result was an institution that redefined the building of community as the development of healthier and more politically loyal workers, rather than better educated and more politically aware citizens.

teorii vneshkol´nogo obrazovaniia (konets XIX veka–pervaia tret´ XX veka): Khrestomatiia (Moscow: Moskovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet kul´tury i iskusstv, Riazanskoe otdelenie, 2000), 57–58. Originally published in “Rezoliutsii s˝ezda po vneshkol´nomu obrazovaniiu,” Vneshkol´noe obrazovanie, no. 6–8 (1919): 13–25. 86

  V. A. Zelenko, “Stadiia nalazhivaniia i uporiadocheniia vneshkol´noi raboty,” in Praktika vneshkol´nogo obrazovaniia v Rossii, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo, 1922), 157–72.

87

 A. I. Plotnikov, “Prezhde i teper´ (‘Vneshkol´noe obrazovanie’ i ‘Politprosvetrabota’),” in Vneshkol´noe delo: Sbornik statei po voprosam vneshkol´nogo obrazovaniia, ed. G. G. Tumin (Petrograd: Nachatki znanii, 1924), 1–30, especially 6–7 and 24–26. 88

  On the decline of interest in the people’s house per se after 1919, the increasing conflation of clubs, people’s houses, and rural reading rooms (izby-chital´ni), and the development of new, specifically Soviet “branded” enlightenment instutions, see M. Saltykova, “O narodnykh domakh v Rossii,” in Tumin, Vneshkol´noe delo, 101–24, especially 101 and 107–08. The classic work on Narkompros and Glavpolitprosvet is, of course, Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

89

  See, for example, “Iz polozheniia o domakh rabotnikov prosveshcheniia, utverzh­ dennogo kollegiei Narkomprosa,” in Iz istorii Sovetskoi arkhitektury, 1917–1925, ed. K. N. Afanas´ev (Moscow: Nauka, 1963), 145.

58 Lynn M. Sargeant

Conclusion As the people’s house responded to the challenges of both war and revolution, it began to fulfill its potential as not only a site for culture, entertainment, so­ ciability, and education, but also a site for political and civic engagement at a grassroots level. Economic and social disruption prevented the complete realization of the far-reaching goals of the people’s house movement, but the institution grew, both in number and prominence, into an essential feature of Russia’s social and civic landscape. In the context of war and revolution, the ambitions of the proponents of the people’s house sometimes seem utopian. Their efforts to create an institution with the potential to transform rural and provincial Russia by educating its population and providing a focal point for community development reflect both the development of a vigorous civil society and of a shared democratic vision of Russia’s future. The abrupt arrival of the future, in the form of the revolutions of 1917, created unprecedented challenges for the people’s house as an institution and as an idea. Unexpectedly, the people’s house became a site of direct political en­ gagement, while its cultural initiatives took on new, more politically charged, coloring. Ultimately, the people’s house was transformed and harnessed to the needs of the “workers’ state. Although the movement may not have fully achieved its ambitious goals—the social transformation and moral moderni­ zation of society and individual citizens—it created a foundation for, and polit­ ically legitimized, community development and adult education in Russian society. Foundations and principles established in the decades before and immediately after World War I retained their social and cultural relevance into the Soviet era and even persist into the present.90 Although Bolshevik and Soviet successors to the people’s houses bore new names, they carried for­ ward essential components of the people’s house mission and ideals. Not only educational and social activists, but also the Soviet state, accepted the need for such institutions for the healthy development of society.

90   On the complex social, civic, and cultural legacies of “Houses of Culture,” one of the Soviet successors to the people’s house, see Brian Donahoe and Joachim Otto Habeck, eds., Reconstructing the House of Culture: Community, Self, and the Makings of Culture in Russia and Beyond (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011).

A Civil Society in a Confessional State? Muslim Philanthropy in the Volga-Urals Region Norihiro Naganawa

On 6 December 1914, 28 representatives of Muslim charitable societies assem­ bled in Petrograd, hosted by Zâhid Shâmil, head of the city’s Muslim Charitable Society. The delegates came from Moscow, Kazan´, Ufa, Orenburg, Astrakhan´, Baku, Simferopol´, and even Arkhangel´sk and Tomsk. The assembly opened with a prayer led by an imam from Kazan´, who called on Allah to support the tsar’s family and assure the victory of the Russian army. Shâmil proposed sending telegrams to Nicholas II and Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the commander in chief, to express the Muslim subjects’ readiness to work for their homeland. With Ibniamin Akhtiamov, a State Duma deputy from Ufa province, appointed as chair, the meeting was to discuss what to do in the name of the empire’s Muslims for relief operations at both the front and the rear.1 The patriotic spirit of the assembly was further reflected in the words of delegates themselves; one representative from Moscow proclaimed that “today is an important moment when we have unified with all of our com­ patriots, inspired by patriotic sentiments [watan hisslarî] and prepared to sacrifice our whole being.”2 The five-day meeting concluded with a resolution to establish a central committee in Petrograd whose purpose would be the coordination of fundraising by Muslim charitable societies for the common cause of supporting Muslim soldiers, their families, and other coreligionists affected by the war. Later this central committee became the first empirewide Muslim organization after the decline of the All-Russian Muslim Union (Rûsiyya musulmânlarî ittifâqî), which had emerged as a political party dur­ ing the 1905 revolution. The assembly in December 1914 served not only to express Russian Muslims’ patriotism, but also their unity. As the climax of 1

 “Musulmân jam‘iyyatlarî isyyizdî” [Assembly of Muslim charities], Waqt [Time], 11 December 1914, 2. 2

 “Pîtrûghrâdda butûn rûsiyya musulmân jam‘iyyatlarîning isyyizdî: Dûrtunchî kûn” [All-Russian Muslim charities assembly in Petrograd: The fourth day], Qûyâsh [Sun], 16 December 1914, 3. Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 59–78.

60 Norihiro Naganawa

this demonstration of Russian Muslim solidarity, Shâmil closed the assembly on 10 December by inviting those present to read Quranic passages for the soul of Ismail Gasprinskii, father of the Russian Muslim enlightenment, who had passed away that September.3 This assembly of representatives of Muslim charitable societies seemingly augured well for a future of harmonious col­ laboration between the autocracy and social activists to boost patriotism in the context of a modern total war. The number of privately-initiated charities began to explode all across the empire in the early 1890s, a movement that also swept up Russia’s Muslim population. Rather than opening branches of Russian charitable associations, Muslim merchants and local notables tried to establish their own independent societies. In the years immediately before World War I, these Muslim societies flourished, partially thanks to financial support provided by zemstvos and city dumas.4 The First World War witnessed a new phase in Muslim philanthropy. On the whole, the exigencies of war forced the Russian government to depend on the horizontal networking of social forces for organizing welfare services, which was epitomized by the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos and All-Russian Union of Towns. It was these developments that encouraged leaders of the Muslim charitable associations in the capital to mobilize their provincial counterparts at the December meeting. Two months later, with the unusually swift sanction of the Interior Ministry, these leaders succeeded in establishing the Provisional Muslim Committee for Assistance to Soldiers and Their Families (‘Askarlarga wa ânlarining ‘â’ilalarîna yârdamchî muwaqqat musul­mân kâmîtîtî).5 Although the tsarist government had vigilantly opposed pan-Islamic connections among Muslim activists before the war, it uncharacteristically treated this new organization with forbearance, accepting its services in rallying the Rus­sian Muslim community to a common patriotic cause.

3  “Pîtrûghrâdda butûn rûsiyya musulmân jam‘iyyatlarîning isyyizdî: Bîshinchî kûn” [All-Russian Muslim charities assembly in Petrograd: The fifth day], Qûyâsh, 17 December 1914, 2–3. 4

  On Russian charities, see Adele Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), chap. 9. On the developments in Kazan´, see R. R. Salikhov, Tatarskaia burzhuaziia Kazani i natsional´nye reformy vtoroi poloviny XIX–nachala XX v. (Kazan: Izdatel´stvo “Master Lain,” 2001), 67–82. A comprehensive study of Muslim charitable societies remains to be done. 5

 Z. Minullin, “Vremennyi musul´manskii komitet po okazaniiu pomoshchi voinam i ikh sem´iam: Obrazovanie i deiatel´nost´,” Fänni yazmalar 2001 (Kazan: Kazan däület universitetï tatar filologiiase häm tarikhï fakul´tetï, 2002), 295–99.

Muslim Philanthropy in the Volga-Urals Region

61

The Russian Empire, a confessional state that provided each religion with official recognition and an overseer, had jealously attempted to control faith and loyalty among the Volga-Urals Muslims with the Orenburg Spiritual As­ sembly in Ufa since 1789.6 Under this administrative structure, fundraising by mosque congregations with mullahs preaching and conveying words of the head (muftî) of the Spiritual Assembly worked well to inspire patriotism in the local Muslim population during both the Russo-Japanese War and the first years of the Great War.7 This article examines the ways in which Muslim philanthropy initiated by the Volga-Urals Muslim charities during the Great War was at first embedded in the confessional state but gradually departed from this long-standing institutional model to such an extent as to transform the philanthropists’ cause from patriotism to the succor of the whole Russian Muslim community. By so doing, I cast new light on two kinds of tensions that haunted late imperial Russia and escalated during the period of total war: first, the tensions created by the state’s efforts to convert the empire into a national state, while simultaneously sustaining religious diversity as pivotal leverage tying the loyalty of multiconfessional subjects to the tsar;8 and second, the strong influence of philanthropy and the printed word on the creation of an increasingly important civil society under autocracy. Accordingly, I first illustrate how the Great War enabled Muslim charities to expand their sphere of activities, collaborating with parish mullahs in boost­ ing loyalty to the tsar and encouraging philanthropy. Then I address the impact of this social activism upon the local Muslims’ collectivity and their understanding of religion, focusing on their encounter with Muslim refugees and the augmented role of Muslim women. It was no accident that Muslim leaders from the Volga-Urals region stood at the center of Muslim philanthropic enterprise in the empire. Muslims from this region had served in the regular army since 1874, while their coreligionists in the Kazakh steppe and Turkestan, who had never been subject to military 6   On the confessional state, see Robert Crews, “Empire and the Confessional State: Islam and Religious Politics in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” American Historical Re­ view 108, 1 (2003): 50–83. 7

  The following book, albeit ideologically constrained, still provides valuable materi­ als concerning this question: L. I. Klimovich, Islam v tsarskoi Rossii: Ocherki (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe antireligioznoe izdatel´stvo, 1936), 298–300. 8

  On this dilemma of the empire, see Ronald Grigor Suny, “The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, ‘National’ Identity, and Theories of Empire,” in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Suny and Terry Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 43–44; Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and A. V. Remnev, eds., Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930 (Bloomington: Indi­ ana University Press, 2007), 19–20.

62 Norihiro Naganawa

service, revolted when the imperial government imposed labor conscription in the summer of 1916.9 This meant that family members of drafted men could not be indifferent to what war brought to both their fighting relatives and their own lives. In addition, the Muslim population in this region was better prepared than ever before to participate in regional and national public life during the Great War. The Muslim press that had burgeoned in this region after 1905 strove to respond to people’s thirst for knowledge regarding the war itself and the aid being provided to soldiers’ families in the rear. Thanks to fruitful cooperation between the zemstvos and local Muslim activists dur­ ing the war, educational institutions spread and basic literacy rose among the Muslim population.10 It was the Muslim charitable societies and local selfgovernments, such as city dumas and zemstvos, in the Volga-Urals region, which played a pivotal role in tackling issues that individuals were unable to resolve or that the state handled only inadequately. With men mobilized into the army, the role of women in public life in­ creased significantly as well, building on a foundation that had been laid be­ fore the war. While in Turkestan Muslim women began speaking out against the Russian administration only in 1916, when the decree was issued calling up their men for labor, their Volga-Urals counterparts were already enjoying their own public sphere before the war, organizing activities and employing language that was intensely affected by the Russian feminist movement.11 9

 On the Volga-Urals Muslims in the Russian army, see I. K. Zagidullin, “Osobennosti sobliudeniia religioznykh prav musul´man v rossiiskoi sukhoputnoi reguliarnoi armii v 1874–1914 g.,” Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies 10 (2009), http://pipss.revues.org/index3745.html (accessed 14 October 2015); Norihiro Naganawa, “Musul´manskoe soobshchestvo v usloviiakh mobilizatsii: Uchastie Volgo-Ural´skikh musul´man v voinakh poslednego desiatiletiia sushchestvovaniia Rossiiskoi imperii,” in Volgo-Ural´skii region v imperskom prostranstve: XVIII–XX vv., ed. Naganawa, D. M. Usmanova, and Mami Hamamoto (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 2011), 198–228. On the 1916 revolt in the Kazakh steppe and Turkestan, see Tomohiko Uyama, “Two Attempts at Building a Qazaq State: The Revolt of 1916 and the Alash Movement,” in Islam in Politics in Russia and Central Asia (Early Eighteenth to Late Twentieth Centuries), ed. Stéphan A. Dudoignon and Hisao Komatsu (London: Kegan Paul, 2001), 77–98; and Daniel Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003), 157–64. 10

 Charles R. Steinwedel, “Invisible Threads of Empire: State, Religion, and Ethnicity in Tsarist Bashkiria, 1773–1917” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1999), especially 493–500; Scott J. Seregny, “Zemstvos, Peasants, and Citizenship: The Russian Adult Education Movement and World War I,” Slavic Review 59, 2 (2000): 290–315.

11

 On Turkestan women, see Marianne Kamp, The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 54–58. On Volga-Urals women, see Azade Ayşe Rorlich, “Intersecting Dis­ courses in the Press of the Muslims of Crimea, Middle Volga and Caucasus: The

Muslim Philanthropy in the Volga-Urals Region

63

The journal Sûyum bîka, for example, published in Kazan´ since 1913 and named after the last empress of the Kazan Khanate, embodied Muslim women’s voices seeking appropriate roles in a society mobilized for war. The experience of the Volga-Urals Muslim women is comparable to that of their contemporary Turkish and Iranian counterparts, who were also expanding their involvement in politics at this time by wielding the printed word and organizing social welfare associations and girls’ schools amidst revolutions, wars, and nationalist struggles.12 For the Volga-Urals Muslim women, it was their intensified social activism during the Great War that led them to openly demand suffrage after the February Revolution, which integrated them into Russian women’s trailblazing movement for political equality in advance of their European counterparts.13 Did Russia seek to incorporate the Muslim men and women of the VolgaUrals region in its endeavor to “nationalize” the front and rear of the Great War? Recent attempts by historians to gauge the degree to which Russia succeeded in nationalizing its subjects tend to underrate the continued influence of the imperial order of religious pluralism on wartime policies.14 But the challenges of modern mobilization pressured the tsarist government not merely to launch the building of a Russian nation, but also to revitalize the confessional state in order to garner loyalty from each religious community of the empire. The Orenburg Spiritual Assembly, the hub of the Muslim administration in Women Question and the Nation,” in Gender and Identity Construction: Women of Central Asia, the Caucasus and Turkey, ed. Feride Acar and Ayşe Günes-Ayata (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 143–61. On a reference to the League for Women’s Equal Rights and its founder Poliksena Shishkina-Iavein, see ‘Ismatî, “Khâtûn-qizlâr isyyizdî” [Women’s assembly], Sûyum bîka, no. 13 (1916): 225–27. 12   Ellen L. Fleischmann, “The Other ‘Awakening’: The Emergence of Women’s Move­ ments in the Modern Middle East, 1900–1940,” in Social History of Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East, ed. Margaret L. Meriwether and Judith E. Tucker (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), especially 100–16; Fatma Müge Göçek, “From Empire to Nation: Images of Women and War in Ottoman Political Cartoons, 1908–1923,” in Bor­ derlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–1930, ed. Billie Melman (New York: Routledge, 1998), especially 48–53. 13

  See the sections of correspondence with the readers in the Orenburg journal Shûrâ [Council], no. 11 (1917): 262–63; no. 13 (1917): 307–10. Interestingly enough, the editor answering the letters from Turkestan deliberately contrasted Central Asian peoples’ backwardness with the progressiveness of Volga-Urals Muslims even at an international level. On Russian women’s suffrage movement, see Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild, Equality and Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010).

14

  Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003).

64 Norihiro Naganawa

the Volga-Urals region, did not exhaust its potential in the last decade of the autocracy. During the Great War, Muslim social activists also utilized this imperial institution with a view toward effectively gathering capital for aid operations at the mosques. Social activism among the Volga-Urals Muslims reveals a reciprocal relationship between their modern way of organization and the long-standing imperial governance for the common patriotic cause.15 Still, the Great War did shake the authority of the existing Muslim ad­ ministration, particularly when the tsarist government betrayed Muslims’ expectations that the prewar administrative system would be reformed as appropriate recompense for their strenuous struggle at the front and in the rear. Among Volga-Urals Muslim activists, two concurrent events in mid-1915, one national and one regional, provoked a shift from loyalty to the tsar to solidarity with fellow Muslims: the Russian army’s disastrous retreat and the tsarist government’s impetuous appointment of a new mufti without taking into account Muslim public opinion. Loyalty to the Muslim community was all the more reinforced by local Muslims’ encounter with coreligionist refugees from the Caucasus and Polish-Lithuanian lands. Scholars have shown how the tsarist government’s policies of enforced resettlement and segregation of ethnic groups both in the army and in the rear on the basis of perceived disloyalty worked as a catalyst for the solidification of national identities and aggravation of nationalisms.16 In the case of the Volga-Urals Muslims, it was their charities and the Tatar-language press circulating news about their activities that generated a public sphere allowing them to artic­ ulate a discourse of the unity of all Russian Muslims.17 Presumably out of this experience, Volga-Urals Tatars would produce a variety of “All-Russian Muslim” movements in 1917, in which Tatar women occupied a visible place. 15  Stéphan Dudoignon rather emphasizes the contentious relationship between the Spiritual Assembly and Muslim charitable societies. See his “Status, Strategies and Discourses of a Muslim ‘Clergy’ under a Christian Law: Polemics about the Collection of the Zakât in Late Imperial Russia,” in Dudoignon and Komatsu, Islam in Politics, especially 52–55. 16

  Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloom­ ington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Mark von Hagen, “The Limits of Reform: The Multiethnic Imperial Army Confronts Nationalism, 1874–1917,” in Reforming the Tsar’s Army: Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution, ed. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye and Bruce W. Menning (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004), 34–55; Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ versity Press, 2003).

17

  On the role of the Tatar press in creating a Muslim public sphere, see Norihiro Naganawa, “Holidays in Kazan: The Public Sphere and the Politics of Religious Au­ thority among Tatars in 1914,” Slavic Review 71, 1 (Spring 2012): 25–48.

Muslim Philanthropy in the Volga-Urals Region

65

Upon the outbreak of the Great War, the religious leaders of the Muslim population in the Volga-Urals region joined with the Russian Orthodox Church and the leaders of other faiths in the empire to mobilize support for the war.18 Initially Muslim religious institutions drew upon experience they had gained during the Russo-Japanese War. During that conflict the Spiritual Assembly in Ufa had attempted to marshal all the mullahs under its jurisdiction to conduct fundraising at their mosques in cooperation with the Interior Ministry, the royal family’s philanthropic societies, and the Red Cross. On 10 February 1904, for example, two weeks after the opening of war with Japan, Mufti Muhammadiyar Sultanov (in position 1886–1915) disseminated an instruction (nasîhat), in response to which 57,914 rubles 13 kopecks reached Ufa, out of which 53,889 rubles 10 kopecks were expended according to directions from the Interior Ministry.19 Even after the Russo-Japanese War ended, fundraising for soldiers and their families took place annually under the leadership of the Spiritual Assembly.20 Muslim religious institutions resumed vigorous efforts to support the military once the Great War began in 1914. On Fridays and other Islamic holidays, mullahs prayed for the victory of the Russian army. Some congregations conveyed their prayers directly to the throne as well, through the provincial governor, and received a response from Nicholas II through the Interior Ministry with formulaic expressions of the emperor’s “sincere gratitude for their loyal sentiments.”21 On 23 August 1915, for example, on the occasion of Nicholas II’s assumption of the position of 18

  Tsentral´nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv Respubliki Bashkortostan (TsGIARB) f. I-295 (Orenburg Mohammedan Spiritual Assembly), op. 11, d. 248, l. 358 (the mufti’s appeal to the subordinate Muslim clergy regarding fundraising for the Red Cross, 16 August 1914). The massive reaction to this appeal is seen in dd. 786, 836, and 845.

19

  The extensive reaction to the mufti’s call is reflected in ibid., d. 40 (no number); d. 715, ll. 27–172. In one of the documents filed in d. 40, one Tobol´sk Bukharan living in Qarqaralî, Semipalatinsk province said that he knew about the mufti’s call from Gasprinskii’s newspaper Tarjumân, no. 17. On the total sum of the fundraising, see Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA) f. 821 (Department of Spiritual Affairs of the Foreign Confessions), op. 133, d. 625, ll. 79–80. Most of the remainder, that is, 3946 rubles 57 kopecks, went to the aid of the Muslim clergy who had suffered poor harvests, particularly in 1906 and other disasters.

20

  On the five-year anniversary of the end of the Russo-Japanese War, see TsGIARB f. I-295, op. 11, d. 803 (no number, but dated 15 October 1910); d. 878 (no number, but dated 13 April 1910). 21

 A huge number of documents concerning this kind of dialogue, including prayers by the Jewish community of the city of Cheliabinsk, are preserved in Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Orenburgskoi oblasti (GAOO) f. 10 (Office of the Governor of Orenburg), op. 4, d. 437.

66 Norihiro Naganawa

supreme commander of the armed forces, Mufti Safa Bayazitov (who served from 1915 to 1917) together with the religious leaders of the five mosques in Ufa organized a massive Friday prayer service on 28 August for the health and prosperity of the tsar’s family and the glory of the Russian army. The mufti related to the Interior Ministry that “these feelings [toward the tsar and his army] are undoubtedly shared by all the Muslims in the district entrusted to me, who are true and devoted sons of their tsar and fatherland.”22 Despite such expressions of patriotic loyalty from Russian Muslims, the entrance of the Ottoman Empire into the war as an ally of the Central Powers in October 1914 made the Russian authorities all the more watchful of the Muslim population as a potential destabilizing factor. The Interior Ministry mandated that the provincial governors prevent Ottoman emissaries from sneaking around the Muslim regions and diverting Russian Muslims’ fundraising to the Ottomans’ benefit.23 The central government’s suspicions were raised further on 14 November, when the Ottomans termed their participation in the war a jihâd. As a counter to the Ottomans’ declaration, Mufti Sultanov circulated an admonition to Russian Muslims that they defend Russia, their historical homeland.24 On 25 October, he had also told those Muslim soldiers departing for the Caucasus Front, “All of you just swore by faith and truth to serve Tsar and Fatherland to the last drop of blood. Remember this! Anyone who betrays his oath will commit a grave sin.”25 Still, the Police Department on 29 January 1915 had to direct the head of the Kazan´ Provincial Gendarmerie to keep the local Muslims’ mood under surveillance and take preventive action, based on information concerning the spread of letters from Medina agitating for a holy war against Russia.26 The demonstration of Muslim loyalty staged by the 22

 RGIA f. 821, op. 133, d. 598, l. 190 (16 September 1915).

23  Ibid., d. 603, ll. 125ob.–26 (18 October 1914). On the surveillance in Kazan´ prov­ ince, see Natsional´nyi arkhiv Respubliki Tatarstan (NART) f. 199 (Gendarme Admin­ istration of Kazan´ Province), op. 1, d. 948, ll. 170 (30 October 1914), 175 (4 November 1914), 183 (30 November 1914); on Orenburg province, see GAOO f. 10, op. 4, d. 437, l. 933 (12 November 1914). 24

 “Muftî hadratining rûhânîlargha khitâbî” [The mufti’s message to the Muslim clergy], Qûyâsh, 23 November 1914, 1. This kind of admonition was made also by his Caucasian and Crimean counterparts. RGIA f. 821, op. 133, d. 603, l. 110 (the director of the Caucasus Governor General’s Office to the director of the Department of Spiritual Affairs, 15 December 1914); ll. 188–188ob. (the Crimean mufti’s admonition). 25

 RGIA f. 821, op. 133, d. 603, l. 172.

26

  NART f. 199, op. 1, d. 1026, l. 29. See also information concerning the spread of a rumor about German emperor Wilhelm II’s conversion to Islam (ibid., l. 67 [22 April 1915]).

Muslim Philanthropy in the Volga-Urals Region

67

Spiritual Assembly did not dissolve the state’s trepidation that Muslims could become a fifth column. The Muslim population was not merely an object of mobilization through the long-standing confessional administration. The novel developments the Great War witnessed among the Volga-Urals Muslims included activities of the Muslim charitable societies that compensated for the state’s insufficient assistance to wounded soldiers and their families. The Orenburg Society, for example, immediately after the declaration of war decided to donate 1000 rubles for soldiers’ medical support, and in September, to found a committee for collecting donations and mobilizing Muslim women to sew linens for wounded soldiers.27 On 14 September, the Astrakhan´ Society convened a special meeting to discuss assisting soldiers irrespective of nationality, and gathered 858 rubles 43 kopecks for this purpose.28 Although its own finances were shaky, the Kazan´ Society resolved to open a hospital, allocating 1200 rubles in its 1915 budget to the new institution.29 In Ufa, the Muslim Women’s Association also opened a hospital, and the local Muslim charitable society gave 300 rubles to the Red Cross and 100 rubles to the city. In the name of Ufa Muslim residents, a war relief committee was chaired by Hasan ‘Atâ Khadrat, one of three executive members of the Spiritual Assembly. More­ over, renowned intellectuals, including imams, joined the relevant city and zemstvo organizations. The local paper Tûrmush (Life) underlined the fact that the Muslims, having been denounced by the Russian authorities as panIslamists and pan-Turkists, now embraced common patriotic sentiments, spontaneously fulfilling their duties to the fatherland.30 Observing the example of zemstvos and cities uniting in their assistance efforts, three Petrograd-based Muslim leaders initiated an attempt to coordi­ nate the fragmented philanthropic efforts by individual Muslim organizations. They were ‘Abd al-‘Azîz Dawlatshîn, chair of the Committee of Mosque 27

 GAOO f. 10, op. 4, d. 437, ll. 77, 702–04.

28  RGIA f. 821, op. 133, d. 603, ll. 33–33ob. (Astrakhan´ governor to the director of the Department of Spiritual Affairs, 19 September 1914). 29

  Qazân jam‘iyyat-i khairiyyasîning wa âning tasarrufindagî qârtlâr yûrtî, bâlâlar maktabî (prîyût), shifâkhâna hem wilâdat khânasîning hisâbî, 1914nchî yil ûchûn [The account of the Kazan´ Charitable Society, Asylum for the Aged, Orphans’ School (Home), Hospital, and Maternity Home under the Society for the year of 1914] (Kazan´, 1915), 5–6, 89. On the financial condition of the Kazan´ Society, see “Yâsh saudâgarlar diqqatiyya” [To the young merchants’ attention], Qûyâsh, 28 November 1914, 1; “Jam‘iyyatlarmiz hâlindan: Qazân jam‘iyyatlarî” [About the condition of our societies: Kazan´ societies], Waqt, 30 November 1914, 1–2.

30

 “Rûsiyya musulmânlarîning watanparwarliklarî” [Russian Muslims’ patriotism], Tûrmush [Life], 31 October 1914, 1.

68 Norihiro Naganawa

Construction in Petrograd; Zâhid Shâmil, chair of the city’s Muslim Charitable Society; and Amîna Sirtlânûwâ, chairwoman of the Muslim Society for the Spread of Knowledge and one of the most active Muslim women during the war. At the end of October 1914, they approached the governor of Petrograd for permission to convene an assembly of Muslim philanthropic organizations. In the middle of November, after receiving sanction from the Interior Ministry, they called for participation in the meeting through the Muslim press.31 On 6 December, leading Muslim philanthropists from across the empire met in Petrograd for the first of five days of discussion and planning to meet the demands of war. In addition to their expressions of patriotic loyalty described at the opening of this article, the representatives discussed the creation of a na­ tional relief committee to unite the resources of the empire’s Muslims for war relief. The representatives readily promised generous support: the Moscow Charitable Society, 500 rubles; the Astrakhan´ Society, 200 rubles; and their Ufa counterpart, 1000 rubles.32 Like other public associations in the empire, the assembly decided to establish and equip a sanitary mission (sanitarnyi otriad) to provide medical care for incapacitated soldiers on the Caucasus Front; the mission was to be identified with a logo comprised of the Arabic words “no God but Allah” within a crescent. Moreover, the planned all-Russian Mus­ lim organization was to distribute 10 percent of the funds it collected to sol­ diers’ families, and to persuade the central government and zemstvos to arrange more stipends for Muslim soldiers’ children. Those present were also concerned about possible threats to the maintenance of Islamic discipline among Muslim soldiers in the army and their fellow believers in the rear. They proposed deploying Muslim chaplains (‘askarî imâmlar) on the front at the Treasury’s expense.33 With a view toward mobilizing the Muslim community in the rear for material and spiritual support of soldiers, they decided to ask the muftis in the Crimea, Transcaucasus, and Orenburg for cooperation.34 At the end of December, the chair of the meeting, Ibniamin Akhtiamov, submitted the regulations of the “Provisional Committee of Muslim Social 31   RGIA f. 821, op. 133, d. 598, ll. 21–22ob.; “Musulmân jam‘iyyatlarî wakîllarîning isyyizdi wa prûghrâmî [An assembly of representatives of Muslim charities and its program),” Waqt, 28 November 1914, 1. 32

 “Musulmân jam‘iyyatlarîning isyyizdî” [The Muslim charities assembly], Waqt, 9 December 1914, 1. 33

  Imams did work in the Russian army during the Great War. But their number was too small to meet the spiritual needs of Muslim soldiers dispersed along the vast front (Naganawa, “Musul´manskoe soobshchestvo,” 208–10). 34

 “Musulmân jam‘iyyatlarîning isyyizdî,” Waqt, 18 December 1914, 2; “Musulmân jam‘iyyatlarîning isyyizdî,” Waqt, 19 December 1914, 1.

Muslim Philanthropy in the Volga-Urals Region

69

Organizations” to the Interior Ministry. They detailed the structure of a central war relief committee that could allow its interactions with state func­ tionaries and the Muslim public. The committee included twelve full and six candidate members, and was charged with encouraging local branches to hold concerts, plays, and other fundraising events at mosques and theaters. Branches with at least three members were required to inform the local au­ thorities of their staff and activities. Every month, the central committee would publicize the amount of aid raised by its local branches in the Muslim newspapers. Already at the beginning of February 1915, the Interior Ministry at exceptional speed approved the new organization under the official name of the Provisional Muslim Committee for Assistance to Soldiers and Their Families.35 Its membership included State Duma deputies, military officers, lawyers, and business tycoons, with Amîna Sirtlânûwâ being the sole woman. To implement the resolutions passed at the meeting in December 1914, the Provisional Committee launched negotiations with the civil and military authorities as well as with its local counterparts. On 13 March 1915, Dawlat­ shîn, now head of the committee, approached the director of the Department of Spiritual Affairs to propose fundraising by parish mullahs and to seek per­ mission to ask the Orenburg mufti to issue another circular for this purpose. He stated that past experience had proven the effectiveness of this practice, citing the successful fundraising campaign that was carried out for victims of the earthquake in Semirech´e province in December 1910.36 With the Interior Ministry’s sanction, the Spiritual Assembly in Ufa on 5 April circulated In­ struction No. 21 to the Muslim clergy under its jurisdiction, inviting them to raise funds for the Provisional Committee.37 This cooperation between the Muslim spiritual administration and local philanthropic organizations produced remarkable results. By the middle of September 1915, the Provisional Committee was receiving 11,000 to 12,000 rubles every month, for a total of more than 52,000 rubles in six months. The committee had 66 local branches across the empire from Warsaw to Irkutsk, though mainly concentrated in Ufa and Orenburg provinces. Where they existed, independent Muslim charitable societies were expected to act as 35

  RGIA f. 821, op. 133, d. 598, ll. 41–44, 86ob. Akhtiamov’s regulations were also published in the Muslim press. “Markaz kâmîtît ta’sîs îtû yûlinda” [On the way to establishing the central committee], Qûyâsh, 30 December 1914, 2; “Musulmân jam‘iyyatlarîning yârâlî ‘askarlarga yârdam kâmîtîtî” [Muslim Charities’ Committee for Assistance to Wounded Soldiers], Waqt, 31 December 1914, 1. 36

  RGIA f. 821, op. 133, d. 598, l. 83. The huge number of papers concerning the fund­ raising campaign based on the mufti’s instruction of 20 January 1911 was preserved in TsGIARB f. I-295, op. 11, d. 892.

37

  TsGIARB f. I-295, op. 11, d. 40 (no number).

70 Norihiro Naganawa

branches of the central committee; in more remote areas, where no Muslim charities existed, the committee tried to establish local branches. It should be emphasized that the Provisional Committee’s reach extended even beyond the jurisdiction of the Spiritual Assembly into the Kazakh steppe and Turke­ stan: branches were established in Karabutak (Turgai province), Atbasar (Akmolinsk province), Zaisan (Semipalatinsk province); Tashkent, Tokmak (Semirech´e province), Chimkent (Syrdar´ia province), Golodnaia step´ (Sam­ arkand province), and Old Bukhara and Kerki in the Bukharan Emirate. The echo of fundraising initiated by the Provisional Committee reached even Qûlja in Chinese Turkestan, which had a sizable Tatar enclave.38 The height of the success of the Provisional Committee was the formation of a sanitary mission on behalf of the Russian Muslims, called the 48th Ad­ vanced Sanitary Transport of the Red Cross. At the end of June 1916 it was dispatched not to the Caucasus Front, as the assembly of charities in December 1914 had planned, but to the west, namely to Dvinsk. The rationale behind this change was, perhaps, to avoid possible contact between the Russian Muslim mission and coreligionists in the Ottoman enemy forces. The head of the Muslim sanitary transport was Amîna Sirtlânûwâ, chairwoman of the Muslim Society for the Spread of Knowledge. Appointed as its chaplain was Jamâl al-Dîn Khûrâmshîn, religious head (âkhûnd) of the town of Belebei, Ufa province and deputy of the second State Duma.39 The Provisional Committee in Petrograd and the local Muslim charities that it coordinated seem to have been in tune with the empire’s existing con­ fessional administration by using mosques as vital venues of fundraising. But the apparent harmony between old and new institutions broke down when the state could not live up to Muslims’ expectation that their contribution to war efforts would pave the way for the improvement of their political rights. The Muslim press amplified and widely circulated their expressions of displeasure. On 12 June 1915, when Mufti Muhammadiyar Sultanov passed away, lively debates erupted in the Tatar newspapers of Kazan´, Ufa, and Oren­ burg over possible candidates as his successor, even demanding the right to 38

 “‘Askarlarga wa ânlarining ‘â’ilalarîna yârdamchî muwaqqat musulmân kâmîtît­ indan: Kâmîtîtining ishlarî wa hâlî haqqinda ma‘lûmât” [From the Provisional Muslim Committee for Assistance to Soldiers and Their Families: Details on the committee’s works and condition], Waqt, 19 May 1915, 2–3; “‘Askarlarga wa ânlarining ‘â’ilalarîna yârdamchî muwaqqat musulmân kâmîtîtî,” Waqt, 29 September 1915, 2.

39

  Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. 102 (Department of Police), Special Section, 1916 g., d. 74, l. 83 (“Musul´manskii sanitarnyi otriad,” Birzhevye vedomosti, 23 June 1916); TsGIARB f. I-295, op. 11, d. 971 (no number, the Provisional Muslim Committee for Assistance to Soldiers and Their Families to the Ufa Provincial Administration, 16 August 1916).

Muslim Philanthropy in the Volga-Urals Region

71

elect the mufti by Muslims themselves. For fear of a prolonged vacancy in a position vital to the Muslim administration, on 27 July the Interior Ministry promptly posted Safa Bayazitov, head of the Muslim clergy in Petrograd, to Ufa without consulting local community leaders. This unilateral action partic­ ularly exasperated Muslim intellectuals (diyâlîlar) in Kazan´ and Ufa, who sent protests to the Muslim deputies of the State Duma and the interior minister, respectively, and the office of the Orenburg newspaper Waqt was deluged with numerous letters of grievance.40 Disaffection toward the new mufti would persist. One year later mufti Bayazitov, citing Quranic verses and secular laws, issued an instruction to mosque congregations to use their capital primarily to support their clergy, rather than for charity or aid to relatives.41 This so irked intellectuals that they questioned the mufti’s religious knowledge. To be sure, Muslims in the Volga-Urals continued to take care to express their loyalty; when unrest erupted in the Kazakh steppe and Turkestan, triggered by the 25 June 1916 decree imposing labor conscription on the Muslim population, the Waqt suggested that Muslims in these regions should be subject to military service just like the Volga-Urals Muslims. The newspaper added, however, that “even if we are not able to obtain equal rights with other compatriots by sacrificing souls for the homeland defense together, we still do not lose hope and wish to obtain [equal rights] someday.”42 Muslim philanthropic fundraising during World War I was not confined within the walls of mosques but developed beyond the existing Muslim administration. Local Muslim charities cultivated and broadened their own public sphere by organizing a variety of events in diverse settings. This was especially true in Central Asia, where no Spiritual Assembly existed, but where reformists (Jadids) enthusiastically organized plays and concerts in spite of the disapproval of such entertainments by conservative Muslim clergy.43 In fact, fundraising activities that occurred outside mosques prof40

 Actually Waqt did not publish these letters, perhaps for fear of censorship. It did mention, instead, that the editor was receiving numerous letters of grievance. “Qazân diyâlîlarîning musulmân frâksiyasî ra’îsî Tafkîlif ismina yibargân maktûblarî” [The Kazan´ intellectuals’ letter addressed to chair of the Muslim fraction Tevkelev], Qûyâsh, 13 August 1915, 2; “Muftîlik haqqinda Mullâ Hasanuf maktûbî” [Mullah Khasanov’s letter concerning the mufti], Waqt, 15 August 1915, 1; “Dakhâ muftîlik mas’alasî” [The mufti question again], Waqt, 19 August 1915, 2. See also D. M. Usmanova, Musul´manskie predstaviteli v rossiiskom parlamente, 1906–1916 (Kazan: Fän AN RT, 2005), 399–406.

41

 “Ûrinbûrgh muftîsîning murâja‘atî” [The Orenburg mufti’s request], Waqt, 10 August 1916, 2.

42 43

 “Qirghizlargha khitâb” [An address to the Kazakhs], Waqt, 8 July 1916, 1.

 Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 132, 154, 239.

72 Norihiro Naganawa

ited the charities the most. Responding to the call of the Provisional Committee, the Khar´kov Muslim Society collected 200 rubles by showing a movie, and a group of Samarkand intellectuals collected 228 rubles at their “Oriental Evening” (Sharq kîchasî).44 In Petrograd, where a substantial number of wounded Muslim soldiers were transferred, the Muslim Charitable Society invited them to enjoy amusements and banquets to mark religious festivals, funded by donations from Petrograd Muslims made during these holidays. As the war dragged on, however, the budget for entertainment shrank as the need for material aid to widows, orphans, and wounded soldiers increased.45 In the fall of 1915 the distant war finally reached the Middle Volga Basin and the Southern Urals with the arrival of crowds of refugees from the Caucasus (particularly from Kars region [oblast´]) and the western borderlands. These destitute people—Poles, Jews, Latvians, and Muslims—became a daily reminder to the local population that Russia was retreating from these territories and losing the war.46 Housing the multiethnic refugees, the local authorities accepted the organization of refugee relief initiated by fellow ethnic groups among the locals. While suspecting that this kind of organization could serve as a new framework for each people’s political demands, the authorities nonetheless had to admit that the social activism, albeit along ethnic lines, would lighten the burden on the state.47 As the need grew and the war came closer, Muslim charities responded with increased fundraising activities, especially targeted at fellow Muslims who were victims of the war. In February 1915, for example, a charity evening for Muslims in war-torn Kars, organized by the Kazan´ Society, sold 772 44

 “‘Askarlarga wa ânlarining ‘â’ilalarîna yârdamchî muwaqqat musulmân kâmîtîtindan: Musulmân kâmîtîtî fâ’idasina qabûl îtilgân i‘âna wa yârdamlar” [From the Provisional Muslim Committee for Assistance to Soldiers and Their Families: Aid and support received to the benefit of the Muslim Committee], Waqt, 3 May 1915, 4; 15 May 1915, 4.

45

  Otchet musul´manskogo blagotvoritel´nogo obshchestva v Petrograde (Petrograd, 1917), 4–5, 28–29, 30, 31, 46, 48, 49. More than 2,000 wounded Muslim soldiers came to the events in 1915, and 3,000 came in 1916. For the festival of the Month of the Pilgrimage, for instance, individual donations reached 867 rubles 14 kopecks in 1914, 873 rubles 50 kopecks in 1915, and only 200 rubles 65 kopecks in 1916. On the wounded Muslim soldiers’ expectation for Muslim charities and the Provisional Committee to quench their thirst for cultural and educational programs, see “Pîtrâghrâd lâzârîtindan” [From a hospital in Petrograd], Sûyum bîka, no. 21 (1916): 348–55.

46

  On the Viatka region, see Aaron B. Retish, Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 44–45.

47

  On Ufa province, see Steinwedel, “Invisible Threads of Empire,” 506–10. For a more general argument, see Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, chap. 7.

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tickets and raised 2675 rubles 85 kopecks.48 The Baku Charitable Society became the hub of efforts to aid Muslim refugees from Kars, receiving funds from other Muslim societies such as the Petrograd Society, which sent it 2500 rubles, and the Orenburg Muslim Committee for Assistance to War Victims, which directed 15,000 rubles.49 Aiding Muslims from distant parts of the empire was regarded as an obligation of the entire community; in the words of the Orenburg Committee, “it is up to the nation [millat ûstinda] to take on parental tasks for innocent children deprived of their own. This is a duty imposed upon each Muslim.” The example of other national groups was cited as a model: “When the Poles, Jews, and Latvians support their own fellow nationals [millatdâshlar], on whom could these Muslims [from the western borderlands] rely except their fellow believers [dîndâshlar]?”50 Kazan´ also had its own Muslim committee supporting coreligionist refugees, where many Muslim women were working to register them (more than 650 by the beginning of December 1915), to find them housing and their children schools, and to provide them with food, funds, medical care, and jobs.51 Muslim refugees from Polish-Lithuanian territories seem to have particularly provoked the Muslim locals’ curiosity. Several articles regarding this “encounter with relatives by blood and religion after centuries” came out in the Orenburg newspaper Waqt, including ones written by renowned religious scholar Ridâ’ al-Dîn b. Fakhr al-Dîn about their history.52 Waqt also advised that people understand the psychology behind the reluctance of Polish Muslims to accept aid, as they had originally lived in wealth: citing a verse from the Qur’ân 2: 273, “the ones may without knowing think, because of their modesty, that they are free from want. You shall know them by their 48

  Qazân jam‘iyyat-i khairiyyasî wa âning tarbiyyasinda bûlghân bâlâlar maktabî prîyût, wilâdatkhâna, âmbûlâtûriyya ham dâr al-‘âjizînining hisâbî, 1915nchî yil ûchûn [The account of the Kazan´ Charitable Society, Orphans’ School and Home, Maternity Home, Outpatient Department, and Asylum for the Aged under the Society for the year of 1915] (Kazan´, 1916), 8, 60–61.

49

  On the Baku Society, see Klimovich, Islam v tsarskoi Rossii, 308–09. On its Petrograd counterpart, see Otchet musul´manskogo blagotvoritel´nogo obshchestva v Petrograde, 33.

50  “Sûghishdan dararlânghân rûssiya taba‘asî musulmânlargha yârdam kâmîtîtindan” [From the Committee for Assistance to Russian Muslim Subjects Suffering from the War], Waqt, 14 October 1915, 1. 51

 “Qazândaghî musulmân qâchâqlârgha yârdam kâmîtîtî wa ânda eshlauchî khâtûn qizlâr” [The Committee for Assistance to Muslim Refugees in Kazan´ and women engaged in it], Sûyum bîka, no. 3 (1915): 50–51.

52

  Ridâ’ al-Dîn b. Fakhr al-Dîn, “Lîtwâ ham pûlsha musulmânlarî” [Lithuanian and Polish Muslims], Waqt, 21 October 1915, 2; 22 October 1915, 2–3.

74 Norihiro Naganawa

habit: they do not beg openly from all and everyone.”53 Such unexpected con­ tact with the “kindred” (tûghânlar) during the Great War enabled the VolgaUrals Muslims to relate their parochial deeds to a project of rescuing the broader coreligionist community of the empire. The mobilization of Muslim communities for the war effort had a powerful impact on the social position of Muslim women, too. As the war increasingly called up men, women took a larger and larger role in developing the Muslim public sphere. This was particularly visible in the Tatar press and education. In the war’s early stages, when the need to replace men in the labor force first arose, the Tatar press repeatedly criticized Muslim women for their lack of knowledge or skills and isolation from the outer world, and Muslim men for frowning upon their women going out for work.54 Some Tatar intellectuals, however, came to realize that resistance to women’s participation in the public sphere was not unique to Islam but a common challenge to “civilized and advanced Europe” (madanî wa mutaraqqî Yâwrûpâ) broadly. On the one hand, the Kazan´ feminist journal Sûyum bîka did report on European women’s en­ ergetic involvement in the war efforts, featuring female soldiers.55 On the other hand, finding “men’s innate, but baseless pride” hampering women’s liberation even in Europe, one contributor to the journal asserted that “Euro­ peans see the isolation of Muslim women and their ineligibility to make appreciable contributions in social affairs as a deficiency in Islam. [But the same] Europeans themselves do not regard their women as useful for such contributions and vital professions.”56 The increasing visibility of women on the home front brought important modifications to Islamic discourse in the region. Some religious scholars (‘ulamâ’) took issue with a long-standing local tradition prohibiting women from coming to mosques. As detailed above, mosques were pivotal spaces in the confessional state, enhancing patriotism and fundraising. With male par­ ishioners mobilized into the army, women prayed for and stood in for them. Challenged by this reality, reformist scholars attempted to demonstrate how far local practice that prohibited women from entering mosques deviated 53

 H. D. Mahmûduf, “Pûlsha musulmânlarî wa qâchâqlar” [Polish Muslims and refu­ gees], Waqt, 3 October 1915, 3. See also the same author’s article in Waqt, 1 October 1915, 1–2.

54

 “Sûghish ham tûrk-tâtâr khâtûnlârî” [War and the Turk-Tatar women], Sûyum bîka, no. 20 (1914): 13–15; “Sûghish wa musulmân khâtûnlarî” [War and Muslim women], Waqt, 19 November 1914, 1.

55

 “Sûghish ham khâtûnlâr” [War and women], Sûyum bîka, no. 3 (1915): 20.

56

 “Yâwrûpâda îng bakhtlî khâtûnlâr” [The most fortunate women in Europe], Sûyum bîka, no. 1 (1915): 17.

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from earliest Islam. Among phrases from the Prophet’s tradition and other normative books, scholars cited verse 2: 114 from the Qur’ân: “who are more unjust than those who prevent the name of Allah from being mentioned in His mosques,” as well as stories of wise women during the reign of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. On 3 May 1915 the imams of Ufa, the city of the Spiritual Assembly, also declared women’s presence at mosques legal in Islamic terms.57 Concern over the course of war and the safety of relatives at the front, along with interest in information about available aid, also increased the thirst for knowledge and education among Muslims. Women took the place of mobilized male teachers in mosque schools. Leading female pedagogues organized summer seminars for the advancement of teachers’ professional qualifications, inviting students through the Muslim press.58 The zemstvos in Orenburg province were especially enthusiastic about arranging libraries for the Muslim population and supporting female Muslim teachers’ initiatives. The embodiment of the collaboration between the provincial zemstvo and Muslim women was Bagbstan Mukminova’s summer seminar in Qâbân village near Orenburg, in which nearly 100 female students from various corners of Russia participated. The provincial zemstvo planned to open similar courses for female teachers in the summer of 1917, too, with each district zemstvo agreeing to send 20 students.59 In 1917, when Muslim soldiers’ wives in Kazan´ founded their own association, it included the organization of schools, libraries, and lectures along with aid to widows and orphans among its tasks.60 Muslim women in the Volga-Urals region also began to imagine roles for themselves that extended beyond such familiar, maternal activities as sewing linens for soldiers, nursing the wounded, and caring for children. In late 1916, confirming the significant increase of Tatar women’s social engagement during the war, the Sûyum bîka forecast a future of continued struggle to hold onto gains made during the war: 57

 Ahmad Tâj al-Dîn, “Khâtûnlâr masjidda” [Women in the mosque], Sûyum bîka, no. 18 (1915): 1–4; “Khâtûnlarining masjidlarga yûrûlarî” [Women going to mosques], Shûrâ, no. 21 (1916): 501–04; no. 22 (1916): 524–26. 58

 “Khânimlar îchûn jâylik darslar” [Summer classes for women], Sûyum bîka, no. 13 (1915): 21; “Mu‘alimalar îchûn qûrslâr” [Courses for female teachers], Sûyum bîka, no. 13 (1916): 233–234; “Mu‘alimalar îchûn qûrslâr wa âlârda ûqûchîlargha yârdam haqqinda” [About courses for female teachers and support for those studying there], Waqt, 17 April 1916, 1–2.

59

  Doklady Orenburgskoi gubernskoi zemskoi upravy chetvertomu ocherednomu gubernskomu zemskomu sobraniiu, Podotdel obrazovaniia inorodtsev, Otdel narodnogo obrazovaniia (Orenburg, 1916), 7–9, 54–57, 60–62. 60

  Qazânda muslima sâldâtkâlar ûyûshmâsîning ûstâfî [Statutes of the Kazan´ Association of Muslim Soldiers’ Wives] (Kazan´, 1917), 2.

76 Norihiro Naganawa

It is evident that the war is substantially facilitating the women’s movement. Still, it is not rational to conclude that the war will completely overturn the obstacles that hamper the advancement of women and provide them with a wide arena of actions.… One day, the war will be over, and everything will fall back into the natural course of life. This will be the time when women’s power and men’s power collide in a terrifying way.… It is at this moment that women must defend the positions they have obtained. Naturally, women from now on must be prepared not to be subdued in this future struggle.61 With the unprecedented mobilization of men for the war, Muslim women strove to occupy and transform the formerly male-dominant public sphere within their community. Motivated by a sense of duty to both Islam and humanity (insâniyyat), they expressed their hopes and aims in the press, organized their own associations, and collaborated with local self-government.62 ab This article demonstrates how total war affected faith and loyalty among the Volga-Urals Muslims in the Russian confessional state, and the ways in which Muslim civil society expanded beyond this imperial order. In other words, it was the total nature of mobilization that obliged the state to rely both upon a variety of social forces orchestrated by local self-government and charitable societies and upon traditional forms of administration that tied multiconfessional subjects’ loyalty to the tsar. The operation of Muslim charities in European Russia showed that their leaders in the cities also tried to cooperate with the Spiritual Assembly in Ufa and its subordinate mullahs with a view toward legitimizing their activism and propelling their influence deep into the countryside. The Muslim leaders’ commitment to prayers for the tsar, his family, and the Russian army as well as to fundraising for the soldiers and their relatives was a crucible of their patriotism, since the Russian authorities remained profoundly wary of their potential collusion with the belligerent Ottoman Empire. But from mid-1915, when the government appointed a mufti, 61

 “Sûghish ham khâtûnlâr” [War and women], Sûyum bîka, no. 20 (1916): 336. For a similar discourse in Russian feminist journals, see Alfred G. Meyer, “The Impact of World War I on Russian Women’s Lives,” in Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, ed. Barbara Evans Clements et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 218, 222.

62

  For an explicit expression of Islam and humanity by a female activist, see Fakhr alBanât Sulaymâniyya, “Eshlarga kîrak” [Necessary to work], Sûyum bîka, no. 20 (1915): 2–3.

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the linchpin of the Muslim administration, without considering Muslim public opinion, collaboration between the Spiritual Assembly and Muslim charities began to dwindle. Muslim philanthropic activities enabled their participants to embrace a new collectivity that had originally figured in the confessional state, but became gradually detached from it, devising both imagined and real con­ nections with Russia’s dispersed Muslim communities. The Provisional Muslim Committee for Assistance to Soldiers and Their Families established communications with local charitable societies that had rapidly grown in the cities around the empire before the war. Its branches spread beyond the jurisdiction of the Spiritual Assembly. In the press, those leaders engaged in the committee’s enterprise positioned themselves as representatives of allRussian Muslims before the central and local authorities and the Muslim public. Educated Muslims gained an opportunity to learn about their own communities in detail so that they could properly organize aid and charitable events. In particular, the arrival of Muslim refugees from the Caucasus and the Polish-Lithuanian lands in the Volga-Urals region prompted the local coreligionists’ initiative to provide relief for them and thereby sympathetic identification with these unexpected guests as members of a common nation. New encounters and connections with fellow believers through the mobi­ lization of social forces and evacuation from the far-off borderlands cultivated a new imagination of an empire-wide Muslim community. The rise of public activism aimed at alleviating the suffering of coreligionists began to produce a language of Muslim national (millî) unity, one that gradually replaced earlier rhetoric about a common patriotic cause to which Muslims could contribute.63 The language of patriotism worked as long as the Spiritual Assembly continued in its role as intermediary between the state and mosque congregations. The herald of the change was protest over the government’s neglect of Muslim voices aspiring to equal rights with other subjects in general and to the right to choose their own religious head in particular. Among Volga-Urals Muslims, streams of Muslim refugees from the Caucasus and the west furthered a sense of solidarity with coreligionists even beyond the jurisdiction of the Spiritual Assembly. This collective experience was, perhaps, one of the inspirations for Volga-Urals Tatars to convene the All-Russian Muslim Congress at the beginning of May 1917 in order to discuss the form of Muslim peoples’ auton­ omy in the future Russian state.

63

 Peter Gatrell also mentions that “refugee associational activity may have crystallized national particularism by helping to generate a sense of what ‘the [national] whole’ entailed, as an alternative to that other whole represented by the imperial polity.” See his A Whole Empire Walking, 169–70.

78 Norihiro Naganawa

At the same congress, the wartime women’s movements bore fruit when the delegates expressed support for women’s suffrage and equality between men and women. This signifies that many Tatar women stood with their Rus­ sian counterparts at the forefront of the women’s suffrage movement that was blossoming in Europe at this time. Moreover, the congress elected Mukhlisa Bûbî (1869–1937) as one of the six executive members of the Spiritual Assembly, the sole female official in the 130-year history of this institution.64 She had been one of the leading pedagogues who had organized summer schools for Muslim women during the war. Thus, the Great War created the two agencies of democracy for the coming revolutions among the Volga-Urals Muslims, with intellectuals involved in politicizing Russian Muslim unity, and women expansively making their voices heard within this new Muslim politics. No other Muslim region in the empire witnessed a similar development. Under an autocracy that deprived its subjects of the rights and duties of citizens and the rule of law, the Volga-Urals Muslims had nonetheless mastered skills of negotiation and organization, and embraced a sense of contract with the tsars and the state through their inter­ actions with such institutions as the Spiritual Assembly, the Russian army, local self-government, and the State Duma.65 Following the example of their Russian and other ethnic counterparts, Muslim charities compensated for the autocracy’s limited capacity to provide social welfare. This enabled their further integration into the Russian state, which culminated in their patriotic participation in the relief services during the Great War. It was during the same period, however, that these Muslim organizations curtailed the scope of state power, fostering an alternative identity and claiming appropriate compensation for their collective war efforts. The First World War transformed Muslim subjects in the Volga-Urals region, deprived of citizenship but most integrated into public life, into champions of a new political order.

64

 Necip Hablemitoğlu, Çarlık Rusyasi’nda Türk Kongreleri (1905–1917) (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Basımevi, 1997), 94–95, 103–04, 107–08. 65

  On the conceptual and practical division of the imperial territory between core and periphery in terms of grazhdanstvennost´ (citizenship) after the Great Reforms and its impacts on Russia’s varied Muslim regions, see Alexander Morrison, “Metropole, Colony, and Imperial Citizenship in the Russian Empire,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13, 2 (Summer 2012): 327–64, especially 341–45, 348–51, 354–56.

Fighting “On Our Own Territory”: The Relief, Rescue, and Representation of Jews in Russia during World War I Polly Zavadivker

On 24 July 1914, the lawyer and activist Solomon V. Pozner (1876–1946) issued a novel appeal in the St. Petersburg Russian Jewish weekly Novyi voskhod (New Dawn). The Russian Army had begun mobilizing in Eastern Prussia against Germany four days earlier, and Pozner called on fellow Jews in Russia to take part in the coming war. For Jews had a duty to defend their homeland, Russia—”the country,” he wrote, “in which we have lived for hundreds of years and from which nothing, neither persecution nor tyranny, can possibly sever us.” But Jews also had an obligation to fight for themselves, for the war had broken out, as he put it, “on our own territory, threatening those of us who live there—our wives, children, and elderly parents.”1 Pozner’s declaration of patriotic loyalty resonated throughout the Rus­ sian Jewish press and was expressed in the speeches of prominent Jewish figures, including one delivered two days later, on 26 July, by Duma deputy Naftali M. Fridman (1863–1921) before members of the Fourth Duma.2 These rhetorical displays of patriotism may have been entirely in earnest, but they also contained a hope that the Jews’ wartime loyalty would prove that they merited equal rights as imperial subjects. However, the second part of Poz­ner’s 24 July appeal—that Russia’s Jews should fight on behalf of fellow Jews—also reflected a prevailing mood among a large proportion of the Jewish popula­ tion. Notwithstanding their expressions of devotion to Russia’s war effort, Jews began from the first days of the war to fight for their own.

1

 S. V. Pozner, “Voina,” Novyi voskhod, 24 July 1914, 3.

2

 Excerpts of Fridman’s speech and other public declarations of patriotism were printed in the 1918 anthology Iz “chernoi knigi” rossiiskogo evreistva: Materialy dlia istorii voiny 1914–1915 g., ed. Simon Dubnov, Evreiskaia starina 10 (1918): 195–296, here 198– 200. Similar examples of patriotic sentiments in the Russian Jewish press are cited in Mordechai Altshuler, “Russia and Her Jews: The Impact of the 1914 War,” The Wiener Library Bulletin 27, 30–31 (1973–74): 12–16, here 12–13. Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 79–105.

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Polly Zavadivker

At first glance, one of the striking aspects of Pozner’s appeal is its deviation from fact: Jews could be found throughout a geographically expansive empire, and certainly not in any territory that they could call their own. Pozner him­ self lived hundreds of miles to the east of the region where the war would ostensibly be fought, among a community of 35,000 Jews in St. Petersburg on the eve of the war.3 It would have been clear to his readers, though, that he meant the region where the vast majority of Jewish communities, totaling nearly 5 million, or over 90 percent of the Russian Empire’s Jewish population, lived by legal decree, in the “Pale of Settlement” (cherta osedlosti).4 The Pale of Settlement became the site of Russia’s first major theater of conflict, and for activists like Pozner, it also represented the demographic and symbolic center of Jewish life in Russia. Pozner’s exhortation that Jews fight for their own on their own territory also contained a call for autonomy. Indeed, as Jewish intellectuals in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was renamed in mid-August of 1914) came to grasp the extent of the Russian military’s anti-Jewish campaign during the first year of the war, they threw their lot in with their fellow Jews. They proceeded to launch what became the most extensive relief effort ever undertaken in Jew­ ish history in response to Russia’s Great War, which generated the greatest humanitarian crisis ever in Russian history.5 On 18 August, a group of Jewish philanthropists and educated professionals in Petrograd founded the Jewish Committee to Aid Victims of War (Evreiskii komitet dlia pomoshchi zhertvam voiny, or EKOPO).6 What began as a project to help Jewish troops and civilians through “self-help” (samopomoshch´) projects evolved over the next four years into a complex network of local relief committees that aided hundreds of 3

  Population figure cited from Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 92. For the history of Jews in St. Petersburg, see Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 81–198; and Mikhail Beizer, The Jews of St. Petersburg: Excursions through a Noble Past, trans. Michael Sherbourne, ed. Martin Gilbert (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989). 4   The Russian Empire annexed these territories from the Polish-Lithuanian Common­ wealth during the last quarter of the 18th century. For religious, economic, and social reasons, the tsarist authorities decided that the Jewish population, estimated between 500,000 and 750,000 during the Partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1772 to 1795 (and by 1914, 5 million), should reside within delineated borders and be limited to certain occupations. For the origins of the Pale, see John Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Question” in Russia, 1772–1825 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986). 5

 On this point, see Lloyd P. Gartner, History of the Jews in Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 270. 6

  Otchet Tsentral´nogo Evreiskogo Komiteta pomoshchi zhertvam voiny s nachala deiatel´nosti, avgust 1914 goda po 30-e iiunia 1917 goda (Petrograd, 1918), 7 (hereafter Otchet).



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communities in the war zone, as well as displaced Jewish war victims moving east toward the empire’s interior. By 1918, the EKOPO had assisted nearly 500 communities and almost a quarter of a million Jews in both frontline zones and the interior. With total revenues of 31 million rubles from the outbreak of the war to mid-1917, EKOPO received the majority of its funds from the Russian government, although Jewish communities in the Russian Empire, United States, Great Britain, South Africa, Australia, and elsewhere also sent contributions.7 The EKOPO’s aid to Jewish troops and civilians paralleled the relief cam­ paign undertaken by Russian society. Aid to military servicemen as well as rural and urban populations was carried out under the auspices of public organi­ zations, principally the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos (Vserossiiskii zemskii soiuz), All-Russian Union of Towns (Vserossiiskii soiuz gorodov), Russian Red Cross, and Tat´iana Committee.8 But as the historian Peter Gatrell has argued, the activists in wartime Russia who served their own ethnic or religious groups—including Poles, Latvians, Muslims, Jews, and others—articulated the suffering of war victims and their own campaign to relieve that suffering in national terms.9 The Russian army’s persecution of so-called enemy aliens, as well as widespread xenophobic propaganda that targeted Poles, Germans, and especially Jews, inflamed nationalist emotions and reinforced existing ethnic and religious differences among the empire’s diverse subjects.10 Conse­ quently, the relief that the empire’s ethnic and religious minorities provided to members of their own national groups became charged with political sig­ 7

 Ibid., 13. By the end of 1916, EKOPO had aided an estimated 240,000 displaced Jews. A. S. Tumanova, “Evreiskie obshchestvennye organizatsii v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny, na primere Tambovskoi gubernii,” in Mirovoi krizis 1914–1920 godov i sud´ba vostochnoevropeiskogo evreistva, ed. O. V. Budnitskii et al. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2005), 124– 42, here 128. 8

 On the Russian public campaign to aid war refugees, see Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). On the wartime efforts of the Union of Zemstvos and Union of Towns, see William Gleason, “The All-Russian Union of Zemstvos and World War I,” in The Zemstvo in Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-Government, ed. Terence Emmons and Wayne S. Vucinich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 365–82.

9

 Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, especially 1–14, 141–70. On Muslim philanthropies in wartime Russia, see the essay by Norihiro Naganawa in this volume.

10

 On the history of nationalism and propaganda in World War I Russia, see Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign Against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 65–82; and Hubertus F. Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).

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nificance. Their organizations became known as “national committees” and their leaders identified themselves as representatives of national groups. The EKOPO’s relief workers and leaders are a case in point: they defined the war as a “national catastrophe” (natsional´naia katastrofa) for Jews, and they framed their relief work not as a humanitarian campaign but a national mission to provide material and spiritual support by and for fellow Jews.11 Russian Jews’ approach to relief work rested on the underlying assumption that Jews possessed a distinct culture and history, and that these attributes entitled them to rights as individuals, as well as the status and privileges of a national group within a multiethnic empire. Earlier scholars have observed some of the ways that the EKOPO’s work promoted Jewish national interests in Russia and Poland during and after the war and revolution.12 However, the question of how nationalist sentiments impacted and were expressed through the EKOPO’s wartime relief work re­ mains largely unanswered. This essay seeks to explain how Russian Jewish activists and relief workers served the proverbial Jewish nation—hundreds of thousands of war victims dispersed and traveling within geographically vast and often physically devastated regions. It examines how they conceptualized their relief work as a national mission and how they expressed principles of national self-determination and autonomy through daily or routine aspects of relief work. 11  The term is cited in Obzor deiatel´nosti Obshchestva dlia rasprostraneniia prosveshcheniia mezhdu evreiami v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1916), 6, translated from Tumanova, “Evreiskie obshchestvennye organizatsii,” 130. 12

 Steven J. Zipperstein, “The Politics of Relief: The Transformation of Russian Jewish Communal Life during the First World War,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry IV: Jews and the European Crisis, ed. Jonathan Frankel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 22–40; Tumanova, “Evreiskie obshchestvennye organizatsii”; Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 145–50; Simon Rabinovitch, Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), chap. 5; Michael Beizer, Relief in Time of Need: Russian Jewry and the Joint, 1914–24 (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2015); and Mera Sverdlova, “Havaad hayehudi leezrat nifgaei hamilhama (EKOPO) be-Russia, 1914–1916,” Yahadut Zmaneinu 4 (1987): 269–88. The construction of Jewish cultural identity during wartime, though not in relation to the EKOPO’s work per se, is the subject of Aviel Roshwald, “Jewish Cultural Identity in Eastern and Central Europe during the Great War,” in European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914–1918, ed. Roshwald and Richard Stites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 89–126. On the emer­gence of Jewish artistic forms and cultural identity in the wartime and postwar period in Russia, see Anke Hilbrenner, “Center and Periphery in Russian Jewish Culture during the Crisis of 1914–22,” in Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914–22, 1: Popular Culture, the Arts, and Institutions, ed. Murray Frame et al. (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2014), 189–207.



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As we will see, a remarkable variety of initiatives comprised Jewish relief work in wartime Russia, including medical, legal, and financial aid, as well as efforts to preserve Jewish cultural life, document Jews’ wartime experiences, and monitor the movement and numbers of displaced Jewish civilians. These seemingly disparate projects were linked by the principle of a national mission. Moreover, the EKOPO’s wartime campaign represented a continuation of values and practices that Jewish philanthropists and intellectuals had first developed over 50 years before the war. Nor was the idea that Jews comprised a nation a novel one. The different socialist, liberal, and Zionist ideologies that emerged among East European Jews in the last two decades of the 19th century had commonly demanded political equality for Jews, both as indi­ viduals and as a nation, notwithstanding their conflicting approaches to ques­ tions of territorial status, language, economy, and religion. The outbreak of war in 1914 represented a watershed in Russian Jewish history because it became possible, and indeed legitimate and necessary, for the EKOPO’s leaders to fuse their provision of humanitarian aid for a large part of the empire’s Jewish population with claims that the Jews existed and were entitled to political rights as individuals and as a nation. The war generated tragic circumstances for the hundreds of thousands of Jewish civilians whom the Russian military ruthlessly uprooted from their homes; yet the relief work campaign that Jewish activists waged in response to this humanitarian crisis also reflected an atmosphere of potential: during the war, it became possible to pursue unprecedented opportunities for collective self-defense and national self-determination.13 The EKOPO’s mission to provide food, jobs, legal aid, transportation, and education for Jewish war victims expressed autonomy both in principle and practice. Jewish aid workers also created and collected vast numbers of documents about Jewish war victims in the form of lists and statistics, official documents, reports, and weekly newspapers. This important but little-known aspect of the EKOPO has been obscured by the assumption that Jews in Russia were prevented by censorship, anti-Semitism, and the general crisis of war from creating comprehensive records about their wartime experiences.14 In fact, Russian Jewish intellectuals and activists pro13

 Several scholars have written about World War I as a moment of both crisis and communal transition: on Petersburg Jewry, Zipperstein, “The Politics of Relief”; on Vilna Jewry, see Samuel Kassow, “Jewish Communal Politics in Transition: The Vilna Kehile, 1919–1920,” YIVO Annual 20 (1991): 61–91; on Polish Jewry, see Ezra Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland: The Formative Years, 1915–1926 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); on Russian Jewry, see Altshuler, “Russia and Her Jews.”

14

 David Roskies has argued that Russian Jewry’s efforts to record Jewish history “largely failed” during World War I because “the tsarist government closed down the entire Jewish-language press, imposed strict censorship on all news from the war

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duced a vast amount of documentation about Jewish collective history during the war.15 Jewish activists documented relief work in part because the EKOPO was a large, centralized organization that the Russian government and Jewish philanthropists abroad held accountable for large sums of money. But the organization’s goal to independently gather records about the identities, locations, and numbers of Jewish war victims also formed an integral and strategic component of the relief campaign’s national aspirations. Such documents provided an arsenal of evidence that Jewish activists used to inform and influence political authorities’ actions vis-à-vis Jewish civilians, raise funds for their work in Russia and abroad, and channel resources to the war victims they served. Documentation efforts provided the EKOPO’s activists with a degree of power to decide how, where, and in what forms they wanted to aid Jewish war victims. This essay begins with an overview of Jewish philanthropic organizations in late imperial Russia and their relation to the formation of the EKOPO in August 1914. A second section examines the situation of Jewish war victims in Russia during the first year of the war. A discussion of Jewish material and cultural rescue work then follows. Finally, the essay explains the strategic and symbolic value of various documentation efforts, including statistics, registra­ tion, personal diaries, and newspapers. Prewar Jewish Public Culture and EKOPO The EKOPO maintained a complex organizational structure. It developed as a conglomerate of several different philanthropies that originated among Russian Jews half a century prior to the war. Between the mid-19th and early 20th century, the majority of these groups were established by wealthy Jewish notables and intellectuals in St. Petersburg but functioned like networks throughout the Pale of Settlement, and collectively constituted the infrastructure of Jewish public culture in prewar Russia.16 The variety of public welfare front, and banned the use of the Hebrew alphabet in the mails.” Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 19. An essay that briefly mentions the cultural and historiographic efforts undertaken by relief workers in Vilna, primarily in the postwar period, is Kassow, “Jewish Communal Politics in Transition.” 15  Russian Jews’ wartime efforts to document their collective history for political purposes is the subject of my article “Reconstructing a Lost Archive: Simon Dubnow and ‘The Black Book of Imperial Russian Jewry’: Materials for a History of the War, 1914–1915,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 12 (2013): 419–42. 16

 On prewar Jewish philanthropy and enlightenment, see Jeffrey Veidlinger, Jewish Public Culture in Late Imperial Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009),



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projects that they pioneered continued under the EKOPO’s auspices during the war. The first major charitable organization founded by Russian Jewish elites in 1863 was the Society for the Spread of Enlightenment among Jews in Russia (Obshchestvo dlia rasprostraneniia prosveshcheniia mezhdu evreiami v Rossii, or OPE). As suggested by its name, this group promoted educational, religious, and cultural modernization among Jews in the Pale, otherwise known as Jewish enlightenment (haskalah), primarily by supporting Russianand Yiddish-language schools, theaters, and libraries. In 1880, Russian Jews established the Society for Artisanal and Agricultural Labor (Obshchestvo dlia remeslennogo i zemledelcheskogo truda, or ORT), which offered labor and occupational training. In 1891, the Jewish Colonization Associationo (Evreiskoe kolonizatsionnoe obshchestvo, better known by its English acronym as the JCA) was established to promote Jewish agricultural settlement and assisted farmers with training and loans. In 1912, a group of doctors and medical experts formed the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population (Obshchestvo okhraneniia zdorov´ia evreiskogo naseleniia, or OZE), which employed physicians and opened clinics and sanatoria throughout the empire. The Jewish activists and philanthropists who financed and managed these four societies tended to be acculturated and highly educated professionals, many of whom lived outside of the Pale in the major cities of the Russian interior as members of the first merchant guild.17 They sought to improve the material welfare of the Jewish masses in the Pale, but they also regarded charitable initiatives as vehicles to spread ideas of haskalah, social integration, and economic advancement. While these figures shared an underlying interest in securing civil rights for all Jews in the Russian Empire, they maintained support for the preservation of traditional religious and cultural life, and at the same time, sought to pioneer forms of modern Jewish national identity, for example, by supporting the creation of secular Yiddish- and Russianlanguage literary culture.

especially 229–91; and Brian Horowitz, Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in LateTsarist Russia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009). 17

 As Benjamin Nathans has written, a law proposed by the ministers of finance and internal affairs, passed in 1859, made Jewish first guild members the first Jews to be legally permitted to reside permanently and own land throughout the empire (Beyond the Pale, 59). Thus, only Jews who possessed significant capital or played prominent roles in domestic and international trade were initially allowed to settle officially in major cities in the Russian interior (not as individuals, but on account of their estate membership).

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During the same decades that a culture of philanthropic activism was emerging among Russian Jewry, a number of intellectuals took up an interest in the study of Jewish history. Scholars like the prominent historian Simon Dubnov (1860–1941) called for the need to develop what we now call public history, or the practice of collecting and preserving records in the form of museums, archives, and publications. In 1908, Dubnov helped establish the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society (Evreiskoe istoriko-etnograficheskoe obshchestvo, or EIEO) in St. Petersburg. However, Dubnov had started advo­ cating for undertaking a systematic historical study of East European Jewry some 17 years earlier. In a groundbreaking essay of 1891, Dubnov argued that the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe would never be able to recognize or identify themselves as a nation unless they developed knowledge about their own complex history and culture.18 As an intellectual and activist, Dubnov sought to secure civil and national rights for Jews, and he regarded history writing as one of the means for doing so. It was not only important to establish archives and preserve documents as an element of nation building, however. In times of crisis, Dubnov believed that it was imperative that Jews establish an independent record that represented their own version of events. The first crisis to which he and fellow activists responded in such a manner was the pogrom in Kishinev on 6–7 April 1903. Dubnov dispatched notable writers, including the poet and essayist Chaim Bialik (1873–1934), to collect eyewitness testimonies, photographs, and observations from the crime scene.19 These documents were intended to serve an immediate political pur­ pose, namely to convince Jews in the United States and Western Europe to lobby their governments to intervene with Russian authorities on behalf of Russian Jewry. Dubnov’s politicized documentation of the Kishinev pogrom should be seen as a precursor to the attempt by Russian Jewish relief workers during the World War to maintain records and comprehensive data about Jewish war victims. When war broke out in 1914, the sudden threat to the majority of the empire’s Jewish population prompted a concerted attempt to establish a centralized or­ ganization that could coordinate and mobilize adequate resources. The ORT, OPE, EIEO, JCA, and OZE were operating independently of one another at the 18

 S. M. Dubnov, Ob izuchenii istorii russkikh evreev i ob uchrezhdenii istoricheskogo ob­ shchestva (St. Petersburg, 1891). Dubnov published a Hebrew version of the 1891 appeal a year later to reach Jews who did not read Russian, as Nahpesa venahkora: Kol kore el hanevonim ba-am, ha-mitnadvim le-esof homer le-binyan toldot bene yisrael be-polin ve-rusiya (Odessa, 1892).

19

 For a detailed account of Dubnov’s response to Kishinev, see Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 19–20, 23.



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time. In the goal to streamline the raising and distribution of money, and to avoid duplicating each other’s efforts, these five organizations agreed during a series of conferences in late 1914 and early 1915 to join forces under the EKOPO’s administrative and financial umbrella. The prominent political and social figures who had supported and administered these charities became part of the EKOPO’s executive leadership: the director, Genrikh Sliozberg (1863–1937) had previously worked for the OPE; the secretary Leontii Bramson (1869–1941) had helped to found the OZE; one board member, S. A. Kaufman (1839/40– 1918), had served as president of the OZE; and another board member, the lawyer Maksim M. Vinaver (1862–1926), had helped found the EIEO six years earlier.20 The EKOPO’s Petrograd office became known simply as the “Central Committee.”21 Ten other branches were established, primarily for the purpose of fundraising in major cities, including Odessa, Minsk, Kharkov, Kiev, and Mos­cow. However, the Petrograd Committee was designated as a “unifying center” and all of the provincial offices addressed it for funds. Relief workers also recognized the Petrograd office as the “center” that all other provinces looked to for material support and guidance.22 In September 1914, the Ministry of the Interior granted permission for the EKOPO to aid Jewish war victims. The following year, the Governmental Commission for the Relief of Refugees, under the Ministry of the Interior, recognized EKOPO as the most important organization serving Jewish war victims. By June 1917, the Russian government had allotted nearly 17 million rubles to the organization, comprising 55 percent of its total revenue.23 The EKOPO’s second largest funder for this period was the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in New York, which provided almost 33 percent of

20

  Otchet, 7–8. The most important published sources that describe the history of the EKOPO’s work are the organization’s official history (Otchet) and the Russian Jewish press during the war (Novyi voskhod, Evreiskaia nedelia, Evreiskaia zhizn´), as well as the newspapers that the EKOPO established in late 1915 to publicize relief work (Pomoshch´, Delo pomoshchi: Zhurnal, posviashchennyi voprosam pomoshchi evreiam-zhertvam voiny). Archival sources include the David Mowshowitch Papers at the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York (hereafter YIVO), Record Group (RG) 348; the Archives of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in New York (AAJJDC), New York Collection 1919–1921, Record Group 4–16. 21

 Reports Received by the Joint Distribution Committee of Funds for Jewish War Sufferers (New York, 1916), 11, 28.

22 23

 “Tsentr i provintsii,” Novyi voskhod, 21 August 1914, 6.

  Otchet, 7, 9, 13. The Russian Ministry of the Interior contributed 17,179,606 rubles over the course of the war. The Tat´iana Committee (a relief fund named for the tsar’s daughter Tat´iana Nikolaevna) contributed 35,000 rubles.

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its revenue, or approximately 10 million rubles.24 Jews in Russia donated 12 percent of the revenue. Although nearly two out of three million rubles in do­ nations raised among Jews in Russia came from Petrograd alone (largely from the proceeds of a self-imposed communal tax), Jewish groups in towns and cities throughout the empire, from the Caucasus to Siberia and Central Asia, raised money by soliciting donations from individuals and holding benefit concerts and lotteries.25 Several continuities bridged prewar Jewish philanthropy with the wartime relief campaign launched in 1914, including organizational structures, values of collective responsibility, and the individual leaders themselves. The various elements that had constituted the Jewish culture of philanthropy and social welfare in the prewar period provided an infrastructure that could and indeed had to be drastically expanded to address the human impact of the war. Along with previous support that Jewish benefactors and activists had given for the medical, legal, financial, educational, and cultural needs of Jewish populations, the conditions of war created demands for local, and urgent, aid to ameliorate the hunger, disease, and lack of shelter and transportation that threatened the lives of tens of thousands of war victims. The wealthy elites who had guided the earlier efforts were supported by hundreds of often younger and russified Jewish activists, who served as relief workers and were eager to assist fellow Jews affected by events along the Eastern Front. Jewish philanthropists and activists alike who served EKOPO and its subsidiary organizations framed the enormous range of services they sought to provide, as well as the sheer number of individuals they sought to help, in national terms. A “New Pale”: Displaced Jews in Russia, 1914–15 In order to appreciate the range of the EKOPO’s activities and why its activists framed their efforts in national terms, it is first necessary to understand the position of Jews in Russia’s western borderlands when the war began. A nega­ tive association between Jews and frontier security could be traced back to 24

  Otchet, 13.The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee formed on 24 Novem­ ber 1914 as a merger of three organizations in the United States that served and raised funds among different constituencies, including the American Jewish Committee, People’s Relief Committee, and Central Committee for the Relief of Jews Suffering Through the War. The Joint’s mission was to facilitate fundraising for Jewish war victims throughout Europe and in the Middle East. Albert Lucas, “American Jewish Relief in the World War,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 79 (September 1918): 221–28, here 223.

25

 EKOPO raised 2,020,584 rubles from Petrograd Jewry, and 1,237,808 rubles from hundreds of Jewish communities throughout the Russian Empire (Otchet, 13).



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Nicholas I, who in 1843 decreed that Jews could not live within 50 kilometers of the empire’s western border; and during the late 19th century, the Russian military began to educate its officers in the view that Jewish civilians in border regions constituted an unreliable and unpatriotic “element” among imperial subjects.26 After the outbreak of World War I, Russian military elites’ preexisting suspicions of Jews boiled over into assumptions of collective guilt.27 Martial law in border regions was imposed on 16 July 1914, shortly before Germany declared war on Russia. Another decree issued in July granted the Russian High Command (Stavka) authority over civilians in areas of military significance. As a result, by the third month of the war, the army controlled a population of nearly six million Jews near the Eastern Front—five million in Russia’s western provinces, and one million in occupied Austro-Hungarian Galicia.28 The multiethnic and multiconfessional populations in the western bor­ derlands, including not only Jews but also Germans and Poles, suffered as a result of Russian military’s enemy-alien policies. The commander in chief, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, and his chief of staff, Nikolai Ianushkevich, were known to be obsessed with the notion that Jews in Russia were abetting the German army, and their views circulated widely among military elites.29 High Command also asked officers to closely watch their Jewish troops, some 300,000 of whom served in the Russian military during the war, in order to

26

 Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 16; Peter Holquist, “To Count, to Extract, To Exter­ minate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia,” in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 115. 27

 William C. Fuller, Jr., The Foe Within: Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 116–214, and especially 175–82.

28  In 1910, Jews numbered 871,906, or 11 percent of the total population in Galicia, and 102,919, or 13 percent of the population in Bukovina. Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstruct­ ing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 15. The Russian military’s treatment of Jews in Galicia is discussed in Peter Holquist, “The Role of Personality in the First (1914–1915) Russian Occupation of Galicia and Bukovina,” in Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History, ed. Jonathan Dekel-Chen et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 52–73; and Alexander V. Prusin, Nationalizing a Borderland: War, Ethnicity and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914–1920 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005). On the Russian military occupation of Galicia, see Mark von Hagen, War in a European Borderland: Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914– 1918 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007). 29

 See Michael Cherniavsky, Prologue to Revolution: Notes of A. N. Iakhontov on the Secret Meetings of the Council of Ministers, 1915 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967).

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monitor their potential for treason.30 The stereotype of the treacherous or unreliable Jew had hitherto been part of Russian military discourse; now it became a pretext for military propaganda and policies that were “strikingly similar to modern ethnic cleansing practices.”31 From July to December 1914, High Command sporadically deported so-called “unreliable” populations, including Germans, Poles, and Jews, as well as Chinese, Koreans, and Mus­ lims, from areas of military importance and border regions without trial. They often took hostages (zalozhniki) from among a given community’s relig­ ious and financial leaders, in order to prevent potential espionage.32 From January to August 1915, these intermittent actions became frequent and in­ creasingly coordinated. When a German of­fensive sent the Russians into a massive retreat in April 1915, Russian troops began to systematically cleanse Jews en masse from the northwest provinces, including Kurland and Kovno provinces, around Minsk, and throughout the Kingdom of Poland. The Russian army wrought chaos and terror while carrying out the mass expulsion operations. Troops frequently looted and burned entire neighbor­ hoods before retreating, and while some army commanders gave expellees a few days to leave their homes, others allowed no more than three hours. One story of an officer who shot dead an immobilized elderly man on the spot reached Jews in Petrograd in the fall of 1915.33 By December 1915, the army had expelled some 3.3 million people from the western territories; estimates of Jews among that number range from 500,000 to 1,000,000.34 The Habsburg Jews in Russian-occupied Galicia fared even worse than their counterparts in Russia. Starting in September 1914, advance Cossack units and other troops carried out violent attacks on Jews, killing and wounding dozens of people in Brody and Lwów and smaller towns in the vicinity. A low regard for the lives of Jews emanated from the highest levels of military command: Ianushkevich 30

 The estimate of Jewish troops is cited from Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “Mili­ tary Service in Russia,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, www. yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Military_Service_in_Russia (accessed 27 June 2013). Morde­ chai Altshuler places the figure at 500,000 (“Russia and Her Jews,” 13), as does HeinzDietrich Löwe, The Tsars and the Jews: Reform, Reaction and Anti-Semitism in Imperial Russia, 1772–1917 (Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993), 323. 31

 Eugene M. Avrutin, Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 182. 32

 Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire, 18–21, 137–50.

33

 Iz “chernoi knigi” rossiiskogo evreistva, 282–83.

34

 Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire, 3, and Lohr, “The Russian Army and the Jews,” 404 n. 1; Zipperstein cites 40,000 Jews from Kurland, 120,000 from Kovno, and 30,000 from Grodno province deported in the spring and summer of 1915 (“The Politics of Relief,” 24).



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and the grand duke themselves contrived a drastic plan to ethnically cleanse Jews from Galicia through deportation or, if necessary, killing.35 The columns of homeless and impoverished people who fled east in the spring and summer of 1915 included refugees (bezhentsy) who fled voluntarily, as well as expellees (vyselentsy), who were deported by military decree. Only a fraction of people traveled on trains—the majority rode on horse-drawn wag­ ons or walked with their life’s possessions in tow. Traveling on the open roads brought the risk of attack, robbery, and illness. The bodies of people who died from exposure or disease often had to be buried in graves along the road. People arrived in unfamiliar towns without adequate food, water, medicine, shelter, or jobs.36 Refugees initially streamed to the southwestern parts of the empire, while the Russian military sent expelled Jews to Poltava and Ekaterinoslav prov­ inces, in the easternmost part of the Pale of Settlement. However, these areas were already densely populated and strapped for resources, and as the new arrivals crowded in, civilian authorities there pleaded with Minister of the Interior Prince N. B. Shcherbatov to move the expellees further east—that is, beyond the borders of the Pale of Settlement. On 15 August 1915, the Council of Ministers therefore issued a circular that provisionally expanded the borders of the Pale until the end of the war. This was not an act of emancipation, but rather reflected the government’s desire to avert problems with overcrowding and to prevent the potential radicalization of tens of thousands of dislocated Jews. The ministers also hoped that the gesture would improve Russia’s stand­ ing among the Entente powers.37 Thus, after August 1915 any Jew could settle in towns and cities of the Russian interior that had previously been restricted to them. The circular did, however, allow Jews residence only through the duration of the war in Mosc­ ow, Petrograd, and Tsarskoe Selo (the town outside the capital where the tsar’s summer residence was located), and prohibited their residence in Cossack set­

35

 Holquist, “The Role of Personality,” 54.

36

 Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 12, 3.

37

 The Council of Ministers debated and agreed to temporarily offer additional terri­ tories for Jewish settlement in their meetings of 4 August and 6 August 1915. See “Tiazhelye dni: Sekretnye zasedaniia Soveta Ministrov 16 iiulia–2 sentiabria 1915 goda, sostavleno A. N. Iakhontovym,” in Arkhiv Russkoi revoliutsii 18 (Berlin, 1926), 42– 50. These documents are translated in Cherniavsky, Prologue to Revolution, 56–72. For a discussion about the ministers’ deliberations, see Löwe, The Tsars and the Jews, 328–34.

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tlements and the Caucasus. Jews continued to be prohibited from living in rural areas or purchasing real estate, as they had been in the Pale.38 Observers in the Jewish press were quick to claim that the decree had created a “new Pale” (novaia cherta)—not the emancipation for which they had been waiting so long, but a mere territorial extension of existing legal disabilities, necessitated by dire circumstances.39 The tremendous human suf­ fering that resulted from expulsions and flight notwithstanding, the expansion of the Pale signaled a profound change in the status of Russian Jewry. Jews established communities in parts of the Russian Empire that had been previ­ ously restricted to them: the Volga region, the Ural mountains, and as far east as Siberia. For better or worse, Jewish refugees and expellees no longer found themselves in the geographic or cultural margins of imperial Russian society. In response to these extraordinary new challenges and opportunities, the EKOPO carried out aid work with the intent to minimize the catastrophic impact of massive social displacement, and to promote the adaptation and survival of the Jewish nation as a physical, cultural, and political entity. In light of the Russian Army’s hostile treatment of Jews, the considerable financial support and authority that the government granted to the EKOPO seems odd. It is likely that political authorities supported national committees for the same reasons that they opted to expand the boundaries of the Pale: they wanted displaced masses to rebuild their lives in the Russian interior with as little disruption to the existing social order as possible, and the na­ tional committees offered indispensable help in achieving this goal.40 Because groups like the EKOPO employed workers who spoke the languages and knew the traditions of the distinct groups who made up the majority of the forcibly displaced populations, they eased the process of transition during and after expulsion and resettlement.

38

 Löwe, The Tsars and the Jews, 328–34; Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 145–46; Avrutin, Jews and the Imperial State, 81–84. The Pale of Settlement was formally abolished by the Provisional Government on 20 March 1917.

39

 This term appeared in the Russian Jewish press and other contemporary accounts within weeks of the August 1915 decree and was still in use at the end of the war: S. Chernovich, “V ‘novoi cherte,’” Evreiskaia zhizn´, no. 10–11 (6 September 1915): 21–23; Chernovich, “Problemy ‘novoi cherty,’” Evreiskaia zhizn´, no. 15 (11 October 1915): 10– 12. See also Delo pomoshchi, no. 1 (1 June 1916): 1–2; and Otchet, 45.

40

 Gatrell (A Whole Empire Walking, 145–50) also notes that political authorities re­ garded the national committees as an alternative to the Union of Towns and Union of Zemstvos, which were distrusted and feared on account of the control the unions assumed in the distribution of military provisions.



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Rescuing “National Treasures”: Human Welfare and Cultural Relief Work The EKOPO’s charter outlined eight types of aid that the organization sought to provide for Jews in Russia and occupied Galicia: (1) general material, med­ ical, legal, and spiritual support for refugees, families of fallen troops, and all others afflicted by the war; (2) food stations with low-cost or free meals and medical stations; (3) shops with low-cost or free groceries; (4) schools for children and youth, adult evening classes, and professional training for veterans; (5) employment assistance; (6) interest-free loans of capital and raw goods; (7) support for returning POWs; and (8) support for business owners seeking to reestablish their industries in their original or new places of resi­ dence.41 How did the organization fulfill this ambitious charge? Given the emphasis on humanitarian and material needs, why did cultural relief work play an important role in the larger campaign? How did these activities ex­ press principles of national self-determination and autonomy? The EKOPO’s activities took place within a geographic region that spanned more than a thousand miles from east to west, from Eastern Prussia to the Volga region. In order to aid civilians throughout this expansive territory, the organization employed hundreds of relief workers. Little documentation has survived about these individuals, but it is likely that the majority were young or middle-aged men and perhaps a handful of young women, who were well educated and literate in Russian, though some of them probably spoke Yiddish as well.42 The principal way that the Central Committee established its presence among war victims was through the creation of small local committees. The Central Committee regarded its relief workers as “agents” (upolnomochennye) and invested them with power to carry out its mission in the field. The Pet­ rograd headquarters also dispatched so-called “traveling inspectors” to com­ munities along the shifting Eastern Front and in the Russian interior, and

41

  Otchet, 45.

42

 L. Ia. Shternberg’s account of his relief work among expellees in Lithuania de­ scribed Jewish relief workers from Petrograd as educated, young, Russified Jews who did not speak Yiddish but felt compelled to help fellow Jews during the war. L. Ia. Shternberg, “Sredi vyselentsev,” Evreiskaia nedelia, no. 17 (13 September 1915): 22. Among a collection of biographies of 100 relief workers published in Vilnius in 1931, there are descriptions of two women (Rashl Rabinovich, born 1883, and Zinaida Levande, born 1882), who served the EKOPO in wartime Russia. Moshe Shalit, ed., Oyf di khurves fun milkhomes un mehumes (Vilna, 1931), cols. 709–948.

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described these individual inspectors as “the Committee’s real and active local organs.”43 When relief workers arrived at their appointed destination, they often had to first create a local committee if none existed. These committees usually included themselves, a local rabbi, and individuals known for their wealth and support of the community’s welfare. The local groups had the authority to receive and distribute funds from the Central Committee, and attempted to assist refugees and expellees at every stage of the journey—before they left, while on the road, at their final destinations, and for some, after returning home. All expellee and refugee populations faced problems once they were on the road, but transportation was especially fraught with challenges. The Russian Jewish ethnographer and Socialist Revolutionary Lev Ia. Shternberg (1861–1927) witnessed relief workers help Jewish expellees in Ponovezh, a Lithuanian town about 80 miles northwest of Vilnius. Shternberg traveled there from Petrograd in June 1915 and spent a week with 2,600 Jews from Ponovezh whom the Russian military had deported 60 kilometers (37 miles) southeast to the town of Onikshty, where a community of 3,500 Jews was already living. Shternberg wrote with admiration about the EKOPO workers’ resourceful responses to the problem of so-called “expulsion trains.” Throughout the retreating front zone, the Russian military designated trains to transport expelled populations, and in this case, they operated under the jurisdiction of local police. However, the trains could accommodate only a fraction of the expellees, and whoever did not manage to secure a spot on them had to travel to Onikshty by wagon or on foot. Moreover, to board the trains one needed a stamped document from the district police, whose office was some 40 kilometers (25 miles) from Onikshty. The EKOPO workers sought to establish authority over who could ride the expulsion trains. They created special categories of expellees, including pregnant women, those with physical disabilities or infectious diseases, and people carrying moveable property—one man had brought hundreds of pounds of flax, another was carrying several hundred pieces of calfskin leather—and then compiled lists of names of people who fell into each category. The aid workers spent several days navigating the police bureaucracy to obtain passes for these groups.44 After deporting entire communities from their native towns, Russian mil­ itary authorities often detained them in places further east for days or weeks, while determining where to send them next. The local EKOPO committees 43

 “Financial Report of the Central Jewish War Victims Relief Committee,” 1 July 1916, YIVO RG 348, F. 108/MK 14504. 44

 Shternberg, “Sredi vyselentsev,” Evreiskaia nedelia, no. 17 (13 September 1915): 23–24.



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found these groups shelter, located possessions they had lost on the road, ran soup kitchens and food shops, and distributed stipends. In Novye Sventsiany (near Ponovezh), Shternberg observed relief workers giving 13 kopecks every day to individual expellees—enough to buy two loaves of bread.45 Relief workers usually secured lodgings by convincing local civilians and political authorities to convert the floors of private homes, hotels, theaters, factories, barracks, and synagogues into temporary shelters. Given the likelihood that they might be awakened and deported at a moment’s notice, some expellees slept in their clothes and used their luggage as bedding. When space was scarce, people with infectious diseases slept alongside others, and epidemics spread. The EKOPO delegated the task of medical care to the OZE, and funded it with two million rubles. During the war the OZE employed nearly 700 individuals in 45 branches that served 102 cities. The society opened 90 polyclinics, 19 hospitals, 28 canteens and nutrition centers for children, 10 “Drop of Milk” stations to provide milk for nursing infants, 125 kindergartens for 12,000 children, 13 summer camps, 40 playgrounds, 2 sanatoria, and 2 hostels for tuberculosis patients.46 The EKOPO’s agents in the field also helped to reconstitute and rebuild dis­ placed communities of Jews in the Russian interior. The local relief committee was often the war victims’ first point of contact. In territories outside of the Pale whose populations were predominantly Russian, these encounters played a crucial role in ensuring that Jewish war victims found jobs, housing, and food, and also began the process of creating communal infrastructures virtually ex nihilo. In Tambov province, for example, some 8,500 refugees had arrived by the end of August 1915, including 5,300 Jews (63 percent of the total). In Tambov, 96 percent of the existing population consisted of ethnic Russians, while 99 percent followed Russian Orthodoxy. The prewar Jewish population—50 families— could hardly support a single rabbi, let alone the schools, synagogues, ritual baths, and other public resources that thousands of newcomers required.47 Although the EKOPO committees greeted the refugees with hot meals and milk for children, they quickly emphasized the principle and practice of selfhelp. War victims were registered according to their professions and connected

45

 Shternberg, “Sredi vyselentsev,” Evreiskaia nedelia, no. 12 (9 August 1915): 19.

46

 This information is drawn from Michael Beizer, “OZE,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/OZE (accessed 7 Decem­ ber 2013). 47

 Population figures cited in Tumanova, “Evreiskie obshchestvennye organizatsii,” 133–34.

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with jobs, as well as family members or friends who might be in the vicinity.48 In Tambov, food stipends were withheld from any able-bodied individuals who refused to work.49 However, finding work in a predominantly Russianspeaking society presented a challenge: many Jews’ primary language was Yiddish, and for those who observed the Sabbath (which according to Jewish practice falls on Saturday), prospects for employment may have been further limited. In fact, the EKOPO existed for those for very reasons. In Tsaritsyn (now Volgograd), the local relief committee set up its own workshops and employed various kinds of artisans, thus allowing Jews to maintain their common language and spiritual traditions while becoming self-sufficient as individuals and a group.50 As they attempted to find jobs and new homes in the Russian interior, displaced Jews had to learn and negotiate a different legal status and system. The EKOPO enlisted many lawyers in its ranks for that purpose. Without a passport Jews could not be mobile or seek employment. In some cases the volunteer lawyers intervened with provincial authorities to secure temporary passports of six months’ duration. In Petrograd and Moscow, lawyers helped Jewish refugees file the necessary paperwork to acquire temporary residence papers.51 Finally, in cases when military authorities permitted expellees to re­ turn to their homes, the EKOPO helped the returnees rebuild their homes. In Satanov (Khmelnitskii province, now western Ukraine), 260 families—about 30 percent of the total number that had been expelled—managed to return by July 1916. They appealed to the EKOPO committee for help replacing broken windows, doors, and ovens in their homes.52 These examples of relief work do not exhaust the range of activities that the EKOPO and its constituent organizations oversaw. The organization also attempted to preserve various aspects of Jewish culture and religion. Some of these initiatives reflected Dubnov’s ideas about the political and national sig­ nificance of preserving Jewish public history: in 1915, for example, the EIEO sought to draw attention to the threat posed to documents and objects related to Jewish history and appealed to the public to send items in their possession to its central office on Vasilievskii Island in Petrograd.53 One Jewish relief 48 49

  Otchet, 41, 45.

 Tumanova, “Evreiskie obshchestvennye organizatsii,” 136.

50

 “Tsaritsyn,” Delo pomoschi, no. 3 (1 July 1916): 30.

51

 Tumanova, “Evreiskie obshchestvennye organizatsii,” 137–38; Otchet, 30–31.

52

 “Iz m. Satanova,” Delo pomoschi, no. 3 (1 July 1916): 37–38.

53

 “Arkhiv i Muzei Evreiskogo Istoriko-etnograficheskogo Obshchestva,” Evreiskaia starina 8 (1915): 428.



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worker called for the need to “evacuate” objects of “great national value” from the war zone, including Torah scrolls, communal record books (in Hebrew, pinkasim), and sacred ritual and ornamental objects like candelabras, cups, curtains, wood carvings, and chandeliers. The EKOPO and the EIEO also at­ tempted to relocate entire libraries. Relief workers packed up and shipped extensive collections of sacred books from yeshivot—schools where men pursued advanced Torah study—including the renowned large schools in Mir and Volozhin (now in Belarus).54 Since 1863, the OPE had supported Jewish schools as vehicles for both promoting modernization and ensuring Jewish national continuity. The group continued its efforts during the war, though now schools came to symbolize a means of ensuring not only the perpetuation but also reconstruction of national life in the wake of massive displacement within and beyond the boundaries of the Pale of Settlement. In 1915 the OPE exhorted readers of the Russian-language Jewish press to support Jewish schools, describing them as the “foundation of our [Jewish] culture,” and the institution that once “rescued our nation (spasla nashu natsiiu) when it stood atop the ruins of Jerusalem two thousand years ago, and will rescue us now too, following the destruction of our Polish-Lithuanian cultural center.”55 EKOPO registered an estimated 46,000 children from 1915 to 1917, and the OPE set up 126 schools to serve their numbers throughout the empire.56 The OPE gave stipends to teachers, as well as students with family members away at war, in Jewish schools near the front lines and rear. The schools promoted the OPE’s agenda to preserve as well as transform Jewishness into a modern, national identity: students were taught secular subjects in Russian, courses in Jewish history, and the basic curriculum of a traditional Jewish elementary school (heder)—instruction of the Torah, Talmud, and liturgy in Hebrew.57 The ethnographer and literary figure S. An-sky (1863–1920) is a notable example of an aid worker who served both the EKOPO and the EIEO during the war. His war efforts continued in several respects the expedition he led for 54

 “Ob evakuatsii pamiatnikov narodnogo iskusstva i predmetov kul´ta,” Delo pomoshchi, no. 3 (1 July 1916): 16.

55

  Obzor deiatel´nosti OPE, cited and translated from Tumanova, “Evreiskie obshchest­ vennye organizatsii,” 130–31. 56

 H. Sliosberg [G. Sliozberg], “Memorandum on the EKOPO, of Petrograd,” 4 April 1921, AAJJDC, online at http://search.archives.jdc.org/multimedia/Documents/NY_ AR1921/00012/NY_AR1921_03746.pdf#search=%27ekopo%27 (accessed 9 December 2013). 57   Otchet, 29; Tumanova, “Evreiskie obshchestvennye organizatsii,” 132. For a descrip­ tion of the heder in Eastern Europe, see Mordechai Zalkin, “Heder,” trans. Barry Walfish, in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, www.yivoencyclopedia.org/ article.aspx/Heder (accessed 23 December 2013).

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the EIEO from 1911 to 1914, to salvage records of Jewish folkways, primarily among Hasidic communities in Volhynia and Podolia. In November 1914, the EKOPO’s director, Sliozberg, and secretary, Bramson, hired An-sky to travel to Russian-occupied Galicia and report back with information about the situation there.58 As an employee of EKOPO, An-sky continued his earlier goal to rescue and preserve artifacts and records of Jewish folkways. In June 1915 he passed through Lutsk, in Volhynia, just prior to the expulsion of the town’s inhabitants. In one day he collected several centuries-old “rare holy objects,” ordered crates to be built for them, and shipped them to Petrograd. An-sky later wrote about this and many other similar rescue efforts in a postwar Yiddish memoir.59 Other relief workers described him as a “tireless collector of our national treasures,”60 and he did indeed assemble a vast amount of material during the war years, of which only fragments remain. An-sky’s contemporary, F. Shargorodskaia, recalled in 1924 that his personal archive from the war contained 502 documents and 1,371 objects.61 He also recorded his personal experiences in a diary and letters, which he later wove into his Yiddish memoir—a four-part, epic chronicle about the history of Jews in the war.62

58

 Gabriella Safran, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 227–28.

59  For An-sky’s account of his efforts in Lutsk, see Der yudisher khurbn fun Poylen Galitsye un Bukovina, fun tog-bukh 1914–1917, in Gezamelte shriftn in funftsen bender (Vilna: Farlag “An-sky,” 1928), 5: 122; the published and abridged English translation is S. Ansky [An-sky], The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey Through the Jewish Pale of Settle­ ment During World War I, ed. and trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002). 60

 “Ob evakuatsii pamiatnikov,” 16.

61

 What remains of An-sky’s war archive is held by the Jewish Manuscript Division of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in Kiev (Natsional´naia Biblioteka Ukraini imeni Vernadskogo, or NBUV). The bibliography of NBUV’s An-sky holdings is Irina Sergeeva, Arkhivna spadshchina Semena An-s´kogo (Kyiv: Dukh i litera, 2006). On the original number of documents and objects, see F. Shargorodskaia, “O nasledii Anskogo,” Evreiskaia starina 11 (1924): 309.

62

 Two fragments of An-sky’s war diary for 1915 are at Rossiisskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI) f. 2583, op. 1, d. 5, ll. 3–63; and ll. 21–40. The first fragment covers the period from 1 January to 8 March 1915; the second from 9 September to 10 October 1915. See also Safran, Wandering Soul, chap. 9; and Polly Zavadivker, “Blood and Ink: Russian and Soviet Jewish Chroniclers of Catastrophe from World War I to World War II” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Santa Cruz, 2013), chap. 2. For an English translation of An-sky’s Russian-language war diary, see S. A. An-sky, 1915 Diary: A Russian Jewish Writer at the Eastern Front, trans. Polly Zavadivker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).



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Aside from well-known activists like An-sky a younger generation also engaged in cultural relief work. Thirty-two-year-old Aba Lev (1882–1959) served as a soldier in the Russian Army. He wrote about his army service in Russian-occupied Galicia in 1916 in a Yiddish-language diary.63 In the town of Buczacz, Lev and ten other Jewish soldiers in his unit spent several days burying the bodies of pogrom victims and assembling remnants of dese­ crated Torah scrolls. During one of his return trips to Petrograd, Lev met with Dubnov, who asked that he continue to “carefully gather materials and record all facts that possessed historical value” upon returning to the front. In his war diary, Lev praised Dubnov, and wrote that An-sky too had “helped our unfortunate brothers so greatly with words and deeds” during the war. Lev also described himself as someone who had witnessed and chronicled a “dark page in the history of Jewish suffering.”64 Jewish relief workers understandably focused on war victims’ most ur­ gent, material needs, but they also regarded books, schools, libraries, and Torah scrolls as integral parts of Jewish national life that required rescue, preservation, and reconstruction. For those activists who conceived of relief work in national terms, cultural rescue served the broader goal of ensuring the survival and continuity of the Jewish nation. “A Knowledge of Everything”: Documentation as National Relief Work In our present-day Information Age it is difficult to imagine how challenging it was for the EKOPO’s leaders in Petrograd to collect accurate data about Jewish war victims. Military censors posed one type of challenge, since they tended to prohibit the printing or circulation of any information that compromised the army’s image. Travel and mobility were also severely limited in the war zone, with railroad lines often jammed with slow-moving trains carrying troops and equipment, and civilians restricted from crossing into militaryoccupied zones. As noted earlier, Dubnov had first championed the idea that historical records could serve as a means of collective self-defense during the Kishinev pogrom in 1903. Now, such values and practices became imperative. Dubnov himself took part in an important campaign in Petrograd to collect documents pertaining to Jews and circulate them among political authorities and lobby­

63

 Excerpts of the diary were translated into Russian and published in 1924 as A. Lev, “Razgrom galitsiiskikh evreev v krovavye gody mirovoi voiny: Otryvok iz dnevnika,” trans. Bella Aizenberg, Evreiskaia letopis´, no. 3 (1924): 169–76, here 173–74.

64

 Ibid., 171, 176.

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ists in Russia and abroad.65 Without accurate information about the locations, needs and conditions of the hundreds of thousands of war victims they sought to reach, the EKOPO’s leaders could neither justify demands for fi­ nancial support from the state and other benefactors, nor effectively bring aid to those who desperately needed it. The collection of information and documentation about war victims assumed importance even beyond these immediate and pragmatic needs, however. The profuse number of records that Jewish relief workers generated during the war enabled activists to as­ sert a modicum of autonomy in how they planned and executed their relief campaign. Indeed, the EKOPO’s choice to identify and count displaced Jews, track their whereabouts, and help them find employment represented an act of political significance. As the historian Eugene Avrutin has shown, these forms of documentation had long been governing instruments in the hands of the imperial state, which had used statistics, internal passports, metrical records, and census data in attempts to monitor and regulate the identity and location of Jews and other ethnic minorities in its expansive empire for nearly 80 years before the war.66 When major demographic upheavals during the war attenuated the state’s ability to monitor its diverse and mobile populations, public or “parastatal” organizations like the Union of Zemstvos and Union of Towns stepped in to register and track refugees.67 Similarly, the EKOPO chose to independently document the refugee and expellee populations it served. The organization created its own systems and bureaucracies to collect and analyze data about Jewish war victims, and its leaders used this information to promote their own agenda for national self-determination. From its inception in August 1914, EKOPO’s Central Committee relied on its aid workers, including the “traveling inspectors” mentioned above, to gather information about conditions of Jews in the western provinces and Galicia, and return with detailed reports. Some of the EKOPO’s employees had previous training and experience as social workers; others, like An-sky, had reputations as “famous journalists and authors” known for publicizing Jewish causes or, like Yitzhak Giterman (1889–1943), had strong ties to secular Yiddish culture.68 Relief workers were likely to have been educated and highly literate, and thus ideal candidates for the task of gathering and relating large 65

 On Dubnov’s wartime efforts, see Zavadivker, “Reconstructing a Lost Archive.”

66

 Avrutin, Jews and the Imperial State, esp. 1–20, 53–85.

67

  The term “parastatal” as a description of the Union of Zemstvos and Union of Towns borrows from Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 68

 “Financial Report of the Central Jewish War Victims Relief Committee,” 1 July 1916, YIVO RG 348, F 108/MK 14504. On Giterman’s background, see Samuel D. Kassow,



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amounts of information. Like frontline correspondents or intelligence agents, they became the Central Committee’s eyes and ears in war zones. Relief workers themselves stressed the need to collect information about the situation on the ground. Three days after EKOPO was established, one Jewish activist argued on the pages of the newspaper Novyi voskhod that “surveys and the most detailed documentation of populations in need must be immediately organized in every location.” The activist proposed that an “information division” should be created within the EKOPO to manage this task, claiming that the organization’s success in reaching civilians depended on having “knowledge of everything taking place at local levels.”69 In a 1916 report the Central Committee’s leaders vaunted their documentation efforts as a kind of national achievement: “no other national organization besides that of the Jews,” they claimed, “has such a full record of its respective communities’ existence.”70 One of the most important types of record-keeping included the registra­ tion of individual expellees and refugees. At a conference held in Kiev on 8–10 June 1915, the EKOPO’s executive committee decided to create lists of individuals who had gotten lost or separated from family on the road and to circulate the lists at all points where refugees and expellees were concentrated. Relief workers assembled records in a system of cards, using different col­ ors to identify women, men and entire families, and organized the cards alphabetically and by location. The EKOPO registered approximately 250,000 individuals in this system and established a separate “Statistics Bureau” to analyze the data and make connections among displaced people.71 Because of the detailed records that the EKOPO collected about individ­ ual war victims, the organization was able to partner with foreign Jewish philanthropies on a variety of projects, including working with the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in New York to resettle women and their children whose husbands had moved abroad before the war. The EKOPO’s ability to track people’s whereabouts also enabled the group to channel funds sent to individuals from their relatives in North America, Argentina, Western Eu­ rope, and South Africa.72

Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: Vintage Books, 2009), 95–97. 69

 “Tsentr i provintsii,” 6.

70

 YIVO RG 348, F 108/MK 14504.

71

  Otchet, 32–33.

72

  Delo pomoschi, no. 3 (1 July 1916): 9–10.

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An-sky’s war diary offers rare and revealing examples of information that relief workers recorded in the war zone. In an average daily entry, he recorded the demographics of the town he had visited, described the living conditions of both locals and refugees, and assessed the availability of medical supplies and food.73 He wrote about his own efforts to create a local relief committee and noted the amount of money he left with it. An-sky also sketched local conditions: he described the mental and physical states of elderly people and children, and the situation of women in particular, noting if there were prostitutes, pregnant women, or rape victims. He collected official documents pertaining to Jews wherever he found them, such as posted military circulars that proclaimed all Jews guilty of treason. He later delivered such documents to both Jewish and non-Jewish politicians in Petrograd and cited from them in reports that he gave to the EKOPO committees in Petrograd and Kiev. The EKOPO’s executives used statistics, reports, documents, and other information that relief workers brought to them as evidence in materials that publicized Jewish wartime relief work. As noted earlier, the EKOPO received one-third of its operating budget from philanthropies in the West. One report that the Central Committee’s executives sent in October 1915 to the AJC in New York cited from aid worker testimonies as evidence to justify their request for additional funds.74 Because relief workers gathered critical information about the needs of Jewish communities at the local level, they could also act as liaisons between the EKOPO, Jewish communities, and Russia’s state and civilian institutions, including the police, Zemstvo Union and Union of Towns, War Industries Committee, and railway authorities.75 In Onikshty, as we saw earlier, relief workers interceded with the local police to ensure that those who most needed to ride the “expulsion trains” could do so. Sliozberg frequently negotiated for appropriations from military authorities, government representatives in War­ saw, and the Special Conference for assistance to war refugees, created in the

73

 RGALI f. 2583, op. 1, d. 5, ll. 3–63.

74

 A 97-page report of 10 October 1915 was sent by EKOPO to request funds from the American Jewish Committee (“Condition of the Jews in Belligerent Countries: A Preliminary Survey with Special Reference to the Jews in Russia,” 10 October 1915, Archives of the American Jewish Committee Box 26, Folder 1, pp. 1–97). The report became the basis for pamphlets that the AJC used to raise funds among the American Jewish public: in English, The Jews in the Eastern War Zone (New York: The American Jewish Committee, 1916); and in Yiddish, Der shvartser bukh, trans. William Poyzniak (New York: The American Jewish Committee, 1916).

75

 YIVO RG 348, F 108/MK 14504.



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fall of 1915. He supported his demands for government funds with statistics and budgets that had been compiled by relief workers in the field.76 Another means of documenting and publicizing war relief were several newspapers that the EKOPO founded and subsidized.77 In December 1915, the Central Committee began publishing the bi-monthly newspapers Pomoshch’ (Relief) and Vestnik trudovoi pomoshchi sredi evreev (Journal of Labor Relief among Jews). In June 1916, Delo pomoshchi (Relief Work Affairs) succeeded Pomoshch’.78 Aid workers often contributed articles about their experiences and opinions to these papers. As Simon Rabinovitch has written, these journals could be interpreted as chronicles, whose “contents constitute a narrative of Jewish life during the war: massive displacement, followed by efforts to rebuild a new society, with the intellectuals and activists in the center attempting to guide the process and serve a political function.”79 These newspapers were directed at refugee and expellee populations, with the intent, as one editor wrote, to resolve “questions of the internal cultural and communal life of the refugees.”80 Relief work newspapers also served as forums where Jewish social sci­ entists debated ideas about the financial and material reconstruction of com­ munities in the interior and former war zones. The well-known economist Boris D. Brutskus (1874–1938), for example, proposed a series of initiatives to support the building of Jewish economic life in the Russian interior. His articles, as well as the debates they generated, offer additional evidence of how relief work became a politicized vehicle for furthering Jewish national interests during wartime.81

76

 “Memorandum on the EKOPO, of Petrograd,” AAJJDC, New York Collection 1919– 1921, p. 2. 77

  Otchet, 71.

78

 For the first editions, see Pomoshch´, no. 1 (24 December 1915); and Delo pomoshchi, no. 1 (1 June 1916). 79

 Rabinovitch, Jewish Rights, National Rites, 183.

80 81

 “Ot redaktsii,” Pomoshch´, no. 1 (24 December 1915): 2.

 See B. D. Brutskus, Evreiskaia nedelia, no. 18 (20 September 1915): 1–14; Evreiskaia nedelia, no. 19 (27 September 1915): 12–15. Brutskus also published an article about the economic conditions of Jewish refugees in the Russian press, titled “Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie evreev i voina,” Russkaia mysl´, no. 4 (1914): 27–45, as quoted in Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 18.

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Conclusion Jewish elites in Petrograd were motivated by a confluence of factors to launch a massive relief campaign on behalf of Jewish war victims in the empire’s western borderlands. In response to patriotic propaganda, xenophobic military policies, and widespread ethnic cleansing operations, Jewish activists in home front territory acted on principles of political and cultural solidarity through the practice of relief work. The formation of a centralized, national committee enabled Jewish relief workers to provide material aid for individual people, while also supporting the distinct cultural and religious identity that defined Jews as a nation. Jews’ conception of relief work was broadly inclusive: it inspired aid workers to intercede with local transportation authorities, run independent workshops for artisans, publish newspapers, bury people killed in pogroms, and evacuate damaged Torah scrolls from war zones. One of the ways that relief workers themselves expressed Jewish cultural values was through the practice of documentation. The records, statistics, and reports that the EKOPO’s relief workers produced, enabled its leaders to more effectively carry out their mission to promote individual self-help and col­ lective survival. The decision to independently register, track, and analyze the identities and locations of hundreds of thousands of displaced Jews helped the organization channel resources to war victims, reunite dispersed families and communities, and secure rights of residence and employment for Jews in the newly opened Russian interior. Relief workers’ reports from the field re­ flected conditions of uncertainty and suffering, but also served as capital in a broader campaign to create and take advantage of opportunities for social and political transformation of the empire’s Jewish communities. The efforts of Russian Jews during World War I set a precedent for polit­ ical, cultural, and economic developments in East European Jewish society that continued through the end of the Second World War. Several of the EKOPO’s local committees continued to operate in independent Poland, and permanent offices were established in Vilnius and Warsaw. International Jew­ ish philanthropies that had emerged in support of the EKOPO during the war, including the New York–based Joint, continued to coordinate large-scale postwar reconstruction projects.82 In 1921, the Joint appointed the EKOPO’s former employee Yitzhak Giterman to direct its operations in Poland, a post in which he remained until his death in 1943, at the hands of Nazi officers in the Warsaw Ghetto. In postrevolutionary Russia, the EKOPO’s Central Committee moved its offices from Petrograd to Kiev, the geographic epicenter of the Russian 82

 See Beizer, Relief in Time of Need.



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Civil War–era pogroms from 1918 to 1920. In 1920, the Bolsheviks authorized the formation of the Jewish Soviet Aid Organization (Evreiskaia sovetskaia organizatsiia pomoshchi, or Evobshchestkom) and merged EKOPO into it. Evobshchestkom operated in Leningrad until it was liquidated in 1930. Just over two decades after the end of the Great War, the idea and practice of supporting material existence and preserving Jewish national-cultural life reemerged powerfully under conditions of ghettoization, deportation, and mass killing during the German occupation of Eastern Europe during World War II. In the ghettos of Warsaw, Vilnius, and elsewhere, Jews once again attempted to collect and preserve books, document their individual and collective experiences, and maintain semblances of their prewar educational and cultural life. In the USSR, prominent Jewish intellectuals who took part in the state-sponsored Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee attempted, among other things, to resettle Jewish survivors, reunite dispersed families, and independently document Jewish life and death under German occupation. Their motives differed from those of their predecessors in World War I, as did the political constraints and expectations that they faced as a state-sponsored organization. One of the tragic differences between the First and Second World Wars is that for a variety of reasons, the abilities of Soviet Jews to promote the reconstitution and self-determination of Jewish war victims were highly circumscribed. The outcomes of the Second World War should nevertheless not prevent us from examining an earlier, first chapter in the history of Russian Jewry to rescue, relieve, and represent the Jewish nation during wartime.

Learned Societies in Russia During World War I: Creating a “Home Front” Anastasiya S. Tumanova

Unlike the Russo-Japanese War that preceded it, World War I was perceived by Russian public opinion as a “national,” “righteous,” and “defensive” conflict. Thus as soon as hostilities began, the educated public (obshchestvennost´) rallied around the state under the slogan of war until final victory. According to public opinion, Russia’s victory in this all-national, unifying war would require not merely the might of the army, but also strength in the rear, which would have to play a decisive role in mobilizing the country’s resources and adapting all social life to the needs of the front. The viability of the “home front” or rear would determine to a considerable degree the strength of the “first” front. Voluntary associations played an essential role in mobilizing the empire’s resources for wartime needs. At the start of the war approximately 10,000 voluntary associations existed in Russia.1 Their members united their efforts around addressing a wide range of pressing issues connected with organizing aid to the front. Civic activists supported the military by equipping troops, outfitting new recruits, and creating and maintaining ambulance trains and military hospitals. Along with caring for the army, its equipment, armaments, and morale, the Russian public also mobilized to provide aid for “war victims,” which included refugees, wounded soldiers, and soldiers’ families. Finally, the public was also concerned with organizing the economy of the rear, which suffered from shortages of food, consumer goods, and fuel as well as inflation. (For a photo of a fundraising drive in 1915 in support of the war, see figure 4 in the gallery of images following page 270.)

This article presents the results of a research project carried out as a part of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. 1

 Joseph Bradley, Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia: Science, Patriotism, and Civil Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 1. Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 107–35.

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Aid for the front, care for war victims, and consolidation of the rear—this was the triple challenge faced by Russian civil society. The material and moral state of both the army and the rear depended on effective solutions to these challenges. Civil society’s ability to mobilize itself for military needs would in many ways determine the government’s success in prosecuting the war and managing the civilian political situation. Many of the Western participants in World War I faced similar challenges,2 but they were particularly prominent in Russia, a nation with authoritarian traditions and a hypertrophied bu­ reaucratic apparatus, which was inherently unable to react quickly and ade­ quately to the challenges of total war. Peter Holquist has written about the mobilization of Russian society for “total war,” and the emergence of the phe­ nomenon of a mobilized society. In his opinion, it was not only the war and the government’s mobilization policies that organized society; rather, civil society began to form itself through war and in the name of war.3 Thomas Porter and William Gleason, writing on the democratization of the zemstvos and the professional organizations associated with them, which united the “third element” during World War I, confirm that military mobilization con­ tributed to the development of civil society.4 This article considers the actions on the home front of the largest and most authoritative learned societies in prerevolutionary Russia: the Free Economic Society (Vol´noe ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo, VEO), the Moscow Agri­ cultural Society (Moskovskoe obshchestvo sel´skogo khoziaistva, MOSKh), and the A. I. Chuprov Society for the Development of Social Sciences at Moscow University (Obshchestvo imeni A. I. Chuprova dlia razrabotki ob­ shchestvennykh nauk pri Moskovskom universitete). The choice of these associations is not accidental. The Free Economic Society was Russia’s oldest learned society, founded by Catherine the Great. Its original mission was to modernize the agrarian economy, rationalize agriculture, and develop agri­ cultural technology. Founded by Alexander I, the Moscow Agricultural Soci­ ety was the largest association of Moscow-based landowners, and like the Free Economic Society it was also involved in the development of strategies 2

  Michael Geyer, “Militarization of Europe, 1914–1945,” in The Militarization of the Western World, ed. John R. Gillis (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 75, 79–80. 3

  Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914– 1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 46. 4

  Thomas Porter and William Gleason, “Democratization of the Zemstvo during the First World War,” in Emerging Democracy in Late Imperial Russia: Case Studies on Local Self-Government (the Zemstvos), State Duma Elections, the Tsarist Government, and the State Council before and during World War I, ed. Mary Schaeffer Conroy (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1998), 238–39.

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for agrarian development. Founded in 1911, the Chuprov Society is the odd one on this list, because it was only three years old at the beginning of the war and encompassed the social sciences, rather than concentrating on agriculture like the VEO and MOSKh. Nevertheless, its department of statistics became a center of discussions pertaining to pressing wartime economic concerns: the financial conditions of the peasant economy, the quality of harvests, and the problem of increasing food prices. According to Joseph Bradley, Russia’s 19th-century learned societies were centers of the production and dissemination of knowledge. They directed their efforts at economic growth and national development, and were involved in translating scholarly research into practical applications.5 With the outbreak of war these associations began to play an important role in national defense by developing strategies for the mobilization of the economy. They united representatives from various scientific fields—economists, financial experts, statisticians, and agronomists—around the task of solving wartime challenges. The war demanded that those professionals who had been prioritizing pure science in peacetime now pursue applied research, and thus the relationship between fundamental and applied science underwent a course correction. As research projects were adapted to wartime conditions, the relationship between learned societies and the state was also transformed. The societies’ contacts with the government became stronger due to the coincidence of their interests. Furthermore, during wartime these societies were essentially carrying out state-level tasks, both in content and in scope. Scholarly associ­ ations were trying to mobilize the nation’s economic resources for war, and reform industry and agriculture. Scientists demanded state support for their research, state assistance in the realization of their scientific projects, and state recognition of the prestige of Russian science. Leading learned socie­ ties collaborated with the two federations of local governments that were prominent in serving the needs of the front and tending to the wounded— the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos (Vserossiiskii zemskii soiuz, VZS) and the All-Russian Union of Towns (Vserossiiskii soiuz gorodov, VSG). The three learned societies chosen for this study have not been a subject of thorough historical treatment, particularly for the war years.6 Most existing 5

  Bradley, Voluntary Associations, 255–56.

6

  Most scholarship on the Free Economic Society and the Moscow Agricultural Society ignores the war period: A. I. Khodnev, Istoriia Imperatorskogo Vol´nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva s 1765 do 1865 goda (St. Petersburg, 1865); A. V. Kvasnikova, “Istoriia agrarnykh obrazovatel´no-prosvetitel´nykh proektov Vol´nogo ekonomicheskogo ob­ shchestva v guberniiakh Tsentral´nogo Chernozem´ia, 1765–1861 gg.” (Ph.D. diss., Kurskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2007); A. A. Karlina, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo sel´skogo khoziaistva v XIX–nachale XX vv.: Iz istorii russkoi agrarnoi mysli” (Ph.D.

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scholarship mentions the war period only in passing, sometimes reaching superficial conclusions. A typical study in this regard is S. P. Strekopytov’s The History of Scientific-Technical Institutions in Russia (Late 19th–20th Centuries). Touching on the fate of the Free Economic Society during World War I and the revolution, the author mistakenly claims that in 1915, the society’s activities “were completely prohibited, and in 1917 the society fell apart.”7 A recent book on grassroots organizations in imperial Russia does not extend into the war period in its sections on learned and agrarian organizations.8 V. V. Oresh­ kin’s economic history of the Free Economic Society gives only a cursory overview of its wartime activities, while the wartime activities of the Moscow Agricultural Society are fairly thoroughly explored in recent monographs by historians S. A. Kozlov and A. A. Kurenyshev.9 Recent Western historiography has studied the issue of the professionalization and politicization of various social-professional circles of Russian society (zemstvo teachers and doctors, peasants, workers, and so forth) during World War I, interpreting their activ­ ities in the context of the formation of a Russian nation.10 Joshua Sanborn has considered the impact of the mass mobilization of 1914 on various spheres of

diss., Samarskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1998); M. I. Dudarev, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo sel´skogo khoziaistva v obshchestvennom i kooperativnom dvizhenii (1895–1908 gg.)” (Ph.D. diss., Institut rossiiskoi istorii, 1997). 7

  S. P. Strekopytov, Istoriia nauchno-tekhnicheskikh uchrezhdenii v Rossii (vtoraia polovina XIX–XX vv.) (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 2002), 93. Both of the author’s assertions with respect to the Free Economic Society are incorrect. As this article shows, a number of its subsidiaries continued functioning despite the suspension of its activity in January 1915; by February 1917, the society was actively functioning again. 8

 A. S. Tumanova, ed., Samoorganizatsiia rossiiskoi obshchestvennosti v poslednei treti XVIII–nachale XX v. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2011). 9

  V. V. Oreshkin, Vol´noe ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo, 1765–1917: Istoriko-ekonomicheskii ocherk (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1963); S. A. Kozlov, Agrarnaia modernizatsiia Tsentral´no-Nechernozemnoi Rossii v kontse XIX–nachale XX v.: Po materi­ alam ekonomicheskoi pechati (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 2012); A. A. Kure­ nyshev, Sel´skokhoziaistvennaia stolitsa Rossii: Ocherki istorii Moskovskogo obshchestva sel´skogo khoziaistva (1818–1929 gg.) (Moscow: AIRO–XXI, 2012). 10

  Scott Seregny, “Zemstvos, Peasants, and Citizenship: The Russian Adult Education Movement and World War I,” Slavic Review 59, 2 (Summer 2000): 290–315; Seregny, “Peasants, Nation, and Local Government in Wartime Russia,” Slavic Review 59, 2 (Summer 2000): 336–42; S. A. Smith, “Workers and Civil Rights in Tsarist Russia, 1899– 1917,” in Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, ed. Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 162–63; Smith, “Citizenship and the Russian Nation during World War I: A Comment,” Slavic Review 59, 2 (Summer 2000): 316–29.

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social life, from medical aid to economic production.11 Melissa Stockdale has explored the mobilization of women through participation in organizations involved in wartime support activities (the Union of Zemstvos, the Red Cross, and others).12 Meanwhile, there is, as of yet, no comprehensive history of major learned societies during World War I; Bradley’s recent monograph is limited to the 18th and 19th centuries, while one chapter of the present author’s recent book addresses the work of learned societies during World War I.13 This article seeks to fill this lacuna and examine the mobilization of three major Russian imperial learned societies on behalf of the needs of both the military and the home fronts. The Free Economic Society and the Organization of the Rear Like other liberal associations, the Free Economic Society greeted the war patriotically. President pro tem Genrikh Fal´bork opened the society’s meeting on 3 August 1914 with a speech suffused with patriotic rhetoric. He described the war as an invasion and called it a “new patriotic war,” thus drawing an analogy with the War of 1812. Russia’s mission in the war was liberation, he proclaimed. Fal´bork spoke of the tremendous responsibility of society “toward Russia’s future,” and described society’s task in terms of the need “to free civilization from … the yoke of militarism” and to “take upon itself the care of mothers, wives, and children left without breadwinners.”14 True to its reputation as Russia’s leading economic organization, the Free Economic Society concentrated on issues pertaining to the nation’s economic life. At the meeting on 3 August, leaders of the society declared that they would pursue work in two directions: organizing the rear and providing for the needs of war victims. The society regarded Russia’s economic and cultural disorganization as the fundamental problem in the rear, and its mission would

11

  Joshua Sanborn, “The Mobilization of 1914 and the Question of the Russian Nation: A Reexamination,” Slavic Review 59, 2 (Summer 2000): 267–89.

12

  Melissa Stockdale, “‘My Death for the Motherland Is Happiness’: Women, Patri­ otism, and Soldiering in Russia’s Great War, 1914–1917,” The American Historical Review 109, 1 (2004): 78–116. 13

  A. S. Tumanova, Obshchestvennye organizatsii Rossii v gody Pervoi Mirovoi Voiny (1914– fevral´ 1917) (Moscow: Rosspen, 2014). For the fate of the Free Economic Society, the Moscow Agricultural Society, and other scientific associations during and after the 1917 Revolution, see the article by Joseph Bradley, “Associations in Times of Political Turmoil: Science Societies and the Bolshevik Regime, 1917–1922,” in this volume.

14

  “Vol´noe ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo,” Russkie vedomosti, 4 August 1914.

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be to counteract these tendencies.15 To give its activities wide publicity, the VEO started publishing a weekly periodical, Izvestiia (News), to shed light on the nation’s economic and cultural needs, as well as to publicize the society’s activities. The prominent economist and zemstvo historian Boris Veselovskii became its editor.16 Hoping to have a public discussion of essential problems, the VEO sent a note to the government, pointing out the increased complexity of economic life engendered by the war, and noting measures to overcome economic crisis. Economic destruction was to be combatted through grassroots social organiz­ ing, which would be consolidated in voluntary associations and organs of local self-government. In an appeal to the populace the VEO declared: “Citizens, we need intense labor, using all of our nation’s strengths, we need wide-ranging voluntary activity of the population, we need an effective alliance of zemstvos and towns with all public organizations.” Only the “genius” of unfettered national development, the appeal declared, could “lead our state successfully through all the coming trials.”17 The general tone of the society’s gatherings at the start of the war was optimistic, full of faith in society’s ability to achieve victory in alliance with the authorities. The idea of the unification of the public and the state was proclaimed at VEO meetings not only by public leaders but also by state rep­ resentatives. N. S. Lenin from the Ministry of Agriculture (Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia) spoke of his agency’s inability to supply the army with foodstuffs without the cooperation of society. Lenin concluded his speech on an emotional note: “All of us have given up trying to settle old scores, and as Russians we shall do our duty for our motherland.”18 At the VEO’s memorable meeting of 3 August 1914, statistician Dmitrii Rikhter announced a program of economic improvement. It included a wide spectrum of activities, from regulating transportation and adapting rail tariffs for the needs of goods circulation, to organizing assistance for the rural population suffering from hostilities, poor harvests, and natural catastrophes. The plan 15   B. B. Veselovskii, “Imperatorskoe Vol´noe ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo (31 oktiabria 1765 g.–31 oktiabria 1915 g.),” Rech´, 31 October 1915; also published in “Imperatorskoe vol´noe ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo v poreformennoe vremia,” Russkoe slovo, 31 October 1915. 16

  Otchet o deistviiakh Imperatorskogo Vol´nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva za 1914 god (Petrograd: Tipografiia I. Lur´e i K., 1915), 5, 9.

17

 Zapiska Soveta Imperatorskogo Vol´nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva o deiatel´nosti Obshchestva vo vremia voiny (predstavlena Glavnoupravliaiushchemu zemledeliem i zemle­ ustroistvom A. B. Krivosheinu) (n.p., n.d.), 1–3. 18

  “Vol´noe ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo,” Russkie vedomosti, 4 August 1914.

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called for the inclusion of public organizations, especially cooperatives, in the task of economic organization. This would improve military supply by elim­ inating self-serving middlemen, and supply cities with food and essential goods. A major point in the society’s economic program called upon the state to support existing economic organizations by providing them with credits, giving them greater freedom to organize and operate, and uniting them under the aegis of an authoritative center, a role to be played by the Union of Zemstvos, recently created in Moscow. In the society’s opinion, the union had the best chance of becoming the representative of society, as long as it adopted the agenda of supporting the economy and worked closely with cooperatives and other public organizations. The VEO also hailed the creation of the AllRussian Union of Towns.19 The VEO Board outlined some specific duties for the society as it for­ mulated a Russia-wide action plan. The society planned to support regions suffering from poor harvests, collect donations, and gather information about the economy. It created a Special Commission for combatting economic dis­ organization and for assisting victims of war, headed by A. S. Posnikov, a prominent liberal economist and the society’s former president who was also a member of the State Duma and one of the leaders of the Progressist faction. A. M. Rykachev became the commission’s secretary; a well-known commen­ tator and economist, he soon volunteered for the front and died holding the rank of private. Seventeen members of the VEO joined the commission, including such leaders of the Kadet Party as A. I. Shingarev, D. D. Protopopov, Prince D. I. Shakhovskoi, P. B. Struve, and N. V. Nekrasov, as well as socialists A. F. Kerenskii, I. V. Chernyshev, and Prince V. L. Gelovani. There were no women on the commission, but they did work in another commission for the construction of infirmaries.20 During the first six months of the war, a major item on the agenda of VEO meetings was the state’s financial policy after its elimination of the revenue coming from state-run sales of alcohol. The importance of this issue for the Russian state was enormous. On 22 August 1914 the emperor issued the “dry law,” an edict that terminated sales of alcohol, vodka, and vodkabased products for the duration of the war. The treasury suffered a huge loss of revenue due to the law. According to Kadet financial expert Shingarev, losses by the middle of 1917 amounted to about 2.5 billion rubles (around 10 percent of total war costs). Minister of Finance P. L. Bark admitted in October

19

  Ibid.

20

  Otchet o deistviiakh Imperatorskogo Vol´nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva za 1914 god, 2.

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1916 that it took the government two years to compensate for these losses.21 VEO members who specialized in economic issues not only supported the government’s refusal to further participate in a “drunken” budget—one that relied on sales of alcohol—but also gave this measure scholarly backing. The liberal economist B. D. Brutskus, as well as the Octobrist A. V. Eropkin, a supporter of the Stolypin reforms, both acted as experts. After analyzing the effects of the elimination of alcohol production on the agrarian economy, they concluded that this measure would not have negative consequences, espe­ cially not for the peasant economy.22 Still, VEO economists understood that eliminating the state liquor mo­ nopoly in wartime conditions would cause budgetary deficits. They discussed whether budget shortfalls could be covered by implementing government monopolies on consumer goods such as tobacco, sugar, and tea. Presenters on this issue included seasoned financial and economic analysts, including Shingarev and professors M. V. Bernatskii and M. I. Fridman. All three were liberals—Bernatskii and Fridman worked at the economic department of the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, where the former was a professor of political economy, while the latter taught finance law and was a leading specialist on the indirect taxation of consumer goods. Shingarev and Fridman favored the establishment of state monopolies to cover war expenses. At the same time, many VEO activists were of the opinion that such an austerity policy would have damaging effects on the nation.23 The public activist and journalist D. V. Filosofov pointed out the political significance of the Free Economic Society’s “financial discussions,” which coincided with the meetings of the State Duma’s budget commission, in the newspaper Russkoe slovo (The Russian Word): The specialists’ various speeches all came down to one thing: how best to organize our finances under current conditions… I listened carefully to these conversations and sometimes I had the impression that I was sitting not in the Free Economic Society but at the State Duma, and that all of these attendees were not the typical Russian radical intelligentsia, but sober-minded, realistic politicians. Could we imagine our intelligentsia seriously discussing the usefulness of tobacco, sugar, tea, 21

  E. V. Pashkov, “Antialkogol´naia kampaniia v Rossii v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny,” Voprosy istorii, no. 10 (2010): 88, 90.

22

  Otchet o deistviiakh Imperatorskogo Vol´nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva za 1914 god, 5; Zapiska Soveta Imperatorskogo VEO, 3.

23

  D. V. Filosofov, “Ustroenie,” Russkoe slovo, 14 (27) January 1915; Otchet o deistviiakh Imperatorskogo Vol´nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva za 1914 god, 2; Otchet o deiatel´nosti Imperatorskogo Vol´nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva za 1915 god (Petrograd, 1916), 1.

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and other fiscal monopolies ten years ago? Anyone speaking on such a topic would have been thrown out of the building.24 From the beginning of the war one major area of the VEO’s activity was aid to soldiers and their families. (For the positive effects such aid was thought to have on morale at the front, see figure 5.) Along with collecting donations, the society was also involved in creating military hospitals (lazarety) for wounded and sick soldiers. To be sure, the society was not the inventor of such facilities. Military authorities as well as the Red Cross, the Union of Zemstvos and Union of Towns, other organizations, and even private individuals were all involved in establishing new military hospitals. According to I. I. Tolstoi, who was the mayor of Petrograd during the war, the task of looking after wounded and sick soldiers was an urgent problem for the city administration, because neither the Red Cross nor the Ministry of War were prepared to handle the colossal numbers of casualties sent to the city. This was why, in Tolstoi’s view, “the government agreed to the founding of the Union of Towns so readily.”25 The Free Economic Society’s involvement in the founding of two hospitals in Petrograd was an example of true public initiative. The society organized a Hospitals Department, headed by historian V. Ia. Iakovlev-Bogucharskii, the heart and soul of which was the practice of holding public subscription drives to attract donors. Subscribers included both well-to-do individuals and those who could not afford large contributions. The expenses of equipping each hospital bed were covered by monthly pledges from individuals or groups of donors. Donors were offered the opportunity of sending representatives to the Hospitals Department, so as to be able to oversee and participate in the administration of the facilities. The financial organization was transparent: one part of the donations was spent on equipping the hospitals and the other part went toward their maintenance.26 The public nature of hospital organization under the auspices of the Free Economic Society attracted broad interest. Donors included members of various occupational groups: factory workers, industrial and commercial employees, government clerks, newspaper employees, students. The society’s call was answered also by groups of neighbors, such as the inhabitants of large apartment buildings. Donors came not only from Petrograd but from as far away as Chita and Khabarovsk. The VEO managed to create two hospitals for soldiers in Petrograd within a relatively short time. The organization of 24

  Filosofov, “Ustroenie.”

25

  I. I. Tolstoi, Dnevnik 1906–1916 (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii dom, 1997), 536.

26

  Imperatorskoe Vol´noe ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo, Godovoi otchet po dvum lazaretam (1914–15 g.) (Petrograd: Tipografiia P. P. Gershunina, 1916), 3–4, 28.

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hospitals by the VEO was assisted by the Petrograd branch of the Union of Towns, which secured space for them at the building of the Old Herbarium of the Botanical Garden and the College of Emperor Alexander II at Petrograd University. These facilities, at 100 and 140 beds each, were fully supplied with surgery rooms, dressing stations, and x-ray cabinets. The scale of the VEO’s operations was comparable to that of the capital’s financially well-to-do corporations. In the first months of the war, for example, Petrograd’s mer­ chants opened two 200-bed hospitals; Petrograd’s Jewish community opened one with 200 beds; and the Society for the Sale of Metal Manufactured Goods of Russian Factories and His Majesty’s Cabinet each opened a 100-bed clinic. In one year, from 1 November 1914 to 1 November 1915, the 140-bed clinic of the VEO treated 559 wounded and sick soldiers, who were also given clothes and money, took literacy classes, and used a library.27 The Free Economic Society was quite concerned with supplying the hospitals with books. This task was handled by its book department, also es­ tablished thanks to public initiative. The society’s appeal for book donations for the wounded was answered by both private individuals and publishers. The VEO ended up receiving over half a million books, out of which it assem­ bled 1300 libraries with 300–400 books each. The libraries were sent out to Ministry of War hospitals, as well as to clinics managed by the Red Cross, the Union of Zemstvos, the Union of Towns, and others. Book publishers sent in editions of collected classics of Russian literature, which allowed the VEO to standardize the content of the libraries that it assembled.28 The VEO also worried about the welfare of the population living in war zones. Of particular concern were Jewish communities, which were victims of extensive discrimination during wartime: confiscations of property, intern­ ment, and mass deportations to the interior of the empire.29 The “Jewish question” was often raised at VEO meetings, and proposals were sent to the government. The Free Economic Society also collected donations for the pop­ ulation of Russian Poland, which was suffering from the war. Funds were sent to charitable organizations for Polish aid.30 At the end of October 1914, in the wake of Turkey’s entry into the war and the formation of the Caucasus Front, the society petitioned the government for permission to carry out an appeal in Petrograd to aid the Transcaucasian population, especially refugees from Turkish Armenia, who were facing particularly difficult hardships. The 27

  Ibid.; “Deiatel´nost´ VEO vo vremia voiny,” Russkoe slovo, 12 February 1915.

28

  Zapiska Soveta Imperatorskogo VEO, 6.

29

  See Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 6–9. 30

  Zapiska Soveta Imperatorskogo VEO, 5.

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request was rejected at the behest of the Chief of the Department of Police, V. A. Briun-de-Sent-Ippolita, who regarded it as “harmful propaganda.” So the society was limited to supporting already existing feeding stations in the Caucasus.31 The position of the police on this question was inevitable. Even before the war, the VEO was active in collecting funds for aid to victims of famine and crop failures, and these activities always met with suspicion on the part of the state, especially when the VEO sent its own representatives to the regions, among whom the police often found “persons of dubious reliability.”32 Members of the Free Economic Society directed their attention to unem­ ployment as well, which was having a significant impact on Russia’s economic life. In October 1914, the society reached out to the Petrograd City Council with a proposal to create a labor exchange. The council supported the idea. The VEO then began researching the unemployment situation in Petrograd and in the beginning of 1915 opened a labor exchange, which became popular among the city’s workers and employers, and grew to have seven branches by the spring of 1916. During 14 months of its existence almost 138,000 unem­ ployed workers used its services, while employers were able to offer almost 230,000 jobs.33 As the society’s activity grew in scope, government suspicion also in­ creased. Some worrying symptoms could already be observed in two circulars from the minister of internal affairs, N. A. Maklakov, of 30 September and 28 November 1914. They requested governors to institute preliminary cen­ sorship over literature sent out by the VEO. Similarly, in November 1914 the Department of Police directed its political investigation division to establish surveillance over VEO libraries. Local authorities did not hesitate to follow up on the center’s directives. Military authorities in Odessa removed all of the society’s books from its hospitals; in Nezhin the head of the Chernigov Provincial Gendarme Department allowed only 179 of 1600 publications.34 Individual administrators often grossly overreached, censoring not only the VEO’s libraries but also its already approved Proceedings (Trudy) on agronomy and economics.35 As the authorities intensified their repressive measures, it became clear that they would be getting less and less instigation from their 31

  Ibid., 5–6; Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. 102.00 (Depart­ ment of Police, Special Section), 1914, op. 244, d. 320, l. 22. 32

  GARF f. 102.00, 1911, op. 241, d. 320, ll. 6ob.–17.

33   “VEO o birzhe truda,” Russkoe slovo, 27 April 1916; Zapiska Soveta Imperatorskogo VEO, 8. 34 35

  GARF f. 102.00, 1914, op. 244, d. 320, ll. 2, 24–24ob., 30, 61ob., 99.

  Ibid., 1915, op. 245, d. 320, l. 9ob.

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suspects. The VEO’s library commission became more organized, and the society started sending out more and more well-known publications, such as the collected works of N. V. Gogol´ and L. N. Tolstoy, the Gospels, folk tales, and so forth. Even the Department of Police had to concede this fact, and con­ sidered only certain works sent from the VEO as inappropriate for reading at the front. Among those were three 1913 issues of the journal Russkaia mysl’ (Russian Thought), which contained some articles that were considered to have anti-military content.36 Government repression of the VEO reached a peak in January 1915, when P. P. fon Zal´ts, the commandant of the Petrograd Military District, shut down all of its activity in the capital for the duration of martial law in the city. The oldest of Russian societies was six months away from celebrating its 150-year jubilee. The order to suspend the VEO originated in Minister of Internal Affairs Maklakov’s desire to demonstrate a “tough line” with regard to civil society. He instructed the Department of Police to search for incriminating material against the VEO, and in November 1914 a number of complaints were filed against the activities of its Library, Hospital, and Unemployment Commissions, which were all accused of distributing “tendentious literature” among soldiers and workers. The Socialist-Revolutionaries and Social Democrats involved in these commissions were accused of striving to disseminate revolutionary propaganda “under the guise of charity.” Among the suspected propagandists mentioned in police documents were Kerenskii (the president of the Unemployment Commission, as well as a participant in the Library Commission) and Gelovani (the chairman of the Hospital Commission), both of them Labor Party (Trudovik) members of the State Duma. Three more suspects included the Menshevik A. N. Potresov and the Bolsheviks G. I. Petrovskii and A. E. Badaev, all of whom sat on the Unemployment Commission.37 We can surmise that the authorities’ suspicions of the VEO were to a considerable extent concocted, because the Kadets who were in charge of the society’s policies were, during the first six months of the war, extremely careful to pursue strictly practical, apolitical work in public organizations.38 The political police lacked direct evidence of any revolutionary activity by the VEO. In 36

  Ibid., 1914, op. 244, d. 320, l. 39ob.

37

 Ibid., ll. 9, 23–23ob., 38ob. There is evidence that Maklakov’s friend N. P. Muratov had something to do with the ban on the VEO. Formerly the governor of Kursk, Muratov had been appointed to membership on the council of the minister of internal affairs, which was also in charge of looking after Russian provisions. The minister of internal affairs also accused the VEO of disseminating tendentious literature among the troops (Tolstoi, Dnevnik, 598).

38

 F. A. Gaida, Liberal´naia oppozitsiia na putiakh k vlasti (1914–vesna 1917 g.) (Moscow: Rosspen, 2003), 59–61.

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fact, a communique from the head of the Petrograd Security Department of 29 December 1914 described the Library Commission and its liberal members as entirely loyal.39 The suspension of activities did not mean that the VEO had to close entirely. Certain of its subsidiary departments continued their work, though at a third of their strength. The VEO Board, the Hospitals Department, the Library Commission (from the second half of 1915), the Soil Commission, and the Commission for the Spread of Agricultural Knowledge all continued functioning. But a whole host of other activities were liquidated, including the distribution of donations, books, and the VEO’s periodical, Izvestiia (News). The authorities even wanted to shut down its hospitals, but they survived thanks to support from the Petrograd Committee of the Union of Towns, as well as due to an increased influx of wounded into Petrograd in the spring of 1915. The VEO continued to run its hospitals until September 1917, when they were transferred to the control of the Petrograd Committee of the Union of Towns.40 The public’s reaction to the suspension of VEO activities varied, due to the wide range of political opinions at the time. Liberal society was upset. Mayor Tolstoi noted in his diary, “[T]he government without a doubt acted foolishly, since the society presented no threat, while its closure will surely worry people and create tensions where there used to be consensus, which is so necessary for Russia at this trying time.”41 The leaders of the Moscow Agricultural Society publicly celebrated the Free Economic Society’s 150year jubilee in November 1915 and petitioned the authorities to lift the ban against its activities. Speakers described the VEO as “the oldest disseminator of economic thought and civic skills in Russia,” the originator of Russian agri­ cultural science and publications.42 At the same time, however, the Odessa Union of Russian People expressed deep gratitude to Maklakov for the “clo­ sure … of a long-burning hearth of criminal anti-government activity.”43 The VEO board attempted to undo the authorities’ punishment. In the late spring and summer of 1915, its representatives entered into negotiations about reviving the society’s activities with General P. A. Frolov, then commandant 39

  GARF f. 102.00, 1914, op. 244, d. 320, l. 51ob.

40

  Otchet o deiatel´nosti Imperatorskogo Vol´nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva za 1915 god, 8–13; Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA) f. 91, op. 1, d. 680, ll. 7, 13; d. 892, l. 12.

41

  Tolstoi, Dnevnik, 598.

42

  “Chestvovanie Vol´nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva,” Russkoe slovo, 14 Novem­ ber 1915. 43

  GARF f. 102.00, 1915, op. 245, d. 320, l. 1.

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of the Petrograd Military District, and Adjutant-General N. V. Ruzskii, com­ mander of the 6th Army. The two military chiefs were well-disposed toward the public activists, but the discussions brought no visible results. After some society members, including President M. M. Kovalevskii, discussed the situation in the fall of 1915 with А. N. Khvostov, then head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the reason for the suspension of the VEO’s operations became clear. Khvostov admitted that the cause lay in the government’s worry that “the society was going to become a center of a wide social movement, similar to 1905.” The minister had no objection to restoring the operations of the VEO, as long as its constitution was revised and its sphere of activity limited. These conditions were unacceptable to the society’s leaders, and thus the board made the decision on 26 November to end negotiations with the authorities over lifting the ban.44 In the spring of 1916 the VEO Board reached out to public organizations with an offer to help them create economic offices, so as to help them become more systematic in their approach to economic issues. The organizations it approached included the Union of Zemstvos and Union of Towns, the Mos­ cow Agricultural Society, the Chuprov Society, and the Russian Technical Society.45 As the economy worsened and political life became more radical, the board in November 1916 contacted M. V. Rodzianko, chairman of the State Duma, urging him to immediately develop a plan for regulating the economic life of the country. The fact that the VEO turned to the chairman of the representative organ of government indicates that by then, its leaders no longer believed that the old regime was capable of charting Russia’s economic course. Rather, they believed that there would have to be a new regime, whose formation would have to be based, in its words, on the “living [i.e., ‘public,’ according to the VEO lexicon—A.T.] powers of the nation.”46 Thus during the war the specialists in the Free Economic Society engaged in economic policy-making that was dedicated to organizing the rear. Elements of their recommendations included economic mobilization, monitoring of financial-economic activity, financial reform, anti-unemployment measures, aid for war victims, food aid for war-torn and low-harvest regions, and so forth. In the society’s own words, it presented itself as the initiator “of the work of public thought on economic issues.” But government distrust toward Russia’s oldest civic society, distinguished by its oppositionist views, was in­ tensified by the trials of war, leading to its closure on the eve of its 150-year

44

  Ibid., ll. 5–5ob.; RGIA f. 91, op. 1, d. 680, ll. 8–10, 19.

45

  Russkoe slovo, 4 April 1916, 16 April 1916.

46

  “Telegramma VEO,” Russkoe slovo, 16 November 1916.

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jubilee. This measure had a sobering effect on liberal society and became a watershed in its political radicalization. The Moscow Agricultural Society and the Peasant Economy The creation of MOSKh in 1819 after the victory over Napoleon’s France was permeated with patriotic rhetoric and ubiquitous declarations about working for the good of the Fatherland. A similar dynamic ensued at the beginning of World War I. The society’s motto from the era of Alexander I, ora et labora (pray and work), must have seemed pertinent once again in the conditions of a new war.47 At the society’s public meeting on 15 August 1914 Prince D. I. Shakhovskoi, a prominent liberal involved in the cooperative movement and a former secretary of the First Duma, claimed that the recently initiated hos­ tilities were a defensive, liberationist, people’s war. He believed that it was incumbent on society to engage in a strenuous effort to mobilize the economy, and he expected a more temperate attitude from the government toward the public.48 Meanwhile, the initial economic prognoses made by MOSKh members within the first month of the war were not optimistic. The society’s agrarian scientists and zemstvo and cooperative activists understood perfectly well that the war would weaken the Russian economy and damage peasant farm­ ing. Shakhovskoi believed that the weakest link was the monetary side of peasant budgets, because the war would lead to the end of exports and the destruction of the relationship between producers and consumers. At the 15 August meeting, Shakhovskoi pointed out that “the war has created four no’s in economic life: no exports, no imports, no credit, and no transport.” He believed that this situation could be improved with respect to exports and peasant budgets by organizing deliveries of food and forage to the army. He thought that supplying the army with provisions “will provide the peasantry with an enormous market … colossal profits … and sufficient means of transport.”49 Shakhovskoi believed that the unified efforts of society and the state could overcome economic devastation. State authorities would concentrate on fighting the external foe and entrust society, in the form of the Union of Zemstvos, cooperatives, and voluntary associations, with organizing the country’s economic life. The ideal of civic solidarity, with zemstvos in charge and government participation, was to be realized. Russian public and business 47

  For more on the founding of MOSKh, see Bradley, Voluntary Associations, 58–60.

48 49

  “Krest´ianskoe khoziaistvo, voina i agronomiia,” Russkie vedomosti, 16 August 1914.

  D. I. Shakhovskoi, “Mobilizatsiia khoziaistva,” Rech´, 30 July 1914.

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circles supported this ideal in the spring of 1915, when the catastrophic state of military supply became apparent. Shakhovskoi assigned cooperatives— “the zemstvo’s little brother”—great significance in rescuing the Russian economy from the brink of catastrophe, by serving as intermediaries in organizing military supply. The prince criticized the government for ignoring cooperatives and assigning the task of supply the army to the Ministry of Agriculture instead.50 MOSKh paid particular attention to agronomic issues. A. N. Minin’s re­ port at the 15 August meeting discussed the task of mobilizing agronomists to aid the peasantry, calling upon them to improve the distribution of peas­ ant agricultural products, primarily by organizing deliveries to the army. According to Minin, not only individual farmers but cooperatives too could use the agronomists’ help because of the shortage of agricultural labor due to military recruitment. Agronomists were called upon to become leading organizers of the cooperatives’ work.51 MOSKh regularly discussed agronomic issues at its meetings throughout the war. In April 1915, for example, it proposed an initiative to expand agronomy programs at universities. The importance of agronomic issues for the society was demonstrated by the election of the agronomist A. A. Iarilov as its vice president in January 1915. In the same year Shakhovskoi also became a MOSKh vice president, marking public recog­ nition of his achievements pertaining to zemstvos and cooperatives, and also appropriately symbolizing the liberal-democratic “physiognomy” of the soci­ ety in the war years.52 MOSKh members paid attention to the peasant economy not only in the Russian interior but also at or near the front. In the fall of 1914 its president, A. I. Ugrimov, initiated an appeal to major civic associations in Moscow, offer­ ing to collect donations to create a fund to aid the Polish population affected by military action. Despite support from individuals, the proposal was never implemented because of similar appeals already being organized by the Union of Zemstvos and Union of Towns, whose efforts MOSKh decided to join.53 As we have seen, the Free Economic Society engaged in similar charity drives. In December 1914 MOSKh began organizing a Russia-wide effort to collect 50

 “Krest´ianskoe khoziaistvo, voina i agronomiia”; I. V. Kuz´mina and A. V. Lubkov, Kniaz´ Shakhovskoi: Put´ russkogo liberala (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2008), 217, 220; I. E. Voronkova, D. I. Shakhovskoi: Zhizn´, otdannaia liudiam (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo “Gotika,” 2007), 77, 82. 51

  “Krest´ianskoe khoziaistvo, voina i agronomiia.”

52

  “V obshchestve sel´skogo khoziaistva,” Russkoe slovo, 17 January 1915; Kuz´mina and Lukov, Kniaz´ Shakhovskoi, 238.

53

  Kurenyshev, Sel´skokhoziaistvennaia stolitsa Rossii, 249.

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seeds and food for farmers in regions affected by the war.54 The Ministry of Agriculture permitted the society to carry out a Russia-wide donation appeal for donations in February 1915. Under general MOSKh leadership, local agrar­ ian societies and cooperatives carried out the collection of donations, with additional help from economic organizations like the VEO. By 15 February 18 associations had answered MOSKh’s call, primarily cooperatives and agricul­ tural societies, and their ranks would double by the end of April. MOSKh collected over 21,000 rubles by 30 April, 11,000 of which were collected by agricultural societies and cooperatives. As the agrarian historian Sergei Koz­ lov has pointed out, this sum was insufficient for any kind of large-scale aid to the population, but under wartime conditions these kinds of measures were much needed.55 In the summer of 1915 MOSKh joined the effort to rescue the agricultural economy in frontline regions after the Ministry of Agriculture reached out to it for help. The society took up the task of rescuing livestock, which western regions had in abundance. Farmers would entrust their livestock to MOSKh and the transfer would be mediated by agricultural societies in Poland, Kovno province, and others. Intermediaries would pay the price set for livestock by the army, then transport the livestock to interior provinces, which would maintain it in exchange for collecting the milk and keeping the offspring. The society not only carried out this project successfully but also took up the problem of evacuating agricultural machines and equipment from frontline zones. Its periodical, Vestnik sel´skogo khoziaistva (Agricultural Herald), de­ scribes how “a very large number of the most diverse types of machinery” were evacuated, in varying condition; “some machines are entirely new, while others have been worked down to scrap.” The society organized the sale of machinery through zemstvos and cooperatives.56 In fall 1914 MOSKh gatherings regularly revolved around a problem that soon acquired top priority—supplying the population with agricultural machinery. Russia’s agriculturally preeminent southern black-soil regions were the first to feel the shortage of harvesting equipment. Technological shortages were amplified by diminishing manpower due to enlistment and the requisitioning of horses from villages. Later on, the society would begin to receive queries from war-torn Poland and Galicia requesting plows and

54 55

  “V obshchestve sel´skogo khoziaistva.”

  Kozlov, Agrarnaia modernizatsiia Tsentral´no-Nechernozemnoi Rossii, 364.

56

  Kurenyshev, Sel´skokhoziaistvennaia stolitsa Rossii, 276–77.

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harrows.57 At first, MOSKh tackled the issue of agricultural equipment through a special commission, which announced a list of solutions on 13 February 1915. Its plan called for instituting an empire-wide organization that would be tasked with purchasing and distributing agricultural machinery and tools, in which zemstvos, municipal governments, cooperatives, and credit societies would participate. There were discussions about instituting subsidized tariffs for rail transport of agricultural machinery from the ports of Arkhangel´sk and Vladivostok. The society also proposed to create a specialized engineering school, as well as a network of occupational Sunday schools and evening classes for preparing specialists in agricultural machinery. All proposals were duly sent to the Ministry of Agriculture.58 In the fall of 1915, the problem of supplies of agricultural equipment worsened to such an extent that the MOSKh leadership began calling for society to mobilize around the agricultural machine industry. The society held an exhibition of domestic agricultural equipment from 11 October to 8 November 1915. Since Germany and Austria were Russia’s primary oppo­ nents during World War I, there was a pressing need to decrease Russian agriculture’s dependence on importing German and Austrian technology. The exhibition’s organizers proposed replacing German and Austrian ma­ chines with equipment from friendly countries, like Sweden, France, and England, as well as domestic manufacture. These ideas were well received by the Ministry of Agriculture, which provided the exhibition with financial support.59 Under the auspices of the exhibition, 175 representatives of the government, zemstvos, public organizations, and private industry gathered together in mid-October 1915 for a conference. They discussed a wide range of questions, from the present condition of domestic manufacture to possible measures for stimulating it by reforming credit, customs and raw material policies, personnel training, and so forth.60 Conference participants were welcomed by the director of the Department of Agriculture in the Ministry of Agriculture, D. Ia. Slobodchikov, who assured the attendees that his agency would work closely and in good faith with civic organizations to resolve the enormous, pressing challenge of securing the tools of production to Russian 57

  Trudy Soveshchaniia 15–18 oktiabria 1915 g. po voprosam obespecheniia naseleniia sel´skokhoziaistvennymi mashinami (Istoricheskii obzor, doklady i zhurnaly zasedanii), vyp. 1 (Moscow, 1916), 1, 101. 58

  “V moskovskom obshchestve sel´skogo khoziaistva,” Russkoe slovo, 14 February 1915. 59

 Trudy Soveshchaniia 15–18 oktiabria 1915 g., 1–2, 7–9, 101–02; Kurenyshev, Sel´skokho­ ziaistvennaia stolitsa Rossii, 277. 60

  Trudy Soveshchaniia 15–18 oktiabria 1915 g., 9–17, 129.

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agriculture. “The very fact that my colleagues and I are among you right now proves how much we sympathize with society’s engagement in this matter,” he stated. “We are firmly convinced that without public support we will not be able to meet the challenge.”61 The MOSKh conference agreed on the need to carry out a national census of farm equipment, in order to assess the necessary volume of domestic equipment manufacture for the 1916 agricultural year. Representatives of agricultural societies, as well as scientists, were invited to participate in the creation of an organ that would oversee this census.62 Major entrepreneurs and manufacturers influenced the conference to declare the matter of equip­ ping the countryside a national defense priority, second in importance to supplying the army. Such a classification would presumably lead to privileges in transport and in obtaining supplies of fuel and raw materials for manufac­ turers.63 Conference participants also supported improvements in the availa­ bility of credit for domestic trade, credit-worthy agricultural societies, and civic organizations and the zemstvos involved in supplying agricultural equip­ ment to western regions of the empire affected by the war. The conference concluded that a national association tasked with supplying the population with agricultural equipment should be created, and it must have exclusive jurisdiction over this issue. MOSKh would take up the task of creating such an organization. In the meantime, the regulation of agricultural equipment manufacturing would be overseen by the Ministry of Agriculture, which should serve the interests first of all of those manufacturers who expressed their willingness to supply the Union of Zemstvos, Union of Towns, and other public institutions with their products.64 The measures considered by the conference also included a proposal to invite zemstvos and public agencies to rent out machinery and tools on favorable terms. Equipment would be bought and leased through credit cooperatives, and families of army recruits would receive purchasing subsidies. There were also proposals to purchase machinery for collective use, so as to encourage self-help and assist farms that had been left short of workers. As Andrei Kurenyshev has noted, a number of 61

  “Zhurnal zasedaniia 15 oktiabria 1915 g.,” Trudy Soveshchaniia 15–18 oktiabria 1915 g., 130–31.

62

  “Zhurnal zasedaniia 15 oktiabria 1915 g.,” 131–32, 134–38, 146; Rezoliutsiia sove­ shchaniia po voprosam obespecheniia naseleniia sel´skokhoziaistvennymi mashinami 15–18 oktiabria 1915 g. (n.p., n.d.), 1. 63

  “Sel´skokhoziaistvennoe soveshchanie,” Russkoe slovo, 18 October 1915; Trudy Soveshchaniia 15–18 oktiabria 1915 g., 123.

64

  Rezoliutsiia soveshchaniia po voprosam obespecheniia naseleniia sel’skokhoziaistvennymi mashinami 15–18 oktiabria 1915 g., 123–26.

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proposals put forth at this fall 1915 gathering prefigured measures taken by the Soviet government during the Civil War, “War Communism,” and NEP.65 Although many of the proposals about agricultural machine production discussed at the conference in fall 1915 were future-oriented, some were implemented immediately. For example, MOSKh created a workshop for repairing used machinery reclaimed from evacuated regions. Members of the society first examined machines at the warehouse of the War Ministry in Moscow, choosing usable pieces and informing potential consumers. The War Ministry then authorized requisition commissions to hand the equipment over directly to MOSKh, thus bypassing the Moscow Military District entirely. MOSKh members repaired the machines and sold them to public organizations and private individuals.66 By 15 March 1916, total sales amounted to 32,000 rubles.67 Like the Free Economic Society, MOSKh’s wartime research activities revolved mostly around the economic effects of the war. While the Free Eco­ nomic Society approached the problem in an extremely wide-ranging way, examining such side effects of the war as economic crises, budget deficits, and unemployment, for MOSKh interest in the wartime economy was defined by its scientific specialization and oriented toward agricultural problems. As early as January 1915 the society claimed that it had a “special responsibility” to examine the war’s influence on agriculture. Member landowners and agrarian scientists expressed the desire to collect, record and save “everywhere, immediately, and thoroughly” all materials that would illuminate changes in the agricultural economy during wartime. As Russia’s most important agricultural society, MOSKh took on a coordinating role in gathering and classifying information, research, and the public dissemination of findings. The society planned to devote special attention to working with voluntary associations and local government institutions. For example, the Chuprov Society, discussed below, had also started researching the war’s effects on the Moscow region’s labor market.68 By 1916, the food supply had become Russia’s leading economic challenge, attracting the attention of MOSKh members and crystallizing the conflict between the state and society. Agrarian scientists attending a meeting of the society in November 1916 could not come to a single position on the issue. Aleksei Doiarenko, professor of the Petrovsk Agriculture Academy, considered the food crisis a fact, accompanied by crises in production and 65

  Kurenyshev, Sel´skokhoziaistvennaia stolitsa Rossii, 283.

66

  Trudy Soveshchaniia 15–18 oktiabria 1915 g., 35–38.

67

  Kurenyshev, Sel´skokhoziaistvennaia stolitsa Rossii, 303.

68

  Kozlov, Agrarnaia modernizatsiia Tsentral´no-Nechernozemnoi Rossii, 365–66.

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distribution. At the same time, Aleksandr Chaianov, another famous agrarian specialist, believed that Russia’s food crisis was not fatal, because peasant farms were not yet suffering from a lack of manpower.69 Most worrisome for the MOSKh experts were reductions in sown area, which had increased to an ominous degree by the summer of 1916. As early as February D. N. Zhbankov, a zemstvo activist, and S. L. Maslov, an economist, predicted based on the situation in 1915 that the reduction in sown area would soon turn into a national catastrophe, undermining the country’s productive capacities and threatening its food supply. Measures already taken to address the problem were declared insufficient. Maslov proposed conducting a census of Russia’s available manpower, and mobilizing workers into regions suffering from the greatest reductions. A labor bureau and workers’ trade associations could be used for this task. Prisoners of war, military recruits, refugees, and free soldiers should all be recruited for fieldwork, and obstacles for hiring foreign labor should be eliminated.70 MOSKh’s wartime political position was a liberal one, hewing closely to the Kadet platform. For instance, a resolution of 21 August 1915 called for a government that would be trusted by the public, thus reproducing the liberal slogan popular at the time: the need for a “government of public confidence.” By spring 1916 a significant part of the society’s membership called for democratic methods of resolving agrarian problems, and criticized government policies for retarding social progress. MOSKh members hailed wartime zemstvo reforms, especially the creation of a county-level zemstvo (volostnoe zemstvo). The society also supported efforts to eliminate administrative barriers to public grassroots organization.71 During the war MOSKh attracted not only liberals but also socialists. Kurenyshev points out the increasing influence of socialist ideas in the society during the second half of the war, reflected in proposals to institute control over manufacture and distribution to overcome the chaos and spontaneity intrinsic to a free market economy. By the beginning of 1917, the agrarian scientific and manufacturing intelligentsia that had united around MOSKh had come to the conclusion that the main obstacle to the improvement in production was the autocratic-bureaucratic regime.72 Overall, during the war MOSKh specialists were concerned with a spectrum of questions, similar to the concerns of the Free Economic Society, aside from the issue of hospitals. Broadly speaking, the society was interested in problems pertaining to Russian agriculture, Russia’s agricultural machinery 69

  Kurenyshev, Sel´skokhoziaistvennaia stolitsa Rossii, 328.

70

  Ibid., 304–06.

71

  Ibid., 275; Kozlov, Agrarnaia modernizatsiia Tsentral´no-Nechernozemnoi Rossii, 367.

72

  Kurenyshev, Sel´skokhoziaistvennaia stolitsa Rossii, 296.

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industry, and the problem of dependence on foreign technology. Members’ scientific work became increasingly linked to practice, as they reacted with alacrity to the needs of the times and uncovered the causes behind shortages of agricultural equipment, reductions in sown area, and food supply problems. Its scholars sought ways to recruit hired labor and support farmers in territories occupied by the enemy, among other things. MOSKh collaborated with the Ministry of Agriculture in a number of areas. Together with government and zemstvo institutions it worked to adapt the peasant economy for war, to supply it with the tools of production, and to develop agronomy and cooperation. Society members participated in the work of government organs that were trying to reform the agricultural economy, while government officials trusted the society’s prognoses and supported many of its proposals. As time passed, however, and Russian society became more radical in 1915 and 1916, MOSKh’s position toward the government became increasingly more oppositional. The Chuprov Society and the Fight against Rising Prices The problem of economic disruption assumed more and more threatening forms with every passing month of the war. In these circumstances, the expertise of learned societies working on economic issues was in high demand. The A. I. Chuprov Society for the Development of Social Sciences at Moscow University along with its department of statistics occupied a niche in the struggle with such consequences of economic disruption as high prices for food and manufactured goods. N. A. Kablukov, a notable economist and statistician, led the Chuprov Society. He chaired the Department of Statistics at Moscow University but was also a man of great practical acumen, who contributed significantly to the creation of zemstvo statistics and research on the peasant economy. P. P. Maslov, a brilliant Menshevik agrarian economist who authored the famous program of land municipalization that was adopted at the IV Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party and co-authored a whole range of foundational works on Russian economic development, served as the society’s vice chairman. Similar to the Free Economic Society, the Chuprov Society researched the effects of the “dry law” or prohibition on the economy. Society member A. K. Vitt, an economist with a polytechnical background who was also chief administrator of the Society of Cotton Manufacturers in the Moscow Region, researched the law’s effects on textile manufacturing in Russia’s Central Region. He conducted a survey of eleven spinning factories with over 50,000 workers in total. His results, presented at the Chuprov Society’s annual meeting on 24 February 1915, showed that labor productivity increased in textile

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manufacturing despite the departure of generally more skilled male workers to the front. Prohibition, he found, contributed to the rise in labor productivity by forcing those male workers who remained at factories to lead sober lives.73 In the spring of 1915 the Chuprov Society became a center for the study of rising prices. The problem arose as a result of food shortages and inter­ ruptions in rail deliveries, which led to decreased supplies of bread, meat, and other necessities in many of the empire’s regional markets. Speculators did not hesitate to take advantage of shortages of food and goods, and started artificially inflating already high prices. Already in the first year of the war rising prices threatened the well-being and stability of the rear. By spring of 1915 prices had increased to a significant degree; essential consumer goods, such as flour, bread, oil, milk, grains, and firewood were 50–60 percent more expensive than they had been before the war.74 Prices rose uncontrollably throughout the empire, but major manufacturing cities were especially affected because of their dependence on imported goods. According to data from the Main Committee of the Union of Towns, rising prices for meat, oil, rye flour, and oats forced residents of Petrograd to overpay more than 21,000,000 rubles for food and forage by spring 1915.75 The poorest residents were the most vulnerable to rising prices and speculation. Their discontent manifested itself in street disorders and pogroms against the shops of suspected speculators. On 12 April 1915 Minister of Internal Affairs Maklakov asked governors and city commandants “to pay the most serious attention to the reasons for increasing prices for necessities and … to prevent speculation.”76 By the beginning of spring 1916 everyday urban life involved mass disturbances caused by price increases, which came to be called “hunger riots” (golodnye bunty). The main participants were the wives of recruits. According to official data for mid-August 1916, popular disturbances over high prices had taken place in 29 provinces and regions of the empire in that year alone. Along with food shortages there were also insufficient supplies of manufactured goods, soap, shoes, paper, etc. In spring 1916 the Department of Police began assembling monthly reports of disturbances due to high prices, raising the importance of the problem to the national level.77 73   “Godichnoe sobranie Chuprovskogo obshchestva,” Russkie vedomosti, 25 February 1915. 74

  GARF f. 102, 4 d-vo (Department of Police, 4 deloproizvodstvo), 1915, d. 130, ll. 3, 86.

75

  Doklad N. I. Astrova na soveshchanii Komissii po voprosam zemskoi statistiki 27 marta 1915 g. Vyrabotka obshchego plana rabot po izucheniiu sovremennoi dorogovizny (Moscow: Tipo-litografiia K. I. Cherokovoi, 1915), 6.

76

  GARF f. 102, 4 d-vo, 1915, d. 130, ll. 3–3ob.

77

  Ibid., ll. 135–38, 188, 207–08ob., 227–28.

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In his analysis of workers’ mass actions during 1915 and 1916 historian Iurii Kir´ianov has noted that even though they were all spontaneous and shortlived, they were nevertheless quite dangerous. The number of actions over prices involving workers tended to increase; in 1916 their number more than tripled compared to the previous year, rising from 21 to approximately 70. These actions affected the majority of the country’s industrially developed regions, and involved entirely new, previously inactive social groups in the struggle against merchants, the war, and the government.78 The Union of Zemstvos and Union of Towns initiated research into rising prices as a result of encountering the problem in their work on mobilizing resources in the rear. As analysis and policy formulation in this regard began to be recognized as an urgent necessity, demand rose for experts in these issues. In the winter of 1915 a Union of Towns meeting resolved to work with “the Chuprov people” on measures to combat price increases. Representatives of the Chuprov Society, the Union of Zemstvos, and learned, cooperative, and consumer organizations all attended this meeting. They elected a coordinating council and formed a commission for the creation of a statistical bureau, which would be tasked with researching price increases and formulating counter­ measures, and supported financially by the Union of Towns.79 In turn, the Chuprov Society Board reached out to the Union of Zemstvos and Union of Towns, the executive organs of the Moscow provincial and district zemstvos, and a whole host of voluntary societies (MOSKh, the Mos­ cow branch of the Russian Technical Society, the Society for Aid to War Vic­ tims and others) in the spring of 1915 with a proposal to work jointly on the problem. A meeting on 19 March set a preliminary action plan that involved identifying and researching the specific conditions creating price increases and devising countermeasures based on scientific expertise. Research was to be carried out systematically and with consideration of accompanying factors, such as the volume of consumer goods production, transport conditions, the state of market and banking operations, monetary exchange, the extent of cultivated areas, and so forth. Special attention should be paid to the two capitals, since these were the major consumer centers. Research would require the expertise of specialists from various areas of economics. The workload would be organized by the Presidium, which was comprised of Manuilov, the chairman, his friend S. N. Prokopovich, P. P. Maslov, and S. V. Speranskii. Under the aegis of the Chuprov Society and with the support of other learned 78

  Iu. I. Kir´ianov, Sotsial´no–politicheskii protest rabochikh Rossii v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (iiul´ 1914–fevral´ 1917 g.) (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 2005), 138–39, 142, 145. 79

  Vyrabotka obshchego plana rabot po izucheniiu sovremennoi dorogovizny, 5.

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and technical associations, a Commission for Research on Contemporary Price Increases was also established.80 A number of statisticians met in Moscow from 25 to 29 March under the auspices of the Chuprov Society’s statistics commission, in order to determine concrete tasks for the society with regards to the problem of prices. Participants described their meetings as “a congress of the zemstvo statisticians,” due to the broad representation of zemstvo employees there. According to information gathered by the Moscow police, from 150 to 200 statisticians participated in the meetings, representing practically all of the zemstvos, with more practitioners than theoreticians. The meetings were also attended by such notable economists and statisticians as N. I. Astrov, V. G. Groman, A. V. Chaianov, N. P. Makarov, A. A. Manuilov, S. N. Prokopovich, N. A. Svavitskii, and others.81 During the course of the Moscow discussions Astrov, a leader of the Union of Towns, pointed out that current measures against price increases were unsystematic and requested assistance from the Chuprov Society. He urged statisticians not merely to come up with ex­ planations of the problem but also to propose practical policies to combat it. The various scholarly organizations researching price increases should, he believed, create an environment of constant collaboration between zemstvos and city governments, which, like the Union of Zemstvos and Union of Towns, should remain in place after the war’s end.82 Accordingly, the research program, developed with input from Chuprov Society members and based on Manuilov’s presentation, had three prongs: study of the different forms of price increases, their causes and consequences, and practical countermeasures. Discussions concluded with the consensus that research on price increases and measures to combat them were matters of urgent public concern, and with the decision to work in tandem with the Union of Zemstvos, Union of Towns, and learned societies.83 The Chuprov Society’s March 1915 meetings also dealt with the war’s effects on the peasant economy. A. V. Chaianov reported on the unevenness of the impact, pointing out that the war strengthened certain aspects of the rural economy, while weakening others. The society took up N. P. Makarov’s suggestion to study this phenomenon further, and zemstvo statistical bureaus were invited to participate in gathering relevant data. The research would be 80

  Ibid., 3–4, 8.

81

  GARF f. 102.00, 1915, d. 104, ll. 43–50ob.

82

  Vyrabotka obshchego plana rabot po izucheniiu dorogovizny, 6–7; “Soveshchanie statisti­ kov pri Chuprovskom obshchestve,” Russkoe slovo, 29 March 1915.

83

  Vyrabotka obshchego plana rabot po izucheniiu dorogovizny, 8–13; “Soveshchanie statisti­ kov pri Chuprovskom obshchestve.”

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overseen by the Chuprov Society, which would create a special commission that would distribute surveys to the population in order to determine the size of cultivated areas prior to the war and in 1915, and to assess the livestock situation and the size of harvests.84 That same month the Chuprov Society began work on predicting the upcoming grain harvest in Russia. Government statistical institutions were not doing this kind of work, while zemstvoproduced statistics were inadequate. The Chuprov researchers drafted a survey. They also planned to survey the population’s level of education, for which they began organizing a congress of statisticians and zemstvo departments of education.85 The mainstay of all the meetings of statisticians at the Chuprov Society in March 1915 was criticism of the government’s economic measures. The critique could be heard in discussions about upcoming harvests, grain reserves, provisioning the army, and the unsatisfactory financial situation of zemstvo employees. Official institutions were criticized for not paying suf­ ficient attention to the economy, and many called for uniting the efforts of learned associations, cooperatives, and the Union of Zemstvos and Union of Towns.86 The government was irritated by the statisticians’ calls to consolidate society around economic issues. The head of the Moscow Security Section re­ ported to the Department of Police that the speeches of Prokopovich, Groman, and S. S. Zhilkin at the 29 March closing dinner revealed “the true ideological colors of the conference.” They spoke of improving the situation of zemstvo employees, unifying the work of zemstvo statisticians, and establishing an empire-wide pension plan for all zemstvo employees. The Moscow Security chief felt that this was essentially just one step away from a call to unionize zemstvo professionals. Furthermore, he suspected criminal intent in the vari­ ous resolutions pertaining to collaboration among zemstvo statisticians in their efforts to research prices, harvests, and the effects of war on the peasant economy. The security official felt that by advocating collaboration among zemstvo employees and placing the collection of Russia-wide statistics in their hands, statisticians and economists were actually working for an agrarian revolution, as well as building political consensus between populists and Marxists. The government felt that the Chuprov Society’s activities were aimed at demonstrating “the ineffectiveness … of official measures” and elevating the significance of the government’s opponents, the Union of Zemstvos and Union of Towns.87 84

  GARF f. 102.00, 1915, d. 104, ll. 43ob.–44; Russkie vedomosti, 27 March 1915.

85

  GARF f. 102.00, 1915, d. 104, ll. 45, 50.

86 87

  Ibid., ll. 45, 48–49.

 Ibid., ll. 51–52.

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Thus even though learned societies and local governing institutions were trying jointly to formulate solutions to important tasks of economic stabilization, government officials interpreted the very fact of their collaboration as opposition. This is why in the spring and summer of 1915 the government took steps to create special high-ranking conferences (soveshchaniia) on defense, fuel, transport, and food. The conferences were supposed to demonstrate the bureaucracy’s preeminence in resolving economic issues, and its ability to ally with civil society while remaining indisputably in charge. Thus the conferences were led by government representatives but also included members of the Union of Zemstvos and Union of Towns, as well as representatives of legislative bodies. The government’s jealousy toward the work of the Chuprov Society and zemstvo statisticians was influenced by its recognition of the great importance of public statistical research. We must agree with historian Igor´ Tropov’s assessment that Chuprov Society statisticians received public recognition of their work in the spring of 1915.88 Historian Viktor Shevyrin points out that the issue of combatting price increases occupied a central position in the work of the Special Conference on Provisions and its various subcommissions. Moreover, the proposed countermeasures adopted the ap­proach that representatives of the Union of Zemstvos, Union of Towns, and a number of learned societies had insisted upon, namely regulating transport according to a clear system of priorities for different kinds of freight, and establishing strict wholesale and retail prices and tariffs, both of them essential components of a coherent plan for regulating supply.89 In this way, in the spring of 1915 the government was following in the wake of proposals by public activists. According to A. P. Martynov, the head of the Moscow Security Section, prices and market regulation were being discussed as intensively by the population as they were neglected by the authorities.90 As for civic activists themselves, the Chuprov Society statisticians criticized the activities of the special government conferences and their falsifications of socioeconomic phenomena. Nevertheless, its members remained open to collaborating with the authorities. In 1916–17, statisticians focused on creating a unified public statistical research organ in Russia, which would be in charge of preparing and carrying out an empire-wide agricultural cen88

  I. A. Tropov, “K voprosu o vospriiatii vlasti rossiiskoi intelligentsiei nakanune i v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny,” in Pervaia mirovaia voina: Istoriia i psikhologiia, ed. V. I. Startsev et al. (St. Petersburg: Nestor, 1999), 87.

89

  V. M. Shevyrin, Vlast’ i obshchestvennye organizatsii v Rossii (1914–1917): Analiticheskii obzor (Moscow: RAN INION, Tsentr sotsial´nykh nauchno–informatsionnykh issledo­ vanii i dr., 2003), 70–71. 90

 GARF f. 102, 4 d-vo, 1915, d. 130, l. 24ob.

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sus.91 Such a census was intended to illuminate the state of the country’s food reserves, and the chief architect of the idea was the Chuprov’s Society’s Commission on Issues of Zemstvo Statistics. The commission planned to create an empire-wide census bureau that would include government and municipal functionaries, as well as representatives of voluntary organizations, economists, and statisticians.92 In conclusion, during World War I Russian civil society displayed its creativity and its ability to adapt quickly in order to address new challenges. The Free Economic Society, MOSKh, and the Chuprov Society carried out a range of diverse projects. These included charity appeals for aiding wounded and disabled soldiers and the population living at or near the front; measures against economic disruption and price increases for industrial goods and food; efforts to aid the peasant economy suffering from shortages of labor, equipment, and machines; and monitoring and modeling of the nation’s economic life and the government’s financial and tax policies. The work on economic reconstruction carried out by the scholarly elites attained an importance that was national in scale. Society assumed functions that had been the prerogative of the government apparatus; activists provided support to a government struggling to bring the war to a victorious conclusion. Economists, statisticians, agronomists, and financial experts expanded the application of their knowledge and research, thereby supporting the development of Russian science and technology, and raising its international prestige and competitiveness. At the same time, the activists assigned greater priority to applied research oriented toward satisfying wartime needs. Generally liberal in their political views, scientists entered the war years favoring the unification of state and local government efforts, believing that only joint efforts could bring success in defending the nation and reinforcing its rear. Furthermore, because the state was incapable of facing the challenges of the rear without the help of specialists, it ended up stimulating the mobi­ lization of society. At the same time, however, the state gradually lost control over the mobilization of Russian experts. Thus, on the one hand, there were systemic failures in the existing government model, while on the other hand the state was unwilling to recognize the increasing influence and authority of the experts. These two factors caused the ideal of unity between the state and the public, pronounced at the start of the war, to founder. The state wanted the public to mobilize, but also obstructed that mobilization with its actions 91

  Tropov, “K voprosu o vospriiatii vlasti rossiiskoi intelligentsiei,” 88.

92

  “Obshchestvo imeni A. I. Chuprova. Komissiia po izucheniiu sovremennoi dorogo­ vizny,” Agronomicheskii zhurnal: Izdanie Khar´kovskogo obshchestva sel´skogo khoziaistva, no. 5 (1915): 130; GARF f. 102.00, 1915, d. 104, l. 49.

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and blatant suspicions toward learned organizations, seeing them as before as competitors, not allies. The suspension of the Free Economic Society’s activ­ ities and suspicions toward the Chuprov Society’s statisticians both illustrate this dynamic. As these organizations became prominent centers of scholarly dis­cussion of the pressing problems of mobilization, they also participated in the formulation of a liberal agenda for the modernization of the country. And in the eyes of the government, the activist civic position taken by the scholarly elite often overshadowed their concrete scholarly and practical work, even though the latter was driven by the best of patriotic intentions. As the liberal political leader Vasilii Maklakov later wrote, by participating in wartime mobilization the public (obshchestvennost´) sought not only to be useful to the country, but also “to show the superiority of the ‘civic’ ap­ proach over the ‘bureaucratic’ one,” the superiority of public institutions over government ones.93 United in learned societies, experts started paying more attention to government initiatives, assessing its problems and failures. Although these scholars originally rallied around the government, they eventually started to criticize its military and mobilization policies, and to express desires for political liberalization. Wartime mobilization thus stirred up discussion of the effectiveness of existing government mechanisms and the whole political regime. The wartime relationship between the state and associations of scholar-activists thus shows the path from loyalty to protest followed by the Russian intelligentsia as a whole. Translated by Pavel Khazanov and Adele Lindenmeyr

93

 V. A. Maklakov, Vlast´ i obshchestvennost´ na zakate staroi Rossii (vospominaniia sovre­ mennika) (Paris: Illiustrirovannaia Rossiia, 1936), 130–31.

Associations in Times of Political Turmoil: Science Societies and the Bolshevik Regime, 1917–22 Joseph Bradley

Throughout the years of revolution and civil war, Soviet Russia had hundreds of more or less autonomous nonprofit associations that pursued broadly philanthropic, educational, professional, and cultural goals. Although signifi­ cantly fewer in number than in prerevolutionary years, these associations were a mixture of venerable learned societies that until 1917 had had imperial patronage, grassroots organizations that had sprung up in the last decades of the old regime, and new societies, the products of the enthusiasm, if not confu­ sion, of the new era. Yet despite the important social, intellectual, and cultural history of the period 1917–21, the phenomenon of associational activity has been treated only tangentially.1 Although scientists and the technical intelligentsia have received the attention of historians, much of the work has been about the upper registers of that class, especially the Academy of Sciences.2 After an I am grateful to the W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellowship program, as well as to the staff of the Hoover Archive, for enabling me to complete this article in the pleasant confines of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. I thank Adele Lindenmeyr and Christopher Read for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. 1

 Diane P. Koenker, William G. Rosenberg, and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Christopher Read, Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia: The Intelligentsia and the Transition from Tsarism to Communism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). Two recent studies that give more consideration to science societies are Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); and, in particular, Stuart Finkel, On the Ideological Front: The Russian Intelligentsia and the Making of the Soviet Public Sphere (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 2

 Loren R. Graham, ed., Science and the Soviet Social Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Graham, The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party, Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 137–72.

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overview of the effect the dislocations and deprivations of War Communism and the Civil War had on intellectual and associational life, this essay will examine the reaction of independent scientific societies, headquartered in Petrograd and Moscow, to the rapid political changes around them. The essay will focus on a handful of the most prominent imperial associations that, after a brief “springtime” in 1917, struggled to cope with the Bolshevik regime.3 By the first Five-Year Plan most were repressed and their functions taken over by state institutions. Through their efforts to chart a course of existence and action under the new regime, we can track the relationship between state and society and the fate of Russia’s prerevolutionary independent associations during this tumultuous time. We can understand better the fate of Russia’s prerevolutionary science societies if we put the Bolshevik reorganization of science and the repression of independent associations in comparative perspective. The Russian science societies represented a particular model of associations and of the organization of science whose origins go back to 18th-century England and France, when 1927–1931 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967); Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Bailes, Science and Russian Culture in an Age of Revolutions: V. I. Vernadsky and His Scientific School, 1863–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Bailes, “Natural Scientists and the Soviet System,” in Koenker, Rosenberg, and Suny, Party, State, and Society, 267–95; Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Alexander Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge: The Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1917–1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); James C. McClelland, “The Professoriate in the Russian Civil War,” in Koenker, Rosenberg, and Suny, Party, State, and Society, 243–66; Paul R. Josephson, Physics and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); and Vera Tolz, Russian Academicians and the Revolution: Combining Professionalism and Politics (London: Macmillan, 1997). An exception is James T. Andrews, Science for the Masses: The Bolshevik State, Public Science and the Popular Imagination in Soviet Russia, 1917–1934 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003). 3  The sample of societies includes the Free Economic Society (Volnoe ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo, VEO), the Moscow Agricultural Society (Moskovskoe obshchestvo sel´skogo khoziaistva, MOSKh), the Pirogov Society of Russian Physicians (Obshchestvo russkikh vrachei im. N. I. Pirogova), the Russian Technical Society (Russkoe tekhnicheskoe obshchestvo, RTO), and the Russian Geographical Society (Russkoe geograficheskoe obshchestvo, RGO). I have selected these associations primarily because of their prominence among Russian science societies before 1917. I make no claim that these organizations were typical or representative of all of Russia’s learned societies, let alone of all associations. But these societies do permit us to examine the relationship between scientific and professional elites and the new Soviet authorities. This essay is based on the published output of these associations, albeit an output much reduced compared to that before the revolution, and a fragmentary archival record.

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free and independent learned societies, sociétés libres, vied with academies and universities as decentralized sites for the creation and dis­semination of knowledge. However, by the beginning of the 20th century, the independent learned society and, even more so, the non-professional scientist, no longer enjoyed a preeminent position, as the creation of knowledge was more and more becoming centered in universities and private and public research institutions and laboratories, sometimes funded by governments, sometimes in partnership with private industry. Many historians have noted the importance of the state in promoting science in imperial Germany, but even in late Victorian Britain, according to Peter Alter, there was a “greater willingness to tolerate” state intervention to coordinate scientific research, an idea that came largely from the scientists themselves. “The state more and more took the initiative in science organization,” Alter argues. “Traditional forms of scientific promotion, whether by learned and science societies or by private persons, were pushed into the background.”4 As S. F. Ol´denburg, secretary of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, put it upon returning from a trip to Europe in 1926, “If the eighteenth century was the century of academies, and the nineteenth century was the century of universities, then the twentieth century is becoming the century of the research institutes.”5 Nevertheless, despite the increased prominence of the state, the research institutes of Europe and North America existed in a multipolar world of government and nongovernment centers.6 Old regime Europe and in particular the French Revolution provide a precedent for the regulation and repression of associations in imperial and early Soviet Russia. Highly suspicious of any spontaneous public initiative that might contradict state goals, absolute rulers repressed the intrusion of seemingly harmless associations of private persons into realms, such as religion and politics, considered to be the domain of the state or the established church. Under the old regime voluntary associations were watched by the 4

 Peter Alter, The Reluctant Patron: Science and the State in Britain, 1850–1920, trans. Angela Davies (Oxford: Berg, 1987), 250, 252. 5

 Loren R. Graham, “The Foundation of Soviet Research Institutes: A Combination of Research Innovation and International Borrowing,” Social Studies of Science 5, 3 (August 1975): 303–29, quote on 314. 6

 Bruce Hevly, “Reflections on Big Science and Big History,” in Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research, ed. Peter Galison and Hevly (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 355–63, especially 356; Robert Kargon, Stuart W. Leslie, and Erica Schoenberger, “Far Beyond Big Science: Regimes and Organization of Research and Development,” in Galison and Hevly, Big Science, 334–54, especially 336–38; Graham, “The Foundation of Soviet Research Institutes,” 314; M. S. Bastrakova, Stanovlenie sovetskoi sistemy organizatsii nauki, 1917–1922 (Moscow: Nauka, 1973), 230; and Alexei Kojevnikov, “The Great War, the Russian Civil War, and the Invention of Big Science,” Science in Context 15, 2 (2002): 239–75.

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police and treated “as if they constituted a permanent threat of subversion and a threat to national security.”7 By a decree of 8 August 1793 the Convention abolished the national academy and other learned societies, confiscated their assets, and subjected their libraries, botanical gardens, and museums to surveillance. By the constitution of 1795, all associations violating public order were prohibited, and the state claimed the right to shut down any organization that became political, entered into combination or correspondence with other as­sociations, or held public meetings; two years later all clubs were dissolved. As one historian aptly puts it, the French state’s struggle against its opponents was “a struggle for the life of the regime; the government could not allow the opposition to use the weapon of associations.”8 The 1810 French penal code, enhanced in 1834, created a repressive regulatory framework for the remainder of the 19th century.9 Similarly, the Prussian Law Code of 1794 barred associations whose purposes and activities were deemed “contrary to the general peace, security, and order,” a principle that was continued in the 1850 Prussian Association Law and, later, the 1867 North German Confederation.10 However, none of these repressive actions (which, in any event, waned during the course of the 19th century) was intended to destroy the bourgeoisie, private property, or bourgeois civil society. The October Revolution and new Soviet government set out to destroy all three.

7

  Carol E. Harrison, The Bourgois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociabil­ ity, and the Uses of Emulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 24. 8

  Raymond Huard, “Political Associations in Nineteenth-Century France: Legislation and Practice,” in Civil Society before Democracy: Lessons from Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Nancy Bormeo and Philip Nord (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 139. See also Eugene N. Anderson and Pauline R. Anderson, Political Institutions and Social Change in Continental Europe in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 276–77. 9

  David Thompson, France: Empire and Republic, 1850–1940: Historical Documents (New York: Walker, 1968), 164. See also Harrison, Bourgeois Citizen, 22–24, 26–27; and Huard, “Political Associations,” 137–38. 10

  Robert J. Goldstein, Political Repression in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 47; Edwin H. Zeydel, ed., Constitutions of the German Empire and German States (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1974), 77, 197, 227, 347, 370, 432. See also Thomas Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 1800–1866, trans. Daniel Noland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 236; and E. N. Anderson and P. R. Anderson, Political Institutions, 278.

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Ideological and Material Restrictions on Intellectual Life and Associations Many of Russia’s prerevolutionary associations were gone within the first year of Bolshevik rule. Hostility to the new government on the part of associations, many of which were led by liberals or moderate socialists, hostility on the part of the Bolsheviks, and the chaos and deprivation of the Civil War decimated many societies and professional unions. One of the first decrees after the October Revolution gave local Soviets the right to disperse public organizations that advocated active resistance to or overthrow of the new regime.11 The Teachers’ Union, which had supported striking teachers and the “counterrevolutionary” Committee to Save the Fatherland and the Revolution and had refused to recognize soviet power, was shut down in December 1918.12 In August 1918 the commissar of justice made all religious and charitable societies subject to closing and their property subject to transfer to local soviets.13 In 1919 the Second Komsomol Congress decided that since “scoutism” was a bourgeois system of physical and mental education, all boy scout organizations as well as sporting organizations should be shut down.14 Those societies that survived the initial year of the revolution, Civil War, and Bolshevik Gleichschaltung carried out a truncated existence. In Petrograd, for

11

 “O pravakh i obiazannostiakh sovetov: Instruktsiia NKVD 24 December 1917,” in Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii rabochego i krest´ianskogo pravitel´stva RSFSR (hereafter SU), no. 12 (1917), art. 180, cited in A. I. Shchiglik, Zakonomernosti stanovleniia i razvitiia obshchestvennykh organizatsii v SSSR: Politiko-pravovoe issledovanie (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 93; Institut marksizma-leninizma and Institut istorii (Akademiia nauk SSSR), Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti, 18 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1957–2009), 1: 91–92, 100. See also McClelland, “The Professoriate in the Russian Civil War,” 243–66; and Bailes, “Natural Scientists and the Soviet System,” 277–95, in Koenker, Rosenberg, and Suny, Party, State, and Society. For opposition to the new regime, the Petrograd and Moscow city councils were dissolved on 16 November and several council leaders were arrested. The Union of Towns and the Union of Zemstvos were disbanded in January 1918. See Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 55–57; and William G. Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917–1921 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 266–67, 289. 12

 Shchiglik, Zakonomernosti, 94; S. A. Fediukin, Velikii Oktiabr´ i intelligentsia: Iz istorii vovlecheniia staroi intelligentsii v stroitel´stvo sotsializma (Moscow: Nauka, 1972), 172–205; M. B. Keirim-Markus, Gosudarstvennoe rukovodstvo kul´tury: Stroitel´stvo Narkomprosa, noiabr´ 1917–seredina 1918 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), 24. 13 14

 SU, no. 62 (1918), art. 685, cited in Shchiglik, Zakonomernosti, 104–05.

 Shchiglik, Zakonomernosti, 100–01.

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example, of more than 500 societies listed in the prerevolutionary city directories, only 50 were active by 1920.15 However, during the chaos of the Civil War, repressive actions were largely ad hoc; there was no attempt to codify laws and procedures until almost five years after the Bolshevik Revolution. Although some organizations were shut down or voluntarily ceased operations, many others did not. Many associations simply submitted their prerevolutionary charters to the Commissariat of Public Enlightenment (Narkompros) or the Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), the successors to the prerevolutionary ministries responsible for the registration of most societies. The disruption of the Civil War years and the absence of legislation permitted many organizations to continue their activities, albeit on a reduced scale, without formal registration or approval.16 Indeed, Narkompros provided money to fund activities, rent meeting halls, and subsidize publications; the newly created Committee for the Improvement of the Life of Scholars (Komissiia dlia uluchsheniia byta uchenykh, KUBU) dispensed food, medical help, housing assistance, and old-age benefits.17 In addition, the Political Education Department (Politprosvet) of Narkompros took on many of the outreach functions of the prerevolutionary science societies and gave these functions a “communist direction.”18 Many of 15

 A. P. Kupaigorodskaia and N. B. Lebina, “Dobrovol´nye obshchestva PetrogradaLeningrada v 1917–1937 gg.,” in Dobrovol´nye obshchestva v Petrograde-Leningrade v 1917–1937 gg.: Sbornik statei (Leningrad: Nauka, 1989), 4, 8. The most complete listings for Moscow and Petrograd can be found in the handy reference Nauka v Rossii, no. 1–2 (Petrograd, 1920, 1922). 16

 T. P. Korzhikhina, “Zakonodatel´nye istochniki po istorii obshchestvennykh organi­ zatsii SSSR,” in Vspomogatel´nye istoricheskie distsipliny, no. 18 (1987): 221–48, examples cited 223–24. Finkel also argues that the infrastructure of surveillance and control was not in place until after the Civil War (On the Ideological Front).

17  Tsentral´nyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy (TsIAM) f. 419 (Moscow Agricultural Society), op. 1, d. 2788 (“Izveshchenie ob ustroistve s˝ezdov, 1916–18”), ll. 141–141ob. Information gathering by Narkompros was the next step. See Tsentral´nyi arkhiv goroda Moskvy (TsAGM) f. 2246 (State Polytechnical Museum), op. 1, d. 11 (“Otchet o deiatel´nosti za 1919 g.”), ll. 121–22; Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. 2306 (People’s Commissariat of Public Enlightenment), op. 19, d. 63, ll. 43– 43ob. (“Voprosy o deiatel´nosti uchenykh komitetov, komissii, soveshchanii, sovetov ekspertov, konsul´tatsionnykh biuro i drugikh nauchnykh uchrezhdenii”). Science Di­ rectorate (Glavnauka) compiled lists of learned societies, unfortunately not all dated. GARF f. 2306, op. 19, d. 236, ll. 1–27 (“Spisok nauchnykh obshchestv”); f. 2307, op. 1, d. 96 (“Svodki nauchnykh uchrezhdenii, 1-go dekabria 1921 g.”), ll. 9–29 (“Spisok nauch­ nykh i nauchno-khudozhestvennykh uchrezhdenii”), 29–272ob. (“Spisok nauchnykh rabotnikov po spetsial´nostiam”). 18

 “Pervoe predosterezhenie,” Pravda, 31 August 1922, 1.

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the intelligentsia who had opposed the Bolsheviks but who had not fled the country tried to cooperate with the new regime in order to advance scholarship and education—and to survive.19 Annual reports indicate that most societies were not above requesting support from the new regime. The Geographical Society reported in 1922 that Anatolii Lunacharskii and others in Narkompros were always solicitous to the needs of the society and supported it in difficult times.20 The 1922–23 annual report of the Moscow Society of the Friends of Natural Science, Anthropology, and Ethnography captures well the sense of cautious optimism emerging from the Civil War years: “During 1918 and 1919, the members met in nooks and crannies of the city, without heat, light, or food, avoiding movement on the streets. 1920 was rather bad. We managed to do something in 1921, but not very much. In 1922 we got back into full swing and a real awakening started. And 1923 saw more of the same progress.”21 This fluid legal situation did not last long. In 1922 two resolutions of the All-Union Executive Committee required all associations and unions to register with the NKVD and to receive permission for all congresses and national meetings.22 The 1922 resolutions did not yet signal an intrusive state in an association’s internal affairs. Indeed, many societies operated under their prerevolutionary charters until as late as 1929. At the same time, supervisory powers over the leadership, mission, and activities of organizations cannot be

19

 Iu. V. Got´e, Time of Troubles: The Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich G´ot´e, Moscow, July 8, 1917 to July 23, 1922, trans. and ed. Terence Emmons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 330–35, 358. See also A. P. Kupaigorodskaia, “Kratkaia istoriia ob˝edinen­ nogo soveta nauchnykh uchrezhdenii i vysshikh uchebnykh zavedenii Petrograda, 1917–1922,” in Rossiia v XIX–XX vv.: Sbornik statei k 70-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia Rafaila Sholomovicha Ganelina, ed. A. A. Fursenko (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1998), 323. 20

 “Russkoe geograficheskoe obshchestvo v 1918–1922 godakh: Kratkii otchet Sekre­ tariata Obshchestva,” Izvestiia Russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva 55, 2 (1919–23): 173–98, quote on 177. 21

  Otchet o deiatel´nosti Obshchestva liubitelei estestvoznaniia, antropologii i etnografii za 1921/22–1923/24 gg. (Moscow: Obshchestvo liubitelei estestvoznaniia, antropologii i etnografii, 1925), 52.

22

 SU, no. 40, art. 477 (1922); no. 49, art. 622 (1922). See also the handy booklet Sbornik vazhneishikh deistvuiushchikh dekretov i rasporiazhenii Pravitel´stva ob organizatsii i deiatel´­ nosti raznogo roda obshchestv, soiuzov, artelei, tovarishchestv, religioznykh, kooperativnykh i trudovykh sel´sko-khoziaistvennykh ob”edinenii (Moscow: Narodnyi komissariat iustitsii, 1922), 5–11.

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ignored; though limited to registration and approval of charters, the NKVD had the power to close or restrict an association’s activities.23 Despite such material support provided by Narkompros and the Supreme Economic Council (Vysshii sovet narodnogo khoziaistva, VSNKh) to individual scholars and to scholarly organizations, the ideological and material disruptions of war and War Communism placed severe constraints on individual and associated intellectual life. The material deprivations are well known. “They have stopped heating us altogether,” Iu. V. Got´e wrote in February 1920, “and it is now below zero inside the building [the Rumiantsev Museum in Moscow]. The ink is freezing; the hands grow numb. No one comes to work and whoever does runs off to dinner. What kind of productive work is possible? Death, cold and hungry, is everywhere.”24 Perhaps more important than direct political or ideological repression of “bourgeois” associations were early Bolshevik financial measures that reduced the independence and sources of support for voluntary associations. Most of the small endowments of nongovernmental associations were invested in government bonds, the interest on which paid for the bulk of associations’ operating expenses; small imperial government subsidies, donations, membership dues, publication sales, and fees collected from a variety of services such as lectures, had been the other principal sources of income. However, on 27 December 1917 (N.S.) all private banks were nationalized. On 5 January 1918 interest and dividend payments on bonds and shares were canceled, and Treasury bonds and short-term notes ceased to draw interest. Finally, between December 1917 and April 1918, in Silvana Malle’s words, “withdrawals of deposits placed in current accounts before 1918 were restricted” and “all shares, bonds and interest-bearing notes were subject to registration.”25 By mid-1918, 23  A. I. Shchiglik, “Dobrovol´nye obshchestva v perekhodnyi period ot kapitalizma k sotsializmu,” in Voprosy teorii i istorii obshchestvennykh organizatsii, ed. Ts. A. Iampol´skaia and Shchiglik (Moscow: Nauka, 1971), 173–230, especially 207; Kupaigorodsakaia, “Kratkaia istoriia,” 330–31; Finkel, On the Ideological Front, 69. 24

 Got´e, Time of Troubles, 339; see also 84, 122, 267, 280.

25

 Silvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 158. See also Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (New York: Penguin, 1969), 50; and E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 2: 137–39. The principal decrees are in Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti, 1: 225–31, 390–91; 2: 130–38, 285. Authors who claim that War Communism began only after full-scale civil war broke out in the summer of 1918 emphasize caution and experimentation in early economic policies. Carr claims that the decree cancelling interest on Treasury bonds “excited no particular interest in Russia, where the inability as well as the unwillingness of the Soviet government to discharge the financial obligations of its predecessors was taken for granted” (2: 139). That was not the reaction of the officers of nongovernmental associations and of those who held

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many nongovernmental associations were deprived of their major means of existence and could continue operations only by relying on membership dues and donations.26 “There is nothing more terrible,” Got´e wrote in January 1918, “than an empty deserted bank in which former soldiers are holding sway.”27 The papers of the Free Economic Society repeatedly refer to the extreme hardship brought about by the inability to collect the interest on its endowment, the inability to draw on its bank account, and the lack of government subsidy; this forced the society to keep going by donations from members.28 Finally, “the headlong depreciation of the currency,” in E. H. Carr’s words, made the financial situation of nongovernmental associations even more untenable.29 According to M. M. Novikov, the former president of Moscow University who was later expelled on the “philosophers’ steamboat” in 1922, the atmosphere of the early Soviet years was one of “total personal insecurity, intolerable apartments, a shortage of clothing, and often one of semi-famine.”30 Scholars who had been part of an international scholarly community were now “under suspicion for their contacts abroad, for keeping in touch with foreign scholarship, and for receiving foreign publications.”31 Arrests and

interest-bearing accounts (B. V. Anan´ich, R. Sh. Ganelin, and V. M. Paneiakh, Vlast´ i reformy: Ot samoderzhavnoi k sovremennoi Rossii [St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1996], 716). A more personalized experience of these economic measures, especially the in­ trusions into private bank accounts, can be found in Got´e, Time of Troubles, 77–78, 85, 89, 96, 126, 199. 26  On the difficulties facing charitable societies, see “Kapital blagotvoritel´nykh ob­ shchestv,” Nashe vremia, 15/28 June 1918, 2. 27

 Got´e, Time of Troubles, 77–78, 85, 89, 96, 126, 199.

28

 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA) f. 91 (Free Economic Soci­ ety), op. 1, d. 217 (“Zhurnaly zasedanii Soveta i obshchikh sobranii, 1917–18”), ll. 201, 205 (“Zasedaniia Soveta,” 28 January 1918, 17 February 1918, 18 April 1918); op. 2, d. 416 (“Kratkii otchet o deiatel´nosti za 1918 g.”), l. 4ob. 29

 Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, 2: 246. See also Malle, Economic Organization, 195.

30

 M. M. Novikov, Ot Moskvy do N´iu-Iorka: Moia zhizn´ v nauke i politike (New York: Izdatel´stvo im. Chekhova, 1952), 299. See also Novikov, “Moskovskii universitet v pervyi period bol´shevitskogo rezhima,” in Moskovskii universitet, 1755–1930: Iubileinyi sbornik, ed. V. B. Eliashevich, A. A. Kizevetter, and Novikov (Paris: Sovremennye zapiski, 1930), 156–92, especially 168, 178–80.

31

 A. P. Kupaigorodskaia, “Pobuzhdeniia k emigratsii petrogradskoi intelligentsii,” in Zarubezhnaia Rossiia, 1917–1939 gg.: Sbornik statei, ed. V. Iu. Cherniaev (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii dom, 2000), 197–201, quote on 200. See also Novikov, “Moskovskii uni­ versitet,” 178, 194; and V. Stratonov, “Poteria Moskovskim universitetom svobody,” in Eliashevich, Kizevetter, and Novikov, Moskovskii universitet, 193–242, especially 205.

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searches, including of university buildings, became commonplace.32 A. P. Kupaigorodskaia concludes that the government control of ideology, ethics, and morals brought about “a sharp drop in living standards, research opportunity, intellectual autonomy, and free public action.”33 The closure of non-Bolshevik newspapers in July 1918 along with the collapse of the publishing market and the closure of most bookshops cut intellectuals off from their major sources of information as well as income.34 Even the most prominent societies were restricted to local activities, and experienced irregularity or cessation of publications, reduced contact with foreign societies and publications, a “famine” of scientific instruments and laboratory equipment, and lowered membership dues.35 Even a supporter of the new regime, the biologist B. M. Zavadovskii, decried the new isolation of scientists brought about by the disappearance of journals: “Thus, we have lost that simple way for society and specialists to keep up with scientific work. We are not only cut off from Western science, but we often do not know even what is going on in the laboratories of our own city, not to mention our own country.”36 Despite the preferential treatment that Kendall Bailes claims the scientific-technical intelligentsia received from the new authorities, a letter he quotes in Pravda by a provincial agronomist suggests otherwise: “It is difficult to describe the full horror of humiliations and sufferings caused at [the hands of local communists]: the constant, shameful denunciations and accusations, the futile but extremely humiliating searches, the threats of execution, the requisitions and confiscations, the meddling in the most intimate sides of personal life.”37 Thus, after October associations faced inconsistent Bolshevik policies, on the one hand, and neglect on the other. All suffered from the economic dis­ ruptions and deprivations, including the collapse of publishing and the book market. Indeed, early Bolshevik financial measures designed to eliminate

32

 Kupaigorodskaia, “Pobuzhdeniia,” 200; Got´e, Time of Troubles, 284, 294, 296, 340, 349, 372, 401; Mary McAuley, Bread and Justice: State and Society in Petrograd, 1917–1922 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 329.

33

 Kupaigorodskaia, “Pobuzhdeniia,” 201.

34

 Got´e, Time of Troubles, 176; McAuley, Bread and Justice, 327.

35

  L. B. Kamenev and N. S. Klestov-Angarskii, eds., Krasnaia Moskva 1917–1920 (Mos­ cow: Mossovet, 1920), 583. 36

 B. M. Zavadovskii, “Nauka v sovremennoi Rossii: Vpechatleniia o rabotakh petro­ gradskoi fiziologicheskoi laboratorii,” Krasnaia nov´, no. 4 (November–December 1921): 128–47, quote on 128.

37

 A Professor Dukelskii, an agronomist in Voronezh, quoted in Bailes, Technology and Society, 55.

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private capital and break the back of the bourgeoisie weakened voluntary associations as much as did policies aimed more directly at associations. Recalibration and Accommodation We can analyze the efforts of scientific societies to accommodate to Soviet power, to recalibrate their mission, and even to assert their autonomy by examining the experiences of five of prerevolutionary Russia’s most prominent societies: the Free Economic Society, the Pirogov Society of Russian Physicians, the Russian Technical Society, the Russian Geographical Society, and the Moscow Agricultural Society. Opposition to the Regime: Free Economic Society (VEO) Like most scientific and professional societies and institutions of learning, the VEO opposed the October coup.38 At meetings of 4 and 14 November 1917, VEO board members gave a bleak assessment of the situation. President N. V. Chaikovskii, a veteran of the populist movement of the 1870s and later a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, maintained that anarchy reigned and that the country was close to economic collapse. “Amidst the strains of war, democratic slogans only corrupt the blind masses. Criminal elements have attached themselves to the masses, and when anarchy is full blown, a dictator will emerge. And we socialists in white gloves wanted to run the government.”39 In late 1917, the VEO opposed the Bolshevik seizure of the state bank and the closing of the city councils. In reacting to the former, the board (sovet) of the VEO expressed its “outrage at the cynical encroachment by the Bolshevik usurpers on the national fortune of Russia and on the hardearned savings of the mass of the population deposited in the state bank as well as at the violent measures of the usurpers against the employees of the Ministry of Finance, who were simply doing their job. The VEO warmly wel­ comes the firm position and energetic struggle of the employees’ union of the Ministry of Finance against the illegality and violence of the Bolsheviks.”40 Not surprisingly, the VEO, which had welcomed the devolution of centralized power after the overthrow of autocracy and seized new opportunities to cultivate ties with other voluntary associations and with local government, spoke out against the closure of the city councils. Addressing the “citizens of 38

 Finkel, On the Ideological Front, 43. The Academy of Sciences, on the other hand, “did not organize a protest against the Bolshevik government, but did support the Constituent Assembly” (Tolz, Russian Academicians, 28).

39

 RGIA f. 91, op. 1, d. 217, ll. 66–66ob. (meeting of the board, 4 November 1917).

40

 Ibid., d. 896 (“Rezoliutsiia Soveta”), l. 2 (meeting of the board, 17 November 1917).

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the capital,” the VEO proclaimed that individuals “calling themselves peo­ ple’s commissars, who have already deceived many soldiers and workers, are preparing now to deceive the entire population of Petrograd.”41 But proposing effective courses of action was more difficult. Chaikovskii claimed that the VEO’s task was to “isolate the Bolsheviks” and, encouraged by the strikes of public employees following the Bolshevik seizure of power, to create a new center of power based on the “commonality among socialists and democratic professional organizations.”42 The zemstvo public health physician and VEO member M. M. Gran went further and argued that the VEO needed to organize the non-party intelligentsia: “There are many organizations of the professional intelligentsia; they must be led by the best Russian socialists—the Free Economic Society, the Russian Technical Society, etc. Everyone is tired of meetings and conversations; we must organize.”43 However, the consensus that the VEO was “non-party” and not in a position of meeting violence with violence prevented the society from becoming a center of organized opposition to the new regime. The danger, as Chaikovskii and Gran realized, was that the Bolsheviks would interpret appeals to the population from the VEO as “counterrevolutionary.” “We have no bayonets,” noted the Menshevik L. I. Aksel´rod.44 In the end, the VEO proposed several actions to “fortify the state-oriented democratic forces”: to organize symposia and reports on current economic and political problems and to create a forum (a “tribune”) for independent, non-party discussion and thereby “offer an organized rebuff to bolshevism.”45 The issue that most galvanized associations such as the VEO was the fate of the Constituent Assembly. A delegate and one of the most important champions of the Constituent Assembly and a leader of the anti-Bolshevik movement was VEO president Chaikovskii. At a board meeting of 17 November 1917, the VEO resolved to take measures to mobilize “broad public groups in the capital and in the provinces to protect the normal work of the Constituent Assembly and to organize in the next few days meetings of representatives of scientific societies, professional organizations, political parties, and cooperatives.” The topic of the meetings was posted bluntly: “All power to the Con-

41

 Ibid., l. 5 (meeting of the board, 17 November 1917).

42 43

 Ibid., d. 217, ll. 72ob. (meeting of the board, 14 November 1917).

 Ibid., ll. 72.

44 45

 Ibid., ll. 68 (meeting of the board, 4 November 1917).

 Ibid., ll. 66–66ob. (meeting of the board, 4 November 1917), 71; d. 896, l. 4 (meeting of the board, 17 November 1917).

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stituent Assembly.”46 Chaikovskii also joined the Committee to Defend the Constituent Assembly, established on 22–23 November and headquartered in the VEO building on Zabalkanskii Avenue in Petrograd.47 The VEO was well represented at the “All Power to the Constituent Assembly” meeting of 25 November. B. B. Veselovskii, the society’s secretary and editor of its Trudy (Transactions) in 1917 and best known for his history of the zemstvo, headed a special bureau of public organizations created at the meeting that, among other actions, appealed to all citizens to defend the Constituent Assembly.48 The VEO’s vigorous support of the Constituent Assembly, and its efforts to reach workers and soldiers, in whose name the Bolsheviks claimed to speak, no doubt provoked armed retaliation on the part of the authorities. On 18 December a conference of workers and soldiers organized by the Committee to Defend the Constituent Assembly and held on VEO premises was broken up by a detachment of Red Guards.49 On the night of 10 January 1918 at 7 p.m., an unidentified commissar accompanied by thirty armed sailors and Red Guards entered the premises and arrested two members of the union sitting in the hall. The commissar grabbed some papers and went to the meeting hall, where he arrested fifteen more people. The sailors released six of the fifteen arrested and left at 9 p.m. with the remaining nine whose “attempts to sing were rudely stopped.” At 10 p.m., there was a banging on the gate and fifty more armed sailors started a second search, ignoring the superintendent’s helpful mention that there had already been a search. The sailors were none too gentle: several shelves were broken, locks on desks were broken, papers were strewn about, and card catalogues were dumped on the floor. “All the while [the sailors] threatened with abusive words, bayonets, and arrest” before leaving at 12 a.m.50 46

 Ibid., d. 896, l. 5; d. 217, l. 76 (meeting of the board, 17 November 1917); op. 2, d. 400 (“Povestki i priglasheniia na s˝ezdy, sovety, 1916–18”), l. 135 (“Priglashenie na sobranie ‘Vsia vlast´ Uchreditel´nomu sobraniiu’”). See also Boris Sokolov, “Zashchita Vserossiiskogo uchreditel´nogo sobraniia,” Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii 13 (1924): 5–70.

47

 S. P. Mel´gunov, N. V. Chaikovskii v gody grazhdanskoi voiny: Materialy dlia istorii russkoi obshchestvennosti, 1917–1925 gg. (Paris: Rodnik, 1929), 34–35; Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, 70. 48

 RGIA f. 91, op. 1, d. 217, l. 78–78ob. (meeting of the board, 26 November 1917).

49

 A detachment of Red Guards broke up one meeting. An account is in Nash vek, 20 December 1917, 3; “Razgon Soiuza zashchity Uchreditel´nogo sobraniia,” Novaia Petro­ gradskaia gazeta, 17 December 1917, 3.

50  RGIA f. 91, op. 1, d. 217, ll. 199–200ob. (meeting of the board, 19 January 1918); and d. 685 (“Dokladnaia zapiska”), ll. 1–1ob. The search was reported by B. B. Veselovskii at a board meeting one week later. Coverage in the Petrograd newspapers may be found in “Nalet na Vol´noe ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo,” Nash vek, 12/25 January

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Yet even a society as openly anti-Bolshevik as the VEO got mixed signals from the Soviet authorities. Throughout 1918 the VEO received invitations to participate in a variety of nongovernmental and governmental commissions and conferences—a recognition of the expertise of its members. In December 1918 the VSNKh invited the VEO to send a representative to its FinancialEconomic Council, since the “participation on the council of the best scholarly forces is important.” In January and February 1919, the Nikolaev Railroad asked the VEO to help in an economic survey of the region between Petrograd and Moscow. The Commissariat of Agriculture (Narkomzem) asked the VEO to serve in its publishing division, and the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) asked the Statistical Division of the VEO to send any of its pub­ lications pertaining to the roads in the region.51 However, there is no trace of the VEO’s activities after early 1919. Dominated by liberals and moderate socialists, many of whom were po­litical economists and educators rather than natural scientists per se, the VEO had been a thorn in the paw of the tsarist authorities before 1917. In the fall and winter of 1917–18 the VEO aided and abetted opposition groups and was a staunch defender of the Constituent Assembly; it provided meeting space and intellectual armor to the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly, one of the many organizations labeled “counterrevolutionary” by the Bolsheviks. To be sure, some prominent members made peace with the new regime: Veselovskii, the former VEO secretary, held posts in Gosplan and other state agencies, and the prominent educator V. I. Charnoluskii worked in Narkompros. But many leaders and prominent members of the VEO openly opposed the Bolsheviks. Chaikovskii headed the anti-Bolshevik National Government of the North in Arkhangel´sk in 1918, joined Denikin’s government in 1919, and was a member of the Political Conference in Paris before emigrating to London in 1920. The Kadet F. I. Rodichev, a delegate to the Constituent Assembly, escaped arrest in Petrograd and participated in anti-Bolshevik activities in southern Russia before emigrating to Paris in 1920. The zemstvo statistician and journalist A. V. Peshekhonov and the economist Boris Brutskus were expelled on the “philos­ophers’ steamboat” in 1922. Not surprisingly, there is no trace of VEO activity after 1919. 1918, 4; “Obyski i aresty,” Novaia zhizn´, 12/25 January 1918, 3. “Obyski i aresty” was a rubric containing many other entries. The breaking up of meetings on the premises of private organizations was not confined to political meetings, as “Razgrom klubov” testifies (Nash vek, 2 December 1917, 4). 51

 Cited passage in RGIA f. 91, op. 2, d. 400, l. 205; see also ll. 206–10 (“Priglasheniia raznye”). See also ibid., op. 1, d. 217, ll. 201–05 (meeting of the board, 28 January 1918 and 17/4 February 1918); d. 400, ll. 171, 178, 180, 191–92 (“Priglasheniia raznye”); and d. 416 (“Kratkii otchet o deiatel´nosti za 1918 g.”), l. 4ob.

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Recalibrating Professional Interests: The Pirogov Society of Russian Physicians Few associations were more enthusiastic in welcoming the February Revolution than the Pirogov Society of Russian Physicians. From its founding in 1883, the Pirogov Society, and especially its periodic congresses, had been the principal organizational framework for community physicians, eager to assert their expertise in matters of public health; the society had long been both a science society and a professional society. By early 1917, membership had swelled to 1,500, making it one of the largest of Russia’s science societies.52 Scientific societies organized a dizzying number of congresses in 1917, in part, no doubt, simply to celebrate the greater freedom to convene publicly.53 The Pirogov Society was no exception, convening the Extraordinary Congress of Russian Physicians on 4–8 April in Moscow, billed as a congress of “free citizens of a free Russia” and “the First Revolutionary Pirogov Congress.”54 The congress gave equivocal support to the Provisional Government and lauded the Petrograd Soviet as “the bulwark for the decisive and complete democratization of the country against attempts at counterrevolution.”55 The congress proposed creating an all-Russian physicians’ union, a union of unions that would encompass local and specialists’ unions. The congress eagerly anticipated the opportunity to dismantle the prerevolutionary government medical establishment, to reorganize Russian medicine and public health, to create a national medical council with representatives from public physicians, and to grant more authority to local bodies of self-government.56 Indeed, through many administrative appointments in the Provisional Government and by using the new Central Medical-Sanitary Council, established in June to coordinate public health policies, as a power base, the Pirogov Society, according

52

 Peter Krug, “Russian Public Physicians and Revolution: The Pirogov Society, 1917– 1920” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1979), 1, 18, 58.

53

 The files of MOSKh suggest many congresses in the realm of agriculture alone. See TsIAM f. 419, op. 1, d. 2788, ll. 63–65, 73–74, 79–83, 96–97 (“Ob ustroistve raznykh s˝ezdov”); d. 147 (Council of All-Russian Cooperative Congresses), l. 1; d. 140 (convoca­ tion of the All-Russian Congress on Agricultural Assistance), ll. 1–2, 35–36.

54

  Vrachebnaia gazeta, 7 May 1917, 324. For more on the congress, see Krug, “Russian Public Physicians,” 101–12; and John F. Hutchinson, Politics and Public Health in Revolu­ tionary Russia, 1890–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 149–53.

55

 “Chrezvychainyi Pirogovskii s˝ezd,” Meditsinskoe obozrenie 87, 11–12 (1917): 418–33, quotation on 431.

56

 “Chrezvychainyi Pirogovskii s˝ezd,” 423–25, 429–30.

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to Peter Krug, had more say in public health matters in 1917 than before or since.57 Seven months later the Pirogov Society condemned the Bolshevik seizure of power in a resolution at a board meeting of 22 November and in a statement to fellow doctors published in its professional journal, Obshchestvennyi vrach (Public Physician).58 Stating that the society could not remain silent before “events which are destroying the fundamental principles of a democratic order and bringing the country to disorder and destruction,” the board called on all physicians to fight against the Bolsheviks. Russia, the statement of the board continued, had become the “victim of political adventurists,” and had been made the object of “mindless social experiments carried out on its bloodless body by a throng of political fanatics” whose demagoguery and promises … gave license for the debauchery of ignorant elements.… The Bolsheviks have destroyed civil liberties, inviolability of person and domicile, the freedoms of speech, press, association, and the right to strike. They have destroyed the judicial system and created favorable conditions for frontier justice, set some groups of the population against others, dragged into the mud the achievements of the [February] Revolution. The Pirogov Society condemned physicians “who participate in violence and who consciously or unconsciously cooperate in the destruction of moral and cultural values…. The immoral, anti-democratic, uncivil character of the usurpers is so great and the unhappiness they have wrought is so great that every morally healthy physician must find the resolve and civic duty to separate himself from physicians in the camp of the perpetrators of violence.”59 57

 M. A. Neviadomskii, “Dva s˝ezda,” Obshchestvennyi vrach, no. 6–8 (1917): 43. Among the Pirogov members on the council were P. N. Diatroptov, editor of Obshchestvennyi vrach, D. Ia. Dorf, Z. G. Frenkel´, and Ia. Iu. Kats. In addition, V. A. Levitskii, A. N. Sysin, L. A. Tarasevich, and Z. P. Solov´ev were appointed to posts in the expanding public health programs of the Union of Zemstvos and Union of Towns. See A. N. Sysin, “Tsentral´nyi vrachebno-sanitarnyi sovet pri Vremennom Pravitel´stve,” Obshchest­ vennyi vrach, no. 1–3 (1917): 155–57; “Khronika: Soiuznye ob˝edineniia vrachei,” Obshchestvennyi vrach, no. 1 (1918): 10. See also Krug, “Russian Public Physicians,” 112–16; and Finkel, On the Ideological Front, 71–72. 58

 The quotes that follow are from “K tovarishcham vracham ot Pravleniia Obshchestva russkikh vrachei v pamiat’ N. I. Pirogova,” Obshchestvennyi vrach, no. 9–10 (1917): 79– 80. See also Krug, “Russian Public Physicians,” 128–33; and Hutchinson, Politics and Public Health, 175–85. 59

 “K tovarishcham vracham,” 80.

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By the time the Pirogov Congress of Russian Physicians convened in March 1918, the Bolsheviks had dismantled the organizations where the Pirogov physicians had power such as the Medical-Sanitary Council, as well as the zemstvos and city councils, which embodied the principles of local authority, so important to the ethos of the Pirogov community physicians.60 A succession of speakers denounced the October seizure of power and subsequent Bolshevik governance and presented checklists of disasters facing Russia. The Bolsheviks had “taken measures from the darkest years of autocracy” to “destroy the entire system of Russian public medicine” and to drive out elected collegial bodies. Local self-government and the zemstvo idea “have been replaced by the class struggle,” one speaker stated. “The destructive work of the Bolsheviks has crippled the public health system, fragile and built on collegiality, public accountability, business-like relations between the center and the periphery, and the autonomy of physicians.… The regime ruling now, in the last days of the Russian revolution, has disorganized and destroyed public medicine with more mercilessness and ignorance than anything like it before.” Speakers accused the Bolsheviks (and, perhaps more important, Bol­ shevik physicians) of a “bacchanalia of power grabbing.”61 A combination of professional and political issues suggests an explanation for the intensity of the reaction against the Bolsheviks on the part of the congress participants. For one, the Bolsheviks were seen to be responsible for the rise of “a cheap and illiterate medicine, an independent feldsherism [claims by fel´dshers or physicians’ assistants for greater professional autonomy and importance], an increase in sorcery, and a reduction in hospitalization of the sick [which] have caused an outbreak of epidemics, empty clinics, rising death rates, and a lowering of medical standards.”62 A “crude” centralization has “killed local initiative and has “returned us to the seventeenth-century Muscovite structure.”63 Physicians had lost their independence and had become “beholden to collectives,” claimed the organ of the Pirogov Society. “The public physician is used to working under difficult conditions. He asks only

60

 “Poslednie sobytiia,” Obshchestvennyi vrach, no. 1 (1918): 1; Krug, “Russian Public Physicians,” 137. 61

 All quotes are from Neviadomskii, “Dva s˝ezda,” Obshchestvennyi vrach, no. 8 (1918): 65–67; and no. 9–10 (1918): 74–76. The author does not identify the speakers. 62

 Neviadomskii, “Dva s˝ezda,” no. 9–10 (1918): 75–76. As Peter Krug points out, the physician-fel´dsher rivalry was a wedge used effectively by the Bolsheviks. The Pirogov tradition had been one of a “search for professional autonomy and recognition of the primacy of competence in public health affairs” (“Russian Public Physicians,” 241).

63

 Neviadomskii, “Dva s˝ezda,” no. 9–10 (1918): 74.

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that organizational principles developed over decades of practice not be destroyed, that his competence be honored, and that his voice not be muffled.”64 The major Bolshevik organs reciprocated in their denunciation of the community physicians in general and of the Pirogov Society and congresses in particular. The majority of doctors, according to Pravda, “have abandoned the ranks of defenders of the people and have gone over to the ranks of the enemies of the proletariat.”65 A Commissar Korzhinskii of the collegium of the Commissariat of Health Protection (Narkomzdrav) claimed that “the Pirogov Society has not only become openly opposed to the soviets but has also become an organization of the counterrevolution.”66 Despite its vehement denunciation of the Bolshevik seizure of power, the Pirogov Society was not liquidated immediately; indeed, it demonstrated a certain degree of accommodation with the new regime. Peter Krug argues that despite the Pirogov physicians’ allegiance to the zemstvos, their rejection of “the transfer of public medicine to Soviet organizations,” and their anti-Bolshevik pronouncements, the “zemstvo physicians remained at their posts.”67 Beginning in 1918, prominent public health physicians “started to integrate into the new administrative structure.” At the same time, according to Krug, the more “political” physicians left the Pirogov Society, “leaving the leadership more in the hands of the ‘professionals.’” Despite their adherence to collegiality and distrust of centralized medicine, when they found out that they were not losing their jobs, the Pirogov “professionals” were willing to work with the authorities toward the goal of improved public health.68 As of 1 July 1922, the society still had 1,229 members.69 However, the society became caught up in the politics of Bolshevik union­ ization. The tsarist government had made professional unions and national amalgamations of voluntary societies extremely difficult, fearing that such unions would turn to politics and claim to represent the nation. After the overthrow of the monarchy, however, the pent-up desire among members of voluntary associations for open collaboration and official amalgamation in 64

  Biulleteni zhurnala “Obshchestvennyi vrach,” no. 1 (1919): 3.

65

 Pravda, 18 March 1918, quoted in Neviadomskii, “Dva s˝ezda,” Obshchestvennyi vrach, no. 8 (1918): 66.

66

 “Khronika: Tret´ia Pirogovskaia epidemiologicheskaia komissiia,” Obshchestvennyi vrach, no. 9–10 (1918): 90. 67

 Krug, “Russian Public Physicians,” 121, 161.

68

 Ibid., quotations on 145, 146; see also 176, 185, 202, 282–90.

69

 D. N. Zhbankov, “Pirogovskaia khronika,” Obshchestvennyi vrach, no. 2 (1922): 119– 21. See also Krug, “Russian Public Physicians,” 94, 269–70. By Krug’s estimates, the society had 1,500 members in early 1917 but declined to 845 in 1919.

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order to advocate professional interests appeared to be realizable. After the February Revolution, many physicians’ unions sprang up. In May 1917 Pirogov Society leaders proposed an umbrella organization, the All-Russian Amal­ gamated Physicians’ Union (Vserossiiskii soiuz professional´nykh ob˝edinenii vrachei, VSPOV, in its Russian initials; constituted in March 1918) to defend the professional interests of physicians and to address problems of public health. However, the Bolshevik union model was not the trade, craft, or professional union, relentlessly criticized as being “corporatist” or “caste-like,” but rather the industrial model that organized all workers in one branch of industry. Accordingly, in 1919 a single union, the All-Russian Union of Medical and Sanitary Workers (Vserossiiiskii professional´nyi soiuz rabotnikov lechebnosanitarnogo dela, VPSRLSD, in its Russian initials) was created to unite all those employed in the “medical industry.”70 When VSPOV was liquidated in 1920, its leaders formed a physicians’ section within VPSRLSD. But VPSRLSD declared its opposition to officially registering the Pirogov Society with the NKVD, claiming that the society was “opposed to Soviet power” and allegedly excluded communist members. The arrest in 1922 of several members of the physicians’ section of the VPSRLSD for allegedly counterrevolutionary activ­ ities, added an ominous note to the matter.71 The fact that Article 29 of the Pirogov charter (that the NKVD was being asked to approve) gave the Pirogov Society the right to organize branches throughout the Russian Federation, when combined with the preference of Pirogov physicians for “self-organized collectivities of physicians, freely formed by local initiative,” made it clear to the VPSRLSD that the Pirogov Society wanted to carry out a “caste policy” and prevent the VPSRLSD from uniting all medical personnel into one union.72 At the second congress of the VPSRLSD in May 1922, a resolution stated that the “present moment required the active collaboration of Russian physicians in proletarian organizations.… Therefore, Russian physicians must affirm their solidarity with the proletariat in the union movement and enter the union of medical workers.”73 In July 1924, the NKVD’s Commission to 70

 Krug, “Russian Public Physicians,” 145. See also M. D. Kovrigina, ed., Sorok let sovetskogo zdravookhraneniia (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo meditsinskoi lit­ eratury, 1957), 630, 636–39; Finkel, On the Ideological Front, 70–72.

71

 Finkel, On the Ideological Front, 73–75.

72

 Quote of Pirogov physicians Katz and Vigdorchuk at the second congress of the VPSRLSD, 10–14 May 1922, in GARF f. 5465 (Central Committee of the Medical Workers’ Unions), op. 4, d. 286a (“Protokoly, rezoliutsii, mandaty delegatov II-go Vserossiiskogo s˝ezda vrachebnykh sektsii profsoiuza ‘Vsemediksantrud,’ 10–14 maia 1922 g.”), l. 16.

73

 GARF f. 5465, op. 4, d. 286a, l. 10 (“Rezoliutsiia k dokladu o profsoiuzakh”); d. 295 (All-Russian Union of Medical and Public Health Workers), ll. 1–1ob.

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Approve the Charters of Associations refused to register the Pirogov Society on the grounds that the society was not a scientific society but a professional organization.74 Thus, the Pirogov Society did not fit the industrial union model and challenged the single-union monopoly, the aim of Bolshevik policy. After 1924 there is no trace of its existence. New Opportunities for Engineers: The Russian Technical Society The Russian Technical Society (RTO) operated in a realm given much higher priority than medicine by the Soviet authorities. A decree of Sovnarkom on 16 August 1918 created a Scientific and Technical Division of VSNKh to mobilize science and technology. In this division were scientific commissions that consisted of representatives from higher educational institutions and scientific and technical societies, including the RTO, charged with reviewing proposals to fund research.75 The RTO did not fare badly under the new regime, receiving subsidies from Narkompros.76 Even in difficult times, the RTO managed to continue to operate 16 divisions, including very active divisions of electricity and economics; it continued to run vocational schools and technical classes.77 It studied all manner of economic and technical problems from the 74

 GARF f. 2307 (Science Directorate of the People’s Commissariat of Public Enlight­ enment), op. 9 (Secretariat), d. 183 (“Ustav Obshchestva russkikh vrachei”), l. 2 (Com­ mission to Improve the Charters of Societies); f. 393 (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the RSFSR), op. 43a, d. 1817a (“Protokoly zasedanii Komissii pri NKVD po utverzhdeniiu i registratsii ustavov obshchestv, 1922–27”), l. 5 (“Zakliucheniia Gosu­ darstvennogo politicheskogo upravleniia, Narodnogo komissariata zdravookhraneniia i Vsemediksantruda”); d. 1822 (“Protokoly zasedaniia Komissii pri NKVD po utverzh­ deniiu i registratsii ustavov obshchestv, 1922–23”), ll. 288, 318, 320 (meetings of the commission). See also Finkel, On the Ideological Front, 76–77.

75

 N. G. Filippov, Nauchno-tekhnicheskie obshchestva SSSR, 1917–1941: Uchebnoe posobie (Moscow: Moskovskii gosudarstvennyi istoriko-arkhivnyi institut, 1977), 10; K. A. Timiriazev, Nauka v Sovetskoi Rossii za piat´ let (Moscow: Krasnaia Nov´, Glavpolit­ prosvet, 1922), 8; Bailes, Technology and Society, 56–57.

76

 N. N. Gritsenko, Nauchno-tekhnicheskie obshchestva SSSR: Istoricheskii ocherk (Moscow: Profizdat, 1968), 93. 77

 RGIA f. 90 (Russian Technical Society), op. 1, d. 988 (“Otchety kursov Postoiannoi komissii po tekhnicheskomu obrazovaniiu”), ll. 1–5; GARF f. 2307, op. 2 (Scientific Division), d. 382 (“Doklad o deiatel´nosti Russkogo tekhnicheskogo obshchestva i perepiska s obshchestvom, 1918–22”), ll. 14–15 ob. (“Otchet o deiatel´nosti”); “Russkoe tekhnicheskoe obshchestvo,“ Biulleten´ VAI i KUBU, no. 2 (1922): 14. The annual report of 1922 listed 584 members of the RTO, most of whom had been members for many years. See GARF f. 2307, op. 1, d. 58 (“Otchety otdelov Glavnauki za 1918–23 gg.”), l. 43 (“Otchet o deiatel´nosti Russkogo tekhnicheskogo obshchestva za 1922 g.”). For more on the RTO’s activities, see RGIA f. 90, op. 1, d. 145 (“Zhurnaly zasedanii Soveta RTO 1922 g.”), l. 47 (“Sovmestnoe zasedanie RTO, Komissii dlia uluchsheniia byta

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economic consequences of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, to municipal services, refrigeration, and the plans for a Petrograd metro. Trying to impress the new authorities with its importance, the RTO claimed that its technical reports and opinions on many technical and economic matters “could be considered authoritative,” and that the expense that went into its reports and publications would be worth it since they exposed ideas and projects to “a broad public opinion” (glasnost´).78 In the end, however, the RTO, like the Pirogov Society, faced unionization problems, albeit a bit later in time. In May 1917 the All-Russian Union of Engi­ neers (Vserossiiskii soiuz inzhenerov, VSI) was formed. According to Kendall Bailes, the Soviet government refused to recognize the VSI as a separate trade union for engineers and “tried to bring workers and technical specialists closer together as members of the same branch industrial unions.”79 In 1919 the AllRussian Association of Engineers (Vserossiiskaia assotsiatsiia inzhenerov, VAI) replaced the VSI, as a professional society rather than a union. The VAI acted as an umbrella organization that allowed prerevolutionary technical societies to federate while maintaining their institutional independence. Although the new government recognized associations like the VAI that at­ tempted to unite specialists in several disciplines in a national organization, it did not want them to become a forum for professional interests.80 In this context, the RTO faced another bête-noir of the new regime: duplication of function. The RTO more and more was seen as superfluous, and the NKVD held up the registration of its charter. Nevertheless, in the years 1925–28, as correspondence with the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovet narodnykh komissarov, SNK), the Academy of Sciences, and the NKVD reveals, the RTO carried on a campaign to convince the authorities of its importance to Soviet economic development. The RTO had supporters in high places, chiefly in the Scientific-Technical Department of the VSNKh. In 1926 even NKVD chief V. G. Beloborodov favored NKVD registration of the RTO on the grounds that uchenykh, Vserossiiskoi assotsiatsii inzhenerov, 14 avgusta 1922”); d. 12 (“Doklad uchenoi sektsii obshchemu sobraniiu”), l. 2 (“Itogi rabot Obshchestva za 1921 g.”); Ekonomist, no. 1 (1922): 183. 78

 GARF f. 2307, op. 2, d. 382, ll. 3–5 (RTO to Council of People’s Commissars of the Petrograd Commune, 12, 21 May 1918 g.), 27 (“Poiasnitel´naia zapiska k sokrashchennoi smete Russkogo tekhnicheskogo obshchestva za ianvar´–iiun´ 1919 g.”). 79

 Bailes, Technology and Society, 46, quote on 58.

80

 Gritsenko, Nauchno-tekhnicheskie obshchestva SSSR, 93–96; Vucinich, Empire of Knowl­ edge, 77–78; Shchiglik, “Dobrovol´nye obshchestva,” 192–93; Bailes, Technology and So­ ciety, 102–06, 110–13; T. P. Korzhikhina, Obshchestvennye organizatsii SSSR v 1917–1936 gg. (Moscow, 1981), 52–53; N. G. Filippov, Nauchno-tekhnicheskie obshchestva Rossii, 1866– 1917 (Moscow: Moskovskii gosudarstvennyi istoriko-arkhivnyi institut, 1976), 18.

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it possessed experience, expertise, infrastructure, and European members.81 However, internal NKVD correspondence suggests that overlapping functions with VAI were only one strike against the RTO. A questionnaire of the RTO leadership submitted to the NKVD in 1928 (a common exercise required of all associations in the registration process) showed that none was a member of the Communist Party.82 More important, the president of the RTO, P. A. Pal´chinskii, allegedly one of the “most important and dangerous enemies of the party,” was arrested three times in 1917, 1922, and 1928.83 According to an OGPU report in 1928, the RTO was allegedly led by “persons not inspiring political trust in their activities.” The OGPU was “categorically opposed” to the registration of the RTO since among its members were a “significant number of the reactionary intelligentsia who are trying to use the society to exercise their harmful influence.”84 Upon the recommendation of the OGPU and Rabkrin and in the aftermath of the Shakhty Trial, in 1929 both VAI and RTO were liquidated. In the words of the Rabkrin committee, RTO was deemed a “lifeless organization, cut off from the Soviet public and not meeting the economic needs of the USSR.”85

81

 GARF f. 393, op. 43a, d. 1060 (“Delo ob utverzhdenii ustava Russkogo tekhnicheskogo obshchestva”), ll. 85–91 (“Zadachi tekhniki v sovremennom khoziaistvennom stroitel´stve i mesto Russkogo tekhnicheskogo obshchestva v nem”); l. 20 (“Mnenie Administrativno-finansovoi komissii Sovnarkoma SSSR 15 maia 1925”), ll. 58–59 (Academy of Sciences President A. P. Karpinskii to SNK, 30 November 1926); ll. 56 (V. G. Beloborodov to N. P. Gorbunov, Secretary of SNK, 2 December 1926); ll. 64–69 (V. Starostin [President of RTO], “Ob˝iasnitel´naia zapiska k ustavu Russkogo tekhnicheskogo obshchestva, 1928”). All citations here from Hoover Institution Archive, Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and Soviet State (hereafter Archives of the Soviet Communist Party, reel no. 3.4495).

82

 GARF f. 393, op. 43a, d. 1060, ll. 82–84 (“Anketnye svedeniia o 14-i aktivnykh chlenov Russkogo tekhnicheskogo obshchestva,” 1 August 1928) [Archives of the Soviet Communist Party, reel no. 3.4495].

83

 GARF f. 3348 (P. I. Pal´chinksii), op. 1, d. 27, l. 31; A. I. Delitskoi, “P. A. Pal´chinskii v poslednie mesiatsy zhizni, 1928–1929 gg.,” Voprosy istorii, no. 7 (2010): 139–44, quote on 139. See also Finkel, On the Ideological Front, 81. 84  GARF f. 393 op. 43a, d. 1060, l. 99 (“Dokladnaia zapiska OGPU 10 avgusta 1928 g.”); l. 128 (Leningrad Province Division of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, “Vyvody i predlozheniia po obsledovaniiu Russkogo tekhnicheskogo obshchestva,” 21 June 1929) [Archives of the Soviet Communist Party, reel no. 3.4495]. 85

 GARF f. 393, op. 43a, d. 1060, l. 128 (“Zakrytie Russkogo tekhnicheskogo obshchestva”).

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Recovery in the Center and on the Periphery: The Russian Geographical Society The Russian Geographical Society (RGO) provides an example of a learned society that experienced hardship during the war, revolution, and civil war but was able to recover and, in the process, partly to reaffirm, partly to recalibrate its mission. Of course, the story of deprivation is also a story of triumph over adversity. Its deprivations followed a familiar pattern. During the war, the society had to cut back on scientific research, expeditions, and foreign and domestic travel. The upper floor of its building in St. Petersburg was given over to a hospital for the wounded. After 1917, the deprivations intensified. The Civil War cut off the society from Western scholarship and even from the work of its own branches. It became necessary “to defend the building from other organizations that wanted to get it, one for a ballet school, another for some kind of club.”86 The RGO had always had a strictly scholarly purpose, and in no small way, it owed its recovery to its ability both to stick to its prerevolutionary mission and to recalibrate that mission in light of new political realities. Although before 1917 it had begun to advocate greater autonomy from the state, its leaders and members stayed apolitical, unlike those of VEO and the Pirogov Society. Like many scientists, most notably members of the Academy of Sciences, they were willing to accommodate to the new regime. Although perhaps no prerevolutionary society was identified more with Imperial Russia than was the RGO, an ethic of service to science as well as to the nation and to whatever state ruled the nation’s territory was particularly strong among members of the RGO.87 Iu. M. Shokal´skii, a former tsarist naval officer, who became vice president at the outbreak of the war and president upon the resignation of Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich after the overthrow of the monarchy, referred to October 1917 as “the greatest revolution in the world” and tirelessly campaigned on behalf of the society before the authorities.88 S. F. Ol´denburg, head of the ethnographic division, despite having been a member of the Kadet Party and minister of education under the Provisional 86

  I. Iu. Krachkovskii, ed., Pamiati Iu. M. Shokal´skogo: Sbornik statei i materialov, 2 vols. (Leningrad, 1946), 1: 66, quotation on 134; G. N. Sokolovskii, “Geograficheskoe ob­ shchestvo za poslednie 10 let,” Nauchnyi rabotnik, no. 12 (1927): 36–45; GARF f. 2307, op. 2, d. 354 (Russian Geographical Society), l. 13 (report of the RGO to the Science Directorate, 8 December 1922).

87

  Krachkovskii, Pamiati Iu. M. Shokal´skogo, 1: 134. See also L. S. Berg, Vsesoiuznoe geograficheskoe obshchestvo za 100 let (Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1946), 208; V. P. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, To, chto proshlo: V dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2009), 2: 49.

88

 Sokolovskii, “Geograficheskoe obshchestvo,” 36.

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Government, advocated support of the new regime.89 In the society’s account of the years 1918–22, the RGO “stayed true to its purposes” and saw no need to make fundamental changes in its charter. It reaffirmed its long-time “service to the state” and made available the results of its scientific work and expertise “whenever requested.”90 Contact with foreign associations was renewed in 1922, and the RGO’s Izvestiia reappeared in 1923. Even more important, after 1917 the RGO was more attentive to the needs of outreach and of practical work. It aspired to popularize geography among a broader public, all the while with a patriotic emphasis on “the native land.” Its practical work (for example, the RGO’s involvement in the study of regional productive forces, in the 1918 census, and in the creation of Russian time zones in 1919) brought the RGO in closer contact with government scientists and economists.91 On the eve of World War I, the RGO had seven branches stretching from Vilno in the west to Irkutsk and Khabarovsk in the east. The war, revolution, and Civil War and the attendant population upheaval and economic disloca­ tion had their impact also on the branch societies, and one can read the same stories of hardship, of interruptions, if not stoppages, in scientific work, pub­ lications, and expeditions. The existence of the Semipalatinsk division of the West Siberian branch “hung on a thread.” The East Siberian branch in Irkutsk resorted to barter arrangements to fund research by its members. The de­ struction of local monuments and the threat to museum, library, and archive collections suddenly thrust to the fore issues of historic preservation; even the threat of the death penalty for the plunder of archives failed to prevent theft as well as physical deterioration.92 As private property was nationalized, the legal status of valuable collections was uncertain, and “there were constant 89

 On Ol´denburg, see Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 22–24, 58–59. As Hirsch recounts it, the accommodation of the Academy of Sciences matched closely that of the RGO. 90

 “Russkoe geograficheskoe obshchestvo v 1918–1922,” 173–74; GARF f. 130, op. 4, d. 631 (Council of People’s Commissars: Reports, Materials), l. 31 (meeting of the Small Council of People’s Commissars, 11 January 1920 g.). 91

 “Russkoe geograficheskoe obshchestvo v 1918–1922,” 175; Semenov, To, chto proshlo, 2: 41, 53; I. B. Kostrits and D. M. Pinkhenson, Geograficheskoe obshchestvo Soiuza SSR za 50 let, 1917–1967 (Moscow: Mysl´, 1968), 3; Geograficheskoe obshchestvo za 125 let (Leningrad: Nauka, 1970), 14, 21, 216, 302, 358. Kostrits and Pinkhenson claim that the RGO became “a truly mass public organization,” but its membership at 1,318 in 1918 and 900 in 1923 was hardly at the level of the “mass” voluntary associations of the 1920s (10). 92

 Russkoe geograficheskoe obshchestvo, Semipalatinskii otdel, Ocherk deiatel´nosti za 25 let (Semipalatinsk, 1927), 7; “Obzor deiatel´nosti za 75 let, 1851–1926,” Izvestiia Vostochno-Sibirskogo otdela Russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva, 50, vyp. 1 (1927): 59, 90. See also Obzor deiatel´nosti Zabaikal´skogo otdela za 30 let, 1894–1924 (Chita, 1924), 45; “Ocherk 50-letnei deiatel´nosti Zapadno-Sibirskogo otdela,” in Zapiski ZapadnoSibirskogo otdela Russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva 39 (1927): 6–7.

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threats to the integrity of property and to the society itself,” especially from local soviet organs. In 1921 Narkompros took the library and the museum away from the West Siberian branch, creating “much conflict and discord among the members.”93 But the priorities of the new regime also offered new opportunities in the provinces. New members brought new interests. Before the revolution, the governor-general had “forced local officials to join.” However, since officials never had time to go on expeditions, the society encouraged teachers, who were free in the summer, to join. This membership trend continued after the revolution, as the “membership consisted less and less of military men and more and more of civil servants and professionals, especially teachers.”94 Along with membership changes came a new enthusiasm for local and regional research, part of a larger “kraevedenie” project to promote the study of Russia’s regions.95 In the opinion of V. P. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, head of the Statistics Division of the RGO and son of the famous explorer, the Soviet government “eagerly” offered work “to all who neither openly nor secretly opposed the regime.”96 Thus, although perhaps no prerevolutionary society was identified more with Imperial Russia than was the Russian Geographic Society, it also stayed far away from political and professional issues and successfully took advantage of new opportunities and priorities. It offered its service to science and to the new regime and was never closed. Representation and Advocacy: The Moscow Agricultural Society During the war the Moscow Agricultural Society (MOSKh) had had to cut back its activities: members were either drafted or were involved in other organizations working for the war effort; there was not even a quorum for the meeting on 17 February, 1917. The greater opportunities to work in public under the Provisional Government “distracted” many members and, accordingly, the “pace of work in the society slowed down.”97 Ironically, the October 93

 The 1920 ruling of Narkompros is in GARF f. 2307, op. 2, d. 353 (Russian Geo­ graphical Society), l. 4 (report of People’s Commissariat of Public Enlightenment, 17 August 1920). See also “Ocherk 50-letnei deiatel´nosti,” 6–7, 34–36; Obzor deiatel´nosti Zabaikal´skogo otdela, 57.

94

 “Ocherk 50-letnei deiatel´nosti,” 6–7; “Obzor deiatel´nosti za 75 let,” 90.

95

  Ocherk deiatel´nosti Semipalatinskogo otdela za 25 let, 13; Biulleten´ geograficheskogo in­ stituta, no. 2 (1921): 3; P. K. Kazarinov, Tri chetverti veka: K iubileiu Vostochno-Sibirskogo otdela Russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva (Irkutsk, 1926), 28, 32. 96 97

 Semenov, To, chto proshlo, 2: 40.

 Tsentral´nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Moskovskoi oblasti (TsGAMO) f. 921 (Mos­ cow Agricultural Society), op. 1, d. 4 (“Otchet o deiatel´nosti za 1917 g.”), ll. 2–3; B.

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Revolution initially promised an expansion of the society’s activities as “many of its active members returned.” Throughout 1918 its committee structure remained intact; the society operated committees with responsibilities for livestock, seeds, soils, and refrigeration, as well as an experimental seed station, a consultation bureau, an agricultural school, a library, a workshop to repair agricultural machines, the journal Vestnik sel´skogo khoziaistva, the Butyrka farm, and the Veshki estate. In February 1918 the board discussed expansion of agricultural assistance programs, and at a board meeting on 18 July 1918, A. P. Levitskii, director of the Moscow Oblast’ Agricultural Experimental Sta­ tion, suggested that MOSKh become a regional center to manage the work of experimental farms.98 At the same time, like other associations the Moscow Agricultural Society experienced “unprecedented hardship.” Already in 1918, the society “became completely dependent materially on Narkomzem.” This came at a time when, according to the 1918 annual report, the closing of the zemstvos “put agricultural assistance in an extremely difficult position.”99 Even though the society’s committee structure remained intact in 1918, in 1919 the society “experienced one constraint after another, one amputation after another.” The book depository was closed, and the repair shop, agricultural school, the Butyrka experimental farm, and the Veshki estate were nationalized.100 The society’s jubilee in 1921 noted that “[a]ll efforts to avoid the waves crashing over Russian life, to stabilize local cultural work, and to remain apolitical were wrecked again and again by harsh reality.”101 Nevertheless, the Moscow Agricultural Society found a variety of ways to cope with the difficulties and to recalibrate its work.102 The small number of specialists in agricultural adult education, the disappearance of popular literature, visual aids, reference books, plans, and budgets made it necessary Veselovskii, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo sel´skogo khoziaistva za 100 let,” Vestnik sel´skogo khoziaistva, no. 4 (1920): 9–20, quote on 20. At the beginning of 1917 there were 726 members; at the beginning of 1918 there were 625 members. 98

 TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 1 (minutes of the meeting of the board, 1917 g.), l. 3ob. (meeting of the board and the Bureau of Cooperative Amalgamations, 18 July 1918); d. 12 (minutes of the meeting of the board, 1918 g.), l. 19 (“Obsuzhdenie agronomicheskoi pomoshchi 12/25 fevralia 1918”).

99

 Ibid., d. 28 (“Otchet o deiatel´nosti za 1918 g.”), l. 13.

100

 Ibid., ll. 4, 13; Veselovskii, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo sel´skogo khoziaistva,” 20; Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti, 4: 503–08.

101

 Veselovskii, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo sel´skogo khoziaistva,” 20.

102

 “Tekushchie zadaniia Komiteta rasprostraneniia sel´skokhoziaistvennykh znanii i usloviia ikh vypolneniia,” Vestnik sel´skogo khoziaistva, no. 43–44 (1918): 10–13.

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to rethink adult education. Faced with the “catastrophic situation” of the book market, MOSKh, through its Committee to Disseminate Agricultural Knowl­ edge, began publishing its own popular brochures.103 The dearth of institutions that could train teaching personnel presented MOSKh with an opportunity to focus on the training of instructors and to expand classes in various branches of agriculture.104 Finally, MOSKh expanded the outreach of its museum of visual aids.105 Such ambitious programs of activities meant that the Moscow Agricultural Society was forced to cooperate with Soviet authorities. It was constantly asking Narkomzem or Narkompros for subsidies for the training of agricultural teachers, for agricultural courses, for visual aids, and for many other projects of its committees.106 In the first few years of Soviet power, the Moscow Agricultural Society became a site of representation and advocacy in a precarious Soviet public sphere. The society claimed to speak on behalf of cooperatives and small agri­ cultural societies in the context of diminished resources and the closing of the zemstvos. Several studies have pointed out the complicated relationship between the Soviet government and the cooperatives. On the eve of World War I, Russia had the largest number of cooperative societies in the world. During the first three years of World War I, the number of consumer cooperatives tripled.107 Although Lenin even fancied that one day Soviet Russia could be one national cooperative, the question here as elsewhere was who would control the cooperatives. The cooperatives and the cooperative movement 103  TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 28, l. 24; d. 36 (Committee to Disseminate Agricultural Knowledge, Programs, 1918), ll. 7–8 (letter to the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, 20 November 1918). 104

 “Tekushchie zadaniia,” 11, 13; TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 36, ll. 24, 36, 66–67 (corre­ spondence with the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture); Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki (RGAE) f. 478 (People’s Commissariat of Agriculture), op. 1, d. 119 (correspondence with the Committee to Disseminate Agricultural Knowledge, 1918– 21), ll. 18–20, 99–101, 123–25ob.

105  “Tekushchie zadaniia,” 12; V. Beketov, “Muzei Moskovskogo obshchestva sel´skogo khoziaistva, kak narodnoe prosvetitel´skoe uchrezhdenie,” Vestnik sel´skogo khoziaistva, no. 23–24 (1918): 19; RGAE f. 478, op. 1, d. 119, ll. 118–22 (Division of Kitchen Gardening and Fruit Growing). 106

 TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 36, l. 102 (correspondence with the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture); d. 10 (Committee to Disseminate Agricultural Knowledge), ll. 26, 30 (correspondence with the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture); d. 58 (All-Russian Congress on Agricultural Assistance), l. 11 (agreement between MOSKh and the Village Soviet). 107

 Eugene M. Kayden, The Cooperative Movement in Russia during the War: Consumers’ Cooperation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), 4; Lars Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 74.

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were regarded as “bourgeois” in Soviet rhetoric, and the gradual effort to sub­ ordinate the cooperatives to state food supply organs or to the local soviets undermined the original cooperative principles.108 Be that as it may, the main issue that concerned MOSKh was its relationship with cooperatives. As early as July 1918, a joint meeting of the Board of the Moscow Agricultural Society and the Bureau of Cooperative Amalgamations (Biuro kooperativnykh ob˝edinenii) heard a proposal by N. V. Maloletenkov, author of studies of cooperatives in northwestern Russia, to enable cooperatives to join the society as juridical persons, an action forbidden in charters of the tsarist regime to prevent provincial agricultural societies from taking on the function of a union.109 The spokesmen for the cooperatives opined that because of the liquidation of the zemstvos, there was no non-state organ that could coordinate agricultural matters. This “new direction” was supported at the society’s annual meeting in September. By working more closely with cooperatives and other agricultural societies, the Moscow Agricultural Society envisioned its chief task to be the “unification of agricultural societies,” because MOSKh was the “best suited in an organizational sense for more extensive and more concrete work in conjunction with cooperative unions and amalgamations for the benefit of the motherland.”110 MOSKh could become an “all-Russian amalgamated agricultural center.”111 In the end the society changed its charter to open membership to cooperatives as juridical persons, and the VSNKh approved the charter on 4 March 1919.112 108

 L. E. Fain, Otechestvennaia kooperatsiia: Istoricheskii opyt (Ivanovo: Ivanovskii gos­ udarstvennyi universitet, 1994), 123–24, 132. See also Moskovskoe obshchestvo sel´­ skogo khoziaistva, Kooperatsiia i agronomiia: Sbornik statei (Moscow: Tipografiia O. L. Somovoi, 1919). 109

 TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 58 (minutes of the meetings of the board, 1918), l. 3 (minutes of the meeting of the board, 18 January 1918). On prerevolutionary restrictions, see TsIAM f. 419, op. 3, d. 141 (“Peresmotr ustavov sel´skokhoziaistvennykh obshchestv, 1917 g.”), l. 25 (correspondence with the Ministry of Agriculture). Active in the coop­ erative movement and a former Kadet, Maloletenkov was arrested and expelled for anti-Soviet activity in 1922 (Finkel, On the Ideological Front, 87, 231).

110

 TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 28, ll. 6–6ob., 8, 10; Veselovskii, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo sel´skogo khoziaistva,” 20. 111

 “Iz deiatel´nosti Soveta Moskovskogo obshchestva sel´skogo khoziaistva,” Vestnik sel´skogo khoziaistva, no. 29–30 (1918): 24. For more discussion, see TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 1, l. 3; d. 58, l. 2 (Division of Agronomy); Vestnik sel´skogo khoziaistva, no. 35–38 (1918): 5–6, and no. 49–52 (1918): 17. 112

  “Pravila vstupleniia iuridicheskikh lits v chleny Moskovskogo obshchestva sel´skogo khoziaistva,” Vestnik sel´skogo khoziaistva, no. 33–34 (1918): 20; Vestnik sel´­ skogo khoziaistva, no. 5–6 (1919): 14; “Stoletie Moskovskogo obshchestva sel´skogo

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The Moscow Agricultural Society’s role as representative and advocate can be seen best in its work on behalf of small local agricultural societies. Such societies, established for the purpose of developing and improving agriculture in their localities, largely through educational and cultural work, grew quickly at the end of the imperial regime. Most agricultural societies were founded after 1905; in 1911 there were 3,103 and in 1915 there were 5,795.113 In order to expand the work and coordinate the activities of myriad local agricultural societies, in April 1917 the Provisional Government asked MOSKh to organize an all-Russian union of agricultural societies.114 The Moscow Agricultural Society’s 1919 charter provided the legal basis for such advocacy as the society was permitted to provide assistance to other agricultural societies and to evaluate their charters. Indeed, the charters of other agricultural societies followed a model charter issued by VSNKh in February 1919, which in turn was modeled after MOSKh’s charter.115 The model charters were issued, in part, in response to the efforts of MOSKh on behalf of the small local agricultural societies to clarify their legal status. Under tsarist law, associations such as agricultural societies were defined as, and required to be, not-for-profit. Because of its anti-bourgeois prejudices, the new regime adhered very strictly to tsarist precedent in this matter. But what if a local agricultural society had a seed depot or leased machinery? What, then, was its legal status?116 Actions taken by both local cooperatives and soviets demonstrated confusion over the legal status of local agricultural societies.117 In 1919 the Rostov khoziaistva,” Vestnik sel´skogo khoziaistva, no. 4 (1920): 6; TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 43 (charters of 1919 and 1928), l. 1. 113

 TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 88 (“Tezisy Soveshchaniia sel´skokhoziaistvennykh ob­ shchestv pri MOSKh, 1920 g.”), l. 3ob. (“Tezisy k dokladu D. M. Shorygina”). Slightly different numbers are found in A. N. Antsiferov, Russian Agriculture during the War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), 77. By comparison, there were 6,178 agri­ cultural societies in France in 1913. Auguste Souchon, Agricultural Societies in France (Evreux: C. Hérissey, 1915), 4. 114

 TsIAM f. 419, op. 3, d. 141, l. 25. MOSKh’s chief organ, Vestnik sel´skogo khoziaistva, frequently carried a rubric “Iz deiatel´nosti sel´skokhoziaistvennykh obshchestv.” 115

 TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 43, l. 1; d. 24 (Committee to Draft the Charters of Agricultural Societies, 1918), l. 5 (model charter); f. 921, op. 1, d. 63 (“Otchet o deiatel´nosti za 1919 g.”), l. 2; SU, no. 9, art. 90 (12 April 1919). The rationale for the model charters was outlined in “Dokladnaia zapiska k primernomu ustavu sel´skokhoziaistvennykh obshchestv” (TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 24, ll. 12–15). 116

  Vestnik sel´skogo khoziaistva, no. 48–52 (1918): 17; and no. 7–10 (1919): 3.

117

 TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 88, l. 1 (correspondence with the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture); d. 70 (correspondence with local agricultural societies, 1919), l. 4 (Zapad­ noe sibirskoe obshchestvo sel´skogo khoziaistva).

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Agricultural Society asked MOSKh to “defend it from the infringement and seizure of its property by the local soviet authorities,“ who had closed the society, confiscated its property, and arrested the members of the board.118 MOSKh responded on several fronts. There were frequent papers at its meetings in 1919 and 1920 about the functions and virtues of the small local agricultural societies, many of which were published in Vestnik sel´skogo khoziaistva. It compiled a questionnaire to get more information about the activities of local societies and local needs and called a series of meetings to discuss their problems. In order to facilitate their incorporation, MOSKh opened an information and consultation bureau, compiled a brochure on organizing local societies and offered to review charter and registration material. In 1919, according the society’s annual report, MOSKh defended local agricultural societies in the provinces of Moscow, Iaroslavl´, Tambov, Smolensk, and Vologda.119 In 1920 MOSKh took to Narkomzem its case in support of local agricultural societies against the efforts of Tsentrosoiuz (Central Union of Cooperatives) to liquidate them. In the first place, the MOSKh report argued, the Tsentrosoiuz plan was illegal and “fundamentally contradicted” the agenda that the Soviet authorities had placed before all economic organs—to raise labor productivity and improve technique. Only a network of strong agricultural societies could “bring agricultural science to the farmer, enliven local village life, and disseminate new rational farming methods.” Because the agricultural societies did not conduct commercial operations, their mission was the production and dissemination of knowledge. But knowledge alone was not enough: rural Russia needed the active participation and initiative of the local population that a voluntary agricultural society could provide. In addition, the activities of the agricultural societies were directed at the entire population of the locality, while those of the cooperatives were directed at their members only. To be sure, the report continued, agricultural societies were financially weak: their needs were greater than their resources. Not engaging in commerce, they were forced to live on small members’ dues and “stingy government subsidies.” Moreover, war and revolution had hurt the local ag118

  Vestnik sel´skogo khoziaistva, no. 7–10 (1919): 23; TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 88, l. 2ob.

119

 TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 91 (“Protokoly zasedanii Vserossiiskogo soveshchaniia sel´skokhoziaistvennykh obshchestv, 22–24 noiabria 1920”), ll. 1–2, 4–5 (“Ob˝edinenie predstavitelei sel´skokhoziaistvennykh obshchestv pri MOSKh”); d. 63, l. 2 (“Otchet MOSKh za 1919 g.”); d. 70, l. 66 (correspondence with local agricultural societies, 1919); Vestnik sel´skogo khoziaistva, no. 7–10 (1919): 23. Moskovskoe obshchestvo sel´skogo khoziaistva, Organizatsiia sel´skokhoziaistvennykh obshchestv (Moscow, 1919) updated the imperial Spravochnye svedeniia o sel´skokhoziaistvennykh obshchestvakh (St. Petersburg: Departament zemledeliia, 1911–17). The 1919 conference of representatives of agricul­ tural societies was reported in Vestnik sel´skogo khoziaistva, nos. 35–42 (1919).

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ricultural societies; survival had been uppermost. But the solution would be for Narkomzem to help the small agricultural societies, not hinder them.120 MOSKh could claim some credit for positive results. The board of MOSKh successfully appealed to the VSNKh and Narkomzem to reinstate the Rostov Agricultural Society. In the end Narkomzem recognized the rights of agricultural societies to an independent existence and “the impermissibility of the local organs to interfere in the affairs of agricultural societies, or to nationalize or confiscate their property.”121 In most cases, according to the 1920 annual report, MOSKh was able to defend successfully agricultural societies against local government organs that had not interpreted correctly the decisions of central Soviet organs.122 These issues were not confined to correspondence between MOSKh and agricultural societies, on the one hand, and the Soviet authorities, on the other; they were discussed in public. During the first five years after the revolution, MOSKh organized a series of congresses and conferences that provided a forum to discuss agricultural issues, including the future of agricultural societies, and brought together local activists.123 Regarding the fate of agricultural societies, delegates to the first conference in 1920 were pessimistic. In a discussion of ways to attract peasants to local agricultural societies and to disseminate knowledge, MOSKh board member P. T. Sala­ matov pointed out that books, lectures, journals, and clubs were not very ap­ plicable any more. MOSKh president A. I. Ugrimov stated that the delegates needed to decide where to attach the agricultural societies—to the cooperative unions or to Narkomzem: “Agricultural societies as voluntary organizations of course cannot be tolerated by Soviet power.” The agronomist V. I. Ivanov suggested that agricultural societies needed to compromise and connect with Narkomzem, for “no matter what, no one listens to us.” The agronomist M. G. Luchebul´ added that “[s]ocieties cannot exist independently, for such is political power.”124 Other delegates, on the other hand, like A. A. Nikolaev, stated that the agricultural societies must defend their freedom (vol´nost´). In a defense of the public sphere, D. E. Potekhin opined that “[i]t’s a bad regime 120 121

 TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 88. ll. 1–4.

  Vestnik sel´skogo khoziaistva, no. 27–30 (1919): 28; TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 70, l. 58.

122

 TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 99 (“Otchet o deiatel´nosti za 1920 g.”), l. 6.

123

 TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 92 (“Protokoly zasedaniia Vserossiiskogo soveshchaniia sel´skokhoziaistvennykh obshchestv, 1920 g.”), ll. 16ob., 37 (report of D. E. Potekhin). See also TsIAM f. 419, op. 3, d. 140, ll. 1–2. 124

 TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 92, ll. 17 (Salamatov), 18 (Ugrimov, Luchebul´). Luchebul´ was arrested and shot in 1937.

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[vlast´] that fears the voice of the people, but it’s also a bad people who are afraid to express their wishes. We must say what we think.”125 In contrast to the fear that agricultural societies had no future in 1920, delegates at the 1922 conference, one year after the pronouncement of the New Economic Policy, expressed cautious optimism. MOSKh had been acting as an intermediary between local agricultural societies and Narkomzem; at the conference MOSKh was able to report that previously closed societies were able to get back on their feet and had resumed activity. Delegate Potekhin, who had defended the public sphere in 1920, lauded MOSKh for keeping agricultural societies together, for summoning representatives from all over Russia, and for assisting local activity in words, deeds, and counsel, “as it has been doing for the past one hundred years.” According to several delegates, agricultural progress depended on the participation and initiative of the local farmers. According to Salamatov, it was not possible to rationalize peasant farming only from above and by coercion; the local population needed to participate. Another board member, D. M. Shorygin, argued that agricultural societies “needed to gather local farmers and encourage them to acquire and apply knowledge by means of meetings, publications, excursions, exhibitions, posters, brochures, libraries, lectures, classes, and clubs.”126 In his closing remarks, President A. I. Ugrimov noted that “just as families have been torn apart, so too agricultural societies have lost contact with each other. Much was destroyed during the war, but just as the idea of the family does not completely perish, the idea of agricultural mutual aid has not been destroyed,” and now that things seem to be getting a little better, “agricultural societies have revived.”127 But in their more reflective moments, the leaders of MOSKh were aware of the difficult times and the very mixed signals they were getting from the government. Despite its century-long work on behalf of Russian agriculture, MOSKh was going through its most trying times. At its centenary celebration in January 1920, MOSKh prided itself that it was able to bring people together freely to discuss agricultural problems—“party and non-party specialists, representatives of ruling communism including the commissar of agriculture … as well as representatives of the so-called bourgeoisie, who don’t believe 125

 Ibid., ll. 16 (Potekhin); 18 (Nikolaev).

126

 D. M. Shorygin, “Sel´skokhoziaistvennye obshchestva, kak tsentry po rasprostra­ neniiu sel´skokhoziaistvennykh znanii” (ibid., d. 88, l. 5); I. T. Salamatov, “O vza­ imootnosheniiakh sel´skokhoziaistvennykh obshchestv i sel´skokhoziaistvennoi kooperatsii” (ibid., d. 92, l. 42). 127

 TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 92, ll. 20 (Ugrimov), 37ob. (Potekhin); “K predstoiashchemu soveshchaniiu predstavitelei sel´skokhoziaistvennykh obshchestv,” Vestnik sel´skogo khoziaistva, no. 2 (1922): 3.

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in the success of communism.”128 Materially, its situation was unstable, and politically its position was indeterminate. All of this was made worse by the arrest in August 1921 of eight board members, including past president F. A. Golovnin and current president A. I. Ugrimov, who had been members of the Famine Relief Committee (Vserossiiskii komitet pomoshchi golodaiushchim), a public organization conceived at a meeting of public activists at MOSKh in June and under suspicion by the Bolsheviks for unauthorized activity, in­ cluding contact with foreigners. The Moscow office was searched, as was the apartment of one of those arrested, M. M. Shchepkin, whose health never recovered after his release. In 1922 Maloletenkov and MOSKh president Ugrimov were expelled on the “philosophers’ steamboat.”129 Finally, in 1923, at the insistence of the GPU, the NKVD refused to approve MOSKh’s charter. The society limped along in legal limbo until it was officially closed in 1929.130 Thus, after 1917 the Moscow Agricultural Society was able to pursue its education mission, and even to enhance that mission for a while by speaking on behalf of Russia’s many small, local agricultural societies and by organizing agricultural conferences. MOSKh was useful to the new regime in the cause of agricultural improvement, at least until agriculture was sovietized in 1929. a

b

The fate of Russia’s voluntary associations during the years of revolution and civil war followed patterns observed by many scholars of the early Soviet years. The February Revolution promised a springtime of full autonomy, the removal of tsarist constraints, and newfound influence in public policy, as well as opportunities for the creation of many new associations and the convocation of numerous congresses and conferences. After October, associations were regulated by a variety of ad hoc and inconsistent measures. They all suffered from the economic disruptions and deprivations of War Communism and the Civil War. Many organizations perished within a year or two of the Bolshevik seizure of power. In the words of Christopher Read, “The 128

 TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 113 (“Protokoly torzhestvennogo sobraniia, 1920 g.”), l. 21; “Stoletie,” 3–4.

129

 TsGAMO f. 921, op. 1, d. 124 (“Otchet o deiatel´nosti za 1921 g.”), ll. 3–4ob., 11; “K stoletiiu Moskovskogo obshchestva sel´skogo khoziaistva,” Vestnik sel´skogo khoziaistva, no. 4 (1920): 8; Veselovskii, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo sel´skogo khoziaistva,” 20. On the Famine Relief Committee and the arrests, see Finkel, On the Ideological Front, 19–39.

130  GARF f. 393, op. 43a, d. 1827 (“Utverzhdenie ustavov”), ll. 54–57 (charter of MOSKh). See also Finkel, On the Ideological Front, 87; and A. A. Kurenyshev, Sel´skokhoziaistvennaia stolitsa Rossii: Ocherki istorii Moskovskogo obshchestva sel´skogo khoziaistva (1818–1929 gg.) (Moscow: AIRO-XXI, 2012), 363–97.

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Bolsheviks assiduously crushed the fledgling institutions of civil society in those years” as “intellectual institutions and professional organizations lost their independence.… The Bolsheviks were suspicious of all independent organizations.”131 Nevertheless, a sampling of Russia’s most prominent science societies can give a more nuanced account than the above pronouncements might sug­ gest. Many science societies did perish, if not immediately, then by the end of the 1920s. At the same time, there were opportunities for survival, or at least temporary survival. All associations studied here desired better working conditions, more autonomy, and more opportunity to participate in public af­ fairs. In varying degrees, all were willing to cooperate with the Bolsheviks for the sake of science, patriotism, and service to the nation in times of peril. But like Tolstoi’s unhappy families, each of those societies that eventually per­ ished had a different story of demise. The most politicized of the prerevolutionary “bourgeois” associations, the Free Economic Society and the Pirogov Society of Russian Physicians, had the greatest difficulty accommodating to Soviet rule. In the fall and winter 1917–18 the VEO opposed the Bolshevik seizure of power and several of its leaders joined opposition groups. There is no trace of its activity after 1919. The demise of the Pirogov Society, which was also a critic of tsarist authority and public health policy, as well as a champion of local self-government, tells a different story, the demise of an independent professional organization. It was Bolshevik policy to subordinate professional organizations to unions on the industrial model, and the story of the Pirogov Society is part of the story of the sovietization of unions. In turn, the sovietization of unions provided a template for the sovietization of independent organizations in general. To paraphrase Kendall Bailes, Soviet policy was “to abolish independent associations of scientists and educators,” such as learned societies, and incorporate them in separate sections of Soviet-controlled organizations.132 Thus, the Pirogov Society perished by 1925. The Russian Technical Society’s story is similar to that of the Pirogov Society. But technical specialists were more privileged than physicians and more receptive to centralized administration. For a while the RTO had a protector in the Scientific and Technical Division of the VSNKh, as it had had protectors in the imperial family before 1917. The RTO was able to serve the state, especially in the technical issues of economic planning. But the RTO was weakened by another bête-noir of Soviet policy regarding associations—duplication of function—and the secret police repeatedly urged the NKVD to close the RTO, which it finally did in 1929. After 1917 131

 Read, Culture and Power, 54.

132

 Bailes, “Natural Scientists,” 283.

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the Moscow Agricultural Society continued to pursue its education mission. As MOSKh spoke on behalf of Russia’s many small, local agricultural societies, its story is one of new opportunities and recalibration of mission, in this case, representation and advocacy in a precarious Soviet public sphere. Like the RTO for industry, MOSKh had supporters in Narkomzem, was useful to the new regime in the cause of agricultural improvement, and was tolerated, at least until agriculture was sovietized in 1929. The Russian Geographical Society provides an example of an association that took advantage of new opportunities and priorities on the part of the regime. Its story most closely resembled that of the Academy of Sciences, the organization Bailes had in mind when he claimed that the central authorities, especially Lenin and Lunacharskii, “treated the scientific community with great caution and tact and great circumspection.”133 The RGO is one of merely a handful of prerevolutionary associations that was never formally closed and is still active today in St. Petersburg. In some respects Bolshevik suspicion and repression of voluntary associations had precedents in Europe. The state has always regulated and even repressed the activities of the public sphere of civil society. In revolutionary times authorities everywhere have had a heightened fear of disorder, and Russia’s political turmoil of 1917–21 has many similarities to that of revolutionary France. Nevertheless, the actual regulation of associations under political absolutism in Europe was haphazard. Moreover, as Stuart Finkel argues, the “liberal concept of the autonomous citizen, the morally respon­sible individual was incompatible with the Bolshevik dictatorship of the proletariat.” In the conflict between “autonomous public work” and “party-directed public work,”134 Russia’s venerable learned societies lost. The learned societies, tainted with the prerevolutionary organizational model that championed autonomy, were insufficiently susceptible to state direction. In addition, too many officers were openly hostile to the new regime. The Bolsheviks wanted to destroy not only its opponents but also the bourgeoisie as a class, private property, and bourgeois civil society. To this end, although it was not accomplished immediately, Bolshevik repression of Russian associations represents a singular moment in the broad history of state regulation of civil society. The story of Russia’s learned societies is also the story of the sovietization of science and, in particular, scientific organizations. Twentieth-century science increasingly became “mission-oriented,” conducted by a “hierarchically or­ ganized research team” in “specialized research institutions and laboratories

133

 Ibid., 270.

134

 Finkel, On the Ideological Front, 7, 15.

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usually financed by governments.”135 Eighteenth- and 19th-century science societies lost their preeminence in this world. In imperial Russia, the larger learned societies, although they supported and disseminated research, existed as much for popularization and advocacy. As a model for the organization of science they were decentralized, diffuse, and autonomous. In any event, according to Loren Graham, in the decade before the Revolution, Russia was “moving in the direction of a network of national research institutes,” largely at the initiative of the scientists themselves. In Soviet Russia learned societies were superseded by government institutions and the Academy of Sciences which, as Graham and many scholars have pointed out, received more prestige, stature, and resources than the tsarist academy ever did; such organizations could better install the models of collectivism and cooperation, not to mention the fulfillment of government technological and developmental imperatives, than could the learned societies.136 The popularization of science became the task of Narkompros and the schools; the learned societies were too diffused for the purposes of education. Professional associations lost their independence, as they became subservient to commissariats or to sovietized unions. Bailes asserts that a “flexible and decentralized system of scientific research” emerged and that by 1921, “science enjoyed considerable influence in a diversified and decentralized system of government research organizations.”137 But this system had no place for independent, nongovernmental organizations. In Europe and the United States, such nongovernmental associations joined in partnership with private industry and governments to create a modern, multicentered scientific infrastructure. Government intervention in science at the beginning of the 20th century, Alter argues, took place “in the context of competition between nations.”138 From the perspective of the Bolsheviks, government intervention in science took place in the context of competition between classes. The proletariat needed its own scientific institutions and patronage, and the only place that could come from was the government.

135  Citations from Robert Kargon, Stuart W. Leslie, and Erica Schoenberger, “Far Beyond Big Science: Scientific Regions and the Organization of Research and Develop­ ment,” in Galison and Hevly, Big Science, 334–54, quote on 335; Alvin M. Weinberg, Reflections on Big Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 123–24; and Joseph Ben-David, The Scientist’s Role in Society: A Comparative Study (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 160, respectively. 136

 Graham, “Foundation of Soviet Research Institutes,” 310, 321, 325, quote on 308; Bastrakova, Stanovlenie, 36, 53, 93–96.

137

 Bailes, “Natural Scientists,” 281, 292. Emphasis added.

138

 Alter, Reluctant Patron, 98.

World War I and the Transformation of the Imperial Academy of Sciences Eduard I. Kolchinsky

Until recently the problem of “science and World War I” remained virtually outside the attention of Russian historians of science. The impact of World War I on the development and institutionalization of Soviet science has also been ignored, with the exception of works on the history of the Commission for the Study of Russian Natural Resources (Komissiia po izucheniiu estestvennykh proizvoditel´nykh sil Rossii, KEPS) or the Chemical Committee.1 Even these works as a rule have not examined the role of science in the events of World War I and the accompanying transformation of scientists’ relations with state and society.2 They also largely ignore the many other ways that academic science was mobilized, for example in organizations within the Ministry of Agriculture (bureaus, field studies of trades, experimental stations, botanical gardens, and so forth), where members of the Imperial Academy of Sciences3 sought answers to the challenges of the times and employed science to mobilize agriculture and bio-resources to ensure victory. The activity of the professoriate that was directed toward defense needs is also virtually unThis work has been written with the support of Research Grant RGNF 15-03-00017a. 1  A. V. Kol´tsov, Sozdanie i deiatel´nost´ Komissii po izucheniiu estestvennykh proizvoditel´nykh sil Rossii, 1915–1930 gg. (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1999), 8–56; E. V. Trofimova, Sozdanie i deiatel´nost´ Khimicheskogo komiteta pri Glavnom artilleriiskom upravlenii v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: Sputnik+, 2002), 3–199. 2

 Authors usually limit themselves to a brief overview of the role of KEPS or the Chem­ ical Committee in the lives and work of those scientists who actively participated in their creation and activity. See I. I. Mochalov, Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadskii (1863–1945) (Moscow: Nauka, 1982), 202–20; Iu. I. Solov´ev, Nikolai Semenovich Kurnakov (1860–1941) (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), 86–94; and B. P. Strogоnov, Andrei Sergeevich Famintsyn (1835– 1918) (Moscow: Nauka, 1996), 93–94. 3

 The Academy of Sciences bore the name “Imperial” until mid-1917, then became the Russian Academy of Sciences, and then, from 1925, the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 173–200.

174 Eduard I. Kolchinsky

studied, as is the role of the War Industries Committees, created throughout the country to coordinate the work of the authorities, zemstvos (elected local governments), and industry.4 We know little about the participation of scientists in the Special Commissions for State Defense (Osobye soveshchaniia dlia obsuzhdeniia i ob˝edineniia meropriiatii po oborone gosudarstva), created in 1915 by an edict of Emperor Nicholas II. Along with the military, representatives of ministries, and industrialists, they included members of the State Council and State Duma. The permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences, Sergei F. Ol´denburg, participated in practically every Special Council on State Defense from the very beginning, for example.5 While the topic of World War I was not very popular in Soviet histori­ ography, the opposite was true in foreign historical literature, especially in Germany. There a huge number of works about the war and its results ap­ peared almost immediately after the Treaty of Versailles. But even in those works the fate of science and scientists in 1914–18 remained in the shadows until recently, although all comprehensive histories of the main scientific and educational institutions have sections on World War I that mention but do not elaborate on the question of the mobilization of science.6 The situation in Russia began to change in the last 10 to 12 years. An Association of World War I Historians was created, and several symposia have taken place. A great deal of attention has been given to problems related to the development of defense industries during the war years. A foundational collection of documents related to the Russian defense industry in the first two decades of the 20th century has been published, in which materials on

4  P. A. Kiung, “Sud´ba arkhivov voenno-promyshlennykh komitetov (1915–1918 gg.),” Otechestvennye arkhivy, no. 2 (2007): 31–35. 5  T. D. Krupina and L. Ia. Saet, eds., Zhurnaly Osobogo soveshchaniia po oborone gosu­ darstva 1915 (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1975), 207. Academicians Vladimir N. Ipat´ev and Aleksei N. Krylov also attended some meetings in an advisory role; T. D. Krupina, L. Ia. Saet, and V. V. Shelochov, eds., Zhurnaly Osobykh soveshchanii dlia obsuzhdeniia i ob˝edineniia meropriiatii po oborone gosudarstva: 1915–1918, 8 vols. (Moscow: АN SSSR, 1975–79). 6  Lothar Burchard, “Die Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschafte im Ersten Weltkrieg (1914– 1918),” Forschung im Spannungsfeld von Politik und Gesellschaft: Geschichte und Struktur der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, ed. Rudolf Vierhaus and Bernhard vom Brocke (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1990), 163–96; Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Wissenschaft, Krieg und die Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften,” in Die Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin 1914–1945, ed. Wolfram Fischer (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000), 3–23; Rüdiger vom Bruch and Brigitte Kaderas, eds., Wissenschaften und Politik (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2002), 52–179.

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its development during World War I occupy a central place.7 A 2008 monograph on military industries by Vladimir V. Polikarpov analyzes in detail the modernization of the defense industry and the debates about this question in Russian historiography from the 1960s.8 At the beginning of the 1990s a book by Lev B. Kafengauz appeared, which includes chapters on Russian industry during the prewar years of intensified development (1908–14), the war (1914–17), the revolutionary period (1917–21), and the restoration of industry (1921–27).9 Several years later Essays on the History of the Defense Industry by Vadim S. Mikhailov, a former tsarist general and later the assistant chief of the Main Administration for Defense Industries in the Supreme Council for the National Economy of the USSR (VSNKh) became available.10 But as a rule these books say nothing about the role of scientists in planning and implementing new technologies in the complex of defense industries that provided the Russian army with military technology, weap­onry, and ammunition, and that developed vigorously in 1915–16. Russian historians of science have also begun to turn to this period.11 The activity of chemists has attracted particular attention, especially Vladimir N. Ipat´ev and Aleksei E. Chichibabin, who were expelled from the Soviet Acad-

7

 Rafail Sh. Ganelin, ed., Voennaia promyshlennost´ Rossii v nachale XX veka, 1900–1917 (Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2004), 465–690.

8

 V. V. Polikarpov, Ot Tsusimy k fevraliu: Tsarizm i voennaia promyshlennost´ v nachale XX veka (Moscow: Indrik, 2008), 159–450. 9

 L. B. Kafengauz, Evoliutsiia promyshlennogo proizvodstva Rossii (posledniaia tret´ XIX veka—30-e gody XX veka) (Moscow: Epifaniia, 1994), 172–214. Kafengauz was assistant minister of Trade and Industry in the Provisional Government. During the years of the New Economic Policy he served as head of the Central Statistical Department of the Supreme Council for the National Economy of the USSR (VSNKh), as well as teaching at Moscow University. His book was about to be published in 1930 when Kafengauz was arrested. 10

 Iu. V. Il’in, L. Ia. Saet, and N. V. Il’ina, comps., General V. S. Mikhailov, 1875–1929: Dokumenty k biografii, ocherki po istorii voennoi promyshlennosti (Moscow: Rosspen, 2007), 83–411. This book was first published in 1928 in a limited number edition with the epigraph “Secret. Use only for military-scientific work and official purposes.” Soon thereafter its author was arrested and shot, and the book was removed even from government access.

11

 Along with the books mentioned in n. 1, see also O. Iu. Elina, “Mir, voina i ‘tukovyi vopros’ (iz istorii proizvodstva mineral´nykh udobrenii v Rossii. 1900–1920-e gg.),” Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, no. 3 (2001): 3–36; A. A. Fedotova, “Russkie bota­ niki v Pervoi mirovoi voine,” Istoriia sotsio-kul´turnykh problem nauki i tekhniki, no. 2 (2004): 208–28; and Trude Maurer, ed., Kollegen, Kommilitonen, Kämpfer: Europäische Universitäten im Ersten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006), 127–254.

176 Eduard I. Kolchinsky

emy of Sciences in the 1930s because they had emigrated.12 The first surveys have appeared that attempt a comprehensive analysis of the relationships between science, society, and the state under the impact of World War I.13 In April 2003 a joint Russian-German conference took place in St. Petersburg on “Science, Technology, and Society in World War I,” which provided the materials for a book that provides a comparative analysis of the development of science in Germany and Russia.14 A number of articles in it are dedicated to the transformation of the Academy of Sciences under the influence of events connected with the war. A general outline of the history of the Academy of Sciences during these years is provided in the introduction to the four-volume Chronicle of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which uses the minutes of meetings of its General Assembly and branches, periodicals, and historical literature to reconstruct the daily activity of the academic community and the ways they acquired a new identity in changing sociopolitical conditions.15 Information about the transformation of the Academy of Sciences in this period may also be found in the biographies, memoirs, and letters of its leaders that have been published in recent decades.16 12

­ V. I. Kuznetsov and A. M. Maksimenko, Vladimir Nikolaevich Ipat´ev (Moscow: Nauka, 1992), 37–62; V. A. Volkov, “A. E. Chichibabin i V. N. Ipat´ev—tragicheskie sud´by,” in Rossiiskie uchenye i inzhenery v emigratsii, ed. V. P. Borisov (Moscow: Nauka, 1993), 40–71; Iu. I. Solov´ev, “Nevozvrashchenets: Tragicheskaia sud´ba akademika A. E. Chichibabina,” Vestnik RAN 63, 3 (1993): 516–23; V. N. Ipat´ev, “Zhizn´ odnogo khimika: Vospominaniia, tom 1. 1867–1917,” in Akademik V. N. Ipat´ev, ed. V. D. Kel´ner (Moscow: Kalvis, 2011), 1: 348–441.

13

 A. E. Ivanov, “Rossiiskoe ‘uchenoe soslovie’ v gody ‘Vtoroi Otechestvennoi voiny’ (Ocherk grazhdanskoi psikhologii i patrioticheskoi deiatel´nosti,” Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, no. 2 (1999): 108–27; Alexei B. Kojevnikov, “The Great War, the Russian Civil War, and the Invention of Big Science,” Science in Context 15, 2 (2002): 239–75; E. I. Kolchinskii, Nauka i krizisy: Istoriko-sravnitel´nye ocherki (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003), 291–334, 357–439; Kolchinskii, Biologiia Germanii i Rossii v usloviiakh sotsial´no-politicheskikh krizisov pervoi poloviny XX veka (mezhdu liberalizmom, kommunizmom i national-sotsializmom (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2007), 159–74.

14

 E. I. Kolchinskii, D. Beyrau, and Iulia A. Laius, eds., Nauka, tekhnika i obshchestvo Rossii i Germanii vo vremia Pervoi mirovoi voiny (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2007), 9–497.

15

 E. I. Kolchinskii, “Predislovie,” in Letopis´ Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk, 1901–1934, ed. Kolchinskii and Galina I. Smagina (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2007), 4: 14—32. 16

 To mention just a few of them: V. S. Sobolev, Avgusteishii prezident: Velikii kniaz´ Konstantin Konstantinovich vo glavе Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1993), 56–57, 75–78; V. I. Vernadskii, Dnevniki: 1917–1921, oktiabr´ 1917–ianvar´ 1920, ed. M. Iu. Sorokina et al. (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1994), 11–52; E. Iu. Basargina, Vitseprezident Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk P. V. Nikitin (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2007),

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This article examines the transformation of the Academy of Sciences under the impact of World War I, the revolutions, and the Civil War as a result of the creation of a mobilizational model for the organization of science, and the re­ lated restructuring of the system of relationships of scientists with society and the state. It attempts to show the growing role of the academic community in mobilizing resources, securing the front and rear with strategic raw materials, developing new weaponry and military technology, providing scientific and technical cooperation for defense orders, and creating new branches of the defense industry. This served as the stimulus to transforming science into a priority in government policy and in the end, to establishing “Big Science” in Russia, to confirming the image of science as the factory of knowledge, and to transforming the relationship between applied and foundational knowledge. It was precisely during these years that academicians worked out plans for forming a network of scientific research institutes that were later embraced by the Soviet government, which demanded centralized planning and strict administrative subordination from the scientific community when assigning material and human resources. This article will also show the role of the war in the self-identity of the academic community of Russia, both under the in­ fluence of the changing role of science in government and in connection with the collapse of the “Scientists’ International” and the reconstruction of the traditional system of international relations. The Academy of Sciences and the State in the Decade before the War In the decade before World War I the Imperial Academy of Sciences found itself in a dual position, which predetermined, in the end, the behavior of its members in 1914–18. On the one hand, scientists were members of an international scientific community, joined prestigious societies and academies, and received wide recognition for their work. The majority of them worked in the laboratories and universities of Western Europe while preparing for the professoriate. Returning to their homeland, they strove to transfer European models of scientific organization, its ethos, and relations between scientists, society, and the state into Russia. In their professional culture, behavior, language, and way of life Russian scientists hardly differed from their foreign colleagues. They were convinced that their activity served the government and the people. In their publications scientists emphasized the objectivity, originality, and novelty of their research. Congresses and learned societies united scientists and scholars by discipline, ensuring a free, “civil” space. Scientists felt themselves to be experts, people with high professional repu254–69; B. S. Kaganovich, Sergei Fedorovich Ol´denburg: Opyt biografii (St. Petersburg: Feniks, 2006), 66–80.

178 Eduard I. Kolchinsky

tations, responsible for the fate of humanity. In the words of geologist, mineralogist, and academician Vladimir I. Vernadskii, it was at these congresses where the state significance of science became apparent and the forms of its social organization were created; while preserving the freedom and independence of individual creativity, these organizations united individual scientists and extended their work to future generations.17 On the other hand, in the prewar decade the Imperial Academy of Sciences remained part of a state machine that was financed by the government, and whose selected members were approved by the emperor. As civil servants members of the academy felt how the government, intentionally or uninten­ tionally, repressed their activity. They understood that the government was not capable of supporting scientific research on the scale necessary to meet the country’s needs. A dangerous split opened in the civil and professional status of academicians as both “government servant” and “priest of science,” which led inevitably to opposition between the two roles. At first academicians, distancing themselves from political issues, stressed that they conducted their work independent of the sociopolitical context. But the growing practical value of science and a sense of their own indispensability caused them to aspire to a special role in resolving the problems that arose during the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905–07 revolution. Many academicians considered the fight for political freedom to be the best means of guaranteeing professional self-realization and self-identification. Participating in the liberal movement, apologists of “pure science” were drawn into politics. Their academic interests took second place, replaced by activity in public organizations, which they considered they did not have the right to refuse for the sake of the people and the country.18 Responding to a demand from academy president Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich to either stop protesting against the government or resign, one of the oldest academicians, plant physiologist Andrei S. Famintsyn wrote: “Not to resign but to fight firmly for one’s views seems to me to be the straightforward responsibility of a citizen, even though it brings the risk of losing one’s post in state service.”19 A significant number of academicians were convinced that the government was incapable of resolving the growing problems. Viewing themselves 17

 Arkhiv Rossiiskoi akademii nauk (ARAN) f. 518 (Vernadskii Vladimir Ivanovich), op. 4, d. 108, l. 9 (“Opravdanie nauki,” early August 1918). 18

 V. A. Steklov, Perepiska s otechestvennymi matematikami: Vospominaniia (Leningrad: Nauka, 1991), 104.

19

 Sankt-Peterburgskii filial Arkhiva Rossiiskoi akademii nauk (SPF ARAN) f. 6 (Presi­ dent of the Imperial Academy of Sciences Grand Prince Konstantin Konstantinovich), op. 1, d. 26, ll. 113–14 (A. S. Famintsyn to the academy president, 4 March 1905).

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as the bearers of progress in a backward country, they tied their future to fundamental reforms, the convocation of a constituent assembly, and the introduction of a constitutional monarchy. During the unrest of 1905 they protested against stationing police and military units at Academy of Sciences buildings, called upon officers and soldiers not to obey orders, and argued that the unrest, strikes, and mutinies were retribution for the authorities’ crimes against the people.20 At the same time they did not forget about their professional interests. Academicians spoke out in favor of stronger state support for science, the abolition of censorship, the development of popular education, and democratization and autonomy for higher education.21 This led to conflict between them and the president, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, who repeatedly called on scientists not to turn science into a “weapon of politics” and to remain loyal toward the authorities who financed their activity.22 The antigovernment disposition of a large number of academicians first manifested itself clearly in the so-called “Note of 342 Scientists” (titled “A Note on Russian Educational Needs”), signed by 17 of the 32 academicians and published on 20 January 1905 in the newspaper Nasha zhizn´ (Our Life). In his resulting clash with the signatories, Konstantin Konstantinovich was obliged to seek accommodation with them.23 The spokesman for the mood, views, and aspirations of liberal academicians was the Academic Union, created in the spring of 1905, and later the Constitutional Democratic Party, which arose after the tsar’s manifesto of 17

20  A. V. Predtechenskii and A. V. Kol’tsov, “Iz istorii Akademii nauk v period revo­ liutsii 1905–1907 godov,” Vestnik Akademii nauk SSSR, no. 3 (1955): 82–87. 21

 These questions were first raised pointedly at an extraordinary meeting of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in February 1905. Рrotokoly zasedanii Obshchеgo sobraniia Imperatorskoi akademii nauk (hereafter PZOS IAN), “Protokol III,” 18 February 1905 (PZOS IAN, 1905, § 73); “Doklad Komissii po voprosu ob otmene stesnenii malo­ russkogo pechatnogo slova: Prilozhenie k protokolu zasedaniia,” 18 February 1905 (PZOS IAN, 1905, ll. 1–28). Later the academic assembly discussed them again several times; “Protokol IV,” 5 March 1905 (PZOS IAN, 1905, § 83); “Protokol V,” 5 March 1905 (PZOS IAN, 1905, § 104); “Zakliuchenie Imperatorskoi akademii nauk po voprosu o svobode pechati v Rossii” (PZOS IAN, 1905, ll. 1–32).

22

 “Pis´mo velikogo kniazia Konstantina Konstantinovicha, napravlennoe chlenam Akademii nauk,” 4 February 1905 (SBF ARAN f. 6, op. 1, d. 26, ll. 117–18); “Osoboe mnenie velikogo kniazia Konstantina Konstantinovicha k proektu postanovleniia Obshchego sobraniia AN ob otmene vremennykh pravil o pechati,” 13 March 1905 (SPF ARAN f. 6, op. 1, d. 22, l. 24).

23

 “Rech´, sostavlennaia Petrom Keppen,” 5 March 1905, SPF ARAN f. 6, op. 1, d. 26, l. 154.

180 Eduard I. Kolchinsky

October 1905.24 After the armed uprisings in late 1905, however, scientists no longer dreamed of “merging with the people.” Instead they feared them, in the words of the scholar and editor Mikhail O. Gershenzon, “more than all the punishments of the authorities,” and praised the government for protecting them from “the people’s rage” with “bayonets and prisons.”25 Philosopher Sergei N. Bulgakov asserted bitterly that “the persecution of knowledge was repeated again during the days of revolution.… Our intelligentsia youth could not acknowledge the autonomous significance of science, philosophy, education or universities….”26 Alienated from scholarly knowledge and higher education, the youth were unable to see the possibilities of using knowledge against tsarism. As a result the academic community, including its leadership, turned out to be divided in its political leanings. President Konstantin Konstantinovich shared the conservative politics of the court, Vice President Petr V. Nikitin sided with the Octobrists, and Permanent Secretary Ol´denburg held liberal-democratic views. The failure of delegates from the academic curia in the work of the State Council buried hopes for reform from above in science and education. The professoriate decided that it must take upon itself the task of the future development of scientific research and education. Many academicians saw a way out of this situation in strengthening the connection of fundamental research with industry and agriculture, elevating its role in the development of Russia, and attracting investment in research from private sources, cooperatives, and zemstva. By creating private institutions of higher education, public foundations, and scientific-technical societies, they expanded the social base of science. Following the example of Germany and the United States, they founded the Society for the Promotion of Experimental Science and Its Practical Application in Moscow (Obshchestvo sodeistviia uspekham opytnykh nauk i ikh prakticheskikh primenenii im. Khristofora Semenovicha Ledentsova), named after Khristofor S. Ledentsov, the merchant whose bequest founded the society. While actively participating in the self-organization of science, acade­ micians did not forget about the government’s patriotic feelings. Vernadskii declared that “a great country like Russia cannot and should not avoid the intense competition that the peoples of Western Europe and beyond the 24

 A. E. Ivanov, “Pervaia russkaia revoliutsiia i professura vysshikh uchebnykh zavedenii: Akademicheskii soiuz. Ideologiia, politicheskaia deiatel´nost´,” Voprosy so­ tsial´no-ekonomicheskogo razvitiia i revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia Rossii, no. 48 (1977): 102–26.

25

 M. O. Gershenzon, ed., Vekhi: Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii (Moscow: Tip. V. M. Sablina, 1909), 92. 26

 Ibid., 28.

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ocean display in this realm. This [i.e., avoiding international competition] is forbidden not only by the noble feeling of national pride, but also by an aware­ ness of the benefit to the state, as far as people of science are able to judge.”27 As before, academicians tried to get the emperor and government to ex­ pand the network of the academy’s institutions, increase funding, approve a new charter, support stronger international connections, and align higher education with economic needs and democratization. This led to new clashes with the authorities, as happened in 1911 in connection with events at Moscow University. Protesting against the firing of Rector Aleksandr A. Manuilov by Minister of Education Lev A. Kasso, more than 130 professors left the uni­ versity. This protest was supported by a number of aca­demicians, and the president of the Academy of Sciences had to intervene in order to prevent condemnation of the Moscow debacle at the academy’s general assembly by categorically rejecting Secretary Ol´denburg’s appeal to include the situation at Moscow University in the agenda.28 In the prewar years this was the situation in which the search for a new self-identity for academic science was conducted, and plans were developed for its transformation into a network of state scientific research institutes. German scientific institutions, societies, and universities remained the Academy of Science’s main scientific partners in these years. A high percentage of the academy’s members and associates were people of German nationality. At the beginning of the war 5 out of 37 academicians (13 percent) were of German descent, and among the 156 foreign honorary members and corresponding members, 53 (33.2 percent) were German scientists. It is typical that during this period only 2 honorary members and 9 corresponding members were elected from England, and only 2 and 19 from France.29 All this testifies to the fact that, as before, the academic community remained oriented toward ties with German scientists rather than those from countries that would become Russia’s allies in the war.

27

 SPF ARAN f. 2 (Office of the Conference of the Imperial Academy of Sciences), op. 1–1911, d. 44, l. 16 (note of Vladimir I. Vernadskii).

28

 “Obrashchenie S. F. Ol´denburgа,” no earlier than 4 February 1911, SPF ARAN f. 1 (Conference of the Imperial Academy of Sciences), op. 2–1911, d. 2, ll. 1–2. 29

 Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk: Personal´nyi sostav. Kniga 1. 1724–1917 (Moscow: Nauka, 2009), 496–525. Despite the anti-German policy carried out since the time of Alexander III, the percentage of German scientists elected between 1901 and 1913 to be foreign corresponding members—29 out of 98—and corresponding members (5 out of 14), remained high.

182 Eduard I. Kolchinsky

Defending the Fatherland World War I placed “its heavy hand on the development of science,” as Vernad­ skii wrote in 1915, “diverting resources, and taking its workers away from sci­ entific work for months at a time.”30 The war also had an immediate impact on the academy itself; in October 1914, for example, a military infirmary opened in the Great Conference Hall of its main building.31 More generally, the war evoked an outpouring of patriotism among Russian academicians. It forced them to forget about their discontent with the government, work out new forms of cooperation with the government, society, and scientists from other countries, and to direct their main attention to applied research of importance to defense.32 Russian scientists as a whole made common cause with the gov­ ernment and army leadership, and part of the professoriate actively joined in the “war of minds”—the exchange of collective appeals by intellectuals on the basis of the pretensions and claims of their nations and culture against the goals and plans of the enemy seeking to discredit it.33 At the same time the Academy of Sciences refrained from overt demon­ strations of loyalty, remained sober amidst the chauvinistic frenzy, and dis­ tanced itself from university professors who called for breaking ties with their counterparts in the Central Powers and for excluding them from the ranks of honorary members of all Russian universities, scientific institutions, and learned societies. The Academy of Sciences took more than a year to im­ plement a government order of 31 October 1914, approved by the emperor on 19 November, which instructed all state institutions to purge themselves of 30

 Ocherki i rechi akad. V. I. Vernadskogo (Petrograd: Nauchnoe khimiko-tekhnicheskoe izdatel´stvo, 1922), 134. At this time Vernadksii became a key figure in transforming the Imperial Academy of Sciences into an institution that coordinated defense research.

31

 Under the patronage of Konstantin Konstantinovich, it was financed by private do­ nations from academicians. E. Iu. Basargina, Imperatorskaia Akademiia nauk na rubezhe dvukh vekov: Ocherki istorii (Moscow: Indrik, 2008), 480–81. 32

 Ivanov, “Rossiiskoe ‘uchenoe soslovie’ v gody ‘Vtoroi Otechestvennoi voiny,’” 109.

33

 Alexander N. Dmitriev, “La mobilisation intellectuelle. (La communauté académique internationalle et la Premiére Guerre mondiale),” Cahiers du monde russe, sovietique et post-sovietique 43, 4 (2002): 617–44. The proclamation titled “An die Kulturwelt,” signed by 93 leading German scholars, scientists, and writers and published on 4 October 1914, is especially well known. They rejected charges against Germany for initiating the war and using harsh military methods, lambasted England and France for entering into alliance with barbaric Russia, and praised German militarism as the defender of culture. The reaction of Russian scientists is analyzed in the article by Trude Maurer, “Der Krieg der Professoren: Russische Antworten auf den deutschen Aufruf ‘An der Kulturwelt,’” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, no. 1 (2004): 221–47.

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enemy aliens. In response to an inquiry from acting Minister of Education M. A. Traube on 14 March 1915, the academicians supported a resolution to re­ ject the imperial order by 21 out of 25 votes.34 “It is not logical to think,” they declared, “that such an extraordinary measure as the deprivation of honorary titles, which has never before been applied in any war as a means of fighting by our academy or others, would not have any consequences for the institution adopting it.” Only those members who signed the appeal “An die Kulturwelt,” issued by German scientists and writers in early October 1914, were expelled from the academy. In January 1916 the Academy of Sciences reiterated its re­ fusal in its response to an inquiry from the governor of Petrograd province.35 Finally, the following month the academy came to the decision demanded by the government by a vote of 20 in favor and 11 opposed.36 At the same time the academicians “forgot” to transfer the expellees and send them the appropriate notification, which deprived the resolution of any legal force, and reserved the right to reinstate those who were expelled after the conclusion of the war. The government’s failure to force the Academy of Sciences to create a united bloc against scientists of enemy states testified not only to political dis­ agreements within the membership, but also to the dominance of oppositionist attitudes and the desire to stay distant from official policy. At the same time, the academy’s composition reflected the impact of the war. Between 1914 and 1918 the academy elected four Frenchmen, four Englishmen, two Belgians, two Norwegians, and one Czech, while up to 1922 not a single German scientist was elected to be a foreign corresponding member. The academy tried to compensate for the damage caused by the rupture of Russian–German contacts. It discussed the problems of receiving scientific publications issued in Germany and Austria-Hungary, and of moving the purchasing center for foreign literature from Leipzig to Uppsala and the leadership of the International Union of Academies from Berlin to Amsterdam. To replace traditional connections, efforts were made to establish close scientific relations with England and France. In strengthening contacts with the liberal academic circles of these counties, many members saw the possibility of democratizing the Russian Empire itself.37 They stressed the strategic nature of the reorientation toward collaboration with the Anglo-French sci34

 “Protokol ekstraordinarnogo Obshchego sobraniia,” 14 March 1915, SPF ARAN f. 1, op. 1a–1915, d. 262, l. 36.

35

 “Obshchee sobranie. Zasedanie I,” 9 January 1916 (ibid., op. 1а–1916, d. 163, l. 17).

36

 “Obshchee sobranie. Zasedanie II,” 6 February 1916 (ibid., ll. 34–35).

37

 A. N. Dmitriev, “Ot akademicheskogo internatsionalizma k sisteme national´nogosudarstvennoi nauki,” in Kolchinskii, Beyrau, and Laius, Nauka, tekhnika i obshchestvo, 36–37.

184 Eduard I. Kolchinsky

entific community, and fought for such measures as holding joint conferences with the Allies, creating intermediaries like the French Institute in St. Petersburg, and translating works by English and French scholars and scientists into Russian.38 These goals received support from the Allies. In a letter of 13 March 1916 to Minister of Education Pavel N. Ignat´ev, British ambassador George William Buchanan, who was close to leaders of the liberal parties, offered to help widen scientific contacts between the two countries. Meeting on 9 May 1916, the academy’s General Assembly resolved to create a special commission, chaired by Ol´denburg, to strengthen contacts between Russian and British scientists.39 Its original membership of four was determined only in October, but soon thereafter, the idea arose of expanding the commission’s sphere of activity and tasks by strengthening contacts with scientists not only in Britain, but also other allied countries. The acting vice president, geologist Anatolii P. Karpinskii, who in effect headed the academy at this time, was named chair of the newly named “Commission for Strengthening Scientific Contacts with the Allies” (Komissiia po ukrepleniiu nauchnykh kontaktov s soiuznikami) in October.40 The commission included representatives of the humanities as well as the natural sciences, and invitations to participate were also extended to universities and learned societies in Petrograd. It was charged first and foremost with arranging for the exchange and translation of scientific information and scholarly publications among the allies, visits by professors to give lectures and young scholars for study, and joint expeditions and projects such as publication of The History of Russia in English.41 It proposed compiling analytical and bibliographical data on the accomplishments of Russian science, and publishing journal articles in Russian and French on the physical-mathematical sciences and the humanities. The Ministry of Education also contributed to the effort to advance scientific and cultural relations between Russia and its wartime allies by creating a “Special Commission for Strengthening Cultural Contacts with the Allies” (Osoboe soveshchanie dlia ukrepleniia kul´turnykh sviazei s soiuznikami). 38

 N. K. Kol´tsov, “Natsional´naia organizatsiia nauki,” Priroda, no. 1 (1915): 155–64; M. I. Rostovtsev, “Mezhdunarodnoe nauchnoe obshchenie,” Russkaia mysl´, no. 1 (1916): 74–81. 39

 “Obshchee sobranie. Zasedanie V,” 9 May 1916, SPF ARAN f. 1, op. 1а–1916, d. 163, § 108, l. 56ob.

40 41

 “Obshchee sobranie. Zasedanie XI,” 15 October 1916 (ibid., § 242, l. 103ob).

 “Protokol zasedaniia Komissii po voprosu ob ustanovlenii bolee deiatel´nykh nauchnykh otnoshenii mezhdu Rossiei i Angliei” (PZOS IAN, 1916, Prilozhenie I–II to § 221, ll. 168–71).

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This government commission was chaired by Vladimir T. Sheviakov, who was the assistant minister of education as well as a corresponding member of the academy. Academicians Karpinskii, Vernadskii, and the historian Aleksandr S. Lappo-Danilevskii were sent abroad by the academy. Influenced by the publication of the collective work French Science in Paris in 1915, the Academy of Sciences created another commission called “Russian Science,” headed by Lappo-Danilevskii (followed by Ol´denburg after Lappo-Danilevskii’s death in 1919). Its purpose was to prepare a similar book titled Russian Science, which would demonstrate the contributions of Russian scholars to international science and “show how much thought, hard work, and trouble have been invested by Russians into creating popular cultural treasures in the form of books, libraries, museums, laboratories, and experimental stations, which are becoming accessible to ever widening circles of people.”42 This commission was the first attempt to institutionalize the study of the history of Russian science. The disruption caused by the war prevented the completion of this collective work, in which more than 50 contributors participated. Various other projects were launched: Russian Science was slated for translation into French; a delegation was sent to establish a Russian Institute in Paris; and the academy’s publications were sent to England. But growing censorship and control over the mail obstructed the exchange of information and printed publications between Russian scholars and their foreign colleagues, and severed existing ties; the 1917 revolutions put an end to this commission as well as the others. Amidst the growing economic and sociopolitical crisis another work, the four-volume publication The Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1881–1914, was also left unfinished. Only two volumes came out—the second and third—containing historical surveys of the academy’s scholarly and administrative institutions and 93 biographies of academicians. Vernadskii completed his survey, The Academy of Sciences in Its First Century, in 1915, but it remained in galley proofs. In 1914 the first attempt was made to organize research in some way on the history of science, but that produced no results.43 The height­ened interest in history was linked to the academic community’s search for a national self-identity and the elevation of science to state importance, the history of which was supposed to become a means of inculcating patriotism and

42

 Otchet o deiatel´nosti Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk po otdeleniiam Fiziko-matematicheskikh i Istoricheskikh nauk i filologii za 1917 god (Petrograd: Tip. RAN, 1917), 8.

43

 V. D. Esakov, “Neosushchestvlennyi proekt Akademii nauk,” Vestnik RAN 67, 12 (1997): 1129–39.

186 Eduard I. Kolchinsky

arousing pride in the world-class accomplishments of Russian scientists and scholars.44 The development of a national self-identity was also bolstered by the academy’s efforts to preserve scientific and cultural monuments threatened by destruction or confiscation. As many reports testify, in trench warfare the same places could change hands many times, accompanied by frequent looting and the destruction of unique historical artifacts, manuscripts, and books. On 29 November 1914, upon the initiative of historian Aleksei A. Shakhmatov, the General Assembly created a Commission for the Preservation of Historical Monuments and Scientific Collections located in areas of military operations. Historians and philologists were joined by the botanist Ivan P. Borodin, the geochemist Vernadskii, and the zoologist Nikolai V. Nasonov. The participation of natural scientists in this commission’s work emphasized the academy’s ambition to become a national center for preserving state cultural treasures under threat. On 20 December 1914 the academy appointed the historian and archeologist Evgenii F. Shmurlo as its representative charged with preserving monuments in Galicia, Bukovina, and Poland. Later the academician and Byzantinist Fedor I. Uspenskii became its representative on the Caucasus front, with the approval of the Supreme Commander. At its extraordinary meeting on 23 February 1915 the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences responded to a request from the Society for the Preservation of Antiquities in Warsaw, and created another special commission.45 The central government allocated 6,000 rubles to the academy on two occasions, in March 1915 and November 1916, for expenses connected with preserving historic monuments, libraries, and collections in areas of military operations. The Academy of Sciences carried out important work in 1915–16 to identify and preserve scientific-cultural historical artifacts on the Southwestern and Caucasus fronts, with the active participation of academicians Nikolai Ia. Marr, the linguist, and Iosif A. Orbeli, the orientalist. Literally hours before his death, President Konstantin Konstantinovich proposed cre­ating a committee under his leadership to describe, preserve, and support archaeological monuments in Constantinople and its environs, which were supposed to go 44

 This reflected efforts to reevaluate the accomplishments of international science in favor of the national, which during these years engulfed all combatant countries, but was especially pronounced in Germany. Stefan L. Wolf, “Fiziki v ‘voine umov’: Vozrazheniia Vil´gel´ma Vina [Wilhelm Wien] protiv ‘aglitsizma,’” in Kolchinskii, Beyrau, and Laius, Nauka, tekhnika i obshchestvo, 79–93. In the decade after the war this became the force behind the emergence of “Aryan physics” in Germany, “proletarian or Soviet biology” in the USSR, and later the notorious struggle against cosmopolitanism.

45

 “Ekstraordinarnoe Obshchee sobranie,” 23 February 1915 (PZOS IAN, 1915, § 43, l. 26).

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to a victorious Russia after the war. 46 The question of creating a Palestine Committee with the same goal was discussed more than once. When Russian forces took Trebizond from Turkey in 1916, they removed a collection of rare manuscripts.47 From the first days of the war, which closed off the opportunity for Russian scholars to publish in German journals, practically all branches of Russian science were seized with the desire to have their own scientific journals and professional societies. The biologist and corresponding member of the academy Nikolai K. Kol´tsov emphasized in 1916 that the ambition to have a network of national journals was dictated not by narrow nationalism but by the desire to tap “the great strengths hidden within the Russian people.”48 The domestic scientific community longed to become self-sufficient. It was this goal that lay behind the congress of botanists held in Petrograd on 20–21 December 1915, upon the initiative of academicians Famintsyn and Borodin, which established the Russian Botanical Society and its journal. The Russian Physiological Society came into existence on 6 January 1916, and in April 1917 the first congress of Russian physiologists elected its leadership and the editorial board of the society’s scientific organ, The I. M. Sechenov Russian Physiological Society. Another corresponding member, the histologist Aleksandr S. Dogel´, founded the Russian Archive of Anatomy, Histology, and Embryology in 1916. That same year, academicians Nikolai I. Andrusov and Аleksei P. Pavlov provided the initiative behind the new Russian Paleontology Society. Thus the foundation was laid for the creation of scientific societies affiliated with the Academy of Sciences and the formation of a network of specialized scientific journals controlled by its members. The orientation to­ward a self-sufficient domestic scientific infrastructure as a whole accorded with the ambitions of a new generation of Russian scholars and scientists, which later led to isolationism and radicalism.49 With the outbreak of war the academy became more closely tied to the everyday needs of the state than it had ever been before. The rapid growth 46

 “Pis´mo velikogo kniazia Konstantina Konstantinovicha S. F. Ol´denburgu,” 2 June 1915 (PZOS IAN, 1915, § 105, 98–99).

47  “Zapiska akademika N. Ia. Marra o registratsii kak vyvezennykh, tak i broshennykh na meste na proizvol sud´by rukopisei i drevnostei zaniatoi nami chasti Turetskoi Armenii,” Izvestiia IAN 6, 16 (1915): 1711–19. 48

 N. K. Kol´tsov, “Uchenye obshchestva i nauchnye zhurnaly v Rossii,” Priroda, no. 2 (1916): 253–54.

49

 D. A. Aleksandrov, “Pochemu sovetskie uchenye perestali pechatat’sia za ru­ bezhom: Stanovlenie samodostatochnosti i izolirovannosti otechestvennoi nauki, 1914–1940 gg.,” Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki 3 (1996): 3–24.

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of industry on the eve of the war did not solve the problems of supplying the army with the necessary armaments, or the dependence of the defense industry on imported raw materials, and it soon became clear that Russian industry could not meet the needs of wartime.50 From mid-1915 war industries committees, modeled after analogous German committees, began to be created to cooperate with the government in mobilizing industry. Many of the Central War Industries Committee’s subdivisions—the chemical, metallurgical, fuel, mechanical, and automobile-aviation subcommittees, among others—attracted the participation of members of the academy. The war industries committees acted as contractors for military agencies and intermediaries between the state treasury and enterprises. They were financed through government subsidies allocated from the orders placed by military agencies through the committees, as well as voluntary dues. The war industries committees worked closely with the government, the Special Commissions, the Main Supply Committee of the Army, the Main Artillery Administration, and the Union of Zemstvos and Union of Towns, in which liberal academicians also played an active role. Scientists closely tied to military production began to be elected as members of the Academy of Sciences. Aleksei N. Krylov, who headed the Nikolai Main Physical Laboratory while serving as a consultant for the Metallurgical, Baltic, Admiralty, and Putilov factories on questions of ship construction, became a member of the academy in August 1916. That same year he headed the Main Military Meteorological Administration and became a member of the commission that investigated the causes of the explosion and sinking of the battleship Empress Maria.51 As a shipbuilding specialist and expert on the defense industry, he was appointed to lead a group of inspectors at the Putilov factory who were looking into the disruption of defense orders there. After the examination Krylov became the chairman of the government administration that took over the factory, and quickly managed to raise labor productivity, doubling the output and variety of guns and shells produced at the factory. Another example is Ipat´ev, who was elected to the academy in January of 1916. From February 1915 he headed a commission for the procurement of 50

 O. R. Airapetov, Generaly, liberaly i predprinimateli: Rabota na front i revoliutsiiu (1907– 1917) (Moscow: Tri kvadrata, 2003), 97–103. This was first demonstrated convincingly in the book by the head of the Main Artillery Administration, Aleksei A. Manikovskii, titled Boevoe snabzhenie russkoi armii v voinu 1914–1918 gg., 3 vols. (Moscow: Vysshii Voenno-redaktorskii sovet, 1920–23). This work was republished several times, and became the foundation for examining the Russian government’s problems of supplying the army. The author asserts that “the true reasons for our defeats are hidden deep in the overall conditions of our life in the period just before the war. The deficiencies in military supply themselves were only a partial manifestation of these conditions” (Boevoe snabzhenie, 1: 9). 51

 A. N. Krylov, Moi vospominaniia (St. Petersburg: Politekhnika, 2003), 212–42.

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explosives formerly imported from Germany. Thanks to energetic measures to create a domestic chemical industry, the commission managed in the space of a year (from February 1915 to February 1916) to increase the production of explosives almost fifteen times, and to arrange for the domestic production of benzene at fourteen newly created factories; over the course of the next year another ten factories were built, and output increased one and a half times.52 Problems of a similar scale and complexity were resolved by organizing the production of other components of ammunition and poison gas. Along with the creation of new factories, measures were taken to exploit domestic deposits of pyrites, lead, sulphur, and saltpeter. A Chemical Committee headed by Lieutenant-General Aleksei A. Mani­ kovskii was created in April 1916 at the Main Artillery Administration for researching and procuring explosives and asphyxiating and incendiary agents. Ipat´ev’s commission joined the Chemical Committee as its Department of Explosives; when Ipat´ev was appointed as its head, the committee added four departments for asphyxiating agents, incendiary agents and flamethrowers, gas masks, and acids. Responsible for the entire chemical industry, the committee exercised considerable authority to carry out its responsibilities, which included the production of explosives and the search for raw material for their manufacture; the development and production of gas masks, and the instruction of troops on how to use them and other means to combat poison gas; the development of poison gas, its uses, and methods of supplying the troops with it; and the construction of new chemical plants, among others.53 Academician Nikolai S. Kurnakov and future members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, including Chichibabin, also worked on the committee. As head of the Chemical Committee, Ipat´ev immedicately recognized the merits of charcoal gas masks designed by future academician Nikolai D. Zelinskii, and arranged for the production of materials to defend against gas attacks.54 The gas masks were tested in 1916 on the Western Front, accepted, and introduced into production. As a result, from 11 to 15 million wet and dry gas masks entered the arsenal of Russian troops. By 1917 around 200 factories came under the Chemical Committee’s jurisdiction. They produced not only various kinds of explosives, but also poisonous materials such as chlorine,

52

 Trofimova, Sozdanie i deiatel´nost´ Khimicheskogo komiteta, 116–90.

53

 V. N. Ipat´ev, Rabota khimicheskoi promyshlennosti na oboronu vo vremia voiny (Petro­ grad: Institut еkomomicheskikh issledovanii, 1920), 3–27. 54

 M. P. Supotnitskii, “Ot ‘shlema Gipo’—k zashchite Zelinskogo: Kak sovershenst­ vovalis´ protivogazy v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny,” Ofitsery, no. 1 (2011): 50–55.

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phosgene, and chloropicrin, for both gas cylinders and shells.55 Academicians Ipat´ev and Kurnakov were among the founders of the Experimental Factory, created in 1916 in affiliation with the Russian Society for Physical Chemistry, which became the proving ground for working out the technology for the mass production of chemical materials developed in the laboratory. The factory played an important role not only in defense but also in the preparation of engineers and chemists. It was thanks to the successes in applying chemical science to military affairs that a symbiotic relationship between academic science and the government began to take shape. Ipat´ev himself became Nicholas II’s personal authority on scientific matters, and received the highest Russian medals of honor. To many members of the academic community, the activity of chemists demonstrated convincingly that scientists were capable of engaging quickly with the resolution of problems, overcoming bureaucratic stagnation, and find­ ing arguments that were understandable to industrialists about the economic benefit of rapidly adopting new technologies important for national defense. At the same time, it was not always clear how much of this activity arose out of selflessness, or whether scientists, becoming consultants for military agencies, lobbied for the interests of one company or another (as happened, for example, with the German scientist Fritz Haber, the “Father of Chemical Warfare”).56 In any case, during World War I Krylov, Ipat´ev, Kurnakov, and others were the first in Russia to show that academicians could be highly ef­ fective organizers of industrial production.57 Over the course of the war industrial production grew significantly, primarily in metalworking, machine construction, and electrical engineering, most often at the expense of a reduction in non-defense production. The rise in production allowed Russia to increase its output of airplanes 7.1 times, aviation motors 12 times, electrical motors and transformers 1.8 times, and radios almost 175 times.58 Thanks to structural reforms and the adoption of new technologies, the metalworking industry emerged from the war enriched with 55

 A. N. De-Lazari, Khimicheskoe oruzhie na frontakh Mirovoi voiny, 1914–1918: Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk (Moscow: Vuzovskaia nauka, 2008). During the entire period of the war 70 new chemical factories were established, and the gross output of the entire chemical industry rose 64 percent, primarily because of the growth in production of explosives (Kafengauz, Evoliutsiia promyshlennogo proizvodstva Rossii, 189–92).

56

 This aspect of Haber’s activity is illuminated in detail in Margit Szöllösi-Janze, Fritz Haber: 1868—1934. Eine Biographie (Munich: Beck, 1998), 256–488.

57

 I. S. Dmitriev, Benzol´noe kol´tso Rossiiskoi imperii: Sozdanie koksobenzol´noi promysh­ lennosti na iuge v gody Pervoi Mirovoi voiny (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2005), 50–51. 58

 Kafengauz, Evoliutsiia promyshlennogo proizvodstva Rossii, 186–87.

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more powerful equipment and new technical experience. The chemical industry occupied second place in the scale and tempo of reforms. There prewar personal connections facilitated cooperation between scientists and generals like General Manikovskii, the head of the Main Artillery Administration, and especially V. S. Mikhailov, who ran the military chemical industry. The successful collaboration of industrialists, the military, and scientists, endowed with the authority to exert power, became the basis for the mobilization of science in the USSR, where scientists not only headed the scientific councils in the government commissariats, later ministries, and other agencies, but also became deputy commissars and ministers, like the future Nobel laureate Petr L. Kapitsa.59 There are other less well-known examples of the successful involvement of academic science in resolving problems that arose when the war disrupted economic ties. The academicians and botanists Vladimir L. Komarov and Nikolai I. Kuznetsov, for example, participated in eliminating shortages of tannins and medicinal plants, and the zoologists and academy members Nikolai M. Knipovich and Petr Iu. Shmidt sought to address food supply problems by improving fisheries. The Commission for the Study of Russian Natural Resources (KEPS) was created in February 1915 as a way of achieving independence in the supply of war materials for the defense industry and the mobilization of resources necessary for defense. Its first chairman, elected in October 1915, was Vernadskii, who was also working in the Economic Commission of the State Council and the Allies’ Interparliamentary Trade Conference. From its creation KEPS included academicians representing virtually all branches of science. Later they were joined by engineers, humanists, the military, civilian officials, and workers at defense industries. By the end of 1915 the mem­bership of KEPS reached 109, and one year later, there were 139 members. The problem of supplying the front with sufficient strategic raw materials oc­cupied a central place in the work of KEPS. Its scientists went on geological expeditions and resolved questions of food supply. Research results were collected and disseminated in the commission’s periodicals, including The Natural Resources of Russia, Russia’s Riches, and Reports on the Activity of KEPS. KEPS developed into a new form of organizing complex scientific research, financed by various government institutions. The greater part of its funding came from the ministries 59  On the mobilization of Soviet science, see Walter Grunden et al., “Laying the Foundation for Wartime Research: A Comparative Overview of Science Mobilization in National Socialist Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union,” Osiris, no. 20 (2005): 98–104; Eduard Kolchinsky, “Science Mobilization in the Soviet Union,” Historia Scientiarum 16, 1 (2006): 15–28; Kolchinsky, “Innovation and National System: Science Mobilization in the Soviet Union,” in Socio-Economic and Tecnological Innovation: Mechanism and Insti­ tutions, ed. Kasturi Mandal, Nadia Asheulova, and Svetlana Kirdina (New Delhi: Narosa Publishing House, 2014), 3–24.

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and agencies whose orders were fulfilled by the commission. The topic of how to improve the organization of science was discussed frequently at its board meetings and general assemblies. Plans were developed for the creation of an institute for physical-chemical analysis and another for the study of platinum and other noble metals, both of which were established after the October Revolution. KEPS worked in close collaboration with the Geological Committee to search for strategic minerals such as tungsten, molybdenum, bismuth, and tin. Some members of the Academy of Sciences, it is true, thought that the creation of KEPS came about more as a result of a desire to take advantage of the situation and develop pure science, rather than out of a desire to aid the Fatherland in time of war. Academician and crystallographer Evgraf S. Fedorov thought that it was impermissible in a war to spend enormous financial and material resources on projects whose return would be realized only after several decades. “At the present time,” he asserted, “it is necessary to make every effort to aid the army and the part of the population that is in need, and not to think about spending for science.”60 Scholars in the humanities tried to make their contribution to victory over the enemy by demonstrating in their scholarly works, public lectures, and ar­ ticles the war’s patriotic character and the necessity of a crushing defeat of the perpetual aggressor—“German barbarians.” An “Archive of War” was created in the academy’s library, where letters, postcards, caricatures, popular prints, and other artifacts of war were preserved. The academy also financed efforts to collect the ritual lamentations that were sung when military recruits left their villages for the front and at soldiers’ funerals, as well as soldiers’ prayers, charms, and amulets, all of which were sent to the library.61 A commission was created at the beginning of 1917 to study the effects of the war on the ethnic composition of Russia. One of its founders was the orientalist Ol´denburg, who by that time practically ran the Academy of Sciences. “The fight still goes on, but it cannot last forever,” he wrote. “A clear understanding of the [country’s] ethnic [plemennoi] composition will have enormous significance, especially in those areas that lie on both sides of our European and Asian borders adjacent to the lands of our opponents.”62

60

 “Mneniia prof. E. Fedorova o zapiske gg. Akademikov ob izuchenii estestvennykh proizvoditel´nykh sil Rossii,” Izvestiia IAN VI, 16 (1915): 1679–80. 61

 The fate of the “Archive of War” is unknown. It disappeared after the library building was occupied by a hospital and other military institutions until the beginning of the 1920s.

62

 Otchet o deiatel´nosti Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk, 311–12.

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Despite the optimism of these words, and the hope they expressed that Russia would participate in the discussions of postwar borders, Ol´denburg himself, along with the majority of academicians, already understood that the measures undertaken to mobilize science could not guarantee a Russian victory, although they still clung to the hope that thanks to the Allies, Russia would not be defeated. Many shared the opinion expressed by academician Vladimir A. Steklov as early as the summer of 1915 that the country was rushing “toward a cliff, toward obvious destruction,” and viewed with great skepticism the ideas of their liberal colleagues that “a friendly union of leading intellectual circles with France and the Entente as a whole … will quickly bring about prosperity” in Russia.63 Others believed that science and democracy were inseparable, and dreamed of a postwar union of nations that would smash German militarism and spread the highest ethical norms in employing scientific accomplishments for the good of humanity. In an article about the war’s influence on Russia’s future development, Vernadskii insisted that the country’s economic and legal structure would be secured with the universal use of scientific knowledge.64 It was with these democratic dreams that the leaders of the Imperial Academy of Sciences approached the revolution of February 1917. The Failure to Implement the Liberal Scientific Program The majority of academicians rejoiced when the tsar abdicated and the Provisional Government came to power. 65 The Ministry of Education, which had jurisdiction over the Academy of Sciences, was headed first by Manuilov, the former rector of Moscow University, who had been fired in 1911, and then, from late July 1917, by Ol´denburg, with Vernadskii as his assistant minister. The economist Petr B. Struve became chair of the Customs and Tariff Committee of the Ministry of Trade and Industry. Ipat´ev was appointed director of the Central Chemical Laboratory and chairman of the Scientific-Technical Administration, which ran 14 institutes. At a special meeting of the General Assembly on 24 March, the Academy of Sciences expressed support for an address sent to the Provisional Government earlier that month by two of its leaders, Karpinskii and Ol´denburg, in which they hailed Russia’s unification into “a powerful and free people, capable of asserting its culture and protecting it 63

 Steklov, Perepiska s otechestvennymi matematikami, 259, 285.

64

 V. I. Vernadskii, “Voina i progress nauki,” in Chego zhdet Rossiia ot voiny, ed. N. N. Mikhailova (Petrograd: Prometei, 1915), 63–76.

65

 V. S. Sobolev, Nesti sviashchennoe vremia proshedshego… (St. Petersburg: NestorIstoriia, 2012), 109.

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from internal destruction and the external enemy,” and pledged to devote the academy’s collective knowledge and resources to “a government that enjoys the people’s trust.”66 Exploiting their close relationship with the government, scientists and scholars now sought to realize their plans for reforming science, beginning with the democratization of the academy itself. The academy became autono­ mous, and its president was now elected. Members were no longer required to live in Petrograd. On 11 July the Provisional Government changed the name from the Imperial Academy of Sciences to the Russian Academy of Sciences. That same day Karpinskii was confirmed as president, after having been elected to this position by the General Assembly in May. Plans for reform extended beyond the walls of the academy. According to a project for a Union of Scientific Institutions drawn up by the historian Shakhmatov, the country’s scientific institutions—museums, societies, institutes—and individual scholars would all be grouped by function, with the formation of unions for research in the humanities, natural sciences, and applied sciences.67 The plan also included a proposal for a “union of unions,” whose chairman would have direct access to the Council of Ministers. The proposed union was not supposed to have administrative control over scientific and scholarly institutions; its task was to be limited to securing government financing for research, and the main principle of its activity was to be the autonomy of each collective and researcher. Existing institutes were to be preserved under this reform plan. In a move to implement this project, a committee of representatives from scientific organizations and institutions of higher education began functioning under Karpinskii’s leadership in April 1917. The academy’s General Assembly also approved a proposal to convene a congress of representatives of Russian scientific institutions and societies, whose task would be the creation of a “Free Association for the Advancement and Dissemination of the Positive Sciences.”68 The association was to be tasked with increasing public and government interest in the development of science, propagandizing its accomplishments, and seeking funds for new scientific institutes. This project won the support of a number of scientific and educational societies and institutions in Petrograd and Moscow, as well

66

 “Obrashchenie k Vremennomu pravitel´stvu,” 4 March 1917 (PZOS AN, 1917, § 94, l. 92). 67

 L. V. Ivanova, Formirovanie sovetskoi nauchnoi intelligentsii (1917–1927 gg.) (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), 210–11. 68

 “Obshchee sobranie. Zasedanie VI,” 15 April 1917 (PZOS AN, 1917, § 112, l. 112).

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as from members of the executive and legislative branches of government.69 Provisional Government ministers, including Minister of War Aleksandr F. Kerenskii and Foreign Minister Petr N. Miliukov, addressed the association at its meetings in April and May. At its organizational meeting in late May of 1917, 11 academicians were elected to the association’s board, and the mathematician and academician Steklov became its chairman. The new association, conceived as primarily an association of the hard sciences, planned to create an Institute for the Positive Sciences with well-equipped laboratories, libraries, museums, and auditoriums, and also to recruit talented young people into scientific research. Subsequent events did not make it possible to test the reality of these plans, which as their authors themselves emphasized, could only be implemented if Russia were a democracy. Nonetheless, many of the projects developed by academicians in the Provisional Government’s scientific committees were realized under the Bolsheviks, including the opening of new academies in Georgia, Siberia, and Ukraine, and the creation of a system of state re­search institutes. These projects were drawn up by the Commission on Scholarly Institutions and Scientific Enterprises headed by Vernadskii,70 who was actively involved in preparing a plan for the creation of new kinds of universities, with faculties and departments of applied science, to address the lack of people with a higher education, which hindered the country’s economic and cultural development. From the summer of 1917 Petrograd seemed to be in danger of German occupation, and the question arose of evacuating the academy’s institutions and collections from the capital. In October the academy sent its collections of manuscripts and books printed before 1800 to Saratov. Meeting on 7 October, the General Assembly decided to send representatives from the fields of mathematics, mechanics, and experimental chemistry to Moscow for a year, and selected Steklov, Kurnakov, Krylov, and P. P. Lazarev to go, since their work in such areas as precise measurement devices, aviation, explosives, and gas masks had special significance for national defense. Many academicians viewed the Provisional Government with suspicion. Steklov wrote that he was sorry that Ol´denburg had agreed to take a ministerial post.71 He found comfort only in the thought that given the ministerial leap-frog, Ol´denburg 69

 M. B. Konashev, “K istorii sozdaniia Svobodnoi Assotsiatsii dlia razvitiia i raspro­ straneniia polozhitel´nykh nauk,” Nauka i tekhnika: Voprosy istorii i teorii, no. 14 (1998): 154–55.

70

 Kendall E. Bailes, Science and Russian Culture in an Age of Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 141–42. 71

 V. A. Steklov to A. P. Karpinskii, 24 August 1917, SPF ARAN f. 2. op. 6. d. 558. l. 1.

196 Eduard I. Kolchinsky

had little chance of remaining in the government long, and the academy would once again benefit from his outstanding abilities. Steklov proved to be right; on 4 September the biochemist Sergei S. Salazkin became the new minister of education, and the talents of Ol´dbenburg and Steklov himself were once agаin employed by the Academy of Sciences, not for reform but for its survival. A Fragment of Empire: From Rejection to Subordination The Academy of Sciences did not accept the October Revolution, and viewed the Bolshevik seizure of power as a “catastrophe unprecedented in history,” in Vernadskii’s words.72 In the 16 November issue of the newspaper Rossiiskie novosti (Russian News), Ol´denburg challenged the Bolsheviks to stop being “the jailers of innocent people.” A significant portion of the academy’s members soon ended up in territories controlled by anti-Bolshevik forces, and several of them, for example the economist Struve, joined anti-Soviet governments and committees. At a special meeting of the academy’s General Assembly on 18 November, Karpinskii announced that events were threatening to ruin the country, and called on the academy to issue a protest, “so that it is not silent at such an exceptional time.”73 Steklov, supported by Borodin, sharply objected; it became clear that while scholars of the humanities opposed collaborating with the Bolsheviks, mathematicians and representatives of the technical and natural sciences were prepared to do so. Three days later, at the next special meeting of the General Assembly, Lappo-Danilevskii read an address to scientists that stated in part that “the Russian people … at the price of a shameful and unstable separate peace, is ready to betray its allies and surrender into the hands of the enemy.”74 In calling upon Russians’ national pride, scholars did not imagine how distant their appeals were from the mood of the masses. By mid-December it was difficult to receive funds from the state treasury, and members began to realize that the Academy of Sciences’ very existence was becoming a bargaining point with the new regime, and its former role in the country’s life was a matter of contention. This worry is the leitmotif of Ol´denburg’s speech at the academy’s annual meeting in December 1917. He sought to convince the regime that “enlightenment and culture”—without which there could be no “decent human existence”—were impossible without 72

 Vernadskii, Dnevniki, 28.

73

 “Ekstraordinarnoe Obshchee sobranie. Zasedanie XVI,” 18 November 1917, SPF ARAN f. 1, op. 1a–1917, d. 164, § 306, l. 148. 74

 “Proekt obrashcheniia konferentsii akademii,” 21 November 1917 (ibid., § 307, l. 149).

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the work of scholars and scientists.75 Under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk Germany became the only source for books, equipment, and instruments. Some academicians forgot their calls to fight to victory, and now regarded Germans as their saviors, hoping for their aid in restoring Russia. But in November 1918 Germany capitulated, and also plunged into socioeconomic and political chaos. While condemning Russia’s withdrawal from the war, in the end the leaders of the Academy of Sciences moved toward collaboration with the new regime. As early as January 1918 talks began with the government on the academy’s participation in state affairs.76 Academicians sought to receive government financial and material support and participate as experts in developing laws, government projects, and planning, while retaining their autonomy. Communist leaders were also interested in such collaboration, given their belief in building the new society by making maximum use of scientific accomplishments and modernizing the economy. The revolution changed the academy’s position in society. What the 1836 charter termed the “pre-eminent scholarly estate,” which had fought for reform in tsarist Russia, now turned out not to be especially necessary to the new regime. The very physical survival of academicians came into question. The few academicians who remained in Petrograd soon experienced all the tribulations of the times: persecution, arrest, hunger, cold, disease, and the absence of the most elementary conditions for work. From the summer of 1918 no more than one-quarter of members attended the academy’s general meetings. The rest lived either in Moscow or in areas not controlled by the Bolsheviks, including German-occupied territory. In September 1918 Karpinskii and Ol´denburg sent a letter to the Commissariat of Enlightenment, which had jurisdiction over the Academy of Sciences, describing the extreme starvation and exhaustion among scientists, whose ranks “are rapidly diminishing due to illness, numerous deaths, and emigration.”77 The following month Ol´denburg appealed again to the commissar of enlightenment, Anatolii Lunacharskii, and proposed the creation of a special commission to take urgent measures.78 In the years that followed it became necessary to call upon the regime repeatedly to take measures “to save Russian science and scientists,” 75

 Otchet o deiatel´nosti Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk, 5.

76

 “Iz Protokola Zasedaniia Gosudarstvennoi komissii po prosveshcheniiu ob ustano­ vlenii tesnogo kontakta s Akademiei nauk,” in Organizatsiia sovetskoi nauki v pervye gody Sovetskoi vlasti (1917–1925), ed. M. S. Bastrakova (Leningrad: Nauka, 1968), 24. 77

 Ol´denburg to Lunacharskii, 25 Seрtember 1918, SPF RAN f. 2, 1–1917, d. 41, ll. 306– 08.

78

 Ol´denburg to Lunacharskii, 8 Oсtober 1918 (ibid., d. 42, ll. 329–30).

198 Eduard I. Kolchinsky

and to issue a reminder that only science could provide a firm foundation for the economy, that applied and pure science were one, and that it was necessary to bring scientists into the work of government organs and the reform of higher education.79 In the end the academy managed to secure financial support. Under the leadership of academicians, Sovnarkom and several commissariats (Health, Agriculture, and Enlightenment) began to create institutes. KEPS organized departments in April 1918 that later turned into institutes that dealt with applied problems. Academicians gained an opportunity to use government resources to realize their scientific plans and to participate in developing government programs. They did not let this opportunity slip by. Scientific institutes began to proliferate at a rate unprecedented in the rest of the world. By the end of World War I the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences was established, along with two institutes and twenty-five scientific departments under KEPS. The personnel of the academy increased sharply. The Bolsheviks, in using academicians as experts and adopting their plans to create a network of state scientific and higher education institutions, allowed the Academy of Sciences to operate according to its prerevolutionary charter up to 1927. Having acquired experience during the war in consulting with the tsarist government on defense matters, academicians easily moved into professional collaboration with the new authorities. In 1918 Krylov became a consultant for the Commission for Special Artillery Experiments and various other naval and industrial institutions, and in 1919–20 he headed the Naval Academy. Ipat´ev, though still a monarchist at heart, collaborated actively with the new regime. As early as November 1917 he headed the Commission for New Production in the chemical industry department of the Supreme Council for the National Economy (Vysshii Sovet Narodnogo Khoziaistva, VSNKh), and later joined both Gosplan and the presidium of VSNKh; in 1919 he became the chairman of the Technical Committee for the Chemical Industry in VSNKh, and in 1921 he headed its Main Administration for the Chemical Industry. Other academicians who stayed in Soviet Russia also began to reorient their priorities to accord with the interests of the new government.80 Often to the 79

 Sixteen full members of the academy perished during the Civil War, constituting one-third of the total, along with 11 honorary members and 35 corresponding mem­ bers. Another 11 academicians ended up abroad by the end of the war. As a result of the hunger, cold, and disease of these years, the scholarly community of Russia lost approximately 25 percent of 11,000 people, and the same number ended up outside Russia due to emigration or the independence obtained by the Baltic states, Poland, and Finland.

80

 The academic community’s methods of adapting to the new regime were also recently analyzed in detail in E. I. Kolchinskii and E. A. Tropp, eds., Akademicheskaia

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detriment of their professional interests, they engaged in searching for useful minerals, participated in reforming the Russian language, carried out inventories of cadres and institutions, and compiled ethnographic maps of the country. Collaboration with the government was explained by references to national interests and the necessity of preserving science. It seemed to them that it was not hard to find a golden mean between “the Bolsheviks’ desires and their own ideas about what science should do.”81 As Vernadskii wrote from an increasingly deserted Petrograd, “I consider creative work to be the most important and necessary thing right now. This will be the salvation of Russian culture, and consequently, of Russia.”82 He regarded the scientific work of those scholars who remained in Russia to be “a pledge for the future and proof of Russia’s future growth and power.”83 The realities of Europe’s post-Versailles order brought about the growth of multifaceted scientific collaboration between Germany and Soviet Russia, Europe’s two pariah states. It was less the tradition of two centuries of cooperation, and more the desire to play the “Russian” or “German card” in relations with the countries of the Entente and overcome isolation that led both Russia and Germany to collaborate in the translation, review, and publication of books by Soviet authors in Germany and German authors in the USSR, as well as in organizing a rapidly growing number of joint efforts, such as expeditions, “scientist weeks,” conferences, and anniversary commemorations.84 Dozens of academy personnel were sent to study in Germany every year. In 1922 the practice was revived of electing foreign honorary and corresponding members to the academy, with a high percentage coming once again from Germany. During the period up to 1929, when the academic community was relatively free to elect foreign members, out of a total of 169 almost one-third (48) were scientists and scholars from Germany, while 37 scholars from France were selected and 12 from England. During this period as well, the number of Russian members of the Academy of Sciences who were elected to be corresponding members of German learned societies and academies increased sharply compared to the prewar years, which testified to the growth in internauka v Sankt-Peterburge v XVIII–XX vekakh: Istoricheskie ocherki (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2003), 336–481. 81

 S. I. Romanovskii, “Rossiiskaia Akademiia nauk v gody grazhdanskoi voiny,” Novyi chasovoi, no. 5 (1997): 121.

82

 Columbia University, Bakhmeteff Humanities Fund (BHF), Vernadskii Collection (VС), box 11 (V. I. Vernadskii to G. V. Vernadskii, 15 June 1921).

83

 BHF, VC, box 86 (V. I. Vernadskii to G. V. Vernadskii, 12 July 1921).

84

 E. I. Kolchinskii, ed., Sovetsko-germanskie nauchnye sviazi vremeni Veimarskoi respubliki (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2001).

200 Eduard I. Kolchinsky

est on the part of the German scientific community in strengthening contacts with the Russian Academy of Sciences. Conclusion World War I marked the crowning point in the decades-long opposition of the academic community to the government. At the same time the war substantially transformed the academic community; representatives of the natural and hard sciences began to play an increasingly important role as they proved capable of solving applied problems and putting the results of laboratory research into practice. Scientists who were closely tied to government and industrial circles or the defense industry were elected to membership with increasing frequency. The experience gained by the academic community during World War I in mobilizing science “in the name of the front” and “in the name of victory” was employed with maximum effectiveness by scientists and the Soviet government in the interwar era. On the whole, World War I spurred the formation of the contemporary system of Russian science. The activities of scientists directed at mobilizing intellectual and material resources, and developing and producing armaments, played an important role in strengthening the connection of academic science with the state, industry, and the army. In the early postwar years the academy’s relationship to the new regime moved quickly from resistance to adaptation and collaboration, while preserving autonomy in internal matters. By the 1930s members of the USSR Academy of Sciences, having adapted themselves to the new government system and received powerful government support, did not really need inter­ national recognition. The share of publications produced by Soviet scholars in foreign languages declined, a tendency evident in all branches of knowledge. Political repression and an aversion to publishing in German journals after the fascists came to power were not the only reasons for the growing isola­ tionism. A more important reason was that during World War I Russian scholars and scientists became convinced of their ability to solve scientific, organizational, and applied problems independently. Recognition of the selfsufficiency of Russian science led to its rapid institutionalization, the creation of national academies, scientific institutions, societies and journals, and also the dissociation of the academic community from politics. The formation of an image of science as a substitute for imperial might gave birth to dreams among the leaders of the Academy of Sciences of establishing a dictatorship of intellectuals. Translated by Adele Lindenmeyr

The Homeland’s Bountiful Nature Heals Wounded Soldiers: Nation Building and Russian Health Resorts during the First World War Yoshiro Ikeda

The First World War prompted a unique campaign in the Russian Empire to send sick and wounded soldiers to various health resorts of the empire for recuperation. At first, educated society1 took the initiative, but officialdom soon also came to realize the campaign’s usefulness, and thus began an awk­ ward collaborative relationship between the two, as in many other spheres of the war effort in the last years of the empire. Although modest in terms of scale, this remarkable project reflected some important trends of thought in wartime Russia, and it deserves more attention than it has received.2 This chapter aims to investigate the motives behind this campaign, and to analyze its implications for the home front in the Russian Empire during the Great War. The analysis will deepen our understanding of the social order that was pursued during the war by various political actors, especially zemstvo and municipal government activists, with special regard to the noticeable issue of healing the wounded soldiers. The stated motivation behind this campaign was to restore the fighting ability of injured soldiers and return them to the battlefield. But this was just one reason why both the government and educated society never ceased to promote it despite many difficulties. This chapter will show that behind the campaign lay mounting public attention paid to domestic health resorts, in comparison with foreign ones, and to Russia’s natural environment itself. Even 1

 I use the term educated society as a translation of obshchestvennost´, which carries with it connotations of an educated and politically active part of society juxtaposed against the autocratic state. On the concept of obshchestvennost´, see Vadim Volkov, “Obshchest­ vennost´: Russia’s Lost Concept of Civil Society,” in Civil Society in the Baltic Region, ed. Norbert Götz and Jörg Hackmann (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 68. 2

 Louise McReynolds makes a brief reference to increased public interest in domestic health resorts during World War I. Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 190–92. Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 201–20.

202 Yoshiro Ikeda

before the war, tourism in Russia had developed within a cultural framework that forged a national identity both in regard to foreign countries and to various parts of the empire.3 But during the war, this development had entered a new stage, in which the role of the state became much greater in organizing tourism with the aim of nation building, as in other countries.4 In Russian public discourse during the war, health resorts came to represent the curative power of the homeland’s bountiful nature. Accordingly, sending the sick and wounded there meant that they were being drawn into a space full of the homeland’s natural power. In this sense, health resort development in Russia during the First World War foreshadowed the state-sponsored “proletarian” tourism of the USSR.5 However, in a society as stratified as the Russian Empire, this process naturally led to a vital question: Who may participate in this space? So, in sending the sick and wounded to health resorts, the Russian elite deliberated upon the desirable contours and components of the political entity called the “Russian Empire.”6 In this process, the trend was toward overcoming social barriers, that is, toward the political consolidation of a nation.7 Recently, scholars of British history have paid particular attention to the social history of military caregiving, highlighting the convalescence of individual soldiers as independent breadwinners as one of the main public concerns.8 It seems 3

 Ibid., chap. 5.

4  For comparison, see Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough, eds., Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 5

 See Diane P. Koenker, “The Proletarian Tourist in the 1930s: Between Mass Excursion and Mass Escape,” in Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism, ed. Anne E. Gorsuch and Koenker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 6

 In recent years historians have reconsidered the meaning of the First World War for Russia, from the viewpoint that it was an overall transformation of the political, social, and cultural order that left a deep impression on the new society to come. A milestone in this trend is Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 7

 By political consolidation of a nation, I mean territorial or civic nation building as opposed to ethnic nation building. On civic nation building across the revolution, see Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003). 8  Jeffrey S. Reznick, Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Christine E. Hal­ lett, Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).

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that in Britain, the public image of civil society to which the convalescent would be welcomed back was firmly established. In Russia, as this chapter will show, the concern with how to expand the scope of potential patients in health resorts reflected the search by educated society for a proper vision of a future civil society. Russians Turning toward Their Own Health Resorts At the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian Empire had reason to be proud of its abundance of health resorts. They were a reward for its imperial expansion, especially to the south, from the annexation of the North Caucasus in the early 19th century to the colonization of the Black Sea shore in the 1880s.9 A brochure of the Ministry of Trade and Industry issued in 1907 registered up to 600 mineral springs in the empire. However, the majority of them were located far from “any centers of civilization.”10 Even the most famous health re­sorts in the empire suffered from insufficient infrastructure. According to a report prepared after the outbreak of the Great War by Deputy Chief Medical Inspector N. Ia. Shmidt, neither Piatigorsk nor Kislovodsk, major resorts in the North Caucasus, had a sewage system yet: “Instead, inside residences there are many bottomless wells and poorly maintained sump holes and cesspools, with general insufficiency of night soil carts and absolutely primitive estab­ lishment of dump sites.”11 So the wealthy classes of Russia preferred to travel to well-established foreign health resorts rather than visit inconvenient domestic ones. According to 1914 official statistics, only 17 Russian health resorts accepted more than 1,000 visitors for the year, there being 39,804 visitors to all the Caucasian mineral springs, with Essentuki, Piatigorsk, Kislovodsk, and Zheleznovodsk as the top resorts. By contrast, Carlsbad, the biggest health resort in the Hapsburg Empire, accepted up to 70,935 visitors in 1911, including 20,000 from Russia.12 9

 Kurorty: Entsiklopedicheskii slovar´ (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1983), 19–20; “Chernomorskoe poberezh´e Kavkaza,” Pravitel´stvennyi vestnik, 29 December 1913, 2–3. 10

 Eaux minérales de l’Etat Russe ressortissant au Ministère du Commerce et de l’Industrie (St. Petersburg: P. P. Soikin, 1907), 3.

11

 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv (RGVIA) f. 2018 (administration of the chief official for sanitation and evacuation attached to the staff of the General Headquarters), op. 1, d. 533, ll. 111–111ob. (“Ob ustanovlenii okrugov sanitarnoi okhrany Kavkazskikh mineral´nykh vod. Otchet,” 3 January 1915).

12

 Otchet o sostoianii narodnogo zdraviia i organizatsii vrachebnoi pomoshchi v Rossii za 1914 god (Petrograd: Tipografiia Ministerstva Vnutrennikh Del, 1916), 184–87; S. A. Novosel´skii, “Kratkie statisticheskie dannye o russkikh lechebnykh mestnostiakh i

204 Yoshiro Ikeda

More than 300,000 Russian visitors were said to have visited foreign health resorts each year before the outbreak of the First World War.13 Especially popular among the Russians were German and Austro-Hungarian health resorts, because they were located nearer to St. Petersburg than the Caucasus or Crimea.14 With the arrival of the 1914 summer season, the wealthy people of Rus­ sia, as in previous years, rushed abroad, especially to luxurious health re­ sorts in Germany and Austria-Hungary. The news of the assassination of the Hapsburg archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo cast a cloud over their vaca­ tion atmosphere, but the Russian guests preferred to stay, not believing that war was coming. On 19 July (Old Style), however, Germany declared war on Russia, whereupon the enemy subjects were rudely detained in hotels, men liable for conscription were taken prisoner, and others had to go through many hardships to get back to the homeland.15 Before long, the Russian public learned of their sufferings, as papers began to carry their stories and to publish the long lists of those taken into custody.16 It is noteworthy that, within the government, Minister of War V. A. Sukhomlinov was the first to react to the news, foreshadowing the patriotic overtones the resort boom would assume. At the 28 July meeting of the Council of Ministers, he turned his colleagues’ attention to “the injustice against Russian subjects in Germany,” stressing that “we must establish our own health resorts without delay.” For the moment, his proposal mainly concerned their economic improvement. “We must attract tourists.… Don’t miss this good opportunity. We need culture, hotels, restaurants, and so on.” Agreeing with him, the Council of Ministers two days later charged Minister of Trade and Industry S. I. Timashev with tackling this problem.17 ikh poseshchaemosti,” in Trudy sostoiashchego pod Vysochaishim Ego Imperatorskogo Veli­ chestva pokrovitel´stvom S˝ezda po uluchsheniiu otechestvennykh lechebnykh mestnostei, vyp. 3 (Petrograd: Tipografiia Ministerstva Putei Soobshcheniia, 1915), 216–17. 13

 M. S. Zernov, “Znachenie i rol´ nashikh otechestvennykh lechebnykh mest v sovre­ mennoi voine,” in Trudy, vyp. 5, 247.

14

 Vladikavkazskaia zheleznaia doroga, “Znachenie zheleznykh dorog v dele razvitiia i protsvetaniia russkikh kurortov,” in Trudy, vyp. 4, 31.

15

 N. P. Karabchevskii, “Kurortnyi plen u nemtsev, ” Novoe vremia, 10 December 1914, 6; 11 December 1914, 7; 16 December 1914, 5; 17 December 1914, 6; 18 December 1914, 6.

16

 For example, Pravitel´stvennyi vestnik, 19 August 1914, 6.

17  Sovet ministrov Rossiiskoi imperii v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny: Bumagi A. N. Iakhontova. Zapisi zasedanii i perepiska, ed. B. D. Gal´perina et al. (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999), 23; Osobye zhurnaly Soveta ministrov Rossiiskoi imperii, 1914 god (Moscow: Rosspen, 2006), 243–44.

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It was hardly possible, however, for the Russian government and educated society to look at this problem from an economic perspective alone. On the contrary, it quickly gained political significance from the beginning of the war for three reasons. First, rivalry with Germany and Austria-Hungary strongly motivated the rush to improve Russian health resorts. The pejorative term “re­ sort tribute” (kurortnaia dan´) was coined to mean the spending of money by Russian patients in Germany and Austria-Hungary.18 Second, the demand for the improvement of domestic health resorts, though at first as a result of external factors, brought about a rising interest in Russia’s own natural riches. Talking about health resorts, the Russian public wanted to know Russia more deeply. This new trend was embodied in the creation of the All-Russian Society for the Development and Improvement of Russian Health Resorts (Vserossiiskoe obshchestvo dlia razvitiia i usovershenstvovaniia rus­ skikh lechebnykh mestnostei), which had its inaugural meeting on 21 August 1914; by November of that year its membership had reached 300.19 One of its aims was to spread knowledge of Russian health resorts, as was declared in the society’s manifesto, issued in November. “For the present, except for the Caucasian mineral springs, the Crimea, the Black Sea coast, Staraia Russa, Borjomi, Kemmern, the Odessa estuaries, and a few others, we know almost nothing about our health resorts.”20 Third, as sick and wounded soldiers began to arrive at hospitals in the rear, the idea arose among public activists of assigning them to health resorts for additional treatment, as will be shown in detail below. The aim was not just curative. In the context of the rising interest in health resorts, this measure became politicized as the public came to see it as a special way to restore health to wounded warriors for the homeland, with the help of Russia’s nat­ ural richness. In this situation, the Medical Council of the Ministry of the Interior, a central administrative body for medical affairs, took the initiative in convening a special congress for discussing a wide range of problems concerning Rus­ sian health resorts. Convoked with exceptional swiftness, the Congress for Improvement of Health Resorts in the Fatherland took place from 7 to 11 January 1915 in the Tavrida Palace, Petrograd, under the patronage of Tsar Nicholas II. The number of participants reached 1,175, including statesmen,

18

 For example, “Galitskie kurorty,” Novoe vremia, 15 February 1915, 8.

19

 Tselebnye sily Rossii, no. 1–2 (1915): 2; “Deiatel´nost´ Vserossiiskogo obshchestva dlia razvitiia i usovershenstvovaniia russkikh lechebnykh mestnostei,” Pravitel´stvennyi vestnik, 6 November 1914, 3.

20

 “K nashemu obshchestvu,” Novoe vremia, 5 November 1914, 5.

206 Yoshiro Ikeda

physicians, geologists, municipal functionaries, and business people. Papers submitted to the congress, 235 in all, were compiled in six volumes.21 In the opening address of the congress, the honorary chairman, Minister of the Interior N. A. Maklakov, reflected upon the empire’s natural wealth. “The richness in Russia of every kind of health resort, bathing place, mud cure resort, climate sanatorium, and others is immense.” He then remarked that after the “resort pilgrimage westward” had been interrupted by the outbreak of war, the “cultural and economic task” of improving domestic health resorts emerged. But, he continued, the war raised another task, too. “It is highly imperative to make arrangements and prepare for giving the best and most conclusive treatment to those who, among our splendid warriors, have dedicated their health and power to the homeland in this unprecedented titanic battle of nations. Therefore, besides the cultural and economic task, before us stands another, great, holy, and patriotic aim.”22 In this way, Maklakov confirmed the political and national significance gained by Russian health resorts. Numerous civic organizations were in sympathy with this sentiment, which pervaded the congress. For example, in January 1915, the Society for the Economic Renaissance of Russia issued an appeal on behalf of injured warriors. “With the renaissance of the homeland’s health resorts, the time has come to look after, in the forthcoming resort season, our valiant defenders— our army—now enduring all the burden of the winter campaign.… Spring will soon arrive, so our Society calls for the citizens of Russia to immediately come to help us carry out the urgent task of establishing a sanatorium named after the commander in chief [Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich] for sick warriors, modeled after the best ones abroad.”23 Who Should Benefit from Health Resorts? Although the idea of assigning wounded soldiers to sanatoria was not new in the Russian Empire, before the First World War this practice was neither large scale nor politically charged.24 By contrast, during the Great War the Russians were sending their injured combatants to health resorts in a systematic man­ ner. Moreover, this practice soon assumed political significance. The point at issue was this: Who should have access to the homeland’s abundant natural curative resources? 21

 Trudy, vyp. 6, 411–19.

22 23 24

 Trudy, vyp. 3, II.

 “Deiatel´nost’ Obshchestva,” Ekonomicheskoe vozrozhdenie Rossii, no. 2 (1915): 16.

 McReynolds, Russia at Play, 172.

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Physicians and municipal activists were the first to embark on practical preparations for this operation. On 12 October 1914, a gathering of physicians in Moscow attended by representatives from 13 sanatoria and clinics agreed to offer at least 200 beds, some of them gratis, for the sake of injured combatants. After three days, on 15 October, the Bureau of the All-Russian Union of Towns heard a report on this decision and resolved to ask the Ministry of War to lodge some injured officers in those “sanatoria and clinics placed at the disposal of the Union of Towns.” Those sanatoria and clinics supposedly included those beds mentioned in the physicians’ resolution, since at that time the union did not have any significant control over sanatoria.25 The Ministry of War found no reason to reject the request, because this proposal concerned officers only. In late November 1914, the ministry itself increased the number of reserve places in army sanatoria for “officers, military officials, and military priests.”26 Soon, however, some physicians and municipal activists raised their voices in calling to extend the right to be cured to the lower ranks. Especially articulate was M. S. Zernov, a Moscow doctor who had run a sanatorium for the needy in Essentuki for years. Approved by the union on 14 December 1914, his report stated that “both high-ranking officers and the lower ranks should assure themselves equally that Russian society will make all possible efforts to lighten their condition.”27 The Petrograd Regional Committee of the Union of Towns echoed this demand. L. B. Bertenson, the head of the Petrograd Committee’s sanatorium section, complained that “for those with tuberculosis in the working classes [narod] in general, and those with tuberculosis in the ranks in particular, we have no convalescent hospitals, that is, there are no special people’s sanatoria [narodnye zdravnitsy].”28 It is noteworthy that Bertenson insisted on opening sanatoria not only to the ranks but also to the narod in general. Both he and Zernov thought that extending the scope of patients to include rank-and-file soldiers was just a starting point for further reform of Russian health resorts. At the 1915 Health Resort Congress, Zernov said that domestic resorts had to “serve as national [obshchenarodnye] hospitals, not for individual classes but, to the 25

 “Pomoshch´ bol´nym i ranenym voinam v lechebnykh stantsiiakh i sanatoriiakh,” Izvestiia Vserossiiskogo soiuza gorodov (IVSG), no. 4 (1915): 54. See also L. B. Bertenson, “Sanatornaia pomoshch´ bol´nym i ranenym voinam,” no. 9 (1915): 46–47. 26

 IVSG, no. 4 (1915): 54; O. I. Averbakh, ed., Zakonodatel´nye akty, vyzvannye voinoiu 1914–1917 gg. (Petrograd: Trud, 1916), 2: 79. 27

 IVSG, no. 4 (1915): 54–58; On Zernov, see N. M. Zernov, ed., Na perelome: Tri pokoleniia odnoi moskovskoi sem´i. Semeinaia khronika Zernovykh (1812–1921), 2nd ed. (Moscow– Paris: Russkii put´, 2001), 64. 28

 IVSG, no. 4 (1915): 57–58; no. 9 (1915): 41, 43–44.

208 Yoshiro Ikeda

extent possible, for all who need to recuperate there.”29 They sought to trans­ form health resorts into places where social barriers were removed and all the people of the Russian Empire might enjoy the effects of the homeland’s bounteous nature. In essence, this was a reorganization of Russia toward a national community. This perspective was given most clearly at the Health Resort Congress by Dr. E. V. Liubek, who stated: The great and hard epoch we are now going through is a transitional one to a new future, opening wide-ranging prospects for the reconstruction of human life. Especially significant changes are waiting for Russia with her boundless space and many millions of peasant inhabitants. In the Russian Empire, a healthy, wealthy, and wise nation [natsiia] must be created. The most important health factors are normal diet, widely absorbing the sun’s energy, and physical work. For the proper combination of these three factors, it is necessary to cover Russia with a net of people’s sanatoria.30 From the spring of 1915, the Union of Towns set about securing beds specialized for balneotherapy—the treatment of diseases with mineral-rich waters—in the local sanatoria with the help of various public organizations. Then, at the beginning of May, the Union of Towns with the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos set up a united sanatorium commission with a view to intensifying efforts to send sick and wounded military personnel, the greater part of them ordinary soldiers, to health resorts.31 It is true that the Unions could not continue their business exclusively. First, a rather conservative and quasistate organization, the Russian Red Cross, was an influential competitor against them. It provided the ranks with more discriminatory treatment. For example, special plenipotentiary of the Red Cross Prince N. P. Urusov wrote in his report on a resort, Khadzhibei Liman, on the outskirts of Odessa, that officers would be permitted to receive treatment as outpatients, whereas “the ranks will be committed to hospitals without exception, due to the requirement of supervision over them and maintenance among them of military discipline.”32

29

 Zernov, “Znachenie,” 248–49.

30

 E. V. Liubek, “K voprosu o narodnykh sanatoriiakh,” in Trudy, vyp. 6, 307.

31

 IVSG, no. 21–22 (1915): 59; no. 23 (1916): 79–80.

32

 “Otchet Osoboupolnomochennogo Rossiiskogo obshchestva Krasnogo Kresta N. P. Urusova za vremia s 1 avgusta 1914 g. po 1 fevralia 1915 goda,” Vestnik Krasnogo Kresta, no. 6 (1915): 2342.

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209

Secondly, the Unions were under the direction of Prince Aleksandr Ol´den­ burgskii, who was appointed in September 1914 as a newly established chief official for sanitation and evacuation, and, from February 1915 on, also placed in charge of arranging health resorts for injured combatants. The prince, a trustee of the Institute of Experimental Medicine and founder of a subtropical resort, Gagra, in Abkhazia, might have deserved this appointment, but he was also notorious for his capriciousness and obstinacy. Even ministers were led around by the nose.33 Ol´denburgskii’s Order No. 46 of 6 May 1915 especially restricted the Un­ ions by instituting a procedure for sending injured combatants to sanatoria that was bound with red tape. According to this procedure, originally drawn up by the Red Cross, a patient could be sent to a health resort only with a medical commission certificate and the permission of the military sanitary inspector. In addition, the Unions were obliged to report regularly to Ol´den­ burgskii on the number of vacant and occupied beds they had secured in the local sanatoria.34 In spite of this, it would be wrong to regard Ol´denburgskii’s standpoint as entirely antithetical to that of the Unions. As his first annual report (3 September 1914–3 September 1915) to the tsar shows, from the outset Ol´denburgskii recognized the necessity of cooperating with public organizations. “[After the first inspection tour in September 1914, I found] the majority of the sanitary organizations of the army were, both on the battlefield and in the interior, much inferior to those of the Red Cross and various other organizations.… I considered it necessary to explain to them [the governors] that the major task of their new activities had to be giving full and comprehensive support for the sanitary work of all government, public, and private organizations.”35 So what was his view on health resorts? He wrote that “organizing and exploiting balneotherapy resorts … is neither a luxury nor benevolence, but a means helpful and beneficial as much for the state as for the sick.” His reference to the benefit of the state implies that Ol´denburgskii’s main considerations were motivated by the demands of total mobilization, seeking to recuperate as many people as possible. As a matter of fact, he was ready to send not only 33

 E. A. Annenkova and Iu. P. Golikov, Printsy Ol´denburgskie v Peterburge (St. Peters­ burg: Rostok, 2004), 339–45, 399–401; Gal´perina et al., Sovet ministrov Rossiiskoi imperii, 60; G. E. Rein, Iz perezhitogo: 1907–1918 (Berlin: Parabola, [1936]), 2: 127, 130–31. 34

 RGVIA f. 2018, op. 1, d. 532, l. 38 (extract from the record of a meeting of the Main Administration of the Russian Society of the Red Cross, 4 March 1915); Pravitel´stvennyi vestnik, 8 May 1915, 3.

35

 RGVIA f. 2018, op. 1, d. 95, ll. 1, 2ob.–3 (“Otchet Verkhovnogo nachal´nika Sanitar­ noi i Evakuatsi­onnoi chasti za vremia s 3 sentiabria 1914 goda po 3 sentiabria 1915 goda,” no earlier than 3 September 1915).

210 Yoshiro Ikeda

officers but also the ordinary soldiers to health resorts, and he even agreed to the idea of people’s sanatoria. He reported that “special attention has been paid to working out a type of people’s sanatorium, which may serve both sick and injured warriors and patients without sufficient financial means.”36 Thus, pushed by the requirements of total war, Ol´denburgskii’s practical aim became identical to that of the Unions, seeking to send as many people as possible to health resorts. In practice, the procedure stipulated by Order No. 46 did not work smoothly. It took a long time to obtain the necessary documents, and injured soldiers in the meantime were often returned home or evacuated deeper into the interior. As a result, many sanatorium beds remained unoccupied after the summer season started. To overcome this situation, as early as June 1915 the Union of Zemstvos and Union of Towns began to take measures, negotiating with Ol´denburgskii and the army authorities. The two unions set up one assembly point in Moscow and another in Khar´kov, the two footholds of their movement, where sick and wounded soldiers whose condition might be improved by balneotherapy would be sent for evaluation. Divided into two groups, one of tubercular patients and another of all the rest, they were thence dispatched to a particular health resort according to their diagnoses.37 In early July 1915, the first parties of patient-soldiers started to arrive at mineral springs in the Caucasus.38 The Unions’ strategy to extend the right to be cured to the lower ranks began to get going. The increasing involvement of zemstvo and municipal government activists in the mobilization of health resorts seems to have stimulated conservative elements at court, who had hatched their own plan to establish an organization for that purpose. The All-Russian Society of Sanatoria [zdravnitsy] in Commemoration of the War of 1914–1915 had Empress Aleksandra Fedorovna as its patroness and V. N. Voeikov, a court favorite, as chairman. According to Voeikov, the idea of setting up a society with the aim of establishing scientifically organized sanatoria in Russia was born at the end of 1914 under the empress’s own initiative, but its foundation meeting took place only on 22 October 1915. At the meeting, the vice chairman of the society, Professor V. N. Sirotinin, made a short speech on the aim of the society, expecting that scientifically organized sanatoria would powerfully promote “the health improvement of the Russian nation” (ozdorovlenie russkogo naroda). The main concerns addressed here clearly extended beyond military matters. Sirotinin in this statement described an extensive vision of a future polity of Russia, 36

 Ibid., ll. 28–28ob.

37

 IVSG, no. 19 (1915): 140–42; no. 21–22 (1915): 99–107; no. 23 (1916): 79–81.

38

 “Na kurortakh,” Kavkaz, 2 July 1915, 3.

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211

remarking that “pursuing just one aim of helping participants of war for the time being, these sanatoria will subsequently serve as a foundation for shaping a new cultural organization, in which each Russian patient, regardless of nationality or confession, will enjoy treatment and cordiality.”39 Advanced by those close to the empress, this was a vision of “official nationalism” seeking to consolidate various groups of subjects, irrespective of nationality or confession, around the dynasty, in competition with the civic nationalism pur­sued by zemstvo and municipal activists.40 The empress was actually displeased with the increased activity shown by the zemstvos and municipalities in the mobilization of health resorts, even warning the tsar not to hand over a royal sanatorium to a Yalta provisional committee functioning under the aegis of the Union of Towns, for example.41 However, having at its disposal only one major sanatorium (a former palace of the Emir of Bukhara) in Zheleznovodsk, the empress’s society barely con­ tributed to curing the sick and wounded.42 The two unions remained the main agents in this regard. Despite the efforts of these two bodies and other organizations, the ac­ tual numbers of injured combatants dispatched to health resorts remained rather modest. According to incomplete data from Ol´denburgskii’s office, the numbers of military personnel who received treatment at health resorts in 1915 and 1916 were respectively as follows (see tables 1 and 2).

39

 RGVIA f. 2018, op. 1, d. 549, ll. 71ob., 74ob. (V. N. Voeikov’s report to B. V. Shtiurmer, 24 May 1916); Pravitel´stvennyi vestnik, 27 October 1915, 2; “Zdravnitsy v pamiat´ voiny 1914–1915 g.,” Novoe vremia, 23 October 1915, 5.

40

 On official nationalism, see Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nation­ ality in Russia, 1825–1855 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959).

41

 Perepiska Nikolaia i Aleksandry Romanovykh 1914–1915 gg. (Moscow–Petrograd: Gosu­ darstvennoe izdatel´stvo, 1923), 3: 494.

42

 RGVIA f. 2018, op. 1, d. 549, ll. 76ob.–77 (Voeikov’s report); “Lechenie ofitserov v Zhereznovodskoi zdravnitse Ee Velichestva,” Pravitel´stvennyi vestnik, 12 June 1916, 3.

212 Yoshiro Ikeda

Table 1. Number of military personnel receiving treatment in resorts from the beginning of the 1915 summer season to 1 January 1916 Officers

Lower Ranks

Total

Ministry of War

2,154

3,896

6,050

Red Cross

806

2,205

3,011

Union of Zemstvos

1,298

6,494

7,792

Union of Towns

7

2,556

2,563

Tsarskoe Selo Special Evacuation Point

53

Other Organizations

113

531

644

Total

4,431

15,682

20,113

53

Source: RGVIA f. 2018, op. 1, d. 583, l. 119 (material for the second annual report of Ol´denburgskii to the tsar).

Table 2. Number of military personnel receiving treatment in resorts in the 1916 summer season Officers

Lower Ranks Medical Personnel

Total

Ministry of War

2,288

6,663

8,951

Red Cross

1,222

686

1,153

3,061

3,510

7,349

1,153

12,012

Union of Zemstvos* Union of Towns* Total

* Ol´denburgskii’s office had not yet been informed about the results of the Unions’ activity. Source: RGVIA f. 2018, op. 1, d. 583, l. 119.

The lack of information from the Unions for the 1916 summer season makes it impossible to judge whether the scale of operations changed significantly from 1915 to 1916. Nevertheless, whatever the missing numbers from the Unions were, the total of about 32,000 individuals given in tables 1 and 2 suggests the limited nature of the undertaking, especially in light of the huge numbers of sick and wounded soldiers during the war. A major reason for the modest scale of the operation was that many health resorts were not ready to accept large amounts of injured combatants. The deepening financial difficulties caused by the war especially hindered the improvement of infrastructure at health resorts. A commission set up by Ol´denburgskii and headed by P. F. Iordanov made an inspection tour of health resorts in the autumn of 1915. In a report to the prince, Iordanov categorically

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213

stated that “with respect to the overall improvement of health resorts, the results accomplished in this year can hardly be regarded as considerable.”43 Besides the financial difficulties, hostilities inevitably affected life in the health resorts, many of which were located on the periphery of the empire. Soon after the outbreak of war, resort towns in the Baltic Sea region such as Druskeniki, Haapsalu, and Kemmern became unavailable due to strategic considerations.44 The Ottoman Empire’s entry into the war in October 1914 exposed the resorts on the shore of the Black Sea, such as Feodosiia, Novorossiisk, and Odessa, to bombardment.45 Against the backdrop of these challenges, it appears all the more remarkable that both Russian officialdom and educated society never ceased to send injured combatants to remote health resorts, even when the difficulties of war were deepening. There were several reasons for this eagerness, of which the most basic one was to restore to soldiers the capacity to fight. Balneotherapy was indeed effective for them, as its results were, according to the report of the Iordanov Commission, “quite favorable, and in some health resorts, they must be considered astonishing.” It was ineffective only for patients suffering from poison gas attacks.46 In addition, for educated society as a whole the provision of relief to the sick and wounded offered a precious opportunity to raise its political voice. For instance, in April 1916 at the Pirogov Congress of Physicians, one of the most influential gatherings of educated society, Dr. A. L. Mendel´son called for the concentration of soldiers’ sanatorium treatment in the hands of the zemstvos and municipalities.47 But we should not overlook the fact that the dispatch of the sick and wounded to health resorts was proceeding in the midst of heightened interest in Russia’s natural resources and beauty. D. I. Mendeleev’s maxim “knowledge of Russia” (poznanie Rossii) was adopted by the press as a catchphrase for 43

 “Nashi lechebnye mestnosti i organizatsiia v nikh pomoshchi bol´nym i ranenym voinam,” Vestnik Krasnogo Kresta, no. 10 (1915): 4529; RGVIA f. 2018, op. 1, d. 583, l. 1 (“Otchet Komissii po osmotru otechestvennykh lechebnykh mestnostei,” 19 October 1915). A classmate of Chekhov and former mayor of Taganrog, Iordanov had long been involved in improvement of Russian health resorts. Gosudarstvennyi Sovet Rossiiskoi imperii 1906–1917: Entsiklopediia (Moscow: Rossiiskaia politicheskaia entsiklopediia, 2008), 108. 44

 RGVIA f. 2018, op. 1, d. 511, l. 60.

45

 “Polozhenie v Feodosii,” Pravitel´stvennyi vestnik, 18 October 1914, 3; “K bombardi­ rovke Novorossiiska,” Pravitel´stvennyi vestnik, 20 October 1914, 1; “K napadeniiu turok na Odessu,” Pravitel´stvennyi vestnik, 21 October 1914, 3. 46

 “Nashi lechebnye mestnosti i organizatsiia v nikh pomoshchi bol´nym i ranenym voinam,” 4527.

47

 “Pirogovskii s˝ezd,” Novoe vremia, 18 April 1916, 4.

214 Yoshiro Ikeda

promoting domestic health resorts.48 In early July 1915, the well-known publicist P. P. Pertsov noted that floating sanatoria on Russian rivers would provide an opportunity for “Russians themselves to know Russia.” Before long, on 11 July 1915, the first floating sanatorium on the Volga, organized by the Petrograd Regional Committee of the Union of Towns, left Nizhnii Novgorod for Astrakhan´ with 17 officers and 111 of the lower ranks on board.49 By sending the sick and wounded to sanatoria in various regions of the empire, many Russians reminded themselves of the beautiful scenery of Russia. Moreover, the mobilization of health resorts for recuperating soldiers enhanced the public’s sense of close ties between the homeland and its numberless defenders. One example is an article entitled “The Caucasus Shore for Wounded Warriors” in the 14 November 1915 issue of Novoe vremia (New Times): “If the extremely favorable conditions of the Caucasian climatic stations restore health even to absolutely exhausted chronic patients … then these conditions would help the huge majority of young and healthy bodies of Russian warriors to cope quickly with severe wounds, and would restore life and health to many doomed victims of war.… To employ the favorable climatic stations at the Caucasus shore as widely as possible for army infantries is a holy duty for Russia not only before defenders of the homeland, but also before itself.”50 We may consider accordingly that consolidation of a national community was one of the motives lying behind the urge to send injured soldiers to various health resorts of the empire during the war. Forging a national community with the help of the homeland’s bountiful nature was, it is true, by no means a monolithic project, as was shown in the rivalry between the Unions, with their democratic goals, and the dynastic concerns represented by the empress’s sanatoria society. Furthermore, a significant segment of Russian society, the Jews, had been excluded from this project, being deprived of the right to be cured without restrictions in the majority of domestic health resorts.51 Con­ 48

 Novoe vremia, 5 November 1915, 1. This maxim was taken from Mendeleev’s work Toward Knowledge of Russia (1906), in which the chemist made a demographic and geopolitical prognosis for the Russian Empire.

49

 P. P. Pertsov, “Plavuchie kurorty,” Novoe vremia, 9 July 1915, 5; IVSG, no. 18 (1915): 164.

50

 P.G., “Kavkazskoe poberezh´e dlia ranenykh voinov,” Novoe vremia, 14 November 1915, 15. 51

 The legal restriction on recuperation at domestic health resorts for Jews was one of the main reasons that so much “resort tribute” had flowed into Germany and Austria-Hungary. Despite the de facto abolition of the Pale after the Great Retreat of the summer of 1915 and criticism from educated society, this restriction was not lifted. I. N. Natanson, “Eshche k voprosu o kurortakh,” Rech´, 2 July 1916, 2. In relation to another pariah, the Germans, the seashore resorts on the Baltic Sea (the Riga seashore,

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215

solidating a national community with the mobilization of Russian health resorts was, therefore, still at a beginning stage during the First World War. Through Barracks toward a National Community So what experience awaited sick and wounded soldiers en route and in their assigned places at health resorts? To start with, many of them had to undergo difficulties before arriving at their destination. Evacuation from Moscow and Khar´kov, the two distribution points set by the Union of Zemstvos and Union of Towns, went well, relatively speaking. On the other hand, Dr. V. A. Levitskii informed the United Sanatorium Commission of the Unions that, in October–November 1915, patient-soldiers evacuated to the North Caucasus from the Southern Front, Kiev, Odessa, Ekaterinoslav, and even Petrograd were “sometimes in a sad state: hungry, ill-dressed, unaccompanied, without documents; sometimes separated en route; often with diseases for which balneotherapy is completely unsuitable.”52 In the health resorts themselves, if administered by the zemstvos or municipalities, local activists commonly devoted great energy to attaining a comfortable and orderly life for their patients. Especially informative is a report submitted to the United Sanatorium Commission by Dr. S. S. Nalbandov on a zemstvo mud resort in Saki village on Crimea’s west coast. According to this report, from 8 June to 5 September 1915, this resort accepted 5 officers and 697 soldiers in total, with a 24-day stay as the ordinary course of treatment. They were accommodated mainly in three hotels in the village. (Besides these, there were barracks adjacent to the hospital for immobile patients.) The diet regime was basically as follows: 1) breakfast—tea, milk (sometimes eggs), 1/2 funt (204.75 g) of rye-wheat bread; 2) dinner—borscht (or soup) with 1 funt of meat, porridge, or pilaf/cutlets/macaroni/braised meat, 1/2 funt of bread; 3) 4 p.m. or teatime—1/2 funt of bread; and 4) supper—soup, 1/2 funt of bread.53 Two doctors continually looked after the patients, and some specialists also Kemmern, and so on) became a focus of public debate, since they were ruled by special German local laws. Against them, educated society called for general local government rule of these health resorts (Trudy, vyp. 3, CVI–CXIII, CCXXX–CCXXXI). 52

 Materialy po organizatsii sanatorno-kurortnogo lecheniia bol´nykh i ranenykh voinov, vyp. 1 (Moscow: Tipografiia A. I. Mamontova, 1916), 81–82. Later, Levitskii would be a Soviet hygienist. Biograficheskii slovar´ deiatelei estestvoznaniia i tekhniki (Moscow: Bol´shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1958), 1: 503.

53

 Nalbandov did not mention separate menus for officers and the lower ranks, due to, seemingly, the low numbers of the former. In other places, officers commonly had a separate menu. For example, see Materialy po organizatsii sanatorno-kurortnogo lecheniia, vyp. 1, 54–55.

216 Yoshiro Ikeda

worked in the resort, although it is not clear whether they were full-time employees or not; elsewhere, medical personnel as a rule also held posts at other local hospitals, working for sanatoria gratis or on salary paid by the Unions.54 While 300 patients were reported to show no signs of improvement, 401 soldiers were found to have benefited from the treatment they received.55 Characteristically enough, neither Nalbandov nor the authors of similar reports mentioned how the sick and wounded themselves perceived their life in the health resorts. Generally speaking, patients rarely made their voices heard, even officers. When their responses were mentioned, they tended to be colored by reporters’ stereotyped views. For example, the following report on the opinions of officer-patients treated at mineral springs in the Caucasus was based on the contrast between a well-organized sanatorium regime for warriors and the pitiable state of health resorts as a whole. “The majority of patients are quite satisfied with the equipment of the infirmaries and treatment in the facilities of the Union of Zemstvos and the Red Cross,” the report claimed, while going on to complain about unsatisfactory sanitary conditions at the resort overall.56 Or perhaps the authors just exhibited their idealized view of the wounded. Literary critic D. S. Filosofov wrote from Essentuki in May 1916 that “a large number of combatants recuperating here, both officers and the lower ranks, confer nobleness on the health resorts.… And at once, we may find that they are satisfied with all, that they accept with gratitude all the good things from the health resorts that the latter may give them.”57 Unfortunately I was unable to find sufficient material to investigate the attitudes of local inhabitants toward military patients. Here I confine my dis­ cussion to citing one episode. In Sevastopol in May 1915 the city commandant (gradonachal´nik) issued a public notice: “To my deep regret, among us, there have been such people who have forgotten about the war and its demands; they have forgotten their duty in relation to the wounded, considering them as ordinary patients, who may be irritated by trifles. Such people do not want to sacrifice their own convenience or comfort for the wounded.” The city com­ mandant then told of an incident of a woman staying in the city, whose child had bothered a seriously wounded officer. In answer to his demand that he

54

 Materialy po organizatsii sanatorno-kurortnogo lecheniia, vyp. 1, 53; IVSG, no. 35 (1916): 134.

55

 Materialy po organizatsii sanatorno-kurortnogo lecheniia, vyp. 2 (Moscow: Tipografiia A. I. Mamontova, 1916), 12–17.

56

 “Mnenie lechashchikhsia,” Piatigorskoe ekho, 17 January 1916, 3.

57

 D. S. Filosofov, “Mineral´nyi sezon,” Rech´, 23 May 1916, 1.

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not be disturbed, the mother heaped abuse on him. By an order of the army authorities she was ejected from the city.58 In reality, local society was rather estranged from the sick and wounded soldiers. The latter were placed in isolation from the rest of society, first of all, physically. The point is that many of them were accommodated in barracks, a structure characteristic of war years. The idea of building barracks in health resorts was at first suggested at a conference organized by the Ministry of Trade and Industry in December 1914.59 But it was Ol´denburgskii who was the most enthusiastic about the plan. He saw three advantages of barracks: capacity (120 beds on average), low prices, and a short period for construction (no longer than two weeks). He sent standard barrack plans as a guide to all corners of the empire, not only for accommodating the sick and wounded in health resorts, but also for holding infectious patients in quarantine.60 Soldier-patients who were assigned to barracks encountered living condi­ tions that were far from ideal. Instructive in this connection is the abovementioned report by V. A. Levitskii on his visit to the North Caucasus, in which he describes the barracks in Goriachevodsk. In the health resort, near a military sanitary station set up in the 1880s for 40 officers, a gable-roofed barracks with 2000 beds was constructed on the order of Ol´denburgskii, and then transferred to the control of the Union of Zemstvos. Levitskii gave a mixed assessment of the quality of housing that awaited wounded soldiers in Goriachevodsk. On the one hand, he criticized their overcrowded conditions and poor ventilation and heating systems. But if one viewed the soldiers’ barracks in the context of the town itself, he noted—an “uncultured” and “philistine” (obyvatel´skii) backwater dominated by common people—they were adequate, at least for the summer season.61 It would be too hasty to regard the uncomfortable conditions in barracks as reflecting a discriminatory attitude toward ordinary soldiers, however. After all, constructing barracks was the most convenient way of accommodating as many patients as possible in extraordinary times. Consequently, both Rus­ sian officialdom and public activists placed many hopes on barracks. In July 1915, for example, in Zheleznovodsk, plenipotentiaries of the Red Cross and

58

 “K svedeniiu kurortnoi publiki,” Novoe vremia, 30 May 1915, 15.

59

2.

 “Soveshchanie ob uluchshenii kurortov,” Pravitel´stvennyi vestnik, 4 December 1914,

60

 RGVIA f. 2018, op. 1, d. 95, ll. 7ob.–8 (“Otchet Verkhovnogo nachal´nika Sanitarnoi i Evakuatsi­onnoi chasti za vremia s 3 sentiabria 1914 goda po 3 sentiabria 1915 goda”). 61

 Materialy po organizatsii sanatorno-kurortnogo lecheniia, vyp. 1, 82–83.

218 Yoshiro Ikeda

the Union of Zemstvos sent to the Caucasus to inspect barracks expressed satisfaction with their condition.62 In other words, barracks were an indispensable instrument for treating a large number of patients. Not only rank-and-file soldiers, but also ordinary civilians were to be beneficiaries, as in Lipetsk, where the construction of barracks was planned “in order to give people with limited funds the pos­ sibility of receiving treatment.”63 Unquestionably, financial motives played a role here. But we should not forget that the promotion of health resorts for military and civilians alike formed part of an overarching political agenda, that is, the consolidation of a national community. In the August 1916 issue of Izvestiia VSG, the physician I. A. Bagashev named three groups as potential visitors to Russian health resorts: “1) warriors of the present time; 2) disabled people in the near future; and 3) sick Russian [rossiiskie] citizens in an epoch of coming renovation.”64 In sending the sick and wounded combatants to health resorts, and constructing barracks for them and for people with limited funds, public activists sought to extend the scope of future citizens of Russia as members of a national community. Conclusion The February Revolution of 1917 brought about radical changes in the poli­ tics around health resorts, as it did in other spheres. The zemstvo and muni­ cipal activists welcomed the liberation from the autocracy that came with the retirement of Ol´denburgskii from politics and the appointment of their comrade, V. I. Almazov, physician and member of the Kadet Party, as the Provisional Government’s commissar in charge of the prince’s office.65 On 12 July 1917, the newly organized Central Medical Sanitary Council (CMSC) finally replaced Ol´denburgskii’s office.66 The CMSC soon found itself trapped in a difficult situation, however. Mounting political tensions in Russia put health resort politics in quite a dif­ 62

 “Na kurortakh,” Kavkaz, 9 July 1915, 3.

63

 “K razvitiiu otechestvennykh kurortov,” Pravitel´stvennyi vestnik, 21 April 1915, 5.

64

 IVSG, no. 35 (1916): 122. Bagashev would be vice-chairman of the central health resort commission of the People’s Commissariat for Health. Putevoditel´, 5: Lichnye fondy Gosudarstvennogo arkhiva Rossiiskoi Federatsii (1917–2000) (Moscow: Rosspen, 2001), 38.

65

 RGVIA f. 2018, op. 1, d. 99, l. 176 (Almazov’s telegram to organizations concerned, 16 or 17 March 1917), 181 (Ol´denburgskii’s telegram to Iordanov, 11 March 1917). On Almazov, see Rein, Iz perezhitogo, 2: 272. 66

 RGVIA f. 2018, op. 1, d. 171, l. 1 (“Zhurnal zasedaniia Tsentral´nogo vrachebnosanitarnogo soveta,” 12 July 1917).

Nation Building and Russian Health Resorts during the First World War

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ferent context. At the 11 September 1917 meeting of the CMSC, its members discussed a petition from the Special Transcaucasian Committee of the Union of Zemstvos seeking funds for sanatoria for amnestied political exiles suffering from tuberculosis. The hygienist Z. G. Frenkel´ categorically rejected this petition, saying that “there should be no place, under any circumstances, for such a disbursement for the realization of the measure, which has nothing to do with war.” The majority of the participants agreed with him, but they had to take great pains to answer the protest to this decision from a representative from the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, which backed the petition.67 The 20 October 1917 meeting of the CMSC managed to put on the agenda the convocation of another health resort congress scheduled for December of that year in Moscow. But this became the last meeting before the October Revolution.68 After that, it seems that this plan was never mentioned again, and the CMSC itself was abolished on 16 February 1918 (New Style).69 Thus came to an end an unprecedented project in the Russian Empire during the Great War of sending injured soldiers to health resorts. What significance did this project have for Russian society? Its main promoters, the zemstvo and municipal activists, were not motivated solely by the military consideration of rehabilitating soldiers. Concerned instead with the issue of who should have access to the homeland’s abundant natural curative resources, they were driven by the political motivation of expanding the scope of potential members in a future civil society. Russian officialdom also was involved with this project, though with more practical considerations of restoring the strength of combatants and inhabitants (as in Ol´denburgskii’s case), or with the intention of promoting a vision of “official nationalism” (as in the case of the empress’s society). Competing and sometimes collaborating with officialdom, the zemstvo and municipal activists endeavored to define more clearly the desirable contours and components of their ideal polity. In comparison with their counterparts in Britain, where the common image of civil society to which the convalescent would be welcomed back was widely shared, Russian public activists during the war had to labor not only in the sphere of practical organization of mobilization, but also in the arena of visions of a coming society. Their vision of civil society was a longstanding 67  RGVIA f. 2018, op. 1, d. 171, ll. 117ob.–18ob. (“Zhurnal zasedaniia Tsentral’nogo vrachebno-sanitarnogo soveta,” 11 September 1917). A member of the Kadet Party, Frenkel´ would be a prominent Soviet hygienist. Politicheskie deiateli Rossii, 1917: Biogra­ ficheskii slovar´, ed. P. V. Volobuev (Moscow: Bol´shaia rossiiskaia entsiklopediia, 1993), 332. 68

 RGVIA f. 2018, op. 1, d. 171, ll. 202–10ob. (“Zhurnal zasedaniia Tsentral´nogo vrachebno-sanitarnogo soveta,” 20 October 1917).

69

 Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1957), 1: 480.

220 Yoshiro Ikeda

goal. But, amidst the extraordinary conditions of total war, they happened to obtain new ways of moving one step closer to the realization of that goal, one way being to send injured soldiers to health resorts. Despite the many difficulties that restricted its scale, this project, pursued at the intersection between the requirements of mobilization and the patriotic rise of interest in the homeland’s bountiful nature, came out as a noticeable part of the movement seeking a Russian civil society.

Monasticism in War and Revolution Scott M. Kenworthy

The prevailing scholarly depiction of Russian Orthodoxy in the era of war and revolution (1914–21) holds that the church continued to lose its already flagging appeal at an accelerated rate due to the hierarchy’s continued support for an increasingly unpopular war and the fallout from the Rasputin scandals. By the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, according to some, the church had failed to respond to the spiritual needs of its flock, had grown increasingly rigid, and was internally divided, so that it was simply swept away by the Bolsheviks.1 Far more research needs to be carried out on the impact of war and revolution on the church and on popular Orthodoxy.2 Was there in 1

 For example, John Shelton Curtiss, The Russian Church and the Soviet State, 1917–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953), 5–9; Simon Dixon, “The Russian Orthodox Church in Imperial Russia, 1721–1917,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, 5: Eastern Chris­ tianity, ed. Michael Angold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 325–47.

2

 See S. L. Firsov, Russkaia Tserkov´ nakanune peremen (konets 1890-kh–1918 gg.) (Moscow: Kruglyi stol po religioznomu obrazovaniiu i diakonii, 2002). Research on the impact of WWI is particularly scarce. On the role of military chaplains and their relationship to soldiers, see Werner Benecke, “Zur Rolle der russisch-orthodoxen Militärgeistlichkeit vor 1914: Assoziationen und Konnotationen,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 52 (2004): 371–87; and Dietrich Beyrau, “Projektionen, Imaginationen und Visionen im Ersten Weltkrieg: Die orthodoxen Militärgeistlichen im Einsatz für Glauben, Zar und Vaterland,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 52 (2004): 402–20. On the church and the February Revolution, see P. G. Rogoznyi, Tserkovnaia revoliutsiia 1917 goda: Vysshee dukhovenstvo Rossiiskoi Tserkvi v bor´be za vlast´ v eparkhiiakh posle Fevral´skoi revoliutsii (St. Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 2008); Vladimir Vorob´ev, ed., 1917-i: Tserkov´ i sud´by Rossii. K 90-letiiu Pomestnogo Sobora i izbraniia Patriarkha Tikhona: Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii, Moskva, 19–20 noiabria 2007 g. (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo PSTGU, 2008); M. A. Babkin, Dukhovenstvo Russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi i sverzhenie monarkhii (nachalo XX v.–konets 1917 g.) (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia publichnaia istoricheskaia biblioteka Rossii, 2007). Babkin takes an extreme view that the church hierarchy was responsible for the fall of the monarchy, which caused quite a sensation in Russia. Babkin also edited a collection of primary documents, mostly focused on the church’s relations to the Provisional Government: Babkin, ed., Rossiiskoe dukhovenstvo i sverzhenie monarkhii v 1917 godu: Materialy i arkhivnye dokumenty po istorii Russkoi Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 221–49.

222 Scott M. Kenworthy

fact a spread in anti-clerical sentiment, or did such attitudes merely persist or strengthen among those groups where it already existed? We still know little about the impact of the war and revolution on the attitudes of different social strata—peasants, workers, and soldiers—toward the Orthodox faith. This article examines the resiliency of monasticism during the cataclysmic changes of war and revolution, its efforts to adapt in a time of national crisis and survive in a hostile political environment. It draws upon my recent monograph on the Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra together with other research and sources that reveal broader patterns.3 Monasteries are a lens for understanding the broader experience of Orthodoxy, for monasteries were institutions of the church but were at the same time populated by recruits from all layers of society and active foci of popular religious experience, above all through pilgrimage. Thus the history of the monastery provides insight both into popular piety and the responses of those completely identified with the church during the upheavals of war and revolution, and how monastic institutions adapted during this time of fundamental social and political transformation. In order to understand the fate of monasteries during the war and revolution it is necessary to understand what preceded those cataclysmic events. A monastery (for men or women) is a community for individuals who freely join in order to pursue a religious vocation, taking vows of poverty, celibacy, and obedience. 4 Although the monastery was a refuge from the world, it maintained contacts with the world through charity and pilgrimage. Monasticism was centrally important for medieval Russian Orthodoxy; 18th-century Russian rulers, however, restricted it because they viewed monasticism as contrary to the needs of constructing a modern state. Their efforts culminated in Catherine the Great’s confiscation of monastic property in 1764 that also pravoslavnoi tserkvi, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Indrik, 2008). On Bolshevik antireligious policy, see Arto Luukkanen, The Party of Unbelief: The Religious Policy of the Bolshevik Party, 1917–1929 (Helsinki: SHS, 1994); Glennys Young, Power and the Sacred in Revolutionary Russia: Religious Activists in the Village (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); William B. Husband, “Godless Communists”: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000). On the church during the revolution, see M. V. Shkarovskii, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov´ v XX veke (Moscow: Veche; Lepta, 2010); A. N. Kashevarov, Pravoslavnaia Rossiiskaia Tserkov´ i Sovetskoe Gosudarstvo (1917–1922) (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo Krutitskogo podvor´ia; Ob­ shchestvo liubitelei tserkovnoi istorii, 2005). 3  Scott M. Kenworthy, The Heart of Russia: Trinity-Sergius, Monasticism, and Society after 1825 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 4

 In Russian there is one general term, monastyr´, which is then qualified as muzhskoi or zhenskii (male or female). In English, scholars sometimes distinguish between “monastery” (for men) and “convent” (for women).

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resulted in the closure of more than half of all monasteries and a drastic reduction in the number of monks and nuns. For half a century after Catherine’s secularization, monasticism stagnated in Russia, but in the era of Nicholas I it began a revival that escalated even more rapidly in the postreform period right up to the outbreak of war and revolution.5 By 1917, there were 1,256 monasteries of all types in the Russian Empire. The number of monks, nuns, and novices grew nearly tenfold in the course of the century before the revolution (from 11,080 in 1825 to 104,512 in 1917), with the most dramatic increase coming in the number of female recruits from the 1880s onward (reaching 77,585 by 1917).6 The 19th century as a whole, and particularly the postreform period, witnessed not only a revival of monasticism but also a dramatic upsurge in pilgrimage—one expression of a broader phenomenon of religious ferment in late imperial Russia.7 Pilgrimage quadrupled in the postreform 5

 For a historiographical overview, see Scott M. Kenworthy, “Monasticism in Russian History,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, 2 (2009): 307–31. On monasticism in the modern period, see Kenworthy, “Monasticism in Modern Russia,” in Monasticism in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Republics, ed. Ines Angeli Murzaku (New York: Routledge, 2016), 265–84; Kenworthy, Heart of Russia; Irina Paert, Spiritual Elders: Charisma and Tradition in Russian Orthodoxy (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010); Andronik (Trubachev), A. A. Bovkalo, and V. A. Fedorov, “Monastyri i monashestvo, 1700–1998 gg.,” in Pravoslavnaia entsiklopediia: Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov´ (Moscow: Tserkovno-nauchnyi tsentr “Pravoslavnaia entsiklopediia,” 2000); P. N. Zyrianov, Russkie monastyri i monashestvo v XIX i nachale XX veka (Moscow: Verbum-M., 2002); Brenda Meehan, Holy Women of Russia: The Lives of Five Orthodox Women Offer Spiritual Guidance for Today (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993) and numerous articles; William Wagner, “The Transformation of Female Orthodox Monasticism in Nizhnii Novgorod Diocese, 1764–1929, in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Modern History 78, 4 (2006): 793–845; Marlyn L. Miller, “Under the Protection of the Virgin: The Feminization of Monasticism in Imperial Russia, 1700–1923” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 2009). 6

 Ia. E. Vodarskii and E. G. Istomina, Pravoslavnye monastyri Rossii i ikh rol´ v razvitii kul´tury (XI–nachalo XX v.) (Tula: Grif i K, 2009), 79. The total number of monasteries includes hermitages, episcopal residences (arkhiereiskie doma), and urban monastery dependencies (podvor´ia).

7

 There is now a substantial body of work on the religious ferment in late imperial Russia. See Nadieszda Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Chris J. Chulos, Converging Worlds: Religion and Community in Peasant Russia, 1861–1917 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003); Valerie A. Kivelson and Robert H. Greene, eds., Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman, Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia (Bloomington: Indiana Univer­

224 Scott M. Kenworthy

years.8 Thus monasteries became increasingly important for ordinary believers, and this growing cultural capital translated into increased financial means as well. Catherine the Great’s reforms had stripped monasteries of all their landed wealth, but gradually they found new sources of income deriving primarily from the upsurge of pilgrimage. In the 19th century the government again permitted monasteries to own land, so that by the time of the revolution many owned substantial tracts (monasteries collectively owned one million hectares by 1917).9 Although there was a great deal of criticism of monastic wealth, in fact there was great variation among monasteries, ranging from the largest, most famous to small rural communities that had barely enough to feed their inhabitants.10 Moreover, the increased income was used in part to support a growing array of charitable institutions, including almshouses for the local sick and elderly, and schools for children. Although they may have provided only a small proportion of poor relief in the empire, the majority of monasteries operated some sort of charitable institution as their means allowed.11 Nevertheless, because of the increased cultural capital sity Press, 2007); Page Herrlinger, Working Souls: Russian Orthodoxy and Factory Labor in St. Petersburg, 1881–1917 (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2007). 8

 Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, 169–220, 268–74; Chris J. Chulos, “Religious and Secular Aspects of Pilgrimage in Modern Russia,” Byzantium and the North/Acta Byzantina Fennica 9 (1999): 21–58; Chulos, Converging Worlds; Christine D. Worobec, “Miraculous Healings,” in Steinberg and Coleman, Sacred Stories, 22–43; Roy R. Robson, “Transform­ ing Solovki: Pilgrim Narratives, Modernization, and Late Imperial Monastic Life,” in Steinberg and Coleman, Sacred Stories, 44–60; Worobec, “The Unintended Conse­ quences of a Surge in Orthodox Pilgrimages in Late Imperial Russia,” Russian History 36, 1 (2009): 62–76; Robert H. Greene, “Bodies in Motion: Steam-Powered Pilgrimages in Late Imperial Russia,” Russian History 39, 1–2 (2012): 247–68.

9

 Vodarskii and Istomina, Pravoslavnye monastyri Rossii, 80.

10

 For polemics about monastic wealth, see Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, 53–56.

11

 Scott M. Kenworthy, “Russian Monasticism and Social Engagement: The Case of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra in the Nineteenth Century,” in Philanthropy and Social Compassion in Eastern Orthodox Tradition: Papers of the Sophia Institute Academic Conference, December 2009, ed. Matthew Pereira (New York: Theotokos Press, 2010), 163–81; Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, 23–24, 44–72, 169–220; Miller, “Under the Protection of the Virgin,” chap. 5; Brenda Meehan, “From Contemplative Practice to Charitable Activity: Rus­ sian Women’s Religious Communities and the Development of Charitable Work, 1861–1917,” in Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy and Power, ed. Kathleen D. McCarthy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 142–56; E. B. Em­ chenko, “Blagotvoritel´naia i prosvetitel´skaia deiatel´nost´ zhenskikh monastyrei i obshchin v sinodal´nyi period,” Tserkov´ v istorii Rossii, no. 6 (2005): 67–120; N. E. Shafa­ zhinskaia, “Sotsial´naia deiatel´nost´ russkogo zhenskogo monashestva v XIX–nachale XX v.,” Vestnik PSTGU IV: Pedagogika, Psikhologiia, no. 4 (19) (2010): 97–108.

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and landholding, there was a rise in antimonastic attitudes among anticlerical intelligentsia, who by the end of the imperial period were calling for a “second secularization” and ac­cused monasteries of excessive wealth and social parasitism; even some of the church’s married parish clergy resented monasticism’s wealth and power within the church.12 Dominated by the aristocracy before 1764, monasticism was democratized during the 19th century: ordinary monks and nuns came from a variety of classes in the 19th century and were overwhelmingly of peasant origin by the beginning of the 20th. Although class differences sometimes persisted even within monastery walls, lower-class monks and nuns had much more oppor­ tunity for advancement in the monastery than they did outside, and it was not unusual for serfs or former serfs to rise to positions of authority even within important monasteries.13 Monasticism and World War I It is important to understand the effect of the war on monasteries themselves and on their relationship to ordinary believers, as well as the ways in which monasteries participated in the war effort.14 In many cases the impact was very direct: hardest hit were those located in the occupied territories. In the dioceses of Western Ukraine, Lithuania, Riga, Novgorod, and Smolensk, numerous communities were evacuated, their inhabitants frequently relocating to already crowded monasteries in the interior. Some cloisters were used to quarter Russian troops, but others fell into enemy hands, like the Pochaev Lavra in Western Ukraine, where the remaining monks were interned in prisoner-of-war camps and the monastery itself desecrated.15 In the case of monasteries in Russia’s interior, the war’s influence varied. Conscription effectively cut off recruitment for men’s monasteries; even novices were drafted. Many male monasteries saw a rise in the number of tonsured monks (tonsur12

 Zyrianov, Russkie monastyri i monashestvo, 6.

13

 Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, chap. 4; Miller, “Under the Protection of the Virgin,” chap. 3. 14

 This section draws particularly upon my article “The Mobilization of Piety: Monasti­ cism and the Great War in Russia, 1914–1916,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 52 (2004): 388–401, which was based upon the annual reports that each diocese sent to the Holy Synod and that are preserved in Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA) f. 796, op. 442; also Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, 274–80.

15

 Evlogii (Georgievskii), Put´ moei zhizni (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii; Izdatel´skii otdel vsetserkovnogo pravoslavnogo molodezhnogo dvizheniia, 1994), 251–53, trans­ lated as Evlogii (Georgievskii), My Life’s Journey: The Memoirs of Metropolitan Evlogy, trans. Alexander Lisenko (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2014), 320–21.

226 Scott M. Kenworthy

ing eligible novices before they were drafted) but a substantial drop in the number of novices, one-third of whom were typically called up. The war had precisely the opposite impact on women’s monasteries, however. The number of female monastics rose sharply between 1914 and 1917;16 this was no doubt a consequence of the enormous number of women who lost their husbands or fiancés, as well as the fact that convents provided important service opportunities for women. The war also had an economic impact on monasteries that varied widely depending upon the type of monastery: larger and more famous monasteries had diversified economies and continued to attract pilgrims (and therefore donations), so the impact was not as severe. Many convents depended upon the labor of their inhabitants, and such communities remained self-sufficient. The majority of men’s monasteries, however, supported themselves by serving the liturgical needs of the faithful and were hard hit by the severe decline in donations that resulted from the general economic hardship brought on by the war, especially of the common people, whose donations had been small individually but collectively large. Contemporary critics frequently accused monasteries of failing to serve the needs of the people during World War I and of having lost the influence and standing they once had in society. Such voices were found even among the clergy. Acknowledging that attacks against monasteries were exaggerated, clergy in Russia’s national parliament, the Duma, nevertheless asserted that “it cannot but be wished that the monasteries rendered more service to society through works of mercy and love. This would increase the importance of monasteries in the eyes of the Orthodox people, and would restore to them the influence which they enjoyed in times past.”17 In fact, monasteries contributed to the war effort in numerous ways: by providing meaning and justification for the war, by supporting soldiers spiritually and materially, and most im­ portant, by delivering relief to refugees, orphans, wounded soldiers, and other war victims. Monasteries supported the war effort ideologically through preaching and publications. Many priest-monks served as chaplains in the army. Monastic publications patriotically supported the war by interpreting it in religious terms and by asserting the duty of soldiers to fight for the Fatherland, the faith, and the tsar. In 1914, for example, the Trinity-Sergius Lavra printed a leaflet to be distributed to soldiers at the front. In addition to the call to defend 16

 A. N. Kashevarov, “K voprosu o sud´be pravoslavnykh monastyrei v pervye gody Sovetskoi vlasti,” Nestor, no. 1 (2000): 331–42, especially 340, where he states that the number of female monastics rose from 71,200 to 84,300.

17

 As cited in John Shelton Curtiss, Church and State in Russia: The Last Years of the Empire, 1900–1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 379.

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the homeland and the faith, it called on the soldiers not to treat enemy soldiers or civilians with cruelty. The message also stated that it was a great “happiness” to give one’s life for the motherland, the faith, and the tsar.18 Monks met and conversed with wounded soldiers or with those departing for the front. In October 1914, Hieromonk Iraklii from the Trinity-Sergius Lavra met with wounded soldiers in the monastery’s infirmary. After singing hymns with the men, Hieromonk Iraklii discussed with them why they were at war with the Germans, why it was necessary to be victorious, and “what threatened them in case of defeat.” He stated that the enemy may be better prepared and stronger, which is why the Russian soldiers needed to put their hope in God and the Virgin Mary. The session ended with the distribution of copies of the Trinity Leaflets, popular religious tracts published by the monastery. On other occasions, Iraklii discussed articles in contemporary newspapers and journals.19 Regiments also stopped at the Lavra, where the monks would offer prayer services for them, give homilies, and distribute crosses and religious literature.20 The most important service monasteries provided during the war was aid to its victims. A large number of monasteries either supported or operated infirmaries for wounded soldiers. The Trinity-Sergius Lavra served more wounded soldiers than any other monastery in its two infirmaries, which had 300 beds in 1915–16, served over 4,000 soldiers, and spent nearly 80,000 rubles.21 By the end of 1914, over 200 (that is, about one in five) monasteries and convents had opened infirmaries, the majority of which were supported and operated by the monastic communities themselves, with the rest being operated by other organizations such as the Red Cross, but using monastery facilities. Cloisters frequently transformed their hotels or hostels for pilgrims into infirmaries, which naturally decreased their ability to receive pilgrims. Nuns also went out to work for the Red Cross at hospitals outside monastery grounds. 18

 “Poslanie Troitskikh inokov,” Troitskoe slovo, no. 238 (1914), cited in Nikon (Rozhdest­ venskii), “Kozni vragov nashikh sokrushi”: Dnevniki, 1910–1917 (Minsk: Pravoslavnaia initsiativa, 2004), 773–78; Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, 278.

19

 Hieromonk Iraklii’s notebook of conversations with wounded soldiers for the fall of 1914. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov (RGADA) f. 1204, op. 1, d. 18469, ll. 115–27. This entire, very large file contains data about the Trinity-Sergius Lavra (and its subordinate monasteries) and their services during World War I, including statistics from infirmaries and information about refugees.

20

 Letter from the commander of the 29th Reserve Regiment to Metropolitan Makarii, 22 February 1917 (ibid., d. 18912, l. 80). 21

 Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, 275–77.

228 Scott M. Kenworthy

In addition to wounded soldiers, monasteries assisted refugees, either by offering temporary shelter along evacuation routes, by providing money, food, or clothing to those sheltered elsewhere, or by offering shelter in their own buildings. In some dioceses monasteries supported or housed thousands of refugees. In sum, monasteries provided a broad array of services to war victims, soldiers, and their families. For example, in the diocese of Nizhnii Novgorod several convents operated orphanages for the children of soldiers, others assisted soldiers’ families, and many made and donated clothing for the active army as well as the Red Cross, while still others sheltered or sup­ ported refugees. Every convent and monastery in the diocese was engaged in some form of aid to those affected by the war. According to the bishop’s annual report to the Holy Synod on conditions in the diocese, these sacrifices “aroused great praise” and were acknowledged by the population.22 As the Nizhnii Novgorod example suggests, convents frequently made the greatest contributions. Nuns were engaged in many of the same kinds of service as thousands of secular women. Indeed, some religious communities of “sisters of mercy” blurred the lines between secular and monastic. One example is the Martha-Mary Community established in Moscow in 1909 by Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fedorovna, who also served as its superior. In this community, the sisters were not tonsured as nuns but nevertheless took vows of poverty, celibacy, and obedience. Instead of devoting themselves to prayer, their primary task was philanthropic service, yet the community was explicitly religious and centered around a remarkable church (designed and decorated by some of Russia’s leading artistic figures).23 Even before the war, convents and nuns were more oriented toward social service than men’s monasteries, and thus adapted those practices and institutions to the war needs more rapidly. Monasteries also provided comfort to increasingly war-weary believers by continuing to act as centers of pilgrimage. According to Robert Greene, the cult of saints and their relics adapted to modernizing conditions in late imperial Russia and remained relevant to believers’ lives even after the revo-

22

 Nizhegorod diocesan annual report to the Holy Synod, RGIA f. 796, op. 442, d. 2756, ll. 43ob., 45ob. On the annual diocesan reports as sources, see Kenworthy, “Mobiliza­ tion of Piety,” 390.

23

 See Liubov Miller, Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia (Redding, CA: Nikodemos Ortho­ dox Publication Society, 1991); L. V. Kulikova, Letopis´ zhizni i deiatel´nosti Blagovernoi Velikoi Kniagini Elisavety Feodorovny, osnovatel´nitsy Marfo-Mariinskoi obiteli miloserdiia, v khronike sobytii (Moscow: n.p., 2011); M. M. Gorinov et al., Marfo-Mariinskaia obitel´ miloserdiia, 1909–2009: K 100-letiiu sozdaniia Obiteli (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo Glavnogo ar­ khivnogo upravleniia goroda Moskvy; Belyi gorod, 2009).

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lution.24 Certainly the pressing needs caused by the war resulted in substantial numbers of believers appealing to their revered saints in prayers for their loved ones. As Archbishop Nikon observed of pilgrims to Trinity-Sergius, the war added new motivation for the effort to pray at a holy site—to pray for the soul of a loved one fallen or the healing of one injured in battle, or for the safe return of a son or husband.25 Many monasteries added special prayer services to their typical liturgical routine, regularly offering memorial services for the fallen and special prayer services for soldiers at the front. No doubt partly for this reason, pilgrimage remained a mass phenomenon, although certainly the war’s disruptions diminished its scale. The Trinity-Sergius Lavra, for example, reported that it fed over 250,000 poor pilgrims in 1915, which was approximately less than half of the number it received in years before the war. Monasteries were frequently unable to shelter or feed pilgrims as they had in the past because their facilities were serving wounded soldiers or refugees. Nevertheless although some dioceses complained of a decline in pilgrimage, more reported that it remained strong, and a few even suggested that the number of pilgrims visiting their monasteries had increased because of the war.26 Finally, it must be noted that, despite all the changes produced by the war, in many respects life in the cloister continued as before. Monks and nuns struggled with the same personal shortcomings, although prohibition removed the greatest temptation in men’s monasteries.27 Monks and nuns had the same aspirations, and worked, prayed, and worshipped together in church much as before. The Holy Synod’s support for an increasingly unpopular war, together with the Rasputin scandals, tarnished the church hierarchy in the eyes of some members of Russian society. But Rasputin and the Holy Synod did not represent the totality of the church or the Orthodox faith. Monasteries and convents were much closer to people’s lives and experience, and their history during the war reveals more about people’s attitudes toward the Orthodox faith. Karen Petrone has recently suggested that the revival of religiosity after the revolution was in part a legacy of World War I, when Orthodox expressions of religiosity became stronger, as revealed in soldiers’ letters from the front.28 Monasteries patriotically supported the war, but more importantly they 24

 Robert H. Greene, Bodies Like Bright Stars: Saints and Relics in Orthodox Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010).

25

 “Rus´ pod krestom,” Troitskoe slovo, no. 280 (1915), cited in “Kozni vragov…,” 914–16.

26

 A number of cases are cited in Kenworthy, “Mobilization of Piety,” 397–99.

27

 On monastic disciplinary issues, see Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, 156–67.

28

 Karen Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 33–43.

230 Scott M. Kenworthy

served its victims of the war, and this was not lost on the Russian population. The evidence suggests that the church continued to satisfy the religious needs of the faithful. For example, the annual diocesan report from Novgorod for 1915 claimed that “the abundance of monasteries in the Novgorod diocese, many of which have arisen in recent times, demonstrates that they satisfy the religious-moral aspirations of the Russian population,” as demonstrated by the persistent flow of pilgrims to the diocese’s monasteries.29 Certainly the ex­ perience of the revolution would demonstrate that some segments of society had grown alienated from the church by the experience of the war and indeed would lash out against it, but it is clear that Orthodoxy retained adherents among other segments of society. Events after both the February and October Revolutions would reveal the complexity and contradictions inherent in the position occupied by monasteries in Russian society. The February Revolution Monasteries were far from immune to the various currents that affected Russian society and the church after the February Revolution: calls for greater democratization in society at large sparked debates and tensions around monastic authority and leadership, and the breakdown of central governmental authority left monasteries vulnerable to seizures of property by local peasants and in some cases local authorities. Although some contemporaries (and later historians) assumed that monasteries were bastions of the old order, and Bolshevik propaganda painted them as staunchly monarchist, available evidence suggests that most were quick to assert their loyalty to the new order.30 To be sure, members of the ruling dynasty had regularly made their own pilgrimages to prominent monasteries like the Trinity-Sergius and Aleksandro-Nevskaia Lavras.31 No doubt many monastics remained loyal to the tsar and were appalled by his overthrow. The notion that the Trinity-Sergius’s authorities somehow belonged to the “old order” and remained staunch monarchists was shared by at least some in the local community who requested the civil authorities to remove them, although in fact the monastery was quite careful to avoid any public position against the new government, and none

29  Novgorod diocesan annual report to the Holy Synod, 1915, RGIA f. 796, op. 442, d. 2714, l. 37. 30

 Examples are given in Babkin, Rossiiskoe dukhovenstvo, 180, 278, 332.

31

 Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, 183, 266.

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of its leaders were removed for that reason.32 In fact monasteries themselves officially, if cautiously, accepted the post-February political order. The issue of monastic administration was particularly paradoxical. On the one hand, the very foundation of monastic life—as expressed in one of the three vows that a monk or nun takes—is obedience to monastery authorities. On the other hand, it had long been the tradition in some, especially cenobitic, monasteries for monks or nuns to elect their own abbot or abbess.33 In principle, monastics would elect the most spiritually suitable person and then be willing to obey that person, who would stay in office for life. By the early 20th century, however, only a small minority of monasteries elected their own abbots; most were appointed by the diocesan bishop or the Holy Synod, and frequently these abbots were complete outsiders to the community. Thus there was great interest in many monasteries in restoring the principle of election for superiors and other positions in the monastery hierarchy; such a move would also increase each community’s control over its own affairs as opposed to outside interference from the Synodal and consistory bureaucracies.34 Many monastics were able to advocate a procedure that was simultaneously a restoration of ancient practice and at the same time in keeping with the spirit of the times in a “free Russia.” In practice, elections sparked factionalism in 1917. Episodes occurred when those who held authority refused to cede power to newly elected monastery authorities. For example, in the Vsesviatskii Convent in the Moscow diocese, the abbess refused to acknowledge or work with nuns elected to the monastery hierarchy subordinate to her. The bishop attempted to reconcile the conflicting parties, but in the end the abbess stepped down and the nuns proceeded to elect a new abbess in her place.35 In the process of elections, monastics sometimes resorted to revolutionary language and methods by holding “meetings,” for

32

 “Proshenie zhitelei Sergievogo Posada v Mossovet ob udalenii iz lavry arkhiepiskopa Nikona i arkhimandrita Kronida” (29 May 1917), in Pravoslavnaia Moskva v 1917–1921 godakh: Sbornik dokumentov i materialov, ed. A. N. Kazakevich (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo Glavarkhiva Moskvy, 2004), 494. 33  Cenobitic monasteries are “communal” in that everything is done and held in com­ mon. The labor of each monk or nun goes to the benefit of the community, and each one in turn receives food, clothing, and cell from the monastery. 34

 For the example of the Aleksandro-Nevskaia Lavra, see M. V. Shkarovskii, “Aleksandro-Nevskaia Lavra v god revoliutsionnykh potriasenii (1917–1918),” Khristi­ anskoe chtenie, no. 1 (2010): 6–33.

35

 “Iz soobshchenii o vyborakh igumenii i starshikh sester vo Vsesviatskom mona­ styre,” Moskovskii listok, 9 May 1917, in Kazakevich, Pravoslavnaia Moskva, 55–56.

232 Scott M. Kenworthy

example, or by ousting superiors viewed as “reactionary” and part of the “old order,” or even by appealing to revolutionary authorities to support them.36 Revolutionary currents also affected the diocesan congresses held by monasteries across the empire in May and the All-Russian Congress of Representatives of Monasteries in July 1917. Elections for representatives to these congresses brought out tendencies that threatened the stability of monastic communities and revealed resentment against certain monastic authorities, couched in the political language of the day. For the Moscow diocesan congress, for example, each monastery and convent sent two representatives: the superior and a second candidate elected by all of the monks or nuns of the community by a secret vote without the participation of the superior. According to the prior Archimandrite Kronid of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, “quiet, peace, and brotherly love ruled in the communities” of the Lavra’s collective until the time of these elections. Once the elections were called the community was thrown into turmoil, “parties formed,” there were angry meetings, and in one of the subordinate communities the monks elected “the worst monk as delegate for the diocesan Congress” because, they asserted, “he promised us to speak against our [monastic] authorities at the Congress.”37 In the Lavra itself, one priest-monk sought to be elected as the monastery’s candidate to the congress and made speeches against the Lavra’s prior and other authorities, in addition to threatening to travel to Petrograd to ask the workers’ soviet there to replace the monastery hierarchy and establish a “new order.” In this case, the majority of the brotherhood stood against the agitator, who in the end backed down.38 At the Moscow diocesan congress it became evident that, contrary to being dominated by such “rebels,” the second repre­ sentative was chosen by the superior (rather than the community) or under his or her influence. Bishop Ioasaf opened the Moscow diocesan congress by stating that “the restructuring [perestroika] of life in all classes of society has begun,” and this was true of monasticism as well. In particular, monasticism had to demonstrate that it still had a place in “free Russia” against critics who claimed that it was obsolete and should be done away with.39 Monasteries also became the objects of numerous revolutionary actions during the course of 1917, especially peasant confiscations of monastery land. 36

 B. I. Kolonitskii, Simvoly vlasti i bor´ba za vlast´: K izucheniiu politicheskoi kul´tury Rossiiskoi revoliutsii 1917 goda (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2001), 63–65.

37

 Deianiia Sviashchennogo sobora Pravoslavnoi Rossiiskoi tserkvi: 1917–1918 gg. (1917–18; repr., Moscow: Izd. Novospasskogo monastyria, 1994– ), 10: 7. 38

 Archbishop Nikon, letter to Bishop Ioasaf (10 May 1917), in Kazakevich, Pravoslavnaia Moskva, 56; Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, 285–86.

39

 Kazakevich, Pravoslavnaia Moskva, 65; see also 57–58.

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Little research has been conducted on such episodes, so it is difficult to inter­ pret what they mean or whether they can be considered outright cases of anticlerical sentiment. As Pavel Zyrianov notes, monasteries themselves were usually not attacked, but rather peasants took over specific lands they felt to be theirs, for example, land that had been given to monasteries by noble landowners after Emancipation but that had previously been worked by peasants, who never accepted its loss.40 Such episodes were less an expression of hostility against monasteries as such than assertions of peasant justice in reclaiming what they regarded as rightfully theirs. In turn, monasteries de­ fended their right to own land and claimed to be “laboring brotherhoods.” Thus they sought the return of lands that had been seized.41 Monasteries also became the victims of both harassment by local revolu­ tionary authorities (local commissars or representatives of local soviets accompanied by soldiers) and acts of outright robbery, products of the steady breakdown of law and order during 1917.42 It was often difficult to distinguish friendly from hostile forces. In March 1917, the Twenty-Ninth Reserve Infan­ try Regiment conducted a midnight search of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, demanding that the prior show them all the cash and gold the monastery pos­ sessed, sparking fears among the monks that the monastery’s money would be confiscated. Paradoxically, however, by the end of the month the same regiment was appointed to guard the monastery from theft, though the fact that the soldiers were subordinate to the local soviet made their reliability uncertain in the monastery’s eyes. Local commissars or representatives from local soviets conducted searches and requisitions at other monasteries.43 As 1917 progressed, monasteries felt that the Provisional Government was too weak to ensure their protection, so monastery congresses and the Holy Synod began taking measures to ensure that monasteries could protect themselves by forming (unarmed) brotherhoods of local laity who would come to their defense if the community was threatened. Such brotherhoods would become particularly important after October.44 Monastic voices reveal a chaotic and frightening atmosphere where there were no clear lines of civil authority and 40

 Zyrianov, Russkie monastyri i monashestvo, 276, also 86, 181–82; Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, 287–90, 298.

41

 Babkin, Rossiiskoe dukhovenstvo, 191.

42 43

 Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, 282–83.

 Ibid.

44

 Jennifer J. Wynot, Keeping the Faith: Russian Orthodox Monasticism in the Soviet Union, 1917–1939 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 31–32; Kazakevich, Pravoslavnaia Moskva, 93; Babkin, Rossiiskoe dukhovenstvo, 191.

234 Scott M. Kenworthy

the Provisional Government was both weak and increasingly alien to the church’s concerns.45 Not only were monasteries under threat from local peasants and banditry, but local revolutionary authorities also seized some property—most significantly, some of the church’s most important printing presses, which belonged to prominent monasteries. In June 1917 the Moscow Soviet of Workers’ Deputies confiscated the Trinity-Sergius Lavra’s printing house, which published numerous titles not just for the monastery but also the church at large. The monastery appealed to the Holy Synod and the Provisional Government. In the end, the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, Vladimir N. L´vov, came to Sergiev Posad and negotiated a compromise, but one which ultimately left the soviet in control of the printing house. The Church Council became involved once it began to meet, but the situation was not resolved before the Bolshevik takeover.46 Similarly, the Ukrainian Central Council (Rada) seized the printing house of the Pochaev Lavra.47 In most ways, monastic life after the February Revolution continued as it had before. Monasteries continued to serve the war effort as well as receive new recruits and pilgrims. In most cases, monasteries remained politically cautious, neither openly defending the monarchy nor enthusiastically em­ bracing the revolution. The collapse of the monarchy per se did not affect the life of the church, except that it allowed the church to begin to challenge the synodal order established by Peter the Great. In the case of monasteries, this meant functioning with greater autonomy from synodal and consistory bureaucracies. Monasteries were caught up in the wave of elections and con­ gresses, which caused factionalism in certain communities where some monks sought to oust the monastery authorities and utilized revolutionary rhetoric. Most, however, embraced the possibility of electing their superiors, which was simultaneously a return to tradition and in keeping with the democratic ethos of the new order. What most detrimentally affected monasteries were the breakdown of central governmental authority and the confused lines of power between local soviets and the Provisional Government, which often left monasteries vulnerable to peasant seizures of property, banditry, and even 45

 See, for example, Archimandrite Kronid’s letter to Moscow Metropolitan Makarii (13 March 1917), as cited in O. N. Kopylova, “Istochniki po istorii Troitse-Sergievoi lavry i Moskovskoi Dukhovnoi akademii v fondakh GARF (XIX–XX vv.),” in TroitseSergieva lavra v istorii, kul´ture i dukhovnoi zhizni Rossii: Materialy II Mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii 4–6 oktiabria 2000 g., ed. T. N. Manushina and S. V. Nikolaeva (Sergiev Posad: Sergievo-Posadskii gosudarstvennyi istoriko-khudozhestvennyi muzei-zapo­ vednik 2002), 108–09.

46

 Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, 284–85; Kazakevich, Pravoslavnaia Moskva, 493.

47

 Deianiia Sviashchennogo sobora Pravoslavnoi Rossiiskoi tserkvi, 1: 78–79.

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seizures by local revolutionary authorities. At the same time, it is noteworthy that there were not widespread acts of popular anticlerical violence even under conditions of disintegrating political authority. The October Revolution After the February Revolution, no fundamental changes occurred in either the nature and structure of monastic life, or the legal or social situation of monastic institutions. That would change drastically and inalterably after the Bolshevik seizure of power. For the Bolsheviks, monasteries were bastions of the older order that had to be swept away. They suspected monasteries of being “nests of counterrevolution” and therefore a real threat to their hold on power, although there is no evidence supporting this suspicion. Their second assumption—that monasticism was a pillar of popular religious belief and practice, which stood in the way of building a new society based on scientific atheism—was on target. Consequently monasteries became an early and key target of the antireligious campaigns, and the Bolsheviks eliminated the majority of monasteries by the end of the Civil War.48 The 26 October 1917 decree on land nationalized all land, including holdings by the church and its monasteries, placing them under the control of local Soviets of Peasant Deputies or land committees. The decree, however, did not provide details about what was to happen with monastery lands, and it left open the possibility that monastic communities could still occupy their lands so long as they worked them. Further, since it left land in control of local bodies, there was great inconsistency in how those local authorities handled monasteries. Sporadic peasant seizures 48

 On monasticism and the Bolshevik Revolution, see Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, chap. 8; Wynot, Keeping the Faith; V. F. Zybkovets, Natsionalizatsiia monastyrskikh imushchestv v Sovetskoi Rossii (1917–1921 gg.) (Moscow: Nauka, 1975), which is still valuable; Charles Timberlake, “The Fate of Russian Orthodox Monasteries and Convents since 1917,” Donald Treadgold Papers 103 (Seattle: Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, 1995); Kashevarov, “K voprosu o sud´be pravoslavnykh monastyrei”; A. V. Zhuravskii, “Nasil´stvennaia sekuliarizatsiia monastyrskikh khoziaistv v natsional´nykh respublikakh povolzh´ia v 1917–1919 godakh,” Istoricheskii vestnik, no. 1 (12) (2001): 147–57; Shkarovskii, “Aleksandro-Nevskaia Lavra”; N. G. Kedrov, “Pravoslavnyi monastyr´ Evropeiskogo Severa i Severo-Zapada Rossii v posle­ revoliutsionnyi period,” in Pravoslavie: Konfessiia, instituty, religioznost´ (XVII–XX vv.). Sbornik nauchnykh rabot, ed. M. Dolbilov and P. Rogoznyi (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii universitet v Sankt-Peterburge, Fakul´tet istorii, 2009), 211–13; G. M. Zapal´skii, “Revoliutsionnye sobytiia v Rossii 1917 g. v vospriatii monashestva,” Tserkovnoistoricheskii vestnik, no. 16–17 (2009–10): 147–55. A very important collection of archival documents is Andronik (Trubachev), ed., Zakrytie Troitse-Sergievoi lavry i sud´ba moshchei prepodobnogo Sergiia Radonezhskogo v 1918–1946 gg. (Moscow: Izdatel´skii Sovet Russkoi Pravoslavnoi tserkvi, 2008).

236 Scott M. Kenworthy

of land continued after the October Revolution, as well as searches and requisitioning by armed men, some of whom were Red Army soldiers, demobilized soldiers, or deserters, while others were simply bandits.49 The role of monasteries in a revolutionary situation came under considera­ tion when the Russian Orthodox Church Council (Sobor) took up the work of the “Section on Monasteries and Monasticism.” The Council, which began meeting in August 1917, was a major event because it was the first since the 17th century and was called to evaluate all aspects of the church’s life. It worked for a year before being disbanded by the Soviet authorities, but since most of it took place after the Bolshevik Revolution, it was unable to accomplish many of its goals.50 During meetings in the summer of 1918 the Council discussed many issues that had preoccupied monastic leaders in the past about measures to raise the quality of monastic life. At the same time, it tried to reckon with the conditions under the new regime, simultaneously granting some concessions (dropping its insistence on the legal rights of monasteries, for example) but holding its ground in other areas, such as the church’s exclusive right to deter­ mine what happened with monastery lands. Claiming that monasteries were “not only praying but also laboring brotherhoods,” the Council asserted their right to work and possess land under Soviet law.51 The first official, open attack of the Soviet regime against the church as such was directed at its most important monastery in Petrograd, the AleksandroNevskaia Lavra. On 13 January 1918, the Commissariat of State Welfare issued a declaration that it was requisitioning the Lavra’s buildings for its needs. That same day the commissar of state welfare, Aleksandra Kollontai, arrived with armed soldiers and sailors to look over the complex. She declared that her commissariat would soon requisition all the capital of the monastery and expel all its inhabitants. The monastery tried to negotiate, but its efforts were ignored. On 19 January a man identified as Commissar Ilovaiskii with 17 sol­ 49

 Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, 296; Kazakevich, Pravoslavnaia Moskva, 136; Zhuravskii, “Nasil´stvennaia sekuliarizatsiia.”

50

 On the council, see James W. Cunningham, The Gates of Hell: The Great Sobor of the Russian Orthodox Church, 1917–1918 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Hyacinthe Destivelle, The Moscow Council (1917–1918): The Creation of the Conciliar Institutions of the Russian Orthodox Church (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2015).

51

 Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, 300–03; on the council’s work on monasticism, see Gün­ ther Schultz and A. G. Kravetskii, eds., Sviashchennyi sobor Pravoslavnoi rossiiskoi tserkvi 1917–1918 gg.: Obzor deianii. Tret´ia sessiia (Moscow: Krutitskoe Patriarshee Podvor´e; Obshchestvo liubitelei rossiiskoi istorii, 2000), 84–187; Sobranie opredelenii i postanovlenii Sviashchennogo sobora Pravoslavnoi rossiiskoi tserkvi, 1917–1918 gg., vyp. 4 (Moscow, 1918; repr., Moscow: Izd. Novospasskogo monastyria, 1994), 31ff.

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diers and sailors returned and surrounded the monastery. Some pilgrims began ringing the bells, and soon a large crowd of local believers—already on alert—came to defend it. Ilovaiskii and his band were surrounded and dis­ armed, and might have suffered a worse fate at the hands of the crowd had the monks not secured their escape; the remaining soldiers also cast aside their weapons and fled. Ilovaiskii returned, however, with two truckloads of soldiers and sailors, who fired machine guns into the air. The soldiers shot and killed a priest, but in the end, realizing that they were surrounded by an ever-growing crowd, again retreated with Ilovaiskii. As historian Mikhail Shkarovskii describes, the Soviet authorities had not expected the people to rise to the defense of the church and were forced to backtrack. The church had scored a first but rare victory against a Bolshevik assault.52 Although there were other incidents when local believers came to the defense of a monastery, the Soviet authorities generally adopted more subtle tactics to avoid situations like the one at the Aleksandro-Nevskaia Lavra in the future. A more common approach was to dismantle monasteries piecemeal rather than seizing them all at once in order to deter would-be defenders. The decree on the separation of the church and the state (23 January 1918) stripped monasteries of their status as legal entities and deprived them of all property, landed or otherwise. It did not give detailed instructions on how to implement the nationalization of church and monastic properties, however, so there was tremendous inconsistency in how the law was applied in different regions. An April 1918 report from the Nizhnii Novgorod provincial department for the separation of church and state (Nizhegorodskii gubernskii otdel po otdeleniiu Tserkvi ot Gosudarstva) outlined a systematic process by which it would liquidate diocesan institutions such as the Ecclesiastical Consistory and candle factories, followed by the nationalization of urban monastic properties (podvor’ia) and closure of chapels connected to various institutions, inventorying monastery property, and confiscating monastery capital in bank accounts.53 According to a central report of June 1918, however, local soviets acted on their own authority and confiscated land, capital, and property of monasteries “according to [their] own understanding.”54 For example, local agencies pilfered money and buildings from the Trinity-Sergius

52

 Shkarovskii, “Aleksandro-Nevskaia Lavra,” 20–33.

53

 Ol´ga Bukova, Zhenskie obiteli Prepodobnogo Serafima Sarovskogo: Istoriia desiati nizhe­ gorodskikh zhenskikh monastyrei (Nizhnii Novgorod: Kniga, 2003), 330–31.

54

 Report of Narkomiust Liquidation Commission to the Commissariat of Finance, 27 June 1918, Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. A-353, op. 2, d. 696, l. 45.

238 Scott M. Kenworthy

Lavra throughout 1918.55 Authorities in the city of Moscow expelled all but ten monks from each monastery and forced those remaining into smaller numbers of cells so as to take over the monastery buildings, ostensibly for living quarters.56 A major change of course in state policy came after the formation of the “Liquidation Department” of the Commissariat of Justice (“Likvidatsionnyi” otdel Narkomiusta, also known as the VIII, later V, Department) in May 1918, especially after the publication of its 24 August 1918 Instructions on how to implement the January 1918 decree on the separation of church and state. The Instructions directed local authorities first to inventory and then to seize all property, capital, buildings and land belonging to monasteries, with confiscations to be completed within two months.57 The response by local authorities in many regions of the country was immediate, although in fact it took years rather than months to complete the process. On the very night the Instructions were published (30 August 1918), Red Army soldiers directed by the Cheka conducted searches in numerous monasteries. Similar searches by armed agents of local Soviet authorities continued throughout the fall of 1918, and frequently resulted in seizures of cash, livestock, and farming implements, and even the personal property of monks and nuns. Ultimately, once its buildings and land were confiscated, a monastery was then closed and its inhabitants expelled. The case of the Aleksandr-Svirskii Monastery in the north, near Lodeinoe Pole, illustrates how the campaign against monasteries was often connected with a simultaneous campaign against saints’ relics. Local authorities had conducted searches of the Aleksandr-Svirskii Monastery, levied taxes on it, and confiscated its property throughout 1918. Local believers had created a union for the defense of the monastery from further encroachments, and the monastery had protested against continued confiscations. In response, the Cheka arrested the abbot at the end of September, and executed him and two other monks at the beginning of November. With the abbot out of the way, Red Army soldiers led by a commissar arrived during the last week of October, gathered all the monks in the refectory, took the keys from their cells, and began to plunder the entire monastery. One particular target was the massive silver shrine for the relics of the monastery’s founder, St. Aleksandr Svirskii. The soldiers “pulled the relics of the saint out of the reliquary and dared to 55

 Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, 298–300.

56

 Kazakevich, Pravoslavnaia Moskva, 173–74.

57

 For a translation, see Bolesław B. Szczesniak, The Russian Revolution and Religion: A Collection of Documents Concerning the Suppression of Religion by the Communists, 1917– 1925 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1959), 40–46.

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open it with their own hands and even mock the holy relics,” according to the report of the Olonets bishop, Ioannikii, to the patriarch.58 Although what exactly transpired is far from clear, the Cheka claimed that they found a wax figure instead of the incorrupt relics of the saint, and publicized this scandalous discovery, with detrimentals effect on the church. Monks testified that this claim was false; a commission headed by Bolshevik leader Grigorii Zinov´ev concluded that “there was neither an ‘uncorrupted body’ nor a ‘wax doll’ nor a ‘skeleton in slippers’ in the coffin, as claimed by the press, but a partially decomposed corpse.”59 Zinov’ev’s findings were ignored by the Soviet press in favor of the story of the wax figure, which became iconic of the church’s purported deception. Antireligious activists seized upon such alleged disclosures that sacred relics were frauds as a new means of undermining people’s adherence to the Orthodox Church. A wave of exhumations of saints’ bodies followed, including Tikhon of Zadonsk, Serafim of Sarov, and Sergius of Radonezh. Because Bolshevik antireligious activists mistakenly believed that relics must be incorrupt, they thought that they could undermine peoples’ faith in the church by demonstrating that most relics were in fact only bones. Historians disagree about the impact of the campaign to expose relics, however. Robert Greene argues that the campaign failed to shake people’s faith and ultimately backfired. S. A. Smith asserts that some lost their faith through such campaigns while, at the same time, agreeing that “popular piety proved to be far more resilient than the Bolsheviks appreciated.”60 During the first year of Bolshevik rule, many monasteries experienced a sense of anarchy, conflicts with local authorities, subjection to arbitrary searches, and seizure of property, but others were left relatively untouched. Beginning in the autumn of 1918 and continuing through the Civil War, however, a mass campaign to close monasteries took place in Soviet-controlled territory. Three factors contributed to these closures. The first was the antirelic campaign: because the relics of saints were most often housed in monasteries, Bolshevik activists believed that exhuming and especially removing saints’ relics should be accompanied by closing the monasteries that housed 58

 Pravoslavnaia entsiklopediia, 1: 610.

59

 S. A. Smith, “Bones of Contention: Bolsheviks and the Struggle against Relics, 1918– 1930,” Past and Present, no. 204 (2009): 157. The church, based on extensive archival evidence, maintains that local Bolsheviks fabricated the story about the “wax figure” to cover up the fact that the relics were in fact incorrupt and that it recovered the relics in 1998. See “Istoriia vtorogo obreteniia moshchei prepodobnogo Aleksandra Svirskogo,” Zhurnal Moskovskoi Patriarkhii, no. 5 (2000): 17–25. 60

 Smith, “Bones of Contention,” 188; Greene, Bodies Like Bright Stars, chaps. 4–6; A. N. Kashevarov, Sovetskaia vlast´ i sud´by moshchei pravoslavnykh sviatykh (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2013). On St. Sergius, see Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, 312–28.

240 Scott M. Kenworthy

them and supported their veneration. Second, in the midst of civil war, many Bolsheviks regarded monasteries as “nests of counterrevolution” that needed to be eliminated for the revolution to succeed. Finally, the leadership of the Liquidation Commission believed that one sure way to undermine the church was to destroy its economic power by confiscating monastic property, including land, candle factories, and rental properties. Local agencies supported these efforts because they were eager to obtain monasteries’ land, property, or buildings. In the conditions of civil war tactics used against monasteries and their inhabitants became much more harsh, and thousands of monks and nuns were summarily shot. Many more were expelled from their communities, left without means of support and discriminated against by the law as members of former “elites” who were stripped of rights.61 While the majority of monasteries that were closed had their property pilfered and buildings destroyed or abused, some of the most famous monasteries were transformed into museums, with their buildings and objects preserved. The Commissariat of Enlightenment, which did not have the same militantly antireligious agenda as the Commissariat of Justice, managed these monastery-museums, which in the early years were frequently staffed by intellectuals and experts sympathetic to the church.62 The Trinity-Sergius Lavra, for example, was “nationalized” by a decree of 1 November 1918 that placed the monastery under the jurisdiction of the Commissariat of Enlightenment. This ended, or at least brought under control, the plundering by other state agencies. A Commission for the Preservation of Monuments of Art and Antiquities at the Trinity-Sergius Lavra (Komissiia po okhrane pamiatnikov iskusstva i stariny Troitse-Sergievoi Lavry) was created to oversee the process of transforming the monastery into a museum as well as studying and cataloging its immense historical treasures. The commission consisted of theologians, such as the well-known Pavel Florenskii, and experts in iconography and history, especially those who sought to transform the monastery into a “living museum” of clas­sical Russian culture. The monastery itself was only closed a year later. The transformation of the monastery into a museum en61

 For a poignant personal illustration, see the letters of the monk Simon Kozhukov in Evgeniia Chetverukhina, “Udalilsia ot mira…”: Vospominaniia o skhimonakhe Simone (Sergee Evgen´eviche Kozhukhove). Pis´ma ottsa Simona (Sergiev Posad: Sviato-Troitskaia Sergieva lavra, 1997).

62

 See M. E. Kaulen, Muzei-khramy i muzei-monastyri v pervoe desiatiletie Sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow: Luch, 2001); O. P. Posternak, “Muzeinaia politika Rossii i sud´ba religioznogo kul´turnogo naslediia v 1920–1930-kh gg.: Po materialam Donskogo i Strastnogo monastyrei” (Candidate’s diss., Moskovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet kul´tury i iskusstv, 2006); T. V. Boiko, “Moskovskie muzei-monastyri v kontekste kul´turnoprosvetitel´skoi politiki Sovetskogo gosudarstva v 1917–1920 gg.” (Candidate’s diss., Moskovskii gosudarstvennyi oblastnoi universitet, 2006).

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abled it to preserve its most important historical treasures during the campaign to confiscate church valuables in 1922.63 As the massive campaign of monastery closures began at the end of 1918 and continued through the Civil War, a parallel development took place among those communities that succeeded in remaining open. The Funda­ mental Law of Land Socialization (19 February 1918) allowed the right of land use unlimited by confession, sex, or nationality, which opened the possibil­ ity of preserving monastic communities if they reformed themselves as agri­ cultural collectives. The process began spontaneously in the summer of 1918 and was officially authorized by the church authorities that fall. Given the communal nature of monastic life, making this transition was not difficult. For example, the Nikolo-Perervinskii Monastery in the Moscow district formed an “agricultural farmstead” (sel´skokhoziaistvennyi khutor) evidently quite soon after the October Revolution. In this particular case, however, the brothers spent the summer growing crops only to have the produce seized by the local land committee—in other words, attempting to play by the rules was no guarantee of success, especially as local revolutionary authorities might change the rules or ignore them altogether.64 The Commissariat of Agriculture (Narodnyi komissariat zemledeliia) directed local authorities to overturn traditional monastic hierarchies and exclude from such agricultural collectives elderly monks or nuns who often constituted the monastery hierarchy but were unable to contribute with their own physical labor. Moreover, collectives needed to be administered by “Soviet workers” rather than an abbot or abbess in order to be registered as a state farm. The joint instructions from the Commissariats of Land and Justice issued on 30 October 1919 directed local land committees to distinguish strictly between collectives with economic purposes and those with religious aims, and to deny registration and use of land to the latter. Clergy and tonsured monks and nuns (though not novices) were to be excluded from such collectives because they belonged to those who had been stripped of civil rights.65 In practice, however, as a Liquidation Commission report from August 1919 makes clear, 63

 On Trinity-Sergius, see Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, 306–12, 319–28; Andronik (Trubachev), Zakrytie Troitse-Sergievoi lavry; Kazakevich, Pravoslavnaia Moskva, 493– 540.

64

 Petition from Archimandrite Ioannikii to the Moscow district (uezd) land com­ missariat of 5 (18) April 1918, and the reply of Tsaritsyn township (volost´) Commissar of Agriculture Mozzhorin, 24 April 1918, in Kazakevich, Pravoslavnaia Moskva, 419–21. 65

 Zybkovets, Natsionalizatsiia monastyrskikh imushchestv, 98; Kashevarov, “K voprosu o sud´be pravoslavnykh monastyrei,” 336. According to Kashevarov, the terminology at this point still appears to be in flux, but the term sovkhoz was used in state documents, although communities usually labeled themselves artel or kommuna.

242 Scott M. Kenworthy

many local land committees accepted monastic communities as agricultural collectives with their former leadership and membership restrictions intact (only men or only women, only Orthodox Christians).66 There was immense local variation; while in some regions all monastic communities were com­ pletely closed, property confiscated, and the monastics expelled, in others monastic communities continued with their previous organization, lifestyle, and property, unmolested by local authorities until collectivization. Indeed, such communities were often the most productive agricultural collectives of a region. By March 1921, there were 116 monastic “state farms.”67 Nuns in the Revolutionary Order Given the diverse fates of monasteries in early Soviet Russia, it is perhaps pre­ mature to distinguish between the experience of male and female monastics before more research has been conducted. Nevertheless, some generalizations can tentatively be made. Men’s monasteries tended to suffer more than con­ vents during the antirelic campaign and were more likely to be closed or transformed into museums because they were more likely to house famous relics or be prominent historical or architectural monuments. Nuns were per­ haps less likely to be summarily executed during the Red Terror, although they were just as vulnerable to arrest or to expulsion from their communities. Those monasteries that succeeded in one way or another in transforming themselves into agricultural collectives were at the mercy of the good graces of local authorities, which tended to vary. Indeed, those local authorities could be quite arbitrary in expelling nuns from their communities and cruel in the process, depriving the nuns even of their own personal property and leaving them entirely without shelter or means to support themselves.68 Urban convents were even more vulnerable than rural ones. The only way to keep an urban monastery open was to officially transform its church into a parish church with a group of lay believers forming a parish council that would be authorized by the state authorities to use the church building. In cases such as that of the Ioannovskii Monastery, founded by John of Kronstadt in Petrograd, all of the monastery’s sources of income were confiscated by 66

 Kazakevich, Pravoslavnaia Moskva, 203–05.

67

 Wynot, Keeping the Faith, 61–70; Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, 330–41; O. Iu. Red´kina, “Sel´skokhoziaistvennye religioznye trudovye kollektivy v 1917–1930-e gg.: Na ma­ terialakh evropeiskoi chasti RSFSR” (Doctoral diss., Volgogradskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2004). 68

 For a very poignant example, see the appeal of the abbess and sisters of the Vsekhsviatskii Edinovercheskii Monastery to N. D. Kuznetsov, 8 October 1918, in Kazakevich, Pravoslavnaia Moskva, 185–86.

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the government, so that the nuns were entirely dependent upon the church’s parishioners for subsistence. Father Ioann Ornatskii, the chief priest serving the monastery, explained how life changed for the nuns after the revolution: Before the revolution the women’s monastery was viewed by the au­ thorities as a legal entity, enjoying particular rights, having its own capital, a percentage of which supported the monastery, and also the Vaulovskoe dependency in Iaroslavl´ Province with a great amount of arable land and forest…. After the revolution the women’s monastery was deprived of the right of juridical personhood; in accord with the decree of separation of church and state the Justice Department took its capital, the Vaulovskoe dependency was transferred to the Provincial Land Commission, and separate members of the women’s monastery (nuns) became viewed by the authorities as ordinary citizens. In this way, after the October Revolution the women’s monastery preserved only its spiritual organization, being deprived of all its rights, privi­ leges, and sources for its support.69 The transformation described by Ornatskii from a legally recognized institu­ tion having the right to own property to a community that had ceased to exist in the eyes of the law characterizes, in effect, the fate of all monastic communities. However, the situation was in fact even more dire than Father Ornatskii described, for tonsured monks and nuns were not regarded as “ordinary citizens” but were specifically named in the 1918 Constitution as belonging to the category of lishentsy, those disenfranchised (and in practice deprived of various rights) under the new order. Moreover, a monastery could preserve its “spiritual organization” only if the authorities allowed it to continue to occupy its residence and use the church building, which was by no means guaranteed, as the further fate of the Ioannovskii Monastery itself would illustrate.70 By contrast with the period between February and October 1917, when monastery lands were sometimes spontaneously seized by local peasants, after October 1917 there were few instances of peasants seizing monastery lands. Rather, the seizure of land was carried out by local revolutionary authorities, ostensibly in the name of the people and against monastic com­ munities as “parasitical” organizations living off the labor of others, even 69

 Protoierei Ioann Ornatskii’s report to the Petrograd Raisovet, 20 April 1922, in M. V. Shkarovskii, Sviato-Ioannovskii Stavropigial´nyi zhenskii monastyr´: Istoriia obiteli (St. Petersburg: Logos, 1998), 311.

70

 Shkarovskii, Sviato-Ioannovskii monastyr´, 109–57; a number of archival documents are also reproduced, 308–49.

244 Scott M. Kenworthy

when those monastic communities supported themselves by their own labor and received the support of the local population.71 In fact, after the Bolshevik Revolution the local population was far more likely to come to the defense of the community than be involved in any action against it, as some of the examples below illustrate. A sense of the local variation can be gleaned from the ten Nizhegorod convents considered by historian Ol´ga Bukova.72 In the spring of 1919, the regional Land Department (Gubernskii zemel´nyi otdel) and Executive Committee (Nizhegorodskii Gubernskii Ispolnitel´nyi Komitet) decreed that monastic collective farms were to be granted land on the same basis as other civilians in the region, granting them the right to stay on their land on the condition that the administration of the collective farm was not the same as the administration of the monastery and that the produce be divided exclusively among those who actually did the work. The latter condition derived from a Marxist interpretation of the class divisions within monasteries, namely that some monastics bore all the heavy labor and others “exploited” them by living off their labor, and that these latter should be excluded from the monastic collective farms and their support.73 In fact, monasteries and convents were complex communities in which the heaviest burden of physical labor was usually borne by the newest and youngest members, and the longer one stayed in the monastery, the more specialized one’s duties frequently became. Tonsured monks and nuns were expected to spend more of their time in prayer and church services, and their responsibilities in the monastery frequently involved some work in the church itself.74 Moreover, monastic authorities could assign tasks in accordance both with the abilities of the brothers or sisters and with the needs of the community as a whole or the season; thus sisters in a convent might be assigned to agricultural fieldwork when it was the season for sowing or harvesting, but in the long winter months those same sisters would be assigned to a workshop or engaged in handicrafts. The monastic community as a whole supported everyone, including elderly monks or nuns who were no longer capable of physical labor or others who might also be dependent upon the community (such as orphans). The Soviet authorities tried to divide this organically interconnected community in ways that impeded its ability to function and support itself. 71

 See again the appeal of the abbess and sisters of the Vsekhsviatskii Edinovercheskii Monastery to N. D. Kuznetsov, 8 October 1918, in Kazakevich, Pravoslavnaia Moskva, 185–86.

72 73 74

 Bukova, Zhenskie obiteli Prepodobnogo Serafima Sarovskogo.

 Ibid., 331–32.

 Ibid., 138.

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The Soviets considered the tonsured nuns who spent more of their time with church services to be “parasites” “exploiting” the other sisters, and therefore they were to be excluded from monastic collective farms (even if they were peasants by birth). In practice, however, this meant that elderly or ill nuns who were unable to engage in physical labor were not only excluded from the collective farm but were also deprived of subsistence. Theoretically, these elderly nuns were to be cared for by the Department of Social Security (regional or local branches of the Narodnyi Komissariat sotsial´nogo obespecheniia), but in practice that did not happen. Further, Soviet authorities tried to divide up monastic communities so that agricultural labor became a state farm separate from workshops and handicrafts, which would form other types of labor col­ lectives and be registered by Soviet agencies than the Land Committee. This destroyed the convents’ flexibility in assigning and reassigning sisters to dif­ ferent tasks in different seasons.75 The experience of these ten Nizhnii Novgorod convents varied tremen­ dously depending upon both the local authorities and the responses of the nuns to the prospect of their convents becoming state farms. Of the ten, only one encountered conflict with local peasants, who seized some of the mon­ astery’s land in October 1917. This was an unusual monastery in that its land holdings were spread out in various locations, even different villages, rather than being connected to the monastery.76 In a more typical case, one convent came under threat at the end of 1918 when a group of Red Army soldiers came and threatened to seize the monastery’s provisions; the sisters rang the bells and local peasants gathered at the monastery to defend it, forcing the soldiers to leave. Although the abbess was subsequently placed under arrest for several months, local believers successfully (if temporarily) defended a community they regarded as holy, as they had in the case of the AleksandroNevskaia Lavra.77 In all the remaining cases, the primary point of conflict was with the local Land Committee. Faced with the demand to become state farms, repre­ sentatives from women’s monasteries met in diocesan assemblies in December 1918 and again in October 1919. At the second assembly, participants observed that convents had three options for reorganization: as communes, state farms, or worker’s collectives (rabochie arteli). They resolved that all monasteries 75

 See, for example, ibid., 338–40.

76

 Ibid., 453–533, especially 507–15.

77

 Ibid., 95. Local believers also came to defend the Trinity-Sergius Lavra against the profanation of the relics of St. Sergius and the Ioannovskii Monastery in Petrograd against the seizure of its valuables. See Kenworthy, Heart of Russia, 315–17; and Shkarovskii, Sviato-Ioannovskii monastyr´. Examples could easily be multiplied.

246 Scott M. Kenworthy

should choose the latter option as permitting the greatest possibility for pre­ serving their monastic way of life. Becoming state farms would entail other complications, making the sisters employees of the Soviet state (paid in wages or provisions rather than subsisting off of what they themselves produced) and subject to Soviet interference in the farm’s administration.78 In fact, how­ ever, authorities rarely gave them the choice. The experience of transitioning to agricultural collective varied greatly depending upon the local authorities, and the process could be relatively peaceful or fraught with great hostility. The representatives of the Ardatov district Land Committee came to the Kutuzov Monastery and declared it a state farm; at first the abbess and the monastery council refused to cooperate, but they soon agreed to compromise. The representative asked the abbess for a list of the nuns able to work and promised that she could even designate herself as the head of the state farm, provided the nuns not use their monastic titles but call themselves “workers of the Kutuzov state farm.” Sisters able to work would receive full rations, while those unable to work would be considered alms-women (bogadelki) and receive smaller rations. The official told her that if she refused, everything (land, livestock, etc.) would be taken from them, but as a state farm everything—including their monastic lifestyle—would be preserved. “Pray to God,” he said, “we won’t forbid you, pray as much as you like.” Although the abbess hesitated in giving a list of the sisters to the Land Committee, in the end the convent agreed to become a state farm and was quite successful, even receiving extra land from former aristocratic estates.79 In this instance the local authorities were unusually tolerant as long as the convent played by the new rules. No other case was as harmonious and successful as that of the Kutuzov Monastery. A contrary example can be found in the experience of the large and important Diveevskii Monastery, which, with some 1,700 inhabitants at the time of the revolution, was three times the size of the neighboring village. In August 1919 the authorities suddenly announced that the monastery now belonged to the “Diveevo State Farm” and all of its possessions were confis­ cated. The authorities searched the sisters’ cells, taking personal property as well as church wine. The leader in the actions against the convent was a certain Katkov, the newly appointed head of the state farm. He gave the nuns few or no provisions and then turned around and demanded that they send 600 sisters for fieldwork. The sisters refused his demands, and in turn Katkov accused them of counterrevolution and had the monastery council members arrested. The nuns sent in reports and complaints to various higher bodies, 78

 Bukova, Zhenskie obiteli Prepodobnogo Serafima Sarovskogo, 331, 350–51.

79

 Ibid., 427–29.

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including the Moscow Bureau of Complaints. The latter conducted a thorough investigation, which confirmed the sisters’ account of events and even ac­ cused Katkov of criminal activity, although the local authorities ignored these results. By the end of the year the sisters were starving and demanded to know “if we have any sort of civil rights in a free state, or if our life and labor will be exploited arbitrarily?”80 In 1920 the Provincial Soviet of the People’s Economy confirmed the establishment of the Diveevo industrial cooperative partnership out of the monastery’s former workshops, which produced a wide range of different handicrafts that were even sold for export, and conditions evidently improved after that. Other convents were forced to become state farms.81 The Land Committee ordered the Ardatovskii Pokrovskii Monastery, for example, to become a state farm and elect new leadership for the farm, which caused tension with the local bishop until the process could be conducted under his authorization. The monastery continued to function after that point, though with periodic inter­ ference from other Soviet bodies and a threat to close the monastery in 1920 and the closure of one of its churches the following year.82 By contrast, when the sisters of the Ababkovskii Monastery refused to reorganize themselves into a collective the authorities eventually confiscated everything and created a state farm, for which most of the nuns initially refused to work. By the fol­ lowing year, however, the majority of the sisters were working for the state farm, and by the end of 1921 relations between the monastery and the state farm were described as “very peaceful.”83 In two cases, authorities established state farms a few kilometers from the monasteries, confiscating their farming implements and livestock. The sisters themselves became employees of these state farms. The sisters of the Dal´ne-Davydovskii Monastery preferred hav­ ing the monastery separate from the state farm, which was disbanded by 1922 anyway.84 In short, the majority of these ten convents were transformed into state farms and the sisters into their employees. In a few cases sisters worked primarily in handicrafts rather than agriculture. At the same time, many were able to maintain their monastic communities and continue worshipping in 80

 Ibid., 365.

81

 Only one, the Malo-Pitskii Monastery, was allowed to become an agricultural col­ lective (artel´) in 1919, though even it was transformed into a state farm a year later (ibid., 95–100). 82

 Ibid., 41–50.

83

 Ibid., 141.

84

 Ibid., 77–78, 408–11.

248 Scott M. Kenworthy

their churches. By the end of the 1920s, however, the authorities had closed all ten of these communities. Conclusion The overall effect of the campaign against monasteries during the Civil War was devastating for Orthodoxy. By the end of 1921, 722 out of 1103 or 65 percent of the monasteries that had existed before the revolution were closed.85 Over 900,000 hectares of land had been confiscated together with 84 factories, 436 dairies, 620 cattle barns, 1,112 rental properties, 708 hotels for pilgrims, 311 apiaries, and 277 hospitals and shelters. These buildings were turned to a variety of uses by various Soviet authorities, including schools, orphanages, hospitals, military establishments, prisons, and labor camps.86 Nevertheless, the revolution did not succeed in eradicating monasticism. The histories of individual convents during the Civil War suggest that the Soviet regime treated nuns with greater toleration than monks. Convents that reorganized as state farms often experienced hardships or conflicts in the process of that transformation in 1919–20, but once some new accommodation was reached, it appeared they were able to survive and preserve their way of life relatively unmolested (at least in some regions) until collectivization, although the same was also true with some men’s communities. An urban monastery with the remains of a venerated saintly figure such as the Ioannov­ skii Monastery would probably have been closed much earlier if it had been a men’s monastery. With the closure of the monastery, however, the nuns were not treated any more kindly in their expulsion. Monasteries were thus sites of contention throughout the revolutionary period. Ordinary believers generally embraced and supported them, while the secular intelligentsia harshly criticized them and viewed them as an inex­ tricable part of the old order they sought to overthrow. In response to the traumas of war, monasteries mobilized to serve popular needs, especially victims of war such as wounded soldiers, refugees, and orphans. After the February Revolution, tensions escalated into conflict: conflicting levels of government authority variously threatened or defended monasteries. Some peasants seized monastery lands, while others continued to make pil­ grimages. The revolution also revealed fault lines within the monasteries themselves, as conflicts over power and authority erupted within monasteries in ways that reflected processes taking place in society as a whole. After Oc­ 85

 A number of monasteries that existed in the Russian Empire fell outside the boun­ daries of the Soviet Union and thereby survived. 86

 Wynot, Keeping the Faith, 56.

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tober, the critique of the radical intelligentsia was translated into policy; the conflicts became much sharper, and the lines of division much clearer. Once the authorities became overtly hostile to monasticism, divisions within monasteries themselves generally ceased, as for the most part did incursions from the peasantry. After October, the authorities seized monastic lands and properties while the populace frequently rose to their defense. The Bolsheviks ruthlessly suppressed the majority of monasteries. Those that managed to survive demonstrated that, where circumstances allowed, monasticism was not rigid and inflexibly part of the old world but was in fact quite adaptable. These communities reformed themselves as labor collectives and survived (sometimes even thrived) in the new environment, all the while keeping their traditional religious life intact. Such compromises were possible under the New Economic Policy but ceased to be an option during collectivization when the authorities eliminated all remaining monastic communities.

From War to Peace: Russian Nurses, 1917–221 Susan Grant

This essay discusses the impact of war and revolution on the development of nursing during the period 1917–22. How did sisters of mercy weather the storm of war and revolution, and what was their relationship with the Bolshevik leadership? What became of nurses in Soviet-controlled areas in conditions of civil war and famine? In answering these questions, I aim to focus on those sisters of mercy who sought to obtain organizational control of nursing and oversee the needs of nurses at the home front during this revolutionary pe­ riod. The October Revolution of 1917, while instrumental in determining the path which nursing in Soviet Russia was to follow, was not the sole factor that set it upon its future course. Wartime conditions and the experience of nurses at the front, followed by the influence of revolutionary fervor produced by the February Revolution, initiated important changes in nursing before the Bolsheviks had even come to power. The October Revolution and the new socialist government, rather than instigating these changes, instead built upon them. As this essay shows, the separation between the old system of nursing in tsarist Russia and the development of a new “Bolshevik system” was not entirely distinct. One system did not simply begin when the other ended; nor can the October Revolution alone bear sole responsibility for changes in the organization of the nursing profession in Russia. After briefly discussing the prerevolutionary system of nursing, this essay analyzes how nursing was changed by war and revolution, paying particular attention to the formation of the All-Russian Union of Sisters of Mercy, the impact of the Civil War, and Bolshevik efforts to organize nursing. The extreme conditions produced by war and revolution shaped nursing identity and had a lasting impact on the evolution of the nursing profession in Russia. The profound consequences of

I would like to thank the Irish Research Council and Marie Curie Cofund for providing the funding that made this research possible. Thanks are also due to Dr. Judith Devlin, Professor Susan Solomon, and the editors of Russia’s Great War and Revolution, especially Professor Adele Lindenmeyr. Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 251–70.

252 Susan Grant

events taking place at this time were germane to the future development of the profession. In past examinations of the history of Russian and Soviet nursing, the emphasis, perhaps unsurprisingly, has traditionally focused on war. Nurses also appear in other gender and military histories, forming a part of the female or medical landscape of war, especially the Crimean War and World War I. Laurie Stoff’s work confirms the important role of Russian women during World War I, be they combatants or nurses, and argues that the experience of nurses in war challenged gender boundaries.1 Recently, Boris Kolonitskii and Joshua Sanborn have acknowledged and highlighted the importance of women and nursing during the war and after the revolution, with both showing the varied perceptions of nurses held by soldiers and society.2 Works on the history of nursing by Natal´ia Lopatina, A. V. Posternak, V. P. Romaniuk, and Elena Kozlovtseva highlight the important historical role of the sisters of mercy, and trace the role of the nursing communities, their patrons, and the work of individual nurses.3 This essay takes a different approach by exploring the history of Russian nursing through the lens of professional development in the midst of the chaos caused by war and revolution. It also draws on archival and published material that shows the plight of nurses struggling to adapt to rapidly changing conditions and establish control over their professional identity and development.

1

 Laurie Stoff, Russia’s Sisters of Mercy and the Great War: More than Binding Men’s Wounds (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015); They Fought for the Motherland: Russia’s Women Soldiers in World War I and the Revolution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006); and “The ‘Myth of the War Experience’ and Russian Wartime Nursing during World War I,” Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 6 (2012): 96–116. 2

 B. I. Kolonitskii, “Tragicheskaia erotika”: Obrazy imperatorskoi sem´i v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010); and Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003). 3

 N. L. Lopatina, Kul´turologicheskie aspekty v razvitii sestrinskogo dela (Kemerovo: Ak­ sioma, 2009); A. V. Posternak, Ocherki po istorii obshchin sester miloserdiia (Moscow: Sviato-Dmitrievskoe uchilishche sester miloserdiia, 2001); V. P. Romaniuk, V. A. La­ potnikov, and Ia. A. Nakatis, Istoriia sestrinskogo dela v Rossii (St. Petersburg: SanktPeterburgskaia gosudarstvennaia meditsinskaia akademiia, 1998); Elena Kozlovtseva, Moskovskie obshchiny sester miloserdiia v XIX–nachale XX veka (Moscow: Pravoslavnyi Sviato-Tikhonovskii gumanitarnyi universitet, 2010).

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The Sister of Mercy Communities Organized nursing care in Russia emerged in the 19th century, when the communities of sisters of mercy (obshchiny sester miloserdiia) formed throughout the country. Directed primarily by aristocratic, religious women with an interest in philanthropy, these first communities oversaw nursing care during times of both war and peace, proving so valuable that they expanded throughout the latter half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. As Adele Lindenmeyr has noted, “[b]y supporting hospitals, clinics, or other medical institutions, schools for nurses, midwives, or other medical personnel, or popular health education, many charities … sought to fill in gaps in Russia’s system of health care and medical education.”4 When the Russian Red Cross was established in 1867, it oversaw the work of the nursing communities, but these were still not standardized and remained largely under the influence of their individual patrons, with each community having its own individual goals, study programs, and regimes.5 The gradual growth of the nursing communities was an acknowledgment of the need for nurses and the further development of the nursing profession in Russia. According to L. E. Gorelova and D. P. Kudriia, the Red Cross played a greater role in Russian nursing after 1892–93, when a number of new nursing communities established to assist in the famine and cholera epidemics of those years began to work as Red Cross communities. By 1898, there were 65 such communities with 2,812 sisters of mercy working in them.6 The Russian Society of the Red Cross attempted to standardize the rules, structure, and educational programs of nursing communities by drawing up a model charter. According to this charter, training and education would take place over a one-and-a-half to two-year period, including both theoretical and practical training. The theoretical course included lectures on anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, epidemiology, and women’s and children’s diseases, as well as skin, nervous, and psychological illnesses. The practical course was to cover subjects such as internal and surgical illnesses, bandaging, minor 4

 Adele Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 222. 5

 For an example of the differences and commonalities between the communities, see Elena Kozlovtseva’s work on the Moscow communities (Kozlovtseva, Moskovskie obshchiny). 6  L. E. Gorelova and D. P. Kudriia, “Rol´ Krasnogo Kresta v podgotovke sester milo­ serdiia,” Meditsinskaia sestra, no. 12 (1987): 55. By 1912 this had increased to 3,500. A. S. Konokhova, “Sestry miloserdiia v gody revolutsii i grazhdanskoi voiny,” Noveishaia istoriia Rossii, no. 1 (2012): 91.

254 Susan Grant

surgical operations, and smallpox vaccination.7 All practical work was to take place in a medical institute (one attached to the community, if possible) and be supervised by a doctor or mother superior.8 Sisters of mercy therefore received sound medical training that allowed them to treat the basic needs of patients. Nurses did not earn money for their services; “unselfishness” was the “first condition of Christian service.”9 Both nurses and probationers were provided for by their nursing community—they received accommodation, food, clothes, and a small amount of money every month to cover any expenses. After five years of “diligent and faultless” service in the community, sisters of mercy received a special token of excellence and a diploma.10 Any payment received by sisters of mercy, including for services rendered when visiting another in­ stitution (with permission from their community) or from those who received care from a sister of mercy at home, went directly to the community. The nurs­ ing communities accepted girls and widows aged 18 to 40 years who were of Christian faith and “reasonably literate and healthy.” In its charter, the Red Cross stipulated that it was preferable for those of an “advanced moral and intellectual development” to enter the nursing communities.11 The strict criteria meant that only the most committed women became and remained nurses. This was all the more so because sisters of mercy had to endure tough working conditions. Those sisters of mercy who served no less than 25 years and those who had to leave on account of poor health (who had served no less than 15 years) were entitled to a state pension. The conditions of the state pension were criticized in an article that questioned why anyone would want to become a sister of mercy, given their trying material circumstances and general hard life. After 25 years, they were “miserable, nervous, overworked, and threatened with destitution.”12 Living and working conditions were difficult and many nurses became weak and ill long before they were entitled to their pension. Sister of mercy M. I. Deviz wrote about the challenging conditions which nurses experienced while working in a hospital after the 7

 See Normal´nyi ustav obshchin sester miloserdiia Rossiiskogo Obshchestva Krasnogo Kresta (Moscow, 1903), 66–67 (arts. 39–40).

8

 Kozlovtseva, Moskovskie obshchiny, 96.

9

  Normal´nyi ustav, 68 (art. 44).

10

 Ibid. (art. 45).

11

 Ibid., 66 (art. 35).

12

 On the state pension, see ibid., 70 (art. 56). If nurses could work for no longer than five years, they usually received no pension. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennoistoricheskii arkhiv (RGVIA) f. 1265, op. 1, d. 1086, l. 152 (“Iz gazety ‘Russkii invalid’ ot 4 maia 1913 o zhelatel´nom tipe sester miloserdiia Krasnogo Kresta” ).

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Russo-Japanese War, where long working hours and cramped dormitories contributed to their weakening health.13 In spite of these conditions (or perhaps, in a way, because of them), the prerevolutionary system of nursing imbued nurses with a sense of duty to their patients, and life in the nursing communities instilled a rigid discipline. Both of these characteristics come to the fore in later Soviet biographies of successful nurses. Sisters of mercy trained before the war and revolution who remained in their profession after the revolution and worked in Soviet medical institutions excelled because of their commitment and devotion to helping the sick.14 They earned excellent reputations and received state awards for their efforts, which sometimes included having cared for the sick and wounded during three wars (World War I, the Civil War, and the Great Patriotic War).15 Dedication to service and high-quality medical training were two of the biggest achievements of the prewar nursing communities, which placed an emphasis on education, care, and discipline. Since the establishment of the first nursing community in 1844, there were an estimated 150 communities by the outbreak of World War I. This was not sufficient to meet wartime needs, and so short-term Red Cross courses for nurses were established.16 Thousands of women from all kinds of social back­ grounds and with varied levels of training entered existing sister of mercy communities. The influx of volunteers meant that Red Cross nurses were broadly divided into two categories of nurse: staff nurses who had trained prior to the war and wartime nurses who had completed short courses immediately prior to or during the war. But at the front the lines dividing these different categories sometimes became blurred, as those with less training often moved quickly up the ranks because of the injuries, illnesses, and sometimes fatalities 13

 M. I. Deviz [Okhotina], “Iz dnevnika sestry miloserdiia,” Istoricheskii vestnik 115, 3 (1909): 1004–30.

14

 For examples of these nurse biographies, see the journal Meditsinskaia sestra. There are numerous examples, but for an early one, see “Meditsinskie sestry: Otlichnitsy zdravookhraneniia,” no. 3 (1947): 31. Four Leningrad nurses trained in the Exaltation of the Cross community went on to become examples of ideal Soviet nurses because of their commitment to caring for patients.

15

 Several prerevolutionary-trained nurses even received the highest state honor, the Order of Lenin, for their years of service. In the nursing press they were revered as model Soviet nurses. See, for example, “Meditsinskie sestry, nagrazhdennye Mini­ sterstvom zdravookhraneniia SSSR znachkom ‘Otlichniku zdravookhraneniia,’” Meditsinskaia sestra, no. 6 (1948): 31. From 1953, nurses awarded the Order of Lenin frequently featured in the journal. See, for example “Stareishii rabotnik bol´nitsy,” Meditsinskaia sestra, no. 12 (1953): 28. 16

 For more on World War I nursing, please see Stoff, Russia’s Sisters of Mercy.

256 Susan Grant

suffered by staff nurses. Death and illness did not differentiate by professional rank. The increased mobility of medical personnel on the Eastern Front and the kinds of injuries inflicted by modern warfare placed heavy demands on nurses. (See figure 6 in the gallery of images following page 270 for a 1914 poster reminding the public of the work done by Red Cross nurses on the frontlines.) These conditions, together with the entry of an entirely new cadre of nurses who had been drawn to work as nurses primarily out of a sense of patriotic duty, began to change the character of Russian nursing. There were now thousands of women with nursing experience, in particular the war­ time nurses, who had no real connections with the prewar sister of mercy communities but who found themselves in need of organization, leadership, and in some cases, employment. The increase in the number of women with nurse training had an immediate impact on the profession, with leading sis­ ters of mercy assuming the responsibility of forming a union to address the needs of all nurses. The changing political and social climate also inspired these same sisters of mercy to attempt to reorganize the nursing communities, with union leaders taking the initiative in undertaking and implementing changes in the profession, as we will learn when examining the All-Russian Union of the Sisters of Mercy. The All-Russian Union of the Sisters of Mercy The shared experience of immense hardship and responsibility during World War I produced a profound effect on nurses working on or close to the front lines as well as those working on the home front.17 Towards the end of the war, sisters of mercy in Petrograd nursing communities realized that there was an urgent need to initiate changes in the Russian nursing profession. No doubt this was part of a broader societal change; as Pavel Petrovich Shcherbinin has noted, the war, which had left many women without husbands and fathers, helped women to realize themselves in a new way as professionals.18 The pre­ war world that these women had inhabited had changed radically. Yet, while women did assume additional responsibilities due to the absence of men, and experienced a corresponding sense of empowerment, this was not the impetus behind the formation of a nursing union. Society had been wracked by a war that left in its midst many sick and injured soldiers and civilians who required care and attention. Nurses considered it their professional responsibility as 17

  Soviet-controlled areas underwent the most change, with attempts made to replace the tsarist-era structures. 18

 P. P. Shcherbinin, Voennyi faktor v povsednevnoi zhizni russkoi zhenshchiny v XVIII– nachale XX v. (Tambov: Izdatel´stvo Iulis, 2004), 228.

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medical workers to organize themselves. In the summer of 1917, a group of sisters of mercy from the nursing communities of Petrograd took steps to form a national organization of nurses, separate from the communities. The political opportunities and freedoms presented after the February Revolution led to the establishment of all kinds of unions, including medical unions.19 Now, for the first time, nurses set up their union. The formation of the All-Russian Union of Sisters of Mercy (Vserossiiskii soiuz sester miloserdiia) was a product of this revolutionary fervor but also, and perhaps more directly, a result of the need to respond to the woeful conditions faced by nurses in the aftermath of three years of war. The All-Russian Union for the Sisters of Mercy emerged from the First All-Russian Congress of Sisters of Mercy held in Petrograd in August 1917.20 The nurses who attended the founding congress and formed the union claimed the nursing communities were found wanting during the war.21 In the first issue of the union publication, the editors wrote that the war had shown that nursing communities, as then conceived and organized, were not able to cope in the current conditions and should be reorganized along “democratic principles.”22 These Sisters of Mercy wanted “rules and a solid organization” so that there could be a “single leadership” that would “unite all members into one, conscious harmonious [druzhnyi] force” so as to “serve the motherland and humanity under the banner of the Red Cross.”23 Part of this undertaking would be a reorganization of the nursing communities. In a resolution on the nursing communities, the nurses at the congress outlined their plans to reorganize the communities to make them more “democratic.” They also articulated their non-political stance but pledged to work with the Provisional Government “for the good

19

 For a list of these, see A. Aluf, Spravochnik srednego medpersonala (Moscow: TsK MST, 1928), 11.

20

 The union was officially “approved” 1 September 1917 and was composed of 15 members and 5 candidate members. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. R-5532 (All-Russian Union of Sisters of Mercy), op. 1, d. 5 (“Otchet o deiatel´­ nosti Tsentral’nogo Pravleniia Vserossiiskogo Soiuza Sester Miloserdiia s 3 sent. 1917 po 15 avg. 1918”), l. 1. 21

  “Ot redaktsii,” Pervyi vestnik sestry [sic] miloserdiia, no. 1 (1918): 2. Pervyi vestnik sestry miloserdiia (The First Herald of the Sisters of Mercy) was a weekly publication of the All-Russian Society of the Sisters of Mercy, first issued in January 1918. It ceased to exist after just a few months. While the publication claimed to represent a “society” of nurses, it was a union publication.

22 23

 Ibid., 3.

 Ibid., 1.

258 Susan Grant

of the country.”24 The Union of Sisters of Mercy outlined a framework for implementing courses of up to six months’ duration.25 In order to protect the interests of nurses, the union placed representatives “in all organizations” that touched upon the needs of nurses.26 These organizations included the Main Administration of the Red Cross, the Medical-Sanitary Section, and the Union of Towns.27 While their power remained limited, the union nurses were no doubt attempting, in earnest, to help their fellow nurses cope with the challenges of war and revolution. The Union of Sisters of Mercy was the first organization of Russian nurses that sought to address their professional needs. Its leaders, all sisters of mercy, were primarily drawn from the Petrograd nursing communities. These Petrograd communities wanted to have closer links with the Main Administration of the Red Cross, but instead of each individual community having its own relationship, the union wanted to create a single body to act as an umbrella organization. In order to achieve this it sought to reorganize the nursing communities. The union leader was sister of mercy Lidiia N. Lazareva, who was also in the Main Administration of the Red Cross and was one of those charged with the reorganization of the communities. Her two deputy leaders were sister of mercy Nina S. Obolenskaia (on the Military Sanitation Administration’s committee overseeing the reorganization of the communities) and sister of mercy Nina Kh. Bazilevskaia (on the Red Cross commission overseeing the professional needs of members).28 The admin­istration of the All-Russian Union of the Sisters of Mercy numbered 30 sisters of mercy in August 1917. In its manifesto, the Congress of the Union of Sisters of Mercy outlined key areas where it sought to effect change. In order to do this several commissions were established, with union members responsible for overseeing the reorganization of the communities, and addressing professional needs and cultural enlightenment.29 It also sought to establish a legal section for the resolution of any conflicts emerging between nurses and/or the communi24

 GARF f. R-5532, op. 1, d. 1 (“Kratkii otchet o rabote VSSM [Petrograd] 26 avgust–3 sentiabria 1917”), l. 3. It is not clear whether this resolution was passed; in any case, it would have made little difference once the Soviet government was installed.

25

  Pervyi vestnik sestry miloserdiia, no. 2 (1918): 3.

26

 Pervyi vestnik sestry miloserdiia, no. 7 (1918): 2.

27

 GARF f. R-5532, op. 1, d. 5, l. 1.

28 29

  Pervyi vestnik sestry miloserdiia, no. 1 (1918): 4.

 Ibid., 3. The congress was structured and organized to deal with each of these and other matters.

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259

ties. At the congress, there were calls for more professional unity among the communities and for one, single study program for all schools. Attendees proposed nominating four nurses to represent the different categories of nurse that existed—staff nurse, reserve nurse, probationary, and wartime nurse—so that all types of nurse would have input into the reorganization of their communities.30 Professional nurses, as stated by union nurse Sister Ol´ga G. Dekonskaia (of the St. George nursing community), were not to remain outside the union, and all communities were expected to merge with the union.31 In a break with the previous system of prewar communities, whereby the professional and private lives of sisters of mercy were effectively controlled by the communities, the Union of Sisters of Mercy called for nurses’ private lives to be separated from their professional role as a nurse, subject only to the laws of the civil state and not the nursing community.32 The increase in the number of nurses who had trained in short-term courses during the war, along with the need for many of these women to earn a living, resulted in nurses taking action to address the difficult working and living conditions in which they found themselves. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks, having organized their own medical detachments after the February Revolution, continued to train their “Red sisters” and medical orderlies (sanitarki), who took care of Red Guards injured during the fighting following the Bolshevik takeover of power. These Red sisters, many of whom had been factory workers, formed the Proletarian Red Cross and later entered the Red Army.33 The Bolsheviks were keen to train their own nursing corps, an effort more systematically undertaken by the Commissariat of Public Health in 1919–20.34 The reorganization of the Red Cross was also undertaken during these years.35 For the time being, short-term train30

 Ibid., 2; Pervyi vestnik sestry miloserdiia, no. 7 (1918): 3.

31

 Speech by O. G. Dekonskaia, 15 February 1918, reported in “Kratkii otchet o so­ veshchanii Tsentral´nogo Pravleniia Vserossiiskogo Soiuza sester miloserdiia s dele­ gatskim s˝ezdom soiuza sester Obshchin i s predstavitel´nitsami frontov i otdelov 14 i 15 fevralia 1918 g.,” Pervyi vestnik sestry miloserdiia, no. 7 (1918): 2–4, here 3. 32

 In their private lives they were expected to adhere to the rules of only the state and in their professional lives by those regulations drawn up under the auspices of the Union of Sisters of Mercy. Pervyi vestnik sestry miloserdiia, no. 2 (1918): 2. 33

 Richard Stites, The Women‘s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 306. 34 35

 Ibid.

 By the start of 1918 a decree was issued to disband the Main Administration of the Red Cross and to transfer its property to the state, which would form a committee for the reorganization of the Red Cross. That committee included M. I. Barsukov, V. M.

260 Susan Grant

ing courses were prioritized and the barely trained Red sisters joined nurses and other medical workers in attempting to deal with the medical needs of a war-weary population susceptible to the typhus epidemic that was sweeping across vast swathes of the former Russian Empire. In November 1918, it was recognized that organized medical help was needed for the front, and the Soviet Red Cross began to establish short-term courses for Red sisters and sanitarki. Although initially Red sisters received just two weeks’ training, courses were later extended so that in 1919 it was possible for them to receive two months’ training.36 From its base in Petrograd the leadership of the Union of Sisters of Mercy struggled to coordinate its members. In November 1917, albeit just some three months after the union’s formation, union leaders noted that many nurses, whether at the front or in Petrograd, did not know of the union’s existence. At the front there seemed to exist separate unions of nurses, not linked to the main Petrograd union. While there was debate as to whether or not nurses knew of the existence of the union, the All-Russian Union of Sisters of Mercy had local sections and corresponded monthly with its members at the front, for example on the Western and Northern Fronts, in Vologda, Voronezh, and Viatka.37 At the same time, the Petrograd union attempted to communicate with those sections with which it was in contact. Communication was not systematic (unsurprising given conditions of war and revolution), but correspondence shows that nurses at the local level were attempting to organize demobilized nurses. Their reports informed union leaders of the kinds of measures that needed to be taken in order to help nurses gain employment. Besides establishing (or attempting to establish) professional courses, some nurses also tried to open hospitals and organize free medical care for the poor.38 Union leaders insisted that the union and nurses remain apolitical and

Bonch-Bruevich, L. Kh. Popov, and T. A. Fortunatova. In August 1918 a decree was issued conferring upon the Soviet Red Cross the legal rights of a social organization working on the basis of the Geneva Conference of 1862; it was officially recognized by the International Red Cross in 1921. V. A. Rybasov, “Krasnye sestry v grazhdanskoi voine,” Meditsinskaia sestra, no. 3 (1949): 21. 36

 Rybasov, “Krasnye sestry,” 21; Romaniuk, Lapotnikov, and Nakatis, Istoriia sestrin­ skogo dela, 80–81. 37

 GARF f. R-5532, op. 1, d. 2 (“Protokoly zasedanii pravleniia VSSM 4 noiabr´ 1917”), l. 15; Pervyi vestnik sestry miloserdiia, no. 7 (1918): 2.

38

  Pervyi vestnik sestry miloserdiia, no. 7 (1918): 2.

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that the union cooperate with the Bolsheviks so that union members could help those nurses in need of support.39 In spite of the efforts of the Union of Sisters of Mercy and its claim to be­ ing a “strong professional unit” with a membership of 120,000, the union was in reality far from being a formidable force.40 It did not seem to hold much importance for nurses more generally or the new Bolshevik authorities. Sister Obolenskaia observed that in all their resolutions on sanitary institutions the Bolsheviks “ignored the sisters.” Indeed, union nurses claimed that the “sisters were ignored everywhere.”41 Notwithstanding their concerns and difficulties, the Union of Sisters of Mercy pressed on with efforts to reorganize the nursing communities and help demobilized nurses find employment. It attempted to help nurses retrain after demobilization and tried to arrange for wartime nurses to attain “professional knowledge” through training as accountants or stenographers.42 Wartime nurses could attend courses to supplement their medical training (courses were on x-ray skills, laboratory work, mechanical therapy, psychiatric patient care, and care for tubercular patients). Members who wanted to remain in the medical field were also encouraged to attend free eight-month courses for the protection of motherhood and infancy.43 In this sense, the union and the Bolsheviks shared a common interest. The Bolshevik health authorities, by maintaining such courses, offered nurses the opportunity to acquire further skills and training. The union, in its commitment to help nurses, promoted these courses by encouraging demobilized nurses to attend them. Nonetheless, common interest did not denote Bolshevik support. The Bolsheviks seemed content to work with the union insofar as this suited their own political ends. This was also the case with organization and education. The new government again had its own plans, as evidenced by its swift decision to nationalize the Red Cross in 1918 and institute a new Soviet Red Cross, which coexisted with the old Red Cross until 1921. The communities and the union 39

 See the comments of Sister Servirova (GARF f. R-5532, op. 1, d. 19, l. 5ob.). Sister Lavrova in this regard noted that when cooperating with the Bolsheviks they worked only as “medical workers” and thus had to remain “apolitical,” participating in the work of all medical organizations (GARF f. R-5532, op. 1, d. 19, l. 6).

40

 Speech by Dekonskaia, Pervyi vestnik sestry miloserdiia, no. 7 (1918): 2.

41

 GARF f. R-5532, op. 1, d. 19, l. 5 (3 January 1918).

42

  Pervyi vestnik sestry miloserdiia, no. 6 (1918): 5.

43  These were first opened by the All-Russian Guardianship for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy. The editors did not note that this organization, established in 1913, had been transferred to Soviet power in January 1918, under Commissar of Social Security Aleksandra Kollontai. The courses were opened a month later (ibid., 5).

262 Susan Grant

remained, and these continued to work with the old Red Cross for as long as they could. At a meeting of the union’s Central Administration with the Executive Committee of the Red Cross Sister Communities on 27 March 1918 in Petrograd, a commission established to oversee the development of nursing schools proposed that the program be of three years’ duration. There should be reduced emphasis on specialization, and priority should be given to more practical classes, especially in the third year, where choosing a specialty was not to be obligatory.44 Later, these plans were co-opted by the Commissariat of Health. In June 1918 the First All-Russian Congress of Medical-Sanitary Sections was held. Seventy-five delegates attended: 45 physicians, 14 fel´dshers,45 7 pharmacists, 4 medical students, and a nurse. The 28 Bolsheviks in attendance dominated proceedings. The congress recommended that a single central organ be created to oversee medical-sanitary affairs.46 This single organ was to be the Commissariat of Public Health.47 With just a lone representative at the congress, nurses stood little chance of having their concerns and needs addressed. The future of the union appeared bleak. Despite its best efforts, the nursing union never managed to achieve the “harmonious force” it had originally envisaged. The reasons for this were myriad and included a lack of cohesion among nurses more generally, as well as among leading nurses in the nursing communities. Continued divisions between the union and the nursing communities weakened the union. Union leaders called for the nursing communities to look upon it as “a professional union of all nurses” and wanted the community nurses, with their vast experience, to merge with it.48 At the same time, the union wanted to reorganize these very communities, which looked upon the union with suspicion. Without the support of the nursing communities, on the one hand, and the Soviet government, on the other, the union had no way forward. The nursing communities spread across the former Russian Empire were integral to nurse 44

 GARF f. R-5532, op. 1, d. 19, l. 77 (protocol 57 from an executive meeting of the AllRussian Union of the Sisters of Mercy, 27 March 1918).

45

 Fel´dshers could best be described as paramedics who were trained in first aid and performed minor surgeries as well as administered certain medicines. See Samuel C. Ramer, “Fel´dshers and Rural Health Care in the Early Soviet Period,” in Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia, ed. John Hutchinson and Susan Gross Solomon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 121–45.

46

 Neil B. Weissman, “Origins of Soviet Health Administration, Narkomzdrav, 1918– 1929,” in Hutchinson and Solomon, Health and Society, 95–120, here 100–01.

47

 For detailed discussion of the creation of Narkomzdrav, see Weissman, “Origins of Soviet Health.” 48

  GARF f. R-5532, op. 1, d. 19, l. 12ob.

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training and employment and, even in spite of revolutionary conditions, represented a much more viable local touchstone for nurses than did a small group of nurses in Petrograd. The Soviet government, meanwhile, was not interested in propping up the union or communities, eager instead to make its own mark on the newly emerging system of healthcare. The institutional transition was now considerably confused by the sheer number of healthcare organizations that existed in 1918: the union of nurses, the Bolshevik Red sisters, the nursing communities, the old Red Cross, the Soviet Red Cross, and now the newly formed commissariats of health and social security. This array of organizations must have been particularly bewildering for patients and medical personnel. During November and December 1918 union leaders discussed merging with some of the other medical unions.49 But by the beginning of 1919, ef­ forts were underway to liquidate the Union of Sisters of Mercy, and in March it merged with the newly organized All-Russian Union of MedicalSanitary Workers (Vserossiiskii soiuz mediko-sanitarnykh trudiashchikhsia or Vsemedikosantrud, organized in March 1919). Even though union nurses were not entirely against joining this new union, they assumed that the general medical union would have a separate section for nurses. However, the Union of Sisters of Mercy was not sufficiently powerful to succeed in estab­ lishing a section for nurses within the medical union, and so nurses were denied separate professional representation.50 They were now in a union that represented 134,000 fel´dshers, nurses, and other medical workers.51 The initial goal of the medical union was the democratization of the medical profession through the achievement of equal status for all health workers and their par­ ticipation in the management of public health institutions. Neither of these principles, Neil B. Weissman argues, was acceptable to the Commissariat of Public Health, and by 1920 the government had ensured that the union had no significant influence in public health affairs.52 Even if the Union of Sisters of Mercy had managed to establish a section for nurses, it is unlikely that 49

 GARF f. R-5532, op. 1, d. 31, ll. 227–28 (protocol 119, 16 December 1918). See also d. 32, l. 223 (protocol 117, 18 November 1918).

50

 GARF f. R-5532, op. 1, d. 18, l. 4 (report from the third executive meeting of the VSSM regarding liquidation, 26 February). Aleksandr S. Aluf, who wrote extensively about the medical union in the 1920s, noted that the Union of Sisters entered the medical union “not without hesitation or reservation,” but that they had no other acceptable alternative. Aluf, Za piat´ let: Ocherk razvitiia i deiatel´nosti soiuza Vsemediksantrud c 1919 po 1924 god (Moscow: TsK Vsemediksantrud, 1924), 6. He added that when entering the union the nurses were not certain that nurses’ rights and interests would be defended. 51

 Weissman, “Origins of Soviet Health,” 103.

52

 Ibid., 103–04.

264 Susan Grant

this would have had much influence in view of the Commissariat of Public Health’s reluctance to tolerate a rival in the healthcare sphere. Although the union disbanded after the merger, a few of its leading nurses remained influential in the reorganization of the nursing profession in Soviet Russia. The work of the union had thus not been in vain. At least three Moscow-based nurses who had been responsible for overseeing the reorganization of the nursing schools went on to work in the Commissariat of Public Health’s Section for Medical Schools and Personnel (Otdel meditsinskikh shkol i personala), which was also the authority responsible for overseeing the opening and operating of the nursing schools. It seemed more likely that nurses working in the commissariat, as opposed to the union (nursing or medical), would have had a greater opportunity to influence policy in nurs­ing education or help nurses. While their hopes of looking after the rights and interests of nurses might have been dashed by the union merger, their presence in the Commissariat of Public Health kept alive some hope of furthering the cause of nurses. Sister Tat´iana A. Schaufuss, who had been deeply involved in reviewing nursing education for the Union of Sisters of Mercy, continued these efforts during her time in the Commissariat of Public Health through her work on the nursing study plans and programs.53 Nurses, however, occupied a precarious position due to their religious and aristocratic background, and in 1921 three Commissariat of Public Health nurses (Schau­ fuss, Sister Kseniia A. Rodzianko,54 and Sister Mar´ia F. Rozen) were arrested and imprisoned by the local Moscow Cheka. This action was strongly con­ tested by Commissar for Public Health Nikolai Semashko, who pleaded with the Cheka to have them released so that they could continue their work in the commissariat, where they were considered to be “excellent” and “loyal workers.”55 Semashko’s efforts proved to be of no avail, however. Schaufuss and at least one other nurse, most probably Rozen, ended up in Siberian labor 53

 Born in Russia in 1891, Schaufuss emigrated to the United States, where she directed the work of the Tolstoy Foundation for more than 40 years until her death in New York in 1986. For more, see www.tolstoyfoundation.org/schaufusss.html.

54

 Born in 1881, Rodzianko served as vice chairwoman of the Society for the Promotion of Private Nurses for hospitals (http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-binfg.cgi?page= gr&GRid=105703066). Unfortunately, I have not ascertained information on Rozen. 55

 GARF f. R-8419 (Moscow Political Red Cross), op. 1, d. 292 (Oprosnye listy i zaiavleniia arestovannykh sester miloserdiia russkoi i pol´skoi natsional´nosti i perepiska ob osvobozhdenii ikh 21 maia 1920–5 oktiabria), ll. 1–3. They were arrested, it was alleged, because Rodzianko (the daughter of a Ukrainian landowner) was mistaken as a relative of former Duma president M. V. Rodzianko. Meanwhile Schaufuss, born Rapaport, was mistaken as an “aristocrat.” The nurses were also accused of having links to the Danish Red Cross, a claim again vehemently denied by Semashko. For more on links between the international Red Cross societies, see Gerald H. Davis,

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camps for six years.56 Schaufuss remained in Russia for a total of 14 years, but friends urged her to leave Russia in the mid-1930s. Despite being “loyal to the existing government,” she reluctantly left Russia.57 With the forced departure of Schaufuss, Rodzianko, and Rozen from the Commissariat of Public Health, the former union nurses definitively lost their chance to influence nursing education and policy in Russia. This was not the end of nursing for these women, however. Schaufuss left Russia for Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, where she received Czech citizenship. In 1938, she emigrated to the United States, where she was in touch with the Rockefeller Foundation’s Elisabeth Crowell in a bid to organize a school of nursing in Prague under the Red Cross. Schaufuss is best known for her role in helping to establish the Tolstoy Foundation and was its executive director, executive vice president, and later, president. Rodzianko worked as a nurse at the front during World War I but was arrested in April 1920 as an alleged member of the Russian “White Cross,” an organization likely linked to the former Russian Red Cross in Siberia, southern Russia, and abroad. She was imprisoned in the Ivazhskii concentration camp until after the Civil War. She returned to Petrograd after her release but was rearrested in 1928 and sentenced to exile in Irkutsk. In 1933, having received permission to travel abroad, she went to Paris and then Prague, where she worked for the Refugee Assistance Committee in 1934. At this time she also worked as a nurse to Czech president Thomas Masaryk. In 1938, she emigrated to the United States, working as an administrator and nurse with the Tolstoy Foundation until her death in 1970. These two women, prominent figures in both the union of nurses and the later Soviet health commissariat, were committed to their profession. Even though the Bolsheviks no longer valued their knowledge and expertise after 1921, these women continued to work in nursing after their emigration. The Impact of Civil War The Civil War produced a public health crisis and an urgent need for medical personnel; it also placed additional pressure on those already working in medical care. Reports from American observers in Russia to assist the medical relief effort during the Volga famine illustrate the desperate conditions. Ac“National Red Cross Societies and Prisoners of War in Russia, 1914–1918,” Journal of Contemporary History 28, 1 (1993): 31–52. 56

 Rockefeller Archive Center (hereafter RAC), Rockefeller Foundation Records, Folder: Reports, Mary Beard, Elizabeth Tennant, RG 1.1 Projects, Series 100 International, Sub series C-Nursing, Box 37-38, Mary Beard diary, 31 March and 4 April 1938, p. 30, disc 2.

57

 Ibid., 4 April 1938.

266 Susan Grant

cording to the Russian health survey issued by the US National Information Bureau in 1922, “the thin line of doctors and nurses on the Famine Front” was “wasting away, after years of unbearable hardship,” while “over 75 percent of all nurses in Russia” were “living on incomes too low to provide the bare necessities of life.”58 The need for medical support was emphasized by Dr. Henry Eversole of the Russian Commission of the National Information Bureau, who added that “[g]reat numbers of doctors and nurses have died in fighting epidemics, others have contracted tuberculosis, and those who remain are so weakened by years of privation and overwork that they have slight resistance to disease.”59 Indeed, so desperate was the need for medical workers that in 1921 Semashko ordered students from the senior classes of middle medical institutes to temporarily withdraw from classes so that they could assist in a smallpox vaccination campaign.60 Having been mobilized since 1914, medical workers were struggling to cope with the immense hardship of continually working on or behind the frontlines and fighting epidemics with shortages of medicine. Local populations were in serious need of medical care. A. S. Konokhova, who has recently written about nurses in St. Petersburg during the Civil War years, argues that the Civil War witnessed the worsening of conditions for nurses and medical workers.61 The everyday working conditions for nurses (and indeed medical workers more generally) at the home front were extremely difficult. A 15-year-old girl who became a 58

 American Friends Service Committee (hereafter AFSC) Archives, Philadelphia, General Files, Box: Foreign Service Russia 1922, File: Medical Aid to Russia. Based on quotations from the Bulletin of Russian Health, which, according to American Haven Emerson, did not show the “whole picture,” typhus fever had jumped from a prewar (1904–13) average of 99,798 cases to 2,777,500 cases in 1920. GARF f. A-482, op. 35, d. 39 (“Perepiska s predsedatelem NKZ RSFSR v Amerike s Amerikanskim komitetom meditsinskoi pomoshchi Sovetskoi Rossii ob organizatsii v Moskve besplatnoi bol´nitsy na 500 krovatei na baze Staro-Ekaterinskoi bol´nitsy, 27 ianvaria–27 oktiabria 1922”), l. 27 (14 April 1922). Neil B. Weissman, while cautioning against overinflated statistics, acknowledges that the number of physicians was greatly depleted during the Civil War due to exposure to disease (“Origins of Soviet Health Administration,” 106). 59

 AFSC, General Files, Box: Foreign Service Russia 1922, File: Medical Aid to Russia. See also General Files, Box: Foreign Service Russia 1923, File: Correspondence re Funds for Russia from USA Doctors 1923. This and similar information became the key phrases for the AFSC publicity and fundraising campaigns in America. 60  GARF f. A-482, op. 14 (Medical Education Section), d. 58 (“Postanovleniia NKZa o mobilizatsii uchashchikhsia starshikh klassov srednikh meditsinskikh shkol na kursy ospoprivivaniia i ob otkomandirovanii rotnykh fel´dsherov na dopolnitel´nye kursy po podgotovke pomoshchnikov vrachei, instruktsiia o poriadke otkomandirovaniia”), l. 2 (24 March 1921). 61

 Konokhova, “Sestry miloserdiia,” 96–97.

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267

medical worker in Simbirsk, a city at the heart of Civil War fighting, later recalled that work in the military hospital was very difficult due to the lack of medicines, materials for dressings, and foodstuffs.62 During the war the American Quaker Anna Haines, who was in both Samara and Moscow, wrote that “hospitals suffered terribly from overcrowding, lack of personnel, lack of medicines, instruments and linen.”63 Other accounts of those visiting hospitals confirmed the deplorable conditions, with another American Quaker, Muriel Payne, adding that due to the shortage of soap, sheets were sometimes baked.64 Inspecting what was then considered the best hospital in Moscow, American Quaker Jessica Smith in 1922 was told by the head nurse of the newly reopened and renovated Evangelical Hospital that “the nurses had to spend about two hours every day scouring the bowls with sand to get rid of the rust … it was hard, the Sister said, to keep the workers from stealing the patients’ food.”65 The lack of basic medical equipment produced great hardship on the part of nurses, doctors, and patients. Smith was informed that “[i] n a ward of 80 patients there was one thermometer.”66 By the end of the Civil War, years of war-induced suffering and deprivation had evidently taken their toll. Hospitals appeared to be little more than mere empty shells with medical staff struggling to get by. New Cadres of Caregivers Responding to the health crisis, the Commissariat of Public Health (Narodnyi komissariat zdravookhraneniia, established in July 1918) set up medical train­ ing courses in early 1919. Factory workers were amongst those trained and sent to the front in brigades (see figure 7). The courses emphasized gaining 62

 I. I. Sevost´ianov, “Klavdiia Aleksandrovna Sorokina,” Meditsinskaia sestra, no. 5 (1951): 31. 63

 A. J. Haines, Health Work in Soviet Russia (New York: Vanguard Press, 1928), 81–82.

64

 AFSC, General Files, General Administration 1921. Foreign Service to Russia, Friends Relief Commission Russian Section 1921–1922, extracts from a report received from Muriel Payne, London, 22 May 1921.

65

 GARF f. A-482, op. 35, d. 38 (“Zaiavlenie Tsentral´nogo Biuro Obshchestva tekhnicheskoi pomoshchi Sovetskoi Rossii v Amerike i Kanade o peredache sobrannykh sredstv, medikamentov i oborudovaniia dlia gospitalia na 500 krovatei; spiski peredavaemykh medikamentov i oborudovaniia. 28 ianvaria 1922–29 sentiabria 1923”), l. 131ob. These sources can be found in both the Moscow and Philadelphia archives and formed part of the AFSC publicity campaigns to raise awareness among Americans about the plight of the Russian nurses. These campaigns were directed primarily to Quaker donors, medical professionals, and nurses in America. 66

 GARF f. A-482, op. 35, d. 38, l. 137–137ob.

268 Susan Grant

experience and knowledge in all aspects of hospital life.67 Courses would turn out nursing “assistants” (pomoshchniki) to act as a type of temporary, emergency personnel. The new nursing courses promised to produce “new cadres of caregivers,” but this would take two to three years; in the meantime, “life would not wait.”68 These kinds of general short-term “crash training pro­ grams,” as Michael David-Fox has called them, were typical of the Civil War period.69 According to Aleksandra Kollontai, some 6,000 medical workers (largely in Moscow) were trained through short-term courses in sanitation and first aid, with some of these appointed as political commissars to hospitals.70 These recruits, together with medical students and the Red Guard nurses from the October days, joined together to form “an effective medical arm.”71 The Proletarian Red Cross also established short courses to train sanitary bri­ gades.72 Longer-term courses, however, were not systematically set up until 1919–20. The priority of the health authorities was to meet the healthcare emergency facing millions of its citizens, a crisis that had been looming large since the end of the war. In tackling the wider issues of public health, the Bolsheviks and the Com­ missariat of Public Health had plans that were twofold: on a practical level, the terrible health conditions necessitated immediate attention; on an ideological level, health policy was to be entirely different from the system that had pre­ ceded it.73 Under the new organization of health worker training, nursing education was not much different in practical content from prerevolutionary 67

 GARF f. R-5532, op. 1, d. 17, l. 5 (“Polozhenie i programmy kratkosrochnykh kursov dlia podgotovki obsluzhivaiushchego bol´nichnogo personala [pri ROKK],” February 1919). 68

 GARF f. R-5532, op. 1, d. 17, ll. 4–5.

69

 Michael David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 25.

70

 A. Kollontai, cited in Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement, 318. According to historian Tat´iana Igumnova, Stites notes, some 50,000 nurses were trained in 1919– 20. Irrespective of the exact figure, it is more important to note that these “nurses” had more than likely only attended first aid courses, and the enumerations of nurses during this period arguably do not distinguish between the many different types (and level of training) of nurses in Russia.

71

 Ibid., 318.

72

 See Irzhi [Jiři] Toman, Rossiia i Krasnyi Krest (1917–1945) (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi komitet Krasnogo Kresta/International Committee of the Red Cross, 2002), 20.

73

 This is the argument discussed in Hutchinson and Solomon, Health and Society, xii. They add that these two goals often came into conflict, as was the case, I argue, with nursing.

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nursing, and educational plans were in fact drawn up with the help of sisters of mercy from the defunct Union of Sisters of Mercy. In October 1918, for ex­ ample, during the eight-month period when both the Union of Sisters of Mercy and Narkomzdrav coexisted, Schaufuss and Semashko worked on drawing up nursing study plans and programs and organizing sister communities into nursing schools.74 To be sure, the religious ethos that had been the foundation of the prerevolutionary communities was omitted. The Commissariat of Public Health planned to create nursing schools with a three-year study program with teaching based on a single, state-approved program where only these schools could award the title of nurse.75 Shorter courses were not to replace or undermine the longer, three-year nursing courses but were to train personnel who would be able to support nurses in the short term. The problem, unforeseen at this time, was that in many cases the assistants and others who had only short-term training became employed in the capacity of fully-fledged nurses. This led to tensions within the profession during the late 1920s and 1930s. In addition to the short courses for red sisters and nursing assistants, efforts were also underway to establish permanent nursing schools. By 1919 and 1920 former nursing communities were liquidated across the country, with “normal schools for nurses” opening in their place. In May 1920, the Commissariat of Public Health published its decree on nursing schools, drawn up by L. Raukhvarger of the Section for Medical Schools and Personnel. The word “mercy” was removed and the communities were to be formally disbanded, with their properties and assets to be appropriated by the new schools.76 There were to be no remaining signs of former “bourgeois” or religious elements. The schools were to recruit “only from the workers and peasants,” and preferably those who had previously worked in medical institutions and been recommended by party organizations, trade unions, etc.77 Decrees did not, however, witness the immediate “disappearance” of sisters of mercy and 74

  GARF f. R-5532, op. 7, d. 30 (18 February 1918–20 January 1919), l. 11 (excerpt from Protocol No 36/10 on the Reorganization of the Russian Red Cross (ROKK) and Narkomzdrav, 17 October 1918).

75

 GARF f. R-5532, op. 1, d. 17 (“Polozhenie i programmy kratkosrochnykh kursov dlia podgotovki obsluzhivaiushchego bol´nichnogo personala [pri ROKK],” February 1919), l. 1; GARF f. R-4094, op. 1, d. 133 (Position on the nursing schools, approved by a VSSM NKZ report on the reorganization of the ROKK, 1918–19), l. 1.

76

 This was published in Izvestiia Narodnogo komissariata zdravookhraneniia, no. 3–4 (1920), as cited in A. V. Flint, “Po povodu dvukh iubileinykh dat,” Sestrinskoe delo, no. 4 (2010): 12. 77

 Ibid.

270 Susan Grant

their communities. While titles of schools or hospitals changed, the personnel in many instances remained the same. Conclusion World War I and the February Revolution presented many ordinary Russians with an opportunity to conceive of themselves and each other in a new way; for the nurses examined here, it represented a chance to assert a greater degree of control over their lives and livelihood. The All-Russian Union of the Sisters of Mercy, formed in 1917 to organize nurses, was inhibited by a number of factors, including ongoing divisions between the union and the nursing communities, a failure to reach wide numbers of nurses, chaotic conditions, and finally by the October Revolution and subsequent establishment of the public health authority, the Commissariat of Public Health. While the Union of Sisters of Mercy continued its efforts to exert some degree of control within the new structures of power, this became increasingly difficult. Nurses were not a unified or homogeneous force before, during, or after the war, and this lack of a sense of unity and common identity—which showed itself so clearly in the aftermath of war and revolution—continued into the Soviet period. At the same time, the strides that had initially been made by the Union of Sisters of Mercy in seeking to organize nurses and help them after demobilization, as well as to reform education, were continued and developed by the Bolsheviks through the work of former sisters of mercy in the Commissariat of Public Health. The October Revolution and Bolshevik power therefore did not immediately spell the end of the sisters of mercy but rather ushered in a period of uneasy coexistence during the turbulent revolutionary and Civil War years.

Communities, Family, and Survival in a Continuum of Crisis

Mobilizing Children: Youth and the Patriotic War Culture in Kiev during World War I Matthias Neumann

The First World War was perhaps the first truly “total war” in European history. Total war meant children and adolescents became an object of war mobilization.1 Naturally, parents tried to shield their children from the immediate effects of war. However, the rapid emergence of “war cultures” in all participating nations meant children were “mobilized” through institutions such as school and church, as well as in their reading and leisure time.2 In Germany, for example, the populist militarism and nationalism of 1914 were institutionalized by war pedagogy: violence and militarism permeated the 1  Manon Pignot, “Les enfants,” in Encyclopédie de la Grande Guerre 1914–1918: Histoire et culture, ed. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Jean-Jacques Becker (Paris: Bayard, 2004), 629. 2

 Catherine Rollet, “The Home and Family Life,” in Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919, ed. Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert, vol. 2 of A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 346; Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, “Kinder und Jugendliche,” in Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg, ed. Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, and Irina Renz (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2009), 139; AudoinRouzeau, La guerre des enfants 1914–1918: Essai d’histoire culturelle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1993); Pignot, “Les enfants,” 7; Eberhard Demm, “Deutschlands Kinder im Ersten Welt­krieg: Zwischen Propaganda und Sozialfürsorge,” Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 60, 1 (2001): 51; and Rosie Kennedy, The Children’s War: Britain, 1914–1918 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). For the concept of “war culture“ and the critique of it, see Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 163–66. I recognize that the civilian experiences of the war differed depending on multiple factors such as region, class, gender, and age. In each of the belligerents there were multiple cultures of war. As Winter and Prost asserted, “a national culture de guerre is both evident and insufficient to account for the ways different civilian groups withstood the pressures of war, understood the nature of the conflict and their contribution to it” (The Great War in History, 165). Despite its obvious shortcomings, the concept thus still provides a good analytical tool to embark on the study of the experience of war amongst specific social and age groups. Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 273–300.

274 Matthias Neumann

curricula and popular literature and were particularly internalized by children and adolescents from middle-class families.3 Indeed, Catherine Rollet has highlighted in a comparative study of the effects of the war on family and home life that in the capitals of Britain, Germany and France, war was accompanied by the creation of a “whole war culture” aimed at children, so that they too could share in the national effort: school syllabus material, book contents, manual and sporting activities, all were altered to bring children into the great national cause.”4 In Russia’s urban centers, things were no different. Immediately following the outbreak of war in July 1914, a ministerial ordinance stated: “All forces must be bent to the defense of the country, and the younger generation must participate in the work.”5 Children very quickly became integrated into the emerging patriotic war culture. Eugenie Fraser, daughter of a merchant born in 1905 in Arkhangel´sk, remembered a “fervent patriotism” at the start of the war and the excitement of personally getting involved in the war effort by posting parcels containing socks, soap, and tobacco to soldiers at the front. She also attended a performance to raise funds for the war at her local theater, in which five girls dressed up in traditional costumes to represent each of the allied countries and Mother Russia.6 Similarly, in the summer of 1915 and one year into the war, floats with flags and girls dressed to symbolize Mother Russia and her allies were paraded through the crowd by young boys in military uniform at the children’s festival in Sokolniki Park in Moscow.7 (See figure 8 in the gallery of illustrations following page 270.) Similar events took place across the empire, suggesting that in Russia, as in other combatants in the Great War, a war culture for children emerged, and this, in turn, inevitably shaped children’s memories and responses to the Great War. This essay examines the complex interplay between state-driven patriotic mobilization and the agency of children as actors in their own right who shaped that very process. It focuses on children in the Kiev educational district, a borderland region of the Russian Empire that was immediately affected by the war, in order to explore how they were integrated into the urban war culture during mobilization and the ways in which they actively participated 3  Andrew Donson, Youth in a Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 223–24.

  Rollet, “The Home and Family Life,” 346.   Quoted in Paul N. Ignatiev, Dimitry M. Odinetz, and Paul J. Novgorotsev, Russian

4 5

Schools and Universities in the World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), 82.

  Eugenie Fraser, The House by the Dvina: A Russian Childhood (London: Corgi, 1984), 195–97. 6

  Zhenskoe delo, no. 16 (1915): 4–7.

7

Mobilizing Children

275

in the war effort. Using primary material from contemporary pedagogical surveys, this essay seeks to reconstruct the children’s experiences and emotional responses to the patriotic war culture in Kiev during the first two years of the First World War. It poses two questions: to what extent was there was an age-specific response to the outbreak of war, and how did children themselves shape the emerging war culture? In examining these issues, this essay will move away from the well-established study of contemporary, published pedagogical discourses, and instead give children’s experiences in their own words and expressions a place in the history of the Russian home front. Children and War In the last two decades children’s experience of war, their involvement in war, and the long-term consequences of growing up in times of violence, dislocation, and the breakdown of traditional authority have received increasing attention from historians.8 Traditionally, the issue of children and war is approached from a perspective of victimhood. Children are seen as noncombatants and nonadults, and hence as innocent victims of war, subjected to the brutalizing forces unleashed by the violence of warfare and a ubiquitous war culture.9 However, recent historical research on World Wars I and II has started to challenge this limited analytical conception, highlighting the complex interplay between state-driven mobilization and the agency of children as actors in their own right.10 Furthermore, we cannot ignore that the totalization of modern warfare in the 20th century has led to an increasing exploitation of children as soldiers. In their role as combatants, the boundaries between children as passive victims, dynamic actors, and even as perpetrators can become very blurred indeed. Olga Kucherenko’s recent study of Soviet child-soldiers in World War II, for example, showed that thousands of children and adolescents below the enlistment age volunteered to fight the German invaders and eventually served in regular and paramilitary formations.11

8

 For example, James Marten, ed., Children and War: A Historical Anthology (New York: New York University Press, 2002). 9

 Pignot, “Les enfants,” 627.

10

 Marten, Children and War; Rollet, “The Home and Family Life”; Audoin-Rouzeau, “Kinder und Jugendliche”; Audoin-Rouzeau, La guerre des enfants; Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005); Olga Kucherenko, Little Soldiers: How Soviet Children Went to War, 1941–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

11

 Kucherenko, Little Soldiers.

276 Matthias Neumann

The historical study of childhood during World War I in Russia still lags behind comparable research on children in Western and Central Europe during these years of turmoil. Whereas childhood and youth in the early Soviet period have gained much attention from Western scholars in recent decades, studies of childhood during the war itself have largely focused on the impact of the war on the Russian educational system, the published discourse on “childhood,” and the ways in which pedagogues and philanthropists sought to address and tackle the problem of waifs and orphans that rapidly ac­celerated as a consequence of war.12 Abandoned children, the so-called besprizornye, were one of the biggest, and certainly most significant, social legacies of the Great War, as Allen Ball’s seminal study has shown.13 It is thus a real shortcoming that existing scholarship has not yet helped us gain a better understanding of the actual children’s experience of war which turned so many of them into waifs and orphans. The immediate effects of mobilization on the Russian educational system and teaching profession were examined soon after the war by two progressive Russian educators, Dimitry M. Odinetz and Paul J. Novgorotsev, who together with Paul Ignatiev, a former minister of education, published their detailed study in 1929.14 However, research into the effects of war on children’s minds and development had in fact already begun in 1914. As Aaron J. Cohen highlighted in his analysis of discourse on child psychology in the Russian educational press, right from the onset of the Great War, Russia’s progressive educators and child development specialists were deeply concerned about its effects on children’s cognitive, behavioral, and moral development.15 Seeing children as the future builders of a more liberal and democratic postwar state, they feared the effects of brutalization and chauvinism on children who were exposed to real violence and to the ubiquitous visual violence disseminated

12

 Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing up in Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001); Anne E. Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Bloomington: Indiana Uni­ versity Press, 2000); Matthias Neumann, The Communist Youth League and the Trans­ formation of the Soviet Union, 1917–1932 (London: Routledge, 2011).

13

 Alan M. Ball, And Now My Soul Has Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

14

 Ignatiev, Odinetz, and Novgorotsev, Russian Schools.

15

 Aaron J. Cohen, “Mass Media, Child Psychology, and the Struggle for Russia’s Future during the First World War,” in Children and War: A Historical Anthology, ed. James Marten (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 38–49.

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by the mass media.16 T. Lubenets, the author of a study on children’s impressions of war that was published in February 1915 over two issues of the pedagogical weekly Shkola i zhizn’ (School and Life), expressed similar concerns: The present war, with all its terrible features, is preoccupying people’s thoughts and feelings. It has also penetrated our elementary schools, and has completely gripped the lively and impressionable minds of children. The lessons of human history show us that war degrades people and stimulates bestial feelings in man. The present generation of children, finding itself surrounded by profound experiences, will feel itself under the power of the events it is living through for the rest of its life. There is no doubt that the great world war will show us new paths to life, and right now we must prepare ourselves for new, more viable educational principles.17 Pedagogues and educators in all belligerents were naturally interested in the effects of the war on children. That said, educators in Western Europe and Russia did not share the same perspective on the war, and this significantly shaped contemporary pedagogical experiments and studies in these countries. Audoin-Rouzeau has shown that, for most part, French pedagogues were actively involved in the mobilization of children. They concerned themselves more with developing effective propaganda for the classroom rather than shielding children from the negative effects of the war. In Germany, as in France, teachers willingly became agents of the state who helped mobilize children as a force for the war effort.18 Andrew Donson’s work has revealed that the emerging “war pedagogy” allowed a surprising marriage of child-centered methods from the educational reform movement with the promotion of militarism, patriotism, and nationalism in Germany. Teachers 16

 Ibid., 45–46.

17

 T. Lubenets, “Voina i shkol´niki: Po ankete ‘detskie vpechatleniia o voine,’” Shkola i zhizn´: Gazeta obshchestvenno-pedagogicheskaia, no. 7 (1915): 2–7; Lubenets, “Voina i shkol´niki: Po ankete ‘detskie vpechatleniia o voine,’” Shkola i zhizn´: Gazeta obshchestvenno-pedagogicheskaia, no. 8 (1915): 3–6. Quotation from “Voina i shkol´niki,” no. 7: 2. 18

 For a short discussion of the responses of the educational establishments in Ger­ many and France, see Cohen, “Mass Media,” 45. See also Audoin-Rouzeau, “Kinder und Jugendliche,” 139; Audoin-Rouzeau, La guerre des enfants, 91, 105, 157; and Donson, Youth in a Fatherless Land, 8, 19, 88, 90. Donson argues, however, that the German “war pedagogy” was more jingoist than the one in France, where patriotic teachers were seeing the war as a just fight against German militarism that would ultimately spread republican values.

278 Matthias Neumann

recognized the positive influence of the war, seeing it as an event that “encouraged schoolchildren’s devotion to Germany.”19 In both countries, France and Germany, feelings of hatred of the enemy were often encouraged by the educational establishment as part of the wartime mobilization of children. With very few exceptions, experiments with free compositions of German children were therefore undertaken to support the national mobilization and show how the new curricula assisted the war effort.20 As the war dragged on and concerns over juvenile delinquency as a by-product of the war erupted in all belligerent countries, the beneficial educational effects of the war on children began to be questioned by more and more adults. However, in Germany it was not before January 1916, that a teacher openly criticized war pedagogy as a whole.21 In contrast to much of the educational establishments in Germany and France, from the onset of the war Russian educators and pedagogues were seriously concerned about the harmful effects of the emerging war culture on children. The reason for this undoubtedly lies in the fact that the tsarist regime had failed to make teachers agents of the state, who would subscribe to its visions and communicate its ideas of economic development, order, and national patriotism.22 The concept of “free education,” informed by Western pedagogical theorists such as Maria Montessori and Friedrich Froebel, as well as by the educational ideas of Konstantin Ushinskii and Lev Tolstoi, had made strong inroads amongst Russia’s educational professionals. It had led to fierce criticism of the coercive nature and intellectual narrowness of traditional education in the late imperial period.23 Education in general, primary education in particular, “was a battleground upon which state and society contested the difficult issues of Russia’s development.”24 As a result of teachers’ progressive 19

 Donson, Youth in a Fatherless Land, 193.

20

 Ibid., 78.

21

 Ibid., 90. In the Habsburg empire, to give another example, the initial enthusiasm for war education turned into a public scare about juvenile delinquency in early 1916. Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 214–15.

22

 Scott J. Seregny, “Teachers, Politics and the Peasant Community,” in School and Society in Tsarist and Soviet Russia: Selected Papers from the Fourth World Conference for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, 1990, ed. Ben Eklof (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 141–43; Scott J. Seregny, Russian Teachers and Peasant Revolution: The Politics of Education in 1905 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 207.

23 24

 Kelly, Children’s World, 32–34.

 Seregny, Russian Teachers and Peasant Revolution, 206. On the growth of the child study movement in the context of the expansion of the professional middle-class intel­

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ideas and their sense of autonomy, educators and pedagogues in the Russian empire undertook numerous scientific studies into the effect of war on children’s behavior and development during the years of conflict. They sent out questionnaires to teachers and pupils, and asked children to write essays and to make drawings.25 In 1915, for example, the Society of Teachers of Graphic Arts organized an exhibition entitled “The War in Children’s Drawings” in Moscow, displaying thousands of drawings and watercolors by pupils from rural and urban areas. The Moscow correspondent for the journal Shkola i zhizn´ reported that the majority of drawings were clear products of children’s fantasy, depicting scenes of horror and blood, battles on land, at sea and in the air, but also, and quite often, scenes that expressed compassion and mercy for the wounded and even the enemy. Concluding with relief that Russian children were maintaining a clear sense of humanity and justice, the correspondent asserted that this young generation was eminently worthy of the blood and tears that the great Russian people was shedding for its future.26 Such exhibitions were no rarity. Teachers and pedagogues attached to the Kiev Froebel Society, for example, put together a collection entitled “Children and War” in which they provided a short history of the outbreak of the Great War through drawings and letters written by children to soldiers at the front.27 Contemporary educators considered analysis of such materials as a promising way to study the effects of war on children’s minds.28 Naturally, many of these studies had shortcomings in design and technique because modern sociology and child psychology were still evolving as scientific disciplines.29 Indeed, unsurprisingly, pedagogues and psychologists, then and today, continue to debate how much we can learn from material such as children’s drawings. Cognitive psychologists, for example, “believe that symbolic representation and other information are organized into cognitive schemata, hierarchical patterns that structure individual reactions

ligentsia in the late imperial period, see Andy Byford, “Parent Diaries and the Child Study Movement in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia,” Russian Review 72, 2 (2013): 212–41. 25

 Cohen, “Mass Media,” 43; Biuro Otdela Srednei Shkoly, “Voina i petrogradskaia sredniaia shkola: Anketa,” Shkola i zhizn´, no. 15 (1915): 6–7. 26

 Al. Ivashchenko, “Voina i deti,” Shkola i zhizn´, no. 6 (1915): 10–11.

27

 Peter Gatrell, Russia’s First World War: A Social and Economic History (London: Pearson, 2005), 256; see also Kelly, Children’s World, 52.

28 29

 Cohen, “Mass Media,” 40–41.

 Ibid., 39.

280 Matthias Neumann

to the outside world,” as Cohen has pointed out.30 In other words, many psychologists argue today that “children learn violence through observation.”31 Helpful as these psychological theories are, as historians we must be cautious to speculate about the long-term effects of the exposure to wartime violence— visual and direct. That said, contemporary pedagogical surveys are still incredibly valuable sources. Undertaken at the time, these studies as well as the discourse on child development during the war reveal much about Russia’s educational professionals and their visions for the future of Russia.32 In many respects, these were expressions of their corporate identity as a “third force” and hence of their political autonomy.33 Furthermore, and more importantly for historians of childhood, the material they collected provides some fascinating raw evidence recorded contemporaneously by children themselves. In contrast to autobiographies and interviews written and recorded long after the events described, this material is not subject to the never-ending process of memory creation and re-creation. It can therefore provide us with a rare and unique glimpse into the feelings, thoughts, fears, and hopes of children, bringing out their unmediated voice in the history of the Great War. The latter is an important task in itself because the voice of children is usually drowned out in a contemporary discourse dominated by adult professionals, who often project their assumptions and concerns onto those children. Kiev’s Children: War in the Ukrainian Borderlands The experience of war cannot be generalized. It is not uniform, neither for adults nor for children. It is determined and shaped by various factors including variables such as location, race, gender, age, class, and whether a close family member, such as a father or a brother, was sent to war. In an empire as large as Russia, children’s experience of war was, of course, significantly shaped by their proximity to the theater of war. As Odinetz pointed out regarding the impact of war on secondary schools, this greatly differed depending on whether the school was in the actual theater of war, either in a region that lay close to the front line or a region completely removed from the combat

30

 Ibid., 41.

31

 Ibid.

32

 Ibid.

33  This was further highlighted by the teachers’ reaction to the revolutions in 1917. See Vera Kaplan, “A Dress Rehearsal for Cultural Revolution: Bolshevik Policy towards Teachers and Education between February and October, 1917,” History of Education 35, 4–5 (2006): 427–52.

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zone.34 Naturally, the experience of the Great War would have significantly differed for children growing up in Siberia from those in Riga, Moscow, or Kiev. But even for children living in the same city there was a multiplicity of experiences. Research on Berlin, Paris, and London has shown that some children fully internalized the patriotic and nationalist war culture, but others were unaffected by it; some expressed despair and anguish, and still others were genuinely traumatized, particularly as a response to the loss of a father.35 Accepting the fact of the plurality of experiences, the microhistorical approach appears to be a very promising route to gauge children’s experience of war. The present analysis primarily focuses on the Ukrainian lands and more specifically on the Kiev region. Being part of the empire’s borderlands, this region was immediately affected by the First World War. Some of the schools in the Kiev educational district quickly found themselves in the actual theater of war, meaning that children and adults had to be evacuated. Most other schools in the educational district existed under the immediate threat of evacuation, whereas some schools in eastern parts of the district became refuges for those which had been evacuated.36 The Great War arrived in Kiev very quickly, dominating the lives of its inhabitants. “The whole city was bustling, boys with telegrams were running about everywhere. There was talk everywhere of the coming war, and nobody could believe that war could happen so unexpectedly,”37 a teenager remembered in December 1914. Another boy from Kiev described a similar impression of the outbreak of the war, but he also recalled a sense of confusion and his inability to put all that he was feeling into words, stating he was struggling against “something”: The city of Kiev became an armed camp, with crowds of people wan­ dering its streets. All the troops were put into their field uniforms and sent off to war. I wandered round the station for days looking at the troops. They were all cheerful and happy. Looking at the soldiers, you couldn’t tell that they were going off to war. Seeing them head off, I felt like I was struggling against something. Some of my thoughts were to go off to war myself, but other thoughts gained the upper hand.38 34

 Ignatiev, Odinetz, and Novgorotsev, Russian Schools, 72–74.

35

 Rollet, “The Home and Family Life,” 346–47.

36

 Ignatiev, Odinetz, and Novgorotsev, Russian Schools, 73.

37

 Lubenets, “Voina i shkol´niki,” no. 8: 5. The teenager was from the age group of 15to 16-year-olds in the survey.

38

 Ibid. The teenager was from the age group of 15- to 16-year-olds in the survey.

282 Matthias Neumann

In many respects, Kiev was a microcosm in which the effects of war could not be escaped. Children witnessed the patriotic mobilization and the changing fortunes on Russia’s Western Front first hand. Refugees from the western parts of Ukrainian territory very quickly brought the horrors of war home to Kiev. As Peter Gatrell has shown, by the end of 1915, around 400,000 refugees, the majority of them Ukrainians from Galicia, had passed through the province of Volynia, heading for Kiev, Odessa, and other places further east.39 Indeed, as the Austrians successfully reconquered Galicia in summer 1915 and entered the province of Volynia, the war closed in on Kiev. The commander in chief of the Southwestern Front, General N. I. Ivanov, felt it necessary to order his subordinates to prepare to evacuate the city.40At the same time, German settlers and families of German descent were driven off their land in the re­ gion and eventually deported to Siberia and Asia.41 Kiev’s children could not escape the real horrors of war, seeing wounded soldiers and frightened refugees in their local community in 1914. Concerned by the long-term effects of the war on children’s psyches, within months of the start of the war one pedagogue by the name of T. Lubenets set out to investigate children’s attitudes to the war and to find out how aware they were of wartime events.42 He sent out a written questionnaire to about 1,000 children between the ages of 9 and 16 living in the center and the outskirts of Kiev between 7 and 18 December 1914. Lubenets carefully designed the questionnaire, trying to make sure it would fulfill contemporary scientific standards. The questionnaire was conducted anonymously, and the children did not have any assistance in answering it. He omitted questions that “in one way or another could have awakened in children profound feelings of animosity, mockery, or vainglory on the one hand, or suppressed suffering and painful experiences on the other.”43 Nevertheless, it is not difficult to find some shortcomings in his research design. For one, all cited excerpts appear to be from boys. This, of course, limits the study considerably. Unfortunately, Lubenets neither addressed the question of gender in his survey nor did he make clear whether girls were completely omitted from it. The very fact that the study focuses on boys, how­ ever, may point towards the presumption that educators were particularly 39

 Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia During World War I (Bloom­ ington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 21, 50.

40

 Ibid., 20.

41

 Ibid., 20, 23–24.

42 43

 Lubenets, “Voina i shkol´niki,” no. 7: 2.

 Ibid., 2–3.

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283

concerned about the brutalizing effects the war had on male children, whom many, then and now, believe to have a predisposition to be mesmerized by violence and warfare. The study’s design also excluded a significant number of children and adolescents who did not attend school, working instead in Kiev’s enterprises and factories. According to the periodical Kievskaia mysl´ (Kievan Thought), child labor was widely used even before the war, with 12to 17-year-olds accounting for 11 percent of the city’s workforce in 1913.44 Cru­ cially, Lubenets’s survey did not address the ethnic and national mix of Kiev’s population that was further diversified by newly arrived refugees, young and old, from Poland and the western Ukrainian lands.45 Only on a few occasions in the survey does it become clear that respondents were not necessarily of the same nationality. A 10-year-old boy from a school in which Polish children were taught, for example, replied to the question, “Would you like to go to war?” with the words, “I very much want to go to war and want to defend dear Poland and Russia.”46 Late imperial Kiev was a city “divided by class, religion and nationality”;47 however, it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, for Lubenets to tackle this sensitive issue. Indeed, it must be noted that some answers of the respondents cited fell victim to tsarist censorship. Despite these shortcomings, the material Lubenets collected and presented carefully in Shkola i zhizn´ in February 1915 is truly fascinating. His study allows us to discern certain patterns in the children’s experiences and attitudes across all age groups, and thereby to reconstruct how children in the Kiev region experienced the first few months of the Great War. Lubenets posed the following questions to the children: 1. How old are you? 2. What impression did the declaration of war make on you? 3. Did you see troops on their way to war? 4. What did you think and feel when you saw the soldiers going to war? 5. Have you seen any wounded, when and where? What did you feel about it? 6. What do you think about the war? 7. Do you know why the war happened? 8. Who is fighting with us and who is fighting against us? 9. What do you know about our successes in the war? 10. Who among your family and relations has gone to war? 11. Who do you think will win? 12. Do you play war games? 13. Would you like to go to war? If so, 44

 Michael F. Hamm, Kiev: A Portrait, 1800–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 221.

45

 For an example of a young refugee arriving in Kiev in 1915, see Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System. Schedule A, Vol. 29, Case 638, Female, 50, Polish, 5.

46

 Lubenets, “Voina i shkol´niki,” no. 7: 3.

47

 Hamm, Kiev, 233, 104 (table 4.2).

284 Matthias Neumann

why? 14. What do you think about the Germans, Austrians, and Turks? Have you seen POWs among them, and what did you think of them? 15. Are you afraid of the war? 16. What have you heard about the war? 17. Would you like the war to continue?48 Whereas younger children answered the questions one by one with rather short, straightforward replies, the older children aged 12 and upwards often wrote coherent essays addressing all the questions posed in a single answer. Lubenets grouped the responses by age in his analysis, allowing the reader to ponder on the age-specific reactions and thoughts about the outbreak and development of war in 1914. Euphoria, Patriotism, and Anxiety Scholars of Russian history continue to debate the strength of patriotism and level of war enthusiasm in 1914.49 Recent scholarship has challenged the notion of a unanimous outburst of patriotism across the Russian Empire, showing instead that there was a wide variety of emotional responses to the outbreak of the war and mobilization in Russia. Patriots and protesters, Joshua Sanborn has argued, were not confined to sociologically definable groups. The most common response, which is often ignored, was weeping by men, women, and children across Russia.50 That said, the debate about patriotism and war enthusiasm has by and large ignored children as a social group. This should surprise us, because as already noted, many contemporary Russian pedagogues clearly believed children were more susceptible to the intense displays of patriotism during the mobilization in 1914 on the streets and in the press.51 Indeed, at first sight Lubenets’s survey appears to support the notion that the majority of children and adolescents had immersed themselves in the patriotic war culture by December 1914. The vast majority of respondents were clearly excited by the spirit of war and manifestations of patriotism. In 48

 Lubenets, “Voina i shkol´niki,” no. 7: 2.

49

 For a brief summary of the debate, see Karen Petrone, The Great War in Russian Mem­ ory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 166–67. For different interpretations of the initial response to the outbreak of war, see Hubertus Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Joshua A. Sanborn, “The Mobilization of 1914 and the Question of the Russian Nation,” Slavic Review 50, 2 (2000): 267–89. 50

 Sanborn, “The Mobilization of 1914,” 289; Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press, 2003), 30–31.

51

 Cohen, “Mass Media,” 39.

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285

this context, however, it is important to note that the students completed the questionnaire at a time when the war in the southwestern regions was going exceptionally well for the Russians. The tsarist army had pushed the Austrians back, regaining the province of Galicia in November 1914 and making inroads into some Carpathian passes and northern Bukovina.52 The belligerent spirit of these months when the war was going well was clearly reflected in many children’s romanticized dreams of a heroic fight for Mother Russia and their wish to take revenge as well as to fight side by side with their brothers and fathers. Responses were permeated with patriotic language. The tsar, the fatherland, and “Rus´’’ were all points of reference, highlighting how children had absorbed contemporary discourse on Russian identity. An 11-year-old boy replied in the questionnaire: “I’ll be going off to war soon, once I have finished school.… I want to! I want to! I want to fight for Rus´ and the Tsar. I want all the Germans, Austrians, and Turks to be killed! I’m not afraid of the war because when I am killed I will have laid down my life for Rus´, the Tsar and the Fatherland.”53 Other 12-year-old boys expressed similar attitudes: “I want to go to war and can’t wait for them to let us out of school”; “I want to, and I’m really jealous of those who have been in the war”; “I want to! I want to! I have heard glorious things about people like me and they get medals”; “I want to go so much that if they took me now I’d go along to try my strength. You only die once, if death comes, then it won’t come again. Nobody dies twice, and you can’t avoid it once”; “I want to go because I want to kill at least one German barbarian”; “I’ll be going to war in the spring, and I want to beat the Germans for my brothers”; “I want to go because I want to be a spy. My father has gone to war and I want to be with him and help him, make it easier for him”; “I want to go to war because I want to bayonet a German and get the St. George Cross.” According to Lubenets’s analysis, such heroic and belligerent attitudes were particularly strong amongst the group of 12-year-olds.54 However, older boys also expressed their wish to fight. Some of the 14-year-old respondents emphasized their patriotism, their belief in the qualities of Russian soldiers, and their dreams of glory: “When I saw an enormous number of soldiers going off to war, I really wanted to go with them. I want to experience the discomforts of war and get a St. George Cross for distinguished service”; “I think they must be really lucky [the soldiers] to go to suffer for Rus´ and the fatherland and I would also like to be at least a bit useful. I 52

 Paul Robert Magosci, A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its People (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 495.

53

 Lubenets, “Voina i shkol´niki,” no. 7: 4.

54

 Ibid., 4–5.

286 Matthias Neumann

want to go to war to take revenge on the enemy for causing so many innocent people to die.”55 A firm belief in the values of “Russianness” was expressed by another 14-year-old boy: The Russian soldier knows no fear or sense of danger, he looks at every­ thing calmly and with a smile. I can’t help feeling courageous, strong, manly, and cheerful myself when I am near them. I would like to go off to the real war, where you can hear the groans of the wounded and the roar of the guns, where so much suffering and death fly from one soldier to another. I would also like to do something for the fatherland, even if I had to give my life for it. Many people think this is childish fantasy, but it is reality.56 Indeed, in some cases young boys tried to run off to the front to join the army. However, according to Lubenets, only two boys in the age group of 12- to 15-year-olds, one 12 and one 13, amongst the respondents claimed to have been to the actual theater of war.57 The 12-year-old wrote: I really want to go to war. Once I went with the soldiers to the war, we took two days to get there. At the first stop I slipped out of the carriage and went into the station, where I bought my soldiers some tobacco and went back to them. When we were near L´vov, we had to change trains and get on another train. Since there was a gendarme alongside each carriage, I asked a soldier not to leave me there. Soon we were already past L´vov, where the soldiers called a halt. I started going forward, but I was unlucky: I got lost going forward and couldn’t find my soldiers, then I ran to where there was some shooting. I saw our trenches nearby and crawled towards them, when suddenly there was a bang and a shell exploded nearby. Suddenly someone grabbed me from behind, I turned to look and there was our officer, who sent me back home to mum for being so reckless.58 Of course, it is impossible to know whether this was a true recollection of events or partly a product of boyhood fantasy. Runaway schoolboys were clearly not a mass phenomenon, but nonetheless a phenomenon widespread enough to gain significant interest in the press, which frequently reported 55

 Lubenets, “Voina i shkol´niki,” no. 8: 4.

56

 Ibid.

57

 Ibid.

58

 Ibid., no. 7: 4.

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287

that children, mainly those from secondary schools, had left school and tried to reach the front.59 After more than two years of war the military authori­ ties of the belligerent powers adopted a more proactive stance on this issue of removing child soldiers from the front. As a consequence, the children’s section of the Tat´iana Committee in Kiev expected the arrival of hundreds of children to the locality for whom some form of care had to be provided.60 The impulsive patriotic and belligerent attitudes expressed in the chil­ dren’s answers written in December 1914, were balanced against much more thoughtful and reflective memories of the outbreak of war. With regards to the latter, the same children articulated their simultaneous feelings of anxi­ ety, unease, and fear. Amongst the 10-year-old boys, Lubenets found that the following answers were most typical: “I was very frightened when I found out that Russia had declared war”; “I felt sad and dejected in my soul after war was declared”; “I felt really bad because I felt sorry for the soldiers be­ cause they were going to war and leaving their families”; “I think that poor soldiers are standing there in snow-filled trenches while bullets are whistling above them.”61 An 11-year-old boy wrote, “When war was declared I always went around with the soldiers and was sad to see them say goodbye to their parents”; a 12-year-old boy expressed his feelings of fear frankly, “I was very frightened and worried that the Germans would come here and kill us.”62 However, other 12-year-old boys stated that they had been in an exhilarated mood: “When war was declared on 20 July [2 August N.S.], my soul was filled with happiness at freeing ourselves from Russia’s old enemy, Germany and Austria”; “When they declared war on us, I was happy, because I wanted us to conquer Germany, although that isn’t very nice for the soldiers.”63 Similarly, a 10-year-old boy stated, “I cried with happiness, I was happy because I thought these soldiers would beat and win against the Germans.”64 These contradictory answers clearly show that children did not respond in a uniform manner to the news of the outbreak of war. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a sense of confusion and a difficulty to fully grasp the complexities of war characterized many answers. This is particularly clear in the response of a

59

 Ignatiev, Odinetz, and Novgorotsev, Russian Schools, 78–79.

60

 “Shkola i voina,” Shkola i zhizn´, no. 48 (1916): 5. “Shkola i voina” was a regular sec­ tion in the journal. 61

 Lubenets, “Voina i shkol´niki,” no. 7: 3.

62

 Ibid., 3–4.

63

 Ibid., 4.

64

 Ibid., 3.

288 Matthias Neumann

13-year-old boy, 12 at the time when the war broke out. He wrote in December 1914: I always wanted there to be a war in my lifetime, but it is not the joy I had expected but a misery worse than any misery, and it was very frightening when they declared war. I saw soldiers going off to the war, some of the soldiers were happy and were saying that they were going off to defend the Tsar and their country, but others were very miserable and were thinking about their families. I felt sad when I saw them and it seemed terrible that here they are alive, but tomorrow they may be killed, but at the same time I was happy that they were going to defend with their own bodies our fatherland and homes, etc.65 When taken as a whole, most of the children’s responses to the questionnaire betray some mixed feelings and contradictions. In many responses children also asserted that their impulsive feelings of patriotism were hampered by the realization that family members, such as fathers, brothers, and uncles, could be sent to war. A 12-year-old boy, for instance, wrote, “When I found out that war had been declared, I was happy at first, but then I cried, because my father was taken for the war.”66 The personal dimension of war certainly played a large role in the emotional response of children. Anxiety, fear for family members, and patriotic spirit were not mutually exclusive. Sanborn has rightly pointed out that one should not make the mistake of equating rallies in support for Russian soldiers at their departure to the front with rallies in support of the war.67 As far as children are concerned, however, the answers in Lubenets’s survey suggest that many did not perhaps possess the mental capacity to make this distinction. Due to their young age, children, it seems, consumed, embraced, and “parroted” the populist patriotic culture more un­ critically than their parents. The dominant patriotic discourses appear to have enabled many children to adopt belligerent and patriotic attitudes despite fears over the war. An 11-year-old boy, for example, wrote: “It [the war] had a very great impression on me, I did not think it would be so dreadful a thing, and I cried a lot because of the war.” Later in the questionnaire, how­ever, he stated that he wants “the war to carry on until we have smashed the Germans.”68 Similarly, one of his peers stated: “When war was declared I felt sorry for the poor soldiers. I was so frightened that I did not know what to do and was just 65

 Ibid., no. 8: 3.

66

 Ibid., no. 7: 4.

67

 Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, 30.

68

 Lubenets, “Voina i shkol´niki,” no. 7: 4.

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praying to God that the war would not start,” only to assert later “I want to go to war and shall be very pleased to do so.”69 Children, it seems, embraced the patriotic culture but also mixed it together with their fears and concerns, often holding conflicting views simultaneously. School and Mobilization—Participating in the War War changed the environment children were growing up in immediately. When they returned to school at the start of the new school year at the end of August, the war had taken over their lives and thoughts. School provided a structured environment where children could discuss the war amongst themselves and with their teachers, where their ideas and perceptions were significantly forged, and where children could take part in activities related to the war effort. Teachers were bombarded with questions concerning the war, not least the question of whether they themselves should fight or not.70 Schoolteachers also noted an increased interest in geography and history. As one village schoolteacher put it: “maps have now acquired a new and fascinating interest.”71 Children not only learned about the war through letters from their fathers and older brothers at the front, but they also began eagerly consuming the press for stories and reports on the war. Indeed, Lubenets’s questionnaire shows clearly that the majority of children between the ages of 10 and 16 had a fairly good understanding of why the war broke out and who was fighting whom. One 13-year-old respondent specifically remembered his raised interest since the day war broke out: “I immediately started reading the paper and found lots of articles on the war. From that day on I started reading papers.”72 Russia was still learning to read in the late imperial period and World War I led to an increase in group reading. Indeed, literate children were often asked by illiterate adults to read them letters as well as the newspapers.73 A 14-yearold respondent of Lubenets’s study, for example, wrote that he went to the hospital to visit the wounded soldiers, bringing them tobacco but also read-

69

 Ibid.

70

 Ignatiev, Odinetz, and Novgorotsev, Russian Schools, 58.

71

 Ibid., 61; see also Tunina, “Deti i deistvitel´nost´,” Zhenskoe delo, no. 22 (1914): 8.

72

 Lubenets, “Voina i shkol´niki,” no. 8: 3, 5.

73  Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 29–30. For an example, see Nikolai Lunev, “Blind Faith in a Bright Future,” in Soviet Youth: Twelve Komsomol Histories, ed. Nikolai K. Novak-Deker (Munich: Institute for the Study of the USSR, 1959), 25.

290 Matthias Neumann

ing the papers to them.74 M. M. Rubinshtein, a leading Russian psychologist, observed that “[c]hildren, almost never interested in the newspaper, now invariably display interest in it.”75 Naturally, children were particularly drawn to illustrations and movies. According to a survey by the pedagogue Vasilii V. Zen´kovskii on children and war published by the Froebel Society in Kiev in 1915, 81 percent of children over the age of ten had seen the war in pictures.76 Children’s interest in the war was perhaps at times exaggerated by the patriotic press, but contemporary academic surveys also show that it was real.77 Moreover, beyond a mere interest in wartime events as described in the press, the war became a crucial point of reference in the lives of children and adolescents, shaping their thinking about the world and their future. A study undertaken by V. Voronov in December 1914, for example, showed that 69.4 percent of pupils at an urban school answered the question of what they would like to be when they had grown up with an occupation directly or indirectly linked to war, i.e., soldier, pilot, or doctor. Voronov saw this as a clear imprint of the war on the minds of children.78 War mobilization also began to adversely affect the operation of schools. Conscription and voluntary enlistment began to deplete the ranks of elementary schoolteachers and trainee teachers, seriously hampering the drive of progressive pedagogues to establish universal elementary education.79 In the Ukrainian city of Akkerman (modern-day Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi), for instance, 30 students at the local teacher seminary voluntarily enlisted. Furthermore, it was reported that pupils of the eighth form of the local gymnasium had also gone to war.80 In contrast to permanent staff at secondary schools, elementary school teachers were not exempted from military service, and their duty to serve was reasserted by the military authorities in autumn 1914.81 This had a severe impact. According to data gathered by some of the district zemstvos (institutions of local self-government), in the Russian Empire, as much as 50 percent of the total number of primary teachers, standing at 56,000 at the 74

 Lubenets, “Voina i shkol´niki,” no. 8: 4.

75

 Quoted in Cohen, “Mass Media,” 40; see also A. Tunina, “Deti i deistvitel´nost´,” 9.

76

 Cohen, “Mass Media,” 40.

77

 Ibid., 39–40.

78

 Ibid., 39. The sample was 107 out of 154. The study was published in Vestnik vospi­ taniia, no. 26 (November 1915), Section I, 146.

79

 For examples, see “Shkola i voina,” Shkola i zhizn´, no. 31 (1914): 7; no. 47 (1914): 6.

80 81

 “Shkola i voina,” Shkola i zhizn´, no. 47 (1914): 6.

 “Shkola i voina,” Shkola i zhizn´, no. 44 (1914): 6.

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beginning of school year 1914–15, were subject to wartime mobilization.82 As a direct result of this development, many one-class village schools were closing completely, and larger urban schools had to operate with fewer human resources. An increasing number of children therefore found it difficult to gain access to education. One statistic for the provinces of Kiev, Chernigov, and Perm´ showed that the percentage of children who wanted to enter school but could not be admitted ranged from 40.9 percent to a staggering 79 percent. Only by the end of the school year 1914–15 did the government begin to see the mobilization of primary school teachers as a problem.83 Furthermore, schools became directly affected by the war in summer 1915 when many school buildings in the empire were temporarily or permanently taken over by the military and used to treat wounded soldiers or to store war materials.84 With schools closing or operating with fewer human resources, and with fathers and teachers going off to the front, many children therefore experienced a distinct reduction of adult authority in their environment. Established hierarchies were clearly undermined as a direct result of the war in all belligerent countries. Like their counterparts in Western Europe, children and adolescents consequently gained more individual freedom. This and the growing number of neglected children roaming the streets led to a widespread perception of an epidemic of juvenile delinquency and crime. Demands for the construction of more corrective institutions for young offenders were voiced. In 1915 the women’s journal Zhenskoe delo (Women’s Affairs) expressed this fear: “We are raising a whole generation of criminals.”85 Children and adolescents were not only indirectly affected by the war­ time mobilization. Indeed, schools very quickly became actively integrated into the national war effort. Children wrote letters to soldiers and organized fundraisers, concerts, and street collections to support the victims of war. They also sent aid parcels directly to the front. In November 1914, for instance, pupils from a boys’ and girls’ gymnasium in Kiev planned to send 82

 Ignatiev, Odinetz, and Novgorotsev, Russian Schools, 63.

83

 Ibid., 63–64.

84

 Ibid., 92.

85

 Alfred G. Meyer, “The Impact of World War I on Russian Women‘s Lives,” in Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, ed. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 216; Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 78; Kelly, Children’s World, 161. Complaints about the increase of juvenile crime as a by-product of the war were also voiced in Western European countries, for example in Great Britain: “Increase in Juvenile Crime,” editorial in The Times, 6 October 1916, 7.

292 Matthias Neumann

relief parcels filled with warm waistcoats, small bags of tobacco, cigarettes, sugar, tea, salt, and socks, to soldiers in the field.86 A girl from a gymnasium of unknown location asked her mother proudly in a letter: “Do you know how many sets of underclothing we made last week? 538!… We have made bed linen for one hundred hospital beds.”87 Even the youngest children were encouraged to participate in the war effort. Children of the Froebel kindergartens in Kiev sent letters to soldiers on the front expressing admiration for their bravery.88 It is evident that in these early months of the war such activities created great excitement amongst children in the Russian Empire. It appears to have provided them with a sense of purpose within the wider war effort. In some respects it also empowered them, allowing them to show initiative and agency. From summer 1915 onwards, schoolboys in the Kiev region and elsewhere in Russia were also mobilized in so-called farm-labor squads and pupils’ collectives (arteli) to help in agricultural work.89 These squads and organizations were treated with skepticism by a large part of the press and the public because many thought more fundamental measures would have to be taken to help the war effort.90 Eventually, the totalization of war also meant that premilitary training entered curricula and extracurricular, organized activities, particularly for those pupils who were in their final years of secondary education. In December 1915 an imperial decree was issued on the “mobilization of sport,” seeking to employ it for preconscription training.91 In the end this meant that despite the fact that the educational establishment was not an agent of the tsarist state, schools in the empire became outlets for mobilization and self-mobilization. One of the most common ways for pupils to get actively involved in the war effort was to help care for the wounded. In some secondary schools and institutions of higher education in close proximity to the front, actual medical squads were created under the supervision of the school doctor, which assisted in the tending of wounded soldiers.92 A schoolgirl from an unspecified secondary school in Russia wrote to her mother: “[W]e, that is the three senior 86  “Shkola i voina,” Shkola i zhizn´, no. 45 (1914): 6; Ignatiev, Odinetz, and Novgorotsev, Russian Schools, 57, 80–81. 87

 Ignatiev, Odinetz, and Novgorotsev, Russian Schools, 77.

88

 Kelly, Children’s World, 52.

89

 “Shkola i voina,” Shkola i zhizn´, no. 28 (1915): 7; no. 8 (1916): 5; no. 13 (1916): 8.

90 91

 Ignatiev, Odinetz, and Novgorotsev, Russian Schools, 81–82.

 Pedagogicheskii vestnik, no. 2 (1916): 65–71.

92

 Ibid., 81. See also “Shkola i voina,” Shkola i zhizn´, no. 45 (1914): 5.

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classes, are working for the Red Cross. I made three shirts last week.”93 In an imperial society with strict gender roles, tending wounded soldiers was one of the prime activities for which girls were trained and mobilized. Russian patriotic postcards, of which there was a real boom during the war, showed young girls usually in idealized, sentimental wartime situations. Many of them, such as the postcards shown in figure 9, stressed the heroic service of women as nurses or as busy helpers sewing shirts for soldiers and sending aid parcels to the front.94 Boys, on the other hand, were not only often depicted playing war at home, but also as soldiers in combat situations and in encounters with the enemy. These postcards promoted military ideals to children, sanitized and romanticized the war, and encouraged activities which prepared children for military service and allowed them to take part in the war effort. Hospitals and train stations became the typical places where children and adolescents came into direct contact with the horrors of war. Children went to these places out of curiosity but also to make small gifts to the soldiers. A 10-year-old boy from Lubenets’s study wrote: “When I saw the wounded I felt very sorry for them and one showed me where his leg had been cut off”; another stated: “I saw wounded people when they were going to hospital and I was sorry to see their bandaged faces and hands, and I gave them apples and bagels and other things to eat.” The answer of an 11-year-old boy who had seen wounded soldiers at the hospital clearly highlights the emotional effects this direct contact with the horrific consequences of war could have on these children: “I saw wounded soldiers and helped them when I carried things, but I was sorry for them and I always cried when I left.”95 A 14-year-old boy remembered his first encounter with the wounded and how this had led him to think about the suffering caused by the war: I saw the first wounded in Kirilovskaia hospital. One evening I was standing out in the street, which was lively at that time. On the way home I saw an ambulance carriage, and ran after it. Carriages were going into the hospital. A large crowd was there waiting for the wounded to leave the carriage, to see whether they recognized the faces of their much-loved breadwinners among them. The wounded started to get out of the carriages; lightly wounded soldiers left under their own steam, and the badly wounded were carried out on stretchers. Different feelings were going through my head, and in my thoughts I went 93

 Ignatiev, Odinetz, and Novgorotsev, Russian Schools, 77.

94

 On patriotic postcards, see Jahn, Patriotic Culture, 39–62.

95

 Lubenets, “Voina i shkol´niki,” no. 7: 3.

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to where that bloody war was taking place. I left that place with sad thoughts and went home. This is the biggest war. There has never been a war like it in history, it is a grandiose war, with lots of states involved in it.96 Older children described how seeing seriously wounded soldiers provoked emotional reactions, feelings of sadness, admiration, pride but also resentment and hatred towards the enemy. Three boys from the 15- to 16-year-old age group recollected their emotional encounter with the wounded: “When I saw one soldier without his legs, I burst into tears immediately. I couldn’t look and walked away. After that I wasn’t so worried by it,” remembered one boy. Another asserted how his shock turned to anger against the enemy: “I have seen many wounded in the hospital and when I saw them tears came to my eyes, and I felt a burning desire to take revenge on the Germans”; in contrast, a third boy expressed feelings of admiration for the wounded: “I saw some wounded, mainly officers. They had been seriously wounded by the Germans’ barbaric bullets. A crowd of people were greeting the wounded warmly, and they were responding. I saw wounded in the military hospital. Despite their grave wounds, they were feeling very cheerful and I envied them for that.”97 The latter reply is also interesting because of its depiction of the enemy as “barbaric.” This kind of language was by no means an exception in the characterization of the enemy. The increasingly debased presentation of war events and the demonization of the enemy in the “popular patriotic” press were clearly leaving their mark. Imagining the Enemy—Playing War Lubenets’s questionnaire showed very clearly that violent imagery and war­ time propaganda left an imprint on the boys’ perception of the enemy as well as on their leisure activities, i.e., games. With regards to the boys’ perceptions, in all age groups of Lubenets’s survey one is able to find expressions of spite, hatred, and mockery directed towards the enemy. Amongst the age group of 12-year-olds, Lubenets found the following remarks: “The Germans are bloodsuckers and murderers. The Austrians too, like Germans they kill women and children. They go against the government and in war they use dum-dum bullets which rip people to pieces and you’re not allowed to use. The Turks cut people’s tongues out. All those three states are very bad”; “The German ruler, like a bloodthirsty beast, thought he’d smash my motherland. 96 97

 Ibid., no. 8: 4.

 Ibid., 5–6.

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The Germans are also poor people under the rule of their idiot, and Austria has also been deceived by Germany and Turkey has too”; “I hate the Germans because they don’t like us and lord it over us with all sorts of executions and killings of peaceful inhabitants”; “I think Germans are cruel people, I think Austrians are cowardly and so are the Turks, but the Kurds are especially brave and cruel.”98 Notably, several youngsters who took part in the survey expressed “positive” attitudes towards the Turks. A 12-year-old boy, for example, wrote, “Germans are not people, they are wild beasts; they are tormenting our people living in Poland. The Austrians are also tormenting people. The Turks aren’t such beasts as the Germans, they’re fighting for the Germans”; and a 13-yearold boy stated: I think the Germans are clever, cunning, but also evil and barbaric. The Austrians are stupid, weak, and not a serious nation, but the Turks are a powerful people but are making a mistake in letting others do the thinking for them. I am not particularly afraid of the war. I have heard that the Russians are fighting with supernatural power, and the Germans are distinguished by their barbarity.99 Once again, however, it would be wrong to generalize these attitudes. Even Lubenets’s study highlighted that such perceptions were not universal. Indeed, it seems that these feelings of hatred, grounded in the abstract imagery of patriotic war culture and the atrocity propaganda, were often challenged once children came into direct contact with prisoners. Amongst the 11-yearold boys some stated: “I have seen prisoners and didn’t feel hostile towards them, I felt sorry for them”; “I saw some prisoners, they were very glum, I felt sorry for them”; “I gave them rolls and cigarettes”; “I saw prisoners, but didn’t feel any hatred for them. I even felt sorry for them.”100 It is also worth remembering that in his review of the “The War in Children’s Drawings” exhibition mentioned earlier, the Moscow correspondent of Shkola i zhizn´ specifically emphasized that many drawings were alien to chauvinism, showing compassion for the enemy. He mentions, as an example, a drawing entitled “The sister of mercy gives alms to a captive German soldier.”101 Thus, boys’ views of war in general were, even if first shaped by patriotic discourses and propaganda, often directly altered by (or came to coexist with) 98

 Ibid., no. 7: 5. Emphasis in original.

99

 Ibid., 4; no. 8: 3.

100

 Ibid., no. 7: 4.

101

 Al. Ivashchenko, “Voina i deti,” Shkola i zhizn´, no. 6 (1915): 10.

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first-hand experiences which challenged those suppositions. In this sense, children’s experience of war was probably often distinct from that of adults, who are much better at reconfiguring evidence to fit the schemas they have already subscribed to. Children, especially those who had not entered adolescence yet, did not necessarily feel the need to wrestle with this cognitive dissonance, and as the Lubenets survey shows could hold two or more conflicting views simultaneously. That said, overall the evidence clearly suggests that many children, partic­ ularly the younger boys, quickly internalized the patriotic war culture. This was most plainly visible in the effects the war had on children’s games. This was also captured and romanticized in postcards such as the one shown in figure 10. One mother wrote in response to an inquiry published in November 1914 in several education periodicals: “My boys are in a state of perpetual war.… Their games are full of hatred and violence”; another wrote: “The games of my boys have undergone a complete change. Travels, boats, and buildings have now given way to war, the siege of fortresses, the mining of bridges, of fortifications and ramparts”; yet another one stated that her 11-year-old boy, a gymnasium pupil, “builds prisons for Germans and erects gallows on which to hang them.”102 The growth in retailing and consumerism in the late imperial period meant that manufactured toys were readily available on the urban market stalls. Along with dolls, toy trains, and teddy bears, war toys such as miniature soldiers, battleships, guns, and uniforms, were also very popular. Such war toys found their way into the hands of many children from better-off households.103 Postcards from the war period often showcased those miniature war toys. As always, boys from a poorer background, who could not afford those items, had to resort to making their own toy weapons to play mock-battles. The vast majority of Lubenets’s boys, too, admitted that war was permeating their games. An 11-year-old boy wrote, “I have played war with some boys, we made rifles and sabres and began to play war and I got bashed on the head and now my mother never lets me play war.” Similarly, a 13-yearold respondent explained, “I have played war, even with real fighting. When we play war, we have sabres and rifles, things carved like rifles. We divide 102

 Ignatiev, Odinetz, and Novgorotsev, Russian Schools, 59, 75, 76.

103

 Kelly, Children’s World, 441–42. On the growth of commerce, retail, and consumerism in the late imperial period, see Marjorie L. Hilton, Selling to the Masses: Retailing in Russia, 1880–1930 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2012); and Steve Smith and Catriona Kelly, “Commercial Culture and Consumerism,” in Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881–1940, ed. Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 106–64.

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them up and then take some fortress or other by storm.”104 A boy aged 14 also declared that he had often played war, “At home we get a few of us together and play war. Often a tightly-packed snowball hits you on the forehead so hard that you are knocked over into the snow.”105 Bruises and bloody noses were not uncommon as a result of these war games; one teacher noted in 1916 that these were often intentionally inflicted upon weaker children who were thereby “providing “wounded” for the children in their games.”106 War games also raised concerns about the abuse of cats and dogs, as they often had to serve as “Germans” in the games, a role that few children were happy to take.107 A photograph entitled “Today’s children’s games: Execution of a German spy,” published as part of an article on “children and war” in the popular illustrated magazine Niva (The Grainfield) in late 1915, vividly demonstrated to the reader how children were mimicking events they had heard about or seen in the media. In the picture (figure 11) a group of very young children proudly stages the execution of a German spy.108 The author of the article, K. Chukov, complained: Oh, those children’s war games! I suffered the whole summer with them. As soon as you started to get down to studying, there would be yelling, wailing and shouting! From three in the afternoon to eight in the evening all the children in the area would become a crowd of lunatics. With deranged, drunken eyes, oblivious to everything, the children would roam the streets in a trance, armed with all sorts of sticks, from which they would shoot incessantly—bang, bang bang! And you should have seen the tall girl with the penetrating voice, who leaped about in a state of warlike ecstasy at the head of that mob as their commander! With hair dishevelled like one of the Furies, this eight-year-old Joan of Arc would fly at the enemy, quite beside herself, with piercing nervous cries. If her own mother or sister had got in her way at that time, she looked like she would not have spared them.109

104

 Lubenets, “Voina i shkol´niki,” no. 7: 3; no. 8: 3.

105

 Ibid., no. 8: 4.

106

 Cohen, “Mass Media,” 44.

107

 Ibid.

108

 K. Chukov, “Deti i voina,” Niva: Illiustrirovannyi zhurnal literatury, politiki i sovre­ mennoi zhizni, no. 51 (1915): 965. 109

 Ibid., 964.

298 Matthias Neumann

Chukov’s example shows that war games were not solely a boys’ domain. Gender lines could be and were crossed, but boys were clearly at the center of concerns held by parents, teachers, and pedagogues. Children, of course, played war games before 1914. Indeed, small boys were often encouraged to play with war toys in the late imperial period.110 However, Chukov noted a significant change: in his article he asserted that since the start of the war playing soldiers had become to modern boys as necessary as drinking. If a boy did not take a great interest in war games, he would be stigmatized as abnormal in these times.111 In this respect, peer pressure and group dynamics within the younger age cohorts certainly also played their part in the emergence of a war culture among children. For many contemporary educators and psychologists these games were a clear external manifestation of the dreaded brutalizing effects of the war and were connected to the perceived rise in juvenile delinquency. Lubenets’s survey on Kiev’s children during the first year of the Great War, as well as data from other studies by pedagogues and child psychologists, clearly show how the war immediately affected the lives of those children living in proximity to the front lines. Evidently, many children were fascinated by the war and the graphic way it was represented in the press. As Cohen has rightly argued, the war propaganda disseminated by the media shaped their perception of war and violence.112 The belligerent mood as well as the hatred, spite, and mockery expressed towards the enemy by the children in Lubenets’s survey, conducted in December 1914, were a clear reflection of the imprint the mobilization and the media’s discourse left on their minds. Long after the war, Lev Kopelev, for instance, remembered how as a young child the illustrated journal Niva had shaped his views and perceptions of the German enemy. When Germans eventually entered Kiev in 1918, he realized that the magazine’s portrayal of them as “vicious, fat, cowardly, wearing helmets with sharp spikes” had been a gross caricature—a product of wartime propaganda.113 This illustrates, once again, that it was only through personal, first-hand experience that children were able to escape the dominant patriotic discourse. Encounters with wounded soldiers and with the deaths of members of their own families were clearly traumatic experiences that brought about the revelation that war was not the straightforwardly glorious thing that many 110 111

 Kelly, Children’s World, 442.

 Chukov, “Deti i voina,” 964.

112 113

 Cohen, “Mass Media,” 44.

 Lev Kopelev, The Education of a True Believer (London: Wildwood House London, 1981), 3–4.

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had imagined it to be. However, it appears that, in contrast to their parents, children were not in the position to see the political dimension of the question of war in 1914 and 1915. By helping in hospitals, organizing fundraisers, or simply playing war on the streets, children began to actively shape and reinforce patriotic discourses. Although the source base for girls is generally weaker (indeed the published data of Lubenets’s study does not include female respondents), there is some evidence that suggests they were also by and large successfully integrated into the war effort. However, more research into the gender-specific responses amongst children is required to corroborate this suggestion. Ultimately, the totalization of war led to a strong interplay between the mobilization of children, i.e., their integration into the war culture, and the selfmobilization of children, particularly boys, who were eager to play their part in the national effort. In doing so, children became themselves active agents in the evolution and development of the patriotic war culture. They became pro­ ducers as well as consumers of patriotic discourses. Thus, as a social group, children should not be ignored in the analysis of war enthusiasm, patriotism, and war culture. Age clearly mattered when it came to attitudes and responses to the war. Only beginning to develop their self-identity and to become in­ dependent, individual personalities, children and adolescents certainly had a very limited conception of nation, empire, and autocracy. However, Lube­ nets’s survey highlights that although Russian children naturally did not quite understood who they were, they had a very good understanding of whom they were fighting. In the first year of the war the dominant patriotic discourse helped to generate and affirm the children’s enthusiasm for the war. Indeed, the answers in the survey suggest that patriotic discourse seems to have helped some youngsters to overcome their initial feelings of fear and anxiety, helping them to adopt patriotic identities. A historian cannot take on the task of judging the long-term psychological effects of children’s war experience, but as this essay has shown, the wealth of material Russian educators and psychologists collected can help us gauge and reconstruct patterns in children’s experiences of war and their attitudes towards the Great War at the time. It enables us to hear the direct voice of chil­ dren, giving them a place in the history of Russia’s Great War. Ultimately, of course, our ability to access and reconstruct individual experience by children of war remains limited.114 The present study has focused on the first year of Russia’s Great War. Obviously, Russia’s faltering, catastrophic, dismal performance and the seemingly endless course of the war affected both experience and attitudes 114

 Pignot, “Les enfants,” 9.

300 Matthias Neumann

between 1914–18. Patriotism undoubtedly faded the longer the war lasted, amongst adults as well as children. Already in December 1914, when the war was still going well for Russia, a 14-year-old boy from Lubenets’s survey was looking quite anxiously towards the future: “I have heard rumors that the war has taken a serious turn and may carry on for a long time, which is not good for me or for the whole state.”115 His feelings would not betray him. For the several age cohorts born after 1900, particularly those born in the western borderlands, war became the defining experience of their childhood and formative years of youth. They became the children of Russia’s “continuum of crisis”116—the children of war and revolution.

115 116

 Lubenets, “Voina i shkol´niki,” no. 8: 4.

 Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914– 1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

The Phenomenon of the Liberated Soldier’s Wife Liudmila Bulgakova

The First World War caused unbelievable suffering for millions of people. In Russia the numbers of sick, wounded, and maimed soldiers, refugees, widows, and orphans were unprecedented. The largest category of war victims was soldiers’ families, aid to whom required the largest expenditures. In the absence of their breadwinning husbands, soldiers’ wives had to manage the household and provide sustenance for themselves and their children. Disenfranchised, oppressed, and largely illiterate, soldiers’ wives were transformed by the war into emancipated, demanding, and independent women who possessed common goals and elements of organization in their actions, and who played an important role in the revolutionary events of 1917. Let us attempt to determine how this transformation proceeded and why it occurred. Soldiers’ families won the attention of the state, society, and philanthropists from the early days of the war. In 1914, for the first time in Russian history, the principle of mandatory, so-called state assistance (gosudarstvennoe prizrenie) was extended on a mass scale to the families of certain categories of rankand-file soldiers (nizhnie chiny): mobilized reservists, soldiers kept on active duty after their compulsory service ended, and men enrolled in the militia. In accordance with a law issued before the war, on 25 June 1912, wives and children of soldiers received the right to assistance in the form of state subsistence allowances (paiki), which were given as monthly monetary payments per person calculated according to the prices of basic foodstuffs. Children up to five years of age were given half-allowances, and when they reached seventeen years, the allowances stopped. While wives and children of soldiers received allowances regardless of their material situation, the parents, grandfathers, grandmothers, brothers, and sisters of the soldiers received allowances only if they had been supported by the mobilized soldier.1 Families of civilians work1

 Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii, sobranie 3, vol. 32, pt. 1, no. 37507 (St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1915). Families of soldiers on active duty in performance of their compulsory military service were not eligible for state allowances under this law. The allowance (paek) was calculated on the basis of one pud 28 funty Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 301–26.

302 Liudmila Bulgakova

ing in workshops, state-owned factories and plants, and similar enterprises who were called to active duty received regular state assistance in the form of one-half, one-third, or one-quarter of the breadwinners’ wages, depending on the size and makeup of the family. In addition, full or partial salaries of civilian employees in central and local government institutions were guaranteed to their families. In these cases, however, the families of the mobilized workers lost the right to the monthly allowance.2 In addition to the subsistence allowance, the central state, municipalities, local governments (zemstva), and various charities provided soldiers’ families with considerable assistance in other forms. The Supreme Council for Aid to Soldiers’ Families (Verkhovnyi sovet po prizreniiu semei lits, prizvannykh na voinu), established on 11 August 1914 and headed by Empress Aleksandra Fedorovna, was in charge of providing general assistance to the families of men called to war, as well as the families of wounded and fallen soldiers. The Elizabeth Committee (Elizavetinskii komitet) in Moscow, headed by the Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fedorovna, operated under the auspices of the Supreme Council, as did the Caucasus Committee (Kavkazskii komitet) and the Olga Committee (Ol´ginskii komitet) in Petrograd, headed by the Grand Duchess Ol´ga Nikolaevna, which extended its operations to Finland as well as Petrograd and its province. The activity of the Elizabeth Committee was particularly extensive, with local branches throughout the empire and up to 6,000 charitable organizations under its jurisdiction by the beginning of 1917. These quasi-governmental committees, named after members of the imperial family, financed their activities through private donations and state appropriations. Additional measures were taken to provide families of soldiers with food, rent, money, goods, labor, and legal support. They were granted free or discounted travel by rail in third- or fourth-class cars, loans on favorable terms, tax benefits (deferments and consolidation of payments), and preference in the allocation of land for resettlement in Siberia as well as the rental and purchase of state-owned land. Peasant communes helped soldiers’ families during planting, harvesting, threshing, and other agricultural activities. They were also provided with free seeds and loans of agricultural equipment and machines, etc. They could take fallen timber from state-owned forest tracts for fuel, and buy firewood at fixed prices. Their children were educated for free in public schools, while little ones were placed in shelters and day nurseries. Existing charitable institutions were expanded and transformed, and new ones of flour, 10 funty of cereals, 4 funty of salt, and 1 funt of vegetable oil per person per month. A pud contains 40 funty, and is equivalent to 16.38 kg. or 36 lbs.; one funt equals 409.5 grams. 2

 Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii pravitel´stva, izdavaemoe pri Pravitel´stvuiushchem Senate, no. 233 (1914), art. 2282.

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established: cheap and free cafeterias, hostels, day shelters, labor offices for job opportunities, and foster care. Sewing, knitting, and shoemaking workshops and laundries were opened, and workers’ cooperatives were organized. In the distribution of orders for the products of cottage industries—coats, boots, warm underwear, and so on—opportunities to earn were provided preferentially to soldiers’ wives. Deductions were made from employees’ salaries and donations collected everywhere in order to help the families of “defenders of the Fatherland,” and charity bazaars and raffles, performances and concerts were held for their benefit. Never before had care for soldiers’ families reached such magnitude.3 Responsibility for the payment of state allowances belonged to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, whose Office of Military Conscription (Upravlenie voinskoi povinnosti) carried out all ​​ the necessary accounting. It was no easy matter to manage assistance to millions of soldiers’ families given the extremely unequal distribution of the population across the wide expanses of the Russian Empire, and its perennially inadequate roads. Minister of the Interior Nikolai A. Maklakov underlined the complexities involved in implementing the 1912 law, incomprehensible to “other European states”: Eniseisk province, for example, is 2,614,200 square kilometers in size, and exceeds the overall size of the western European powers; the Iakutsk region is six times the size of Germany and thirty-two times the size of Serbia; Eniseisk is more than five times the size of Austria-Hungary, Germany, Spain, Italy, and France taken together; Tomsk is larger than each of those countries; Arkhangel´sk province is larger than France and Italy together, and twenty-eight times larger than the territory of Belgium. The great expanse of individual provinces so complicates the implementation of food assistance that it completely exceeds the abilities of local administration and inevitably entails delays and omissions in certain cases, the great infrequency of which serves only to confirm how successfully the distribution of aid is going.4

3

 See L. A. Bulgakova, “Privilegirovannye bedniaki: Pomoshch´ soldatskim sem´iam v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny,” in Na puti k revoliutsionnym potriaseniiam: Iz istorii Rossii vtoroi poloviny XIX–nachala XIX veka, ed. V. S. Diakin (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Historia, 2001), 429–93; N. L. Pushkareva and P. P. Shcherbinin, “Organizatsiia prizreniia semei nizhnikh chinov v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny,” Zhurnal issledovanii sotsial´noi politiki 23, 2 (2005): 147–63. 4

 Izvestiia Verkhovnogo Soveta po prizreniiu semei lits, prizvannykh na voinu, a takzhe semei ranenykh i pavshikh voinov, vyp. 6 (1915): 51.

304 Liudmila Bulgakova

In reality, a multitude of complaints about “omissions” came in. Implementing the new system of security for soldiers’ families demanded effort and time. Chaos and confusion reigned in the realm of assistance to soldiers’ families as the legislation was being interpreted during conditions of war, lists of allow­ ance recipients were being compiled, surveys of funds were being conducted, and accounts drawn up. In some places soldiers’ wives rioted. According to an eyewitness of events in Odessa on 11 August 1914, the wives of mobilized reservists there “assembled together in a large crowd, probably under the influence of some agitator, and headed toward the city council building.” In the melee that followed a policeman was wounded, and the women “created an uproar” at the Hotel Europe and Robin’s Pastry Shop. Then groups of Odessa “suffragists,” each about ten persons, went into shops and asked for money. Strictly speaking, an amazing sight; never before has there been as much concern for the families of reservists as in this war. The city council, with all its energy, does not have the possibility of satisfying everyone at once—the completion of some for­ malities, as well as time, are needed, and then all will be satisfied. Here, evidently, is the influence of those who spread false rumors that entire military units have perished.… Everything was so good, so friendly, up to now, and suddenly this sharp dissonance. Such actions will cost them sympathy, stupid women.5 All the same, at the beginning of the war soldiers’ wives preferred not to riot, but rather appealed to authorities with complaints and “tearful petitions,” which were composed at their request by literate people such as the writer S. L. Obleukhova (whose pseudonym was “S. Kuchinskaia”). Writing on 11 August 1914 from St. Petersburg (to be renamed Petrograd one week later for patriotic reasons), Obleukhova described her experience with soldiers’ wives to the deputy to the State Duma V. M. Purishkevich, a fellow member of the “Russian Popular Union of the Archangel Michael” who was working in the local branch of the Red Cross in Warsaw: [M]any offices treat [reservists’ families] with distressing rudeness and do not give out money. Simply unbelievable scenes take place. Four 5

 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. 102 (Department of Police of the Ministry of Internal Affairs), op. 265, d. 993, l. 1242. Excerpt from letter signed “your Kolia” from Odessa to N. A. Sheller in Kremenchug, Poltava province. I am grateful to my colleague Boris Kolonitskii for information about the materials in this collection.

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hundred to six hundred women come each day for aid, nothing is ex­ plained to them, and they are chased away. In another place a guard threw 150 tickets for the right to receive a few rubles into a crowd of six hundred women. Scuffles break out, gendarmes on horseback force their way into the crowd and “press back” the women. Today … one child was crushed to death. I did not believe all of this, but women with children come to me, weep, and swear to me that it is the truth.6 A great admirer of the “charitable exploits” of Father Ioann of Kronshtadt and no stranger herself to charity work, Obleukhova blamed unscrupulous aid workers (popechiteli) for everything, but in such a situation even the most well meaning would have given up in the face of the crowds of soldiers’ wives. Obleukhova herself was not able to manage the petitioners who “are be­ sieging my kitchen. I helped one, then another, and they send tens of others, all with complaints and tears. What can I do? I don’t have money for them. I make inquiries, I write threatening letters to building owners and doormen who evict the women. So far the threats work, but I am occupied solely with compiling complaints and inquiries.”7 It was clear that emergency measures were needed to normalize the situation. Life itself suggested a way out: a path should be made for the public (obshchestvennost´), without which efforts by the bureaucracy, local authorities, and individual philanthropists to organize systematic assistance to soldiers’ wives was practically impossible. A broad field of activity opened up before the Russian public. (For an appeal to aid soldiers’ families, in the gallery of images following page >.) Locally, aid to soldiers’ families was distributed largely through township (volostnye) and municipal guardianships (popechitel´stva), while in those few towns, including the capitals, where district guardianships for the poor already existed, they were charged with these functions. A multibranched system of guardianships quickly began to form. All formal obstacles to joining guardianships were removed immediately, and volunteers from both sexes and all classes and economic conditions poured into them. Among them were many women, people from the liberal professions (lawyers, doctors, engineers, professors, etc.), and students. Sergei K. Gogel´, chairman of the executive board of the All-Russian Union of Welfare and Charity Organizations and Activists (Vserossiiskii Souiz uchrezhdenii, obshchestv i deiatelei po obshchestvennomu prizreniiu i blagotvoritel´nosti), urged the general assembly of Union members on 8 March 1915 to remind the public and the government that the revitalization of the guardianships’ activ6

 Ibid., l. 1225.

7

 Ibid.

306 Liudmila Bulgakova

ity and the influx of new volunteers into them occurred only because, “with the tacit approval of the administration, formal requirements [of membership] were not observed, and all who joined the guardianships received an opportunity to act autonomously and to influence their direction.”8 Guardianships came to represent de facto grassroots cells of local government. After advocating for decades for the introduction of a township-level (volostnoe) zemstvo, the Russian public regarded the establishment of guardianships on this level, elected by a township assembly, as the first step toward the creation of all-estate township-level institutions of local government. Gogel´ without apology asserted that all-estate township-level guardianships “as it were temporarily substituted for a township-level zemstvo.”9 Similarly, municipal guardianships were considered to be the embryo of local government units at the level of the municipal district (municipal district councils). Soldiers’ wives did not participate themselves in the work of the guardianships, and as recipients of charity remained passive, if one does not count protests and complaints about abuses and irregularities in the distribution of allowances. (See figure 13 for a photo of soldiers’ wives waiting at the office of one of the Petrograd guardianships in 1916.) If the hope began to dawn in the intelligentsia of liberation from bureau­ cratic fetters and the restructuring of public life, the war promised nothing but grief for the populace. A story told by S. A. Sokol´skaia, a student and medic at the time, is typical. Spending her vacation in her native village of Karabanovo (Vladimir province), she recalled how fellow villagers greeted news of the war “with frenzied wailing, shrieking, and weeping,” and crowds of people started walking toward the church; “some are hurrying, others trudge along, bathed in tears.”10 Even before the war began, on 16 July 1914, Minister of the Interior Maklakov admitted that “war cannot be popular in our country, in the interior, and to the people the idea of revolution is more understandable than victory over the Germans. But you do not walk away from fate.”11 Maklakov’s premonition was confirmed. V. A. Posse, editor and publisher of the magazine Zhizn´ dlia vsekh (Life for Everyone), recollected that

8

 Prizrenie i blagotvoritel´nost´ v Rossii, no. 3–4 (1915): 172.

9

 S. K. Gogel’, “Kak zemstvu i gorodu pomogat´ zhertvam voiny?” Prizrenie i blago­ tvoritel´nost´ v Rossii, no. 3–4 (1915): 175. 10

 Voenno-meditsinskii muzei Ministerstva oborony Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Osnovnoi fond, d. 76938.

11

 Quoted in S. Dobrovol´skii, O mobilizatsii russkoi armii v 1914 godu (Moscow, 1929), 106.

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only gentlemen [gospoda] burned with patriotism. Among the lower classes there was an indistinct ferment. In the villages of such dangerous provinces as Saratov, reservists were rounded up at night and quickly “whisked” away to who knows where, without the opportunity of say­ ing goodbye to their families. This, at least, was what “simple folk” told us in Saratov…. In answer to our question about how the village responded to mobilization, we often heard: “with moaning.”12 The people understood that it was necessary to defend the country, but the reasons for war were incomprehensible. Soldiers and their wives had a murky idea even of their native land, let alone of other countries and international re­ lations. In Posse’s words, “an unimaginable confusion reigned in the heads of ‘simple folk’ at the start of the war.”13 They did not expect war and reacted to it as to an enormous grief. Moscow pediatrician A. I. Dobrokhotova informed her fiancé F. O. Krauze on 1 August 1914: “Today my sister arrived here [from the village of Vichuga in Kostroma province—L.B.] to begin nursing courses; she says that in the village they are convinced that the Second Coming has arrived (you see, all the words of the Apocalypse are coming true), they just cannot decide who is the Antichrist—Wilhelm or Nicholas II.”14 While rejection of the war became only stronger with time, the lack of understanding of its reasons remained. A year after the beginning of the war peasants were saying that Germany “in large part went to war because of overcrowding. So their tsar wishes to kill half of his people.”15 General A. A. Brusilov also encountered incomprehension of the reasons for war. “How many times did I ask in the trenches, What are we fighting for, and I inevitably received the answer that some ertz-gertz-pertz [sic] over there was killed with his wife by someone, and that’s why the Austrians wanted to hurt the Serbs…. It turned out that people were led to slaughter without knowing why, that is, at the tsar’s whim.”16 According to V. I. Gurko, a member of the State Council, the war “evoked a silent, vague, submissive but real dissatisfaction. To a significant degree the distribution of aid to families of mobilized reserv-

12

 V. A. Posse, Moi zhiznennyi put´: Dorevoliutsionnyi period (1864–1917 gg.) (Moscow– Leningrad: Zemlia i fabrika, 1929), 479. 13

 Ibid.

14

 Krauze family private archive.

15

 GARF f. 102, op. 265, d. 1026, l. 442 (excerpt from a letter of 25 July 1915 from Moscow to F. I. Rodichev in Petrograd, signature illegible). 16

 A. A. Brusilov, Moi vospominaniia (Moscow: Rosspen, 2001), 69.

308 Liudmila Bulgakova

ists, beginning approximately a month after [the start of the war], reconciled [people] to it.”17 The implementation of the 1912 law on state allowances raised many vexed questions, even among governors, who repeatedly asked the Ministry of the Interior to explain the law and about directives and instructions.18 A survey conducted by the Central Information Bureau of Petrograd Municipal Guardianships in November–early December 1914 found that guardianships “almost unanimously all noted countless complaints about extremely difficult and inequitable distribution of allowances in the provinces,” which they mainly attributed to incorrect interpretations of the law rather than ill intent.19 Soldiers’ wives thought otherwise; they distrusted village guardianships, which operated virtually without oversight, even more than municipal ones. “Many women harbor the firm conviction that in the village ‘you won’t get,’ ‘they don’t give,’ ‘they bite off [some of the money],’” wrote V. S. Krivenko, chairman of the Petrograd City Charity Commission.20 Peasants disappointed the hopes of liberals: occupied with agricultural work, they had no time to engage in elections and regarded the right given them to elect guardianship members as an empty formality. As a result the task of caring for soldiers’ families ended up in the hands of village elders, township heads (volostnye starshiny), scribes, etc. Other times soldiers’ wives did not miss a chance to take advantage of the absence of contact between charitable organizations and to receive assistance from various places. Rumors about the significant funds released for aid to soldiers’ families quickly spread among the population. “And so, intoxicated by rumors, reservists’ wives go from one organization to another, receiving assistance from everywhere and in some cases raising their income to a level unprecedented when the husband was around,” a speaker claimed at the general meeting of one Petrograd guardianship on 10 February 1915.21 Such “abuses” by soldiers’ wives were possible in places where a more or less developed structure of charitable organizations existed. With rare exceptions soldiers’ families in both village and town struggled in the clutches of poverty before the war, and so the state allowance was a 17

 V. I. Gurko, Cherty i siluety proshlogo: Pravitel´stvo i obshchestvennost´ v tsarstvovanie Nikolaia II v izobrazhenii sovremennika (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2000), 644. 18

 Bulgakova, “Privilegirovannye bedniaki,” 448–50.

19

 “Anketa po vydache kazennogo posobiia Petrogradskimi gorodskimi popechitel´st­ vami o bednykh,” Prizrenie i blagotvoritel´nost´ v Rossii, no. 3–4 (1915): 24.

20

 V. S. Krivenko, “Sem´i zapasnykh,” Novoe vremia, 20 September 1914.

21

 “O deiatel´nosti patronata pri 11 gorodskom popechitel´stve o bednykh,” Prizrenie i blagotvoritel´nost´ v Rossii, no. 1–2 (1915): 62.

The Phenomenon of the Liberated Soldier’s Wife

309

godsend to them. Krivenko, who as the chairman of the Petrograd Charity Commission had continual contact with families of mobilized reservists, found their material condition little different from “the hopelessly poor who are served in peacetime by the guardianships.” Many soldiers’ wives lived in filthy quarters and hardly made ends meet. The overwhelming majority of them were illiterate and could not even sign the distribution registers. It is no wonder that soldiers’ wives treated state allowances “with a certain rev­ erence.”22 Sometimes the allowance payments to soldiers’ families exceeded the earnings of their breadwinners called up for military service. “In such fam­ ilies the women usually felt little grief over the departure of their husbands for war,” State Councilor Gurko commented.23 The monthly allowance of several rubles or tens of rubles for a family was a kind of minimum living standard guaranteed by the government, but many families before the war did not have even that. There is a mass of evidence of the significance of the allowance for soldiers’ families. For example, one private letter from early September 1914 stated: “As for the care shown to soldiers and their families, in this respect there is even great luxury. Funds for the allowance payments have already arrived at township administrative offices, and there are families, they say, who are due to receive 80 rubles by December.”24 The writer of another letter commented in July 1915 that “[s]oldiers’ wives live no worse than before the war in the economic sense. At least their menfolk do not feel very sorry for them. For example, we had a worker making 60 rubles a year; now his wife receives 40 rubles in three months.”25 As the number of war victims needing social assistance swiftly grew, fresh resources were required. At the end of 1914 and the beginning of 1915, however, public enthusiasm noticeably declined. Demand for free volunteer labor in the guardianships exceeded the supply by many times, and volunteers began to leave, tired of working out of “pure enthusiasm” or finding some­ where else to apply their energies. For example, in 1914 the number of volun­ teer workers in Petrograd municipal guardianships increased three to four and even five to six times; but the following year their number decreased

22 23

 Krivenko, “Sem´i zapasnykh.”

 Gurko, Cherty i siluety proshlogo, 644–45.

24

 GARF f. 102, op. 265, d. 995, l. 1422 (excerpt from letter of Neratov [no first name or initials] from 8 September 1914 to A. A. Neratov in Petrograd).

25

 GARF f. 102, op. 265, d. 1026, l. 442 (excerpt from letter of 25 July 1915, signature illegible).

310 Liudmila Bulgakova

by half, although the guardianships managed to retain their stability.26 One commentator lamented: “[W]e need broad democratic organizations, we need the activism of the masses themselves, on the basis of self-help. Deep strata of the urban working population, however, have as yet displayed hardly any initiative and energy in this direction.”27 The creation of broad democratic organizations was even less to be expected from the rural population. The initial surge of public activism to come to the aid of soldiers’ families was replaced by a certain irritation caused by the behavior of soldiers’ wives and by criticism of the equalizing approach taken to distributing aid. Comments appeared in the press about the “corrupting influence” of chari­ table assistance, which could cause soldiers’ wives to grow accustomed to “dependence,” and of allowance payments given out without consideration to recipients’ ability to work or material situation. As early as the fall of 1914 A. P. Vvedenskii, professor at Petrograd University and chairman of the 17th Petrograd municipal guardianship, expressed concern to the general meeting of the Union of Welfare and Charity Organizations and Activists over whether some families should not receive assistance, “so that they are not schooled in living off of charity. However,” he added, “this misallocated assistance is not so terrible, if one remembers that it will continue only to the war’s end, and that it now goes not to vodka but to improving the well-being of those families who are still more or less poor, and who feel [they possess] an inarguable right to special attention from society.”28 At the general meeting of Union members in March 1915 the chairman of another Petrograd guardianship, A. E. Znosko-Borovskii, worried that by giving reservists’ families “excessive” aid, guardianships were discouraging families from working and “preparing them for a sad future after the war ends.” He also expressed concern over the failure to make distinctions between deserving and undeserving recipients, in violation of the principles of rational public assistance.29 But the colossal number of those needing aid, and the lack of necessary legal guidelines, personnel, and financial resources, made the task of conducting investigations and establishing supervision (patronat) over recipients unrealizable, and also

26

 L. Ia. Gurevich, Obzor deiatel´nosti gorodskikh popechitel´stv o bednykh za pervyi god voiny 1914–1915 (Petrograd: Sovet po prizreniiu semei lits, prizvannykh na voinu, 1915), 76. 27

 K. Oranskii, “Shtrikhi obshchestvennosti (Pis´mo iz Petrograda),” Kievskaia mysl´, 18 November 1914.

28

 “17 popechitel´stvo,” Prizrenie i blagotvoritel´nost´ v Rossii, no. 8–10 (1915): cols. 1037– 38.

29

  Prizrenie i blagotvoritel´nost´ v Rossii, no. 3–4 (1915): 171.

The Phenomenon of the Liberated Soldier’s Wife

311

made no practical sense, given the obvious material insecurity of the absolute majority of soldiers’ families. Other activists were concerned with giving soldiers’ wives first and foremost the opportunity to earn their own living. S. V. Bakhrushin, who be­ longed to a family of renowned Moscow philanthropists, warned the annual meeting of the City Charity Council on 24 February 1915: “It is necessary to organize assistance on the largest possible scale, but at the same time it is necessary in every way possible to avoid all those forms of aid that could lead to the creation of a class of people living exclusively on charity.” This famous philanthropist proposed “rejecting the principle of benevolence [blagotvorenie] in the narrow sense of the word” and advocated preventive measures, such as the provision of employment.30 K. I. Anufriev, secretary of the Special Petrograd Office for the Investigation and Relief of Beggars, worried that the law of 25 June 1912 “immediately created a kind of privileged class of people who enjoyed government-funded support independent of the level of their need, which violated one of the basic principles of welfare.”31 Anufriev bemoaned the fact that other categories of the poor “were somehow eclipsed, reduced to nothing,” while first place went to families of reservists, “on whom great and abundant favors are showered” and “colossal amounts are spent.… [M]any reservists’ families have begun to receive incomparably more than was earned by their breadwinners now called up to war, [and] have begun to live as never before.”32 Recognizing the right of soldiers’ families to social assistance, Anufriev insisted on the necessity of helping them in the same way as any poor person. “We have not understood this and in striving to help have created in wartime a kind of privileged class of public welfare pensioners out of reservists’ families.”33 In a country where indigence was an everyday and ubiquitous phenomenon, the right to obligatory assistance for one of the categories of the needy was regarded by society as a privilege. The introduction into Russia of so-called prohibition (sukhoi zakon)—the ban on the sale of alcohol—had a large influence on the lives of the population. It took some time for people to adapt to prohibition and learn to evade it, and in the first months of the war the press was in an optimistic mood. The press unanimously noted that “forced sobriety” facilitated the improvement of popular well-being, raised labor productivity, benefited health, and trans30

 “Deiatel´nost´ moskovskikh gorodskikh popechitel´stv o bednykh v sviazi s voinoi,” Prizrenie i blagotvoritel´nost´ v Rossii, no. 3–4 (1915): 203.

31  K. I. Anufriev, “Blizhaishie zadachi gosudarstva v oblasti prizreniia v sviazi s voinoi,” Prizrenie i blagotvoritel´nost´ v Rossii, no. 6–7 (1915): 389. 32

 Ibid.

33

 Ibid., 389–90.

312 Liudmila Bulgakova

formed the popular standard of living. The pages of the press in the capital and provinces painted a wondrous picture of the people’s recovery from an evil “illness”: by imperial decree, as if by magic, “Mother Russia sobered up.”34 Overall deposits into savings banks increased in 1914 in comparison with the previous year by 6.5 times, from 13 million to 84 million rubles. The increase was especially sharp once the war began; the influx of deposits in December 1914 exceeded December 1913 by 41 times, and for the first week of 1915 deposits increased 51 times compared to the same period in 1914. The sudden improvement in popular well-being was explained first and foremost by “liberation from the tribute paid to the tavern” and state allowance payments.35 Sobriety brought with it a decrease in crime, hooliganism, fires, and the rate of illness at the beginning of the war. “The peasants’ household economy has already begun to improve noticeably; even among the ‘down-and-outs,’ families are fed, shod, clothed,” a contemporary noted.36 The purchasing power of the population grew significantly, trade in textiles was brisk, people flocked to cultural pursuits, felt themselves to be participants in events taking place in the country and beyond its borders. One journalist confirmed in astonishment: “a burning desire to know what is going on in the world has appeared in the villages.”37 Soldiers’ wives attained economic and financial autonomy during the war, and could be in charge of their money. Some broke away from large peasant families, not wishing to put their money into the “common pot” and reconcile themselves to the tutelage of “elders.” Once vege­ tating in poverty and deprived of rights, soldiers’ wives now dressed themselves up and equipped themselves with umbrellas, galoshes, eau de cologne, and other “luxury items.” Changes in soldiers’ wives’ out­ ward appearance were immediately noticed by contemporaries, who began to reproach them for their extravagance and wastefulness. The expenditures of female dandies on “ribbons, lace, and shoes” could not be compared, however, to the former expenditures of their husbands on drink. Not only breadwinners went to war, but also drunkards. 34

 For example: I. V. Zhilkin, “Provintsial´noe obozrenie,” Vestnik Evropy, no. 9 (1914): 338–42; V. M. Bekhterev, “Otrezvlenie naroda i nravstvennoe ozdorovlenie,” Birzhevye vedomosti, 12 December 1914; N. P. Oganovskii, “Otrezvlennaia Rossiia,” Severnye za­ piski, no. 12 (1914): 10–11, 21–24; A.Ch., “Pis´ma chitatelei: Voina i krest´ianin,” Kurskaia byl´, 1 December 1914. 35

 V. D. Kuz´min-Karavaev, “Feericheskie tsifry,” Birzhevye vedomosti, 10 January 1915.

36

 K. Ponomarev, “Perevorot v narodnom bytu,” Den´, 27 November 1914.

37

 A. Ufimskii, “Gazet! Gazet!” Zashchita, 13 September 1914.

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As later events showed, the ecstasies over the mass sobering up and the “cleansing of filth” were premature. Prohibition created a niche for denatured spirits and homebrew.38 Enterprising soldiers’ wives hastened to extract ad­ vantage from prohibition. In February 1916 a correspondent from the Urals wrote Senator N. S. Grabar´: Sobriety, having brought so much good, lasted about a year, but lo, the green serpent, seemingly breathing its last breath, has stirred to life again and reappeared. Almost every soldier’s wife traded almost openly in homebrewed beer and moonshine, no less capable of making one drunk than the former 80-proof stuff. The large flow of money into the village and the absence of cultured recreation create favorable conditions for the rebirth of our historical vice. And the evil expands and grows without any restraint. You do not hear about any measures against underground distillers anywhere. People say openly that the latter have opened up a new source of income for the police. Were the defenders of letting the people drink [spaivanie naroda] really right when they said that it is better to let the government obtain reliable revenue from the people’s vice?39 Other new opportunities for earnings appeared, resulting from increased work at manufacturing enterprises due to military orders and the army’s orders for food and fodder “at good prices,” which had great significance for the population’s material condition, especially for soldiers’ families. Press reports noted the successes of various kinds of cooperatives, and the high rate of activity among women, especially soldiers’ wives, who joined consumer cooperatives. Thus the proportion of women in Moscow cooperatives rose several times, and in some they constituted half of the members.40 In Petrograd guardianships helped organize laundries and sewing, knitting, and shoemaking workshops. Workshops there produced five million items in the first 38

 See Artur Mak-ki [Arthur McKee], “Sukhoi zakon v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny: Prichiny, kontseptsiia i posledstviia vvedeniia sukhogo zakona v Rossii, 1914–1917,” in Rossiia i Pervaia mirovaia voina (Materialy mezhdunarodnogo nauchnogo kollokviuma), ed. N. N. Smirnov (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999), 147–59.

39

 GARF f. 102, op. 265, d. 1051, ll. 362–362ob. (excerpt from a letter from A. V. Ognev, 10 February 1916, from Sosnoozerskaia Agricultural Colony, Perm´ province, to N. S. Grabar´ in Petrograd).

40

 K. E. Baldin, “Povsednevaia zhizn´ rossiiskikh rabochikh-kooperatorov v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny,” in Malen´kii chelovek i bol´shaia voina v istorii Rossii: Seredina XIX– seredina XX veka. Materialy mezhdunarodnogo kollokviuma (Sankt-Peterburg, 17–20 iiunia 2013 g.), ed. T. A. Abrosimova (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2014), 181.

314 Liudmila Bulgakova

year of the war, and the aggregate earnings of female workers reached 360,000 rubles. The well-known philanthropist Countess S. V. Panina and A. S. Miliukova, wife of the Kadet party leader, actively participated in organizing workshops. Soldiers’ wives eagerly learned a trade, and workshops quickly spread. Approximately 20,000 women worked in them in Petrograd by the beginning of 1916, and more than 15,000 were sent to other workplaces in 1915.41 Women replaced men who had gone to war in various spheres of labor. Soldiers’ wives became fighters on the labor front—as farmers, artisans, factory workers, etc. Soldiers’ wives dealt alone with difficult agricultural work; they plowed, sowed, mowed, reaped, and threshed. Many left for cities in search of work. The capitals, where it was easier to find work and charitable aid was better, were particularly attractive. By the beginning of 1916 around 25,000 members of soldiers’ families were counted, or more than 11 percent of all allowance recipients in Petrograd had come from outside the city.42 The majority of them were soldiers’ wives, because they usually arrived in Petrograd with­ out their children. Here young women quickly found work in factories and mills, in commercial and manufacturing enterprises and workshops, or went into domestic service. The traditional spectrum of their occupations in towns expanded, which had included work as laundresses, cooks, day laborers, ancil­ lary workers, unskilled laborers, or in the best case, as seamstresses. But this victory had its negative side. The sight of a woman straining herself loading and unloading goods or doing repair work on railroads became a common one. The hard physical labor of a stevedore, stoker, or smith, not characteristic of the weaker sex, could not help but harm female health. The same was true of labor by children and adolescents, which expanded significantly. There the question of protecting women’s and children’s health arose with particular urgency, but resolving it was postponed until peacetime. Thus at the beginning of the war the overall material condition of soldiers’ wives noticeably improved. The sharp contraction in grain exports, which almost ceased in 1916, and the introduction of “prohibition” also helped. While their husbands fought, thousands of peasant women became city dwellers and adapted to urban culture. Soldiers’ wives raised their heads, felt their strength, and acquired the habit of economic independence. The war forced them to perceive the real need for literacy. Knowing how to read, write, and count helped them find suitable work, run the household, insist on their rights, 41

 “Obshchestvennaia rabota v gorodskhikh popechitel´stvakh: Letopis´ Petrograd­ skikh i prigorodnykh popechitel´stv,” Prizrenie i blagotvoritel´nost´ v Rossii, no. 1–2 (1916): col. 12.

42

 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA) f. 1291 (Military Service Administration of the Ministry of the Interior), op. 7, d. 350 (“O prekrashchenii vydachi paika sem´iam nizhnikh voinskikh chinov, pribyvshim v gor. Petrograd”), ll. 58–59.

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correspond with their husbands without intermediaries, and venture out beyond the confines of their little domestic worlds. P. P. Shcherbinin, author of the only monograph, along with a series of articles, to pay serious attention to the condition and everyday life of soldiers’ wives at various stages in Russian history, has emphasized that World War I destroyed barriers that in peacetime had always obstructed women’s self-realization in the public and labor spheres, the elimination of inequality, and the attainment of equal rights.43 The new type of willful and defiant soldier’s wife who challenges the patriarchal order of village life found its literary embodiment in the story by Lidiia Seifullina, “Virinea” (1924), written “hot on the heels” of events, which became a classic of Russian literature. As the soldier’s wife Anisia, one of the story’s heroines, says: “Womenfolk have made themselves free these days!” The war undermined not only the foundations of government but also the moral foundations of family and society. It was in those years that the sources of social revolution and the “sexual revolution” that followed it were clearly revealed. As the soldier’s wife, receiving a legal right to the state’s and society’s support, rose in status, the relationship toward her also changed in the family. Now the breadwinner and benefactress, the soldier’s wife became the central figure in the family and mistress in her own right. With husbands gone to the front the problem of family despotism resolved itself naturally. Old-fashioned (domostroevskie) customs and the subordinate position of women in the family came to an end. The emancipation process for women picked up speed and became irreversible. As one society lady wrote to Minister of Finance P. L. Bark in January 1916 from her Ukrainian estate: “It will be interesting to observe how men will conduct themselves after returning from the war, when they will run into a huge group of ‘suffragists’ who have seized all domestic affairs into their hands, who know how to work, have their own money, and are strong after two years of autonomy.”44 As the war dragged on, it brought income to some but subjected others to poverty. Thanks to abundant harvests in 1914–15 peasants accumulated some grain reserves, but gradually mobilization exhausted the village’s resources. While the standard of living rose for part of the urban and rural population, households left without workers fell into ruin, and the population in areas of military operations became impoverished, deprived of shelter and food. Although soldiers’ families, in contrast to so many others, were guaranteed subsistence aid, at times they could not help but experience hardship as sup43

 P. P. Shcherbinin, Voennyi faktor v povsednevnoi zhizni russkoi zhenshchiny v XVIII– nachale XX v. (Tambov: Iulis, 2004), 269.

44

 GARF f. 102, op. 265, d. 1050, l. 229 (excerpt from a letter by Princess E. K. Kantakuzina [Cantacuzène], Countess Speranskaia, dated 29 January 1916 from Velikaia Buromka, Poltava province, to P. L. Bark in Petrograd; translation from the French).

316 Liudmila Bulgakova

ply problems worsened. On 31 May 1915 Dobrokhotova wrote her fiancé at the front from the village of Marfino in Kostroma province: “The most desired word is ‘peace.’ All the soldiers’ letters end with the words: ‘Have you heard anything about peace?’ Ferment is beginning here too. It is caused by the huge shortage of supplies. The stores are expected to be looted.”45 “Ignorant womenfolk” may have understood little about military operations, but they knew all about prices for food and manufactured goods. Fears expressed earlier in the press about the emergence of a “dependent mood” in soldiers’ families were fully justified. Not all soldiers’ wives rushed to work by the sweat of their brow from day to day. A certain gentleman from Bendery in Bessarabia province, signing his letter “A Local Landowner,” in­ formed Minister of Agriculture A. N. Naumov in alarm: Very little winter grain has been sown in Kherson and Bessarabia provinces, and none of the landowners and renters is planning to sow spring crops because there are no workers. Of course the main reason is that many have gone into the army, and the able-bodied women, adolescents, and old men left here do not want to work because they receive state allowances. Before the war they all worked for themselves and neighboring landowners, but now they do not intend to sow for themselves any more than is required to feed their own families. So next autumn Bessarabia will not provide the army with millions of pounds of grain and vegetables.46 The “local landowner” proposed sending able-bodied refugees to Bessarabia without giving them allowances, and recruiting military units deployed in the area to do the work. Other measures he proposed concerned soldiers’ wives directly: “Of course, it is necessary to force the local population receiving allowances to work also. It is already impossible to take away their allowances, but one can reduce them by depriving able-bodied family members of the right to an allowance. Then prohibit free postage for letters to the army, abolish free and reduced fares on railroads, and impose some kind of tax on calico.”47 But there was no way back. Any one of these measures would have caused a storm of indignation among soldiers’ wives. If the situation of soldiers’ families generally seemed relatively stable, protected, and even well provided for at the beginning of the war, with time it began to worsen. Public attention switched to other war victims—sick, 45

 From the Krauze family private archive.

46

 GARF f. 102, op. 265, d. 1050, l. 224.

47

 Ibid.

The Phenomenon of the Liberated Soldier’s Wife

317

wounded, and disabled soldiers, refugees, homeless children. But the main reason for the impoverishment of soldiers’ families was the economic crisis developing in Russia from mid-1916. Despite the significant reduction in sown area due to the labor shortage, there was bread in the country, but far-sighted kulaks and landowners behaved like “speculators,” holding back grain surpluses and refusing to sell grain at the announced fixed prices. Many soldiers’ families ended up in poverty due to poorly organized supply systems, difficulties in shipping goods by rail, the disruption of normal trade in commodities, growth in prices for essentials and goods, more frequent requisitions of livestock and horses, the contraction of charitable aid, and finally, the introduction of forced grain requisitions. In December 1916, for example, Petrograd received only 50 percent of its required norm of flour and 25 percent of needed cooking oil.48 As rising inflation rates outstripped state allowances, soldiers’ wives demanded increases and the inclusion of other foodstuffs in the allowance—potatoes, sugar, tea, and milk for children. The State Duma supported demands to widen the circle of allowance recipients to include all relatives, including those by marriage, who had been supported by the labor of men who were mobilized. The wives of soldiers who had not been mobilized but were fulfilling their regular compulsory military service demanded to be given the right to the state allowances, from which the 1912 law excluded them. Providing for soldiers’ civil (grazhdanskie) families, not bound by church marriage, became an especially acute question. According to some figures they constituted approximately 10 percent of soldiers’ families, a complete surprise to the government and society. Apparently the main reason why civil marriage was so widespread could be found in the great difficulty of divorcing and creating a new family. The processes of urbanization and increased population migration due to railroad construction and the development of industry, trade, and migratory labor exacerbated the situation that facilitated “freedom of morals.” The declining authority of religion and the church probably also played a role. There were other reasons as well for the prevalence of “illegal cohabitation,” especially the expenses of weddings, which according to custom had to be celebrated on a scale too lavish for the poor. Aid to soldiers’ civil families and especially to their illegitimate children existed only on the unstable basis of charity. Inequality forced “unmarried” soldiers’ wives to launch a bitter struggle for the recognition of civil marriages.49 48

 Ia. P. Krastyn´, Revoliutsionnaia bor´ba krest´ian v Rossii v gody imperialisticheskoi voiny (1914–1916) (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi agrarnyi institut, 1932), 82.

49

 See L. A. Bulgakova, “Nevenchannye soldatki: Bor´ba za priznanie grazhdanskogo braka v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny,” in Vlast´, obshchestvo i reformy v Rossii v XIX–

318 Liudmila Bulgakova

Rising inflation, frequent delays in the distribution of allowances, and interruptions in the food supply exacerbated dissatisfaction among soldiers’ wives and gave rise to spontaneous actions expressing economic demands to the government. In her analysis of food riots during the war Barbara Engel correctly notes the unprecedented activity of soldiers’ wives and their readiness to resort to violence.50 Unrest and pogroms against shops, stores, and markets with the participation of soldiers’ wives, and often at their instigation, took place in towns and villages in many provinces.51 In Semipala­ tinsk, for example, from 2 p.m. on 19 November to 11 p.m. on 20 November 1915 soldiers’ wives looted stores, destroying 80 percent of local trade. A local resident claimed that “the pogrom was carried out with the complete con­ nivance of the authorities and the undisguised cooperation of troops. Soldiers first announced to the rioters that they would not shoot or undertake anything, and then they themselves took active part in the looting.” Rioters who were arrested were defiant, saying that “this pogrom was only the bud, and the full flower lies ahead…. Given the mess with our food supply one must believe that the “flowers” they promise are entirely possible.”52 In 1916 the overall number of actions caused by high prices grew about 13 times, reaching a total of 228, and the majority of police documents men­ tion actions specifically by soldiers’ wives and adolescents.53 “Given the cur­ rent heightened anxiety of the population, clashes sometimes occur with representatives of the guardianships and the city over the most insignificant slip-ups in the distribution of allowances, which are always possible; some incidents called for the intervention of police detachments,” wrote B. M. Iakunchikov, chairman of the 10th Petrograd guardianship, to Prime Minister

nachale XX veka: Issledovaniia, istoriografiia, istochnikovedenie, ed. T. V. Andreeva et al. (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2009), 183–214. 50

 Barbara Engel, “Not by Bread Alone: Subsistence Riots in Russia during World War I,” Journal of Modern History 69, 4 (December 1997): 696–721. 51

 The provinces included Astrakhan´, Voronezh, Kiev, Kutais, Nizhegorod, Oren­ burg, Saratov, Samara, Simbirsk, Stavropol, Tomsk, Khar´kov, Kherson, Kuban, Semi­ palatinsk, Semirechensk, Turgaisk, and the Don Cossack territory; Iu. I. Kir´ianov, “Massovye vystupleniia na pochve dorogovizny v Rossii (1914–fevral´ 1917),” Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 3 (1913): 8–9; also A. M. Anfimov, Russkaia derevnia v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: Sotsekgiz, 1962), 354–57; and Anfimov, ed., Krest´ianskoe dvizhenie v Rossii v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny, iiul´ 1914 g.—fevral´ 1917 g.: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow–Leningrad: Nauka, 1965); Shcherbinin, Voennyi faktor, 264–69.

52

 GARF f. 102, op. 265, d. 1063, l. 1328 (letter from N.S. from Semipalatinsk, dated 27 November 1915, to N. Ia. Konshin in Petrograd).

53

 Kir´ianov, “Massovye vystupleniia,” 10, 3.

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319

B. V. Stürmer on 8 July 1916.54 Women found support in their struggle for survival and equality from fellow villagers and their husbands, who in letters from the front incited their wives to revolt: “Beat them—nothing will happen.”55 Soldiers and Cossacks sent to put down “women’s riots” (bab´i bunty) announced that they would not shoot at “our wives.”56 Soldiers’ wives began to advance political as well as economic demands after the February 1917 revolution, as the economy fell into ruin, charitable organizations collapsed, and the authorities proved helpless. These included demands for a change in government, a democratic republic, a Constituent Assembly, land and freedom, women’s equality, and an end to the war. One outstanding example of the transition of soldiers’ wives to organized political struggle was a massive demonstration on 9 April 1917 of more than 100,000 women carrying banners along the streets of Petrograd to the Tauride Palace. The influence of the Petrograd Soviet of Soldiers’ and Workers’ Deputies could be perceived in the antigovernment political slogans the soldiers’ wives promoted. All the same, the basic demands of soldiers’ wives remained economic. They distrusted the guardianships and suspected them of malfeasance. To those who worked for the guardianships, the logic of the dual system was clear: on the one hand, aid from the state in the form of the allowance, and on the other, supplementary aid from the municipal government, zemstvo, or other sources. But recipients found this difference “completely incomprehensible”; after all, “the money is disbursed by the government for mandatory assistance, and if this assistance varies in amount among the guardianships, that means sometimes they are not giving some of it to recipients.”57 This distrust toward the guardianships had been observed from the beginning of the war. One guardianship, reviewing the results of the first months of the war, commented: “Clients widely regard the volunteers as people who are feeding at the public trough and are consuming a good portion of it themselves.… [R]esponsibility for this lies in the deep-seated view that people who receive aid do not need to know where it comes from and how it is distributed. This gives birth to legends, and legends at such a difficult time can lead to all kinds of excesses.” In order to gain recipients’ trust, reformers proposed various measures: discussions with them, popular brochures explaining the functions of the 54 55

 RGIA f. 1291, op. 7, d. 350, l. 63.

 Krastyn´, Revoliutsionnaia bor´ba, 79.

56

 Kir´ianov, “Massovye vystupleniia,” 14.

57

 P.B., “K voprosu o neobkhodimykh reformakh v deiatel´nosti popechitel´stv po prizreniiu semeistv voinov: Letopis´ Petrogradskikh gorodskikh i prigorodnykh po­ pechitel´stv,” Prizrenie i blagotvoritel´nost´ v Rossii, no. 2–3 (1917): col. 60.

320 Liudmila Bulgakova

guardianships and local government, and the creation of small guardianship units composed of local residents.58 But guardianship volunteers remained “strangers” in the eyes of soldiers’ wives. It is likely that disclosures of dis­ order, waste, and embezzlement in prewar charitable organizations, which dispensed aid arbitrarily, played a role in the prejudice clients felt toward the guardianships. The alienation between them could not be overcome during the war. After the monarchy was overthrown their relationship grew worse, and discontent with the guardianships grew exponentially. In the spirit of the times soldiers’ wives demanded their own role in the guardianships’ work. In some cases soldiers’ wives demanded that guardian­ ships cease their activity and the entire aid effort be transferred into their hands, and that aid in kind (housing, meals, milk, bread, etc.) be converted into cash payments and, of course, that allowance payments be increased. Meetings with soldiers’ wives in Petrograd guardianships turned into stormy scenes, and it became impossible not to take their demands into consideration. “The hour of destruction for the old order has struck, and democracy in the person of reservists’ families has come before the guardianships with their ‘views’ and has begun to demand reforms in their operations,” one participant told a general meeting of guardianship representatives in Petrograd on 24 March 1917. “All these demands amount to one thing—that those receiving aid take direct part in distributing the funds allocated for their needs,” he continued. “Whatever criticism one levels at the demands of servicemen’s families,” he continued, “they contain one deep and vital truth: the prerevolutionary order with its principles of bureaucratic tutelage over each and all, and particularly the tutelage of administrative authorities over civic organizations, could not successfully establish proper relations between the guardianships and the families they cared for.” The principle of “charitable tutelage” over the fami­ lies of active duty military has turned out to be completely unacceptable under the new order. Soldiers’ wives and their children are in the eyes of society not simply people on welfare but a special class of people whom the state must aid. Therefore the whole business of helping these people and all war victims as well must be reformed on the basis of new civic principles and transferred to local self-government, [and] reorganized on a demo­ cratic foundation. He proposed immediately bringing representatives of recipients into the governing boards or guardianships, so that they could participate in resolving 58

 “O deiatel´nosti patronata pri 11 gorodskom popechitel´stve o bednykh,” Prizrenie i blagotvoritel´nost´ v Rossii, no. 1–2 (1915): 63–64.

The Phenomenon of the Liberated Soldier’s Wife

321

questions about the distribution of aid.59 Both guardianships and the people under their care demanded reform of the existing system of social assistance, to accord with the general democratic transformation of the government and civic order in the new Russia. An avalanche of appeals from soldiers’ wives rained down on the Pro­ visional Government. Complaints about withholding and improperly distrib­ uting allowances, requests for them or for increases were contained in a third of all “military” petitions.60 If soldiers’ wives had accepted the subsistence allowance as a blessing and favor from the tsar at the beginning of the war, now it was recognized as an inalienable right. The tone of their petitions changed fundamentally. In May 1917, for example, soldiers’ wives in a village in Vladimir province demanded from A. F. Kerenskii that “in light of hunger” a law should immediately be passed giving allowances to the families of “actual soldiers,” that is, active duty soldiers, not those who had been mobilized. The “citizenesses of free Russia” (as they called themselves) demanded pointblank in their petition: “We ask you Mr. General War Minister to pass a law granting allowances or else give us back our husbands and children, and let those whose families receive aid do the fighting.”61 Provincial officials in Eni­ seisk petitioned the Provisional Government in March 1917 for extending assistance to unmarried soldiers’ wives and families; although the “ubiquitous discontent” in the province among these women and children had so far found expression in “vague mutterings,” they feared it would soon become “a movement that threatens public tranquility.”62 Beginning in March 1917 the Ministry of the Interior worked on the ques­ tion of giving the right to allowances to unmarried families and other soldiers’ relatives, which under the old regime had been opposed by the State Council. On 22 June the Provisional Government acceded to the demands of soldiers and their unmarried families, guardianships, civic organizations, soviets, and local authorities, and changed the rules on aid to soldiers’ families to include those unmarried families who had been supported by mobilized soldiers.63 59

 P.B., “K voprosu o neobkhodimykh reformakh,” cols. 60–62.

60

  S. N. Tutolmin, “Pervaia mirovaia voina v krest´ianskikh zhalobakh i prosheniiakh 1914–1917 gg.,” in Chelovek i voina: Istochniki, issledovaniia, retsenzii, ed. S. V. Iarov and V. I. Musaev (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2003), 381–82. 61

 RGIA f. 1292, op. 7, d. 592 (“Po khodataistvam soldat i ikh semei o vydache prodo­ vol´stvennogo posobiia sem´iam soldat, prizvannykh v armiiu”), ll. 38–38ob.

62

 RGIA f. 1929, op. 7, d. 588 (“Postanovleniia i khodataistva mestnykh gubernskikh prisutstvii i sovetov deputatov i prosheniia raznykh lits o vydache prodovol´stvennogo posobiia sem´iam soldat”), ll. 12–13. 63

  Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii pravitel´stva, no. 122 (1917), art. 1019.

322 Liudmila Bulgakova

An unmarried family was not eligible for the allowance if the soldier already had a married wife and family, however. Although far from all unmarried soldiers’ wives could take advantage of this law, the circle of allowance recipi­ ents widened considerably. Despite the government’s readiness to make certain concessions, soldiers’ wives grew increasingly dissatisfied. Even the wives of deserters and soldiers who surrendered without resistance sought the right to receive allowances. A law of 15 April 1915 had deprived the families of such soldiers of the allowance, but the soviets of soldiers’, workers’, and peasants’ deputies came out on their side. “Under the former regime,” their argument went, “soldiers lacked sufficient awareness to carry out their duty and besides, the reasons for surrender, which are generally difficult to establish when fighting is going on, have not been investigated adequately, and soldiers themselves have not taken serious part in establishing many of the facts, as a consequence of which mistakes are often made.” The Ministry of War categorically disagreed.64 Completely innocent children and wives of those who violated military authority went hungry, evoking sympathy from the population and unions of soldiers’ wives, which began to form in the spring of 1917, and in some cases were given aid.65 The numerous petitions and complaints sent to various places, including to “Mr. Citizen Minister” Kerenskii and later to “Mr. Comrade” Lenin, clearly reflect growing disarray in the distribution of state allowances in 1917. “Here and likely all across Russia, state funds are thoroughly plundered through the ostensibly legal distribution of allowances,” six retired soldiers from the village of Nizhnie Kigi in Ufa province complained to Kerenskii in a petition of 19 August. Why are payments given to the relatives of servicemen who do not need outside help because they are well-to-do and provided for? Why are payments given to families of servicemen, many of whom have deserted and live at home, doing regular work, even still in uniform? This is shameful and encourages desertion. Why are payments given to families of those over 40, who did not obey the order to join the army but stayed at home and work? One could point out more cases, but enough. Where is the Ministry of the Interior with its desire to cut back

64

 RGIA f. 1292, op. 7, d. 529 (“Ob izmenenii zakonopolozheniia o vydache prodo­ vol´stvennogo posobiia sem´iam soldat”), ll. 7–7ob.

65

 N. L. Pushkareva and P. P. Shcherbinin, “Organizatsiia prizreniia semei nizhnikh chinov v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny,” Zhurnal issledovanii sotsial´noi politiki 3, 2 (2005): 153–54.

The Phenomenon of the Liberated Soldier’s Wife

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on state expenditures? It and the various comptrollers there obviously do not see the massive plunder going on.66 Many complaints came in about village guardianships, not only from sol­ diers’ wives and parents but also from soldiers themselves, on home leave or discharged from service. Retired soldier Anton Stepanenko informed the All-Russian Soviet Central Executive Committee from the village of NovoBogdanovka in Tauride province of the misallocation of allowances in his village: “There are many who split the money with the village scribe. These people—one of them an elder and another a policeman—do whatever they like, since there are no soldiers in the village.”67 Konstantin Khorez, a soldier on leave from the village of Dorozhaev in Tver´ province complained to the Petrograd Soviet about negligence, chaos, and disarray in the district guar­ dianship, which “does not pay enough attention to investigating and, it is ob­ vious, makes up how it gives out payments,” following local customs and ignoring the level of need. “Comrades,” the soldier asked, “where is justice, where is God, when it is obvious that people who have reached positions of power immediately oppress the poor laboring peasant.“68 The vocabulary of complainants became richer, with denunciations of “persons of the old regime” and “internal enemies.” The categorical demand for an increase in allowance was the most wide­ spread. A typical example of the changed character of appeals to authorities is a resolution adopted on 14 August at a meeting of soldiers’ wives in Matveev­ skaia township in Tver´ province. Addressing the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet, they warned: “In the future, if payments are given out in the old way or we are informed that … our resolution is not satisfied, we will demand and ask of our husbands: ‘down with the war.’ We in addi­ tion pledge to track down and denounce all deserters in general, so that they do not receive allowances improperly.”69 To confirm the seriousness of their intentions the soldiers’ wives filled more than four pages with their signatures, mainly in the form of various scribbles. Civic committees, frontline organizations, and local authorities, who at their end attested to the critical situation of soldiers’ families, supported soldiers’ wives’ demands. The Economic Section of the Commission for Army Reform, reviewing the allowances question at a meeting on 2 June, agreed on the necessity of increasing allowances: “rising prices require a sympathetic 66

 RGIA f. 1292, op. 7, d. 592, ll. 77–78ob.

67

 Ibid., ll. 87–87ob. (17 October 1917).

68

 Ibid., ll. 88–89 (31 October 1917).

69

 Ibid., ll. 69–71.

324 Liudmila Bulgakova

attitude toward this question.” A letter accompanying materials about the allowance sent in late June from the War Minister’s Cabinet to the Main Ad­ ministration for the Local Economy of the Ministry of the Interior stated: “A great deal of information comes to the Cabinet daily about this matter, and it is one of those that upsets the army the most.”70 A Ministry of the Interior committee established on 29 May 1917 to review existing legislation on the distribution of allowances allowed delegates of soldiers’ wives from Petrograd, Kazan´, Kostroma, and Arkhangel´sk to join its meetings and present their demands.71 Although discussions of amendments to the legislation on allowances dragged on, it proved possible for the different sides to agree on some questions. For example, in discussions about allowances for soldiers’ parents and grandparents, all agreed without reservation that men older than 55 and women older than 50 were unconditionally to be considered unable to work. The committee’s recommendations were submitted to the appropriate departments for their conclusions, and then reviewed again at the Ministry of the Interior on 23–24 August and on 7 September at a meeting of ministry representatives, representing the state treasury’s interests, and delegates from the All-Russian Executive Committee of Soldiers’ and Workers’ Soviets and the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies, representing the interests of soldiers’ families. Despite existing disagreements, the meeting found it necessary, in light of the democratic reforms underway in municipal and local government and the creation of a township-level zemstvo in particular,72 to bring representatives of soldiers’ families and delegates of local soviets into the guardianships and allowance offices.73 Such efforts to bring soldiers’ wives into the work of guardianships and local governments were not successful. The time to realize the Provisional Government’s starry-eyed plans had already passed. Old government and civic structures were collapsing and new ones were only just being created. But the very fact that delegates of soldiers’ wives participated in them demonstrates the emergence of hotbeds of organized struggle among women for their rights. The bankruptcy of the Provisional Government became obvious. Allowances to soldiers’ families represented a fundamental part of all state expenses. While the allowance on average was 2–3 rubles per person at the beginning of the war and 15 million rubles a month went to allowances, in September 1917 the allowance was 10–15 rubles, the number of recipients ex70

 Ibid., ll. 31–32.

71

 Bulgakova, “Privilegirovannye bedniaki,” 466–76.

72 73

  Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii pravitel´stva, no. 182 (1917), art. 655.

 RGIA f. 1292, op. 7, d. 529, ll. 6ob.–7.

The Phenomenon of the Liberated Soldier’s Wife

325

ceeded 37 million persons, and 323 million rubles a month were needed to pay allowances. According to the Ministry of the Interior 3.265 billion rubles were spent on allowances alone during the war. More than 430 million rubles a month, according to preliminary estimates, or more than 5 billion rubles a year, would be needed to continue paying allowances.74 Banknotes issued by the Provisional Government rapidly lost their value, and inflation outstripped ministry estimates, but the Provisional Government still tried to its final days to fulfill the tsarist government’s obligations to soldiers’ families. Delays in allowance payments, along with the reduction of charitable aid in the face of unstoppable rises in prices and the ruble’s falling purchasing power, turned soldiers’ wives into a menacing force. The soviets of soldiers’, workers’ and peasants’ deputies also had a revolutionary effect on soldiers’ wives. Their meetings, protest demonstrations, collective appeals to authorities, and disturbances became everyday phenomena. Reports of their discontent and unrest came in from all over the country.75 “Women’s riots” turned into a general wave of protest. Some guardianships were forced to capitulate under pressure from enraged elements: some threw off their responsibilities, others tried to bring in representatives of soldiers’ wives, still others unsuc­ cessfully called for help from the center. On 7 November A. Guteev, chairman of the Pogorel´tsevskaia township administration in Tver´ province, addressed the new government, asking it to satisfy soldiers’ wives’ demands quickly, “otherwise local organizations will be subjected to violent threats of popular punishment.”76 Declarations by soldiers’ wives erased the border between freedom and license, equality and leveling, fairness and legality. Self-government turned into arbitrary rule, which led to the presentation to the government of ultimatums with unrealizable demands and to robbers’ tactics along the lines of “grab and divide.” The first act taken by Soviet power toward soldiers’ wives was a call issued by the Council of People’s Commissars on 18 November 1917, which noted that “some local soviets are resolving the question of allowances in a revolutionary manner, by confiscating money from the rich to pay allowances to soldiers’ wives.” Expressing complete sympathy with this approach, the Soviet government reminded citizens that “in the struggle against malfeasance and avarice on the part of the bourgeoisie, only spontaneous revolutionary action and revolutionary initiative by local

74

 Ibid., ll. 1ob., 20.

75

 Bulgakova, “Polozhenie soldatskikh semeistv v 1917 godu (Po materialam pravi­ tel´stvennoi korrespondentsii,” in Noveishaia istoriia Otechestva XX–XXI veka, vyp. 2 (Saratov: Nauka, 2007), 70–88.

76

 RGIA f. 1292, op. 7, d. 529, ll. 85–86ob.

326 Liudmila Bulgakova

soviets are capable of solving this painful question.”77 In effect this was an open call for plunder and force. The Russian home front was heterogeneous and crumbled easily. It was weakened by the internal contradictions rending the country, declining au­ thority, violent political struggle, growing economic difficulties and social tension, and finally people’s exhaustion from living in wartime conditions. Soldiers’ wives were not only the largest and most costly “object of welfare” at the rear, but also an able-bodied if not always reliable home-front army. Like their husbands, soldiers’ wives poorly understood why Russia was fighting, and did not think about Constantinople, the Bosporus and Dardanelles. Jingo­ istic slogans found no response among them, but this did not mean that they did not love their motherland. Women wanted the soonest possible return to peacetime life, and worried most of all about their daily survival and that of their children. They ended up willy-nilly on the left wing of the home front in the economic demands they presented to authorities, and in 1917 they began to display an element of political activism. Spontaneous actions by soldiers’ wives turned into organized struggle, but due to their dispersion across the empire’s vast expanses this organization was local in character. As a war unexampled in history continued for a fourth year, millions of soldiers’ families lived in poverty. With the mass impoverishment of the population, subsistence aid acquired enormous significance. The destruction of the state doomed many of them to death by hunger. Translated by Adele Lindenmeyr

77

 Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii rabochego i krest´ianskogo pravitel´stva, no. 3 (1917), art. 39.

Germans in Russia during World War I Reinhard Nachtigal

Tsarist Russia was a multiethnic empire in which Germans of various social classes and educational backgrounds had found their place. Many Russian Germans made their fortune in Russia, not least because of a series of privileges granted to them since the 18th century. As Russian nationalism grew in the second half of the 19th century, however, some members of Russian society became increasingly concerned about the dominance of Germans in Russia as well as the power of Germany, particularly after the German Empire was founded in 1871. These factors influenced the ways Germans were treated in Russia during World War I. Both the Russian government and elites were swept up by the patriotic mood during the early stage of the war, the result of which was partly to deprive Russian Germans of their rights. This article investigates the anti-German policies adopted during the war, the responses of Russian Germans to them in their effort to preserve their fortune and lives, and the reasons why some eventually looked to Germany for protection. On the eve of World War I around two million people of German ethnicity or descent lived in the Russian Empire.1 They originated from Germanspeaking territories in Central Europe, Switzerland, Alsace, and Austria. Ger­ man Russians shared a few common features, the most important of which was language, although the existence of distinctive dialects had rather the effect of dividing them. Perhaps the most common feature was their Protestant religion. The majority of Germans in Russia were of the Lutheran faith, which was ad­ ministered by a German-dominated General Consistory in St. Petersburg, a separate section within the Ministry of the Interior. There were small, though not negligible, populations of Roman Catholics, Reformists, Mennonites, 1

 In 1914 large agglomerations of Germans were to be found in the Baltic provinces (170,000), a few larger towns (altogether some 120,000), Ukraine (600,000), Russian Poland (450,000), and the territories of the middle Volga (350,000). Smaller populations could be found in western Siberia (60,000), the Don Cossack territory (35,000), and the Caucasus (40,000). These figures are based on the 1897 census. See Demoskop Weekly, http://demoscope.ru/weekly/pril.php (accessed 14 May 2012). Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 327–42.

328 Reinhard Nachtigal

and a few other Christian sectarian groups of German background as well. Some Germans converted to Russian Orthodoxy. While the great majority of people of German ethnicity in the empire were subjects of the tsar, some 200,000 German subjects and around 80,000 Austro-Hungarian subjects lived in Russia on the eve of World War I.2 Swiss subjects made up a large part of the Reformed branch, together with the few Dutch and French living in Rus­ sia. Russian Germans tended to define themselves and their interests more by social estate, religious affiliation, and material situation than by ethnicity. National consciousness was largely absent among them until the last decades of the 19th century. To a significant degree cultural nationalism and a political orientation towards Germany were instigated by the rising Russian nation­ alism of that time. Russian Germans generally belonged to three different socioeconomic groups. The largest group consisted of farmer-colonists who had migrated to Russia mostly from the southern German territories beginning in the 18th century. Compared to the German colonists, the two other main groups in the Russian German population—urban dwellers and Baltic Germans—were much less numerous but economically and politically more influential. On the eve of World War I, some 120,000 Germans lived in Russia’s two capitals as well as in a few other large cities like Odessa, Saratov, and Kiev.3 They came primarily from northern Germany, and provided many of the technical and scientific intelligentsia in Russia. The universities in Halle, Göttingen, Leipzig, and Berlin had long-standing links with Russia in general, and with the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg in particular. The social and economic diversity of urban Russian Germans was particularly marked in St. Petersburg, where they were part of the technical and administrative intelligentsia. Although their social and professional diversity had increased over two centuries, this did not weaken the German community of Petersburg as a whole, neither in a political nor in an ethnic-cultural sense. On the contrary, diversification in academic and technical professions enhanced their influence all over the empire. This diversification eventually came to be perceived by Russians as one factor contributing to growing German predominance (germanskoe or nemetskoe zasilie) in the empire. German cultural life, concentrated in professional unions, clubs, and social organizations, boomed in Petersburg before 1914, while in Moscow the German community tended to 2  Elsa Brändström, Unter Kriegsgefangenen in Russland und Sibirien 1914–1920, 6th ed. (Leipzig: Köhler & Amelang, c. 1927), 119. Translated into English by C. Mabel Rick­ mers as Among Prisoners of War in Russia and Siberia (London: Hutchinson, c. 1929). 3

 Victor Dönninghaus, Die Deutschen in der Moskauer Gesellschaft: Symbiose und Konflikte (1494–1941) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2002), 472; and Demoskop Weekly, http://demoscope.ru/ weekly/pril.php (accessed 14 May 2012).

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congregate around the Lutheran and Reformed churches.4 The upper classes of the Russian-German community in the two capitals, together with the Baltic Germans, supplied many of the empire’s senior civil servants and military leadership. Large parts of the Russian ministerial leadership had been recruited from Russian Germans, though the trend slackened in the decades before 1914.5 Still, the realms of Russian foreign policy, the military hierarchy, and the sanitary-medical administration showed a strong presence of Russians of German descent well into World War I. The third group consisted of some 170,000 Baltic Germans living in the provinces of Estonia, Livonia, and Courland. Only a few of them descended from the native landed gentry. These “Baltic barons” were joined by a thin German burgher population in the towns, themselves forming the upper and middle classes of burghers (or patricians in a few larger towns like Riga and Tallinn), German employees on noble estates, and German farmers. More than their conationals within Russia proper, the Baltic Germans lived apart from German colonists or Russians, with their intelligentsia looking to Germany rather than to Petersburg or Moscow. Unlike the two other groups, they perceived themselves not as Russian Germans but as “Balts.” Until World War I they lived in a kind of dual “apartheid”: ethnically apart from the indigenous Estonians and Latvians, and politically apart by virtue of defending their privileges against Russian central authorities and their efforts to extend their influence in the Baltic provinces. The empire’s two million Russian Germans were professionally estab­ lished and well-to-do, or at least had some prospects of a promising future in the empire, especially as it experienced rapid economic and industrial

4  There is an abundance of German and Russian studies on German associations and educational institutions in St. Petersburg and Moscow. See, e.g., the contributions of Margarete Busch, Ralph Tuchtenhagen, and others in Nordost-Archiv 3, 1 (1994). 5

 Historical studies suggest that some 15 to 20 percent of the Russian officer corps and senior ministerial ranks were composed of persons with either German family names or of the Lutheran religion, which is commonly equated with being of German descent. See Ingeborg Fleischhauer, Die Deutschen im Zarenreich: Zwei Jahrhunderte deutsch-russischer Kulturgemeinschaft (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1986), 461, and Alexander A. Melenberg, “Deutsche in der russischen Armee vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Der Beitrag der Deutschbalten und der städtischen Russlanddeutschen zur Entwicklung des Russischen Reiches 1850–1917, ed. Boris Meissner and Alfred Eisfeld (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1999), 65–84. A thorough proof of this fact is the reference book by Erik Amburger, Geschichte der Behördenorganisation Russlands von Peter dem Grossen bis 1917 (Leiden: Brill, 1966).

330 Reinhard Nachtigal

development.6 This also applies to the rural colonists, though factors such as population growth and fluctuating harvests placed pressure on their com­ munities. The prosperous German colonies in Ukraine had to cope with a population surplus, for example, while some of the Germans in the droughtprone Volga region found it difficult to earn a living. Some migrated to Siberia or Central Asia, and others chose to emigrate to Germany or America. Industrial and capitalist expansion scattered many of the Germans all over the empire, thus loosening social and religious ties with their mother commu­ nities, and sometimes weakening their cultural identity. At the same time industrial development fostered international economic and commercial rela­ tions, particularly with Germany. Thus in the last decades before World War I, in addition to their common religion and language a third element of “German identity” came to feature among Russian Germans, namely economic ties with Central Europe. With the outbreak of war in August 1914 Russian Germans, like Germans in other belligerent countries, were subjected to discriminatory laws and hos­ tile propaganda, even though the great majority were loyal Russian subjects.7 The government embarked on a shortsighted policy of issuing decrees, thus circumventing the legislative process. The first target of the anti-German decrees were subjects of the Central Powers living in Russia. In anticipation of a quick victory over the Central Powers, the restrictions imposed on enemy aliens in the early stage of the war were rather mild, but they gradually became harsher during the course of the war, especially as it went unsuccessfully for Russia. On 10 August 1914 all treaty-based privileges for subjects of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, mostly relating to economic ar­ rangements, were cancelled. In October enemy aliens were prohibited from acquiring or exploiting estates, and a month later all kinds of transfers of money and valuables abroad to Germany or Austria-Hungary were restricted,

6

 Dittmar Dahlmann and Carmen Scheide, eds., “… das einzige Land in Europa, das eine grosse Zukunft vor sich hat”: Deutsche Unternehmen und Unternehmer im Russischen Reich im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Essen: Klartext, 1998). 7

 There are few comparative studies on the internment of enemy aliens in belligerent countries of World War I. They include Panikos Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst: Germans in Britain during the First World War (New York: Berg, 1991); Matthew Stibbe, “Civilian Internment and Civilian Internees in Europe, 1914–20,” in “Captivity, Forced Labour and Forced Migration during the First World War,” ed. Stibbe, special issue, Immigrants and Minorities 26, 1–2 (2008): 49–81; and the articles in Alfred Eisfeld, Guido Hausmann, and Dietmar Neutatz, eds., Besetzt, interniert, deportiert: Der Erste Weltkrieg und die Zivilbevölkerung im östlichen Europa unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Deutschen, Juden und Polen (Essen: Klartext, 2012).

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which eventually disrupted commercial ties with these countries.8 Although enemy aliens were required to register, until spring 1915 they were allowed to stay in the places where they lived in Russia. But soon governmental decrees, mostly launched by the military leadership, targeted male enemy aliens who were liable to military service in their home countries for forced migration from their homes in the empire’s western provinces. They were joined during the course of 1915 not only by women, children, and elderly men who were enemy aliens, but also Germans and Austrians who held Russian citizenship. In addition, some 15,000 German subjects were deported from Eastern Prussia, which was occupied by Russian troops in the autumn and winter of 1914–15. The destinations for the forced migration of Germans in 1915 and 1916 were mainly Vyatka and Vologda in Northern Russia, Orenburg, Ufa and Perm´ in the southern Urals, and Siberia.9 Another target was the use of the German language, which was prohibited in public places in Russia immediately after the outbreak of the war. This generally affected large towns and their German-speaking communities. In particular, the prohibition impinged on church services and the operations

8

 Elena G. Boldina, “Deutsche Unternehmer während des Ersten Weltkrieges in Moskau anhand von Dokumenten des Zentralarchivs für die Geschichte der Stadt Moskau,” in Deutsche in Russland und in der Sowjetunion 1914–1941, ed. Alfred Eisfeld, Victor Herdt, and Boris Meissner (Berlin: LIT, 2007), 40–50. 9  The complex of wartime forced migrations of Germans (as well as even fartherreaching projects of wholesale forced migration of all Russian Germans) is scrutinized in articles by Sergei Nelipovich, including “Repressii protiv poddannykh ‘Tsentral´­ nykh derzhav’: Deportatsii v Rossii 1914–1918 gg.,” Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 6 (1996): 32–42; “Rol´ voennogo rukovodstva Rossii v ‘nemetskom voprose’ v gody Per­ voi mirovoi voiny 1914–1917,” in Rossiiskie nemtsy: Problemy istorii, iazyka i sovremennogo polozheniia. Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii. Anapa, 20–25 sentiabria 1995 g., ed. Igor V. Plehwe (Moscow: Gotika, 1996), 262–83, published in German as “Die Politik der militärpolitischen Führung Russlands gegenüber den Deutschen während des Ersten Weltkrieges 1914–1918,” in Eisfeld, Herdt, and Meissner, Deutsche in Russland und in der Sowjetunion, 106–26; “V poiskakh ‘vnutrennego vraga’: Deportatsionnaia politika Rossii (1914–1917),” in Pervaia mirovaia voina i uchastie v nei Rossii (1914–1918) (Moscow: Gotika,1994), 1: 51–64; and “General ot infanterii N. N. Ianushkevich: ‘Nemetskuiu pakost´’ uvolit´ i bez nezhnostei. Deportatsii v Rossii 1914–1918 gg.,” Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 1 (1997): 42–53. See also Serena Tiepolato, “‘…und nun waren wir auch Verbannte. Warum? Weshalb?’ Deportate prussiane in Russia 1914– 1918,” in Deportate, esuli, profughe: Rivista telematica di studi sulla memoria femminile 1 (2004): 59–85; and Tiepolato, “L’internamento di civili prussiani in Russia (1914–1920),” in La violenza contro la popolazione civile nella grande guerra: Deportati, profughi, internati, ed. Bruna Bianchi (Milan: Unicopli, 2006).

332 Reinhard Nachtigal

of German cultural and social associations.10 Many German societies, includ­ ing some in Petrograd and Moscow that had existed for a long time, were forced to dissolve in the months after the beginning of the war. German newspapers and periodicals, including one of oldest periodicals in Russia, the St. Petersburger Zeitung (St. Petersburg News), which had been published since 1727, were shut down early in 1915.11 Owing to their remoteness from direct state control, colonists living in the countryside were much less affected by the prohibition of the German language, despite the fact that many of them did not know Russian but only German. The decree against German hardly affected the Baltic Germans, who to a large degree remained the masters in their non-Russian environment until 1917, though a few of them were exiled to towns in the interior. In spite of increasing legal restrictions, some 300,000 Russian Germans were called up into the Russian army during the war, 250,000 of them colonists. Ethnic discrimination generally did not occur in the army, which itself was a multiethnic organization. But distrust of Germans in the ranks evolved fairly early among the higher leadership, which presumed or suspected divided loyalties among soldiers of German descent. By 1915 almost all Russian German soldiers had been transferred to the Caucasian front to face the Ottoman army.12 A solution was also found for several thousand pacifist German Mennonites who were liable for military service in the Russian army, according to which these men were sent to serve in medical-sanitary units of the army and later to forest labor units.13 Around 30,000 Germans in Russian Poland and western Volhynia, which were occupied by German and Austrian troops in summer 1915, ended up in Germany. Another 20,000 to 30,000 Russian soldiers of German descent found themselves in German and Austrian 10

 Dönninghaus, Die Deutschen, 227–363. Teaching in German schools was prohibited only later, in summer 1916; Vladimir A. Auman and Valentina G. Chebotareva, eds., Istoriia rossiiskikh nemtsev v dokumentakh (1763–1992 gg.) (Moscow: Ekonomicheskii zhurnal, 1993), 1: 47. 11

 S. V. Smirnitskaia, “Nemetskoiazychnaia pressa v Rossii,” in Nemtsy Rossii: Problemy kul´turnogo vzaimodeistviia, ed. Liudmila V. Slavgorodskaia et al. (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1998), 211–14. 12

 Fleischhauer, Die Deutschen im Zarenreich, 469–75; and Sergei Nelipovich, “Istoch­ niki po istorii nemetskikh kolonistov Rossii v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny,” in Plehwe, Rossiiskie nemtsy, 106–17. Between October 1914 and 1916, over 32,000 Volga colonists were sent to the Caucasian Military District. On anti-German propaganda as perceived by Russian soldiers, see Olga Porshneva, “[The] Image of the German Enemy as Per­ ceived by Russian Army Soldiers during World War I,” in Quaestio Rossica, no. 1 (2014): 79–93. 13

 Fleischhauer, Die Deutschen im Zarenreich, 475–78.

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captivity, where they were singled out for privileged treatment, including later settlement in Germany.14 In short, the war initiated the dispersion of large segments of the Russian German population across the empire. The outbreak of war aroused widespread suspicion and hostility toward anyone believed to be German. “Spy mania” was a major problem in Russia during World War I, contributing in some degree to the collapse of the empire.15 Interest groups such as industrialists, entrepreneurs, merchants, and the Orthodox Church, which encouraged the anti-German mood of the masses, were also motivated at least in part by a desire to eliminate German competition and influence. Although according to Hubertus F. Jahn the Rus­ sian state disapproved of Russian nationalist organizations that operated in­ dependent of state control, it not only allowed anti-German demonstrations and bullying through the media but yielded to pressure from these interest groups.16 In early August 1914 a street mob damaged the German embassy in central St. Petersburg, literally under the eyes of the Russian government and the police. A German diplomat lost his life, and the embassy remained closed for most of the war. The Austro-Hungarian embassy, situated on an inconspicuous side street, was closed as well. German shops in the capital were damaged and closed down. Also in August, St. Petersburg received the new, Russian-sounding name “Petrograd,” and the names of a few other towns bearing non-Russian names were changed as well. Russian Germans in Petrograd came under particularly rigorous surveillance and did not dare speak up or act on their own behalf during the war. In Moscow a full-scale pogrom against German, Jewish, and foreign shops, enterprises, and individuals erupted in May 1915. There is no discernible link to the anti-German pogroms in England at the same time, which were a reaction to the sinking of the Lusitania.17 The Moscow pogrom attracted par­ ticular attention because some five persons died at the hands of the lumpenproletariat, who used the opportunity to pillage shops, apartments, and busi­ nesses, and not only ones belonging to Germans. Again, this incident took 14

 Ibid., 470, 474–75. Karl Auerbach, “Die russischen Kriegsgefangenen in Deutsch­ land” (Ph.D. diss., University of Potsdam, 1973), 147; and Klaus J. Bade and Jochen Oltmer, eds., Aussiedler: Deutsche Einwanderer aus Osteuropa (Osnabrück: Rasch, 1999), 12–13.

15

 See William C. Fuller, Jr., The Foe Within: Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 16

 Hubertus F. Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). The author chose the formula “patriotic culture,” as it stirred up the most diverse and even antagonistic groups and classes of the empire.

17

 Panikos Panayi, “Anti-German Riots in London, 1914–1918,” German History 7, 2 (1989): 184–203.

334 Reinhard Nachtigal

place under the eyes of local authorities, who afterwards were reproached by the government for having allowed the riots to continue for a couple of days without interfering.18 The political damage for Russia may have been as large as the material destruction, since proprietors from such neutral countries as Sweden, Denmark, and the United States and even the Allies suffered damage during the Moscow pogrom. Anti-German pogroms occurred in late spring 1915 in other Russian towns as well, inspired by the beginning of the Russian army’s Great Retreat in the face of a broad, successful offensive by the Central Powers. Moreover, as in the tumultuous year 1905, the Jewish population was severely affected, which alarmed Jews in the United States and in Britain, who called upon their governments to protest sharply against Russian antiSemitism. Another effect of the pogroms was to discourage Russian Germans from speaking up for two more years of the war. Russian Germanophobia reflected a historical hierarchy. Baltic Germans had been hated and opposed by the Russian intelligentsia and the political right at least since the reign of Tsar Alexander II (1855–81), as they were con­ sidered to be the social and intellectual group that most successfully avoided russification. Nevertheless, until the fall of the monarchy they remained tightly integrated into the state machinery. During the war, public opinion perceived not only Baltic Germans but all high-ranking civil servants of German descent, or with German-sounding names, as well as the tsar’s entourage itself, as representing a German camarilla acting against Russian national interests. In addition, some of the grand dukes in high state offices were practically of German blood, not to speak of their German-born wives. Next in the hierarchy of popular suspicion came German merchants and in­ dustrialists, who often faced sheer envy from their Russian competitors and the many have-nots. A German law on Reich citizenship issued in July 1913 had already been perceived by Russians as a tricky device enabling Germans in Russia to obtain dual citizenship that would allow them to “buy up Russia.”19 German colonists ranked last, although their land eventually became slated for confiscation.20 The expropriation of land and other property and deportation of Russian Germans began in February 1915 with a law aimed at the land of German 18

 Dönninghaus, Die Deutschen, 373–467, is the most thorough study of the Moscow pogrom.

19

 Ibid., 368.

20  Sonja Striegnitz, “Der Weltkrieg und die Wolgakolonisten: Die Regierungspolitik und die Tendenzen der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung,” in Zwischen Reform und Revolution: Die Deutschen an der Wolga 1860–1917, ed. Dittmar Dahlmann and Ralph Tuchtenhagen (Essen: Klartext, 1994), 134–46.

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settlers “close to the war theater” or within a range of 150 versts from the western borders. As the legislation could no longer be applied to Germans living in Russian Poland due to the Russian retreat in summer 1915, the first victims were some 200,000 Germans in the western Ukrainian province of Volhynia, who were deported to the Russian interior, many of them to Siberia. Confiscation started in other parts of European Russia the same year, although the Germans of Bessarabia and southern Ukraine were mostly left untouched; for a time they evaded confiscation because of the convincing argument that those parts of the country were vital to the nation’s food supply, and thus for the war effort.21 The same consideration applied to other provinces of the Black Earth Belt as well, where land confiscation seems to have been implemented only to a small extent and, even more characteristically, wholly unsystematically.22 The policy of land confiscation represented a concession by the govern­ ment to the hyperpatriotic, anti-German popular mood, engendered even before the war began by fears of German predominance in Russian economic and public life. Although conservative elites in the government were also nationalistically inclined, they were reluctant to approve such policies, be­ cause they well understood that the expropriation of property, which contra­ dicted both national law and international legal custom, might return as a devastating boomerang. Perhaps it was due to the influence of the old elites, among whom there were still enough Germans or other persons with Ger­ man ties, that the process of confiscation was slowed or even delayed. The confiscation decrees were amended in December 1915 to exempt Russian Ger­ mans from expropriation if they met the following conditions: if they had taken Russian citizenship before January 1880; if they or their sons were officers in the Russian army or had volunteered for military service after the beginning of the war; or if they were Russian soldiers who had received military decorations, were wounded, or died in combat. In the latter case their families were to be left untouched. Sometimes the fact of whether a German had been baptized Russian Orthodox, or had converted to Orthodoxy before the war, played a decisive role in determining what happened to his land. All borderland provinces were included in the expropriation program. In 1916 confiscation legislation was intensified, and all land owned by Russian Germans in the empire was designated for expropriation. These projects were 21

 See the recent Ukrainian study on land confiscation in southern Ukraine by Aleksandr N. Kadol, “Antinemetskaia kampaniia v Rossiiskoi imperii 1914–1917 godov: Regional´nyi aspekt” (Doctoral diss., Dnipropetrovs´kiy natsional´niy univer­ sitet imeni Olesia Gonchara, 2013).

22

 This is the finding of a regional study for the Don Cossack territory. Reinhard Nachtigal, Die Dondeutschen 1830–1930 (Augsburg: Waldemar Weber, 2005), 147–50.

336 Reinhard Nachtigal

not only not carried out, however, in practice they were even ruled out, because at that time it became clear that without the effective and modern agricultural production of German colonists Russia risked agricultural shortages which could cause social unrest. Nevertheless, the government continued to issue decrees against German-owned land, extending expropriations in autumn 1916 and February 1917 into the internal parts of Russia. Shortly before the February Revolution all land owned by Russian Germans was intended for confiscation. It is estimated that of the 3 million or so desiatins held by German owners in Russia, some 500,000 to 600,000 had been expropriated by 1917.23 The extraordinary anti-German laws were largely a result of the severe setbacks experienced by the Russian army on the front and ever increasing problems in the interior, including food and fuel shortages and war-weariness. The plans for expropriation of 1916–17, though never fully implemented, pre­ saged the far-reaching plans for forced migration and ethnic cleansing that were introduced some 25 years later during World War II.24 Confiscation decrees affected not only landowners but also urban Russian German industrialists and traders. Although some large enterprises were actually nationalized, again the results of the legislation were ambiguous. Some German owners resorted to legal tricks to evade or resist expropriation, by selling their enterprises to Russian business partners, often straw men, or defending their Russian citizenship. There were Germans who resorted to donating their property for humanitarian purposes, hoping to regain some of it after the war. This was the case with the owner of a small-scale electronic workshop in Moscow, a German subject. He “invested” his money in care for invalid and wounded Russian soldiers and POWs by providing accommodations as well as crutches, bandages, sunglasses, etc., at a time when the Russian military lacked the funding to care for and equip its own troops. When he returned to Germany in August 1915, the German and Aus­ trian governments reimbursed him for the loss of his property.25 Since many German-owned enterprises were vital to the war effort, they were not closed down and German employers and directors continued to run the firms. German industrialists and merchants had been well integrated in Russian 23

 Fleischhauer, Die Deutschen im Zarenreich, 523.

24

 See the works by Sergei Nelipovich cited in n. 12, as well as Bakyt Alicheva-Himy, Les Allemands des steppes: Histoire d’une minorité de l’Empire russe à la CEI (Berne: P. Lang, 2005), 107–10. Both authors find a striking similary between the forced migration plans of 1916–17 and those of 1941, although that of 1917 did not materialize owing to the February Revolution.

25

 R. Nachtigal, “Beistand für Kriegsgefangene in Russland 1914–1918: Die Moskauer Deutschen,” in Eisfeld, Herdt, and Meissner, Deutsche in Russland und in der Sowjetunion 1914–1941, 62–84: and Dönninghaus, Die Deutschen, 500–03.

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economic life long before the war, or they were closely linked with the ad­ ministrative or municipal authorities, which enabled them to learn early of any expropriation laws planned by the government. So they had more op­ portunity to take countermeasures in time than did German farmers, who were often isolated from important news. It has to be added, however, that Moscow’s Russian merchants generally welcomed anti-German restrictions and even urged additional discriminatory measures in order to get rid of potential rivals. Moscow traders may be seen as the vanguard in the economic war against Germany in particular, although in 1916 many of them, as well as officials in the Ministry of Industry and Trade and the Ministry of Finance, came to realize the severe disadvantages of pushing out German expertise and partnership in trade. It was not only German-owned enterprises that were affected by war legislation but Russian firms with German or Austrian employees as well. They had to register and report all their enemy alien employees. The dismissal of such personnel, particularly technical experts and managerial employees, was also planned, but this measure was among those which failed to take hold; most of the enterprises were heavily dependent on their foreign experts, and Russian substitutes were difficult to find. Nevertheless, the months after the Moscow pogroms saw a large-scale forced migration of German and Austrian enemy aliens from the city to the interior of the country. At the same time enterprises had to accept Russian government inspectors who functioned as directors, and German property was sequestered and put up for public auction. It may well be that Moscow was the place where the expropriation of German property and its sale to Russians happened most often, in comparison to the Donets Basin, for example, where foreigners of various Western countries also played a major role in industry. In Moscow, where German-held firms and enterprises were concentrated, “liquidation” decrees indeed had their effect, even with such persons who had been Russian subjects long before the war.26 The vacillating policies toward expropriation are demonstrated by the recommendations of a “Special Committee to Combat German Dominance,” created by the Duma in August 1915. The committee’s recommendations as well as those of the entire Duma often included calls to delay or suspend severe expropriation measures against Germans, since they correctly perceived that such measures could damage the Russian war effort. Most of the German col­ onists, who had not yet been expropriated, were allowed to till their land until the end of the war. This trend did not wholly stop expropriation in 1916, but it was reduced and slackened. Strangely enough, many Russians who had called for the expropriation of their German rivals soon complained about the lack 26

 Dönninghaus, Die Deutschen, 506–16.

338 Reinhard Nachtigal

of equally good Russian products. During 1916 and 1917 Russian economic and financial circles, including relevant ministries, underwent a thorough process of reorientation: whereas in 1914 and 1915 Russian economic and in­ dustrialist circles hailed the military as well as the financial and industrial alliance with Britain and France, by 1916 it became ever more clear that neither of them was able to fully substitute for the decades-long German economic presence in Russia, though Russian industry and commerce gladly accepted financial support by the Western allies until 1917–18. The Russian campaign against “German dominance” evolved from an economic war in 1914 and 1915 into a careful consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of antiGerman measures and the Western alliance in 1916. The ministerial hierarchy became conscious of the danger of economic overdependence on Britain or France; the economic and financial resources of Germany came to be seen as a potential counterbalancing factor by which the Russian economy would be less dependent on British banks after the war.27 The restrictions imposed on Russian Germans in towns and in the government caused many of them to deny their German roots, russify their German names, or even convert to Orthodoxy. Some of them turned into “more than Russian” Russians. The response to anti-German policies was less pronounced among the colonists living in rural Russia or Baltic Germans, as long as the latter were not closely affiliated with the Russian state or noble families, or with Germans in the military, particularly frontline troops and the officer corps. For a long time during the war Baltic Germans seemed to be the least affected by Germanophobia. Owing to their close and long estab­ lished affiliation with the imperial political elite, as well as with their peers in the Russian aristocracy, they had less to fear for their property. To be sure, as early as the summer of 1914 a governor general was appointed for the Baltic provinces to oversee the loyalty of the non-Russian peoples there. A few Germans were deported from the Baltic provinces, but due to their political influence they usually ended up not in Siberia but in Moscow and other towns of European Russia. The problem the elitist Baltic Germans had to face was of an existential, psychological nature, completely different from that of their co-nationals, the farmer-colonists and urban Germans. After having served the Russian 27

 This remains a neglected aspect of Russian history during World War I. For the reorientation of Russian economic elites, see Keith Neilson, Strategy and Supply: The Anglo-Russian Alliance, 1914–1917 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984); and K. Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar: British Policy and Russia, 1894–1917 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Horst-Günther Linke, Das zarische Russland und der Erste Weltkrieg: Diplomatie und Kriegsziele 1914–1917 (Munich: W. Fink, 1982), 61–98; and Rainkhard Nakhtigal´ [Reinhard Nachtigal], Murmanskaia zheleznaia doroga 1915–1919 gody: Voennaia neob­ khodimost´ i ekonomicheskie soobrazheniia (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2012), 223–56.

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tsars for 200 years as military officers and senior civil servants, the Baltic Germans came to doubt the tsar’s commitment to preserving their traditional privileges. When Russia, and with her the ruling dynasty, started to play nationalist tunes in order to promote the war effort among the masses, Baltic Germans experienced a severe “loyalty crisis.” The war eventually alienated the Baltic Germans from the Russian Empire and the Romanov dynasty they had served, and they began ardently to consider annexation by Germany.28 



The February Revolution of 1917 initially brought relief for Russian Germans, who had been increasingly harassed by tsarist legislation and war plans directed against “internal enemies.” Although there is no evidence that ex­ propriated Germans received any compensation under the democratic Provi­ sional Government, confiscations were brought to a halt, a final decision on land liquidation was postponed, and the policy of expropriation was eventually cancelled.29 All Russian Germans now enjoyed full civil rights, as did other non-Slavic minorities such as Jews, who had also been targets of discrimination from the start of the war.30 The Provisional Government rescinded the tsarist prohibition against the use of the German language, and Germans were now allowed to conduct their church services and meetings in their vernacular. The relief provided by the new measures was general for all groups of Germans and non-Slavic minorities; even German and Austrian subjects were now allowed to apply for their repatriation. Russian Germans took full advantage of the freedom inaugurated by the February Revolution to begin the formulation of their political goals. During the few months of the Provisional Government’s existence a large variety of social and political associations and groups emerged, representing many fea­ tures of public life. Among them were the Russian Germans. The country’s Lutheran church organization took the first steps to reorganize itself, because it too had been harassed by the tsarist government. After the February Rev­ olution the non-Orthodox religious communities were released from the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior. The ethnic wings of the Lutheran church in Russia (Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, and Polish) broke away from the 28

 Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Michael Garleff, “Loyalität in der Krise: Deutschbalten während des Ersten Weltkrieges,” in Eisfeld, Herdt, and Meissner, Deutsche in Russland und in der Sowjetunion 1914–1941, 27–39. 29

 Auman and Chebotareva, Istoriia rossiiskikh nemtsev v dokumentakh, 54–56.

30

 Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire, 137–50.

340 Reinhard Nachtigal

main body and founded their new national Lutheran churches. Typical for the time was the abundance of congresses and declarations by interest groups, among them Germans. The earliest and most important German conventions happened in Odessa and Saratov, capitals of the German “colonist belts” in southern Ukraine and the Volga region. These gatherings formulated national goals such as cultural autonomy and political representation for Russian Germans. Russian-German deputies convened twice in Moscow in order to discuss autonomy within Russia. In late April 1917, some 86 deputies from 15 provinces met for a conference in Moscow, which aimed at a broad political representation of Germans and made recommendations to the new Russian government on their behalf. In May 1917, the “Moscow Association of Russian citizens of German ethnicity” was founded. In August it was formally regis­ tered. All the political demonstrations of Russian Germans emphasized the necessity of strict respect for private property by the state, and requested the return of Germans who had been deported. Some historians are inclined to see demands for national autonomy for Germans within Russia during the Provisional Government as being directly motivated by the tsarist antiGerman policy of the earlier war years.31 While most Russian Germans saw opportunity in the fall of tsarism, it had a different impact on the Baltic Germans. They had perceived the Russian reign over “their” Baltic homelands as a feudal relationship with the Russian emperor, rather than in terms of modern statehood. The war effectively un­ dermined their loyalty to the tsar, thanks to the tsarist government’s harsh wartime restrictions on Russian Germans and the endorsement it gave to the Russian nationalist mood against all Germans in the empire. In March 1917 many of the Baltic Germans perceived the abdication of Nicholas II as a release from their feudal alliance. Subsequently, most of them very soon came to believe their future “freedom” lay in affiliation with their ethnic homeland Germany, not with Russia.32 With German troops constantly moving towards the North and occupying most of the Baltic provinces by February 1918, Baltic Germans now embarked on a policy advocating German annexation of the Baltic provinces. Although the few months of bourgeois government produced an amazing number of liberal laws and brought equal rights to all subjects of Russia, the 31

 This view is put forth by Alfred Eisfeld, “Deutsche Autonomiebewegungen in der Ukraine und in Westsibirien 1917–1918,” in Eisfeld, Herdt, and Meissner, Deutsche in Russland und in der Sowjetunion 1914–1941, 127–44, who speaks of “movements for autonomy.” 32

 Garleff, “Loyalität in der Krise”; and C. Leonard Lundin, “The Road from Tsar to Kaiser: Changing Loyalties of the Baltic Germans, 1905–1914,” Journal of Central European Affairs 10, 3 (1950): 223–55.

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Provisional Government’s tenure was too short to bear lasting results. Russian German political aims and activities came to naught with the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917. The revolutions of 1917—beginning with Finland’s declaration of independence in July 1917 and followed by Ukraine (January 1918), Estonia, and Latvia—accelerated the disintegration of the empire. Major territories of German settlement in the former Russia Empire were isolated from each other, making any common effort by Russian Germans, especially in conditions of civil war, impossible. Until 1914 Russian Germans had been among the most progressive and developed of all non-Slavic minorities in the empire. In addition, they com­ prised the largest Western ethnic minority in Russia. Regardless of their place of settlement, when the war began they came to be perceived as a single large group that endangered Russia’s very existence. The reason for the perception of Russian Germans as a homogenous whole lay in their distinctive mode of life and work: the Lutheran religion, the use of the German language, and strict adherence to private property were features generally common to Bal­ tic Germans, Russian Germans in the towns, and rural colonists alike. The jingoistic patriotism of the Russian masses increased dramatically during the militarily unsuccessful year 1915 and erupted in anti-German pogroms. In the following year, when the Russian war machine was overhauled and brought to its highest efficiency, patriotism evolved into distrust of the ruling family and the court, and threatened to tear Russian wartime society apart. Under the short-lived Provisional Government nationalist propaganda did not abate, but was increasingly channeled by civil legislation. Nationalism was eventually overcome by general war-weariness and petered out in the October Revolution, which seemed to give the masses what they wanted most: peace and land.33 The ruling elite was anything but innocent in this fatal development. From the beginning of the war it had encouraged anti-German moods and actions, stubbornly ignoring the fact that most Russian Germans had been loyal and reliable elements of social and political conservatism for 200 years. On the periphery of the multiethnic empire the Russian government and mil­ itary leadership played the national card in the expectation that Estonians, Latvians, Poles, and Ukrainians could easily be mobilized against “German predominance.” But instead of fostering loyalty to the tsar and the empire in a common fight against an external enemy, the Russian elite awakened the nationalism of little nations within the empire, whose nationalism had re­

33

 A. B. Astashov, Russkii front v 1914–nachale 1917 goda: Voennyi opyt i sovremennost´ (Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2014).

342 Reinhard Nachtigal

mained dormant or been shut down by repressive measures.34 It was tsarist wartime policies and Russian propaganda that launched many of the national movements and increased the desire of non-Russian minorities to become completely independent from Russia after the war. Even the democratic Provisional Government could not offer much to the small nations on Russia’s western and southern borders in 1917, and so the separation from the empire actually started in summer of that year, with Finland declaring her independence in July and the Ukraine embarking on a break-away process in the same month.

34

 Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire; Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).

Transforming Society: Criminologists, Violence, and Family in War and Revolution Sharon A. Kowalsky

In mid-1917, the popular journal Zhizn´ i sud (Life and Law) reported on the case of Terentii Alpatov, from the provincial city of Lugansk (southeastern Ukraine, in the Donets Basin), who massacred his family. Shortly before com­ mitting his crime, Alpatov and his wife had separated. While together, she had suffered frequent beatings and abuse from her drunkard husband and eventually left him. One day, Alpatov came to see his ex-wife and beat her so severely that she was taken nearly dead to the hospital. Her daughter’s at­ tempts to defend her mother resulted in her being knocked senseless. After this, Alpatov returned home angry and drunk, grabbed his three young chil­ dren who were playing in the street, and forced them inside. He doused a large wooden chest with kerosene and lit it on fire. He threw the children on the fire, left the room, and locked the door. The two younger children succumbed and died but the oldest managed to escape through a window. Alpatov, noticing that one child survived, ran into the forest and strangled himself with his belt; his body was found two weeks later. The main factors in this crime, the report’s author suggested, were a backward, provincial mentality and alcohol consumption. Noting that Alpatov was rarely sober, he concluded, “Only a drunk, a person out of his mind from alcohol, could decide to embark on such a horrifying affair and see it through to the end.”1 While Alpatov’s actions present an extreme case of domestic violence, they raise questions regarding the prevalence of family violence in Russian society during the extended period of war and conflict, 1914–21. The brutal­ ity of the crime suggests that violence permeated Russian society and family relationships during W-orld War I and on the eve of revolution. While intrafam­ ily violence was certainly not new or unique to wartime, the ways such violent reactions manifested themselves on the homefront during and following the upheavals of war and revolution, and the ways that such incidents were 1

 K. S-ii, “Otets-zver´,” Zhizn´ i sud, no. 23 (18 June 1917): 5.

Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 343–63.

344 Sharon A. Kowalsky

discussed and interpreted among professionals, by the courts, and in the press, reveal contemporary observers’ understandings of the dynamics of family relationships and criminality in a period of dislocation and transformation. Indeed, such extreme moments of violence among family members, while certainly not the norm, suggest the difficulties faced by the Bolsheviks in their efforts to implement their vision of the new Soviet family after 1917, as pre­ sented in the 1918 Family Code. In many ways, the social transformations to the family occurring after the 1917 revolutions were guided and shaped by wartime experiences and dislocations as much as by revolutionary policies and ideology. By examining the nature of violent family crimes during and immediately following the war years, we can better assess criminological professionals’ understanding of the impact of the war on personal behavior and the ways that they believed social relationships needed to be refashioned to create the new socialist society after the revolution. This article explores how criminologists and other observers represented and understood violent crimes perpetrated against family members during and immediately after the war years. Criminologists’ perceptions of violent family crime were shaped by their assumptions about the nature of crime during wartime and the factors that contributed to domestic conflict. In fact, the trauma of the experience of World War I and the Civil War, and the shifting political environment in Russia during the revolutions, meant that criminologists may have overlooked or minimized the role that institutional factors played in shaping domestic violence during the war and in the immediate postwar period, as can be seen in increased crime rates and violent reactions to the new family policies implemented in 1918. Russian and Soviet criminologists were a diverse group of sociologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, jurists, forensic scientists, penal experts, and other professionals who gathered and analyzed data on crime and criminality. These professionals had been active in their fields in the late imperial period and continued to pursue their studies both during and after the war years, serving as “bourgeois specialists” under the new Soviet regime.2 Grounded 2

 On criminologists as professionals, see Sharon A. Kowalsky, Deviant Women: Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Russia, 1880–1930 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009); Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); and Dan Healey, Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917– 1939 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009). In this article, “criminologist” will be used as a catch-all term to refer to anyone whose particular professional spe­ cialization could not be determined. Criminologists were among a larger group of tsarist-era professionals who often sympathized with aspects of the Bolshevik project and were employed by the Bolsheviks as “bourgeois specialists” during the 1920s. In this capacity, they continued to practice their professions after the October Revolution,



Criminologists, Violence, and Family in War and Revolution

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in Western European, and particularly German, developments, Russian criminologists embraced a positivist orientation in crime studies that emphasized the social influences and factors that shaped criminality.3 Its practitioners generally took a holistic approach to their studies of crime, assessing broad trends from sociological and economic perspectives, and delving into the motives of individual offenders using psychological analysis. They created their own statistics, drawing from government figures on arrests and convictions, but also by interviewing prison inmates and analyzing their personal stories. Criminologists’ conclusions sought to present a comprehensive understanding of the motives of individual criminals by highlighting the social, economic, and personal factors that shaped their actions. Indeed, as observers and chroniclers of social morality, criminologists played an im­portant role in assessing the nature, morality, and dynamics of Russian and Soviet society. For Russian and later Soviet criminologists, the war years provided the context for understanding criminal activity and shaped the ways they inter­ preted the dynamics of crime after the conflicts ended. The start of the Great War stimulated criminologists to assess seriously the relationship among war and crime and violence, and their studies suggested how war might im­ pact crime rates and society more broadly. Sociologists in general have paid little attention to the relationship between war and crime rates on the home front. In recent years, scholarly work on crime and war has focused on war crimes and violence, especially toward women, in wartime.4 During and im­ mediately following the Great War, however, criminologists across Europe raised concerns about the link between soldiers brutalized at the front and although by the late 1920s those criminologists trained before the revolution began to be replaced by newly trained Soviet cadres. On the role and position of tsarist professionals within the early Soviet state, see, among others, Stuart Finkel, On the Ideological Front: The Russian Intelligentsia and the Making of the Soviet Public Sphere (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); and Eugene Huskey, Russian Lawyers and the Soviet State: The Origins and Development of the Soviet Bar, 1917–1939 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 3

 On the development of criminology in Europe, see, among others, Richard F. Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Piers Bierne, ed., The Origins and Growth of Criminology: Essays in Intellectual History, 1760–1945 (Aldershot, UK: Dart­ mouth, 1994). 4

 Much of this literature is in relation to recent conflicts, such as the crisis in the former Yugoslavia, although there has been some important work on gender and wartime violence historically, as well as on war crimes tribunals. See, among others, Maria Bucur and Nancy Wingfield, eds., Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Jeffrey Burds, “Sexual Violence in Europe in World War II, 1939–1945,” Politics & Society 37, 1 (2009): 35–73.

346 Sharon A. Kowalsky

increased violence at home.5 Early 20th-century Russian criminologists thus participated in a broader pan-European discussion of the relationship between war and criminal violence. Their engagement with these issues placed them at the forefront of the European criminological profession as they employed a variety of methods and approaches in their attempts to understand the dy­ namics of crime and society. One of the first discussions of the war’s impact on crime in this context was statistician E. N. Tarnovskii’s 1915 article “The Influence of War on the Dynamics of Crime” (“Vliianie voiny na dvizhenie prestupnosti”). Noting that crime served as a “barometer” of social life, Tarnovskii sought to explain changes in criminality during wartime by tracing the major European conflicts of the 19th and early 20th century and their corresponding crime rates in various European countries. He noted that short or insignificant wars tended to have a minimal impact on crime rates and trends, while longer and more important conflicts influenced crime significantly.6 Tarnovskii also found that the dynamics of crime reflected popular attitudes regarding a particular conflict, embodying the patriotic sentiments of the population. During the Russo-Japanese war, for instance, crime in Japan decreased while crime in Russia increased, a result, Tarnovskii explained, of a temporary decrease in Russian crime just before the war and the mood of the Russian population—the lack of popular support—during the conflict.7 Moreover, he argued, the difficulties of wartime provided “various breeding grounds for separate religious, national, class, economic, and political struggles that result not in a decrease but just the opposite—an increase in certain types of crime.”8 Tarnovskii stressed that in conflicts where a unifying sense of purpose was missing it was impossible to expect a decrease in the “pathological conditions of social life, such as crime, 5

 Few scholars have examined the connection between the Great War and criminal violence, although it was discussed to some extent at the time as a way to explain and justify the occurrence of violent crime as violence in society grew increasingly stigmatized after the war. See Clive Emsley, “A Legacy of Conflict? The ‘Brutalized Veteran’ and Violence in Europe after the Great War,” in Problems of Crime and Vio­ lence in Europe, 1780–2000: Essays in Criminal Justice, ed. Efi Avdela, Shani D’Cruze, and Judith Rowbotham (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2010), 43–64; and Emsley, Crime, Police, and Penal Policy: European Experiences, 1750–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), especially 227–45. 6

 E. N. Tarnovskii, “Vliianie voiny na dvizhenie prestupnosti,” Zhurnal Ministerstva iustitsii, no. 6 (1915): 48–49. Tarnovskii discussed the major conflicts of the 19th century, beginning with the Crimean War and touching on the Great War only at the very end of the article. 7

 Ibid., 87.

8

 Ibid.



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prostitution, alcoholism, etc.”9 In contrast, Tarnovskii argued that the Great War created a different mood among the population, and a rise in patriotism, that led to a significant decrease in convictions by as much as 20 percent in the second half of 1914, compared to the same period in 1913. Moreover, he found that this decrease was particularly evident in crimes relating to alcohol consumption. He concluded that the wartime prohibition against the sale of alcohol had an immediate and profound impact in lowering crime rates.10 Tarnovskii continued his discussion in 1918 with an assessment of crime in the early years of the Great War (1911–16). Comparing the immediate prewar period to criminal trends during the first three years of the war, Tarnovskii found that in the major urban areas of Russia, crime rates overall increased in the years leading up to the war and decreased suddenly with the start of the war in 1914 (and the introduction of the prohibition against alcohol sales). By 1916, however, crime rates had again increased, so much that in major cities like Khar´kov, Moscow, and Saratov, for example, he found that crime was 50 percent greater when compared with 1911.11 Tarnovskii stressed the role that alcohol played in criminality and the significant impact on crime that the “dealcoholization” of the country had during wartime. The curtailment of alcohol sales, he argued, correlated directly with declining rates of serious bodily injury, which he argued had decreased by over 50 percent in 1916 com­ pared with 1911. In contrast, he found that murder rates increased during the war. Tarnovskii explained this trend as a result of murderers’ “selfish motives which, in a period of serious economic need, can grow in number apart from the influence of alcoholism.”12 Nevertheless, he concluded that despite the continued prohibition against alcohol, by the third year of the war, high prices and widespread economic destruction led to rising violent crime rates. Although lacking data for 1917, Tarnovskii suggested that, just as the war significantly influenced the dynamics of crime, so too crime trends would reflect the “complete and radical changes in the political and economic conditions 9

 Ibid., 87–88.

10

 Ibid., 88–89. On alcohol and its role in Russian and Soviet society, see Kate Transchel, Under the Influence: Working-Class Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1895–1932 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006); Laura L. Phillips, Bolsheviks and the Bottle: Drink and Worker Culture in St. Petersburg, 1900–1929 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000); and George Snow, “Perceptions of the Link between Alcoholism and Crime in Pre-Revolutionary Russia,” Criminal Justice History 8 (1987): 37–51.

11

 E. N. Tarnovskii, “Voina i dvizhenie prestupnosti v 1911–1916 gg.,” Sbornik statei po proletarskoi revoliutsii i pravu, no. 1–4 (1918): 104.

12

 Ibid., 107.

348 Sharon A. Kowalsky

of life in Russia.”13 These explorations thus provided a first step in establishing criminological perspectives of the impact of the war and revolu­tion on criminality. By the early 1920s, interpretations of the relationship between war and crime had begun to shift, reflecting a new emphasis driven by ideological priorities that stressed socioeconomic factors in explaining trends in society. Leading criminologist M. N. Gernet published two volumes on moral statis­ tics that addressed the growth of and changes in criminality due to the World War, a topic he argued that was “completely unexplored in foreign litera­ ture.”14 Noting a significant decline in crime rates during wartime, Gernet explained this not as an expression of patriotism, as Tarnovskii had, but rather as a result of the decrease in the number of men available to commit crimes, as well as by a lack of prosecution of less serious offenses: “The drafting for service of a significant percentage of the able-bodied working population of the age most likely to commit crimes must result in a decline in crimes committed by men of this age. The decreasing intensity of industrial life and commercial transactions in general, and the drafting into the army of peo­ ple engaged in trade and industry, should result in lowering the number of crimes committed by this class and reducing the number of offenders from this class.”15 Gernet did note the possibility as well that changes in alcohol consumption during wartime resulted in an improved moral level for the population. Like Tarnovskii, Gernet maintained that crime decreased at the beginning of the Great War, but he noted a significant increase in crime levels later in the conflict and in its aftermath, compared with its start.16 In contrast, statistician D. P. Rodin took issue with previous explanations for shifts in crime rates during wartime in a 1926 article focused on crime and war. Challenging Tarnovskii’s conclusions in particular, Rodin sought to determine if war had a “moralizing” influence on the population that resulted 13

 Tarnovskii, “Voina i dvizhenie prestupnosti v 1911–1916 gg.,” 122.

14

 M. N. Gernet, Prestupnost´ i samoubiistvo vo vremia voiny i posle nee: Vtoroi vypusk “Moral´noi statistiki” (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo TsSU SSR, 1927), 3. See also Gernet, Moral´naia statistika (Ugolovnaia statistika i statistika samoubiistv) (Moscow: Izdanie Tsen­ tral´nogo Statisticheskogo Upravleniia, 1922). On moral statistics and their use in early Soviet society, see Kenneth Pinnow, Lost to the Collective: Suicide and the Promise of Soviet Socialism, 1921–1929 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). 15

 Gernet, Moral´naia statistika, 222.

16

 Ibid., 97. Gernet gave some statistics for Moscow: there were 15 sentences for murder in 1914 and 130 in 1921; 5 sentences for arson in 1914 and 24 in 1921; overall there were 4,191 sentences in 1914 and 10,676 in 1921. Gernet did not offer any explanation for these increases.



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in a decrease in crime.17 Rodin argued that decreases in crime rates during wartime resulted in part from the draft, but also from disruptions to the courts and from the distraction of the administrative apparatus away from crime. Deliberately excluding crimes prosecuted by the military and taking into consideration the impact of mobilization, Rodin explained decreasing crime rates not because of a surge in patriotism but instead as a result of the poor recording of crimes during the war, particularly at its start.18 Indeed, for Rodin, the most convincing explanation for the decrease in criminal activity seen in crime statistics during the war was the tsarist government’s inability to maintain accurate crime and arrest records.19 Furthermore, he highlighted certain crimes and offenders whose crime rates actually increased during the war: declining rates of male crimes saw a corresponding rise in female crimes; crime among youth increased; violent crime (including murder, infanticide, and sexual crime) grew. Noting these dynamics and considering the influence of economic factors, Rodin asserted that “the war increased more serious crimes such that, of course, we cannot speak even slightly of a moralizing influence of war.… [It] is impossible that wartime decreases in criminality can be explained by the moralizing effect of patriotism.”20 Rodin’s assessment of the relationship between war and crime reflected a postrevolutionary re­ orientation in the social sciences toward a purer socioeconomic approach. Factors such as patriotism that seemed a compelling explanation before the revolutionary upheavals were dismissed in favor of practical factors that al­tered social life and a criticism of imperial bureaucratic capabilities during the war. Criminologists also highlighted the significant psychological impact of the Great War on the population, and they used this as a way to explain the social dynamics of the immediate postwar years that seemed to privilege vio­ lence and to hinder the quick and complete transformation of the Russian family and society. In their studies, criminologists found the influence of the war reflected in the criminal activity of the population, and especially in the nature and rates of violent crimes during and after the conflict. For instance, Gernet noted that “war embitters a person and increases his violent crime.… Assaults emerge [in crime statistics] as one of the most common forms [of crime] during war, which conveys [the attitude] ‘each against the rest and all 17

 D. P. Rodin, “Statistika prestupnosti vo vremia i posle Evropeiskoi voiny v raznykh stranakh,” Problemy prestupnosti, no. 1 (1926): 173–91. 18

 Ibid., 174.

19

 Ibid., 174, 176. See also Gernet, Moral´naia statistika, 221. Indeed, such records do not exist from 1917, although that can hardly be the fault of the tsarist government, deposed in late February. 20

 Rodin, “Statistika prestupnosti vo vremia i posle Evropeiskoi voiny,” 186, 189.

350 Sharon A. Kowalsky

against the one’ in contemporary society.”21 Criminologist and psychologist S. Ukshe added that war “broke down the nervous system, weakened mental control [zaderzhivatel´nyi] centers, undermined belief in the inviolability of hu­ man life, and made it easier to end it.”22 Early Soviet criminologists directly linked the war with violent criminal behavior, stressing the significant toll the years of war and upheaval took on the mental health of Russia’s population. Psychologist N. N. Lavrent´ev argued, for example, that the years of war, revolution, economic crisis, and civil war “required from people a great exertion of nervous energy that contributed in particular to the hyperextension [giperestezii] of the nervous system, but also in many instances served as a stimulus for the development of formal mental disorders.”23 Moreover, psychiatrist E. K. Krasnushkin con­ nected psychopathology and war, noting that the war contributed to social illnesses that could appear as criminal psychopathology. He suggested that the brutalization of the war created more psychopaths, whose antisocial be­ havior was manifested through crime, stressing that the “world war shook not only the socioeconomic basis, but also the neuropsychical health of the population.”24 Krasnushkin continued: “In the psyche of each participant in the war, removed from their hearth, tossed about from place to place, gladly preserving their life by ending the life of another, … living in constant danger, protecting themselves not only with weapons, but also with lies and deception, in a word in the psyche of every war … primitive instincts must naturally be aroused.”25 Thus, criminologists argued that the stresses and dislocations of war brought out the most base and primitive reactions in people, reflecting a decrease in the level of civilized behavior and increasing the potential that a person might engage in violent criminal activity, most frequently against family members. Overall, criminological professionals asserted that the war profoundly affected the health and well-being of the Russian population, causing mental illness, instability, and increased criminal violence. While some criminologists admitted that the upsurge in patriotic feelings accompanying the start of the war might have dampened criminal activity temporarily, they remained more concerned about an increase in crime due to 21

 Gernet, Prestupnost´ i samoubiistvo, 141.

22

 S. Ukshe, “Ubiitsy,” in Prestupnyi mir Moskvy, ed. M. N. Gernet (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Pravo i zhizn´,” 1924), 45. 23

 N. N. Lavrent´ev, “Dushevnye bolezni i polovye prestupleniia,” Zhurnal nevropato­ logii i psikhiatrii imeni S. S. Korsakova, no. 1 (1928): 61. 24

 E. K. Krasnushkin, “Kriminal´nye psikhopaty sovremennosti i bor´ba s nimi,” in Prestupnyi mir Moskvy, 205, 192.

25

 Ibid., 192.



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the wartime weakening of social morality and mental stability.26 Indeed, the figures that criminologists were able to collate for the war (despite a lack of good recordkeeping) suggested to them the broad dynamics of the problem. For instance, Gernet noted that 1,283 thefts occurred in Moscow in March and April 1916, rising to 6,884 for those same months in 1917, an increase of nearly 540 percent. Similarly, in the same period, he found that murders grew by eight times, from 4 to 32, and rates of violent crime in famine-stricken areas nearly doubled the average.27 While such figures cannot be taken as accurate representations of the levels of crime at the time, they do reflect the perspectives of Gernet and his colleagues. The links criminologists made between mental illness, instability, and war led them to expect violent crimes to increase during periods of conflict. Moreover, criminologists emphasized that a weakening of morality during the war undermined the value of human life and made violent crime more common. Despite the expectation of increased violent crimes, criminologists noted actual decreases in certain types of crimes against the person in wartime criminal statistics. According to Gernet, between 1913 and 1916, male violent crime decreased 53 percent. Moreover, rates of serious bodily injury declined by 54 percent in 1915 and 51 percent in 1916, compared to 1911 levels.28 Gernet stressed that the reasons for these dynamics during the war had to be found in the impact of war on society, especially the enlistment of young men into the military.29 Indeed, over the course of the war, criminologists’ statistics showed a marked decline in the number of men committing crimes against the person. At the same time, however, criminologists found that the number of women sentenced for crimes against the person increased, as did the pro­ portion of women sentenced for such crimes, and overall female violent crime

26  Gernet, Moral’naia statistika, 221. Rodin, “Statistika prestupnosti vo vremia i posle Evropeiskoi voiny,” 189, finds that patriotic feelings led to decreased criminality among male recidivists during the war, while among women recidivists no noticeable impact was observed. 27

 Gernet, “Predislovie,” in Prestupnyi mir Moskvy, xxv; Gernet, Prestupnost´ i samo­ ubiistvo, 182. Gernet noted a decrease in thefts by 1923 to only 1792 for January–March, although the murder rate remained steady at 43 for that same period. These figures seem underreported. Rodin also found that serious crimes increased during the war. See Rodin, “Statistika prestupnosti vo vremia i posle Evropeiskoi voiny,” 186.

28

 Gernet, Prestupnost´ i samoubiistvo, 126–27.

29  Gernet, Prestuplenie i bor´ba s nim v sviazi s evoliutsiei obshchestva (1914), in M. N. Gernet, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1974), 309; Tarnovskii, “Voina i dvizhenie prestupnosti,” 107. Statistics do not include crimes that would have fallen under military jurisdiction.

352 Sharon A. Kowalsky

rates rose by 18 percent.30 These numbers suggested to criminologists that the war years produced a significant shift in the gender division and dynamics of crime. Highlighting increases in all types of crimes committed by women, Rodin emphasized the impact of the war on women’s criminality. He and other criminologists found that as male rates of crime declined as men left for the front and as the tempo of social life slowed, rates of female criminal activity increased as women took on new roles in the public sphere that exposed them to the pressures of daily life in new ways. Women, they argued, felt the force of wartime difficulties more intensively and began to commit a wider variety of crimes than they had before the war, so that in a sense the needs of the war liberated them from the confines of traditional gender roles. Overall, while the number of offenders decreased during the war, women began to make up a greater percentage of those offenders, particularly for serious crimes. Rodin even noted a 79 percent increase in rates of serious female crimes between 1913 and 1916.31 Criminologists fully expected women’s new roles in society as a result of the war years to change the nature of their criminality. As Gernet put it, the realities of the war forced women to become more independent and less isolated within the domestic world. Their engagement in the public sphere thus removed women from domestic “pettiness” and had the modernizing and progressive effect of expanding the nature and scope of their criminal activity.32 Rodin also emphasized that while war created burdens for the popu­ lation in general, it did so in particular for women who had to become selfsufficient, and this facilitated a rise in their criminality as they dealt directly 30

 Gernet, Prestupnost´ i samoubiistvo, 126–27. Gernet gives the following statistics for sentencing for crimes against the person: 1913: 6486 men (89.6 percent) and 754 women (10.4 percent) 1914: 6190 men (82.9 percent) and 1240 women (17.1 percent) 1915: 2962 men (71.6 percent) and 1178 women (28.4 percent) 1916: 2913 men (66.6 percent) and 1466 women (33.4 percent)

31

 Rodin, “Statistika prestupnosti vo vremia i posle Evropeiskoi voiny,” 176. Rodin does not provide absolute numbers, so it is difficult to determine the statistical signifi­ cance of this increase. 32  Gernet, Prestupnost´ i samoubiistvo, 141. These sentiments reflected criminologists’ perceptions of the nature of women’s social roles before the war and their new opportunities during the war to a greater extent than women’s actual experiences, as women had of course engaged in the “struggle for existence” before the war. Certainly, however, the number of women forced by necessity to become involved in the public sphere expanded during the war, and women became more visible in public by taking over positions previously filled by men. On female crime and the “struggle for existence,” see Kowalsky, Deviant Women, especially 87–97.



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with the difficulties and temptations of daily life.33 In addition, criminologists argued that war created more widows, more women struggling to make ends meet without the assistance of their spouses, thus placing women in a more precarious position that could induce them to crime.34 As a result, criminol­ ogists concluded that as women took on new and different roles during the war, changes in their opportunities to commit crimes as well as the social pressures to which they reacted served to alter the fundamental dynamics of their criminal activity and led them to commit greater numbers and a wider variety of offenses. Paradoxically, criminologists themselves came to understand the potential expansion of female criminal activity as a positive development that would liberate women from the home, bringing them into the public sphere and making them more like and more equal to men. Even as criminologists believed they would see more diversity in female crime accompanying women’s greater engagement in public life, however, they found that women’s violent crime remained focused on women’s tradi­ tional sphere of interest—the family. Criminologists expected women, forced by wartime conditions, to enter the public sphere and participate more in what they called the “struggle for existence.” Yet they still found women mostly committed violent crimes against family members. In particular, crim­ inologists noticed a significant rise during the war in rates of the most typical female crimes—infanticide, abortion, and child abandonment (along with a corresponding decline in the birth rate)—reflecting the issues and concerns that most influenced the lives of women and shaped their ability to survive in difficult circumstances. Indeed, statistics showed criminologists that women most often acted violently against their young children during the war; among women tried for crimes against the person, 76.2 percent in 1915 and 78.6 percent in 1916 were sentenced for infanticide.35 Criminologists attributed the high wartime infanticide rates to the difficult position of women during the war, extramarital relations that resulted in un­ wanted illegitimate pregnancies, women’s greater engagement in the public sphere as they replaced men in the workforce, and the “moral conditions” of the war that left pregnant women, both married and unmarried, in dire 33

 Rodin, “Statistika prestupnosti vo vremia i posle Evropeiskoi voiny,” 176.

34

 Gernet, Prestupnost´ i samoubiistvo, 140. Gernet noted that women whose husbands were away, presumably fighting, should be considered de facto or “economic” widows.

35

 Ibid., 129. S. Ukshe noted that infanticide rates in 1916 were nearly 250 times greater compared to 1912, and that they grew steadily over the course of the war (“Ubiitsy,” 42). Certainly, these statistics cannot be considered full and accurate representations of the extent of such crimes, as many occurrences probably went unreported and unpunished during the war. Interest in such crimes may also have been driven by concerns and anxieties about depopulation.

354 Sharon A. Kowalsky

economic conditions.36 The growth of infanticide, Rodin argued, “graphically illustrated the moral influence of the war. Of course, the question here is in the economic difficulties that the war brought for pregnant women. [This crime of infanticide] … is committed almost exclusively by women, and the callup to the army … of husbands, official and de facto, left pregnant women in such difficult circumstances that contemplating their coming maternity did not bring a smile to their faces.”37 As criminologist B. N. Zmiev noted, the ex­ odus of men to the front “left a large number of women in difficult material circumstances.” The need to get by drove many women to employment, often in jobs previously considered “male,” and made them question the wisdom of having children. Dislocations brought about by the war forced women to move to new places, and in their unfamiliar surroundings they sometimes sought temporary liaisons with men, leading to unwanted pregnancies and further increasing rates of infanticide.38 Thus, the failure of female crime to diversify as a result of wartime conditions suggested to criminologists that despite the potentially transformative experiences of the war years, women remained chained to hearth, home, and family. Particularly regarding female offenders, then, criminologists’ perceptions of crime trends were shaped by assumptions about the “backwardness” of women and their continued adher­ ence to prewar and prerevolutionary norms of behavior. Criminologists noted shifts in rates of juvenile criminality as well that they attributed to wartime factors. Indeed, they acknowledged that as a result of poor recordkeeping and statistics gathering, figures suggested a decrease in some juvenile crimes during the war. They emphasized, however, that juvenile delinquency generally increased in direct relation to economic circumstances, such as the price of bread.39 “War and revolution,” one observer wrote, “taking many lives, forced the young generation independently to obtain for them­ selves a piece of bread at a significantly young age,” leading them into a life of crime.40 Indeed, criminologists confirmed this trend by noting that during

36

 See Ukshe, “Ubiitsy,” 42; B. N. Zmiev, “Detoubiistvo (Po dannym sudebnoi stati­ stiki),” Pravo i zhizn´, no. 6–7 (1927): 95; Rodin, “Statistika prestupnosti vo vremia i posle Evropeiskoi voiny,” 181–83.

37

 Rodin, “Statistika prestupnosti vo vremia i posle Evropeiskoi voiny,” 183.

38

 Zmiev, “Detoubiistvo,” 95.

39

 V. I. Kufaev, “Pravonarusheniia i besprizornost’ nesovershennoletnikh v Rossii,” Pravo i zhizn´, no. 1 (1922): 37–39; Rodin, “Statistika prestupnosti vo vremia i posle Evropeiskoi voiny,” 174. Rodin also dismissed the notion that youths had become more patriotic during the war as an explanation for decreases in juvenile criminality.

40

 L. Skliar, “Moshenniki,” in Prestupnyi mir Moskvy, 165.



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and after the war, more juvenile delinquents were orphans.41 Furthermore, the new Soviet expectations that both men and women would engage in wage labor contributed to continued and growing juvenile delinquency after the war as parents spent more time engaged with work and politics, and became less aware of the activities of their children. While juvenile offenders with one or both parents generally lived at home and engaged in less pickpocketing than orphaned children, they tended to steal foodstuffs more often, suggesting parents continued to face difficulties in caring for their families, as well as the persistence of survival behaviors acquired during wartime.42 Juveniles, how­ ever, were rarely involved in perpetrating violent crimes; the vast majority of minors committed thefts of various kinds and other crimes that disturbed the peace (crimes against public order and the like). Indeed, of a sample of 3,120 juvenile delinquents in Moscow in 1922, only 55 had committed crimes against the person, and most of those had been fights. Only two committed murder and five (four girls and one boy) committed sexual crimes.43 Gernet argued that the factors that promoted juvenile crime—orphanhood, poverty, living on the street, drug use—all existed before the war, but that the war intensified these factors, contributing both to the growth of juvenile crime and to its character.44 Gernet also highlighted the widespread hunger of the war years, the devaluation of human life, and the violence of the fighting that taught youth to murder and steal for a crust of bread.45 Criminologists thus argued that, despite their evidence suggesting declines in juvenile crime rates, social upheavals and economic strains led to a weakening of morality and family structure that contributed to increased criminal activity among youths. In the criminologists’ assessments, the war affected the shape and structure of the family, in many cases removing it as a protective shield from children and thrusting them into the world prematurely.

41

 V. I. Kufaev, “Detskie pravonarusheniia v Moskve,” Na putiakh k novoi shkole, no. 9 (1923): 11. Kufaev’s full figures are: for 1909, 39.3 percent had both parents, 22.1 percent had only a father, 35.1 percent had only a mother, and 3.5 percent had no parents; for 1922, 37.5 percent had both parents, 8.1 percent had only a father, 32.3 percent had only a mother, and 22.1 percent had neither parent. Here the impact of the war on the family is particularly evident as fewer children have fathers and more children are orphans.

42

 Kufaev, “Detskie pravonarusheniia,” 12–13.

43  Ibid., 38. Kufaev notes that all girls arrested for sexual crimes (prostitution) were from places other than Moscow (18). 44 45

 Gernet, Prestupnost´ i samoubiistvo, 113.

 Gernet, Moral´naia statistika, 116, 221–22.

356 Sharon A. Kowalsky

Criminologists interpreted crime trends during the war, and the implications of those trends for society and family relations, according to their assumptions regarding the nature and dynamics of crime. The wartime crime statistics they reported revealed to them the many shifts and changes in personal, family, social, and economic circumstances as people responded to the challenges they faced during the war. Criminologists believed that an understanding of these wartime dynamics was essential to making sense of the trends in crime rates that followed the war and revolution, in order to assess the ways these events affected the scope and nature of criminality.46 Indeed, they fully expected crime to continue to escalate after the war as the population dealt with the intense mental instability and psychological trauma created by the conflicts. Confirming their expectations, crime seemed to explode in the later years of the war and particularly after the revolution. Murder rates, for example, escalated impressively.47 Criminologist A. A. Gertsenzon indicated that far from stemming crime, the instability and chaos created by the February 1917 revolution exacerbated it. According to his statistics, in March and April 1917 murders and robberies were nearly 100 times greater than in 1915–16, and in 1918 these crimes exceeded their prewar rates by nearly 15 times. Psychologist S. Ukshe confirmed this trend, noting a significant increase in murder cases in Moscow, from 12 in 1914 to 102 in 1921. While Gertsenzon pointed to the worsening economic situation for workers, growing numbers of criminal elements in cities, the release of criminals from prison as part of a general amnesty, and the demobilization of soldiers as contributing factors for the explosion of crime after the February Revolution, Ukshe added the influence of famine and a declining moral sense resulting from the war.48 Overall, criminologists interpreted wartime criminality according to moral, material, and bureaucratic causes. They stressed tsarist administrative failures and alcohol policies to explain statistics showing declining crime rates during the first years of the Great War, proposing that the experience of war itself did little to change peoples’ behavior. In addition, criminologists asserted their understanding of the impact of war on society, highlighting shifts in the gender and age dynamics of criminality. In many instances they expected to see a radical reconfiguring of crime that would reflect the new opportunities and new realities of wartime, particularly for women and youths. At the same time, crime trends during the war that criminologists pointed out reinforced 46

 Tarnovskii, “Voina i dvizhenie prestupnosti v 1911–1918 gg.,” 100–22.

47

 Rodin, “Statistika prestupnosti vo vremia i posle Evropeiskoi voiny,” 183.

48

 A. A. Gertsenzon, “Osnovnye tendentsii dinamiki prestupnosti za desiat´ let,” So­ vetskoe pravo, no. 1 (1928): 70–71; Ukshe, “Ubiitsy,” 43.



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traditional social dynamics, suggesting the war exacerbated social tensions rather than transforming them. Indeed, homicide rates were considerably lower in Russia during the war than both before and after it, probably for the reasons criminologists suggested. Furthermore, statistics suggested that the traumas of revolution (both in 1905 and 1917) were more significant in terms of raising violent crime rates than the war itself. According to evidence compiled by Andrew Stickley, there were 6.9 homicides for every 100,000 people in St. Petersburg in 1905 and 8.9 in 1917, compared to only 1.5 in 1915.49 Murder rates remained elevated through approximately 1922, after which they began to decline, while still remaining considerably higher in Russia than in many other European countries.50 While criminologists worried about the high levels of violent crime in Russia during and after the war, their focus on placing blame with the traumas of war and the inadequacies of the tsarist regime may have led them to pay less attention to the impact of revolutionary policies, particularly relating to the family, on crime trends. Indeed, new laws that attempted to restructure intimate relationships, combined with the psychological damage of the war years, may have unintentionally created more victims of violent crimes, espe­ cially among women and children. After October 1917, the new Bolshevik leaders of Russia set out to transform family relationships with the passage of a Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship (the Family Code), promulgated in October 1918. The Family Code reflected the first comprehensive attempt to implement the Bolshevik regime’s vision of the new socialist society by institutionalizing the destruction of the family that had already begun during the war. The Family Code abolished the patriarchal “bourgeois” family, replacing it instead with egalitarian arrangements centered around communal and social responsibility, where individuals would come together based on mutual benefit and desire. It legalized divorce, making it possible for partners to leave formal registered relationships when such unions no longer suited their needs. It ended church marriages, instead instituting a system of civil registration. The Code went even farther by recognizing “de facto” unions as legitimate relationships with 49

 Andrew Stickley, “On Interpersonal Violence in Russia in the Present and the Past: A Sociological Study” (Ph.D. diss., Stockholm University, 2006), 20–21. Stickley also notes the gender disparity in homicide rates, with the male rate reaching 33.8 in 1905 (compared to the female rate of 4.9) and 87.1 in 1917 (female rate 9.8).

50

 Ibid., 24–25. Stickley gives homicide rates for Leningrad for 1922–24 as 19.7 per 100,000 people, compared to a 1.7 rate in Stockholm and 0.9 in Copenhagen. Stickley’s figures suggest comparatively high rates of homicide in Russia compared to other European counties in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is beyond the scope of this paper to consider the reasons for such trends.

358 Sharon A. Kowalsky

the same rights and obligations as marriage. Consequently, the Family Code no longer acknowledged illegitimacy; all children were legitimate in the eyes of the state, regardless of the marital situation of their parents. Likewise, all mothers and fathers were bound by parental responsibility to care for and maintain their children, regardless of their marital status. Such provisions established a legal and material basis for a new “Soviet” understanding of family relationships and gender roles even as the Family Code dissolved traditional family bonds by separating marriage from reproduction.51 The Family Code provided the basic legal framework for dealing with family relationships and conflict in the immediate postwar period. And, while the new policies were shaped according to socialist ideology, the ways the population made use of them were directly related to the conditions created by the war. While easing restrictions on marriage and divorce, the Family Code en­ forced parental responsibility by promoting child support (aliment) awards. Parents could receive court awards for the maintenance of their children from recalcitrant spouses or lovers, regardless of their marital status and in propor­ tion to each parent’s means. This reform proved to be one of the more popular elements of the Family Code, creating a barrage of cases for the local courts.52 Parents, usually women, exhibited a clear willingness to turn to the courts for assistance with obtaining child support payments.53 In these court dynamics can be seen a continued attempt to resolve the dislocations and impact of the 51

 See The Marriage Laws of Soviet Russia. Complete Text of the First Code of Laws of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic dealing with Civil Status and Domestic Relations, Marriage, the Family and Guardianship (New York: The Russian Soviet Government Bureau, 1921); Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

52

 Moscow courts heard over 9,300 cases involving child support requests in 1925, four times more than in 1923. The number of child support cases also grew so that they outnumbered even the extremely popular divorce cases by 1925. See A. T. Stel´makhovich, “Alimentnye dela,” Proletarskii sud, no. 4–5 (1926): 1; Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution, 134; and I. Smirnov, “Doklad predsedatelia Moskovskogo Gubsuda tov. I. Smirnova na plenume Mossoveta 3 fevralia 1925 goda,” Proletarskii sud, no. 3 (1925): 5. Goikhbarg noted that in 1918 only 49 of 536 divorce cases included requests for support. Still, divorce cases increasingly involved child support requests, increasing from 16 percent in 1919 to nearly 45 percent by 1924. See A. G. Goikhbarg, “O brakakh i razvodakh,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia i pravo, no. 5 (1918): 15.

53

 Historians have shown that before the revolution, peasant women had turned to the courts to secure their rights, particularly in terms of property claims. Their willingness to use Soviet courts for child support requests thus built on a previously established pattern. See Beatrice Farnsworth, “The Litigious Daughter-in-Law: Family Relations in Rural Russia in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Russian Peasant Women, ed. Farnsworth and Lynne Viola (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 89–106.



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war years, as women exercised their new legal rights to better provide for the children they were all too frequently raising on their own. Soviet child support policy thus contributed in significant ways to reshaping the family, making single parenthood a more viable and legal option. At the same time, women made use of the new Soviet legal framework out of necessity to resolve the lingering impact of the war years on their families and to bolster their economic security in the absence of the traditional family structure.54 Sometimes, however, those who sought to make use of the new legal avenues for resolving family conflict found themselves victims of violent crimes. While many women tried to take advantage of what they perceived as a beneficial policy by requesting child support from the courts, many men understood such awards as a burden and a punishment rather than part of their responsibilities as parents and Soviet citizens. Indeed, some men reacted violently when faced with the possibility of paying child support. This was the case with Iakov, a young peasant whose parents would not allow him to marry his girlfriend, Praskov´ia, even after Praskov´ia became pregnant. One night, Praskov´ia threatened to request child support from Iakov through the courts if he did not marry her. In response, Iakov panicked and strangled Praskov´ia with his bare hands. When asked why he refused to marry her, Iakov replied that he wasn’t sure that the child was his.55 In another case Mikhail, a 22-yearold peasant ordered by the court to pay ten rubles a month to his lover, Aleksandra, to support his daughter, killed both mother and child in the woods.56 In a third case, 20-year-old Maksim murdered his pregnant girlfriend Irina because she “impudently nagged” him either to marry her or to pay child 54

 The Family Code’s vision of marriage and family relationships did not always reflect the needs, customs, or desires of the Russian population. Indeed, Russian women generally wanted and preferred the stability that traditional marriage poten­ tially offered. Although a significant number of women took advantage of the new laws by seeking child support through the courts, in most cases these awards failed to improve the material situation for these women. Frequently, they were unable to collect the sums awarded to them, because low wages and unemployment often meant that fathers lacked the means to make their payments. Frequent moves and relocations also made collection of child support almost impossible. Furthermore, awards generally were only for a short period of time, usually less than one year, making it a temporary financial supplement at best. See Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution, 237–46.

55

 S. V. Poznyshev, Prestupniki iz-za alimentov: Tipy ikh i mery bor´by s nimi (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo, 1928), 35–36. Apparently, the two lovers had broken up and had been seeing other people.

56

 Poznyshev, Prestupniki iz-za alimentov, 48. Mikhail received a ten-year sentence for the murders. Ten years was the maximum prison sentence for murder under the 1922 RSFSR Criminal Code, but relatively few persons received such long prison terms.

360 Sharon A. Kowalsky

support. Contemplating the results of his actions—a prison sentence of eight years—Maksim thought that perhaps it might have been better to let Irina take him to court before resorting to killing her. After all, he mused, the court might not have made an award.57 In each of these cases, criminologists found that child support awards or the threat of child support provoked a violent reaction that resulted in murder. These assessments suggested that men did not always show an awareness of or willingness to accept the parental responsibility advocated by Soviet authorities. Furthermore, such cases illustrated for criminologists the difficulties Soviet authorities faced in trying to refashion personal relationships while simultaneously enforcing conventional parental responsibility, especially considering the dislocations of wartime. Indeed, the very possibility and widespread application of child support payments may have further destabilized traditional relationships and created more crime victims among both mothers and children. The violent reactions to these policies certainly indicated that not everyone accepted the state’s social vision. Beyond their interpretations of the factors behind child support crimes, however, criminologists rarely addressed family violence during or after the war. Although concerned about trends showing an increase in violent crime, their approach to crime studies generally focused on the psychopathology and motivations of individual offenders, which served to make domestic violence disappear by minimizing the attention devoted to crime victims and ignoring the relationship between perpetrator and victim. One must infer, therefore, the extent of interpersonal family violence based on the social status of the offender. Although criminologists’ statistics rarely identify the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator, and often fail to detail the nature of the crime itself, the significant representation of offenders who were married with children suggests the possibility that perpetrators frequently found their victims in close proximity to themselves in their families.58 While statistics hint at the possibility of widespread interpersonal violence, the cases that show up in the criminal record represent only the most extreme reactions that 57  Ibid., 49. Poznyshev notes Maksim as having expressed frustration with the notion that he was sent to jail because of a woman. 58  Ukshe notes that Ministry of Justice statistics from before the war seemed to illus­ trate this trend, indicating that in 26.3 percent of murders and 66.6 percent of attempted murders, the object of the crime was a woman (“Ubiitsy,” 45). From these figures, however, we do not know the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator. Statistics for crimes against the person for 1923 show that 67.8 percent of male and 59.1 percent of female offenders were married and that of these, 64.6 percent of men and 59.2 percent of women had children. See Statistika osuzhdennykh v SSSR 1923–1924 (Moscow: Izdanie TsSU SSSR, 1927), 48–49.



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resulted in murder or other criminal action. We do not see in these figures the daily abuses suffered by family members, only the final deadly outcome. One last example suggests the nature of domestic abuse, the difficulty in transforming private behavior and family relationships, and the factors, including wartime experience, that criminologists understood as contributing to extreme violent reactions. In an assessment of murderers published in 1923, psychologist S. Ukshe described the case of A., a 46-year-old party member who shot his wife in the woods and cut her body into 15 pieces. After the revolution, A. became a devoted and zealous Communist Party member. He served as a political commissar in the Red Army at the front during the Civil War, where he claimed to have become accustomed to death. He also co­tracted gonorrhea and lost the ability to have children. After his first wife died, he remarried, but divorced his second wife around the time of the revolution. His third marriage, never officially registered, lasted about three years. During their time together his wife had two pregnancies that could not have been from A., and aborted both. From very early in the relationship, A. wanted to separate, but his wife insisted that they were bound together until death and despite his attempts to break off their relationship, she always returned. Finally, he could no longer tolerate her. On the Sunday after Easter he took her into the woods where he shot her in the head with a revolver and then cut up her body to hide it. He considered suicide but instead went to Moscow, where he confessed his crime to top party officials.59 In the analysis of the crime, Ukshe emphasized A.’s moral beliefs that theft and murder were permissible in the interests of society and the Party. A.’s actions, however, indicated an awareness of the unacceptability of his behavior toward his wife. When no other legal option seemed to present itself to resolve his situation, A. embraced violence, making a conscious and premeditated decision to rid himself of his problem once and for all. This example, as well as the story of Alpatov that opened this article, reflects deeply ingrained patterns of long-term domestic abuse in Russian society. While the results of these cases were extreme, their causes can be found in the realities of everyday life in the process of transformation, and they highlight the persistent influence of the violence of wartime experiences. Indeed, both examples reveal the integration of violence as a normal element of war and postwar life. In the case of A., the experience of the war years emerged as particularly relevant. His time at the front directly contributed to establishing a morality that justified criminal activity and accustomed him to death, so that murder appeared to him as a viable solution to his problem. The wide-

59

 Ukshe, “Ubiitsy,” 72–76.

362 Sharon A. Kowalsky

spread violence of the war years, combined with the social changes initiated by the revolution, thus contributed to the nature of the crime. 



In their works that focused on the war years, criminologists sought to assess the dynamics of the war on crime and violence in society. Their engagement with the issue reflected their recognition of the profound influence of the war years on violent crime. Criminologist V. D. Men´shagin, for instance, while identifying multiple reasons for a rise in murder rates after the war, particu­ larly the continued existence of a “backward” mentality and the strong influ­ ence of rural traditions and passions, nevertheless highlighted the war as a persisting factor shaping violent crime, concluding that “the influence of war (both imperialist and civil), which resulted in a decrease in the population’s understanding of the value of human life, contributed to the growth of mur­ der.”60 Criminologists thus acknowledged the deep and sustained impact of the war on the population, manifested through the continued growth of violent crime, and they linked trends in postwar crime rates directly to war­ time experiences. Ultimately, however, the social and legal transformations of the family initiated after the revolution contributed to rather than decreased the commission of family violence. Wartime conditions played a major role in acculturating the Russian population to violence, and criminologists pointed specifically to the upheavals of the war years as the most important factor shaping and influencing criminality immediately after the war. Violence permeated early Soviet society, often manifesting itself in extreme reactions to family issues and relationships. Yet, as the New Economic Policy (NEP) got underway, criminologists began to seek other explanations for rising rates of violent crime. For example, they often linked the growing number of sexual crimes to hooliganism, arguing that the low cultural level of working youths contributed to its occurrence, rather than wartime or other factors.61 Likewise, criminologists explained the increased incidence of infanticide not as a result of wartime dislocations and pressures but because of the “backwardness” of women and the irresponsibility of men. Such explanations focused not on the 60 61

 Men´shagin, “Ubiistva,” 86.

 B. S. Man´kovskii, “Sovremennaia polovaia prestupnost´,” in Pravonarusheniia v oblasti seksual´nykh otnoshenii, ed. E. K. Krasnushkin, G. M. Segal, and Ts. M. Feinberg (Moscow: Izdanie Moszdravotdela, 1927), 79. On hooliganism and sexual violence in late imperial and early Soviet Russia, see also Naiman, Sex in Public; and Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).



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role of wartime experience but rather on the resistance of the Soviet population to change.62 In placing responsibility on the populations’ lack of transformation, however, criminologists and other professionals minimized the impact of Soviet family policies themselves on violent crime. While the war years affected the level of violence in Russian society and even accustomed people to violence, they served to reinforce rather than transform social attitudes. In contrast, the changes introduced by the Bolsheviks directly shaped family relationships in ways criminologists and policy makers never envisioned. Indeed, laws and policies designed to protect those most vulnerable members of society may have actually made more family members into potential violent crime victims as Soviet citizens attempted to resolve the effects of the war and revolution on their family relationships.

62  On infanticide in revolutionary Russia, see Sharon Kowalsky, “Making Sense of the Murdering Mother: Soviet Criminologists and Infanticide in Revolutionary Russia,” in Killing Infants: Studies in the Worldwide Practice of Infanticide, ed. Brigitte Bechtold and Donna Cooper Graves (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), 167–94.

­

The Kitchen Gardening Campaign in World War I Russia Christine Ruane

While all governments that participated in World War I struggled to supply sufficient amounts of food to both the battlefield and the home front, in Russia the issue of food supplies quickly mushroomed into a major crisis.1 Historians point to several factors that made the food crisis so intractable. There was con­ flict among state and local officials in creating effective measures to get the food to the army and also maintain sufficient supplies for the home front. An inadequate transportation system meant that some foodstuffs never reached their destinations, and the absence of a clear system of pricing allowed for the development of speculation.2 Beyond these systemic issues, the Russian army had first priority for any foodstuffs, and while most rural inhabitants were able to supply themselves with enough food during the war, this was not the case in the cities. By the winter of 1914 foodstuffs began to disappear from grocery shelves and eventually food shortages led to long queues. I would like to thank the Research Office at the University of Tulsa and the Garden and Landscape Studies Program at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library for providing financial support to conduct the research for this article. 1

 Russia was not the only country to face serious food supply problems during World War I. In Europe, see Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). In the United States, see Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 137–46; David M. Tucker, Kitchen Gar­ dening in America: A History (Ames: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 121–39; and Dana Frank, “Housewives, Socialists, and the Politics of Food: The 1917 New York Cost-ofLiving Protests,” Feminist Studies 11, 2 (1985): 255–85. 2

  Peter B. Struve, K. I. Zaitsev, N. V. Dolinsky, and S. S. Demosthenov, Food Supply in Russia During the World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930); Lars T. Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); George L. Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 401–62; and Peter Gatrell, Russia’s First World War: A Social and Economic History (Harlow: Pearson/Longman, 2005), 154–75. Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 365–85.

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To alleviate the urban food supply problem, the Ministry of Agriculture3 initiated a kitchen gardening campaign to expand the amount of land devoted to vegetable and fruit production, train individuals to work in the fields, and increase Russia’s supplies of dried and preserved food. This food could then be distributed to the army or used to feed the urban population. And while many of the other nations fighting in World War I enacted similar policies, known as “war gardens,” in Russia the kitchen garden campaign was more than an attempt to raise more food. Government officials, agronomists, and landowners saw the war as an opportunity to enact a more ambitious agenda: the development of modern horticultural practices and industrial food processing among fruit and vegetable growers. They believed that with the development of a more modern food industry Russia could emerge from the war better prepared to feed its people. Thus, the campaign was not an ad hoc wartime measure but a serious attempt to modernize vegetable and fruit production. Advocates believed that in so doing, Russia would take a huge step toward ending its economic dependence upon Germany, which was the major supplier of plant materials (seeds, nursery stock, planting soil, etc.) and processed food to Russia.4 Kitchen Gardening and Food Processing Before the Great War Kitchen gardens (ogorody) were ubiquitous in imperial Russia. Every noble estate, summer dacha, and peasant home had garden plots of varying sizes where vegetables, fruits, and herbs were grown for family use. The gardens were usually located in close proximity to the house and in a place where the land was sheltered from the north wind. Peasant kitchen gardeners and commercial firms supplied those who lived in urban areas with their fruits and vegetables. The crops in the gardens varied due to weather and soil conditions, but peasant gardens typically included cabbage, turnips, potatoes, beans, and peas, while estate gardens might also contain plots for asparagus, tomatoes, eggplants, and berries. Commercial firms usually specialized in one crop. Most private gardens contained at least a few plants used for medic-

3

  In 1914 the administrative unit charged with overseeing agriculture was officially called the Main Administration of Land Tenure and Agriculture. It was renamed the Ministry of Agriculture in 1915. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to it by its later designation throughout this article. 4   In a recent article the historian Olga Elina has argued that the fertilizer industry in Russia got its start during World War I. See Olga Y. Elina, “Private Initiatives, Public Support, and War Practices: Development of Fertilisers in Russia,” Ambix 58, 1 (March 2011): 29–61.

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inal purposes as well as flax, hemp, and sunflowers, which could be pressed to make vegetable oils. Despite the fact that all family members benefited from the kitchen garden’s produce, the care of these private gardens was highly gendered. Regardless of social class, food preparation was a woman’s responsibility. It was their job to plant, weed, water, and harvest the produce. With the garden’s crops, women were expected to provide the food that the family ate, either by making it themselves or supervising the servants who prepared the food. Peasant women dried fruits and vegetables on the roofs of outbuildings, in the sunshine, or in the family’s Russian stove. Fruits and berries were made into jams, and vegetables were pickled. Urban women were expected to carry out these culinary tasks in their apartments or dachas, and women living on estates supervised the work of their servants in preserving food for their pantries.5 The planting and harvesting of vegetables as well as field crops followed the rituals and practices of Russian traditional agriculture. According to eth­ nobotanists, these practices evolved over many centuries and combined both Christian and non-Christian cosmologies to reflect a Russian belief system about the natural world.6 These practices varied from region to region, but they shared some common features. The lunar and Russian Orthodox calen­ dars played a key role in the sowing and harvesting of produce.7 Peter’s Day (29 July, the feast day of Saints Peter and Paul) was the unofficial start of autumn and a convenient deadline for the harvest of many crops.8 It is also important to stress that while it may appear that Russian traditional agri­ culture was limited to the peasantry, this was probably not the case. However, to what extent the Russian landed aristocracy shared these views with their agricultural laborers remains a question for further study.9 5

  For more on these activities, see Elena Molokhovets, Classic Russian Cooking: Elena Molokhovets’ A Gift to Young Housewives, trans. Joyce Toomre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), especially 40–44 and 63–64. Molokhovets has four chapters devoted to food preservation. 6   Ethnobotanists and linguists in Eastern Europe have been working for years to create a comprehensive picture of traditional folk cultures in the Slavic lands. A bibliography of some of this literature can be found at www.rastko.rs/rastko/delo/11596 (accessed 26 July 2013). 7

  Andrei B. Moroz, “Narodnoe ogorodnichestvo u vostochnykh slavian kak sistema kodov,” Kodovi slovenskikh kultura, no. 5 (2000): 131. 8

  T. A. Agapkina, “Petrov den´,” in Slavianskie drevnosti: Etnolingvisticheskii slovar´ (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2009), 4: 24–27. 9

  Sergei A. Kozlov has analyzed what constituted traditional agriculture among both peasants and landlords for the non-black earth provinces of Russia before the abo-

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On the eve of World War I, traditional agriculture coexisted with scientific farming.10 Scientific or rational agriculture, as it was called, was an attempt to use scientific discoveries to increase agricultural yields and profits. The promise of greater profit tantalized Russian landowners, who often struggled under harsh climatic conditions to produce enough food for their families and the market. There was another important factor involved in the adoption of scientific agriculture. The introduction of Western science into agriculture proved a radical break with the past because its proponents were trying to replace the traditional Russian cosmology with a new understanding of nature based on scientific findings. Soil conditions, the weather, and the maturity of the produce would be the criteria for when the sowing and harvesting of crops would occur, not the lunar or church calendars. Moreover, rather than seeing famine, flooding, and pestilence as God’s punishment of Russians for their sins, agronomists now believed it was within their power to alleviate or at least mitigate such natural disasters through scientific farming. The very words used to describe these new agricultural practices suggests what its practitioners had in mind—the replacement of what they viewed as backward, superstitious horticulture with reasoned, reliable practices based on the laws of science.11 But using adjectives such as “rational” also created a gendered dynamic to the discourse on agricultural practice. If women kitchen gardeners’ activities were dominated by a strict allegiance to traditional agri­ culture, then, science was the creation of enlightened men whose minds had been trained to allow them to observe and study without bias the world around them. They could overcome superstition and religious explanations to discover the true nature of the universe. Their education, training, and ability to apply scientific discoveries to improving the human condition stood in stark contrast to those who tilled the land according to the old ways. By 1914, agronomists were working for the Ministry of Agriculture and the zemstvos to provide peasants with instruction in scientific agricultural techniques.12

lition of serfdom in 1861. See S. A. Kozlov, Agrarnye traditsii i novatsii v doreformennoi Rossii (Moscow: Rosspen, 2002), 23–134. 10

  For more on the history of agronomy in Russia, see O. Iu. Elina, Ot tsarskikh sadov do sovetskikh polei: Istoriia sel´skokhoziaistvennykh opytnykh uchrezhdenii XVIII—20-e gody XX veka (Moscow: Institut istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki im. S. I. Vavilova, 2008).

11

  For more on this, see Joseph Bradley, Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia: Science, Patriotism, and Civil Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 38–85.

12

 See Ilya V. Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia: Rural Professionals and Self-Organization, 1905–30 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

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By the early 20th century Russia had developed an empire-wide garden­ ing community, which consisted of government officials, small and large landowners, agronomists, and amateur gardeners. It was their passion for gardening and a commitment to rational, modern horticulture that united them. Their publications, such as Promyshlennoe sadovodstvo i ogorodnichestvo (Industrial Gardening and Vegetable-Raising, 1899–1902) and Progressivnoe sadovodstvo i ogorodnichestvo (Progressive Gardening and Vegetable-Raising, 1904–16) are replete with articles advocating the introduction of scientific agriculture to create industrial kitchen gardening. Russian fruit and vegetable production would no longer be found in private homes and garden plots, but rather in large commercial gardens and food processing plants. The War Begins There was one European country to which Russian progressive horticulturalists looked with admiration and envy: Germany. By the early 20th century, Germany served as the clearinghouse for many of the materials gardeners used, such as seeds, horticultural implements, fruit trees, and planting soil, to list just a few. The Germans had also laid the foundation for a food processing industry by creating commercial dryers and other machines that made it possible to preserve and can fruits and vegetables in workshops and factories. Moreover, Hamburg served as the chief European port for imported fruits and vegetables, which German railroads transported all across the continent. The start of World War I changed all of that. Now that Germany was Russia’s enemy, the gardening community demanded an end to Russia’s economic dependence upon her enemy and lent its support to a trade embargo on all German goods, which was enacted in the early weeks of the war. Eventually, Russia found itself behind two naval blockades—Germany set up a naval blockade against Russia, and England blockaded sea shipments to Germany. And since German rail shipments were now stopped due to the outbreak of hostilities, this meant that it was extremely difficult for Russia to receive any imports, even from its allies. The cessation of trade had a profound impact on vegetable and fruit production. Russia imported vast quantities of plant materials and processed foods. Much of this vital material came directly from German nurseries and factories, or was purchased in Western Europe or the United States and shipped through Germany. But of all the goods now barred, it was the inability to purchase vegetable seeds that was to have the most profound effect on the Russian food supply.13 According to the garden press, Russians had long 13

  The garden press was filled with discussions about the seed issue. For some ex­ amples, see P[avel] Ch[efranov], “Kursk, 1 marta 1915 g.,” Kurskoe sadovodstvo, plodo­

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distrusted the native seed sellers, who were primarily peasants. The chief complaint was that the buyer would purchase what they thought were cabbage seeds, plant them, only to discover a field of cauliflowers, or a random mix of crops. Moreover, the growers that were most dependent upon foreign seeds were the commercial kitchen gardeners who supplied food to Russian urban areas. Peasants used their own seed, but this imbalance between urban and rural kitchen gardens as a result of the cessation of trade relations meant that the cities rather than the countryside faced a serious problem from the very beginning of the war. Once their supplies of imported food and seeds ran out, urban producers and consumers were going to have to find other sources of vegetables. The most immediate problem with the outbreak of war was how to feed the Russian army. World War I began just as the harvest was about to begin, and yet, the mobilization called thousands of peasants away from the land at this critical moment.14 As a result, there were fewer laborers but more mouths to feed. On 1 August, the Council of Ministers charged the Ministry of Agriculture and the Intendant of the Army with the responsibility to or­ ganize food supplies for the army. The ministry immediately ordered tens of thousands of pounds of dried vegetables from zemstvos in Central Russia.15 When the war continued into the fall with no end in sight, army officials placed equally large orders for preserved food as well. Because of the vast scale of the army’s demand for processed food, it was this issue that the Rus­ sian government addressed first in its kitchen gardening campaign. The Great War brought the attention of the government, the gardening community, and the public to the issue of food processing as never before. Over the course of the 19th century, Russia had developed some food processing capability, but it lagged behind Europe and the United States. Indeed, since women performed this work for free, there was no real incentive to develop commercial food processing on a large scale; efforts to pickle, can, and preserve were limited primarily to artisanal workshops. In a report to the Imperial Fruit Growers’ Society in 1914, one member outlined the problems that de­ vodstvo i ogorodnichestvo (hereafter, Kurskoe sadovodstvo), no. 3–4 (1915): 145–47; and A. Ia. Abolin, “Semenovodstvo v Rossii,” Vestnik sadovodstva, plodovodstva i ogorod­nichestva (hereafter Vestnik sadovodstva), no. 4 (1915): 281–88. 14

 For more on this, see Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 155–56.

15

 G. I. Bonk-Bon´kovskii, “Organizatsiia zagotovki prodovol´stviia i furazha dlia deistvuiushchei armii,” Sad i ogorod, no. 11 (1914): 417–21. The list of desired produce for drying included cabbage, beets, carrots, onions, horseradishes, peas, beans, apples, pears, plums, cherries, bilberries, raspberries, and mushrooms. At the same time, the army needed huge quantities of items such as tomato puree, jams, pickled cabbage, cucumbers, and mushrooms.

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terred the development of canning facilities: the lack of trained specialists, and the need for larger harvests of fruits and vegetables and cheaper tin cans. The lack of training was seen as a particularly acute problem. One gardener complained, “We do not have a single serious demonstration canning opera­ tion at which anyone who wants could study the preservation of fruits and vegetables.”16 Unfortunately, the exigencies of war provided a sharp demand for processed food without necessarily providing the appropriate conditions for its advancement. The embargo against German imports meant that the machinery necessary for canning was unobtainable, and the need for trained specialists and workers could not be solved until the war was over. The only measure that was enacted during the war was in December 1914. After suc­ cessful lobbying on the part of the Imperial Fruit Growers’ Society, the tariffs charged for transporting fruit and vegetable preserves by rail were lowered.17 In collaboration with the army and state officials, the gardening commu­ nity set to work to meet this demand by undertaking three important ini­ tiatives. First, they attempted to create a large network of workshops to dry fruits and vegetables. The periodical press carried articles alerting readers to the different methods for drying produce and providing architectural plans for the building of workshops and dryers.18 Second, the societies created can­ ning facilities and training courses for workers.19 The third measure was a media campaign to teach individuals how to can and dry at home, using scientific techniques provided by the gardening press. Plans to build processing facilities and to train a workforce involved the industrialization of food processing by removing it from the home. One article published by E. S. Beritov in the Imperial Horticultural Society’s magazine provided detailed architectural plans, names and descriptions of 16

 K. El´sner, “K voprosu konservnogo dela v Astrakhanskoi gubernii,” Sad, ogorod i bakhcha, no. 10 (1914): 652; and A. Vlasov, “Imperatorskoe Rossiiskoe Obshchestvo Plodovodstva,” Zemledel´cheskaia gazeta, no. 52 (27 December 1914): 1670.

17  Vlasov, “Imperatorskoe Rossiiskoe Obshchestvo Plodovodstva,” 1670; and “Tarif na konservy i ovoshchnye, fruktovye i iagodnye piure,” Kurskoe sadovodstvo, no. 12 (1914): 636. For a brief overview of food processing in Russia, see Glavnoe Upravlenie Zemleustroistva i Zemledeliia, Departament Zemledeliia, Ocherk sovremennogo sostoia­ niia plodovodstva, ogorodnichestva i vinogradarstva s vinodeliem v Rossii i pravitel´stvennykh meropriiatii k ikh razvitiiu (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia V. F. Kirshbauma, 1914), 120–27. 18

 “Ot Pravleniia Imperatorskogo Rossiiskogo Obshchestva Plodovodstva,” Kurskoe sadovodstvo, no. 8 (1914): 463–67; and E. S. Beritov, “Nastavlenie po zagotovke ovoshchei dlia prodovol´stviia armii,” Vestnik sadovodstva, no. 7–8 (1915): 477–523.

19

 See, for example, “Mestnye konservy dlia voiska na teatr voennykh deistvii,” Sad, ogorod i bakhcha, no. 8 (1914): 551; and “Zavod tekhnicheskoi pererabotki,” Kurskoe sado­ vodstvo, no. 10 (1914): 530.

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the machines, and a precise explanation of the work. All decision making rested in the hands of processing supervisors.20 Thus, this highly structured, industrial work contrasted sharply with the idea of food preservation as part of women’s domestic tasks. Nevertheless, the workforce for these new facilities was still predominantly female. The pictures with Beritov’s article show women working as “day labor­ ers,” while the men are in supervisory positions or running the machinery. The designation of day laborer meant that these women were seen as unskilled even though they had been drying and processing food in their homes for their entire lives. In the eyes of their employers, it was their gender that qualified them for this work, but by labeling them as unskilled their employers could deny women’s considerable domestic experience as immaterial in the waged labor force. This resulted in very low wages for women employees. Because the gardening societies understood full well that they could not establish enough food processing facilities to meet demand, they engaged in a publicity campaign and established training courses for home canning and drying. The idea here was to eliminate the old methods and replace them with more modern ones. Editorials appeared encouraging everyone to learn food processing techniques and in the process support their nation in its time of need. Nevertheless, the very fact that home canning and drying was traditionally women’s work made it unlikely that very many men became involved.21 As evidence of the pervasiveness of gendered notions of food processing among the peasantry, the Astrakhan´ Gardening Society set up courses to teach men and women how to preserve fruits and vegetables, but the men soon lost interest in the classes taught by a female agronomist. On the other hand, the women, eager to learn new ways to use slightly bruised produce and earn more money from their gardens, stayed to learn new recipes for tomato puree, pickled eggplant, and fruit pastilles.22 Although this work was presented as a way to perform patriotic service, in this example only women answered the call to duty. At the same time, peasant women responded for their own reasons as well. Their desire to earn more money from their gardens indicates that no matter how backward they appeared to male 20

 E. S. Beritov, “Nastavlenie po zagotovke ovoshchei dlia prodovol´stviia armii,” Vest­ nik sadovodstva, no. 7–8 (1915): 477–523.

21

 P. Ch[efranov], “Kursk, 1 ianvaria 1915 g.,” Kurskoe sadovodstvo, no. 1 (1915): 1–3.

22

 “Ot Pravleniia,” 464–67; P. Ch[efranov], “Kursk, 1 ianvaria 1915 g.,” 1–3; “Kursy po tekhnicheskoi pererabotke plodov i ovoshchei,” Sad, ogorod i bakhcha, no. 3 (1915): 120; “Iz zhizni Otdelov Obshchestva,” Sad, ogorod i bakhcha, no. 4 (1915): 163–64; and B. Svetlik, “Otchet o deiatel´nosti stantsii o tekhnicheskoi pererabotke,” Sad, ogorod i bakhcha, no. 5 (1915): 201–03.

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agronomists and government officials, these women were keenly attuned to Russia’s capitalist marketplace. By the winter of 1914–15 the wartime disruptions to the food supply were being felt in Russia’s biggest cities, especially Petrograd. The editor of one gar­ dening periodical reported that among the special foods that were so much a part of the New Year celebrations, there were shortages of oranges, lemons, dried fruits, and nuts in the city.23 Imported goods had disappeared from store shelves, and the prices of basic ingredients such as cabbage, onions, carrots, and beets were ridiculously high.24 By the spring of 1915, some imported citrus was for sale in Petrograd markets, but at prices that few could afford.25 Gardening and the Army As the gardening community turned its attention to the 1915 spring planting season, it faced a series of difficulties. The Russian army had suffered a series of defeats, which resulted in losses of agricultural land on the western border. Russian trains filled with food were headed to the front, not to the cities, and there was little refrigeration to store the food that did arrive. The Russian gov­ ernment needed to intensify its efforts to find a solution for providing more food for the cities. Since the army had requisitioned most of Russia’s livestock, this meant raising more fruits and vegetables. The architect of one scheme to grow more produce was Pavel Elagin. In 1893, Elagin was serving as a government agronomist in Pskov province (guberniia) when he proposed offering classes to introduce scientific agriculture to the lower ranks in the army, an idea he borrowed from Western Europe.26 In the early 1880s, the Italian government sponsored agricultural classes for its conscripts for “moral” and “educational” purposes. The government wanted peasants to see that agricultural work was good for one’s physical health and that it was possible to earn a decent living from farming.27 Belgium, France, 23

 “Ot redaktsii,” Progressivnoe sadovodstvo i ogorodnichestvo (hereafter, Progressivnoe sadovodstvo), no. 52 (1914): 1603. 24

 N. Sh., “Vnimanie nashikh khoziaev,” Progressivnoe sadovodstvo, no. 10 (1915): 289– 90.

25

 A. Bakhtiarov, “Pochemu apel´siny i limony prodaiutsia dorogo?” Plodovodstvo, no. 4 (1915): 256. 26

  Although Elagin does not mention this in his account, there was a long history of attempts to popularize science in Russia. Elagin’s effort is another attempt to apply scientific discoveries to Russian agriculture. See Bradley, Voluntary Associations. 27

  For more on Italian efforts among the civilian population and their impact on Russia, see Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform, 49–51.

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Denmark, Austria-Hungary, and Germany quickly followed the Italian example. Although the officers in Pskov were interested in Elagin’s proposal, the project was deemed impractical due to a lack of teachers. In 1894, Elagin was transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture in Petersburg, and there he continued to lobby for his idea among ministry officials. Finally, in 1907, agricultural classes were approved for the troops stationed in Petersburg. Elagin organized 47 lectures covering all different aspects of modern agricultural practice, including kitchen gardening. The Ministry of Agriculture requested that the courses should include soldiers who were patients at the Nikolaev military hospital in Petersburg and an infirmary in Peterhof.28 Elagin explained his motivation for starting the classes in his brief history of the military agricultural courses. He described the peasantry in the darkest of tones. Illiterate, “shabbily dressed,” and “often half-starving,” peasant men did not have the scientific knowledge to become successful farmers, and as a result remained mired in the backwardness of rural life. Only those peasants conscripted into the army found improved circumstances—they had enough to eat and decent clothing. According to Elagin, this exposure to a better life meant that many soldiers did not return to their villages, preferring to work in the city as watchmen, policemen, and factory workers. They abandoned the “healthy” life of a peasant for the “lighter” work of a city resident, which endangered their bodies and their morals by exposing them to the violence and depravity found in urban settings. In Elagin’s view, it was essential to teach peasants the practices of scientific agriculture. By making their labor more productive and profitable, they could remain peasants free from urban corruption.29 With these goals in mind, Elagin worked with the military commanders to create agricultural courses in St. Petersburg. He enlisted some of Russia’s most distinguished agronomists to give lectures in their areas of expertise. At the end of each lecture, soldiers could ask questions, which led to many lively conversations. In addition to the profits to be earned from scientific farming, the courses emphasized the health benefits of agricultural work. It “strengthened nerves and muscles and taught the virtues of order, cleanliness, and observation.”30 In other words, rational agriculture would make them into 28

  P. N. Elagin, Opyt proizvodstva sel´skokhoziaistvennykh chtenii dlia nizhnikh chinov voiskovykh chastei, raspolozhennykh v Sankt-Peterburge i ego okrestnostiiakh, v Nikolaevskom voennom gospitale i Petergofskom mestnom voennom lazarete, 1907–1911 gg. (St. Petersburg: Tipo-litografiia M. P. Frolovoi, 1911), 6–11. 29

  Ibid., 4–5.

30

  P. N. Elagin, Programmy sel´sko-khoziaistvennykh chtenii proizvodimykh v narodnykh auditoriiakh i v voiskovykh chastiakh (Petrograd: Tipo-litografiia M. P. Frolovoi, 1914), 1.

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virile men whose habits would identify them as modern farmers. Attendance fluctuated between 100 and 200 individuals composed primarily of troops in their second or third year of service. To illustrate the principles of scientific farming, a few demonstration kitchen gardens were established, and fruit trees and berry bushes were planted around military buildings.31 Elagin’s efforts should be seen as part of a larger movement initiated by the Russian military to improve the fighting capacity of its troops. In his book Drafting the Russian Nation, Joshua Sanborn argues that the military had grown increasingly concerned about the physical weakness of its troops after the military defeat incurred during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. It set about to improve the physical and mental strength of the conscripts and to prepare them for modern warfare by working with the schools to improve physical education and by creating paramilitary organizations to drill young men even before they joined the army. Sanborn has called this emphasis on strong bodies and minds dedicated to the good of the nation-state “the nationalization of masculinity.”32 As an agronomist, Elagin supported this nationalization but added his own agenda. While the military appreciated his efforts to provide healthy exercise to improve the overall physical conditioning of the troops, Elagin saw the courses as an excellent opportunity to transform backward peasants into strong, virile agriculturalists who would be eager to defend their nation and be active participants in the state’s efforts to modernize agriculture. When the troops in Petrograd were called to fight in World War I, Elagin lost his audience. In their place, wounded soldiers poured into the city’s hospitals and makeshift infirmaries. The infirmaries, in particular, made the wounded visible to the home front population as never before. Philanthropic organizations gave money and space to medical personnel to set up small facilities. Young women took first aid or nursing courses to care for the wounded, while others volunteered to make linens, bandages, and clothing for the soldiers.33 It was the presence of these medical facilities located in the heart of Petrograd, Moscow, and other urban areas that forced the Russian home front and government to confront the problem of how to reintegrate soldiers back into civilian life, an issue that was made especially complicated when so many 31

  Elagin, Opyt proizvodstva, 17–29. Officers could attend the lectures, and some did.

32

  Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 132–64. 33

 See “Druz´ia!” Progressivnoe sadovodstvo, no. 34 (1914): 1025–27; and “Khronika,” Sad i ogorod, no. 7–8 (1914): 321–27, for instructions from the Free Economic Society on how to set up infirmaries.

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men had been maimed. Russians, like other Europeans, saw the problem of the wounded soldier in gendered terms. Losing their productive capacity as workers had emasculated wounded soldiers. The fear was that these men would spend the rest of their lives as passive victims of war rather than productive citizens. In Russia and in Western Europe, where passivity was defined as a female trait, it was essential to provide wounded soldiers with the means to become active again.34 The goal became to reeducate the wounded by offering classes in carpentry, blacksmithing, agriculture, and auto repair. With this new training, tailored to the soldier’s new physical self, the wounded would be able to resume their roles as wage earners and heads of households.35 Work would restore men to their manliness. Elagin saw his courses as a critical component of Russia’s rehabilitation of wounded soldiers. Life in these medical institutions could be very boring, with little for soldiers to do except play cards or chess or chat about their wartime experiences. According to the nurses, one recurring theme in these conversations was the orderliness and prosperity of the farms in Poland and East Prussia that these peasant soldiers had seen in battle. The men spent considerable time speculating on the origins of that prosperity, and Elagin believed that his agricultural courses could give them the tools to achieve that same prosperity in Russia. He argued that having just come from the trenches, from places of horror, where in the “hurricane of fire,” in the thousands of shots from the terrifying guns, in the colorful words of a soldier, [where] “the earth mixes with the sky,” does he not need some spiritual peace, in order to get better, to forget about the terrible wartime experiences? Elagin reasoned that lectures in scientific agriculture would allow wounded peasant soldiers that respite. Thoughts of home would restore these wounded

34 35

 Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, 162.

 For more on this, see Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Roxanne Panchasi, “Reconstructions: Prosthetics and the Rehabilitation of the Male Body in World War I France,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7, 3 (1995): 109– 39; Seth Koven, “Remembering and Dismemberment: Crippled Children, Wounded Soldiers and the Great War,” American Historical Review 99, 4 (1994): 1167–1202; Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Jeffrey S. Reznick, Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).

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men to physical and moral health and renew in them a desire to work the land that they had just defended at great personal cost.36 By 1916, 193 medical facilities scattered around Petrograd and its suburbs offered agricultural classes for the wounded. The lectures occurred wherever there was room—corridors, cafeterias, and auditoriums. Soldiers lying on stretchers formed the front row of the audience. In the second row were those in wheelchairs. Sometimes lecturers would go to the wards to share their knowledge with those too ill to be moved. Many agronomists confided to Elagin that they often found it difficult to keep their composure when they saw the ravages of war on the men’s bodies. For those who could get around on their own or with crutches, there were filmstrips in cinemas, trips to the Imperial Agricultural Museum, and horticultural excursions around Petrograd.37 To accompany the lectures, Elagin expanded the network of existing demonstration kitchen gardens so that the men could practice the techniques discussed in the lectures and see the results for themselves. In each garden, the soldiers planted the vegetables found in the Russian peasant diet—cabbage, beets, turnips, carrots, garlic, peas, and beans, and they experimented with crops intended for the urban market such as artichokes, leeks, celery, toma­ toes, salad greens, and radishes. A few fruit trees and bushes were also planted. To complete the garden, the agronomists helped soldiers to select medicinal plants and flowers to attract bees, since there were often classes on beekeeping. The harvests from the kitchen gardens were used in the medical facilities to feed the soldiers. In addition, many men gathered bouquets of flowers to give to the nurses and to place in the wards of those who were too ill to spend time outside.38 Because the agricultural classes and their gardens helped to feed the wounded and rehabilitate them, they became a model that other organizations tried to emulate. In April 1915, the minister of education, Pavel N. Ignat´ev, called for the creation of agricultural courses for infirmaries sponsored by his ministry.39 In 1916, the Pirogov Society officially encouraged the creation of agricultural courses for handicapped soldiers, noting with approval that the 36

 P. N. Elagin, Sel´sko-khoziaistvennye chteniia i prakticheskie sel´sko-khoziaistvennye za­ niatiia s uvechnymi i ranenymi voinami, 1914–1916 gg. (Petrograd: Tipografiia uchilishcha glukhonemykh, 1917), i–ii.

37

 Ibid., 5–16.

38 39

  Ibid., 32–45.

  A. Chuchupal, “Pokazatel´nye ogorody pri lazaretakh Petrogradskogo voennogo okruga letom 1915 goda,” Vestnik Vserossiiskoi sel´sko-khoziaistvennoi palaty, no. 10–11 (1915): 42.

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food raised in the gardens should be used in the hospitals. In June of the same year, the Moscow Society for the Dissemination of Agricultural Knowledge among the People started their own classes for wounded soldiers. By the fall of that year, the Ministry of Agriculture had allocated 500,000 rubles to a variety of governmental and public organizations to sponsor courses. How­ ever, unlike the original classes, soldiers now had to be literate, and at least in one case, the specifications indicated that only individuals with one good leg and at least three fingers on each hand would be accepted.40 The Vegetable Crisis Meanwhile, gardening magazines carried reports of devastating losses of fruits and vegetables. In the spring of 1915 frosts had destroyed the fruit har­ vests in southern Russia. In Tashkent worms destroyed the fruit before it could be harvested, and in Astrakhan´ frosts damaged the vegetable crops.41 At the same time, southern Russia lost 20,000 migrant laborers when Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in the fall of 1915. The loss of the migrant workers meant that crops withered in the fields.42 These losses of crops and workers could not have come at a worse time. By the summer, consumers, mostly women, had begun protesting the high cost of food.43 The shortages of fruit and vegetables meant that there was less produce to dry or to make into jams so that the army and the home front had to do without an important source of nutrients. In response to the failed harvests, there were calls to set up demonstration orchards across Russia to

40

 “Ob usvoenii s.-kh. znanii ranenymi i bol´nymi voinami na Pirogovskom s˝ezde vrachei 14–18 aprelia 1916 g.,” Vestnik Vserossiiskoi sel´sko-khoziaistvennoi palaty, no. 4–5 (1916): 72–73; “Sodeistvie Departamenta Zemledeliia ustroistvu sel´sko-khoziaist­ vennykh kursov dlia uvechnykh voinov,” Zemledel´cheskaia gazeta, no. 40 (1 October 1916): 1074; and “Kursy dlia uvechnykh voinov,” Saratovskii sadovod, no. 10–12 (1916): 201.

41

 “Gibel´ krymskikh sadov,” Sad, ogorod i bakhcha, no. 8 (1915): 401–02; and “Rezul´taty fruktovogo sezona v Tashkente,” Sad i ogorod, no. 9 (1915): 414.

42

 Kh. Klein, “O meropriiatiiakh dlia razvitiia ogorodnichestva v Astrakhan´skoi gubernii,” Sad, ogorod i bakhcha, no. 1 (1916): 3–6; and A. Kuznetsov, “Groznyi vopros,” Progressivnoe sadovodstvo, no. 52 (1915): 1363–66.

43   For more on these protests, see Iu. I. Kir´ianov, “Massovye vystupleniia na pochve dorogovizny v Rossii (1914–fevral´ 1917 g.),” Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 3 (1993): 3–18; and Barbara Alpern Engel, “Not by Bread Alone: Subsistence Riots in Russia during World War I,” Journal of Modern History 69, 4 (1997): 696–721.

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encourage the planting and care of fruit trees.44 However, these measures could not alleviate the immediate situation since it took several years for the trees to bear fruit. In January 1916, N. P. Spichenko, the ministry official who had worked with Elagin and the infirmaries to establish their kitchen gardens, published a report summarizing the situation. Russia had begun the war confident that it could feed the army and the home front. Instead, the war exposed “those deficiencies and shortcomings which in peacetime were completely insignifi­ cant, but in wartime stood before us in all of their nakedness.” In the winter of 1916 consumers were paying over four rubles for a bag of potatoes or a pood (about 36 pounds) of cabbage, exorbitant sums for the staple ingredients of a Russian diet. Even the army was suffering from a deficit of vegetables. According to Spichenko, “The chief reason for all of this is a lack of knowledge, energy, persistence, and initiative on our side.” The only solution at this point was to increase the number of kitchen gardens. Spichenko proposed collecting the seeds and tools for planting; organizing talks and lectures in both the cities and the countryside to explain the principles of successful gar­ dening; expanding the number of medical facilities involved in the kitchen gardening program; setting up demonstration gardens at rural schools; creat­ ing a publicity campaign in the agricultural press and local newspapers about kitchen gardening; and using prisoners of war and refugees as laborers. He urged all local governments and agricultural societies to join with the Minis­ try of Agriculture in this vital campaign to end the vegetable crisis.45 In a 3 February 1916 circular, the ministry began to implement this pro­ gram for increasing vegetable production. It authorized twelve-year leases for vacant public lands to be put under vegetable cultivation, subsidies for the purchase of foreign and domestic seed, and the participation of agricultural specialists in the creation and maintenance of these gardens.46 On 22 February Elagin gave a speech to the All-Russian Chamber of Agriculture (Vserossiiskaia sel´sko-khoziaistvennaia palata),47 explaining what the ministry had in mind. 44

  Ia. Pengerot, “K voprosu ob opytnom sadovodstve,” Progressivnoe sadovodstvo, no. 36 (1915): 929–35; and V. Gomilevskii, “Obraztsovo–pokazatel´nye plodovye sady dlia krest´ian i nebogatykh zemlevladel´tsev (sel´skikh obyvatelei),” Plodovodstvo, no. 11 (1915): 637–44.

45

 N. Spichenko, “Na pomoshch´ russkomu ogorodnichestvu,” Vestnik Vserossiiskoi sel´sko-khoziaistvennoi palaty, no. 1 (1916): 18–20.

46

 “Tsirkuliar ministra zemledeliia 3 fevralia 1916 goda za No. 1418,” Zemledel´cheskaia gazeta, no. 7 (March 1916): 184–86.

47

 The chamber was founded in 1912 to promote Russian agriculture. See Alexis N. Antsiferov et al., Russian Agriculture during the War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), 79.

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“Public kitchen gardens” (obshchestvennye ogorody) were to fill every piece of vacant land. Those charged with organizing this effort included agricultural specialists as well as teachers from the entire school system. The work force would include volunteers, students, prisoners of war, and convict labor.48 The hope was that by expanding the number of kitchen gardens significantly there would be more food for the army and the home front, and that a certain amount of this new land could be used to produce more domestic seed. The Ministry of Agriculture’s work on the vegetable crisis proceeded in tandem with its efforts to deal with meat shortages. New legislation was proposed and ratified in the late spring and summer of 1916 that rationed meat for the civilian population and introduced meatless days. While the Russian Orthodox Church required its followers to observe two meatless days a week, the government regulations extended that prohibition to three days for the home front.49 A. A. Chuchupal reassured his readers in The Agricultural Gazette that bread, vegetables, and fats could satisfactorily sustain the health of human beings without adding meat to the diet. But, he warned, Russia needed to act quickly to produce more vegetables before it was too late.50 The ministry’s decision to ration meat before it had provided consumers with more vegetables only exacerbated the situation. There were several obstacles to the Ministry of Agriculture’s plan. Most of the empty plots had never been farmed before and required some serious preparatory work before they would be ready for planting. Pavel Chefranov, the president of the Kursk Gardening Society, pointed out that volunteers would require credit advances in order to lease the land and buy the seeds, fertilizers, and tools to plant a garden. He recommended that gardeners sign army contracts to supply dried vegetables before they planted.51 Despite these problems, officials and the public responded positively by implementing the measures proposed by government and professional horticulturalists to end the vegetable crisis. As reported in the gardening press, hospitals, infirmaries, military units, and schools established gardens on nearby empty spaces. There were even gardens along railroad tracks. However, the real difficulty was not land but labor. In the past, commercial kitchen gardens had hired women day laborers to work in the fields at 48

 P. N. Elagin, “Obshchestvennye ogorody,” Vestnik Vserossiiskoi sel´sko-khoziaistvennoi palaty, no. 1 (1916): 9–10

49

 Struve, Food Supply, 165–68.

50

 A. A. Chuchupal, “K voprosu ob ovoshchnom krizise,” Zemledel´cheskaia gazeta, no. 5 (February 1916): 118–19. 51

 P. Chefranov, “K voprosu o rasshirenii ogorodnichestva v Kurskoi gubernii,” Kurskoe sadovodstvo, no. 2–3 (1916): 72–75.

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pitiful wages, but now there were no women laborers to be found as they had found jobs in the city’s factories and workshops.52 Efforts to recruit more kitchen gardeners among male peasants were not terribly successful because the men repeatedly stated, “This is not our affair, this is women’s work.”53 Elagin’s wounded soldiers were able to raise some food for their hospitals and infirmaries, but the other residents of Petrograd also needed fruits and vegetables. Furthermore, because the government and the progressive gardening community wanted these newly cultivated gardens to demonstrate the superiority of scientific horticulture over traditional methods, they needed to find a workforce that would be receptive to new scientific approaches to gardening. To provide labor for the public kitchen gardens, not just in Petrograd but all over Russia, government officials looked to young people. In 1915, the Department of Agriculture had organized brigades (druzhiny) of students from agricultural schools to help soldiers’ wives bring in the harvest. Ministry officials reported that the students, who were already trained in scientific agri­ culture, had done an excellent job, and now the ministry wanted to expand the program.54 In the spring of 1916 zemstvos and private associations organized brigades from regular schools. The brigades were composed of 15 to 20 stu­ dents, segregated by sex. The ages of the student volunteers ranged from 12 to 20. To help them with their task, the Ministry of Agriculture authorized the creation of two-week agronomy classes, introducing them to the principles of scientific agriculture. Once the brigades had completed these classes, the students would be sent to work in the public kitchen gardens, to plant and harvest vegetables, and to gather medicinal herbs, berries, and mushrooms. Teachers and agronomists would supervise the work of the students.55 Because these public kitchen gardens were scattered throughout Russian urban areas, passersby could see with their own eyes scientific agriculture at work. The brigades did provide the needed labor. Authorities in Kiev reported that thousands of students had volunteered. In Petrograd, the Northern Agricultural Society signed up hundreds of students, and the city government

52

 A. Bakhtiarov, “Ogorodnaia kul´tura v stolitse,” Sadovod, no. 7 (1916): 354–56.

53

 Quoted in Klein, “O meropriiatiiakh,” 7.

54

 “K organizatsii uchenicheskikh druzhin dlia proizvodstva polevykh rabot,” Zemle­ del´cheskaia gazeta, no. 24 (11 June 1916): 672–73.

55

 “Trudovye druzhiny uchashchikhsia, bezhentsev, i pr.,” Vestnik Vserossiiskoi sel´sko-khoziaistvennoi palaty, no. 4–5 (1916): 65–66; and Ch-in, “Trudovye druzhiny uchashchikhsia,” Zemledel´cheskaia gazeta, no. 29 (July 1916): 801–02.

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also had its own separate recruitment effort.56 Elagin also continued his ef­ forts to offer agricultural education and practice. Wounded soldiers who had been trained to work in the medical kitchen gardens during the 1915 growing season had been moved to infirmaries in the Russian interior to make way for new casualties. Consequently, Elagin needed more workers for his vegetable gardens. In cooperation with the People’s Aid Society (Obshchestvo narodnoi pomoshchi) of Petrograd, he organized 13 brigades recruited from the city’s primary and secondary schools. The children received money for transportation to the fields, and the girls were provided with headscarves. Many of the medical institutions provided the youngsters with some nourishment as they worked. According to Elagin, the work was deeply beneficial to the children. Some were orphans, and others were the children of the working poor. He described them as weak, sickly, and corrupted by all they had seen on the streets. At the beginning of their agricultural work, he maintained, many of these children tired easily, but they soon grew strong from their “honest labor” in the fresh air and sunshine. Once the gardens had been harvested, Elagin reported, they returned to the city tanned and strengthened by their labor.57 By training a new generation of gardeners using the latest scientific meth­ ods, government agronomists and leaders of the gardening community hoped to replace what they saw as the superstition and backwardness of traditional gardening with rational, profitable agriculture in which each sex would play a role. Having learned through the agricultural courses that they could partici­ pate in kitchen gardening without losing their manliness, young men would feel more comfortable acquiring the training and skills necessary to set up commercial kitchen gardens and food processing facilities. New canning and drying facilities set up during World War I, it was hoped, could serve as the model for how the industry would operate in the postwar period. In other words, by breaking the hold that the family vegetable plot had on Russian food production, commercial kitchen gardening and industrial food processing could prosper. Meanwhile, the young women who had also worked in the bri­ gades were now properly trained to either join the food industry as modern, trained workers or to continue raising fruits and vegetables efficiently and economically at home. With this new labor force, experts predicted, Russia could now fulfill its role as a great agricultural nation.

56

 “Organizatsiia letnego truda uchashchikhsia,” Zemledel´cheskaia gazeta, no. 15 (9 April 1916): 421–22. For the lists of students recruited by the Northern Agricultural Society, see Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv f. 448, op. 1, d. 49, ll. 1–44ob.

57

 Elagin, Sel´sko-khoziaistvennye chteniia, 59–63.

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Conclusion What can Russia’s forgotten kitchen garden campaign tell us about life on the home front in World War I? Contrary to the government’s explicit attempts to publicize the campaign as an important tool in solving the food crisis, that outcome was not possible. Russian agriculture faced too many systemic problems during the Great War, such as a lack of plant material, labor, and transportation networks, to overcome them by enlisting the home front to raise more vegetables. By 1916 residents in Russia’s cities were experiencing short­ ages of bread, sugar, milk, and meat. The Russian gardening press reported the destruction of fruit and vegetable crops due to late frosts and flooding in the spring of 1916.58 In August, a full-page advertisement appeared in The Agricultural Gazette. Due to the high demand for vegetables that was predicted to grow over the autumn and winter months, the Ministry of Agriculture asked everyone to use simple household recipes to preserve vegetables, mush­ rooms, berries, and fruits. The ad declared, “The more of these supplies in each household, the less there will be of food shortages.”59 In other words, the Ministry of Agriculture called upon ordinary citizens to redouble their food processing efforts. Unless every single vegetable, fruit, and berry was conserved, there would not be enough for the home front or the army during the winter months. The other goal of the kitchen garden campaign was to create a modern food industry based upon scientific agriculture that would flourish once the war was over. At the same moment when the Ministry of Agriculture was calling for redoubled efforts to preserve fruits and vegetables, representatives of Russian agriculture were insisting upon the bright future of commercial kitchen gardening. The All-Russian Chamber of Agriculture issued its own view of what needed to be done and why: In the interests of the army and for its own benefit the entire population must participate in increasing the food supply. Vegetables must re­place flowers in gardens, front yards, and indoor rooms… The wide devel­ opment of kitchen gardening as an industrial enterprise is essential, so that at the present moment it can give incredible [basnoslovnye] profits,

58

 “Gibel´ sadov,” “Moroz,” and “Zatoplenie sadov i ogorodov,” Sad, ogorod i bakhcha, no. 4 (1916): 115 and 118. 59

 “Ot Departamenta zemledeliia,” Zemledel´cheskaia gazeta, no. 32 (6 August 1916): back of title page.

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and the supply of vegetables and preserves does not diminish after the war is over.60 By August 1916 urban residents were frustrated and angered by the “incredible profits” gained in the sale of fruits and vegetables. In their view, only a small circle of speculators and black marketeers profited, while the home front went hungry. What the All-Russian Chamber of Agriculture and its members failed to see was that this anger and frustration was at the boiling point in the win­ter of 1916. When the anger toward war profiteers did boil over in Russia’s revolu­ tionary crisis, their dream of a modern food processing industry was put on hold. The new Bolshevik government had its own ideas of how to provide Russians with fruits and vegetables. Ironically, instead of creating the foundation for modern food processing, the kitchen garden campaign appears to have furthered the persistence of the family vegetable plot. The Ministry of Agriculture and progressive agricul­ turalists attempted to teach urban Russians, many of whom had lost their con­ nection to gardening, the practical knowledge to grow more and better food for themselves and their families. Indeed, one of the themes that runs through all of the pamphlets, gardening books, and articles published during the Great War is self-reliance: with a few tools, seeds, and a plot of land, any Russian— male or female—could become a successful kitchen gardener. Rather than dis­ rupt private gardening, the campaign encouraged it. Even when the tsarist government was swept away in the February Revo­ lution, the Provisional Government and the Bolshevik regime continued to extol the importance of ordinary people growing fruits and vegetables on their own. Both governments as part of their own kitchen gardening cam­paigns continued the propaganda efforts of the Great War. Pamphlets and gardening books were republished to provide the Russian public with practi­cal advice on how to maintain a family garden plot, replacing traditional prac­tices with scientific methods. This advice became all that more critical as the Civil War further disrupted food production and distribution. In 1918, the agronomist T. Guzhavin urged his fellow Russians: “Don’t wait, citizens, for a Messiah/ Redeemer. You will not find anyone who will take care of you. Do not consider that some sort of magician or sorcerer will prepare whole mountains of vege­ tables for the winter, but lay in your supplies yourselves.”61 As food short­ ages became commonplace not just in the cities but in the countryside during 60

 “Ot Pravleniia Palaty,” Vestnik Vserossiiskoi sel´sko-khoziaistvennoi palaty, no. 8–9 (1916): 2. Emphasis added.

61

 T. Guzhavin, Grazhdane! Zagotovliaite ovoshchi, plody i iagody vprok—oni spasut vas ot goloda (Petrograd: Tipografiia Trenke i Fiusno, 1918), 4.

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the Civil War, Russians heeded Guzhavin’s words and planted whatever seeds they could find to provide themselves with food.62 It was these private vegetable plots that often meant the difference between death and survival. Thus, it was precisely this message of self-reliance, independent action, and resilience in the face of continued food shortages, war, and economic hardship that was the legacy of the kitchen garden campaign.

62

 For two examples from the autobiographical literature on the Russian Civil War that discuss their gardening efforts, see Emma Cochran Ponafidine, Russia—My Home: An Intimate Record of Personal Experiences Before, During and After the Bolshevist Revolution (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1931); and Iu. V. Got´e, Time of Troubles, The Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got´e: Moscow, July 8, 1917 to July 23, 1922, trans. and ed. Terence Emmons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

Alcohol in Russia as a Means of Social Integration, Cultural Communication, and Survival during World War I and the Revolution Igor V. Narsky and Yulia Y. Khmelevskaya

In Russia and beyond the country’s borders, the persistent, commonplace no­ tion of “Russian drunkenness” as almost a national character trait possesses all of the merits and shortcomings of an interpretive cliché. On the one hand, it gives rise to the great temptation to explain many features of Russian history as due to the population’s predilection for alcohol or to the government’s greed or irresponsible attitude toward alcohol duties. On the other hand, the view that alcohol played a special role in Russia’s history, as with any other stere­ otype, commits the sin of simplification. It ascribes an “eternal” status to the alcohol problem in Russia, as if it began with Kievan Rus´ or the invention of vodka in the 16th century, and it exaggerates the connection between Russian vodka and Russian politics. At the same time, as research about Russian drinking culture in the late Russian Empire and in the Soviet Union shows, the consumption of alcohol in Russia before the First World War differs little from that of the European powers. In fact, many features that are considered characteristic of Russian drinking culture for all time have comparatively recent origins.1 In the histo1  On alcohol’s functions in the late Russian Empire and in revolutionary Russia, see R. E. F. Smith and David Christian, Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 74–109; B. M. Segal, Russian Drinking: Use and Abuse of Alcohol in Pre-Revolutionary Russia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies, 1987); David Christian, Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Dmitry Shlapentokh, “Drunkenness and Anarchy in Russia: A Case of Political Culture,” Russian History/Histoire russe 18, 4 (1991): 457–500; Laura L. Phillips, Bolsheviks and the Bottle: Drink and Worker Culture in St. Petersburg, 1900–1929 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000); Patricia Herlihy, The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Matias Braun, “Vremja Golovokruženija—Zeit des Schwindels: Der alkoholische Rausch als Geste kulturellen Beharrens in der Sowjetunion der 1920er und 1930er Jahre,” Zeitschrift

Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 387–410.

388 Igor V. Narsky and Yulia Y. Khmelevskaya

riography on the alcohol question in Russia, World War I and the introduction of prohibition in 1914 have received and still receive great attention as a kind of point of reference, a turning point, and the beginning of a “new stage” in the history of alcohol in Russia and in the USSR. Indeed, Russia was the first and at the time the only country that dared to introduce full prohibition on the sale of alcoholic drinks, and at the same time, nowhere else during the war and postwar years did alcohol excesses appear with such force. Is it valid, however, to ascribe to the world war and Russian Revolution a formative role in the development of Russia’s modern drinking culture? Can it be assumed that at this particular time alcohol and the communication around it began to play a kind of special role in the life of Russian society? Events that occurred during the eight years between the start of the world war and Soviet Russia’s emergence from the unprecedented famines at the beginning of the 1920s seemingly provide the basis for an affirmative answer to these questions. The period is marked by three episodes that illustrate the important place of alcohol in Russian history in 1914–22: state prohibition of the free sale of strong alcoholic drinks in the summer of 1914; mass destruction of urban alcohol (vinnye) warehouses in the last months of 1917 that occurred in parallel with the Bolsheviks’ coming to power; and an epidemic of moonshining and home-brewing of beer in the countryside in the fall of 1922 at the end of the famines and the revolutionary upheavals. Strictly speaking, the looting of alcohol warehouses in 1917–18 and the mas­s moonshining and drunkenness in the countryside in the fall and winter of 1922–23 were only the most radical manifestations of alcohol’s popularity in Russia in 1914–22. This fact thus compels one to presume that drinking had important functions during World War I and the revolution in Russia. At the same time, the prominent role of alcohol in the extraordinary conditions of World War I and the revolution should be relativized: the prob­ lem of the consumption of spirits in Russia was not new and had become a serious issue long before the beginning of the war. In order to attempt to adequately explain the place and role of alcohol in Russia in 1914–22, “the alcohol events” of those years will be briefly introduced, and then the problem of Russian drunkenness in 1914–22 will be placed in the prewar and prerevo­ für Geschichtswissenschaft, no. 10 (2003): 896–909; Kate Transchel, Under the Influence: Working-Class Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1895–1932 (Pitts­ burgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006); D. Bairau [Dietrich Beyrau], “Bakhus v Rossii,” in P. A. Zaionchkovskii, 1904–1983 gg.: Stat´i, publikatsii i vospominaniia o nem, ed. L. G. Zakharova, Iu. S. Kukushkin, and Terence Emmons (Moscow: Rosspen, 1998), 352–77; S. A. Pavliuchenkov, “Veselie Rusi: Revoliutsiia i samogon,” in Revoliutsiia i chelovek: Byt, nravy, povedenie, moral´, ed. P. V. Volobuev (Moscow: Institut Rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 1997), 124–42; I. V. Narskii, Zhizn´ v katastrofe: Budni naseleniia Urala v 1917– 1922 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2001); and others.



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lutionary context of state policy and the culture of libation. The factors that created favorable conditions for the spread of drunkenness and the means by which the population circumvented prohibition during the war and revolu­ tionary years will also be outlined. With these steps, it is possible to approach an answer to the question of what functions alcohol consumption fulfilled during the years of war and revolution, as well as the specificities of the Rus­ sian alcohol problem and its resolution. State Policy and Alcohol Excess in 1914–22 In July 1914, prohibition on the trade of sprits was imposed in all of the regions of the Russian Empire where military mobilization had been proclaimed, and extended till the end of the war by the imperial decree of 22 August 1914. This naïve and from a long-term perspective economically harmful measure was dictated, among other things, by the sad experience of the Russo-Japanese War, in particular the mass alcohol excesses in army divisions both at the time of mobilization and during active military operations in the Far East, due to which the defeats in Manchuria became directly connected with the intemperate consumption of spirits. Memoirs and accounts from witnesses and participants of the events of 1904–05 are filled with bitterness due to the mass drunkenness of Russian Army soldiers and officers despite the official ban.2 The ironic remark attributed to the German Kaiser Wilhelm II that in the approaching European war victory will be on the side of the sober was repeatedly reprinted in anti-alcohol editorials and studies.3 In the first week after the promulgation of the decree of 22 August 1914, riots occurred in 35 provincial and district cities in Central Russia in which crowds of townspeople attacked approximately 230 drinking establishments 2

 A. N. Kuropatkin, The Russian Army, and the Japanese War, Being Historical and Critical Comments on the Military Policy and Power of Russia and on the Campaign in the Far East, 2 vols. (London, 1909), 1: 292–93; Frederick McCormick, The Tragedy of Russia in Pacific Asia, 2 vols. (London, 1909), 2: 280–81; Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, 52–53, 61–63. See also a detailed description of everyday army life during this period by V. V. Veresaev, who served in the Russo-Japanese War as a regimental doctor: V. V. Veresaev, Zapiski vracha: Na iaponskoi voine (Moscow: Pravda, 1986), 286–557. 3  See A. Mak-Ki [W. Arthur McKee], “Sukhoi zakon v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny: Prichiny, kontseptsiia i posledstviia vvedeniia sukhogo zakona v Rossii. 1914–1977,” in Rossiia i Pervaia mirovaia voina: Materialy mezhdunarodnogo nauchnogo kollokviuma, ed. N. N. Smirnov (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999), 152; Irina Sirotkina, “The Politics of Etiology: Shell-Shock in the Russian Army, 1914–1918,” in Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture, ed. Angela Brintlinger and I. Vinitsky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 118–19; Aleksandr Bais, “Frontovye grammy: Optimalist,” Obshcherossiiskaia gazeta optimalistov, no. 5 (104) (2007): 9; and others.

390 Igor V. Narsky and Yulia Y. Khmelevskaya

in 33 provinces and districts. The police reported 107 injured and 145 dead during these outbursts of violence; two-thirds of the victims were from the disorder in the Siberian town of Barnaul. The governor of Perm´ even turned to higher authorities with the request that they allow the sale of alcohol for at least a couple of hours during the day in order to avert “bloody clashes.”4 Drunken riots that broke out sporadically in Russia between August 1914 and February 1917 were accompanied by violence, to the point of mob rule, clashes with the police, and the destruction and looting of alcohol reserves. The insti­ gators of these drunken disorders included reservists and recruits (as in Bar­ naul and Perm´) who stopped vehicles transporting alcohol and forced the convoys to sell vodka to the crowd under the threat of looting or demanded the immediate opening of alcohol warehouses for business;5 nationalisticallyminded townspeople (an alcohol component was present, for example, in the anti-German riots of May 1915 in Moscow);6 peasants drunk on moonshine who had begun to divide landowners’ property long before Bolshevik legalization of the “black redistribution” and even before the February Revolution;7 and— beginning in 1917–18—deserters and demobilized soldiers.8 The policy of the successive regimes on the territory of the former Russian Empire in 1917–22 was characterized by inconsistencies and demonstrated a weakness of the power structures. Unable to implement the decisions they had adopted and to control their execution, the regimes oscillated between appeals to “consciousness” and one-time, demonstrative punitive measures notable for their greater cruelty.9 4  See for further detail A. B. Berkevich, “Krest´ianstvo i vseobshchaia mobilizatsiia v iiule 1914,” Istoricheskie zapiski 23 (1947): 3–43; A. I. Faresov, Narod bez vodki: Putevye ocherki (Petrograd: Tipografiia M. Merkusheva, 1916), 175; Dmitry Shlapentokh, “Drunkenness and Anarchy in Russia: A Case of Political Culture,” Russian History/ Histoire russe 18, 4 (1991): 477. 5

 Iu. I. Kir´ianov, “Byli li antivoennye stachki v Rossii v 1914?” Voprosy istorii, no. 2 (1994): 46; Mak-Ki, “Sukhoi zakon v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny,” 152.

6

 See for further detail Iu. I. Kir´ianov, “‘Maiskie besporiadki’ 1915 v Moskve,” Voprosy istorii, no. 12 (1994): 140; L. S. Gatagova, “Khronika beschinstv: Nemetskie pogromy v Moskve v 1915,” Rodina, no. 10 (2002): 18–23. 7  V. B. Aksenov, V. E. Bardasarian, and V. N. Gorlov, eds., Veselie Rusi, XX vek: Gradus noveishei rossiiskoi istorii ot “p´ianogo biudzheta” do “sukhogo zakona” (Moscow: Probel-2000, 2007). 8

 V. V. Kanishchev and L. Protasov, “Dop´em romanovskie ostatki!” Rodina, no. 8 (1997): 62. 9

 See, for example, G. A. Gerasimenko, “Transformatsiia vlasti v Rossii v 1917 godu,“ Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 1 (1997): 69; V. P. Buldakov, Krasnaia smuta: Priroda i posledstviia revoliutsionnogo nasiliia (Moscow: Rosspen, 1997), 113.



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The Provisional Government prolonged the operation of the “dry law” and—more pre­cisely—the struggle against drunkards. On 20 May 1917 in the name of the Minister of Finance M. I. Tereshchenko a circular, “On the Status of the Struggle against Drunkenness and the Measures Taken in this Regard,” was published. In addition to high-flown pronouncements on the historic fate of the people and the necessity of sobriety, the circular noted that “[i]n the meantime, there are people who place their own personal gain above the welfare of the people… These most evil enemies of the people’s freedom strengthen their criminal activity by secretly producing and selling alcoholic drinks.”10 However, the anti-alcohol policy of the Provisional Government failed, to some extent influencing the fate of the government itself, in any case, facilitating the replacement of its representatives in the Russian provinces with Bolsheviks or (less frequently) their opponents. By an irony of history, several days after the celebration on 29 August 1917 of the All-Russian Day of Sobriety and three years after the introduction of prohibition, a wave of destruction of state alcohol warehouses enveloped the country. In September, it gripped Astrakhan´, Tashkent, Orel, Gomel’, Tambov, and Ufa; in October—Kharkiv, Starodub, Ternopil, and a series of other cities in the southwest of the former Russian Empire. In November, it overwhelmed Petrograd, and after the first rumors about the fall of the Provisional Government—the majority of provincial and district centers of provincial Russia. In December, the destruction of alcohol stores subsided (with the exception of isolated excesses that occurred up until the summer of 1918) and had finished raging in the periphery of the country, including in the regions outside Bolshevik control during the Civil War.11 According to the authoritative opinion of the commander of the troops of the Moscow military district—a figure possessing enough information to make generalizations—all of these “excesses” proceeded according to one scenario: “The picture observed everywhere is almost identical. It begins with the destruction of the alcohol warehouses. The completely drunken crowd then proceeds to destroy stores, shops, and homes. The leaders and instigators are a small bunch of shady individuals who are, for the most part, 10

 Vserossiiskii Soiuz Gorodov. Komissiia po bor´be s alkogolizmom, Materialy (Mos­ cow, 1917), 9.

11

 For further detail on the destruction of state wine warehouses, see V. V. Kanishchev, Russkii bunt, bessmyslennyi i besposhchadnyi: Pogromnoe dvizhenie v gorodakh Rossii v 1917–1918 (Tambov: Tambovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1995); I. V. Narskii and Iu. Iu. Khmelevskaia, “‘Upoenie’” buntom v russkoi revoliutsii (na primere razgromov vinnykh skladov v Rossii 1917,” in Rossiiskaia imperiia chuvstv: Podkhody k kul´turnoi istorii emotsii, ed. Ia. Plamper, Sh. Shakhadat, and M. Eli (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010), 259–81.

392 Igor V. Narsky and Yulia Y. Khmelevskaya

freed criminal convicts.”12 The similarity and simultaneity of the actions by alcohol warehouse looters in different regions created contradictory im­ pressions for (enlightened) contemporaries, in which fear of out-of-control masses combined with an impression of malevolent organization. Attempts to politicize these events, however, by attributing to them, depending on the narrator’s political position and the local state of affairs, either a revolutionary or a counterrevolutionary meaning, explains neither their mass character nor their overall outcome. The wave of pogroms led to the destruction of a great part of the gigantic state reserves and other property of the alcohol warehouses and private stores. Also, according to the inexact estimates of the press, the victims of drunken carelessness, who drowned in tanks of alcohol or died in the fires of alcohol warehouses, from alcohol poisoning and, starting in late autumn, from hypothermia, numbered into the thousands. The Bolshevik government reacted to manifestations of drunken anarchy with considerable decisiveness. To put a stop to the looting of alcohol warehouses a Committee for the Struggle against Pogroms, headed by V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, was created. Speaking on 14 January 1918 at a meeting of the Presidium of the Petrograd Soviet on the question of the struggle against hunger, V. I. Lenin proposed executing speculators and robbers, including looters.13 On 21 February 1918 the Sovnarkom passed a decree entitled “The Socialist Fatherland Is in Danger!” in which point 8 stated that “hostile agents, speculators, burglars, hooligans, counterrevolutionary agitators, and German spies are to be executed on the spot.”14 The immediate implementation of these measures was entrusted to the organs of the Cheka.15 In 1918 in territories under the control of anti-Bolshevik governments, one-time actions for the normalized sale of alcohol from the few remaining alcohol stores were undertaken with the goal of replenishing the state budget, and in early 1919, prohibition in “White” territories was de facto lifted. Thus from 1 February 1919 the state sale of alcohol was reestablished in Siberia.16 The Bolshevik government settled the question of prohibition in Soviet Russia 12

 Quotation from Narskii, Zhizn´ v katastrofe, 198.

13

 V. I. Lenin, “Vystupleniia po voprosu o merakh bor´by c golodom,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1974), 35: 311.

14

 Institut marksizma-leninizma pri TsK KPSS. Institut istorii SSSR Akademii nauk SSSR, Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1957), 1: 491.

15

 Izvestiia VTsIK, 23 February 1918.

16

 For further detail, see Narskii, Zhizn´ v katastrofe, 247–48.



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only at the end of 1919, with a decree on 19 December banning the production and sale of spirits and strong alcoholic beverages with the exception of those not exceeding a strength of 12 proof. After the introduction of NEP in 1921–22, the private production and sale of grape wine, and subsequently beer, were allowed. Mass drunkenness marked not only the first year of the revolution but also its end. In the autumn of 1922 authorities were seriously alarmed by the unexpectedly rapid and extensive spread of moonshining and drunkenness in the countryside. The peasantry celebrated the end of famine and the return to a relatively normal life in its singular manner. The “drunken” holiday of 1922 had precedents in the Russian past: “Drunken binges were usually observed during a bountiful autumn harvest after a series of lean years, as well as on the occasion of an unanticipated cancellation of tax arrears, a declaration of war, and the conclusion of peace.”17 All of these circumstances came together in 1922: the harvest was relatively bountiful, famine had been survived, taxes were not as burdensome as they had been in 1921, and after the hardship of many years of war and revolution, it appeared that a peaceful time had arrived. Mass rural drunkenness aroused concern in the cities, as shown by searches and confiscations, an anti-alcohol press campaign, and in early 1923, the appearance in the bulletins of the State Political Directorate of reports on the mood of the population under the special rubric “Drinking Report.” Despite the measures that were adopted, the drunken chaos began to decline only with the start of the agricultural cycle in 1923. Finally, the “dry law” of 1914 was repealed with the establishment of an official state vodka monopoly in 1925. What factors—and to what extent—brought about such “scenarios” of popular reactions to the state’s struggle with drunkenness and, even more, with drunkards? Is it possible to isolate in these scenarios the particular impact of wartime experience or do they represent the actualization of trends present in the late imperial period, before the war and revolution? Drinking Culture in Prewar Russia: Traditions and Innovations According to statistical data and researchers, the general level of alcohol consumption in Russia at the turn of the 20th century was not high, significantly below France, for example, and just surpassing the Scandinavian countries with their harsh state control over the consumption of spirits.18 Nevertheless, 17

 Pavliuchenkov, “Veselie Rusi,” 134.

18

 Bairau, Bakhus v Rossii, 355; Hugo Hoppe, Die Tatsachen über den Alkohol: Eine Dar­ stellung der Wissenschaft vom Alkohol (Berlin: S. Calvary & Co., 1904), 428; Stephen

394 Igor V. Narsky and Yulia Y. Khmelevskaya

the problem of mass drunkenness in Russia was not new, and anti-alcohol discourse existed in various spheres of Russian society in the last third of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The perniciousness of the Russian population’s passion for alcohol was discussed by doctors, Duma leaders, and the temperance movements that had formed by this time, both apolitical and ones with a political (most frequently right-nationalist) slant.19 The dissemination of this discourse was marked by some successes. This was the case, for example, at the end of the Russo-Japanese War, when the General Staff and the Ministry of War, which had previously rejected proposals by the Anti-Alcohol Commission and doctors of the Pirogov Society to limit the consumption of spirits in the army, introduced much harsher penalties, including tribunals, for alcoholism while performing military service. In 1908, the state vodka ration in the military was abolished, and the sale of strong alcoholic drinks was prohibited in army canteens, replaced with beer and wine.20 Before turning to the aspects of Russian drunkenness that troubled the advocates of a sober way of life, it should be noted that in the Russian Empire several dining cultures coexisted in a population with a full soslovie structure; at a minimum there were three: noble, urban (working-class), and rural. The first of these did not undergo fundamental changes either after the adoption of the excise system under Alexander II or with the beginning of the state vodka monopoly, or even with the establishment of limitations on the consumption of spirits in 1914. Russian educated society was characterized by regular but moderate everyday consumption of quality alcohol (wine, liqueurs, cognac, and vodka) in domestic settings and in “respectable” eating establishments for the “clean” public. Inasmuch as this part of the population retained access to alcohol (through a doctor’s prescription or at elite restaurants) after the in­ White, Russia Goes Dry: Alcohol, State and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11; Ikka H. Makinen and I. Therese C. Reitan, “Continuity and Change in Russian Alcohol Consumption from the Tsars to Transition,” Social History 31, 2 (2006): 160–79; Alexandr Nemtsov, A Contemporary History of Alcohol in Russia (Stockholm: Södertörns högskola, 2011), 59, 89. 19

 For further detail, see J. F. Hutchinson, “Science, Politics and the Alcohol Problem in Post-1905 Russia,” Slavonic and East European Review 58, 2 (1980): 232–34; W. Arthur McKee, “Sobering Up the Soul of the People: The Politics of Popular Temperance in Late Imperial Russia,” Russian Review 58, 2 (1999): 212–33; George Snow, “Socialism, Alcoholism and the Russian Working Class before 1917,” in Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern History, ed. Susan Barrow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 243–64; and others.

20  I. V. Sazhin, Alkogolizm v armii i mery bor´by s nim, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: Tip. Aleksandro-Nevskogo ob-va trezvosti, 1913); George Snow, “Alcoholism in the Russian Military: The Public Sphere and the Temperance Discourse, 1883–1917,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, N.F., 45, 3 (1997): 428.



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troduction of prohibition in 1914, it irritated the Russian lower classes as a violation of social justice. As a result, as advocates of compulsory temperance noted with bitterness, “prohibitory measures are discredited in the eyes of the people, who are accustomed to follow always and in all things the example of the intelligentsia, which evokes a mixture of temptation and indignation with discussions of how ‘the rich always live well.’”21 The drinking culture of the urban lower classes differed in a number of features. First, contemporary researchers at the beginning of the 20th century noted that in the city the consumption of alcohol was 4 to 4.5 times higher than in rural areas, and in working-class neighborhoods 3 to 4 times greater than in the neighborhoods of the well-to-do. Second, as is characteristic for any early industrial society, the drunkenness of workers was not an everyday but a social activity, the consequence of growing modernization and “the rising intensity of life, with the acceleration of its pace.”22 Alcohol allowed working people to escape bitter reality and suppress the terror of disorientation in a radically changing environment. Due to the fact that the peasant dining culture partly fed into the culture of the urban lower classes, they shared some common features. Peasants, who were migrating in great numbers to the cities of the late Russian Empire, carried with them, among other things, their drinking habits. In rural areas, these habits had fundamentally changed after the establishment of the excise system and the state vodka monopoly. As with the worker drinking culture, peasant habits of consuming spirits were transformed from premodern to modern. The consumption of alcohol was detached from holidays and became systematic and routine, turned into a matter of free choice for those who independently earned money and could pay for alcohol. In other words, it acquired the status of a male privilege.23 Consequently, government drinking establishments became a sort of “drinking commune,” where the urban and rural drinking habits merged: “In many ways the tavern replaced some of the functions of the village commune (mir).… [T]he commune negotiated all contacts between the peasant and the external world and its authorities. Since the collective took precedence over the individual, the peasant commune fostered a homogeneous, cohesive society based on common interests 21  I. N. Vvedenskii, Opyt prinuditel´noi trezvosti (Moscow: Izdanie Moskovskogo Stolichnogo Popechitel´stva o Narodnoi Trezvosti, 1915), available online at http://rusk. com.ru/lib/bitva/vvedensky.htm (accessed 2 April 2012). 22

 See, for example, D. N. Voronov, Alkogolizm v gorode i derevne v sviazi s bytom naseleniia: Obsledovanie potrebleniia vina v Penzenskoi gubernii v 1912 (Penza, 1913), 47; S. A. Pervushin, Opyt teorii massovogo alkogolizma v sviazi s teoriei potrebnostei (St. Petersburg, 1912), 23, 35–36.

23

 Transchel, Under the Influence, 28.

396 Igor V. Narsky and Yulia Y. Khmelevskaya

and values. As the 19th century wore on and modern drinking culture altered traditional social structures, the tavern took on some of the characteristics of the commune.”24 According to researchers who directly witnessed state alcohol policy at the turn of the 20th century, the excise system and the monopoly not only did not facilitate the inculcation of “civilized” habits of consuming alcohol but on the contrary led to the development of new forms of alcoholization. The transformation of the drinking culture of the Russian lower classes was accompanied by an increase in male consumption of strong alcohol; the establishment of the “northern” drinking style characterized by “shock” doses (200-milligram glasses) with the goal of rapid and complete intoxication; and a bar-oriented culture of alcohol consumption divorced from the home and family.25 According to doctors, public health experts, economists, lawyers, and moral reformers, this led to the destruction of health, family, well-being, order, and morals. The most important result of the “modernization” of drunkenness, however, was the transformation of alcohol consumption in the late Russian Empire into an acquired necessity and the perception of it as a personal right. The quality of satisfaction was guaranteed by the state monopoly, which prior to the introduction of the “dry law” gave this need legitimacy, however doubtful from the perspective of the advocates of sobriety and moral purity. Notably, the rhetoric of both advocates and opponents of compulsory sobriety invoked the personal argument both before and during World War I. Yet if the former emphasized convincing people to make a personal choice and give up drinking, in other words to display “consciousness” and “sacri­ fice,” supporting the state for the sake of higher common goals, then the latter perceived in the dry law “an infringement of the legal notions of the Russian people,” “an illegal encroachment on the private life of the citizen,” and a cause of an oppositional mood26 that did not hesitate to appear in the different strategies of adaptation and resistance to the state liquor policies in 1914–18. It goes without saying that such theorizing was characteristic of the “enlightened” part of the discourse on alcohol. However, the first reactions of ordinary citizens to the government’s prohibitory measures in 1914 attest to the fact that certain diametrically opposed aspects of this discourse, in 24

 Ibid., 28. For further detail about the history of taverns in Russia, see, for example, Ivan Pryzhov, Istoriia kabakov v Rossii v sviazi s istoriei russkogo naroda: Materialy k istorii obshchestvennogo i narodnogo byta v Rossii (Kazan´: “Molodye Sily,” 1914); Igor´ Kurukin and Elena Nikulina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´ russkogo kabaka ot Ivana Groznogo do Borisa El´tsina (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2007).

25

 V. K. Dmitriev, Kriticheskie issledovaniia o potreblenii alkogolia v Rossii (Moscow: Izda­ tel´stvo V. P. Riabushinskogo, 1911), 304. 26

 Vvedenskii, Opyt prinuditel´noi trezvosti.



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particular, changing conceptions of the prerogatives of the individual and the state, and of state sanctions and private rights, were shared by the common people. This is illustrated, for example, by the practice of petitioning author­ ities to permanently ban the sale of alcohol and the fact that the first alcohol “excesses” at the beginning of mobilization started with demands to resume the “legal” sale of spirits—in other words, to return to the accustomed order— and not with spontaneous riots as occurred later. The State of Affairs in Wartime and Revolutionary Everyday Life World War I and the revolution that followed created a dangerous mix of intricately intertwined factors that were favorable to the unprecedentedly extensive and unhindered prevalence of drunkenness. The mobilizational model of the economy with the concomitant changes in the consumer market and man­datory state deliveries of the peasants’ grain at fixed prices transformed moonshining, despite its prohibition, into a profitable enterprise. From 1917 on, an array of sociopolitical circumstances favoring mass drunkenness were added to the economic motives. Among them were the rapid weakening of authority and destruction of mechanisms of state control over the production and sale of spirits; the derelict condition of gigantic state reserves of alcohol; and uncertainty about the future in the face of unexpected and inexplicable events. First, the instrumental role of alcoholic drinks in Russia during World War I and the revolution must be considered. Alcohol was first of all an important economic resource, in a sense the most reliable hard currency in conditions of inflation and increasing shortages. Second, its physiological significance grew, approximating the role alcohol played in the Middle Ages.27 The switch to low-calorie food preserved with salt raised the importance of alcoholic drinks to a level unknown today as a source of additional calories and a means of satisfying thirst. The deteriorating sanitary conditions in cities, epidemics that were increasing in frequency and severity, and shortages of fuel and medicine all transformed alcohol-containing substances into an alternative to unreliable water sources and an essential antiseptic and medicine (in full conformity with stereotypes held among the common people). The trend that emerged in the international historiography of the 1980s– 90s to interpret the intensive consumption of alcohol during transitional 27

 For a survey on the functions of alcohol in the Middle Ages and modern history, see Massimo Montanari, Der Hunger und der Überfluss: Kulturgeschichte der Ernährung in Europa (Munich: C. H. Becksche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1999), 145–49; Jack S. Blocker, Jr., David M. Fahey, and Ian R. Tyrrell, eds., Alcohol and Temperance in Modern History: An International Encyclopaedia, 2 vols. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003).

398 Igor V. Narsky and Yulia Y. Khmelevskaya

periods as a physiological rather than psychological phenomenon possesses indisputable advantages.28 But a number of circumstances permit us to as­ sume that the consumption of alcohol, which during peacetime also functions as an instrument of escapism, served during the war and revolution, among other things, as a means of reducing the sensation of dramatically growing uncertainty, and escaping fear in an uncomfortable, barely comprehensible and rapidly changing environment, and of symbolically “rectifying” reality, of restoring social ties that had been destroyed, or escaping from reality. Indeed, drunkenness in the Russia of 1914–22 reached its apogee during the most acute political moments, namely in periods when the entire political course or power changed. In the village “drunken phases” coincided with the end of the harvest, when the peasantry simultaneously celebrated, according to tradition, the completion of the agricultural cycle and lived in anticipation of yet another regime’s claims on the fruits of their labor. The “Quiet” Practices of Access to Alcohol The inconsistency of anti-alcohol policies and the shortcomings of legislation regulating alcohol created opportunities for the unprecedented ingenuity of vodka worshipers and those wishing to satisfy their needs. Lovers of the bottle could acquire alcohol substitutes, which were used in great quantities and with weak inventory controls in shoe manufacturing and for other technical uses outside state warehouses, without major problems. Thus, trade in highquality, high-proof spirits—cognacs, vodkas, rums, and various liqueurs— partly but entirely officially migrated to pharmacies, where they could be ac­ quired with a doctor’s prescription. According to some estimates, during the war years the sale of alcohol in pharmaceutical establishments grew ten- to twentyfold,29 and the actual number of pharmacies increased considerably.30 In addition to relatively “legitimate” methods of accessing alcohol, the Russian population promptly developed a series of economically profitable shadow strategies of resistance to sobriety, which can be designated as “quiet” in the sense that they did not encroach upon the integrity of state reserves but created a private alternative to them. This type of accommodation to the 28  On the state of the research on this problem in Western historiography, see Heinrich Tappe, Auf dem Weg zur modernen Alkoholkultur: Alkoholproduktion, Trinkverhalten und Temperenzbewegung in Deutschland vom frühen 19. Jahrhundert bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1994), 19–26. 29

 David Christian, “Prohibition in Russia, 1914–1925,” Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 9, 2 (1995): 89–118, here 105.

30

 See Denny Vågerö, “Introduction,” in Nemtsov, A Contemporary History of Alcohol in Russia, 22.



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prohibition of the free sale of strong alcohol developed in several ways. While contraband and under-the-counter trading in closed warehouses and cellars in front-line zones were well known and repeatedly tested strategies, mass practices of moonshining and using technical surrogates as drinking alcohol were new phenomena. It is thought that prior to the introduction of the dry law, Russia’s urban and rural population, with the exception of some remote regions—for ex­ ample, Siberia—did not have long-standing traditions of large-scale illegal production of strong alcohol.31 Beer and low-alcohol drinks were brewed in villages, and on noble estates a moderate quantity of vodka was produced for personal consumption. Towards the end of the 19th century, surveillance by landowners and the state led to the near total loss of the technologies for home production of high-proof alcohol, while the accessibility and comparatively low cost of high-quality vodka had extinguished the need to distill moon­ shine. Insignificant too was the “non-purpose” use of industrial compounds containing alcohol—this type of product, initially industrial in origin, was itself relatively new and even for its intended purpose had come into wide use only with the beginning of industrialization. If in 1913 only 600 cases of moonshining were reported in all of Russia, by the second half of 1914, according to information from the Ministry of Agriculture, 1,825 secret distilleries had been discovered, 160 of which proved to be well-equipped technically: 92 factories specially for refining lacquer and varnish and 60 for refining denatured alcohol.32 In 1915, the Excise Department recorded 5,707 sites for the illegal production of alcohol,33 and from September 1916 to May 1917—9,351. At the same time, excise officials themselves estimated the actual number of bootleggers producing spirits for sale to be about ten times that number.34 In the first months of compulsory sobriety, doctors noted a sharp increase in the number of poisonings from alcohol-containing surrogates as a result of the internal use of denatured or wood alcohol, cologne, varnish, hair products, etc. “Having first come to light, as would be expected, in big cities, [the use of surrogates] began to be observed in the provinces and even to penetrate the village. Surrogates are consumed in pure form or undergo processing either to render them harmless, if possible, or merely

31

 Сhristian, “Prohibition in Russia,” 96.

32

 Vvedenskii, Opyt prinuditel´noi trezvosti.

33

 Christian, “Prohibition in Russia,” 107.

34

 Faresov, Narod bez vodki, 43; Mak-Ki, “Sukhoi zakon v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny,” 156.

400 Igor V. Narsky and Yulia Y. Khmelevskaya

to improve the taste.”35 The imagination that people craving alcohol applied to the process of procuring and “ennobling” questionable liquids knew no bounds, and developed into a favorite subject for the local press.36 The widespread use of and habituation to alcohol substitutes can also be seen in their popularity in the urban folklore of the World War I and Civil War period.37 The introduction of the dry law in 1914, in conjunction with the beginning of the state grain monopoly, contributed to the commercialization of the pro­ duction of homemade alcohol. The processing of grain into moonshine and homemade beer yielded a return several times greater than the value of the food-stuffs utilized for this purpose.38 The underground production and consumption of homemade alcohol increased even more in connection with the February Revolution and the liqui­ dation of the police: the strength of authority and the scale of drunkenness were inversely proportional. The freedom granted by the revolution was understood by the population as license to expand the distilling of moonshine to new locales.39 Neither the police nor the excise inspectorate was capable of coping with the production of moonshine. The courts were swamped with cases involving the illegal production of spirits that were ignored or were reviewed only after a delay. The Bolsheviks’ repressive measures could not overcome 35

 Vvedenskii, Opyt prinuditel´noi trezvosti; L. Granovskii, Alkogolizm i kooperatsiia, 3rd ed. (Moscow, 1919), 30–31. 36

 For futher detail, see Faresov, Narod bez vodki, 43–45; P. P. Shcherbinin, “Alkogol´ v povsednevnoi zhizni rossiiskoi provintsii v period Pervoi mirovoi voiny 1914–1918 godov,” Vestnik Cheliabinskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, no. 2 (2003): 66–68; and Ol´ga Chagadaeva, “Smes´ krasnogo vina s rastvorom dinamita: ‘Sukhoi zakon’ i chernyi rynok v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny,” Rodina 8 (2010): 77–79.

37

 For example, the most widespread alcohol substitutes—moonshine, denatured alcohol, lacquer, and khanzha—are included in different versions of the well-known urban songs “Sharaban moi” i “Chizhik-Pyzhik,” which enjoyed wide popularity during World War I and the Civil War. Russian khanzha (aka khanka) comes from North Chinese khan-shin or khan-chin, strong homemade alcohol with a distinctive yellow color made by double distilling fermented grain—kaoliang (sorghum), foxtail millet, and corn. The Russians got to know this word (and “technology”) in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 and brought it back home to call any strong booze made of cheap or “plebeian” grain. Later it became a synonym for any lowquality moonshine. 38

 In January 1917, in Urzhum district in Viatsk province, where a bushel of rye flour could be sold for 2.2–3.5 rubles, a bucket of moonshine prepared with the same quantity of grain cost 12 rubles. See Viatskaia rech´, 21 January 1917.

39

 See A. P. Sheksheev, “Vlast´ i eniseiskoe krest´ianstvo: Otnosheniia na pochve samogonovareniia (1917—nachalo 1930-kh godov),” in Vestnik Krasnoiarskogo gosudarst­ vennogo universiteta, Seriia “Gumanitarnye nauki,” no. 3 (2006): 26.



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401

the mass production and sale of alcohol either. During War Communism, as before, “disorderly outbursts of drunkenness at all social levels and the party leadership’s not entirely firm reaction” were observed everywhere.40 The antimoonshine raids of the Red Guards and the “flying brigades” often met fierce resistance and sparked insurgency,41 transforming “quiet” practices into a qualitatively different, demonstrative level of opposition. Revolution and the “Loud” Storming of Alcohol Reserves The most vivid example of the new authorities’ weakness and inconsistency in the struggle against drunkenness was the fate of the state alcohol warehouses in 1917–18. State reserves of spirits42 turned into a real headache for the Provisional Government, and later for the Soviet government, provincial commissars, and public organizations. The collapse of the autocracy cast doubt on the right of ownership to this “treasure,” which had in an instant become a tempting object for unsanctioned encroachments. In addition, the procedure for issuing permits for legally acquiring alcoholic liquids for technical or medical needs was called into question and had to be reconceptualized. Formerly, according to the law of 13 October 1914, this was done by the police, which no longer ex­ isted in March 1917. On 13 March 1917, the Provisional Government sent excise officials a circular directing them to strengthen security at alcohol warehouses and stressing the strategic significance of spirits for the defense industry, including for the manufacture of gunpowder. The directive also made provi­ sions for the destruction, if absolutely necessary, of the alcohol reserves at the discretion of local authorities.43 This argument apparently concealed a different and no less important motive. The pogroms against wine cellars in the capital had demonstrated a threatening reality much earlier than in other regions: having begun immediately after the February Revolution and repeated during each subsequent political crisis (May, July, and October 1917), they were regarded as a serious danger to the existence of the new regime. 40

 Pavliuchenkov, “Veselie Rusi,” 127.

41

 Sheksheev, “Vlast´ i eniseiskoe krest´ianstvo,” 26–27.

42

 Over the course of the war the equivalent of 70 million buckets of 40 percent al­ cohol accumulated in various warehouses, that is 6 liters for each resident of the former Russian Empire, including infants. One “bucket” (vedro) = 13.12 liters or 3.466 US gallons. See T. P. Korzhikhina, “Bor´ba s alkogolizmom v 1920-e–nachale 1930-kh godov,” Voprosy istorii, no. 9 (1985): 21.

43

 This document in fact repeated the tsarist government’s instructions, which had been sent to provincial authorities in the fall of 1916. See Shcherbinin, “Alkogol´ v povsednevnoi zhizni,” 69.

402 Igor V. Narsky and Yulia Y. Khmelevskaya

But from the outset it was clear that intractable obstacles of a purely tech­ nical nature stood in the way of liquidating the alcohol reserves, those potential sources of threat to the new order: the enormous volume of spirits, the lack of technology to destroy them, and imperfections in the sewage systems, where they could have been quietly poured in the majority of provincial and district towns. Authorities could not come up with an alternative to dumping alcohol in urban reservoirs (as was done in many towns). These actions did in fact prompt mass riots from the fall of 1917 into the spring of 1918. The behavioral and verbal character of the emotional displays of those who participated in the alcohol riots suggests that they perceived free access to “the goods,” hidden from them by the state and “bourgeoisie” during the three years of war and prohibition, as a well-earned holiday, compensation for the privations and sacrifices they had endured.44 It was precisely this form, that is, the looting of alcohol reserves, that combined a display of physicality and sociality, elements of ritual and revolt,45 and proved to be the universal capable of combining mass expectations and complaints, and of concentrating their lack of trust in the authorities. The role of ritual practices of popular festivals, their “infectiousness” as means of “releasing” pent-up feelings, and their possible influence on the “emotional regimes” of that time is noted by authors interested in the history of emotions: Such emotional refuges may take a great variety of forms, from private understandings, to informal sociability, to Carnival-type ritual, to international secret brotherhoods. They probably play a role in most emotional regimes. Their significance is polyvalent. They may make the current order more livable for some people, some of the time. For others, or in other times, they may provide a place from which contestation, conflict and transformation are launched.46 44

 For further detail, see Narskii and Khmelevskaia, “‘Upoenie’ buntom,” 259–81.

45

 For further detail on the connection between holidays and riots, see Yves-Marie Bersé, Fête et révolte: Des mentalités populaires du XVI au XVIII siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1976); James von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Axel Honneth, “Die unendliche Perpetuierung des Naturzustandes: Zum theoretischen erkenntnisgehalt von Canettis masse und Macht,” in Einladung zur Verwaltung: Essays zu Canettis “Masse und Macht,” ed. Michael Krüger (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1995); M. M. Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul´tura srednevekov´ia i Renessansa (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990); Mona Ozuf, Revoliutsionnyi prazdnik, 1789–1799, trans. U. E Liamina (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul´tury, 2003); Z. A. Chekantseva, “Prazdnik i bunt vo Frantsii mezhdu Frondoi i Revoliutsiei,” Odissei: Chelovek v istorii (Moscow: Nauka, 2005), 49–67. 46

 William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 128. See also the reasoning of L. Febvre



Alcohol in Russia

403

Elements of “carnival” and holiday-riot are inherent in Russian folk holiday culture, embodied in Christmas and especially Shrovetide celebrations, and accomopanied by unbridled merriment, excessive consumption of food and alcohol, games and risky amusements characterized by a weakening of moral taboos and the transgression of age roles, including fistfights. This in part explains why the pogroms of 1917 were regarded by their participants at something not only legal and normal but also commendable, like victory in a risky game. This attitude is manifested in the naïve, at first glance, youthful bravado of those obtaining alcohol, in their dismissive attitude toward the danger associated with their actions, in the foolish custom of getting domestic animals inebriated, and in the dissolute excitement of sharing the alcohol. Eyewitness recollections of these events in Russian towns thousands of kilo­ meters from one another are practically identical.47 Both those looting the alcohol warehouses and outside observers characterized the unbridled drunkenness as similar to that at Easter—the main Orthodox holiday, which was traditionally accompanied by especially intensive drinking bouts and emotional rejoicing. But despite the religious roots of Easter symbolism, its use by the participants in drunken pogroms speaks not to the religiosity of the lower classes in the revolution, although the idea of “recompense” for the sufferings endured is present in many of the rioters’ statements. Rather, it may be assumed that what was taking place was a case of secularization of the original sense of the religious holiday, which, incidentally, occurred not without the involvement of more educated compatriots. Beginning in the spring of 1917, on the wave of emotional euphoria evoked by the February Revolution, the revolution’s enthusiastic followers began to propagandize the image of a “revolution-Easter” that would resurrect the Russian people. This image proved so universal that alcohol warehouse looters confidently substituted for the notion of revolution the concept of an Easter laden with multilayered meanings, which apparently seemed to them the most felicitous and concise synonym for the end of suffering and the coming of a freedom that had removed moral and social barriers. Notably, the “festive” component, which meant, apart from everything else, the collective consumption of alcohol, was characteristic of practices of front fraternization. on the ritual side of emotions and its role as a unifying factor in collective act´ion: “Chuvstvitel´nost’ i istoriia: Kak vossozdat´ emotsional´nuiu zhizn´ proshlogo,” in Lius´en Fevr [Lucien Febvre], Boi za istoriiu, trans. A. A. Bobovich et al. (Moscow: Nauka, 1991), 112, 124. 47  See, for example, the description of the behavior of thieves in Borisoglebsk and Ostrogozhsk in the Voronezhsk district and in Orenburg in S. M. Volkonskii, Moi vospominaniia, 2 vols. (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1992), 2: 254; S. M. Krivoshein, Skvoz´ buri (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1959), 31; Orenburgskii kazachii vestnik, 20 December 1917.

404 Igor V. Narsky and Yulia Y. Khmelevskaya

Having begun with spontaneous truces during traditional holidays (Easter and Christmas), towards the end of World War I this ritual assumed the character of mass outright insubordination and violation of discipline that, according to the conjectures of certain authors, was actively encouraged by the enemy.48 The assumption that in 1922, in conjunction with the relatively bountiful harvest, the same motivational and interpretative “scheme” was at work in the behavior of historical actors as in 1917–18—the end of the “burdens” of protracted war and famine, perceived and celebrated as a mass holiday— requires special investigation. But given the lack of state alcohol reserves com­ parable to those which had accumulated prior to 1917, the rural population of Soviet Russia resorted to the “quiet,” peaceful practices of the time of the tsarist dry law. Meanwhile, during the years in which the dry law was formally in effect, bootlegging practices had become fully established, were rooted in Russian everyday life, and had become so habitual that it was difficult to battle them with punitive and prohibitory measures. Noteworthy as well is the large body of evidence from 1918–22 about drunkenness taking root amongst provincial senior officials, members of the Bolshevik Party, and especially law enforcement officers at the district, city, and provincial levels.49 Accounts in the press and Cheka reports about local authorities’ incessant drinking, gallivanting about with loose women, and rowdiness grew more frequent, as a rule, during the most dangerous periods of the populace’s worsening relationship toward Soviet power—during the forcible requisitioning of grain and peasant unrest. During the first years of the Soviet Union’s existence, representatives of authority and law-enforcement agencies could certainly be classified as high-risk groups. The weakness of state institutions and mass hostility on the part of the population made life for these categories of government officials full of everyday perils, from which alcohol probably provided a temporary escape. As for other segments of the population, immoderate use of spirits allowed workers of the new regime, on the one hand, to lose themselves, relax, escape from everyday stress, and stifle doubts and fears in alcohol, and on the other hand, to cheer themselves up, symbolically demonstrate membership in a masculine circle, and cultivate a friendly disposition and comradely ties.

48

 For further detail, see A. B. Astashov, “Brantaniia na Russkom fronte Pervoi mirovoi voiny,” Novyi istoricheskii vestnik, no. 28 (2) (2011): 29–41.

49

 See E. G. Gimpel´son, “Sovetskie upravlentsy: Politicheskii i nravstvennyi oblik (1917–1920),” Otechestvennaia istoriia, no 5 (1997): 44–54.



Alcohol in Russia

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Alcohol and the Army The participation of military garrisons and demobilized soldiers in the alcohol disorders in 1917–18, noted by many witnesses, offers a reason to reflect on the influence of the experience of military service itself in the alcohol excesses. The problem of drunkenness in the army had begun to concern military officials, doctors, and commentators long before the mobilization of 1914 and the dry law that followed.50 In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, temperance advo­ cates perceived a direct connection between army drinking traditions and illness, crime, and the breakdown of discipline amongst servicemen as well as the transformation of previously sober individuals into lovers of the bottle.51 Doctors and public health officials were particularly concerned by the presence in soldiers’ rations of a state-provided alcohol allowance—a practice that had by that time been abolished in the majority of European powers. “During wartime, the lower ranks are issued an alcohol portion of a cup of hot wine (1/80 of a bucket)—to those serving in combat units, 3 times a week, and to those in non-combat units, 2 times. In peacetime, about 15 such soldiers’ cups of 40% spirit 1/200 of a bucket in size are distributed in the ground forces and are drunk by the lower ranks on parade on festive occasions.” In addition to the “state portions,” there was the possibility of obtaining spirits at one’s own expense in regimental canteens.52 On average, each soldier had no fewer than 100–20 cups (that is, approximately half a bucket of 40 percent alcohol) per year in addition to the official ration and refreshments at the personal ex­ pense of “father-commanders.”53 Advocates of temperance in the army were concerned not only by the al­ cohol allowances and military drinking traditions in and of themselves, but also by the accompanying moral pressure on non-drinking recruits, whose refusal to accept the “little cup” made them the object of ridicule and raised doubts about their masculinity. Analogous pressure was present in the civilian 50

 For further detail of the discussion on alcoholism in the Russian army at the turn of the 20th century, see Snow, Alcoholism in the Russian Military, 418–25; Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, 52–68; Mikhail Malygin, “Kak v russkoi armii c ‘zelenym zmiem’ borolis´,” Voennyi Vestnik Iuga Rossii (Rostov-na-Donu), 16 June 2010, pt. 1, http://rus. ruvr.ru/by_source/2395930/index.html; Malygin, “Kak v russkoi armii c ‘zelenym zmiem’ borolis´,” pt. 2, Voennyi Vestnik Iuga Rossii (Rostov-na-Donu), 22 June 2010, http://rus.ruvr. ru/2010/06/22/10292063.html (last accessed 2 April 2012). 51

 Snow, Alcoholism in the Russian Military, 419–20; N. N. Shipov, Alkogolizm i revoliutsiia (St. Petersburg: Grad, 1908), 19–20.

52

 Shipov, Alkogolizm, 20–22.

53

 Calculated with data from N. N. Shipov.

406 Igor V. Narsky and Yulia Y. Khmelevskaya

environment as well, but amongst servicemen it was intensified many times over by the closed character of army institutions with their intrinsic formal and informal hierarchies.54 Anti-alcohol criticism of military drinking rituals intensified noticeably after the scandalous excesses of the Russo-Japanese War, public discussion of which led to the aforementioned abolition in 1908 of the state ration and the sale of vodka in soldiers’ shops. The “Guide for Calling Up Lower Ranks of the Reserve to Active Military Service,” issued that same year, ordered dis­ trict and provincial authorities, including excise departments and military boards, to determine in advance a procedure for stopping the sale of strong drinks at assembly points and for following conscripts at every point in the mobilization schedule.55 To a certain extent, these measures can be considered precursors of the more general “dry law” policy. As for the role of alcohol in the preservation of army divisions’ esprit de corps (for example, the celebration of regimental holidays, the number of which reached 214 in the prewar years56), it shifted to the informal sphere and was maintained at the personal expense of commissioned officers and under their personal responsibility.57 Consequently, the Russian army entered World War I formally sober, offi­ cially possessing in the soldier’s ration neither the “cup” traditional since the era of Peter the Great nor the notorious “People’s Commissariat 100 grams” of the Great Patriotic War. In officers’ attestations, the column “Attitude towards alcoholic drinks” was introduced, and in 1914 this situation was strengthened when the military issued order #309, “Measures against the Consumption of

54

 N. D. Butovskii was one of the first to show the connection between army drunken­ ness and “the license to youthful bravado.” See N. D. Butovskii, “Neskol´ko soobra­ zhenii po povodu vinnoi soldatskoi portsii,” Voennyi sbornik, no. 12 (1883): 295–302; Butovskii, “O kazarmennoi nravstvennosti i o vnutrennem poriadke v voiskakh?“ Voennyi sbornik, no. 1 (1883): 132–36. See also Snow, Alcoholism in the Russian Military, 420–21; Karen Petrone, “Masculinity and Heroism in Imperial and Soviet MilitaryPatriotic Cultures,” in Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, ed. Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healey (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002), 172– 93.

55

 E. V. Pashkov, “Antialkogol´naia kampaniia v Rossii v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny,” Voprosy istorii, no. 10 (2010): 86–87.

56

 E. G. Vapilin, “Vse bedy v Rossii ot prazdnikov?” Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 2 (2003): 70.

57

 See, for example, a description of this holiday in V. S. Trubetskoi, Zapiski kirasira: Memuary (Moscow: “Rossiia,” 1991), 125–26.



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Alcoholic Beverages in the Army,” subsequently entered into the Statute of Internal Service as addendum #40.58 Of course, the image of the sober defender of the fatherland corresponded to patriotic canons. After the introduction of prohibition, the military began to report on the successes of the anti-alcohol campaign in the army—the crea­ tion of regimental temperance societies, educational activities, sports clubs, voluntary activities, reading rooms—i.e., everything intended to create an alternative to “drunken gatherings.” At the beginning of World War I, a slight decrease in the number of cases of mental illness in the army in comparison with that of 1904–05 was noted; contemporaries attributed it to the influence of the dry law.59 But evidence from witnesses of everyday life at the front indicates that despite the official prohibition, the situation with the alcohol question in the army in the field was anything but rosy. Thus, for example, it was noted that in the major cities closest to the front (for example, Kiev) alcohol was traded openly. Once arrangements were made with liquor mer­ chants, it was possible to organize a practically uninterrupted supply of wine and vodka, while in the rear—in Moscow or Tula, for example—the sale of alcoholic drinks was prohibited.60 The fluidity and disorder of life at the front, combined with the constant stress, made temperance propaganda and recreational activities intended as a substitute for drinking unpromising. Being stationed at the front, with the abundance of belongings abandoned by retreating armies and civilian refu­ gees, created conditions ripe for pillage and acquiring “trophies”—practices hardly conducive to discipline and moral control. There were incidents when soldiers, having discovered supplies of schnapps in enemy trenches, some­ times drank themselves unconscious, leading their comrades to take them for dead.61 “Everyone to a man strips apartments of valuable property.… In cellars, soldiers find vodka and wine. As long as this remains unknown to officers, the soldiers get drunk, but when their find comes to light, the wine and vodka are confiscated for the officers’ gatherings.”62 Sometimes head­ 58

 For the complete text of Addendum 40 to the Regulations of Internal Service, Meas­ ures against the consumption of alcoholic beverages in the army, Army order, 1914, No 309, see http://www.bergenschild.narod.ru/Reconstruction/archive/ustav_internal_service/ ustav_internal_service.htm (accessed 2 April 2012). 59

 Sirotkina, The Politics of Etiology, 118–19.

60

 D. Os´kin, “Zapiski praporshchika,” in Otkrovennye rasskazy (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1998), 227. 61

 A. N. Ardashev, Velikaia Okopnaia voina: Pozitsionnia boinia Pervoi mirovoi (Moscow: Iauza Eksmo, 2009), 464.

62

 Os´kin, Zapiski praporshchika, 248.

408 Igor V. Narsky and Yulia Y. Khmelevskaya

quarters undertook special preventive measures to avert drunkenness by the victors, which speaks to the prevalence of this phenomenon and the open con­ cern of military commanders. For example, after Russian forces took the city of Schirwindt in Eastern Prussia in 1914, one of the first orders was to break all the bottles of wine found there.63 There is evidence that the problem of access to alcohol seriously worried soldiers themselves, as well as their relatives at the home front. As early as December 1914, authorities began to receive petitions from the wives of frontline soldiers requesting that they guarantee the state vodka allotment for their husbands, who were freezing in the trenches.64 By the second half of 1916, most likely due to the depletion of accessible reserves of alcohol near the front, what were clearly home-front “technologies” for obtaining alcohol spread to the military environment. Soldiers resorted to purifying and consuming surrogates and also acquired forbidden alcohol in exchange for foodstuffs while fraternizing with the enemy,65 which to a cer­ tain degree resembles black-market practices. According to the testimony of a contemporary, officers “send their orderlies far into the rear for moonshine or buy “Triple” cologne, which passes for vodka, in pharmacies.”66 Also, just as city dwellers used fictitious prescriptions to receive medicinal alcohol, officers obtained pure alcohol under the orders of regimental doctors and veterinari­ ans.67 The lower ranks, who had difficulty mastering new and unfamiliar means of defense against gas attacks, nevertheless quickly found a “creative” method of using gas masks for other needs: “An order has been issued by the army: it has been noticed that soldiers in many units use gas masks for puri­ fying, through the activated charcoal contained in them, denatured alcohol, lacquer, and other alcohol surrogates. The command is ordered to set up monitoring and not use gas masks to purify alcohol surrogates.”68 In the aggressive behavior of the “activists” of the drunken pogroms in 1917–18, indeed, there is much that evokes analogies with frontline practices of marauding and destruction. Before attributing this to the influence of the war and military psychology, however, it is necessary to consider the changed composition of the army following the military reforms of 1874. Despite the 63

 See Velikii kniaz´ Gavriil Konstantinovich: V mramornom dvortse (Moscow: I. V. Zakharov, 2001), 224.

64

 Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, 66.

65

 For further detail, see Astashov, “Brataniia na Russkom fronte,” 36.

66

 Os´kin, Zapiski praporshchika, 261.

67

 Iurii Bakhurin, “Byla li russkaia armiia zdorova?” Nauchno-prosvetitel´skii zhurnal “Skepsis,” 27 October 2010, http://scepsis.ru/library/id_2818.html (last accessed 2 April 2012). 68

 Os´kin, Zapiski praporshchika, 224–25.



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fact that anti-alcohol measures touched the Russian military before the rest of society, the army, based on mass conscription, turned out to be more susceptible to the problems and life strategies of the population from it was recruited. Drunkenness was one of these. Did War and Revolution Radically Change the Drinking Culture? Compulsory sobriety, introduced by the state in 1914, not only did not obtain the expected result but also acted as a factor contributing to the alcoholization of the population. The haste, inconsistency, and inadequate examination of the prohibitory measures caused the production and consumption of alcohol to shift to the illegal sphere, in effect launching a shadow and highly mobile sector of the economy with its own rules and groups of influence. This made any reliable account of the actual consumption of alcohol-containing substances impossible. Moreover, the ban on the free sale of alcohol created what advocates of sobriety feared—an “emptiness” in the “everyday life of the people”69 that nothing could fill: the war and budgetary losses left no hope for any state measures to divert people from drinking or to combat it, other than repression. The looting of state alcohol reserves in 1914–18, which reached its peak in the fall of 1917, the heretofore unknown spread between 1914 and 1922 of moonshining in rural locations, and the unprecedented popularity in these years of alcohol-containing surrogates in the town explains the appeal of the theory that World War I and the revolution exerted a formative influence on Russian drinking habits. But when the strategies for resolving the alcohol problem in Russia in 1914–22 are placed in the broader context of alcohol policy and drunkenness in the late Russian Empire, the influence of World War I and the revolution on the practices of alcohol consumption in Russia cannot be characterized as determinative. At the same time, it also provides a basis for doubting certain aspects of widespread historiographical interpretations of the Russian alcohol problem in the war and revolutionary period. Even prior to the beginning of World War I, changes in the general consumer culture, along with urbanizing and modernizing processes that led to a break in customary social ties, contributed to the growth of the sociality of drunkenness, transforming it into a daily necessity that in the conditions of a lack of adequate educational and social policy was increasingly perceived as a personal right. In the conditions of the dry law and the mobilization of pressure “from above” these features of alcohol consumption became radicalized and crim69

 Vvedenskii, Opyt prinuditel´noi trezvosti.

410 Igor V. Narsky and Yulia Y. Khmelevskaya

inalized, and a lack of state control over the alcohol situation allowed this to occur on a mass scale. Under these conditions, Russian consumers and producers of alcohol asserted the modern “right to drink” employing all available means, in which modernity was oddly intertwined with tradition. Thus, the use of varnish, cologne, and other ersatz substances signified the acquisition of new skills oriented to “quietly” adapting to the circumstances. The preparation of alcohol surrogates by making moonshine and home-brewing beer or its ethnic counterparts to all intents and purposes revived premodern rural drinking traditions along with the general pattern of peasant drunkenness during holidays (whether official or invented by those wishing to drink). On the one hand, this contributed to the archaization of economic relations, transforming alcohol into a substitute for currency and giving the countryside a monopoly on moonshining. On the other hand, however, one of the paradoxical results of the reversion to premodern practices of the home-based production of spirits was emancipatory—a significant number of the illegal producers of moonshine and home-brewed beer for sale were peasant women, left by mobilization without male support. Consequently, a closer look at mass manifestations of discontent with the dry law and the varied secret and open strategies for circumventing it permits us to examine the population’s reaction to state anti-alcohol policy not only as devotion to “age-old tradition” but also as a unique reflection of the willingness to defend the modern features of the drinking culture that had developed in the late Russian Empire. In the extreme conditions of war and revolution, however, with the introduction of the dry law and the criminalization of both traditional and modern drinking practices, prewar changes in the drinking culture were manifested more radically, as a kind of “drunken revolution.” Translated by Kelsey Norris and Adele Lindenmeyr

War, Revolution, and Drugs: The “Democratization” of Drug Abuse and the Evolution of Drug Policy in Russia, 1914–24 Pavel Vasilyev

Contemporary Russian drug policy, which has already been described by some as a synthesis of a “harsh moralism” and the worst traditions of Soviet psychiatry,1 is currently radicalizing even further. Drug addiction has been openly declared “a threat to national security” at the highest levels of Russian government, while the proposed countermeasures include such dubious initiatives as forced rehab, legal liability for drug use, and the institution of capital punishment for drug trafficking.2 Clearly, Russia’s current drug policy is based on a traditional essentialist understanding of drug abuse3 as a supposedly clear-cut social problem that I would like to thank the Gerda Henkel Foundation for their generous financial sup­ port of my Ph.D. dissertation research, “Drug Abuse in Petrograd-Leningrad, 1917– 1929: The Social Problem and the Search for Its Solution.” 1

 Petr Meilakhs, “Narkotiki: Ideologiia, narkopolitika i moral´” (St. Petersburg: Tsentr nezavisimykh sotsiologicheskikh issledovanii, 2007), http://www.cisr.ru/files/publ/ Meylakhs/Meylakhs_Drugs_Ideology.pdf (accessed 14 December 2015). 2  President of the Russian Federation, “Zasedanie prezidiuma Gossoveta, posvia­ shchennoe bor´be s rasprostraneniem narkotikov sredi molodezhi,” Prezident Rossii­ skoi Federatsii, at http://kremlin.ru/news/10986 (accessed 14 December 2015); “Studentov predlagaiut ‘vytalkivat´’ iz universitetov za upotreblenie narkotikov,” NEWSru.com, 18 May 2011, http://www.newsru.com/russia/18may2011/narko.html (accessed 14 December 2015); Fond “Gorod bez narkotikov,” www.nobf.ru (accessed 14 December 2015); V. Bogdanov, “Narkomanov predlozhili sazhat´,” Rossiiskaia gazeta, 23 November 2001, http://www.rg.ru/2011/11/22/problema-site.html (accessed 14 December 2015); G. A. Ziu­ ganov, “Vstavaite, liudi russkie! Obrashchenie k russkomu narodu,” on the website Kommunisticheskaia partiia Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 2011), http://kprf.ru/rus_soc/98095.html (accessed 14 December 2015). 3

 In this article I use the term “drug abuse” (narkotizm) broadly in the sense of a “social disease,” by which I understand that drug addiction (an individual, medical condition) has been extrapolated onto the social sphere. See V. T. Lisovskii and E. A. Kolesnikova, Narkotizm kak sotsial´naia problema (St. Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskii

Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 411–30.

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must be “solved” with the aid of drug-market regulations. This approach gets in the way of understanding that throughout history there have existed various regimes of drug regulation and that any particular form of drug en­ forcement is historically conditioned.4 To elaborate an alternative, it would be important to carry out deep scholarly research on the beginning of the 20th century, when drug use first arose as a social problem in Russia and when the initial principles of the state drug policy were formulated. In the present work I concentrate on the ten-year period from 1914 to 1924. In this relatively short period, Russia was rocked by a great number of changes in absolutely every sphere of life. Significantly, the government’s and professional societies’ view of drugs and drug use also underwent a sea change at this time. Prior to 1914, drugs were basically not on the list of late imperial Russia’s social issues, while government regulation was extremely limited.5 By the end of 1924, however, drug trafficking had become legally categorized as a specific criminal act (which meant a significant increase of government control over the drug market),6 while the scale of the social problem was medically described in terms of an “epidemic”7 and a “social catastrophe.”8 The scholarly timeliness of this line of research is obvious, because Soviet historiography virtually entirely ignored the more shadowy aspects of Russian social life in the 20th century.9 History after October 1917 was presented in gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2001), 10–12. This term seems to be the most appropriate for my purposes, because it alone adequately characterizes the whole conjunction of issues pertaining to the proliferation and consumption of drugs, while helpfully evading unnecessary and cumbersome descriptive constructions. 4

 Milton Friedman, “Foreword,” in After Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century, ed. Timothy Lynch (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2001), vii. 5

 W. Bruce Lincoln, In War’s Dark Shadow: The Russians before the Great War (New York: Dial Press, 1983), 351; N. B. Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´ sovetskogo goroda: Normy i anomalii, 1920–1930 gody (St. Petersburg: Neva; Letnii Sad, 1999), 28. 6

 M. V. Shkarovskii, “Sem´ imen ‘koshki’: Rastsvet narkomanii v 1917–1920-e gody,” in Nevskii arkhiv: Istoriko-kraevedcheskii sbornik III, comp. A. I. Dobkin and A. V. Kobak (St. Petersburg: Atheneum-Feniks, 1997), 3: 474–75; Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´, 32. 7

 S. M. Rodinov, quoted in “Khronika,” in Voprosy narkologii 1, ed. A. S. Sholomovich (Moscow: Moszdravotdel, 1926), 91–92; Shkarovskii, “Sem´ imen ‘koshki,’” 474. 8

 G. D. Aronovich, “Nabliudeniia i vpechatleniia sredi kokainomanov,” Nauchnaia meditsina 6 (1920): 677; S. Visloukh, “Prostitutsiia i narkomaniia: Po dannym ankety sredi prostitutok v Moskve, organizovannoi Nauchno–issledovatel´skoi komissiei,” Rabochii sud, no. 7–8 (1925): 317.

9

 Some typical traits of Marxist historiography are “the mythologization of the past, and the silencing of events and phenomena that are incompatible with the given ideological conception” (N. B. Lebina, “O pol´ze igry v biser: Mikroistoriia kak metod

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a simplified manner, with a “successfully developing, progressive process” that was accompanied by a quick elimination of the “holdovers of the past.”10 Furthermore, historians did not consider the cultural-anthropological and everyday-behavior aspect of Soviet social life in the 1920s and 1930s.11 Since the late 1980s, a number of new authors began to take an interest in problems of deviant behavior in general and drug use in particular; however, the historical picture that they have assembled is still fairly fragmentary.12 One of the main problems of modern historiography has to do with chronology. Existing histories of the period (those by Mikhail V. Shkarovskii, Nataliia B. Lebina, and Stanislav E. Panin) view October 1917 as a turning point, after which the number of drug addicts dramatically increased, while drugs started penetrating previously “clean” social circles. (Lebina has termed

izucheniia norm i anomalii v sovetskoi povsednevnosti 20–30-kh godov,” in Normy i tsennosti povsednevnoi zhizni: Stanovlenie sotsialogicheskogo obraza zhizni v Rossii, 1920– 30-e gody, ed. Timo Vikhavainen [St. Petersburg: Neva, 2000], 7). See also a critique of Soviet historiography on this theme in M. V. Khodiakov, ed., “Goriachechnyi i triumfal´nyi gorod”: Petrograd ot “voennogo kommunizma” k NEPu. Dokumenty i materialy (St. Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2000), 11–12; V. I. Musaev, Prestupnost´ v Petrograde v 1917–1921 gg. i bor´ba s nei (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2001), 5. 10

 Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´, 19.

11

 Ibid., 14.

12

 V. A. Popov, “Bor´ba s narkomaniei i toksikomaniei detei i podrostkov v 20–30-e gody,” Sovetskoe zdravookhranenie, no. 5 (1989): 67–70; Mary Schaeffer Conroy, “Abuse of Drugs Other than Alcohol and Tobacco in the Soviet Union,” Soviet Studies 42, 3 (July 1990): 447–80; Conroy, In Health and in Sickness: Pharmacy, Pharmacists and the Pharmaceutical Industry in Late Imperial, Early Soviet Russia (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1994); M. V. Shkarovskii, “Leningradskaia prostitutsiia i bor´ba s nei v 1920-e gody,” in Nevskii arkhiv: Istoriko-kraevedcheskii sbornik, comp. A. I. Dobkin and A. V. Kobak (Moscow: Antheneum-Feniks, 1993), 387–411; Shkarovskii, “Sem´ imen ‘koshki’”; N. B. Lebina, “Tenevye storony zhizni sovetskogo goroda 20–30-kh godov,” Voprosy istorii, no. 4 (1994): 30–42; Lebina, “Narkoman iz narkomata i klub morfinistov revoliutsionnogo Baltflota,” Vechernii Peterburg, 12 April 1996; Lebina, “Belaia feia, ili Kak ‘navodili marafet’ v Sovetskoi Rossii,” Rodina, no. 9 (1996): 64–66; Lebina, Povse­ dnevnaia zhizn´; Lebina, Entsiklopediia banal´nostei: Sovetskaia povsednevnost´. Kontury, simvoly, znaki (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2006); N. B. Lebina and M. V. Shkarovskii, Prostitutsiia v Peterburge: 40-e gg. XIX v.–40-e gg. XX v. (Moscow: Progress-Akademiia, 1994); N. B. Lebina and A. N. Chistikov, Obyvatel´ i reformy: Kartiny povsednevnoi zhizni gorozhan v gody nepa i khrushchevskogo desiatiletiia (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003); N. B. Lebina and V. S. Izmozik, Peterburg sovetskii: “Novyi chelovek” v starom pro­ stranstve. 1920–1930-e gody (Sotsial´no-arkhitekturnoe mikroistoricheskoe issledovanie) (St. Petersburg: Kriga, 2010); Musaev, Prestupnost´.

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this process the “democratization of the typical Russian drug addict.”)13 As I will show below, this chronological breakdown is not entirely accurate, because it does not sufficiently consider the significance of armed conflicts— World War I and the Civil War, and (perhaps unwittingly) politicizes the theme by suggesting drug abuse to be a particular problem of the early Soviet period, previously absent in Russia prior to the 1917 revolutions. Another problem with current historiography is that it tends to be marked by essentialist attitudes about drug abuse, to which the majority of scholars apparently subscribe.14 That is why all contemporary historical studies treat key sources, medical texts in particular, uncritically. It seems that for many historians the data given in these texts are undeniably objective, even though they were all compiled in a particular historical moment, by particular authors. Moreover, there is an a priori assumption that “drug abuse” had the same meaning and connotations at the beginning of the 20th century as today, even though quite often specific terms have been continuously adjusted and redefined to fit new scientific theories, while also, in turn, influencing particular research programs.15 Underestimating the role of the medical establishment results in a lack of historical attention to the relationship between scientific work and the government regulation of drugs. At the present moment, Russian historical narratives have been considering the social, medical, and legal aspects of drug abuse in artificial isolation from each other, and thus an adequate and complete appraisal of the issue is still lacking. Due to the fact that at the present moment there are relatively few histori­ cal studies of drug abuse in late imperial and early Soviet Russia, it is impera­ tive to expand significantly the tranche of sources and to bring new documents to scholarly attention. The source base of the present study is comprised of 13

 Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´, 32. See also Shkarovskii, “Sem´ imen ‘koshki,’” 467; S. E. Panin, “Potreblenie narkotikov v Sovetskoi Rossii (1917–1920-e gody),” Voprosy istorii, no. 8 (2003): 129.

14

 This attitude is obviously taken from our contemporary world, in which the majority of nations strictly regulate the drug market and significant material, financial, and human resources are expended on the “War on Drugs,” while doctors and mass-media periodically start up new stages of “moral panic.” In this regard, see a critique of contemporary US drug policy in Ethan A. Nadelmann, “Drug Prohibition in the United States: Costs, Consequences, and Alternatives,” Science 245, no. 4921 (1989): 939–47.

15

 Some examples of scholarship on the deconstruction of scientific “objectivity” are Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel, 1978); Karin Knorr-Cetina, Die Fabrikation von Erkenntnis: Zur Anthropologie der Naturwissenschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984); Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).

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government decrees; normative acts; documents from public health organs, hospitals, and research and educational institutions; documents from public safety organs; criminal case files and court hearings; medical and criminology texts (monographs, articles in professional journals, popular literature); peri­ odical press; and memoirs. A significant number of the archival materials used in this study have never been examined by scholars before. This is especially true of documents pertaining to the activity of local branches of public health, as well as medical research and clinical institutions. This study aims to analyze the evolution of drug abuse and drug policy in Russia in 1914–24 (primarily via materials from Petrograd-Leningrad), by considering the issue in the context of “grand historical” events such as World War I, the 1917 revolutions, the Civil War, and the transition to the New Economic Policy (NEP). Building on the notion of “democratization,” I focus primarily on the penetration of drugs into wide social circles, as op­ posed to discussing the use of psychoactive substances by certain well-known historical personae. I will show that Russia’s “narcotization” should be seen as a gradual process, which sped up not as a result of the famous shot from the Aurora, but as a result of the first volleys and casualties of World War I. An analysis of late imperial and early Soviet drug policy will also point out elements of continuity that have previously never been considered: most of the arguments for the criminalization of drugs that finally happened in the 1920s were based on prerevolutionary ideas. In this way the present work casts doubt on the notion of 1917 as a watershed between two historical epochs, and thus contributes to that historical tradition which has underlined the continuity of Russian history on various levels.16 Drug Abuse and Drug Policy in the Russian Empire prior to World War I When discussing the growth of drug use after the start of World War I, we should keep in mind that any supposed sharpening of the problem can only be considered in comparison to the period prior to 1914. For a long time drug abuse in Russia was simply not seen as a problem: the number of drug users was a rounding error on an imperial scale, and the users were concentrated in exotic borderland regions (Central Asia, for example). The use of drugs (opium, morphine, hashish) in major cities of the European part of the country was taking place almost exclusively among the elite circles of the creative intelligentsia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and it caused no problems 16

 For example, see Daniel Beer, “Blueprints for Change: The Human Sciences and the Coercive Transformation of Deviants in Russia, 1890–1930,” Osiris, 2nd ser., 22 (2007): 46–47.

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for the governing structures.17 Lebina and Shkarovskii point out the proliferation of drugs among prostitutes and medical professionals in prerevolutionary Russia, but whether or not this phenomenon had any consequences for the wider society is still something that needs to be looked into.18 The appearance of cocaine in Russia at the beginning of the 1910s also did not lead to any serious social problems: the principal users of this drug were, as before, “glamorous dames of the night, high-ranking officers, and bohemians.”19 However, a purely quantitative assessment may be missing the point. What is much more important is that “a social problem does not exist for a society unless it is recognized by that society to exist.”20 Prior to the beginning of World War I, Russian professional societies also did not think of drug addiction as a serious social problem. Moreover, medical science was full of internal contradictions. In their studies, doctors used a great number of differing terms for defining both the objects of their research (iady, narkotiki, durmany) and the effects (narkomaniia, narkotizm, or the more specific morfinizm/kokainizm). Furthermore, the actual list of drugs would vary from one study to another, and could include or exclude such substances as cocaine, opium, morphine, and heroin, as well as alcohol (often subdivided into beer, wine, and hard spirits), tobacco, tea, and coffee. Many authors did not see the problem of abuse of hashish or opium as markedly different from excessive consumption of tea or coffee. Sometimes, the epithet “consciousness-affecting poisons” (a term close to our contemporary understanding of drugs or psychoactive substances) included all alcoholic beverages, tobacco, tea, and coffee, as well as hashish and opium.21 Meanwhile, morphine, heroin, and cocaine were seen primarily as medicinal substances (though highly potent ones, to be sure, and thus demanding strict control).22 Moreover, many researchers in the prewar 17

 Lincoln, In War’s Dark Shadow, 351; Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´, 28.

18

 Lebina and Shkarovskii, Prostitutsiia, 89; Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´, 28.

19

 Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´, 28; Lisovskii and Kolesnikova, Narkotizm, 24.

20

 Herbert Blumer, “Social Problems as Collective Behavior,” Social Problems 18, 3 (1971): 301–02. 21

 S. N. Danillo, O vliianii nekotorykh iadov (spirt, opii, gashish) na soznanie u cheloveka (St. Petersburg: K. L. Rikker, 1894); N. K. Reimer, Iady tsivilizatsii (St. Petersburg: A. N. Tsepov, 1899); Sharl´ Rishe [Charles Robert Richet], Iady, deistvuiushchie na soznanie (Alkogol´, khloroform, gashish, opium i kofe) (Kremenchug: M. I. Apatov, 1900).

22

 For a critical analysis of this contradiction in the perception of drugs as both “poison” and “cure,” see Alfred R. Lindesmith and John H. Gagnon, “Anomie and Drug Addiction,” in Anomie and Deviant Behaviour: A Discussion and Critique (London: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), 162–63.

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period believed that introspection—the observation of one’s own feelings and behavior while on drugs—was an entirely legitimate research method.23 Even as drug abuse became an object of analysis in medical texts, the problem’s root causes were rarely marked out in a distinct manner. Rather, they were guessed at, based on that well-known fin-de-siècle narrative, which dealt in morals and ethics, rather than strictly medical aspects of the problem. Drugs were “the poisons of civilization,” according to Nikolai K. Reimer’s eponymously titled 1899 book.24 The root causes of drug abuse were steadily associated with decadence and with psychic and physical degen­ eration, which were themselves the results of civilization’s involvement in technological progress and its fellow-travelers—market capitalism, urbaniza­ tion, and secularization. The drug consumers who were the main victims of this disease were also determined in accordance with this discourse of degeneration. The typical addicts were rich, educated individuals living a modern way of life. These included artists, intellectuals, representatives of the middle class (especially doctors), and entrepreneurs.25 Since drug abuse was not considered to be a serious social problem, dis­ cussions of possible countermeasures were generally kept at the individual (medical) level, as opposed to the social one.26 However, this does not mean that prewar Russian medical science was uninterested in social processes. It is actually the reverse—the main trend among medical practitioners was to­wards the increasing popularity of radical reformist and revolutionary ideas.27 As John F. Hutchinson has noted, for Russian doctors at the time the phrase “the ‘healthifying’ of Russia” was not a mere medical slogan—it

23

 Danillo, O vliianii nekotorykh iadov, 18–21; “Otchet o doktorskom dispute N. N. Lange,” in Rossiiskaia psikhologiia: Antologiia, ed. A. N. Zhban (Moscow: Al´ma Mater, 2009), 487–88, 494, 506, 511. 24

 Reimer, Iady tsivilizatsii.

25

 Ibid., 17–20. Of particular interest is Reimer’s characterization of drugs in a colonial context, as “aides of the missionaries of European culture” and “levers of civilization,” notwithstanding their danger and “toxicity” (iadovitost´) (21). Curiously, Reimer con­ sidered alcohol an entirely different matter, because alcoholism was already tightly associated with poverty, ignorance, and the lower classes (8). 26  Once again, the situation with alcohol was different. Because alcoholism already constituted a serious social problem in the late 19th century (and was seen as such), doctors often included various medical and sociocultural suggestions in their texts on the subject. For example, see Danillo, O vliianii nekotorykh iadov, 38–39. 27

 Nancy M. Frieden, Russian Physicians in an Era of Reform and Revolution, 1856–1905 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).

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actually expressed genuine aspirations for a rationalization of government regulation, science-based planning, and control.28 Finally, we must note the virtual absence of a normative-legal basis, or even a conception of the need for government regulation of drugs prior to 1914. Researchers working on Russia’s late imperial history sometimes point out that the use of drugs did not present any problems for government structures.29 Strictly speaking, we have no data to suggest that the Russian government felt it was even necessary to fight drug use by means of criminal legislation. In the country’s criminal code at the time there was at first simply no clear sense that drug trafficking constituted a particular criminal offense. Various psychotropic substances (cocaine, morphine, opium, ether, heroin, Indian hemp extract, etc.) were listed as poisonous and highly potent: therefore, there were special administrative norms that dictated their storage in pharmaceutical institutions.30 It is important to point out that criminal liability was only possible as a result of violations of regulations on drug sales at pharmacies, and punishments for infractions were not particularly strict.31 This attests both to the lack of widespread drug abuse, as well as to the fact that in Russian public consciousness, drug substances were primarily seen as poisons. Overall, we can conclude that in Russia during the late 19th and the be­ ginning of the 20th century, drug abuse was not, and was not seen to be, a serious social problem that required state intervention and control. This un­ derstanding, however, would be dissipated as a result of the First World War and the transformations that it wrought. “A Fatal Fashion”? The “Democratization” of Drug Abuse after 1914 Contemporaries characterized the period of the late 1910s and early 1920s as a time of “frightening proliferation” of drugs (cocaine and morphine in par­ ticular).32 It is at this moment that we observe the first appearance of drug abuse as a serious social issue in Russia. Modern historiography generally 28

 John F. Hutchinson, Politics and Public Health in Revolutionary Russia, 1890–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), xv. See also Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 1–8. 29

 Lincoln, In War’s Dark Shadow, 351; Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´, 28.

30

 Rossiiskaia farmakopeia, 6th ed. (St. Petersburg: K. L. Rikker, 1910), 541–46.

31

 Ulozhenie o nakazaniiakh ugolovnykh i ispravitel´nykh: Ugolovnoe ulozhenie (stat´i, vvedennye v deistvie) (Petrograd, 1916), 178–79. 32

 A. S. Sholomovich, “Narkotizm kak sotsial´no–patologicheskoe iavlenie i mery bor´by s nim sredi rabochikh,” in Sholomovich, Voprosy narkologii 1, 49.

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tries to explain this phenomenon as a manifestation of a deep structural crisis that began either in October 1917 or at some other, unspecified time. Thus, Lebina points out that along with other, more visible transformations of political life, crisis also enveloped the legal sphere, as a result of which Russia experienced “the situation of a legal vacuum” at the beginning of the 1920s.33 The economic deprivations of the revolutionary and Civil War periods could not help but contribute to an increase in the number of social deviants (specifically, drug addicts). Meanwhile, the intense psychological crisis that followed the First World War and produced the so-called “lost generation” of Europe also coincided with the radical change of ideological reference points in Russia, thus leading to a transformation in the understanding of norms and abnormalities.34 Lebina latches on to the latter observation and points out that in the wake of the revolutionary upheavals, the “victorious folk” accepted drugs as a kind of “code of bohemian personality,” fairly accurately identifying them as an attribute of the everyday leisure of the highest circles of society.35 Thus, the “fatal fashion”36 of drug use turned out to be a natural result of the “change of the hierarchy of behavioral standards.”37 As an example, Lebina cites the “Morphinists’ Club” that appeared in the first year of Soviet rule on one ship in the Baltic Fleet and that not only met regularly but also actively recruited new members.38 Of course, I do not deny the importance of the 1917 revolutions and the Civil War, the effect of the general “environment of chaos, weakness, and instability of power”39 on the development in Russia of a situation of “anomie,”40 which certainly contributed to an increase in the number of deviants (including drug addicts). Nevertheless, I think we should once again emphasize that if we are to understand the dramatic growth in the number of drug users and the proliferation of drugs in broad social circles as the “democratization” of 33

 Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´, 15.

34

 Ibid., 14, 16.

35

 Ibid., 29.

36

 Aronovich, “Nabliudeniia,” 677.

37

 Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´, 29.

38

 Ibid. See also Lebina, “Narkoman iz narkomata.”

39

 Musaev, Prestupnost´, 5.

40

 In Lisovskii and Kolesnikova’s rendition of the classic Mertonian conceptualization, anomie is a result of “abnormal social conditions, in which social ties have been sig­ nificantly weakened … as a result of rapid social changes, past forms have lost their meaning, while new ones have not yet taken shape“ (Narkotizm, 47–48).

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the typical Russian drug addict, then we cannot avoid considering the importance of the First World War as a distinct (and precipitating) factor. Even though medical professionals had known of morphine’s narcotic ef­ fects since the end of the 19th century, the substance was still widely used as an excellent painkiller.41 Thus, naturally, World War I led to increased de­ mand for the drug throughout the world, including Russia. Many heavily wounded soldiers became addicted to their prescribed morphine. Meanwhile, doctors and nurses themselves became addicted to the morphine they took to cope with severe psychological trauma, all the while confident in their ability to control their use of the drug.42 Overall, as the famous German scientist Ernst Joël had observed, under the conditions of World War I “the prescription of opiates … was less restricted than it had been in peacetime.… The medical and police oversight … was not sufficiently strict, and trusted persons did not always exercise the care that was needed for doling out these drugs.”43 Since morphine was legally distributed throughout various medical institutions and pharmacies, it was often possible to get the drug by merely simulating pain or faking a prescription.44 Thus, during the war, morphine addicts appeared in virtually all medical facilities.45 Finally, we must especially underline the significance of the fact that in the context of the dry laws, which had been introduced at the beginning of World War I,46 such drugs as morphine, cocaine, and opium turned out to be much more accessible than alcohol: a significant part of the population saw these substances as a suitable replacement for the vodka to which they 41

 Josef Gossmann, “Über chronischen Morphiummissbrauch,” Deutsche Medicinische Wochenschrift, no. 34 (1879): 431–35; no. 35 (1879): 450–52; no. 36 (1879): 463–65.

42

 A. M. Rapoport, “Kokainizm i prestupnost´,” Moskovskii meditsinskii zhurnal, no. 1 (1926): 46; V. A. Gorovoi-Shaltan, “Morfinizm, ego rasprostranenie i profilaktika,” in Voprosy narkologii 2, ed. A. S. Sholomovich (Moscow: Moszdravotdel, 1928), 47; R. Ia. Golant, “Problemy morfinizma: Klinicheskie i dispansernye nabliudeniia, eksperi­ mental´nye issledovaniia,” in Trudy Gosudarstvennogo instituta meditsinskikh znanii (GIMZ) 5, ed. N. K. Rozenberg (Leningrad: GIMZ, 1929), 24–25; Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´, 29; V. A. Shishkin, ed., Petrograd na perelome epokh: Gorod i ego zhiteli v gody revo­ liutsii i grazhdanskoi voiny (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2000), 93.

43

 Ernst Joël, Die Behandlung der Giftsuchten: Alkoholismus, Morphinismus, Kokainismus usw. (Leipzig: Georg Thieme, 1928), 26–27. 44

 Golant, “Problemy morfinizma,” 29.

45

 Panin, “Potreblenie narkotikov,” 130.

46

 The production of wines above 14 percent ABV was permitted only on 9 August 1921. After 30 January 1923, liqueurs and brews under 20 percent ABV were permitted. Vodka would not be sold freely until 1925.

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had been accustomed.47 Between 1914 and 1924, at a time when obtaining vodka would require “black market” dealings, drugs were being deployed ubiquitously and legally in medical practice, with especially active use in den­ tistry and ophthalmology. In this context it is unsurprising that there were many instances of rule violations pertaining to the dispensing of cocaine at government pharmacies and warehouses.48 Analyzing the “democratization” of the typical Russian drug addict, re­ searchers have noted a sharp increase in the number of drug consumers in the latter half of the 1910s,49 which was curbed neither by the normalization of everyday life, nor by the transition to NEP. 50 The number of drug addicts in Russia started to decrease in earnest only after the criminalization of the drug market and the introduction of cheap vodka in the mid-1920s.51 However, “democratization” meant not only a sharp quantitative growth of drug addicts. What seemed far more important and threatening for profes­ sional organizations and governing structures was the penetration of drugs into previously “clean” social circles. Of course, drugs continued to circulate among socially marginal com­ munities, such as prostitutes, for example; among them, drug consumption had been widespread even prior to World War I.52 A paper by a certain doctor Andreevskii, entitled “On the Necessity of Struggle with Prostitution and Venereal Diseases,” is indicative here. Submitted in February 1918 to the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the Union of Communes of the Northern Region, Andreevskii’s note points out the relationship between prostitution and “mass abuses of various poisons—primarily alcoholism and 47

 Aronovich, “Nabliudeniia,” 685–86; Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´, 30.

48

 Tsentral´nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga (TsGA SPb) f. 2815 (Commis­ sariat for Public Health of the Union of Communes of the Northern Region), op. 1, d. 526, l. 40ob. (protocol of the conference at the Commissariat for Public Health on the issue of the fight against prostitution, 23 January 1919); Aronovich, “Nabliudeniia,” 682.

49

 Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´, 32–33; Panin, “Potreblenie narkotikov,” 133; Shkarov­ skii, “Sem´ imen ‘koshki,’” 476.

50

 N. A. Semashko, “O kokainizme i bor´be s nim,” Izvestiia TsIK SSSR, 4 January 1925; Shkarovskii, “Sem´ imen ‘koshki,’” 470. 51

 M. P. Kutanin, “Voprosy teorii i praktiki morfinizma,” in Trudy Pervogo Vsesoiuznogo s˝ezda nevropatologov i psikhiatrov, ed. V. A. Beliaev et al. (Moscow–Leningrad: Gosu­ darstvennoe meditsinskoe izdatel´stvo, 1929), 40; Lebina, “Belaia feia,” 66; Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´, 32–33; Shishkin, Petrograd na perelome epokh, 93; Lebina and Chistikov, Obyvatel´ i reformy, 117. 52

 Gorovoi-Shaltan, “Morfinizm,” 47; Lebina and Shkarovskii, Prostitutsiia, 69, 90; Musaev, Prestupnost´, 180.

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especially intensified and now fashionable cocaine addiction.”53 He then goes on to say that “at the present time it is a rare prostitute who does not poison herself with cocaine,” and demands that some measures be taken.54 Vasilii V. Shul´gin also pointed out the “thoroughly coked-out prosti­tutes” present in the “unhealthy” atmosphere of Odessa in the winter of 1919–20.55 As the researchers analyzed the social make-up of cocaine users, they concluded that this drug was especially often consumed by members of criminal groups.56 The representatives of the intelligentsia as well as former officers also continued to indulge in drugs as before. According to doctors’ observations, during the revolutionary period many of these people had experienced serious nervous and psychological shocks, which were accompanied by the crumbling of moral and behavioral foundations.57 The painter Iurii P. Annen­ kov describes in his memoirs how Nikolai S. Gumilev would offer “to breathe some dreams” (to sniff confiscated ether) after discussions about the “heavy absurdity of the revolution.”58 As noted above, morphine users were especially affiliated with the medical profession.59 Statistics showed that almost half of the drug addicts in this period were somehow connected to the medical pro­ fession, and the majority of these people were under 30 years old.60 Underground opium dens existed among the compact residential areas of Chinese migrants, who had been employed at construction and railway works after the start of World War I.61 These establishments were not only places of

53

 “V Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del Soiuza kommun Severnoi oblasti: Zapiska d-ra Andreevskogo ‘O neobkhodimosti bor´by s prostitutsiei i venericheskimi zabolevaniiami’” (February 1918), TsGA SPb f. 142 (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the Union of Communes of the Northern Region), op. 1, d. 9, l. 323.

54 55

 Ibid., l. 324.

 V. V. Shul´gin, Dni: 1920 (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1989), 310.

56

 Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´, 31; Panin, “Potreblenie narkotikov,” 131–32.

57

 Aronovich, “Nabliudeniia,” 682–83; Panin, “Potreblenie narkotikov,” 132.

58

 Iu. P. Annenkov, Dnevnik moikh vstrech (Moscow: Zakharov, 2001), 69.

59

 Shkarovskii, “Sem´ imen ‘koshki,’” 469; Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´, 28; Shishkin, Petrograd na perelome epokh, 93.

60 61

 Gorovoi-Shaltan, “Morfinizm,” 47.

 “Delo No. 151 ob obyske v nochlezhnom dome kitaiskogo grazhdanina Fan-ChenLi” (15 April–16 May 1918), TsGA SPb f. 142, op. 2, d. 21, ll. 3ob., 5; “Bor´ba s opie­ kureniem,” Petrogradskii listok, 10 May 1917, 4; A. Pe-rov, “V trushchobakh zheltoi opasnosti,” Petrogradskii listok, 18 June 1917, 10; Krasnaia gazeta, 10 April 1918. See also Shishkin, Petrograd na perelome epokh, 82.

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storage and consumption of drugs, but were also used for gambling. The drug would often spread from these places to other social groups.62 During the years of “War Communism,” confiscated cocaine was also a temptation for many commandants, Red Army soldiers, and revolutionary sailors. Thus, for example, young employees of revolutionary militias “would use fixed orders … to arrest wholesale cocaine dealers, and confiscated large reserves of cocaine for their own purposes.”63 At the beginning of the 1920s there was a special tendency of widespread drug use among those “outside of the antisocial element”: cocaine penetrated into the circles of labor youth as a result of the ban on alcohol and due to workers’ contact with prostitutes, according to researchers.64 After 1920 cocaine also spread especially actively among orphans; soon it “began threatening the work of children’s services organizations.”65 Virtually all scholars who have studied the issue of drug use in Russia at the beginning of the 1920s have noted its association with orphans and have expressed serious concern about this fact.66 The everyday life of constant drug use by orphans, those among them who had “the spirit of the inveterate cocaine addict,” were described in the era’s literary works, for example in Viacheslav Ia. Shishkov’s novel The Wanderers.67 Overall, as far as age was concerned, drug use was a disease of children, adolescents, and young adults: up to 60 percent of users were under 25.68 The fact that drugs were a peculiar attribute of the criminal world, which is always attractive for adolescents, must have also played a significant role. Thus, scholars note that “investigation of adolescents detained for vagrancy in 1923–24 showed that 80 percent [!] of them had gotten addicted to drugs 62

 Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´, 30; Shishkin, Petrograd na perelome epokh, 93; Lebina and Chistikov, Obyvatel´ i reformy, 116. 63

 Aronovich, “Nabliudeniia,” 679–80.

64

 Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´, 31–32.

65

˜Shkarovskii, “Sem´ imen ‘koshki,’” 472.

66

 D. S. Futer, “O detiakh-narkomanakh,” Moskovskii meditsinskii zhurnal, no. 10 (1925): 59–63; Rapoport, “Kokainizm i prestupnost´,” 52, 54; R. M. Ziman, “O kokainizme u detei: Doklad I nauchnoi konferentsii po voprosam narkotizma 8 dekabria 1923 g.,” in Sholomovich, Voprosy narkologii 1, 30; M. N. Gernet, “Sotnia detei-narkomanov,” in Sholomovich, Voprosy narkologii 1, 38; F. D. Zabugin, “Otsenka lichnosti deteinarkomanov po metodam Rossolimo, Bine i Kelle,” in Sholomovich, Voprosy narkologii 2, 59; G. Dubrovich, “Klinicheskaia kartina kokainizma v detskom vozraste,” in Sholomovich, Voprosy narkologii 2, 75. 67

 V. Ia. Shishkov, Stranniki (Moscow: Pravda, 1986).

68

 Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’, 30.

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between the ages of 9 and 15, and had a firm predilection for them. Children from normal families, in search of something romantic, just as today, often visited orphans’ dens and their traditional gathering places.”69 Claims-Makers and the Government Response: Russian Drug Policy, 1914–24 Existing historiography does not give enough attention to non-government actors, who nevertheless participated actively in the evolution of government drug policy. In sociological theory these people are called “claims-makers”— they are groups of individuals, who, based on their professional experience, conceive the social problem and often create moral panics by making loud declarations and manipulating public opinion.70 Medical professionals and criminologists were two such key groups in the Russian context of 1914–24. The sharp increase in the number of drug addicts and the penetration of drugs into the lowest social layers demanded that Soviet medical professionals come up with an adequate explanation and a response. As I have already shown in another work, early Soviet medical texts construed drug addiction as a disease that was tightly connected to the problems of the modern world and of capitalism, and thus it was an enemy of the socialist system.71 We should also point out that the majority of doctors called for active government intervention and regulation of the drug market, without considering alternative approaches. The monographs, articles, and conference presentations of Russian medical professionals on the subject of drugs were not taking place in an isolated, narrow professional milieu. On the contrary, doctors were actively participating in the development and implementation of state drug policy. One such channel of influence was the First Scientific Conference on Issues of Drug Abuse, which took place in Moscow in December 1923. In a peculiar way this event demonstrated the inadequacy of the scattershot measures undertaken to counter the proliferation of drugs. The conference concluded with a battlecry resolution of the doctors (in which it was stated, among other things, that

69

 Lebina and Chistikov, Obyvatel´ i reformy, 116.

70

 For more on claims-makers and moral panics with regards to drug abuse, see Petr Meilakhs, “Opasnosti moral´noi paniki po povody narkotikov,” Credo New 1 (2003), http://credonew.ru/content/category/7/48/55/ (accessed 14 December 2015). 71

 Pavel Vasil´ev, “Evoliutsiia predstavlenii o narkotikakh v rossiiskikh meditsinskikh tekstakh (1890–1930-e gody): Ot ‘iadov tsivilizatsii’ k ‘perezhitkam kapitalizma,’” in Biulleten´ Germanskogo istoricheskogo instituta v Moskve, ed. Katja Bruisch (Moscow: Germanskii istoricheskii institut v Moskve, 2012), 52–65.

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drug use in Soviet Russia has taken on the “character of an epidemic”).72 Most importantly, the doctors appraised all existing government countermeasures as ineffective, and outlined their own plan of action, much of which was eventually put into practice by the state. In this way, professional medical definitions were able to bring about direct social consequences. Analyzing the evolution of government drug policy in Russia we must again point out that the initial changes had already taken place in the late imperial period, as a result of the “democratization” of drug abuse, which began during World War I. On 7 June 1915, fines and minor jail sen­tences were introduced for the manufacturing, storage, and sale of opium without the appropriate permit.73 The creation of the General Directorate of Public Health (Glavnoe upravlenie gosudarstvennogo zdravookhraneniia) in 1916 was another major milestone—its sanitation department was tasked with a number of responsibilities, one of which specifically included the struggle against “habitual use of ether, opium, hashish, and other narcotic poisons.”74 Certainly, all of the initial government anti-drug measures implemented in 1915–16 were primarily local and incomplete. Nevertheless, they set the vector of development and laid the foundations of the drug policy that followed. We should note that the anti-drug measures implemented after the 1917 revolutions were also quite haphazard. Vadim I. Musaev has written about the absence of clear legal norms in this period and points out that in practice, “state organs were basing their actions on their own understanding of what could and what could not be tolerated in the new society.”75 Thus, there was no systematic anti-drug campaign in 1917, and the majority of detentions were carried out spontaneously, on individual initiative.76 Prison sentences for the sale of cocaine could range anywhere from six months to two years, while police officials would sometimes limit themselves to a “stern lecture on morals.”77 The changes introduced by the Provisional Government in the Municipal Public Administration Act authorized city dumas to fight “drugging” (odurmanenie) but did not give any concrete recommendations. 72 73

 Shkarovskii, “Sem´ imen ‘koshki,’” 474.

 Ulozhenie o nakazaniiakh, 14–15.

74

 “Ob uchrezhdenii Glavnogo upravleniia gosudarstvennogo zdravookhraneniia,” in Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii pravitel´stva 252 (1916): 2448.

75

 Musaev, Prestupnost´, 169.

76

 Vedun, “Razrushennye gnezda kokainistov,” Petrogradskii listok, 4 May 1917, 13; “Arest glavaria kokainistov,” Petrogradskii listok, 17 June 1917; A. Pe-rov, “V tru­ shchobakh zheltoi opasnosti,” 10. 77

 Vedun, “Razrushennye gnezda,” 13.

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Perhaps the state displayed its highest engagement in the context of shutting down opium dens.78 Overall, however, the anti-drug course was not being pursued particularly consistently.79 During the Civil War years, the fight against drugs proceeded primarily via harsh repressive measures that trended in the direction of eliminating free trade (similar measures, also connected to moral opprobrium, were used against the purveyors of alcohol, tobacco, and playing cards). Thus, in June– December 1918, 632 individuals were arrested in Petrograd for selling playing cards and drugs.80 According to Shkarovskii’s data, the arrests of cocaine dealers took place regularly in 1919–20, while prison terms could be as long as ten years.81 We also should not forget that at this time arrests could be made even “for consumption of cocaine.”82 A series of legal decrees regulating the activities of pharmaceutical institutions placed the sale of medicine under strict government control.83 According to available sources, we can observe that the practice of applying repressive measures against the dealers and con­ sumers of cocaine during the Civil War years bore some fruit: doctors and 78  In this regard, consider the 2 May 1917 letter of I. V. Nikanorov, a member of the Petrograd city government, to the head of Petrograd city militia, which asks the latter to take “the most decisive measures to discover and shut down dens … for opium and card gambling” (TsGA SPb f. 131 [Petrograd city militia], op. 1, d. 248, l. 1). See also “Bor´ba s opiekureniem,” 4. Overall, the problem of immigrants from China was so acute in 1917, that the Provisional Government even decided on 19 September to “cease bringing Chinese workers to Russia” (B. F. Dodonov, ed., Zhurnaly zasedanii Vremennogo pravitel’stva [Moscow: Rosspen, 2001–04], 4: 156). 79

 Dodonov, Zhurnaly zasedanii Vremennogo pravitel’stva, 2: 383–84, 390–91, 397, 403; “Ob izmenenii deistvuiushchikh polozhenii ob obshchestvennom upravlenii gorodov,” Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii pravitel’stva 157 (1917): 1432, 1438, 1445, 1450.

80

 “Vedomosti arestov i zaderzhanii po g. Petrogradu za iiun´–dekabr´ 1918 g.,” TsGA SPb f. 142, op. 3, d. 18, ll. 4, 5, 12, 13, 18, 19, 24, 25, 30, 31, 36, 37, 43, 45. 81

 Shkarovskii, “Sem´ imen ‘koshki,’” 468.

82

 “Zhurnal registratsii proisshestvii po gorodu i prigorodam” (1 June–1 October 1919), TsGA SPb f. 33 (Directorate of the Petrograd Guberniia Worker-Peasant Militia), op. 1, d. 33, ll. 78, 102ob., 154, 184, 193, 225, 229, 233, 238, 254, 266; “Zhurnal registratsii proisshestvii po gorodu i prigorodam” (1 October–19 December 1919), ibid., d. 34, ll. 175ob., 196.

83

 “O regulirovanii prodazhi i otpuska aptekarskikh tovarov,” Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii Rabochego i Krest´ianskogo Pravitel´stva 56 (1918): 665–66; “Ob izmenenii dopolnitel´nogo raz˝iasneniia p. 2-go postanovleniia o roznichnoi prodazhe i otpuske aptechnykh tovarov,” Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii Rabochego i Krest´ianskogo Pravitel´stva 73 (1918): 904–05; “O natsionalizirovannykh aptekakh, aptechnykh pred­ priiatiiakh, ob organizatsii upravleniia imi i organakh ikh snabzheniia,” Sobraniie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii Rabochego i Krest´ianskogo Pravitel´stva 100 (1918): 1290–91.

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public health employees admitted that during War Communism drug abuse “decreased significantly.”84 After the conclusion of the Civil War, the prosecution of drug dealers weakened somewhat. The introduction of NEP led to the emergence of private pharmacies, which had the potential to become hubs of drug distribution, and the government sought to regulate and restrict sales of highly potent substances by passing special legislation to that effect.85 In 1922–23 a whole complex of anti-prostitution and anti-unemployment measures were imple­ mented,86 which indirectly resulted in a decrease in the number of drug addicts. The seeming haphazardness of the anti-drug campaign was tied to the Soviet government’s and the legal establishment’s continuing lack of interest in considering this struggle as an important state responsibility. The RSFSR Criminal Code, published in June 1922, did not contain specific articles against drug trafficking. Still, individuals who engaged in the sale of cocaine, morphine, opium, and other highly potent substances without the appropriate permit could be prosecuted under articles 136, 139, and 141 of the Criminal Code. These articles regulated sales, established government monopolies, and as punishment mandated prison terms from six months to one year.87 The decrees that are key to our inquiry, On the Means of Regulating the Trafficking of Drugs and On the Amendment to the Criminal Code of Article 140-d, were implemented only at the end of 1924 (on 6 November and 22 December respectively). In a way, these acts mark a historical boundary. According to the 6 November measure, “the free exchange of all highly potent means,” which served or could serve “various forms of intoxication, having a destructive effect on national health (cocaine and its salts, opium and its derivatives, such as: morphine, heroin and others)” was now “forbidden on the territory of the RSFSR.”88 The measure also regimented the production, import, and export of drugs. For the moment, violators would still be pun-

84

 Semashko, “O kokainizme.”

85

 “O dopolnenii i izmenenii instruktsii o prave otkrytiia i proizvodstva torgovli medikamentami,” Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii Rabochego i Krest’ianskogo Pravi­ tel´stva 2 (1923): 19–20. 86

 V. B. Zhiromskaia, Sovetskii gorod v 1921–1925 gg.: Problemy sotsial´noi struktury (Moscow: Nauka, 1988), 91; Shkarovskii, “Sem´ imen ‘koshki,’” 471.

87

 “Ugolovnyi kodeks RSFSR,” Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii Rabochego i Krest´ian­ skogo Pravitel´stva 15 (1922): 27, 28. 88

 “O merakh regulirovaniia torgovli narkoticheskimi veshchestvami,” Sobranie uza­ konenii i rasporiazhenii Rabochego i Krest´ianskogo Pravitel´stva 85 (1924): 1216–17.

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ished according to the terms mandated by articles 136 and 141 of the RSFSR Criminal Code.89 However, with the implementation of Article 140-d, “the production and storage for the purpose of sale, and the actual sale of cocaine, opium, morphine, ether, and other intoxicating substances without an appropriate permit,” penalties for violators were set at a maximum prison term of three years. The same crime carried out as a profession, or in the context of operating a drug den in which sale or use of substances took place would be punished with a minimum term of three years.90 Thus, the Soviet government clearly went along the path of intensifying and gradually systematizing repressive measures: the rooting out of drug abuse as a social disease now became a consistent policy. In the beginning of January 1925, the people’s commissar for public health, Nikolai A. Semashko, published an article in Izvestiia TsIK SSSR that commented on the recent legal changes.91 Clearly aimed at the general public and printed on the front page of the newspaper, the article was titled “On Cocainism and the Fight Against It,” and discussed issues pertaining to the use of cocaine, as well as other drugs. In Semashko’s view, Article 140-d showed that Soviet law’s anti-drug rallying call was “treatment and help for the sick, as well as punishment for the parasites profiteering from people’s unhealthy dispositions.”92 The author also claimed that Soviet legislation was “the only one in the world that has introduced a series of rules for the strict regulation of exchange of these substances. (Because our government is the only one in the world that does not depend on the powerful syndicate of drug manufacturers and drug dealers).”93 Semashko also called for economic, sanitary and educational measures, thus marking out a multi-pronged program for the fight against drugs, which he hoped would be carried out quickly and in full. Conclusion Having considered the process of the “democratization” of the typical Russian drug addict, we must once again underline the significance of World War I as a 89

 Ibid.

90

 “O dopolnenii Ugolovnogo kodeksa statei 140-d,” Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii Rabochego i Krest´ianskogo Pravitel´stva RSFSR 4 (1925): 58–59.

91

 Semashko, “O kokainizme.”

92 93

 Ibid.

 Ibid.

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429

catalyst for changes pertaining to drug abuse and the evolution of drug policy in Russia. It seems that an explanation of “democratization” by an appeal to a “code of bohemian personality” works only in individual cases and fails entirely to explain morphine addiction, to take one example. Rather, in the extraordinary conditions of late 1910s and early 1920s (particularly in the conditions of the “dry laws”) drugs became more accessible to the population than alcohol. Of tremendous importance is the fact that throughout the 1920s morphine, cocaine, and opium were actively used in medical practice. Thus, as a counterweight to the popular understanding of drugs as “black market” goods we must emphasize that in Russia and elsewhere during this time there was a fully legal and widespread drug market. The analysis of Russian drug policy from 1914 through 1924 is able to explain why the Soviet state ultimately decided to take the course of active struggle against drugs, and implemented strict regulation of the drug market. On the one hand, this was a purely pragmatic decision: it seemed possible and doable to cut drug consumption sharply (as opposed to alcohol consumption, in the face of which the state essentially capitulated, permitting free sales of vodka in 1925). Moreover, by the latter half of the 1920s it became possible to start gradually decreasing the use of drugs in medical practice. However, we also must not ignore the pressure of medical professionals and criminologists, as well as the fact that drug addiction was construed as a capitalist, bourgeois disease, and thus was seen as a direct economic and political challenge to the socialist system. The examined facts allow us to observe that doctors’ fiery resolutions about the drug “epidemic” should be viewed with skepticism. It seems more correct to underline the fact of widespread alcohol addiction, which weathered all the difficulties of obtaining spirits during the First World War and the ini­ tial years of Soviet rule.94 Though the number of drug addicts did grow, the state apparatus was primarily concerned with growing alcoholism and illegal alcohol production.95 The implementation of Article 140-d, discussed above, came both chronologically and thematically after the articles pertaining to the illegal production and distribution of various alcoholic beverages (Article 140-a, b, v, g). Thus, we can see how even though the early Soviet drug policy was thoroughly informed by the reaction of professional societies and the govern­ ment to the “democratization” of drug abuse and the rapid growth of users 94

 “Sutochnye raporta. I Admiralteiskii podraionnyi komissariat” (March–August 1917), TsGA SPb f. 131, op. 1. d. 16, ll. 1–95, and many others.

95

 Za 8 let: Materialy po istorii Sovetskoi Raboche-krest´ianskoi militsii i ugolovnogo rozyska za 1917–12 noiabria–1925 gg. (Leningrad: Na postu, 1925), 165–78.

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after World War I, this reaction was nevertheless often inappropriate for the scale of the problem and took the form of a moral panic, which led to a po­ tentially dangerous politicization of drug use.96 In this context, the presence of continuities on either side of the 1917 revolutionary divide once again casts doubt on this supposedly impermeable historical boundary. Notwithstanding the steep decline of drug consumers, as well as the superficial success of 1920s drug policy,97 Soviet government actions obviously could not liquidate the actual desire to consume drugs. Moreover, in the long run medical conceptions of drug abuse were used to marginalize and repress drug addicts in subsequent years. The problem of drug abuse remained (though in a less obviously expressed way) throughout the 1930s,98 but what also survived was the tradition of purely negative attitudes towards drug addicts and drug use. These attitudes persist today as well, even as a growing number of specialists have cast doubt on the government’s expensive, harsh, and ineffective drub policy. Translated by Pavel Khazanov

96

 Lebina, “Tenevye storony,” 30.

97

 Shkarovskii, “Sem´ imen ‘koshki,’” 472, 474, 476; Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´, 32–33; Lebina and Chistikov, Obyvatel´ i reformy, 117.

98

 TsGA SPb f. 7384 (Leningrad Soviet of the Workers’, Peasants’, and Red Army Deputies), op. 2-s, d. 60, l. 250; Arkhiv Severo-Zapadnogo gosudarstvennogo meditsin­ skogo universiteta im. I. I. Mechnikova (Arkhiv SZGMU), nauchnaia chast´, d. 23, ll. 20, 23, 35ob., 36, 39ob.–40, 46, 59, 74; Izmozik and Lebina, Peterburg sovetskii, 123–34.

Everyday Revolution: The Making of the Soviet Urban Communes Andy Willimott

In October 1918, just shy of one year since the Bolsheviks seized power in the name of the proletariat, the Soviet press stumbled across one of the first self-proclaimed “domestic communes” of the new revolutionary state. This was a cohabiting alliance of young activists and workers who had taken up residence in one of the apartment blocks near Preobrazhenskaia Gate in Moscow. Despite the building’s poor state of repair, and a lack of running water, this small band of revolutionary enthusiasts sought to turn their hum­ ble corner of this residence into a bastion of socialism. They established a system of comradely cooperation and mutual regulation—arrangements ex­ pressly designed to facilitate and monitor the sharing of resources, material, income, and, most important of all, modern socialist ideals. Inhabitants were expected to pick clothing and even underwear from a common pool, subsidize group costs and activities, live by a collective code governing behavior and habit, and instill socialism within one another and in the world around them. This was a construct of practical and ideological necessity. It provided ac­ commodation and support during a period of intense political and social upheaval, but it also attempted to implement key revolutionary visions in an immediate and concrete form. “With the rise of the working class,” it was op­ timistically reported, “such groups would help to reclaim the domestic and urban landscape from the ‘bourgeois yoke.’”1 This commune was eagerly (if The research for this chapter was originally funded by a UK Arts & Humanities Re­ search Council Studentship; it has come to fruition with the support of a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. Constructive criticism was provided by Peter Waldron, Simon Dixon, Adele Lindenmeyr, Matthias Neumann, Jonathan Waterlow, and Jenni­ fer Davey, as well as the readers and board of Russia’s Great War and Revolution series. 1  “Po kvartiram rabochikh,” Kommunar, 9 October 1918, 3. Kommunar was a daily newspaper published in Moscow under the auspices of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). It was in print from October 1918 to June 1919. The vast majority of its pages were concerned with collective farming but included numerous articles on worker communes and urban, collective housing. The

Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 431–54.

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disproportionately) cited as an example of the socialist revolution taking root in Russia. Far from an isolated or eccentric development, however, the same article noted that similar units of eight to ten people living in this manner made the most of the limited accommodation available and released social life from the “oppression of the old order.”2 In this early revolutionary environment, as old tenements were being claimed by enthusiasts and the new government issued decrees sanctioning resettlement rights, the first domestic communes, as another report put it, started to “sprout like mushrooms.”3 At first, local soviets sought to lead the reclamation of housing space on behalf of the proletariat, acting directly on Bolshevik Party imperatives, but they soon looked to local bodies and revolutionary organizations for support. The process of eviction and resettlement passed into the hands of small workers’ organizations, housing commissions, and even factory committees. In some cases revolutionary authorities expressed concern over the zealous potential of these organizations. At the same time, while soldiers, workers, and activists struggled to find suitable residential arrangements, a number of self-styled “communes” and “communards” declared their intention to rectify the “housing problem” and the inadequacies of their surroundings.4 Cohabitational communes sprang up across Petrograd and Moscow, of­ ten united around both a common fund (obshchii kotel), into which members placed a share or all of their income, and a founding charter (ustav), which regulated domestic rules and collective principles. Among the early, scattered examples of domestic association, both form and practice varied, but as the challenges of civil war unfolded most seemed ready to equate revolutionary advance with the political, social, and cultural reform promised under the Communist Party. In line with the dominant social tenets of revolutionary discourse, many focused their resources and time on the development of equal relations, collective dinning, and new cultural activities associated with modern socialist habit.5 The dormitories and accommodation attached to the Soviet institutes of higher education witnessed the formation of a number of

stories covered under this title were subsequently added to the remit of Pravda and Bednota. See Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi sotsial´no-politicheskii arkhiv (RGASPI) f. M.1 (Komsomol Presidium), op. 3, d. 1, ll. 4–4ob. 2

 Ibid.

3

 “Pereselenie v burzhuaznye doma,” Kommunar, 17 October 1918, 2.

4

 I. Gromov, “Zhilishchnaia nerazberikha,” Kommunar, 1 November 1918, 3.

5

 “Uluchshenie byta chernorabochikh,” Kommunar, 22 November 1918, 3.

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student communes run in this manner.6 Some went on to replicate the “Red corners” and structures of Soviet workers’ clubs, dedicating space to reading, studying, and other enlightening activities. Others took the form of workercommunes, appropriating the practices of the Russian arteli (prerevolutionary labor associations) by living together and selling their efforts collectively for mutual security.7 Here, too, the ideological pertinence of collective living and new cultural habits was clearly evident and frequently expressed in overtly revolutionary terms.8 By 1919, some revolutionary commentators were urging the Communist Youth League (Komsomol) to help its members form “exemplary communes” that would lead this assertively collectivist development and provide a space for its members to interact with workers.9 The central Komsomol leadership did not act upon these suggestions directly, but the domestic, urban commune did become a preserve of Komsomol activists and those seeking admission to party organs. It also attracted the interest of the press, particularly the youth press. Here we find the central tension of the early commune movement: this phenomenon was not part of an official initiative, yet it often proved attractive to those that did operate within the official apparatus of state. In this sense, the urban communes flirted with the political infrastructure of the revolution. At the start of 1918 a small faction of the Socialist League of Young Workers (SSRM)—the body that eventually evolved into the Komsomol—founded a short-lived commune in an apartment on Dvorianskaia Street, Petrograd, with the express aim of providing a living example of socialism to young workers in the city.10 In the years to come, a number of local Komsomol representatives encouraged youths to join existing communes or establish their own groups to help press the revolutionary agenda. At the Moscow Automobile Society (AMO) plant, for instance, “a certain Rudakov,” it was reported, “suggested

6  V. S. Izmozik and N. B. Lebina, Peterburg sovetskii: “Novyi chelovek” v starom pro­ stranstve, 1920–1930-e gody. Sotsial´no-arkhitekturnoe mikroistoricheskoe issledovanie (St. Petersburg: Kriga, 2010), 143; N. A. Filimonov, Po novomu ruslu: Vospominaniia (Len­ ingrad: Lenizdat, 1967), 12. 7

 “Rabochie i kommuny,” Kommunar, 24 December 1918, 3; “Gorodskie kommuny,” Kommunar, 27 December 1918, 3. 8

 See “Rabochie i kommuny,” 3.

9

 [Aktivnyi rabotnik], “Kommuny molodezhi,” Iunyi kommunist, no. 3–4 (16 March 1919): 10–11. 10

 G. Driazgov, “Anarkhistskaia kommuna,” in Leninskoe pokolenie, ed. P. F. Kudelli (Leningrad, 1926), cited in Isabel A. Tirado, Young Guard! The Communist Youth League, Petrograd 1917–1920 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 41.

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that all Komsomol members form a commune.”11 Similarly, at the Red Proletariat (Krasnyi proletarii) plant in Moscow, one young Komsomol member by the name of Anikeev helped to establish a commune that managed to attract “strong support from the factory committee and party cell.”12 But actions like these remained unsanctioned by the higher echelons, occasionally opening local officials, including Rudakov, to criticism and reprimand.13 At a time when both the Komsomol and the Party were concerned about their ability to stimulate the mass participation necessary for the construction of communism in Russia, the urban communes were not an unwelcome development, but de facto inclusion of these groups within official operations was sometimes seen as a step too far. Nevertheless, in many cases, Komsomol representatives and members continued to view the urban communes as a means of escaping the poor living conditions left in the wake of war and revolution. It was thought that they could provide the formative ideological environment necessary for the first generation of communists. As the vocal Komsomol dele­gate Vladimir Dunaevskii proclaimed, these communes seemed to offer a precursor to the erosion of the old family and its bourgeois habits.14 For figures such as Duna­ evskii, who was also a leading exponent of the more contentious notion of youth soviets and youth sections in the trade unions, the formation of spon­ taneous, urban communes bore the promise of “new social patterns.”15 The Third Congress of the Komsomol formally dismissed the idea of youth soviets and youth sections in October 1920. Each was deemed a factious proposition, detrimental to the Komsomol’s wider political duties.16 But the communes sur­ vived largely because they stoked significantly less controversy and criticism. They offered a form of agitational engagement and revolutionary participation that did not directly challenge the institution’s authority or newly established political structures. Emerging from this period of possibility, therefore, the communes and communards that had formed were able to present themselves

11

 E. Milich, “Raspad,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. 5–6 (16 February 1923): 9.

12  Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. 7952 (Stenogram of Kom­ somol cell based at Red Proletariat factory), op. 3, d. 98, ll. 7–7ob. I thank Simon Pirani for bringing this and the above source to my attention. 13

 Milich, “Raspad,” 9.

14  V. I. Dunaevskii, “Oktiabr´ i trud rabochei molodezhi,” Iunyi kommunist, no. 15 (7 November 1919): 2–5. 15

 See Tirado, Young Guard!, 151–55.

16

 Ibid.

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as the cadre of the domestic agitational front, attempting to take the lead on issues that officials were still debating. Situated between official ideology, activist interpretation, and the urban public, these communes did not fall under the purview of any single state institution. As a result, no central study or numerical assessment was conducted until the end of the 1920s, when the Komsomol noted that the urban communes had developed into a “network of activism” with up to 50,000 participants.17 During the early months and years immediately following October, the nascent structures of this “network” remained modest—a range of press reports suggest a number limited to a few hundred across Petrograd and Moscow. Nevertheless, the formation of the urban commune phenomenon during these years speaks to a number of issues of broader significance. The urban communes show how the rank and file could operate in the margins of Soviet state apparatus. Furthermore, they shed light on the interaction between activist citizens and revolutionary discourse, understood here as a popular response to revolution and as the field of ideas that could be called upon to drive or construe revolution.18 While dealing with a revolution that clearly gave birth to a centralized regime employing violent and authoritarian methods of government, this chapter reveals a degree of independent appropriation and an indeterminacy that has been underrepresented within the historiography of the early Soviet state and its ideological formation. It shows that where there was no clear or absolute modality to revolutionary developments, the voice of activism could be heard. This is not to suggest that such formations represent the driving force of the wider revolutionary project. Rather, by bringing the urban communes into sharp focus, this chapter offers a new social history based on popular interactions with state imperatives. Ultimately, the story of the urban communes and communards enhances our understanding of how revolutionary visions were constructed within society.19

17

 RGASPI f. M.1 (Approved directives from Secretariat of the Komsomol, June 1930), op. 4, d. 45, ll. 33–34. 18

 Cf. Steven Best and Douglas Keller, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (Lon­ don: Macmillan, 1991); Peter Schöttler, “Historians and Discourse Analysis,” His­tory Workshop Journal, no. 27 (1989): 37–65.

19

 Here “society” is not understood in the normative sense or as a homogenous whole but as a space of social interaction and communication that involved people who were not directly acting on behalf of the state apparatus. See Malte Rolf, Das sowjetische Massenfest (Hamburg: Hamburger Editions, 2006), 26–29.

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Identifying with Revolution The October Revolution of 1917 marked the birth of the first avowedly socialist state in history. As the earliest posters, fliers, decrees, and declarations ap­ peared promising radical change, young idealists, including the urban com­ munards, set about putting into practice their own conceptions of what it meant to be part of this brave new world. These activists and enthusiasts tried to turn theory into practice, imbricating the promise of collectivist visions and revolutionary messages within their everyday lives and popular experience. As they interpreted and implemented revolutionary ideals, they increasingly saw themselves as participants in the construction of a new state. Their prac­ tice and lifestyle exhibited a sense of revolutionary citizenship, which, as Isabel Tirado has shown in relation to the activities of the rank and file, could send “ripples” throughout local and national branches of the Soviet system.20 Indeed, by mid-1919 even the main press organ of the Bolshevik Party, Pravda, was citing the urban communes as an ideologically pertinent example of “mutual collective agreement” and rational domestic management.21 Only recently, however, have the daily “interpretation” and “performance” of revolution come in for closer inspection from historians. Traditionally, stud­ ies that stress the totalitarian and coercive nature of the Soviet state have left little room for popular identification with revolutionary goals or the potential of human action in the face of a centralized regime. In this context, Soviet socialism has been presented as both a “lie” and “fraud” conducted against a wholly passive or sleeping people.22 In opposition to these readings, a number of revisionist social histories published predominantly between the 1960s and 1990s sought to detail incidences of support and dissent within the Soviet population, making room for popular agency. But a disconnect between the “above” and “below,” as well as a disproportionate focus on cases of non­ compliance, it has been suggested, continued to obstruct a fuller view of revolutionary experience.23 Extending critically on past studies, current intel­ 20  Isabel A. Tirado, “The Komsomol’s Village Vanguard: Youth and Politics in the NEP Countryside,” Russian Review 72, 3 (July 2013): 427–46, here 429. 21

 “Rabochaia zhizn´,” Pravda, 12 August 1919, 4.

22

 Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994), 270; Jeffrey Brooks, “Socialist Realism in Pravda: Read All about It!” Slavic Review 53, 4 (1994): 978. Also see Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1990). 23

 For a survey of this literature, see The Resistance Debate in Russian and Soviet History, ed. Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Marshall Poe, Kritika Historical Studies 1 (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2003), especially Lynne Viola, “Popular Resist­

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lectual trends have encouraged an understanding that recognizes and better accounts for the complexities of revolutionary appropriation and conditioning. In particular, Stephen Kotkin’s influential investigation into the different forms of expression and self-expression among the inhabitants of the industrial city of Magnitogorsk during the 1930s posited that, whether through genuine be­ lief or through careerism, most citizens had mastered the art of “speaking Bolshevik.” By conforming to the accepted language, customs, and identity prescribed by the Party, Kotkin argued, individuals empowered themselves and, crucially, the ruling system.24 Focusing on the subjectivity of the Soviet population, one developing school of thought has since used diaries, autobiographies, and memoirs—the writing of which was encouraged by the Soviet educational curriculum and the party admission process—in an attempt to show how citizens formed a view of both themselves and the wider world through the medium of “official discourse.”25 Combined with Kotkin’s work, these studies have advanced our understanding of how state-sponsored rhetoric could shape habit and prac­ tice, helping to form new social and political structures across the opening decades of the Soviet Union. The “official discourse” of Bolshevik ideology, some scholars have suggested, presented an eschatological understanding of the world that encouraged individuals, especially former non-Bolshevik socialists, to narrate their life and their past as a journey of redemption, con­ cluding with admittance to the Party.26 Looking at the techniques by which people initiated this “self-fashioning” in line with Bolshevism during the 1920s, Igal Halfin has argued that party cells and representatives attached ance in the Stalinist 1930s: Soliloquy of a Devil’s Advocate,” 69–102. On the “detached” image of the subject in these histories, see Jochen Hellbeck, “Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia,” 103–37. 24

 Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 222–23. The author cites his specific sources of influence on pp. 22–23: Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Struc­ turalism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed., ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). He also notes the essays and analysis provided in Power-Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980); and The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984).

25

 Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Auto­ biographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Igal Halfin, Red Autobiographies: Initiating the Bolshevik Self (Seattle: Herbert J. Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies, University of Washington, 2011). 26

 Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 1–38.

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themselves to student debating circles to help determine the topics and results of discussion.27 Again, the importance of revolutionary discourse and the individual’s exposure to Bolshevik thinking is clearly demonstrated. The seeds of these practices were certainly sown during the opening years of the revolution, as the Bolsheviks sought to secure political power and limit the threat of rival socialist parties. Among other things, they sought to control the language of revolution, curtailing non-Bolshevik press organs to ensure the spread of a unified and ideologically acceptable narrative. Party cells and official representatives were also placed within local organizations in order to monitor and mold the revolution on the ground. However, while accepting that language management played an important part in the formation of the Soviet state, we must be careful to avoid linguistic determinism. Equally so, party-approved identities should not blind us to those individuals and groups that partook in revolution in a manner other than that determined by state policy.28 When it comes to assessing the subjectivity of the Soviet people, selected diarists are not necessarily an accurate reflection of broader social experiences. In their quest to join the Party, for instance, many autobiographers wrote texts to secure the favor of local authorities. In other words, these accounts were often written to power. Moreover, to suggest that effective propaganda methods alone explain the development of revolution neglects the full dynamism of events. It presents a one-dimensional view that renders any/all expression as the implementation of power, denies the existence of spaces outside the official party apparatus, and assumes that the Soviet citizen was an entirely malleable entity. It is important that we also explore spaces, practices, individuals, and groups operating outside the apparatus of state. This shows how official dis­ course could be both adopted and, at the same time, “colonized” in imaginative, stubborn, and even idiosyncratic ways.29 Revolutionary ideas and causes can thus be seen to align with other norms and experiences within society. If we accept that official power was not omnipresent, we must acknowledge the variety of circumstances and encounters through which revolution was ac­ commodated and developed, as well as how these interactions fed back into official structures over time. This is especially true for the period with which 27

 Igal Halfin, Stalinist Confessions: Messianism and Terror at the Leningrad Communist University (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); and Halfin, Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, 1918–1928 (Pittsburgh: University of Pitts­ burgh Press, 2007). 28

 Cf. Steve A. Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 234–35.

29

 Rolf, Das sowjetische Massenfest, 28–29.

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this volume is concerned, the formative years of the revolutionary project. While it has been argued that state-driven agitation campaigns during these years elicited social support and convinced its perpetrators of the validity of their messages, it should be remembered that the spread of revolution was also aided by the fact that mobilized forces, especially young communists, were permitted to take initiative at ground level.30 The communes and commu­ nards were a prime example of this “informal” or “unofficial” initiative. As evidenced in their activities, the communards embraced many Bolshevik visions, but they did not kowtow to the methods of state authorities. They had a tendency to extend upon the political campaigns of the Komsomol and Party, even calling for the removal of politically unsympathetic teaching per­ sonnel within Soviet educational facilities as early as 1918–19.31 Subsequent commune groups extended upon the operations of university authorities and local cells by standing as exemplary practitioners of revolu­ tion, sponsoring fellow students and agitation missions, confronting nonsocialist teaching staff, and helping to establish collective dining halls for all students.32 Others tried to implement greater collective practices within industry and society at large. At a time when state resources were focused elsewhere, the communards tried to take responsibility for the political, cul­ tural, and working environments in which they were situated, challenging official organs to act on the issues they cared about and affecting the manner by which the revolution extended across state, society, and institution. Their practices were not accommodated in full, but in some cases they did help to conceive the manner by which socialist visions and state imperatives came into being. Interpreting Revolution The urban communes and communards constructed their world through the revolutionary trends and prevalent themes of the new Soviet state. Utilizing the French term commune (kommuna), as opposed to the Russian term mir or obshchina, meaning “traditional community or peasant commune,” the activists who formed these groups of collective cohabitation and revolutionary living were, in part, a response to the new Soviet state’s active glorification of the Paris Commune of 1871. After all, this was an insurrectionary event that lived on in the memory of many revolutionaries and was used by the Bolsheviks to 30

 Cf. Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 5–7, 84–85.

31

 Filimonov, Po novomu ruslu, 9–12.

32

 “Kommuna,” Pedvuzovets, no. 3–4 (1931): 4.

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legitimize their actions both before and after October 1917. Throughout 1915 and 1916 Lenin insisted that the Paris Commune had taught the world that the only way to escape the spectre of imperialist war was through civil war.33 Following the abdication of Nicholas II in March 1917, Lenin refused to work with the Provisional Government, again summoning the example of 1871, when the Communards of Paris did not work with bourgeois institutions but instead sought to replace them with their own body of proletarian democracy. State and Revolution, Lenin’s boldest and most utopian text, declared that in ”the [1871] Commune is the form ‘at last discovered’ by … [which] the bourgeois state machine … can and must be replaced.”34 Armed with this example from Europe (carrying special connotation due to the likewise imported theories of Marxism and socialism) the Bolsheviks set about constructing a workers’ state. Even the Bolshevik call for “All Power to the Soviets” was linked to the “democratic” structure of the Commune, providing local representatives for the working class. After the seizure of power in October, however, the realities of governing and civil war highlighted the need to retain old bureaucratic and institutional elements. The systemic overhaul advocated in State and Revolution proved wholly infeasible. The last attempt to implement an ambitious citywide commune structure akin to 1871 came in the form of the Petrograd Consumer Commune (Petrokommuna), which was established to tackle the mounting food crisis of 1918–19. For a short period the Petrokommuna, with 8 trains, 40 carriages, and over 100 canteens and tearooms, was “the largest economic organization run on communist principles” in Soviet Russia.35 Despite this grand endeavor, the importance of 1871 to the Soviet leadership rapidly shifted 33

 Marian Sawer, “The Soviet Image of the Commune: Lenin and Beyond,” in Images of the Commune. Images de la Commune, ed. James A. Leith (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978), 245–63. 34

 V. I. Lenin, State and Revolution, trans. Robert Service (London: Penguin, 1992), 50– 51. The Civil War in France, a pamphlet written by Karl Marx shortly after the collapse of the Paris Commune, was widely circulated in Russia from 1905. It famously eulogized this struggle as “the first dictatorship of the proletariat.” Lewis S. Feuer, ed. Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (London: Collins, 1969), 389– 429. 35

 Peterburg, den´ mirovogo internatsionala 19 iulia 1920 g. (Petrograd, 1920) [anonymous pamphlet]. Also see A. E. Badaev, Desiat´ let bor´by i stroitel´stva: Prodvol’stvennokooperativnaia rabota v Leningrade, 1917–1927 (Leningrad: Priboi, 1927); M. N. Potekhin, Petrogradskaia trudovaia kommuna: 1918–1919 gg. (Leningrad: Izdatel´stvo Leningrad­ skogo universiteta, 1980); Martin McAuley, “Bread without the Bourgeoisie,” in Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History, ed. Diane P. Koenker, William G. Rosenberg, and Ronald G. Suny (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 158–79, here 159; A. Iu. Davydov, Kooperatory sovetskogo goroda v

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from its supposed example of good governance to its value as an inspirational tale of working-class heroism. In this form, the legend of 1871 became a feature of celebration on the Red calendar and an entrenched topic of discussion in Soviet publications.36 Increasingly, the word kommuna became a signifier of socialist revolutionary aspirations. It was associated with the values of workers’ control, direct democracy, and institutional and social reformation, as well as collectivism and collective action. These were the principles through which the activists of the urban communes imagined themselves. As surviving accounts reveal, often in the form of letters and reflections written to the Soviet youth press, many communards tried to implement a system of management that put all motions to the collective vote. Everything, from daily practical contingencies, to founding rules and regulations, underwent group scrutiny.37 The communes attempted to practice an idealized and uncompromised vision of democracy commonly associated with the Paris Commune, socialism, and early Soviet claims of representation. Furthermore, as the accounts of a later commune reveal, some groups explicitly cited the heroism of 1871 as a source of inspiration, directly equating themselves to the exemplary figures much eulogized within Soviet readings of this foundational socialist event.38 “Spark” (Iskra), a commune with the same name as the revolutionary émigré newspaper formerly edited by Lenin, vowed to replicate what they referred to as the “selflessness and devotion” of the Communards of 1871. To carry the name of these heroes, they insisted, was a “great responsibility.”39 Like many commune groups before them, Spark tried to channel this example and lead their peers, gaining a sense of self-affirmation in the process. Situated within institutes of higher education and in “factories big or small,” wrote one activist, the urban comgody NEPa: Mezhdu “Voennym kommunizom” i sotsialisticheskoi rekonstruktsiei (St. Peters­ burg: Aleteiia, 2011), 51–60. 36

 See N. M. Lukin, Parizhskaia Kommuna 1871 g. (Moscow, 1922); A. A. Slutskii, Parizhskaia Kommuna 1871 goda (Moscow, 1925); A. I. Molok, Parizhskaia Kommuna i krest´ianstvo (Moscow, 1925); A. I. Molok, Parizhskaia Kommuna 1871 g. (Leningrad, 1927); P. M. Kerzhenstev, Istoriia Parizhskoi Kommuny, 1871 (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo sotsial´nopoliticheskoi literatury, 1959); I. S. Galkin, I Internatsional: Parizhskaia Kommuna (Mos­ cow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1963); A. I. Korolev, ed., Parizhskaia kommuna i sovremennost´ (Leningrad: Izdatel´stvo Leningradskogo universi­ teta, 1971).

37  For example: Kollektiv, “Stroiut novyi byt,” Iunyi kommunist, no. 1 (1 January 1924): 45. 38 39

 “Dnevnik odnoi kommuny,” Komsomol´skaia pravda, 9 July 1930, 4.

 Ibid.

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munes displayed a sense of “obligation” and “duty” that emboldened them and gave them the confidence to engage in local revolutionary projects.40 The manner in which the urban communes and communards conducted themselves displayed a great deal of ingenuity and enterprise. The idea of instilling collective values within the domestic setting, however, was not entirely their own creation. In this area they took influence from a number of sources. As the word kommuna became popular shorthand for revolutionary ideals, it was also adopted by Soviet institutions as diverse as local schools, orphanages, juvenile detention centers, and provincial administrations. On top of this, the opening years of revolution witnessed the transformation of a number of luxury hotels, such as the Astoria and Hotel de l’Europe in Petrograd, into specialized residences for party officials. Known as “Houses of the Soviets” (Doma Sovetov), they contained collective services, including general catering and shared facilities, designed to free the inhabitants from domestic chores and introduce new socialist environments.41 The designs for non-party variations, very few of which were actually built, even became known as “house-communes” (doma-kommuny). Building on Lenin’s citations of Friedrich Engels’s The Housing Question (1872), which stated that the Paris Commune had shown how the proletariat could benefit from “the rational utilization of … buildings,” the renovation of domestic and interior life became increasingly identified with communism itself.42 While a lack of stability and finite resources prevented the standardization of the house-commune model at this time, a formative discourse on home planning and daily life was firmly established.43 This was a discourse imbued with the confidence of modernity and bolstered by the Marxist conviction that matter determines consciousness.44 Highlighting the connection between this discourse and the formation of the urban communes, the Third Congress of the Komsomol in October 1920 declared that the cohabitant arrangements exhibited by these groups would

40

 [Aktivnyi rabotnik], “Kommuny molodezhi,” 10–11.

41

 N. B. Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´ sovetskogo goroda: Normy i anomalii, 1920–1930 gody (St. Petersburg: Letnii sad, 1999), 161.

42

 Lenin, State and Revolution, 53. Cf. Robert Service, Lenin, A Political Life, 3: The Iron Ring (London: Macmillan, 1995), 34–37. Cf. Michael David-Fox, “What Is Cultural Revolution?” Russian Review 58, 2 (April 1999): 181–201, here 199. 43

 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Rus­ sian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 201. 44

 Also see David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, eds., Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 11.

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reform the home and “advance life in general.”45 One year later, Komsomol delegates confirmed that the urban communes offered a means of “protect[ing] youths from the corrupting influence of the street, the petty-mindedness of the family, and the heavy weight of … [bourgeois] domesticity.”46 Keen readers of the Soviet press, many urban communards subscribed to the leading news­ papers and journals, which frequently led them to discuss and enact ideas surrounding the “new way of life” (novyi byt)—the socialist reformation of daily customs, practices, and habit.47 Indeed, this became an increasingly im­ portant area of consideration within the urban commune phenomenon. By the end of the 1920s, while the communes remained disconnected from official structures, the Komsomol went on to report that “articles on the organization of everyday life and collective habits in Soviet society could ignore neither the lessons of the urban communes nor the voices of their inhabitants.”48 The closest that state-sanctioned developments came to the urban com mune movement was the promotion of “agricultural communes” (sel´skokho­ ziaistvennye kommuny), which fell under the jurisdiction of the Commissariat of Agriculture (Narkomzem). With 500–600 registered agricultural communes in 1918, and a number of common traits, including the use of common funds and the strict regulation of membership, it is likely that reports of these rural creations served as a source of direct, practical inspiration.49 Indeed, some communards, including Stepan Afanas´evich Balezin, who went on to become a prominent figure within the student communes of Petrograd, would bring the experience of rural life and collective farming with them.50 But when rural practices were introduced to the urban communes, they were not always well received, as seen in the case of Kolia Silin, who earned the 45

 Tovarishch komsomol: Dokumenty s˝ezdov, konferentsii i TsK VLKSM, 1918–1968, comp. V. I. Desiaterik et al. (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1969), 1: 34. 46

 Ibid., 63. Also see Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´ sovetskogo goroda, 164.

47

 See, for example, G. Levgur, “Komsomol´skaia kommuna ‘Kauchuk,’” Iunyi kommu­ nist, no. 9 (9 October 1923): 26–27. 48

 M. Gol´braikh, “Kak dolzhen byt´ organizovan studencheskii byt,” Krasnoe studen­ chestvo, no. 3–4 (1928): 6–17. 49

 On the agricultural communes, see Robert Wesson, Soviet Communes (New Bruns­ wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963). Also see Eric Aunoble, “Le Communisme, tout de suite!” Le Mouvement des Communes en Ukraine soviétique, 1919–1920 (Paris: Les Nuits Rouges, 2008).

50  Muzei istorii Rossiiskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo universiteta im. A. I. Gertsena (MRGPU im. Herzen), d. B-5 (Personal file of Balezin), ll. 20–16. NB: It is the practice of this repository to count pages from the back of the file. This allows the museum to add subsequent materials or family accounts to the front of the file.

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nickname “peasant ideologue” (ideolog krest´ianskii) for bringing a pig into the cramped quarters of his city-based commune.51 Furthermore, it must be noted, there is no evidence of a coterminous, interconnected relationship. The most ambitious rural-based “communes” or “colonies,” some formed by opti­ mistic foreign immigrants, remained exclusively agricultural, functioning as holistic microcosms or new socialist farming prototypes.52 Some returning soldiers did form rural collectives out of conviction, but, for Narkomzem, the agricultural communes represented a more overt means of extending their influence in the countryside, as traditional peasant communities and farms were offered financial support for registering with this section of the Soviet government.53 In this sense, there was also a greater level of state involvement in their evolution. Nevertheless, with Narkomzem issuing model charters for the agricultural communes from July 1918, championing the pooling of resources and a communist lifestyle, what linked these two developments together was the wider discourse on domestic reformation, new comradely relations, and the commune.54 The unintentional result of all this was that the meaning of kommuna shifted from a form of governance to a concentrated mechanism of revolutionary transformation. In the immediate aftermath of 1917, publications such as Kommunar (The Communard) helped to ground the grand revolutionary visions and the imagined principles of 1871 in concrete, even prosaic form, eagerly reporting on collective units of farming, accommodation, and labor as examples of “spontaneous communes.”55 Many pieces of advice literature subsequently jumped at the opportunity to report on tangible examples of commune and collectivist practice. These included reports on Komsomol summer camps (self-styled “commune camps,” “school communes,” ”summer colonies,” or “collective dachas”), which promoted communist habits and col51

 M. Iankovskii, Kommuna sta tridtsati trekh (Leningrad, 1929), 35–38. Silin was subject to a number of pranks for his troubles. In one instance, he was given a series of empty egg shells for dinner. After two eggs fell apart in his hands he screamed, “What bastard did this?” At the moment he was passed a third egg, he threw it away in anger, only to discover it was not empty. In fact, it had landed on the head of a fellow communard.

52

 Cf. Benjamin W. Sawer, “Shedding the White and Blue: American Migration and Soviet Dreams in the Era of the New Economic Policy,” Ab Imperio, no. 1 (2013): 65–84.

53

 Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917– 1921 (London: Clarendon Press, 1989), especially chap. 3. See also Wesson, Soviet Communes, 104–08.

54

 M. Sumatokhin, Davaite zhit´ kommunoi! (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo Vserossiiskogo Tsen­ tral´nogo Ispolnitel´nogo Komiteta Sovetov RSK i K. Deputatov, 1918), 20–24.

55

 “Po kvartiram rabochikh,” 3.

The Making of the Soviet Urban Communes

445

lectivism.56 In this way, the activists that formed the urban communes were both agent and subject within a developing revolutionary experience. In other words, they were influenced by common and established revolutionary discourses, but often employed their readings in a manner not foreseen. The urban communards helped to conceive the revolution and the Soviet imagining of the Commune within the autonomous space of everyday life. By appropriating and reappropriating, sometimes in a subtle rewriting of existing influences, the urban communes and communards established an unmandated means of revolutionary participation. Making Their Revolution The actions and undertakings of the urban communes offered its members the chance both to display their revolutionary identity and to partake in revolutionary developments. Internally the urban commune groups looked to extend the collective principles advocated by the revolution. Having attended one of the Komsomol’s summer camps at the start of the 1920s, a group of young activists, all aged between 19 and 22, were determined to translate the discussion of collectivism into real-life action.57 In its simplest form, this was understood as the act of putting the common good before personal inter­ est. To facilitate this vision, these youths found an apartment in Moscow, purchased a few essential items, established a common fund, and wrote a founding charter, declaring their intentions to form new comradely relations. Initially taking 40 percent of an individual’s income, the group later voted to increase this to 100 percent. This went towards food, lighting, fuel, and group leisure activities, including trips to the cinema.58 In this way, they embraced one of the key tenets of Marxism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” Formed in humble conditions, this and other urban communes developed strict systems of domestic regulation and collective living. Another Moscowbased group, composed predominantly of Komsomol members frustrated at the slow pace of change in Soviet housing, wrote to Iunyi kommunist (Young Communist) to declare that while many of their peers still lived in the “false collectivism” of the hostel, they had broken away to create “not a hostel, but a commune.”59 The Rubber (Kauchuk) commune, named after the factory where 56

 L. Nizhegorodets, “O letnikh koloniiakh,” Iunyi kommunist, no. 3–4 (April 1921): 12.

57

 A. Mar, “Zelenye pobegi,” Smena, no. 19 (October 1929): 2–3.

58 59

 Ibid.

 Levgur, “Komsomol´skaia kommuna ‘Kauchuk,’” 26–27.

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its ten members found employment, proclaimed that they did not merely live in close proximity, but rather had built a “cell” to press for change.60 It was their belief that the Komsomol leadership was not doing enough to promote collectivism and domestic reform. As well as sharing their clothes, footwear, linen, and general accounts, the Rubber commune implemented a daily sched­ ule to ensure that all members conducted their fair share of household duties, while also allocating set times for working, studying, eating, and sleeping.61 On the one hand, the collective practices undertaken by the urban com­ munes represented an overt display of their political conviction. As with their decision to embrace the name kommuna, the language of the urban commu­ nards reveals a degree of revolutionary astuteness. Adopting the phrases “cell” and “collective” when describing their activities, for instance, the Rub­ ber commune tapped into a revolutionary lexicon associated with the small revolutionary groups and spontaneous worker alliances that emerged in the wake of the 1905 Revolution.62 They were showing their place within the zeitgeist of early Soviet Russia. Correspondingly, a student activist and local Komsomol representative at the Herzen University, Balezin, recalled how he first encountered spontaneous collective initiative in the form of the “Red Student Artel´.” This was an association of students who lived in cohabitation, worked at the port to support their studies, and shared their resources equally. In this environment the term artel´ (labor association) was a symbol of political consciousness, working-class affiliation, and revolutionary intent.63 Within revolutionary circles, the worker arteli and labor associations of late tsarist Russia had long been held up as higher forms of comradely organization and as the precursors of working-class authority.64 The activists who formed the first urban communes displayed a keen awareness of these developments, employing the labels “cell,” “artel´,” and “collective,” alongside “commune,” as a sign of their revolutionary credentials.65 60

 Ibid.

61

 Ibid.

62

 Ibid.

63

 MRGPU im. Herzen d. B-5, ll. 20–16.

64

 Cf. Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study in Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 76; Mark D. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 64–65, 102–06; Steve A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1–55. 65

 See also “Gorodskie kommuny,” Kommunar, 27 December 1918, 3; K. I. Kochergii, “Bor´ba za reformu universiteta,” in Na shturm nauk: Vospominaniia byvshikh studentov

The Making of the Soviet Urban Communes

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But it would be a mistake to think that the internal structures and the revolutionary display of the communes prevented the application of practical contingencies in the wider sphere of their activities. Indeed, the records of leading Bolshevik and wife to Lenin Nadezhda Krupskaia reveal a constructive affinity between early factory-based commune forms and the memory of the arteli. Amassing information on these groups, Krupskaia noted that by 1921 a number of “labor-youth-communes” (kommuny trudovoi molodezhi) were engaged in cohabitant living, the pooling of resources, and collective working practices akin to the “self-contracting” of the artel´.66 Before the advent of the shock-work movement, socialist competition, or the “production” (proizvodstvennye) communes that emerged in the late 1920s, some activist communards saw the artel´ as the precursor of new working habits. By channeling these units they thought they could transform the operational and working culture of the Soviet factory. What is more, their actions did not go unnoticed. The AMO plant, for instance, discussed helping activist workers form artel´-like commune units as a means of overcoming the “bureaucracy, self-seeking, slovenliness, and dishonesty” embedded in the Russian workplace.67 The party cell attached to this plant also thought that this would help foster good relations among workers.68 Writing later, in 1930, Krupskaia emphasized the connection between the artel´ and the urban communes further still, going so far as to place these groups in a teleological narrative incorporating the Russian arteli, the European guilds, and the cooperative movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries.69 Within this idealistic reading, however, she also examined the practical implications of building on artel´ traditions. Krupskaia did not assess the urban communards as utopian anomalies, but as worker activists concerned with the development of socialist duty in the workplace and society.70 In search of both comradely relations and efficiency gains, she noted, many communards tried to extend their experimentation with collective methods to group work fakul’teta obshchestvennykh nauk Leningradskogo universiteta, ed. V. V. Mavrodina (Lenin­ grad: Izdatel´stvo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1971), 16–23. 66

 GARF f. A.2313 (Krupskaia’s notes from her time with the Political Education Com­ mittee of the RSFSR), op. 1, d. 57, l. 138. 67

 Tsentral´nyi arkhiv goroda Moskvy (TsAGM) f. 415 (AMO factory cell discussions), op. 16, d. 590, ll. 51–55. First cited in Simon Pirani, The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920–24 (London: Routledge, 2008), 53. 68

 TsAGM f. 415, op. 16, d. 590, ll. 51–55.

69

 N. K. Krupskaia, O bytovykh voprosakh: Sbornik statei (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo, 1930), 30–36.

70

 Ibid.

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and self-training, often articulated with references to artel’ habits. By the late 1920s, as the Soviets began to mobilize for industrial expansion, such practices became the cornerstone of a growing commune phenomenon. As Krupskaia explained with hindsight, those that viewed the first postrevolutionary com­ munes as “exceptions” would, ten years later, witness the formation of a “common movement” (obshchee dvizhenie).71 Between the centralized policy, local improvisation, and general upheaval of the First Five-Year Plan (1928– 32), the urban communards went on to help forge a new working culture on the factory shop-floor.72 Expanding on their early forays into industry, con­ temporary activists explained that the communes increasingly demanded that their members form a “public face” (obshchestvennoe litso) and act as “social activists” (obshchestvenniki).73 In turn, the domestic display of the urban communards was not limited to private or insular aspirations. As well as offering activists the opportunity to openly exhibit their revolutionary convictions, the collective space of the urban commune became inextricably linked to wider revolutionary concerns. Chief among these were calls for a cultural revolution, with which the urban communes became increasingly embroiled. This was a conscious and explicit discourse, present in the first flowerings of revolution. It sought the formation of a “new person with … new feelings and moods.”74 Marked not just by learning and the arts, but by the cultivation of socialist values, goals, and practices, “cultural revolution” encompassed a wide range of activities.75 The most determined urban communards avidly recorded their attempts to im­ plement “cultural revolution” through new collective activities and living ar­ rangements. In 1919, one anonymous activist wrote to the Soviet youth press to promote his commune’s practice of collective reading and self-betterment activities, which included trips to the theater and cinema.76 It was believed that these efforts would improve the cultural level and revolutionary consciousness of each member; the domestic rules and regulations of the commune, it was 71

 Ibid., 35.

72

 Ibid.; Kurt S. Schultz, “Building the ‘Soviet Detroit’: The Construction of the Nizhnii-Novgorod Automobile Factory, 1927–1932,” Slavic Review 49, 2 (Summer 1990): 200–12.

73

 Iu. Verber, “Krasnovorotskaia,” Krasnoe studenchestvo, no. 6 (1929): 20–21.

74

 V. Polianskii, “Pod znamia Proletkul´ta,” Proletarskaia kul´tura, no. 3 (August 1918): 35–36; David-Fox, “What Is Cultural Revolution?” 189.

75

 For discussion on this topic, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Revolution Revisited,” Russian Review 58, 2 (April 1999): 202–09; and Michael David-Fox, “Mentalité or Cultural System: A Reply to Sheila Fitzpatrick,” Russian Review 58, 2 (April 1999): 210–11.

76

 [Aktivnyi rabotnik], “Kommuny molodezhi,” 10–11.

The Making of the Soviet Urban Communes

449

noted, were designed to foster self-assessment and socialist responsibility.77 A number of urban communes, at this time and later, stressed the importance of reading and taking out subscriptions to the major newspapers and journals of the day. A cyclical relationship eventually developed whereby activists embraced the ideas and language presented within the press, and the press eagerly reported on the progress of cultural revolution in the domestic spaces of communes.78 In 1919, therefore, Dunaevskii was already referring to the urban communes, somewhat grandly, as “a socialist revolution in life” itself.79 These themes were particularly prevalent among the student-based communes. Formed by those previously denied access to higher education, as some of these youths recounted, dormitory-based communes rallied in opposition to the “hangovers” of imperial higher education.80 In 1919, one student from the Third Pedagogical Institute was shocked to discover that Soviet universities did not yet constitute communist entities; Bolshevik resources had not come to bear and they were still staffed by non-communists.81 Activists frequently noted a lack of communist infiltration, individualistic behavior, and limited collective facilities.82 While there was no uniform policy driving these voluntary formations, records suggest that student communes constantly debated the material and cultural life of their institutes.83 As Balezin recorded, the communes picked up where the Party and Komsomol cells left off, agitating against the crumbling infrastructure and slovenly conditions of student life.84 He would himself turn to the communes to overcome what he saw as educational and cultural apathy among some sections of the Petrograd Komsomol.85 At the start of the 20th century, the debating circle (kruzhok) formed a node of student radicalism within Russia’s higher education 77

 Ibid.

78

 See Levgur, “Komsomol´skaia kommuna ‘Kauchuk,’” 26–27; Kollektiv, “Stroiut novyi byt,” 45; “V nastuplenie!,” Smena, no. 19 (October 1929): 1. 79

  Vl. Dunaevskii, “Kommuny molodezhi,” Iunyi kommunist, no. 16 (25 November (1919): 5–6.

80

 Izmozik and Lebina, Peterburg sovetskii, 142–52; Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn´ sovet­ skogo goroda, chap. 2. 81

 M. A. Rom, “V bor´be za sovetizatsiiu universiteta,” in Na shturm nauki, 7–16.

82

 Ibsen-Shtrait, “Studencheskie kommuny,” Krasnyi student, no. 8–9 (September 1924): 44–45; Pozdenko, “O kommunakh II MGU,” Krasnoe studenchestvo, no. 11 (December 1926): 24–26.

83

 MRGPU im. Herzen, d. B-5, ll. 20–16.

84

 Ibid.

85

 Ibid.

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system.86 Alongside the regional student network (zemliachestvo), and student assembly (skhodka), some radicals used the kruzhki to co-organize mutual aid programs, aspiring to shape civic values in line with populist revolutionary visions.87 After 1917, however, it was the commune and communards that tried to act as the brokers of institutional and cultural change. Starting in single dormitory rooms with a few like-minded individuals, sometimes expanding across whole floors, the commune structure offered young enthusiasts the opportunity to present themselves as exemplary revo­ lutionaries to their peers and institute authorities. Around the obligatory common fund, into which members placed their stipends and earnings, student groups added routines of collective dining, amassed shared libraries, and promoted cleanly living, conducive to study.88 These practical contingen­ cies were promoted by budding communards as a first step toward the im­ provement of material conditions and dormitory life more generally.89 As well as leading the domestic collectivist movement, these communes used their shared funds to undertake joint activities, including political and cul­ tural campaigning. They also promoted the idea of social or civic work (obshchestvennaia rabota), which included aiding fellow students and assisting local Komsomol cells.90 As stated in the journals and newspapers to which many communes subscribed, involvement in wider social activities and the promotion of revolutionary values became a crucial aspect of commune and university life.91 In sum, the activists of the urban communes not only pressed the “housing question,” extending commune principles indoors, they also sought to overcome the ideological and cultural shortfalls of Soviet institutes. 86

 Allan K. Wildman, “The Russian Intelligentsia of the 1890s,” American Slavic and East European Review 19, 2 (April 1960): 157–79, here 160. 87

 Susan K. Morrissey, Heralds of Revolution: Russian Students and the Mythologies of Radicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 24–25. Also see S. P. Mel´gunov, Iz istorii studencheskikh obshchestv v russkikh universitetakh (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo zhurnala “Pravda,” 1904). On the Chaikovskii circle of the early 1870s, see Daniel R. Brower, Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 202–05; S. L. Chudnovskii, “Iz dal´nikh let (Otryvki iz vospominanii),” Byloe, no. 9–10 (1907); P. S. Gusiatnikov, Revoliutsionnoe studencheskoe dvizhenie v Rossii, 1899–1907 (Moscow: Mysl´, 1971).

88

 “Oskolok novogo byta (Kommuna vodnikov Politekhnicheskogo Instituta im. Kalinina),” Krasnyi student, no. 2 (February 1925): 35.

89  Chlen kommuny, “Kommuna studentov-vodnikov,” Krasnyi student, no. 4–5 (May 1924): 44–45. 90 91

 Ibid.

 E. Petrov, “Akademizm i obshchestvennost´,” Krasnyi student, no. 6 (1925): 12.

The Making of the Soviet Urban Communes

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Ripples within Revolution The disciplined lifestyle exhibited by the urban communes, proudly regaled in letters sent to the youth press, shows how the October Revolution both framed and fired the imagination of activists, encouraging a sense of participation and self-initiative.92 At this time, many young revolutionary enthusiasts wrote to Soviet journals asking what it meant to be a communist and how they should conduct themselves. Replying to some of these queries in 1922, Aleksandra M. Kollontai said that communists had to reject “bourgeois mo­ rality” and submit every aspect of their lives to “a collective regime.”93 When challenged to provide a more detailed answer, Kollontai insisted that moral­ ity was “an instrument in class domination and class struggle.” As such, “a person can be taught to think like a communist,” if he or she lived by a certain “code of ethics.” It was a “categorical imperative” of communism, she con­ tinued, that each individual advance the lessons, experiences, and feelings of the “proletarian life.”94 Extending the ideas of Marxism into everyday life, collectivism was presented as an antithesis to the self-interested, individualist societies of both the capitalist world and the Russian past. Asking the same question as many of their peers: “What did it mean to be communist?” the communes and communards thought the answer was ripe for picking. Many had already formed their own collective contracts, vowing to adhere to new socialist values and ideas. Their compact nature and direct action, claimed one student commune, offered “the best means to influence everyday life.”95 The urban communes offered young activists the means of discussing revolution, displaying their political convictions, and participating in the process of renovation.96 These groups were formed around the imaginative appropriation and reappropriation of key revolutionary themes and discourses, including the much-lauded 1871 Paris Commune—its association with workers’ control, direct democracy, social reformation, and collective action—and the 92

 Cf. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination; Fredrick C. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 126–48.

93

 A. M. Kollontai, “Pis´ma k trudiashcheisia molodezhi: Kakim dolzhen byt´ kommu­ nist?” Molodaia gvardiia, no. 1–2 (April–May 1922): 1–10.

94

 A. M. Kollontai, “Pis´ma k trudiashcheisia molodezhi: Moral´, kak orudie klassovogo gospodstva i klassovoi bor´by,” Molodaia gvardiia, no. 6–7 (October–November 1922): 8–16.

95

 Chlen kommuny, “Kommuna studentov-vodnikov,” no. 4–5 (1924): 44–45.

96

 “Rabochaia zhizn´,” Pravda, 11 April 1919, 4; “Pervaia rabochaia domovaia kom­ muna,” Pravda, 12 August 1919, 2.

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revolutionary ideals envisioned within the artel’, the cell, other prerevolutionary comradely forms, and Russia’s own experience of collectivism. As such, the constructs of the urban commune emerged as an unmandated development, providing the rank and file with a greater platform to engage with revolution. Inside higher education, a number of student communes partook in the political campaigns of the Komsomol, as well as trying to instill communist ideals within the dormitory. Similarly, inside Soviet factories, a number of youth communes tried to change working practices, while promoting new domestic and social habits in general. Building on the immediate ambition of these early revolutionary years, the communes and communards looked to turn theory into practice, using their collective structures as a means of transforming the surrounding environment. In this way, the communes sent ripples through the established revolutionary canon and the apparatus of state. Adopting and adapting key Soviet ideals, their actions soon became embroiled within broader developments, including the pursuit of “cultural revolution”: the battle to replace bourgeois life with a new collective community, complete with new values and mores. From 1919, leading youth journals, such as Iunyi kommunist, were praising the urban communards for their commitment to revolutionary undertakings; comparing them to state facilities, such as public canteens, nurseries, and laundries—all designed to promote a new collective polity.97 In the coming years, as the urban commune became an established part of the revolutionary landscape, members continued to write to the Soviet press with tales of their revolutionary exploits. The Rubber commune explained how the common fund and shared resources at the heart of their alliance not only provided them with clothing, footwear, linen, and food: it taught them the financial and personal discipline necessary to stand as an example of communism.98 The rules of cohabitation, monitored by a rotating system of duty officers, it was noted, enforced a strict regime of hygiene management, education, and political campaigning. These were the markers of modern, socialist enlightenment. The Rubber commune insisted that their methods should be “extended to all youths” and those living in the numerous hostels and dormitories of the new Soviet state.99 Likewise, a 12-person commune in Tomsk wrote to explain how they had created a scientific means of organizing their daily routine.100 Ensuring that all members met their social responsibilities, which included helping 97

 [Aktivnyi rabotnik], “Kommuny molodezhi,” 10; Dunaevskii, “Kommuny molo­ dezhi,” 5–6.

98

 Levgur, “Komsomol´skaia kommuna ‘Kauchuk,’” 26–27.

99

 Ibid.

100

 Kollektiv, “Stroiut novyi byt,” 45.

The Making of the Soviet Urban Communes

453

to promote local literacy campaigns, the commune established a timetable that regulated their activities from eight in the morning until midnight.101 As the activists of the urban communes were well aware, the revolution was moving beyond armed insurrections and political upheaval. Now the challenge was to create a new social and cultural stock. The rational and aesthetic reordering of everyday life became an ever more important com­ ponent of the revolution. Far from being curtailed by the onset of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and its capitalist elements in 1921, the promise of socialist modernity rallied against new obstacles. Between 1921 and 1922 ac­ tivists and sections of the Soviet press confirmed their embrace with “cultural revolution.” The revolutionary reprieve of NEP was met with hostility from activists, including the communards, and sections of the Komsomol.102 In opposition to the cultural surplus of this policy, calls for the complete reno­ vation of everyday life continued to be heard, encouraging Lev Trotskii to declare that revolution could not proceed “by politics alone”; it also required a “cultural struggle” in work, life, and society.103 Starting in the immediate aftermath of October, the activists of the urban commune can be seen to appropriate, ground, and augment revolution, helping to lay the way for some of the political, social, and cultural developments of the 1920s. Krupskaia declared that the communards acted as “agitators” for the “socialization of life,” attempting to “forge new social bonds” between comrades, as well as “new relations between man and woman.”104 As Anne E. Gorsuch noted in her study of Soviet youth, some student communes at Moscow State University went as far as banning sexual relations and marriage until a new collective bond was established.105 In these cases, it was believed that the commune would replace the family, acculturate the next generation, and, with hints of Nietzsche’s promethean superman, develop a new subject.106 More importantly, these actions were noted by local-level representatives and 101

 Ibid.

102

 Cf. Peter Gooderham, “The Komsomol and Worker Youth: The Inculcation of ‘Communist Values’ in Leningrad During NEP,” Soviet Studies 34, 4 (October 1982): 506–28.

103

 L. D. Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life and Other Writings on Culture & Science (New York: Monad Press, 1973), 15–24. Originally published in Pravda, 10 July 1923. 104

 Krupskaia, O bytovykh voprosakh, 30–36.

105

 Anne E. Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 55. 106

 Cf. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination, especially chap. 3; Bernice G. Rosenthal, ed., Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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the Soviet press. Indeed, the press and subsequent Soviet studies increasingly associated the urban communes with the much-extolled “new way of life” (novyi byt) being developed under communism. The communes even acquired the generic prefix bytovaia, associated with daily routine, social practice, do­ mestic life, and cultural values.107 The bytovaia commune, it was later reported, “swept out the old” and created the ideal socialist environment in which to raise the New Soviet Person (Novyi sovetskii chelovek).108 As self-conscious advocates of revolutionary values and practices, the urban communards found themselves involved in a number of social and cultural struggles throughout the opening decade of the Soviet state. In their various forms, they initiated a corrective project that encompassed domesticity, the family, society, work, and culture. By the mid-1920s they commented on matters such as the moral panic building over cases of hooliganism and drunkenness among youths, while the late 1920s saw commune groups increasingly engaged in the pursuit of new industrial practices.109 Much like the first cohabitational communes that arose during the housing resettlements of 1917–21, these groups took the form of an interaction between the impulses of state and activist by operating in a space between the authorized and the autonomous, and occasionally surpassing the ideological objectives of official bodies. Some Komsomol members even decided to utilize the unofficial constructs of the commune to fulfill local and national revolutionary imperatives. But, in all cases, the concept of the urban commune, bolstered by press interest, stood in opposition to the shortcomings of the established revolutionary apparatus, highlighting the gap between promise and reality.

107  A. Naishtat, I. Ryvkin, and I. Sosnovik, Kommuny molodezhi (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1931); V. Ol´khov, Za zhivoe rukovodstvo sotssorevnovaniem (Moscow, 1930); Iu. Larin, Stroitel´stvo sotsializma i kollektivizatsiia byta (Moscow, 1930). 108

 “V nastuplenie!” 1.

109  “Kak vesti bor´bu s khuliganstvom,” Komsomol´skaia pravda, 30 September 1926, 3; “Vzorvem staryi byt,” Komsomol´skaia pravda, 13 September 1929, 3; Iu. Ber, Kommuna segodnia: Opyt proizvodstvennykh i bytovykh kommun molodezhi (Moscow: Molodaia gvar­ diia, 1930), 53–62.

Poltava in Revolution and Civil War: From the Diaries of Vladimir Korolenko and Aleksandr Nesvitskii Mark Conliffe

In the revolution and Civil War years anarchy spread more rapidly and fully in Ukraine than it did anywhere else in the Russian Empire. Events there created for most people a state of persistent uncertainty, fear, and anxiety, as competing powers sought to establish, defend, and regain authority in cities and the countryside. Until the establishment of Soviet rule in 1920 at least nine governments tried to secure their authority over the land, but none succeeded. The democracy of the Provisional Government, the moderate socialism of the Rada and its General Secretariat, left- and right-wing communism, the Cossack Hetmanate and the German occupation armies, the proto-fascist Directory, peasant anarchism, and the military rule of the White Armies all failed. With each year the country disintegrated further, until by 1919 it no longer represented one country but a constellation of isolated communities.1 Some of these powers ruled cities and provinces again and again, and changes of rule occurred quickly. Rule of Kyiv, for example, changed five times in 1919 alone. The large picture of Ukraine during this time—that is, the military maneuvers, political upheavals, and economic hardships—has been

I am indebted to The Lilly Project for the Theological, Spiritual, and Ethical Exploration of Vocation at Willamette University and The Center for Religion, Law, and Democracy at Willamette for the generous support in grants they provided, which made it possible for me to travel to Poltava to work in archives and meet with colleagues. I am grateful to Natal´ia Viktorovna Kuz´menko at the Poltavs´kii kraeznavchii muzei imeni Vasilia Krichevs´kogo (The Vasil Krichevs´kii Poltava Museum of Local Lore), who helped me with materials and questions on Poltava’s history, and to Adele Lindenmeyr at Villanova University and Bill Smaldone at Willamette, who read and commented on early drafts of this essay 1

 I owe much in this summary to Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism 1917–1923, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 148–49. Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 455–74.

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well documented.2 We know less about the impact of these events on indi­ vidual residents and their daily lives. It was a time, surely, when residents had little choice but to try to navigate the demands and dangers from these takeover efforts, doing what they could to maintain their health and security. But what did this attempt at navigation look like? How did such rapidly spreading administrative anarchy affect individual residents, and how did individual residents experience these events? These questions provide the framework for this study, which explores the revolution and Civil War diaries of two residents in the city of Poltava, Ukraine—Oleksandr Oleksandrovich Nesvits´kii (Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Nesvitskii, 1855–1942) and Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko (1853–1921).3 These diaries record two men’s efforts to give structure to the chaotic life in Poltava, and they speak to their ability to act with noteworthy independence, prudence, and constancy. They express the men’s subjective wrestling with events and the agency they assigned themselves. These diaries reveal that within this context of ongoing anarchy some individuals sought to create manageable, understandable, and morally acceptable lives for themselves and others. I treat the diaries as texts and investigate them in order both to reflect on the characters of these two men and to shed light on individual experiences and fates in Poltava at this time. On first glance, we might anticipate 2  For chronologies of events in Ukraine during this time, see S. A. Alekseev and N. N. Popov, eds., Revoliutsiia na Ukraine: Po memuaram belykh (Moscow–Leningrad: Gosu­ darstvennoe izdatel´stvo, 1930), 393–419; and Irena R. Makaryk and Virlana Tkacz, eds., Modernism in Kyiv: Jubilant Experimentation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 584–86. For discussions of this history, see Stephen Velychenko, State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine: A Comparative Study of Governments and Bureaucrats, 1917–1922 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 491–556; Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 4th ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 339–79; Serhy Yekelchyk, Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 67–87; Pipes, Formation, 114–50; Arthur E. Adams, Bolsheviks in the Ukraine: The Second Campaign (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963); John S. Reshetar, Jr., The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917–1920: A Study in Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952). 3  For Nesvitskii’s diary during this time, I draw on O. O. Nesvits´kii, Poltava u dni revoliutsii ta v period smuti 1917–1922, ed. A. O. Rotach (Poltava: Derzhavnii arkhiv poltavs´koi oblasti, 1995). He wrote his diary in Russian, and thus when I refer to him in the text of this paper, I will use the Russian transliteration of his name (Nesvitskii). For Korolenko’s diary, I refer to two volumes: V. Korolenko, Dnevnik. Pis´ma. 1917– 1921, ed. V. I. Losev (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel´, 2001); and P. I. Negretov and A. V. Khrabrovitskii, eds., V. G. Korolenko v gody revoliutsii i grazhdanskoi voiny 1917–1921: Biograficheskaia khronika (Benson, VT: Chalidze Publications, 1985).



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encountering the men’s similar understandings and experiences in these diaries. They were contemporaries, acquaintances, well known, and progressive. For Nesvitskii, this part of Ukraine was home for most of his life. Biographical information on him is scant, but it explains that he left the Poltava and Kremenchuk areas only for his university studies, when he attended the St. Petersburg Medical-Surgical Academy and the University of Kyiv.4 He was born in Kremenchuk, completed his secondary schooling in Poltava, and then left for St. Petersburg. In early 1879, in his fourth year, he was arrested at a student gathering and sent back to Kremenchuk in his parent’s charge and under police surveillance. In 1880 he was freed from surveillance, went back to St. Petersburg, and petitioned for readmission to the academy, but was denied. He completed his studies in Kyiv and returned to the Kremenchuk district in 1882, where he served as a zemstvo doctor, established and organized its zemstvo medical services, and recorded and published medical articles and public health statistics. He moved to Poltava in 1902 and took leadership roles in developing health services, organizing the city outpatient health care clinic, and working as the city doctor. Korolenko’s move to Poltava in 1900 was a return to Ukraine for him, al­ beit to a new region. Born in Zhytomyr, he had studied as a boy and youth there and in Rivne, before moving to St. Petersburg and then Moscow for postsecondary studies. He spent much of the years 1876–84 in various forms of exile, first for speaking out against school authorities, then for his involve­ ment in populist activities, and finally for refusing to swear allegiance to Alexander III. On returning from exile he settled in Nizhnii Novgorod, before moving to St. Petersburg in 1896. By the time he left the capital for Poltava in 1900, Korolenko’s stories about Siberia, his journalism (social and literary commentaries), his editorial work, and his humanitarian activism, most famously his work during the famine of 1891–92 and his public defense of Udmurt peasants in Viatka province falsely accused of making human sacri­ fices (1892–96), had earned him recognition throughout the Russian Empire. Although now distant from major centers, neither Korolenko nor his writing

4

 Kremenchuk city is located on the Dnieper River approximately 75 miles southwest of Poltava. For this short sketch I draw on three brief sources: the biographical en­ try on Nesvits´kii, Poltava, 3, which is reproduced from I. F. Pavlovskii, ed., Kratkii biograficheskii slovar´ uchenykh i pisatelei Poltavskoi gubernii s poloviny XVIII veka (Poltava: PUAK, 1912), 127; the notice of Nesvitskii’s death on Nesvits´kii, Poltava, 11, which is reproduced from Golos Poltavshchini, 3 May 1942; and the entry “Nesvitskii Aleksandr Aleksandrovich” in Deiateli revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v Rossii: Bio-bibliograficheskii slovar´. Ot predshestvennikov dekabristov do padeniia tsarizma, ed. Vl. Vilenskii-Sibiriakov, Feliks Kon, and A. A. Shilov et al. (Moscow: Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo politicheskikh katorzhan i ssyl´no-poselentsev, 1927–35), 1020–21.

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and activism had slowed down or lost significance. (See I. E. Repin’s 1912 portrait of Korolenko, figure 14 in the gallery of images following page 270.) By their ages, intellectual accomplishments, and involvement in society, these men belonged to the Russian intelligentsia and shared its commitment to critical thinking and civic involvement. In addition, they knew Poltava life well, and residents often turned to them for assistance and advice. Though there is much here that affirms the similarities that we would expect in their diaries, a parallel reading of them soon reveals that the men were different sorts of writers, each with his own understanding of the scope and types of detail that diary-writing demands. These differences in scope and detail hint also at differences in the men’s interaction with the events of revolution and civil war. Their diary-writing during these five years was remarkably unflagging, and thus it shows their impressive commitment to creating narratives of this time.5 These were demanding years for both men, their diaries suggest, and the regularity with which they wrote in them expresses the importance they placed on recording and reflecting on what they learned, what they experi­ enced, and what they did. There might have been specific reasons at this time in the Russian Empire for men of their upbringing and stature in society to keep diaries, but for the purposes of this paper I look at the diaries in four ways: (1) as expressions of uncertainty about the present situation and what was to come; (2) as records of material conditions that shaped existence in Pol­ tava; (3) as chronicles of individual residents in revolution and civil war; and (4) as articulations of their personal involvement in events.6 My analysis receives fuller meaning when we situate the men and their diary-writing. Poltava’s location between Khar´kiv and Kyiv, Ukraine’s two chief cities during the revolution and Civil War period, almost certainly 5

 The opening entry in Nesvits´kii, Poltava, is dated 12–14 August 1917. It is not clear from this publication or from other research whether diary-keeping was usual for Nesvitskii or prompted by the revolution and Civil War. Korolenko had kept a note­ book (zapisnaia knizhka) and diary at least since 1879 and 1881 respectively.

6

 For discussions of the diary form and how it can be read, see the special issue of Russian Review committed to the analysis of diaries and intimate archives (6, 4 [October 2004]), especially Irina Paperno, “What Can Be Done with Diaries?” 561–73; David L. Ransel, “The Diary of a Merchant: Insights into Eighteenth-Century Plebeian Life,” 594–608 (particularly 595–601); and Jochen Hellbeck, “The Diary between Literature and History: A Historian’s Critical Response,” 621–29. See also David Gillespie, “First Person Singular: The Literary Diary in Twentieth-Century Russia,” Slavonic and East European Review 77, 4 (October 1999): 620–45; Hellbeck, “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin Era Autobiographical Texts,” Russian Review 60, 3 (July 2001): 340–59; and Hellbeck Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).



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earned the city the competing authorities’ political attention and thus the related changes, dangers, and challenges to residents’ lives that Nesvitskii and Korolenko expressed. The city’s appeal to these authorities surely was enhanced by the fact that it was a self-sufficient and developing administrative center for Poltava province. By the beginning of 1916 its population was 61,458 (including 2,225 evacuees and mobilized soldiers),7 and many people could be employed there at a range of relatively large industrial works, repair shops, processing plants (particularly in agricultural raw materials), iron foundries, tobacco factories, garment shops, printing offices, mills, and small enterprises.8 Residents had ready access to news, essays, and works of literature from St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kyiv, Odessa, and other cities, and they could boast churches of different denominations, synagogues, health care facilities, schools, libraries, a museum, and a theater.9 Poltava possessed a relatively energetic political scene, having become home to a community of politically minded individuals and an active group of exiles in the late 19th and early 20th century. Indeed, at the turn of the 20th century these groups had strong appeal to the leaders of the rival factions of the Russian Social Democratic Party, Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) and the Mensheviks’ Iulii Martov (1873–1923), as these men discussed ways to forward their political goals and, among them, possible places from which to circulate what would become the political newspaper Iskra (Spark).10 Poltava’s residents also understood their own political opportunities, and they did not shy away from meetings, 7

 On 1916, see Statisticheskii spravochnik po poltavskoi gubernii na 1917 god (Poltava: Tipografiia t-vo pechatnogo dela, 1917), 4. The 1897 census lists Poltava’s population as 53,703, of which Ukrainians formed more than half (30,086), and Russians and Jews made up approximately one-fifth each (11,035 and 10,690 respectively). N. A. Troinitskii, ed., Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii, 1897. XXXIII: Poltavskaia guberniia (St. Petersburg: Tsentral´snoe statisticheskoe ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, 1904), 1: 100–03. 8

 Poltava: Istorichnii naris (Poltava: Poltavs´kii literator, 1999), 108, 109; S. O. Danishev, Velikii Zhovten’ na Poltavshchini (1917–berezen´ 1918 r.) (Khar´kiv: Prapor, 1969), 11. 9

 Poltava: Istorichnii naris, 122–23. On health care facilities, see M. Geidel´berg, Metodi­ cheskie materialy po teme: “Ulitsy staroi Poltavy” (Poltava: Znaniia, 1988), 13. 10

 Israel Getzler, Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967). See pp. 45–47 for the developments in Poltava and pp. 45–89 more generally for the Iskra years. On Martov and Poltava, see also Allan K. Wildman, “Lenin’s Battle with Kustarnichestvo: The Iskra Organization in Russia,” Slavic Review 23, 3 (September 1964): 481–82. According to early plans Iskra’s south­ ern office would be in Poltava, and the northern office would be in Vilna. See the introduction to Z. N. Tikhonov, V. N. Stepanov, and K. G. Liashenko, eds., Perepiska V. I. Lenina i redaktsii gazety “Iskry” s sotsial-demokraticheskimi organizatsiiami v Rossii 1900–1903 gg.: Sbornik dokumentov v trekh tomakh (Moscow: Mysl´, 1969–70), 1: 10–11.

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demonstrations, walkouts, and strident demands for better working conditions.11 Perhaps most memorably, Poltava province witnessed peasant uprisings against landlords in 1902, fueled by peasant land hunger and nation­alist aspirations.12 Finally, Poltava had other connections to political figures in the revolution and Civil War years, too. It was the birthplace of the Bolshevik and future commissar of enlightenment Anatolii V. Lunacharskii (1875–1933) and the Ukrainian Civil War leader Simon V. Petliura (1879–1926), both of whom in these years would return to the city and would receive mention in Nesvitskii’s and Korolenko’s diaries. We learn from Korolenko’s early 1917 diary entries that at the beginning of that year Poltava residents were finding out through political channels and word of mouth that sociopolitical tensions enhanced by World War I were reaching a peak in Petrograd. Korolenko notes on 26 February 1917 that “[a]s of the 23rd in Petrograd there are troubles [besporiadki]. They’re talking about it in the Duma, but there are no details in the newspapers. It’s obvious that it has to do with hunger; there are lines outside bakeries and complete disorder in the capital’s provisions.”13 Then, on 3 March 1917, he records that “[p]eople arriving from Petrograd and Khar´kov reported that on 1 March there was revolution [perevorot] in Petrograd.… For us in Poltava it’s quiet.”14 Less than a week later he writes that “events have been racing with such swiftness that there’s no time to discuss or even simply write them down.”15 Korolenko’s letters to family members at this time clarify what people in Poltava were learning about events in Petrograd—about the tsar, about the motivations be­ hind events in Petrograd, about the war, and about the revolution—and what changes were occurring in Poltava. In one letter he underscores that things are “going well: here the authority has already recognized the new government. Committees have been elected. The police voluntarily submitted to the city’s administration.… the mood everywhere is peaceful and joyful.”16 Although people seemed to welcome the news that the tsar had abdicated and the 11

­ O. A. Belotskaia, Iu. P. Lavrov, and V. H. Sarbei, Khronika revoliutsionnogo rabochego dvizheniia na Ukraine (1900–1917): Spravochnik (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1987). See the entry for the workers’ strike of 17–22 February 1905 for the additional conditions noted here (60).

12

 Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 (London: Pim­ lico, 1996), 77–79.

13

 Korolenko, Dnevnik, 13 (26 February 1917).

14

 Ibid., 13–14 (3 March 1917).

15

 Ibid., 15 (9 March 1917).

16

 To Praskov´ia Semenovna Ivanovskaia (sister of Korolenko’s wife), Negretov and Khrabrovitskii, V. G. Korolenko, 18 (6 March 1917).



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Provisional Government had taken over authority, residents of Poltava still were looking for some indication of what was coming next. Through the first nine months of 1917, politics and events in Poltava were relatively calm. The local Duma, the Central Rada, the Provisional Government, and the Soviet of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies all received some support there. As the year went on, however, social and material conditions in Poltava deteriorated. In August Nesvitskii records the arrival of reserve and regular forces that wandered through the markets, taking things without pay­ ing.17 In the fall, Korolenko and Nesvitskii write of strikes, robberies, shortages of firewood and coal, and a general mood of anarchy.18 Korolenko notes his receiving news of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd and Moscow in his entry of 13 November 1917, and a month later he describes Russia as “a worm, which has been cut up into pieces. Each part lives its own life.”19 Events in late October and November led to a wave of public anarchy in Poltava that would last through the next four years. Disorder, robbery, and drunkenness were common. Through December, though power most often seemed to be in the hands of the Soviet of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies, there were discussions between it and the representatives of the Central Rada. This situation changed on 6 January 1918, when Bolshevik forces occupied Poltava. Korolenko and Nesvitskii had been living in Poltava long enough to appreciate that changes occurring there during 1917 were extraordinary, par­ ticularly as the excitement of revolutionary victory in February and March gave way to anxiety and uncertainty about what this victory would bring. Their entries of that year make clear the men’s worries about the conditions of daily life in Poltava, and thus about the setting for transition to a “new” life. Whether life would settle down or gain some state of normalcy is a central theme in their diaries in the second half of 1917; moreover, it is a theme to which both men return throughout the revolution and Civil War years, and which therefore underscores their attention to residents’ constantly unstable and perilous existence. This lack of knowledge and uncertain leadership made life difficult for many in Poltava to navigate, but also, and more importantly, it caused people to resort to extreme behavior, on the one hand, and to accept such extreme life as usual, on the other, revealing perhaps an inevitable decline in the humane attitudes that previously had informed residents’ behavior and those routines.

17

 Nesvits´kii, Poltava, 16 (20 August 1917).

18

 Korolenko, Dnevnik, 29 (2 November 1917); Nesvits´kii, Poltava, 18–20 (19 Septem­ ber–26 October 1917). 19

 Korolenko, Dnevnik, 52 (15 December 1917).

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Already in late August 1917 Nesvitskii, in deadpan factual prose, refers to a breakdown in authority and civic behavior, when he writes about the murders and robbery of people he knew personally.20 His choice to record examples of residents’ taking matters into their own hands in the face of uncertain or weak local power and resorting to banditry and wanton aggression expressed his concern with this behavior. In mid-October, for example, he notes that the historical museum commemorating Peter the Great’s victory over the Swedes was broken into and robbed; in the middle of November he describes how thieves stormed clubs and a teahouse to search and rob the people who were there.21 The violence prompted some residents to take retaliatory action, as Nesvitskii records on 27 November 1917: Theft, robbery continue, they are robbing at night, in the evenings, and in the daytime. [Thieves] went right up in a cart to the shop of the merchant Al´tshuller, loaded the cart with goods, and hauled it away. [Then] they appeared at the gentry’s warehouse and demanded 28,000 rubles, which they received on the very same day. A crowd gathered at the judicial militia and demanded that the thieves, who were part of a group of twelve, be handed over. The crowd rushed in by force, dragged out one thief, and killed him. An armed detachment was called in. Gunshots could be heard; the thieves were moved to the Red barracks and from there to jail.22 Though an image of justice appears in these brief paragraphs—the thieves are in jail—the thieves are the ones who get what they demand—the money—and it is the crowd demanding justice that acts brutally. It is obvious that the effect of such thieving is breaking down usual behaviors, yet Nesvitskii allows him­ self no commentary or personal reaction. On their own these facts lay bare the present state in society, making clear the effort of residents to set and carry out their own punishment of unstoppable robbery. As these incidents suggest, the impact of this uncertainty in these first years of the revolution and Civil War is as noteworthy as the uncertainty itself. Not only is this uncertain exis­ tence leading to thievery and thus putting people on edge, there also is a growing sense that some residents are losing or giving up control of daily habits, routines, security, and usual understandings of justice. In the face of such behavior, Nesvitskii’s seemingly dispassionate tone stands out.

20

 Nesvits´kii, Poltava, 16–17 (27 August 1917).

21

 Nesvits´kii, Poltava, 19 (14 October 1917), 23 (18 November 1917).

22

 Ibid., 24 (27 November 1917).



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Nesvitskii and Korolenko are sensitive to the changes occurring around them, and in late 1917 they begin to comment more specifically on the growing presence of the Central Rada, the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, and the Bolsheviks in residents’ lives in the streets, in curfews, and in searches of their homes.23 The men’s diaries give detail, shape, and cause to an existence that seems fragile and chaotic to many people. For Korolenko, feelings of uncertainty often result not from the type of change or the force with which change was effected, but rather from the speed with which seemingly vital events occurred. On 30 January 1918 he begins his diary for the day with that admission: Events supersede each other so quickly that you can’t note even the most important one. Today there is celebration and a parade—the Bol­ sheviks are celebrating victory: Kyiv is destroyed, bloodied, in many places turned into ruins, and is under the power of the soviets… Such are the fruits of replacing an external war with an internal one. Indeed, it’s a fatal illness that’s been driven into the organism.24 Korolenko’s juxtaposition of celebration and parade in one clause with destruc­ tion and bloodshed in the next exposes the tradeoff of this “victory,” and his comments that follow it disclose his concern for the power battles—and their collateral destruction—that have begun in earnest. It is plain from these last sentences that he opposes the Bolsheviks’ actions, and that he opposes them because of the destruction and human tragedy that they have caused in Kyiv. On the same day, Nesvitskii also documents the Bolshevik seizure of power in Kyiv, recording the events more briefly and making no comment on them: “A public expression of power in the Bolsheviks’ taking Kyiv. They’re saying that Kyiv suffered from the bombing.”25 Does he lack the information that Korolenko has? More and more, as we consider the diaries, we see that the men adopt different styles when recording events. In these months Korolenko is struck by the impact that competing rule, random gunfire, violence, and rapid changes are having on residents’ sense of what is usual. In March 1918, when Bolshevik forces were retreating from Poltava and German forces were arriving, he observes how the mix of constant insecurity and danger was redefining everyday life in Poltava. In a letter he

23

 See Nesvitskii’s entries from 13 December to 31 December 1917 (Poltava, 26–33) and Korolenko’s from 6 December to 31 December 1917 (Dnevnik, 49–60).

24

 Korolenko, Dnevnik, 81–82 (30 January 1918).

25

 Nesvits´kii, Poltava, 37 (30 January 1918).

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wrote over 17–21 March 1918, he believes that the cumulative negative effect of such living would be physical, emotional, and moral: The Bolsheviks are “packing up” but still acting like despots and carrying out savage requisitions. The Ukrainians will arrive—they will begin, probably, to act despotically in another way. And then, probably, all kinds of despotic acts “of restoration” will begin. And still there will be darkness all around. Nowhere can we see simple, clear, straightforward ideas about the principle of freedom… Well, that’s all clear, and it’s no good to repeat it. Now we wait for the darkest days: when one group will begin to leave and the other will arrive. However, all of this has become usual. Our nerves have become dull.26 Korolenko is frustrated and worried. His lament over the decline of political rhetoric and his dread of numbed nerves express concretely his social con­ cerns and beliefs. He fears greatly at this time people’s indifference to decent, morally acceptable responsibilities. Nesvitskii’s entries at this same time confirm Korolenko’s concerns. Nesvitskii writes on 14 March 1918 that Bolshe­ vik soldiers are robbing residents at will, the mood of residents is uneasy, schools are closed, and those breaking curfew are being handed over to revolu­ tionary courts.27 Days later, as he reflects on skirmishes between Bolshevik and German forces, Nesvitskii brings facts together to offer a mixture of po­ tential danger and business as usual in Poltava, highlighting unwittingly that dulling of residents’ nerves that worried Korolenko: The city is being bombed. Every now and then gunshots and the rattle, the “ta-ta-ka,” of machine guns can be heard. Bullets flying into the city knock on the iron roofs like hailstones. But, despite this, many people are walking the streets, and one doesn’t hear that anyone’s been killed or wounded. Adults are out walking, children are running. On the cliff behind the cathedral, where there’s a pavilion, above the precipices stand crowds of onlookers, who are watching the shooting coming from the train station, that’s being made by the guns of the city, and one doesn’t notice panic anywhere.28

26

 To an unidentified addressee in Petrograd, Negretov and Khrabrovitskii, V. G. Korolenko, 93 (17–21 March 1918). 27

 Nesvits´kii, Poltava, 44 (14 March 1918).

28

 Nesvits´kii, Poltava, 46 (17 March 1919). His account recalls Tolstoy’s description of Sevastopol nearly 70 years earlier.



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There seems to be quiet surprise in Nesvitskii’s voice as he records these facts. There is nothing cavalier in such residents’ behavior, his entry suggests; rather, residents in Poltava have become so used to violence that gunfire and skirmishes have become an expected part of life. For Korolenko these are manifest reasons to worry about what people are becoming. This numbing of nerves also appeared in more harmful and inexcusable behavior, according to Korolenko’s thinking, in attacks directed at Jews and the tormenting of prisoners in Poltava. The degeneration of public behavior prompted him to publish a short article titled “Sin and Shame” (“Grekh i styd”), condemning such acts and calling upon readers to return to moral behavior: the “struggle of the people must be different from an animal fight,” he proclaims.29 Indeed, in these months the men’s steady mention of gunfire, robberies, and chaos in Poltava becomes usual, such that we no longer are surprised by it. The striking contrast Korolenko draws between a city “at the mercy of open robbery,” with “cross-fire on the streets,” and the “quiet” or “calm” to be found there on the same day emphasizes how possible yet unpredictable these surges in behavior might be.30 In their diaries neither man attributes the quiet or calm to the efforts of any particular governmental authority. The challenges and anxieties that people faced in getting even minimal material goods, in maintaining their health, and in protecting themselves and those close to them are central topics in the diaries. Nesvitskii and Koro­ lenko took pains to record in factual detail changes in prices, the availability of supplies, and challenges and tragedies of health and security. They docu­ ment how prices were going up more quickly than wages, supplies were going down, and such everyday items as flour, kerosene, and tea at times were una­ vailable. By mid-1918 speculation was rampant.31 By 1920 and 1921 prices had increased many thousand-fold over what they had been in 1917. Subsistence was impossible for most people, and some tried to make a few rubles selling valuables. Nesvitskii offers the “sad picture” of educated (intelligentnye) women peddling their personal belongings at the second-hand market.32 Oth­ ers turned to hold-ups and break-ins. Rising costs and decreasing supplies of firewood, soap, kerosene, vegetables, and water affected people’s health significantly, and refugees arriving in the city and province in poor health created moral and concrete challenges for health care providers, facilities, 29  Svobodnaia Mysl´, 2 April 1918; T. M. Makagonova and I. T. Piattoeva, eds., Neizdan­ nyi V. G. Korolenko: Publitsistika 1914–1916, 1917–1918, 1919–1921 (Moscow: Pashkov dom, 2011–13), 2: 352–58. 30

 Korolenko, Dnevnik, 92 (30 January 1918).

31

 Nesvits´kii, Poltava, 57 (10 June 1918).

32

 Ibid., 121 (19 August 1919).

466 Mark Conliffe

and residents, as well as for other aspects of the local infrastructure and supply systems.33 On 7 December 1918 Korolenko notes the trip he took that day with a member of the city government to the outskirts of Poltava, where refugees were living in a community dubbed “Infectious Town” (Zaraznyi gorodok).34 People in general became weaker and dirtier, and the city less hygienic and less able to provide effective health care for its inhabitants. To add to this state of emergency, residents were suffering from sickness. In late September 1918 there was a large outbreak of influenza, and 1919 began with a frightening outbreak of typhus. In descriptions of such outbreaks and the attempts to combat them, Nesvitskii hits a descriptive and analytical stride in his writing that rarely appears elsewhere in his diary. His access to medical statistics gives these narratives painful effect and rich historical value as they expose the results of outbreaks of epidemic disease. We learn of the extra­ ordinarily large increase in cases of typhus in 1918 (482, as compared to 55 in 1917, 55 in 1916, and 80 in 1915), while by 4 February 1919, according to his diary, there had been 359 reported cases since the beginning of the year.35 For the month of April 1919 there were 10,415 acknowledged cases of spotted ty­ phus in Poltava province.36 As he confides in his diary on 30 December 1919, Nesvitskii was working from morning until mid-afternoon in surgery and was on house calls from then until late evening, making 15 to 17 visits each day and having to decline still more.37 People are living in conditions that cannot promote recovery, he observes on 24 February 1920, and one senses the informed despair in his voice: There are terrible cold spells. It’s brutally cold weather. They’re selling firewood for thirty rubles a pud. To economize residents fix up for themselves little iron stoves; they warm their rooms with them and cook on them. There’s still typhus; over February 805 were registered with spotted typhus and 4,920 with recurring typhus. In all 1,462 became infected!!38

33

 Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia During World War I (Bloom­ ington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 21, 58. Nesvitskii, Poltava, 67 (27 October 1918). 34

 Negretov and Khrabrovitskii, V. G. Korolenko, 144 (7 December 1918).

35

 Nesvits´kii, Poltava, 89 (4 February 1919).

36

 Ibid., 105 (16 May 1919).

37

 Ibid., 150 (30 December 1919).

38

 Ibid., 157. A pud is 36 lbs. or 16.38 kg.



Poltava in Revolution and Civil War

467

The magnitude of the health crisis dwarfs the “little iron stoves” that appear as the most noteworthy protector against the “brutally cold weather.” Yet Nesvitskii seems to hold back from stating that the little stoves do not have a chance against sickness. In the earliest diary entry in which he mentions typhus (12 December 1918), Korolenko anticipates Nesvitskii’s observations, connecting the disease to terrible living conditions.39 We learn also about out­ breaks of cholera near the end of the Civil War. Nesvitskii notes two cases on 19 April 1920, but later he includes statistics showing that this rate picked up frighteningly over the next 15 months.40 He records that over the 25-day pe­ riod from 17 June to 10 July 1921 60 people contracted cholera and 27 died from it.41 The famine and epidemics, products of the cumulative disruptions from the civil war that raged in and around Poltava, took a great toll. On 7 January 1920 Nesvitskii describes a terrible impression that stays with him: sledgeloads of bodies, piled high and covered with a tarp, being steered through the city to the cemetery, where the bodies are put into mass graves.42 Korolenko’s and Nesvitskii’s concern for the high mortality produced by famine and drought in 1920 comes through in their diaries clearly.43 On 31 May 1920, after many months of famine, Korolenko records with despondency that “the famine of 1891–1892 was a joke in comparison with the famine that has seized all of Russia.… Many people won’t survive this winter. In addition to the famine, the cold will be our undoing.”44 And in early 1922, Nesvitskii records the image of rail cars carrying some 2,000 frozen corpses of famine victims, which had been collected along the rail lines to Poltava. His son, who worked at the railway station, struggled a long time to free himself from this horrible sight.45 These detailed records inform our sense of the catastrophic state of every­ day life in Poltava. The men’s similar choices in what to record speak to the priority that they place on the dramatic changes in public well-being over po­ litical events. Writing with little emotional or moral commentary, both diarists

39

 Negretov and Khrabrovitskii, V. G. Korolenko, 144–45 (12 December 1918).

40

 Nesvits´kii, Poltava, 159 (19 April 1920).

41

 Ibid., 208 (10 July 1921).

42

 Ibid., 151 (7 January 1920).

43

 In November 1918 Korolenko also wrote publicly about children who were dying from hunger throughout the empire (“Na pomoshch´ russkim detiam,” Kievskaia Mysl´, 5 November 1918. See Makagonova and Piattoeva, Neizdannyi V. G. Korolenko, 2: 409–13. 44 45

 Negretov and Khrabrovitskii, V. G. Korolenko, 243–44 (31 May 1920).

 Nesvits´kii, Poltava, 217–18 (13 January 1922).

468 Mark Conliffe

choose to let such facts tell most of the story about the absence of order and increasing brutality of life in Poltava. In their descriptions of others and of their own actions both Nesvitskii and Korolenko express a desire to give human face and feeling to the everyday life, sacrifices, battles, and achievements created by the revolution and Civil War. Central to the men’s chronicling are their efforts to provide identity and agency to individuals who were affected by or played a role in the events of these years. Records of residents as victims of famine, illness, robberies, murders, arrests, and executions, as well as of residents as robbers and, perhaps, murderers themselves appear throughout the men’s descriptions and anecdotes. When Nesvitskii and Korolenko refer to individuals by name in these diaries, most often they do so for one of the following reasons: to refer to someone whom other residents of Poltava would know and thus who matters to a local history of Poltava, to name someone from outside Poltava who warrants an entry for his/her role in the events (positive or negative), to give a diary record to victims of executions, or to include a family member in their narratives. Korolenko’s entries are more descriptive and, at times, emotional. He often identifies an individual and then analyzes his psychology or highlights the actions that the individual carried out or that affected him. Among the many hundreds of individuals who make it into these diaries, we read of the deaths of Mariia V. Rakhubovskaia, Poltava resident and niece of the writer N. V. Gogol´, and Nikolai V. Bykov, Gogol´’s nephew.46 We learn of the arrival in Poltava of the brutal Bolshevik officer M. A. Murav´ev, a “coarse figure” (grubaia figura), in Korolenko’s words,47 and of the hundreds of people executed by the city Cheka, whose names, charges, and personal information the men transcribe into their diaries from newspapers and lists posted throughout the city.48 The diaries also record the fates of revolutionary political leaders such as K. I. Liakhovich, Korolenko’s son-in-law, a social democrat and member of the Poltava Duma, who died in a Poltava jail on 16 April 1921 from typhus that he contracted there.49 At times his relationship to residents gives Nesvitskii cause to elaborate on them or on why he has recorded them, but in these moments his entries are 46

 Nesvits´kii, Poltava, 15 (22 August 1917), and 81 (1 January 1919).

47

 Korolenko, Dnevnik, 74–75 (7 January 1918).

48

 For example, see Nesvits´kii, Poltava, 172–73 (1 July 1920); and Korolenko, Dnevnik, 303–07 (14 June 1920). The diaries suggest that the largest number of executions on one night was 85, which occurred on 7 October 1921 (Nesvits´kii, Poltava, 213 [20 October 1921]).

49

 Negretov and Khrabrovitskii, V. G. Korolenko, 318 (18 March 1921), 323–25 (entries for 9, 16, and 17 April 1921); Korolenko, Dnevnik, 383–85 (17 April 1921).



Poltava in Revolution and Civil War

469

restrained. We receive names of residents whom he has treated and who have died during these years, and we learn of families who have had contact with his relatives in the past, but these comments are rarely more than a sentence or two of elaboration, elaboration nonetheless that creates human connection and a sense of community among Poltava residents. At other times, it is clear that his entries serve to keep a Who’s Who record of activities in Poltava, and in these entries too, he is brief and to the point. Korolenko’s project is different in this regard, and perhaps that fact should not surprise us. He was a writer after all. If an anecdote requires a full description for him to make his point, then he provides a full description. In a lengthy entry of 6 November 1917, for example, he recounts his chat with a soldier on sentry duty, a young man who is convinced of Russian officers’ guilt in not establishing peace and ending the war. Certain that this young man is spouting Bolshevik-influenced renderings of events, Korolenko pushes him on his convictions. To his surprise and hor­ ror he listens to the soldier tell him of his experiences, when officers at the front spoke openly of regular soldiers as expendable and necessary cannon fodder, and how officers pushed the soldiers into action when action was not necessary. As he is listening to the soldier, Korolenko recalls in his diary, “a dark, somber, fantastic tangle of that mood rises up before me, in which the entire psychology of our anarchy and our defeat is stuck.”50 Such entries re­ veal important elements in the collective attitude at that time. For example, dissatisfaction with the officers and with the war—and thus with those who support it—was real and founded on appreciable causes. In addition, they dis­ close how Korolenko uses his diary as a place to think out loud, to express his thoughts and feelings, and to work through them. These processes of thinking and feeling are keenly important to Korolenko the diary writer, and, as his chat with this young man suggests, they are, for him, the foundation for shared understanding among people, too. These efforts to understand what is happening among residents, and thus to understand the complexity of that historical moment in which he and others are situated, concerns Korolenko as much as making the diary record concerns him. The sense that they were part of a larger collective appears in every one of Nesvitskii’s and Korolenko’s entries. One of the striking omissions from them is any extended description of their own interests, experiences, and suf­ ferings. When they do write about themselves, these descriptions are brief, employed usually to shore up the truth of facts and details. Their gaze, rather, tends to turn outwards to the changing complexion of Poltava, to the ways in which abrupt changes are affecting the population and altering individuals’

50

 Korolenko, Dnevnik, 34 (6 November 1917).

470 Mark Conliffe

sense of who they are. It is this interaction between the changes and the city’s residents that defines Poltava, to their minds, and that attracts their attention. The diaries also reveal the extent to which Korolenko and Nesvitskii re­ gard the changes brought on by revolution and civil war as a call to action, a call that for both men has no obvious connection to political groups, but that sounds in accord with their understandings of ethical rightness, their profes­ sional responsibilities, and their physical capacities. The diaries themselves, of course, are one response to this call, but the men also respond more publicly and interactively in the events of this period. Both men give place to their work and professional obligations in these diaries, expressing their particular identities among Poltava residents and the responsibilities attached to these identities. The physician Nesvitskii, we know already, writes of being busy in the surgery, making house calls, and carrying out official functions such as attesting to deaths. At other times po­ litical groups call on him for medical assistance. In these entries he neither draws attention to himself nor pushes his importance aside. In addition, in comparison with what Korolenko notes in his diary, Nesvitskii appears more interested in the physical effects of revolution and war on residents, perhaps because of his professional training and interests. Over a few days in late March 1918, for instance, he writes of residents’ injuries and deaths from bombings, of little girls who are sleeping on an institute’s corridor floors, and of Jews being beaten and killed, and none of this information appears in Korolenko’s diary.51 Nesvitskii’s records are the more striking because he makes them with no comment. The best indicator of his personal reaction to events appears in his modifiers and punctuation. We know he is sensitive to events when he describes moods, impressions, images, pictures, reports, and actions with such adjectives (and their adverbial forms) as dispiriting (udruchushchii), horrible (uzhasnyi), anxious (trevozhnyi), and grave (tiazhelyi). Exclamation marks draw attention to a small number of statements, but ones that might seem odd without them: “It’s true, it’s already our thirteenth government [in Poltava]!!!”52 He also uses them not to criticize a political or military individual or group, but to stress the sadness and anger that he feels when he visits an inadequately run typhus ward. Consider the following long excerpt, which is one of Nesvitskii’s most emotional:

51

 Nesvits´kii, Poltava, 49 (18, 19, and 20 March 1918). In the entries for March 1918 Nesvitskii can be less exact than he is in later months in noting whether his entries correspond with the Old Style calendar or the New Style calendar.

52

 Ibid., 142 (28 November 1919).



Poltava in Revolution and Civil War

471

All the medical personnel at the field hospital, which had been set up in the theological seminary to treat patients with typhus, abandoned it, leaving the patients to the will of God. Linen, clothing, medication, provisions, and other goods were taken. Patients were lying on hospital beds, wrapped in old overcoats, and for a few days had been without assistance. In the entire field hospital one nurse remained from the medical personnel. In the washroom, on beds, and on the floor were several dead bodies. Because of the total absence of heating and lack of firewood, the patients were moved to a different place, and during the move three patients died. My colleague at the ambulatory, second doctor Samuilo Frantsisk Onufrievich, was posted to provide medical assistance. It was disgraceful for the medical personnel to give in to panic and to abandon the field hospital in a helpless situation, which was filled with typhus patients, many of whom were so seriously ill that they died without any help right there and then in the field hos­ pital and during the move to the other place. But it was even more disgraceful, taking advantage of the general panic, to clean out the hospital, all its equipment, instruments, and so on, and so on!!.. And because of the circumstances, all this proceeded without consequences for these inhuman offenders of duty and honor.53 The last three sentences are rare in his diary for their tone and judgment. Here unlike anywhere else he decides guilt, assigns shame, and reveals his anger and disappointment. In hundreds of other moments, he mutes such commentary, but in this medical context that defines him most fully, he cannot hold back. To be sure, he assigns blame to the medical staff, to private individuals rather than to political or military representatives, and we might appreciate in such commentary an informed yet safe stand for him. Nesvitskii is willing to take responsibility for such judgments in those areas—solely medical ones—where he feels able to act knowledgeably and responsibly. He limits, or perhaps disciplines, himself to commenting in his diary on those activities that he is able to complete with clarity, integrity, and meaningful effect. Whether he should limit his stand would never have entered Korolenko’s head. For decades he had maintained a diary as the place for him to record, to reflect, and to comment. The scope in his entries is broad and his tone ranges from informal and curious to declamatory and accusing, just as it did in his personal interactions and journalistic writing. For instance, in November 1917 he has nothing but contempt for an article by recently appointed Commissar of Enlightenment Lunacharskii, who speaks positively about writer and 53

 Ibid., 140–41 (25 November 1919).

472 Mark Conliffe

journalist Ieronim I. Iasinskii (1850–1931).54 On 4 July 1918, in an expansive entry in which Korolenko writes of news refuting the execution of the tsar, he extends his thoughts to other rumors and from there to complaining over the mayhem and seeming unconcern throughout society: There are rumors all round… There are “punitive expeditions,” and after them, the usual gossip and assumptions… […] Instead of reason­ able resistance and struggle of valid forces, there have been murders on the sly and savage punitive measures… This shouldn’t destroy any­ one’s resolve [to do something], and for the intelligentsia there’s the most appropriate role: subservience before the masses, who just don’t want to acknowledge what’s best, what the intelligentsia might bring about, so there’s subservience before the worst: before murders on the sly. As it is the masses are given to this. To indulge this inclination doesn’t mean to serve the people properly…55 And in September 1920 he decries Bolshevik measures thus: “One spurious step draws another after it, [and a] third. Bolshevism already has made so many spurious steps, that for it, it’s very likely, there already is no return and it will have to go through to the end.”56 We see none of this stream of consciousness and brainstorming in Nesvitskii’s diary, none of the suppositions or social analysis, and yet this rhetoric and these topics are common in Korolenko’s diaries. Korolenko’s attachment to the idea that revolution would bring about discussions and conscious efforts towards freedom kept him from accepting compromises on, let alone challenges to, this stand. To be sure, he had his human limits, and in an entry from 27 June 1919, we witness a rare moment of indifference from him: Executions happened twice: at one, 13 bandits and 1 of Denikin’s scouts were executed, at the other, 4 bandits. Among the bandits were some who were extremely dangerous—one who had escaped from prison and after the escape had committed another murder. Some were con­ nected to the robbery of Tsarenok, and among them Ekaterina Petrash, a participant in a lot of murders… Now this no longer creates any par­ ticular impression, not even on me.57 54 55

 Korolenko, Dnevnik, 43 (22 November 1917).

 Ibid., 114 (4 July 1918).

56

 Ibid., 338 (30 September 1920).

57

 Ibid., 215 (10 July 1919).



Poltava in Revolution and Civil War

473

My point here is not whether Korolenko is correct about the Bolsheviks, but rather that he sees his diary as a place to vent or rant, when he feels inclined. It discloses his impressions and usually critical reactions, as he records events and thinks about them, and consistently criticizes the absence of freedom, the abuses of power, and the excesses of atrocities. Korolenko did not save such outbursts or complaints for his diary. In these years he maintained the identity that he had created and assumed in tsarist times as an advocate for justice. During the revolution and Civil War he continued to send telegrams, write newspaper articles, and give speeches to protest against injustice and share information. In addition to acting as a personal intermediary for individuals, he worked in a variety of organiza­ tions to relieve sickness, hunger, and other forms of distress, such as the League for the Rescue of Children, founded in Poltava in 1918, for which he served as honorary chairman.58 Although his range of activities was broad, its motivation is singular; he does all he can to help residents. Nesvitskii’s and Korolenko’s Poltava diaries are historically important for both the insights that they yield into the impact of revolution and civil war and the literary and personal response that they reveal to the sufferings of those years. Both diaries display the men’s access to public figures, events, newspapers, circulars, meetings, and ways that their work and prominence in Poltava gave them entry to interactions and events that other residents might not have had. Read together, the diaries reveal the men’s similar attention to those factors that placed the safety and wellbeing of Poltava’s inhabitants under persistent threat and kept the city in harsh flux. Moreover, Nesvitskii’s and Korolenko’s interest in and responses to the forces that made this time a tumultuous one enliven those factors, displaying the situation the factors created for residents, the feelings they produced in the men, and the agency they compelled these diarists to embrace. Against the background of the “rapidly spreading anarchy” of these years, the diaries appear as instructive expressions of the men’s efforts to gain some control over the moments that make up this time, a control that appears in the constancy, detail, and breadth of their writing, and thus in their efforts to embrace responsibility to navigate and record that time.

58

 Negretov and Khrabrovitskii, V. G. Korolenko, 136. In late November/early December he was also elected honorary chairman of the Poltava branch of the Political Red Cross (144). On 27 July 1921, though in poor health, he agreed to serve with Maksim Gor´kii (1868–1936) and others on the All-Russian Public Committee to Aid the Hungry, the committee that earned the support of Herbert Hoover and the American Relief Asso­ ciation, which helped to relieve the famine and guide relief efforts (see 342–46 for his correspondence with the committee and Gor´kii).

474 Mark Conliffe

The men’s reactions to what they learn and experience in these years give significant shape to their behavior and diaries. In Nesvitskii’s diary facts almost always stand without commentary. Although the constant tallying of facts creates a mix of weighty prosaic detail with scenes of potentially debilitating uncertainty and anxiety, Nesvitskii’s entries disclose his efforts to maintain self-discipline, integrity, and clarity in order to endure the uncertainty and anxiety of the times. Such prudence, his diary lays bare, was as practical and productive an approach to diary-writing as it was an approach to living in Poltava in these years. Korolenko’s diaries express his concern also with many of these details, but more strikingly they reveal his preoccupation with social behavior, especially with extremism. Thus his diaries display the noteworthy emotion and reflection that result from his efforts to respond to people’s needs and actions and to account for them, to help residents tolerate and survive the time and to understand causes of and solutions to what was happening. His diaries depict a consciousness stimulated by its feelings of outrage and compassion, a consciousness that is uninhibited in protesting against violence and suffering. These diaries, then, both in the information they record and in how they are written, reveal one way in which the men interacted with that time’s events, changing circumstances, and news.

Catastrophe Befell Our House: A Famous Family’s Struggle for Survival in the Russian Civil War Lynne Hartnett

On 25 October 1917, Vera Figner and the other members of the Council of the Republic convened in Petrograd’s Mariinskii Palace as they had done on most mornings over the course of the previous few weeks. Although the group informally referred to as the “Preparliament” was in its infancy, many of its members, including Figner, boasted distinguished revolutionary pedigrees. Vera Figner achieved political notoriety decades before when she and the other members of the radical populist group The People’s Will assassinated Tsar Alexander II. After spending two decades in the infamous political prison Shlisselburg Fortress, and almost a decade in European exile, Vera rejoined the political fray in the wake of the February Revolution.1 While she eschewed any specific party affiliation, Vera’s notoriety as a “world famous revolutionary assassin,”2 and former political prisoner afforded her the opportunity to work on behalf of a number of cultural and political initiatives after the overthrow of the tsarist regime. In the autumn of 1917 these included her service as a member of the Council of the Republic. Formed in a rare and brief instance of agreement between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet, the Council was designed to serve as an advisory body to the Provisional Government in a stopgap attempt to bridge the widening political chasms that seemed to portend a renewed round of revolutionary violence and disorder.3 Yet on the morning of 25 October, this tenuous modus vivendi proved illusory as Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik party

  This essay employs first names when referring to Vera Figner and her siblings in order to distinguish them from each other, and to help convey the personal, intimate aspects of their experience during the Civil War. 1

2

 Film footage of the “Funeral for the Martyrs of the February Revolution,” Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Axelbank Collection, reel 17 (4/296).

  Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 164. 3

Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2015, 475–95.

476 Lynne Hartnett

effected the revolution that the Preparliament was designed to avoid. As Vera gradually recovered from the humiliation of being forcibly expelled from the Mariinskii Palace by radical soldiers and sailors in the early hours of the Bolshevik Revolution, she wrote to her sister Lidiia that “in February, March and the eight months that followed there was not a revolution. The revolution has only just begun.”4 Vera quickly realized the momentous significance of this latest political upheaval. Writing to her sister again just weeks after the Bolshevik Revolution, she predicted a period of turmoil and deprivation during which “suffering would abound.”5 Her words proved prophetic. Rather than serving as the denouement to Russia’s revolutionary drama, the events of 25 October inau­ gurated Russia’s downward spiral into a bloody and traumatic civil war. Although a prolific memoirist throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Vera refrained from publishing any extended accounts of her views of the October Revolution, and limited her comments about both Lenin’s government and the Civil War to a handful of public speeches and personal letters in which she referenced the Communists’ repression of their ideological foes. In spite of her position as a quasi member of the government that fell to the Bolsheviks, Vera rejected public partisan acrimony and thus her published writings fail to offer an insider’s insight into the political dimensions of the events that followed 25 October. Yet Vera’s extensive unpublished correspondence, most of which is preserved in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, conveys a profound understanding of the social history and personal dimensions of the Civil War period. Although the Figners were a famous family with a rich history of political and social activism, their members neither vigorously aligned with nor openly opposed the Bolsheviks during the Civil War. Subse­ quently, the family neither suffered specific persecution nor, with the excep­ tion of Vera, enjoyed special perquisites. Based on an analysis of scores of extant letters that Vera Figner both wrote and received during the Civil War period, the present essay seeks to utilize the experience of the Figner family as a means to demonstrate the extent to which personal suffering and familial ruin pervaded Soviet society during this period, and to shed light on the strat­ egies of survival Russians employed. The case of Vera and her family reveals that an ability to navigate the nebulous geography of opportunity, limited political connections and informal networks of assistance and aid could mean the difference between survival and destruction in this country on the verge

4

 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI) f. 1185, op. 1, d. 246, l. 17ob. (letter of Vera Figner to Lidiia Nikolaevna Stakhevich, 8 December 1917).

  Ibid., l. 17ob.

5



Catastrophe Befell Our House

477

of collapse. (See the photograph of the Figner family in 1915, figure 15 in the gallery of images following page 270.) Vera Figner and Two Revolutions When Vera, then aged 52, finally emerged from more than two decades of incarceration in 1904, she felt alienated from the industrializing Russia that she discovered and too emotionally and physically fragile from her years in prison to take part in the burgeoning revolutionary movement. As strikes, agrarian revolts, and demonstrations metastasized into the revolution of 1905, Vera lamented to a friend how much she yearned to be “thirty or forty years old with no prison scars,”6 so that she could play a role in the political tumult. But alas the previous decades could not be erased and Vera kept her distance from this latest Russian revolutionary drama. In the wake of the 1905 Revolution, both Vera and Lenin made their way to Western Europe where they remained for the next decade. While Lenin led the Bolshevik contingent of Russian émigrés and wrote prolifically about the necessity of revolution, Vera quickly ended a brief affiliation with the Socialist Revolutionaries, focusing instead on her literary endeavors and efforts to raise funds for Russian political prisoners and exiles. When World War I erupted, Lenin famously declared himself a defeatist, believing that a decisive loss for Russia was the surest path to a future revolution, while Vera’s nationalism overrode her socialist sensibilities.7 Having secured per­ mission from the authorities to return to her native country, Vera arrived in Russia in early 1915 anxious to do her part for the war effort. Although her revolutionary past precluded an official public role, Vera organized cultural events, book drives, and literary readings for soldiers and the local population in Nizhnii Novgorod, where she lived before she finally returned to Petrograd in December 1916. She played no role in the revolutionary events that toppled the Romanov regime, but like Lenin, she immediately capitalized on the op­ portunity offered by February’s events to become politically active once again. Vera maintained a tireless pace in 1917. She was a fixture on the daises of numerous public events, attended trade union meetings, supported several cultural endeavors, and was a featured participant in the March 1917 demon­ stration for women’s suffrage in Petrograd. She spearheaded efforts to build a Museum of the Revolution and established the Committee to Help Liberated

6

 Vera Figner, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, ed. B. P. Koz´min (Moscow: Izdanie vsesoiuznogo obshchestva politkatorzhan i ssyl´no-poselentsev, 1932), 6: 300.

7

 Ibid., 7: 244, 247.

478 Lynne Hartnett

Political Prisoners and Exiles.8 Vera left the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1908 after decisive evidence emerged that Evno Azef, one of the leaders of its terrorist wing, was a traitor in the employ of the tsarist police. Yet many Rus­ sians continued to associate Vera with this party and thus she found herself elected on its behalf to the newly formed Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies in May 1917, and to the Constituent Assembly in November.9 In spite of her unease with the building tension between various groups of revolutionaries and reformers in 1917, Vera agreed to serve on the Council of the Republic, an appointment that she received by virtue of her member­ ship on the Soviet of Peasant Deputies. Immediately after the body convened, however, the Bolsheviks called its validity into question when they charged that the Preparliament, along with the Provisional Government, were merely “tools of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie”10 and comprised of individ­ uals “graciously ‘invited’ by the ruling Bonapartist clique.”11 After the Bolsheviks dissolved the Council of the Republic and assumed political power in the October Revolution, Vera was dismayed, demoralized, and nearly incapacitated by shock and disappointment. Writing to her sister in December, she confessed that “I was so troubled after 25 October … that I was flat on my back in a state of dismay. I didn’t leave home … my nerves simply could not endure this mad tumult.”12 One month later, Vera suffered a new emotional defeat and personal humiliation when the Soviets disbanded the Constituent Assembly.13 In a short autobiographical piece she published in the mid-1920s, Vera deemed the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly a “new humiliation of the lifelong dream of many generations.”14 This was the strongest published indictment that Vera ever made about Lenin or the Communist Party. In spite of her disagreement with the Bolshe­ viks’ refusal to allow for a period of parliamentary freedom,15 Vera showed 8

 Vera Figner, “Avtobiografiia Very Nikolaevny Figner,” in Deiateli SSSR i revoliutsi­ onnogo dvizheniia Rossii: Entsiklopedicheskii slovar´ Granat (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklo­ pediia, 1989), 478.

  “M. Kerensky at Odessa,” The Times, 4 June 1917, 8.   Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 201.

9

10 11

 Robert Paul Browder and Alexander F. Kerensky, eds., The Russian Provisional Gov­ ernment, 1917: Documents (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961), 1723.

12

 RGALI f. 1185, op. 1, d. 246, l. 17 (letter of Vera Figner to Lidiia Nikolaevna Stakhevich, 8 December 1917).

13

 Figner, “Avtobiografiia,” 479.

14

 Ibid.

15

 Ibid.



Catastrophe Befell Our House

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no inclination to enter the political opposition in reaction. Sixty-five years old and dealing with chronic maladies from her years in prison, Vera reconciled herself to the fact of Bolshevik power in a speedy and pragmatic fashion as a means of social survival. She had sacrificed her youth for the revolutionary cause, and exchanged a meaningful private life for a life as a public figure once she had been released from prison. After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, Vera was terrified by the thought that she might spend the rest of her days without a social role or public existence if she openly opposed the new regime. In addition, she acknowledged that for better or worse, her generation of revolutionaries needed to accept some responsibility for the Soviet state and the Bolsheviks’ actions since, as their radical forebears, they had in fact “called the people to effect a social revolution under even more difficult circumstances” than those under which Lenin’s party overthrew the Provisional Government.16 Thus, like several other aging radical luminaries, Vera forged a social, yet determinedly non-partisan role for herself within the public arena and remained outwardly loyal to the Soviet regime. There is no evidence that suggests that the new Soviet authorities chal­ lenged such a position. Rather, early signs exist of a rapprochement, albeit a potentially tense one, between the aging revolutionary icon and the revolution­ aries turned rulers. For instance, in the last days of January in 1918, Vera authored, signed, and submitted a written request to the Soviet commissar of justice to approve the establishment of the Moscow Political Red Cross,17 an organization that had its roots in the repression of the tsarist period but was nourished by the fertile soil of early Soviet political oppression. As Vera described it, the organization would aspire to provide moral support and material aid to political prisoners regardless of their party affiliation. Thus, less than a month after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, Vera insti­ tutionalized efforts to mitigate the consequences of political intolerance and persecution, rather than challenge their existence. The Bolshevik authorities demonstrated their acquiescence by approving the establishment of the Politi­ cal Red Cross and allowing it to operate in one fashion or another for more than a decade. The Figner Family in the Revolution and Civil War Vera’s equivocal standing as a non-Communist revolutionary forebear trans­ lated into a life lived as a privileged outsider in the early Soviet period. Yet 16

  Ibid.   Hoover Institution Archives, Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and Soviet

17

State Microfilm Collection, reel 3.6820, file 1.

480 Lynne Hartnett

during the Civil War, with state production and distribution systems prac­ tically incapacitated, only a very few select political figures and insiders could lay claim to formal outright assistance from the embattled government. Vera’s few perquisites during this time were limited to personal favors she actively negotiated through her social network of political contacts. Most of her com­ patriots though lacked even these modest opportunities and were forced to find ways to supplement their meager rations on their own. For the majority of the Russian population, the battle to find sustenance and escape disease became the preeminent battle of the Civil War. But as the turmoil worsened, even the Figners with their revolutionary pedigree joined millions of other families who discovered that survival depended upon individual initiative, family solidarity, effective interpersonal connections, and an ability and will­ ingness to relocate in search of more favorable material circumstances. The members of the Figner family experienced the Bolshevik Revolution from a variety of vantage points and experienced a range of reactions to the ensuing upheaval. Of the five surviving children of Nikolai and Ekaterina Fig­ ner, Nikolai Nikolaevich Figner had the most to lose in the revolution.18 After a brief stint serving as an officer in the tsar’s navy in the 1870s, Nikolai became one of the most celebrated and wealthiest tenors in the history of the Russian opera. Over the course of more than two decades, he collected riches and real estate across Russia and Western Europe and garnered the prestigious title of “Soloist of His Imperial Majesty.”19 He learned of the revolution that promised to eviscerate his life of privilege from his dacha in Tuapse, the Black Sea resort community just north of Sochi. Soon after the Bolsheviks came to power, Nikolai left his dacha and reunited with his family in Ekaterinoslav. Although he found a teaching position at a local music school, earned a modest sum of money, and avoided the outright persecution that many former elites faced, Nikolai rued the revolution and mourned the world that the Bolsheviks overthrew.20 Lamenting the difficulties her brother faced in the aftermath of the October Revolution, Vera writes, “Kolia is quite depressed by everything that is going on in Russia. It is understandably more difficult for him than for the rest of us because his lifestyle and convictions belong to the past. More than any of the rest of us, Kolia can not reconcile himself to the new order

  Nikolai and Ekaterina Figner had four daughters and two sons who were born between 1852 and 1862: Vera, Lidiia, Petr, Nikolai, Evgeniia, and Ol´ga. Petr died in 1916. 18

19

 N. N. Figner, Vospominaniia, pis´ma, materialy (Leningrad: Izdatel´stvo “Muzyka,” 1968), 10.

20

 RGALI f. 1185, op. 1, d. 246, l. 16 (letter of Vera Figner to Lidiia Nikolaevna Stakhevich, 8 December 1917).



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of things.”21 According to Vera, soon after the Bolshevik takeover Nikolai wrote to her and bemoaned his fate, noting that “those who died before the revolution were the lucky ones.”22 The political and military situation in Ekaterinoslav did little to quiet Nikolai’s nerves as the Bolsheviks, Ukrainian nationalists, and German troops vied for control of the region. In the late spring of 1918, the world with which Nikolai identified temporarily reemerged when General Pavlo Skoropads´kyi led a coup d’état in the Ukraine that reinstituted “the old world of imperial privilege that the Revolution had swept away.”23 By September of 1918 when Nikolai resettled in Kiev, he appeared reborn and relished his Ukrainian refuge from Bolshevik rule. His long-standing struggles with diabetes and heart disease seemingly under control, he began a satisfying job at the Kiev conservatory and encountered many old friends and lively acquaintances since numerous “men and women who once had been part of Russia’s upper and middle classes flooded into Kiev from the Bolshevik domains.”24 Although a festive mood gripped Kiev with its refugees “living as if there was no tomorrow,”25 tomorrow quickly dawned. In November 1918, after Germany surrendered, Skoropads´kyi learned that without the Germans’ protection, his regime could not withstand the challenges launched by a Ukrainian revolutionary state committee. With the region embroiled in a new round of internecine feuding and the Bolsheviks bearing down on the breakaway region, Nikolai rediscovered the trauma of the revolution for people of his station. In Odessa visiting family when the coup against Skoropads´kyi unfurled, Nikolai was cast adrift. His numerous attempts to return to Kiev were thwarted by the breakdown in the transportation system and the difficulties created by roving gangs who exploited the political disorder to their own ends and attacked train cars at will.26 Although Nikolai finally made it back to Kiev, the deprivation and stress of the preceding weeks, which included being forced off of a train at gunpoint, took an irrevocable toll. Within eight days of his return, Nikolai passed away from complications from his diabetes. Once a lauded artist and cultural figure, he died alone and without public notice. In21

  Ibid.   Ibid., l. 16ob.

22

23  W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War, 1918–1921 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1999), 308. 24

 Ibid.

25

 Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1996), 555. 26

 N. N. Figner, Vospominaniia, 112.

482 Lynne Hartnett

stead of being buried with honors in Petrograd’s Aleksandr Nevskii cemetery, as he had long desired, Nikolai was interred in an undistinguished grave in Kiev; he was another unheralded casualty of the civil turmoil that engulfed the country. 27 News of Nikolai’s death did not reach Vera until the end of January in 1919. In spite of the risks posed by his privileged background and the Bolshevik re­ surgence in Kiev in late 1918, Vera had convinced herself that her only living brother would be safe. Immediately before she learned that Nikolai had passed away, Vera shared her optimistic assessment with her cousin, noting that despite the turmoil in Kiev, “Nikolai will be protected because he is [such a] significant artist.”28 Even after months of civil war, Vera demonstrated a naïve confidence that noteworthy figures from the old regime would receive a modicum of privilege and security from the most grievous consequences of the war and political upheaval in Soviet Russia. Her brother’s death thus not only saddened and shocked the aging revolutionary but also heightened her anxiety about her own security. As Vera struggled to come to grips with the loss of her brother, her anxieties were further fueled by concerns about the safety of her sister Evgeniia. Just before the October Revolution, Evgeniia and her husband, Mikhail Sazhin,29 moved from Petrograd to Grozny, in Russia’s Caucasus region, more than two thousand kilometers away. The Sazhins relocated there in order to live with their son, who worked in the region’s booming oil industry, and escape the escalating tensions and shortages in the capital. Though far from the center of political power, Grozny quickly demonstrated that it was not immune to the chaos provoked by the revolution. According to Vera, the Sazhins lost every­ thing to relentless Chechen attacks in the fall of 1917 as the city came under siege with various groups battling for control.30 Before the end of the year, the “railway on both sides of the town [was] effectively destroyed and the oil 27

 Ibid.

  RGALI f. 1185, op. 1, d. 229, l. 23–23ob. (letter of Vera Figner to Elizaveta Viktorovna Kuprianova, 25 January 1919).

28

29

 Evgeniia Figner was a member of the People’s Will along with her sister Vera. She was arrested more than a year before Alexander II’s assassination. A military court sentenced Evgeniia to 21 years in Siberian exile for her crimes. There she met fellow political criminal and notable Bakunist Mikhail Sazhin, whom she married and with whom she had four children. See Vladimir Burtsev, Za sto let 1800–1896: Sbornik po istorii politicheskikh i obshchestvennykh dvizhenii v Rossii (London: Russian Free Press Fund, 1897), 2: 104.

  RGALI f. 1185, op. 1, d. 246, l. 15 (letter of Vera Figner to Lidiia Nikolaevna Stakhevich, 8 December 1917).

30



Catastrophe Befell Our House

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fields [were] already ablaze.”31 Threatened first by groups organized by the Chechen National Council, then by Cossack troops, and finally by occupying White forces; Grozny’s population was cut off from the rest of the country. By the late summer of 1918, Bolsheviks and Cossacks were engaged in “savage street by street fighting.”32 Although the Sazhins managed to communicate with their relatives in Petrograd for a time, by April of 1918, only silence ema­ nated from Grozny. Vera tried to reassure an aunt in early 1919 that “the situation in Grozny was not that bad,”33 and that the Sazhins surely were fine. But just days later Denikin captured Grozny and steadily began to persecute those who opposed the White forces. With no word from or about her sister, Vera had no way of knowing whether Evgeniia and her family managed to survive the months of fighting that preceded the White general’s conquest of the city. Even if they had, Evgeniia and Mikhail Sazhin’s involvement in revolutionary movements during the imperial period put them at risk of persecution. By the time that Vera learned of her brother Nikolai’s death, she had not heard from or about the Sazhins for over nine months. While Evgeniia and her family experienced the uncertainties that came with the battle for Grozny, Vera and her other two sisters, Lidiia Stakhevich and Ol´ga Florovskaia, struggled to endure the hunger, cold, and crime that gripped Petrograd in the winter and spring of 1918. Like Vera, Lidiia and Ol´ga had revolutionary credentials dating back to the 1870s and 1880s, but those did not enable the sisters to escape hunger and disease.34 Subsisting on as little as two ounces of bread and oats a day, Vera’s physical condition be­came increasingly compromised.35 She anxiously watched as cholera swept through the city and a growing number of Petrograders, including her former brotherin-law, Sergei Stakhevich, succumbed to hunger. In an effort to save them­

  Alex Marshall, The Caucasus under Soviet Rule (New York: Routledge, 2010), 70.

31

32

 Ibid., 79, 113–27.

33

 RGALI f. 1185, op. 1, d. 229, l. 23 (letter of Vera Figner to Elizaveta Viktorovna Kupri­ anova, 25 January 1919). 34

 Lidiia began her revolutionary career in 1874 after studying medicine in Zurich with Vera. In 1877 a tsarist court sentenced her to five years in Siberian exile for spreading populist propaganda. In Siberia, Lidiia married Sergei Stakhevich. The couple later divorced (Figner, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5: 180–89). Ol´ga joined a radical circle in the late 1880s. In spite of her affiliation and her by then infamous family name, Ol´ga was never arrested for her illegal activities. However, when an imperial court sentenced her husband, Sergei N. Florovskii, to exile for his political crimes, Ol´ga joined him in Siberia.

35

 Figner, “Avtobiografiia,” 479.

484 Lynne Hartnett

selves and find the sustenance they needed, Vera, Ol´ga, and Lidiia decided to follow the Soviet government to Moscow. While the situation in Moscow was less dire than in Petrograd, the newly established capital nonetheless faced daunting shortages of food. Both Ol´ga and Lidiia remained in Moscow, but almost immediately after she arrived, Vera decided to leave the city for Velikie Luki, a town in the Pskov region (oblast´). Vera left Moscow so quickly because her health was in a precarious state after a year of deprivation. She was determined to find an improved material situation in order to strengthen her body over the warm summer months, so that she could withstand what promised to be another difficult year ahead.36 Velikie Luki was an important railroad hub and a sizable city, but less populated than either Petrograd or Moscow. Thus, the town seemed to hold the promise of relief as one could assume that provisions might be more readily available than in either of the capitals. Adding to Velikie Luki’s promise was the fact that Vera had personal contacts in the town. These connections proved decisive for Vera when she arrived in early June. Every day Vera ate lunch at her friend’s home. Acknowledging that her friend fed her out of pity, the normally proud Vera welcomed a bit of charity.37 Yet Velikie Luki did not provide the deliverance that Vera expected. In mid-July, she wrote an old friend that “it is a bad situation here. What little bread there is can only be secured at an exorbitant price and butter is nowhere to be found.”38 Vera admitted that she was losing weight as a consequence of eating little more than one egg, two helpings of bread, and some milk every day.39 As she struggled to survive, Vera’s local acquaintances lent assistance by sharing the vegetables they grew in their small gardens. Once again Vera admitted that she was completely indebted to her friends’ life-saving generosity.40 Vera’s sojourn in Velikie Luki demonstrates her willingness to employ two strategies for survival to which she would repeatedly return for the re­ mainder of the Civil War. Not content to passively suffer through a dearth of food, medicine, fuel, and other supplies in a given location, Vera utilized her vast social network to relocate to more promising areas in the country. When 36

 RGALI f. 1185, op. 1, d. 253, l. 5 (letter of Vera Figner to Aleksandra Timofeevna Shakol, 6 August 1918).

37

 Ibid., d. 627, ll. 211–13 (letter of Vera Figner to Mikhail Vasil´evich Novorusskii, 12 June 1918).

38

 Ibid., d. 220, l. 10 (letter of Vera Figner to Iulii Savel´evich Gessen, 16 July 1918).

39

 Ibid., d. 627, l. 211 (letter of Vera Figner to Mikhail Vasil´evich Novorusskii, 12 June 1918).

40

 Ibid., l. 213 (letter of Vera Figner to Mikhail Vasil´evich Novorusskii, 21 July 1918); d. 220, l. 10 (letter of Vera Figner to Iulii Savel´evich Gessen, 16 July 1918).



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this geographical mobility was insufficient to ease her material woes, Vera then relied on the assistance of friends and acquaintances to help her either obtain provisions or arrange for yet another physical move. Thus, during this first summer of civil war, Vera learned a lesson that would serve her well over the next two years: that social networks of mutual support and collaboration were vital to survival. Vera’s difficult stay in Pskov region came to an end in August when she returned to Moscow. The situation in the new capital, however, remained dire. Rations continued to be hopelessly low and the little food that could be bought through private traders was priced beyond what most Muscovites could afford. In an ominous diary entry, the historian Iurii Vladimirovich Got´e speaks to the desperation that permeated Moscow in late 1918: “There are no potatoes, nor will there be, as they have been spoiled, frozen, hidden, or stolen; and without potatoes the hunger in Moscow will grow more intense.”41 By this point in the Civil War, many Russians lost faith in the government’s ability to provide the basic necessities of life.42 Filling the void left by the government supply chain, speculators and bagmen charged starving people exorbitant prices for mere morsels of food. Decades earlier during the American Civil War, determined female citizens in the North regularly navigated official channels and government agencies that constituted a “geography of relief.”43 Their Russian counterparts, however, encountered a state that more often than not proved to be a font of demands rather than a conduit of supply. Russians were forced to rely upon their own ingenuity, the generosity of friends, the cooperation of acquaintances with connections, and an ability and readiness to be physically mobile in their effort to survive. Although prices for basic foodstuffs soared during the 1918–19 winter, Vera muddled through thanks to her social network and to the fees she commanded for a reliable stream of autobiographical and biographical writings. Even with this invaluable assistance and income, her health continued to suffer, forc­ ing her to curtail her social commitments and the literary endeavors that

41   Iu. V. Got´e, Time of Troubles, the Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got´e: Moscow, July 8, 1917 to July 23, 1922, trans. and ed. Terence Emmons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 224.

  Lars T. Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1917 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Mauricio Borrero, Hungry Moscow: Scarcity and Urban Society in the Russian Civil War, 1917–1921 (New York: Peter Lang, 2003).

42

  Judith Giesberg, Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Homefront (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 66.

43

486 Lynne Hartnett

secured her modest funds.44 In May of 1919, Vera confided to a friend that in Moscow she was continually ill, and so welcomed a new opportunity to leave the city as a way to right her health.45 Vera’s sister Lidiia, Lidiia’s daughter, Vera Stakhevich, and Vera Stakhevich’s infant son Sergei had relocated to the town of Lugan in Orel province in late 1918 so that Vera’s niece and namesake could work as a doctor at a local sugar factory. With the desperate situation created by the Civil War and the ensuing food shortages, an opportunity for employment in an area less affected by the war was tremendously appealing, not only for a prospective employee but also for the other members of his or her family. This certainly was the case for the Figner family in 1919. Vera Stakhevich’s job became an attractive alternative to a hungry life in Moscow not only for the young doctor but for her aging mother and aunts as well. Thus after Lidiia left Moscow with her daughter and grandson, her sisters Vera and Ol´ga made plans to join her. This was to be Vera’s fourth relocation in a single year. Not content to wait for starvation to seize her, Vera exercised an active agency to secure her survival, one predicated upon physical mobility. Vera was not alone in this regard. “The upheavals of war, revolution, and civil war,” writes Sheila Fitzpatrick, “had made the population exceptionally mobile” not only in a social sense but in a physical one as well.46 The significance of mass population mobility in the midst of military conflict was not unique to Russia. In her study of movement in the Confederate South, Yael A. Sternhell argues that “marching, retreating, fleeing, and straggling are simultaneously physical actions and psychological conditions, personal undertakings and mass endeavors, transformative politi­ cal processes and mundane occurrences. Together they create the vortex of war.”47 Yet the enormous number of people caught up in this vortex of civil war from 1918 until 1920 was virtually unprecedented. Russians fled hunger and epidemics, gangs of bandits, and the retributive fury of Red, White, and Green armies by the millions. Unlike refugees and evacuees in the American Civil War, who navigated roads, woods, and swamps in a quest to find free­

44

 RGALI f. 1185, op. 1, d. 246, l. 18 (letter of Vera Figner to Lidiia Nikolaevna Stakhe­ vich, 30 December 1918).

45

 RGALI f. 1185, op. 1, d. 220, l. 11 (letter of Vera Figner to Iulii Savel´evich Gessen, 23 May 1919). 46

 Sheila Fitzpatrick, “New Perspectives on the Civil War,” in Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History, ed. Diane P. Koenker, William G. Rosenberg, and Ronald Grigor Suny (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 5.

47

 Yael A. Sternhell, Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 3.



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dom, provisions, and/or safety, in Russia negotiating significant distances demanded access to the nation’s railroads. During the Civil War Russian trains overflowed with refugees from the front and townspeople fleeing to the countryside in search of food. But by 1919 train tickets became increasingly rare and valuable commodities. The Saratov academic Aleksei Babin notes how impossible train travel had become by the spring of 1919 explaining that “[o]nly Bolshevik officials will be carried by rail.”48 Olga Chernov Andreev, the daughter of the Socialist Revolutionary leader Viktor Chernov, concurs. She alleges that by the start of the year “traveling in Russia had become an all but impossible undertaking. To obtain both a ticket and a seat on the train, one had to have an official traveling permit, obtained from Soviet government institutions” which could only be obtained through personal connections.49 Even then, train travel could be curtailed or indefinitely interrupted because of military exigencies, intentional or incidental damage to rail lines that resulted from combat operations, and a perennial shortage of fuel.50 When a train ticket could be procured, the journey was fraught with chal­ lenges and, sometimes, outright dangers. A mass of undernourished, diseaseridden, desperate Russians crammed onto already overflowing train cars in an effort to survive unparalleled trauma. “Because millions of people singlemindedly sought mobility and found it on the railroads, the body lice and microbes they carried also acquired extraordinary mobility,”51 and spread typhus through the nation. Vera’s risk for contracting typhus on her journey to Lugan was minimized by having obtained a private third-class compartment, which afforded her at least some space and privacy at a time when most train cars were crammed well beyond capacity. This unusual circumstance resulted from the personal intervention of Leonid Krasin, a member of Lenin’s government since 1918 and the commissar of railroads as of March 1919. In a letter to a friend, Vera relates her satisfaction that no one, not even the train’s workers, disturbed her

48

 Donald J. Raleigh, ed., A Russian Civil War Diary: Alexis Babine in Saratov, 1917–1922 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988), 136.

49

 Olga Chernov Andreyev, Cold Spring in Russia, trans. Michael Carlisle (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1978), 121.

50

 Anthony J. Heywood, “War Destruction and Remedial Work in the Early Soviet Economy: Myth and Reality on the Railroads,” Russian Review 64, 3 (July 2005): 459.

  R. T. Argenbright, “Lethal Mobilities: Bodies and Lice on Soviet Railroads, 1918– 1922,” Journal of Transport History 29, 2 (2008): 260.

51

488 Lynne Hartnett

in her private compartment as a result of the directives Krasin gave when he arranged her ticket.52 The extent of Vera’s relationship with Krasin is not clear. Given the fact that both spent time in Europe before the Great War, there is a good chance that they traveled in the same émigré circles and thus knew each other personally. Or, Vera may have had another friend who was highly placed in Lenin’s government intercede on her behalf. The fact remains that many men and women who acquired political authority after the October Revolution had at one time been political prisoners or exiles of the imperial Russian state, and Vera inevitably had numerous connections among them. Since she refrained from political acrimony after the revolution and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, Vera did not sever these connections and thus had many contacts on which she could rely for official favors. These favors could come in various forms. While one might assume that the most helpful accommodation would have been an increase in the food ration which she was allotted, the extent of the crime that gripped Moscow calls this assumption into question. Instead, the ability to utilize one’s social network to obtain a ticket and a seat on a train in order to employ mobility and relocation as a potential means of survival was likely more decisive and effective. Vera did not embark on the trip to Lugan lightly. Given the crime and disorder in Moscow, she worried that her apartment would be looted in her absence53 but decided that the potential benefits outweighed any risks. In addition, though Ol´ga planned to accompany her eldest sister on the trip, her health was so compromised by pleurisy and sclerosis in the spring of 1919 that she was physically unable to make the journey, and Vera was unwilling to delay leaving the capital. In spite of the private train compartment Krasin arranged for her, the trip to Lugan took a toll on the nearly 67-year-old Vera. Her nose bled for days after she arrived and the anemia that plagued her as a result nearly incapacitated her.54 Within weeks though, the benefits of this latest move became apparent. With provisions in Orel more abundant than in Moscow and with access to medicine that she seemed unable to procure in the Soviet capital,55 Vera’s body slowly began to recover in the early summer of 1919. Fortunes change quickly in wartime, however. By the end of the summer of 1919, Vera’s woes multiplied. Ol´ga, who had joined her sisters, niece, and 52

 RGALI f. 1185, op. 1, d. 220, l. 12 (letter of Vera Figner to Iulii Savel´evich Gessen, 23 May 1919).

53

 Ibid., l. 11.

54 55

 Ibid., l. 12.

 Ibid., d. 195, l. 145 (letter of Vera Figner to Iulii Savel´evich Gessen, 23 June 1919).



Catastrophe Befell Our House

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great-nephew in Lugan after a brief upturn in her physical state, had a serious relapse and was quickly wasting away. Lung and kidney disease rendered Ol´ga incapacitated and she demanded full-time care. Even the younger Vera, a physician, found the emotional and physical demands of caring for her dying Aunt Ol´ga almost more than she could bear.56 The stress inherent in tending to Ol´ga’s needs was exponentially compounded by the worsening economic conditions in Lugan. By the end of the summer, even basic foodstuffs were scarce. With their supply of eggs exhausted and only a teaspoon of butter left in the house, Vera and her family desperately searched for household goods and clothes that they could exchange with peasant traders for food.57 But having bartered away so many of their possessions already, the women could find nothing to spare. Lamenting their desperate situation, Vera concluded that “[t]he economic conditions in Russia are such that people like us, of the cultured class, are dying from exhaustion, illness, and suicide.”58 As summer gave way to fall, the situation only worsened. General Deni­ kin’s White forces began to advance into Orel province, and the Red Army became an increasingly visible presence as a result. Weary local peasants billeted exhausted Red Guards, who demanded the peasants’ precious re­ serves of food.59 Locals like the women in the Figner-Stakhevich household feared that they would soon be caught in the crossfire of combat and that “everything would be destroyed.”60 These anxieties played out for Vera and her family as Ol´ga’s condition deteriorated. Exhausted from the physical and emotional demands of caring for her incapacitated sister, Vera tersely wrote to her aunt on 26 September, “Ol´ga died yesterday, after two horrible final days.”61 As her sisters mourned 56

 Ibid., d. 229, l. 26 (letter of Vera Figner to Elizaveta Viktorovna Kuprianova, 4 August 1919).

57

 Ibid., l. 27. This was a typical situation. As Daniel Brower writes, in an effort to avoid starvation “[h]ouseholds searched among their belongings for any item, such as linen or skirts, to the taste of peasant traders.” While Brower’s focus is the Soviet urban population, his point applies to the reality of life in Lugan. Daniel R. Brower, “The City in Danger: The Civil War and the Russian Urban Population,” in Koenker, Rosenberg, and Suny, The Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War, 72. 58

 RGALI f. 1185, op. 1, d. 229, l. 27ob. (letter of Vera Figner to Elizaveta Viktorovna Kuprianova, 4 August 1919). 59

 Ibid., l. 28 (letter of Vera Figner to Elizaveta Viktorovna Kuprianova, 28 August 1919). 60 61

 Ibid.

 Ibid., l. 32 (letter of Vera Figner to Elizaveta Viktorovna Kuprianova, 26 September 1919).

490 Lynne Hartnett

Olga’s loss, the threat from General Denikin escalated. By October, White and Red forces battled to control the larger area around Lugan, with Orel briefly captured by Denikin before it reverted to Bolshevik control. Denikin’s ouster offered only partial relief. For months after Denikin’s forces left the region, Lugan and the surrounding countryside remained isolated from the rest of the country, with the local postal department evacuated and railroad travel unavailable.62 In the midst of this most recent round of disruption, a new tragedy descended upon the Figner-Stakhevich home. This latest nightmare began on 12 December 1919 when Vera Stakhevich showed signs of illness. As a physi­ cian, the younger Vera treated many patients with typhus and it soon became clear that this was the affliction from which she was suffering. Although the elder Vera and her sister frantically tended to the ailing young mother and tried to stave off the disease that threatened the entire household, they were hampered by a lack of supplies and their physical isolation. Vera writes, “It is impossible to clean our clothes and disinfect the furniture in this out of the way place. I can only expect that we will all succumb to this disease.”63 Although Stakhevich was clearly the hardiest of the household, neither her infant son nor her elderly relatives contracted the illness. But sadly, she was not strong enough to survive. Vera Stakhevich died on her son’s first birthday, leaving him an orphan and both her mother and her aunt grief-stricken. Vera Stakhevich’s death began one of the most difficult periods of the Civil War for the remaining family members. Two days after her daughter passed away, Lidiia Stakhevich suffered a debilitating stroke that left her partially paralyzed and unable to speak. The 67-year-old Vera struggled to care for both her sister and her great-nephew. Although the family had a housekeeper and, as of early January, a nurse whom the sugar factory committee hired to tend to Lidiia and little Sergei, Vera found them of little use. She complained to friends that not only were both women so slow that Vera often took care of various chores herself,64 but also she suspected that one of these servants was robbing the family.65 With household items regularly disappearing at a time when bartering such goods often was the only means to obtain food, such thievery was serious indeed. Isolated geographically, with no access to well62

 Ibid., d. 241, l. 106 (letter of Vera Figner to Evgeniia Nikolaevna Sazhin, 30 March 1920). 63

 Ibid., d. 195, l. 1 (letter of Vera Figner to Iulii Savel´evich Gessen, 22 December 1919).

64 65

 Ibid., l. 4 (letter of Vera Figner to Iulii Savel´evich Gessen, 26 January 1920).

 Hoover Institution Archives, Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet State Microfilm Collection f. R-8419, op. 1, d. 10, l. 3 (letter of Vera Figner to the Political Red Cross in Moscow, 24 February 1920).



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placed friends in Moscow and with no available transportation out of Lugan, Vera became despondent.66 In a letter penned two weeks after her niece’s death and her sister’s stroke, Vera poured out her despair: “A catastrophe has befallen our house…. I was at the bottom in Shlisselburg but now I am on the brink… There are no words to describe what I am enduring.67 After two years of revolution and civil war, grief and fatigue threatened to overwhelm the legendary survivor of 20 years’ incarceration in the “Russian Bastille.” Spending seemingly endless days and sleepless nights as a fulltime caregiver to her incapacitated sister and infant nephew, with no access to support from friends or admirers, Vera admitted that she “planned to kill [her]self.”68 In one poignant letter, Vera told a friend that, “if someone does not come to save me within the next two to two and one-half months, I will have no choice but to simply die as the Romans did by severing their arteries.”69 Once mail services resumed in early 1920, she sent several letters like these to various friends. Vera understood that she could not engineer her own salvation, and that deliverance from her present conditions necessitated yet another geographical move. By this point in the Civil War, Vera demonstrated an awareness that her network of friends and political connections were essential to her survival as only they could arrange her transportation back to Moscow and Lidiia’s move to a sanitarium in Kiev, close to her other daughter, Tat´iana, in Borispol.70 Vera had ample reason to believe that such assistance would materialize. With mail service restored, the aging revolutionary received several letters from friends in the capital expressing their sympathy for her recent losses and asking how they could be of service to her.71 Aleksandra Shakol and Aleksandra Bakh, both friends of Vera’s, offered to go to Lugan and accom­ 66

 Ibid., l. 3.

67

 RGALI f. 1185, op. 1, d. 217, l. 3 (letter of Vera Figner to Valentina Iakovlevna Boro­ dino, 12 January 1920). 68

 Ibid., d. 241, l. 106 (letter of Vera Figner to Evgeniia Nikolaevna Sazhin, 30 March 1920).

69

 Ibid., d. 217, l. 3 (letter of Vera Figner to Valentina Iakovlevna Borodino, 12 January 1920), l. 4.

70

 Hoover Institution Archives, Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet State Microfilm Collection f. R-8419, op. 1, d. 10, l. 3 (letter of Vera Figner to the Political Red Cross in Moscow, 24 February 1920).

71

 Among these was a letter from the Political Red Cross in Moscow. Hoover Institution Archives, Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet State Microfilm Collection f. R-8419, op. 1, d. 10, l. 2 (letter from members of the Political Red Cross in Moscow to Vera Figner, 5 January 1920).

492 Lynne Hartnett

pany her back to either Petrograd or Moscow. When Shakol came down with typhoid fever en route, the task fell to Bakh. The logistics involved in Vera’s planned relocation to Moscow and Lidiia’s and Sergei’s to Kiev were quite complicated. As much as Vera wanted to leave Lugan, she feared the trip for herself and for her vulnerable relatives; she knew that the trio had to wait until warmer spring weather arrived to leave town. She writes, “The journey is awful; trains get stuck in the field; people freeze and are then thrown out of the trains.”72 To minimize the risks and discomforts of the trip, Vera asked the Political Red Cross to help Aleksandra Bakh make connections and obtain needed supplies. While she acknowledged that it was probably impossible to secure all of her requested items, she asked the members of the Red Cross to try to obtain soap, candles, matches, canned fuel,73 food, a fur coat and a bed pan.74 To minimize other challenges that the journey would pose, Bakh borrowed 10,000 rubles from the Political Red Cross to arrange for a private compartment to bring Vera back to Moscow.75 Lidiia Stakhevich, however, never left Lugan. She died on 7 March in the same room where her daughter passed away weeks before.76 Left alone with her great-nephew, a physically and emotionally exhausted Vera anxiously waited for Aleksandra Bakh to arrive in Lugan to accompany her back to Moscow, and for her niece Tat´iana to come to retrieve little Sergei. Bakh ar­ rived first. With her own salvation near at hand, Vera decided not to wait for her niece’s arrival. Placing her orphaned nephew in the care of neighbors, Vera boarded the railroad car procured with Red Cross funds and escaped the “complete nightmare”77 of the previous few months. The situation in Moscow was better than it had been when she left the capital the previous spring but after the trauma of the past year, Vera felt inclined towards continued support and so immediately moved in with the Bakh family. Things continued to improve for Vera when news reached her 72

 Hoover Institution Archives, Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet State Microfilm Collection f. R-8419, op. 1, d. 10, l. 4 (letter of Vera Figner to the Political Red Cross in Moscow, 24 February 1920).

73

 In Russian, sukhoi spirt—a solid heating and cooking fuel made from denatured alcohol in gel form. 74

 Hoover Institution Archives, Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet State Microfilm Collection f. R-8419, op. 1, d. 10, l. 4 (letter of Vera Figner to the Political Red Cross in Moscow, 24 February 1920).

75

 RGALI f. 1185, op. 1, d. 241, l. 107 (letter of Vera Figner to Evgeniia Nikolaevna Sazhina, 30 March 1920).

76

 Ibid.

77

 Ibid.



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that the cooperative publishing house Zadruga was about to publish her book The Prisoners of Shlisselburg (Shlissel´burgskie uzniki). She had finished the book in 1918 before the nadir of the Civil War and now that the book was going to press, Vera stood poised to receive a handsome royalty. With her own situation stabilized, Vera reached out to loved ones whom she believed she now could help, including the one remaining sibling who might still be alive. Just a week after she left Lugan, and still unsure if the Sazhins had survived the siege of Grozny, Vera wrote an emotional missive to her sister Evgeniia. “It has been two years since I have had any news of you,” she wrote, “and I do not know if you are alive or dead. In the time since we have been in contact, both Russia and our family have endured terrible ordeals.”78 After describing the deaths of Nikolai, Olga, Lidiia, and Lidiia’s daughter, Vera again confided that just weeks before she had been so distraught and overwhelmed that she planned to take her own life. She was spared by the rescue engineered by her friends. She contends that although “I have broken loose from the snare which held my soul in unquenchable desperation … our family is dying.”79 Vera was desperate to save Evgeniia if she could. With the current conditions in Grozny unknown, Vera promised her sister that if “money is needed in order to engineer your escape, I can send you some from my own funds and some from the coffers of the Political Red Cross.”80 Vera’s appeals to her sister bore fruit. Evgeniia and her husband Mikhail managed to survive the tumult of the Civil War in the Caucasus and moved to Moscow in June of 1920. When they arrived, Vera was recovering from a serious case of dysentery in a Moscow sanitarium. Physically debilitated from the tribulations of the previous years, Evgeniia joined her in the sanitarium.81 By the fall, both surviving Figner siblings were out of the hospital and living together in an apartment that Mikhail Sazhin obtained as a result of his work with the Central Archive Administration. As Vera relates in a letter to her niece Tat´iana (who had retrieved baby Sergei and brought him home to Borispol), their privations became a thing of the past once the extended family pooled their resources. With the income from her copious writings and the academic ration bestowed on both her and her brother-in-law, Mikhail Sazhin, by the Soviet government, Vera asserted that she and the Sazhins (who

78

 Ibid., l. 106.

79

 Ibid., l. 108.

80 81

 Ibid.

 Ibid., d. 195, l. 27 (letter of Vera Figner to Iulii Savel´evich Gessen, 17 August 1920).

494 Lynne Hartnett

continued to live together on and off until Evgeniia’s death in 1932) “lived like bourgeoisie”—a dramatic change from her life only a few months before.82 Conclusion For most Soviet citizens, recovery did not come as easily. Instead, escape from the dislocation and grief of the Civil War was unobtainable for millions of Russians, including several members of the Figner family who perished from the conditions of deprivation created by the conflict. To a great extent, because of the homogenizing effects of the suffering that ensued, the Civil War proved a greater tool of democratization than any decree that the Soviet government could issue. Hunger, disease, dislocation, and death pervaded society. While survival amidst such disastrous circumstances necessitated an active agency on the part of individuals, paradoxically its realization also demanded a collaborative effort. With a state system unable to provide the basic necessities of life, informal mutual assistance networks of friends and extended family members collectively pooled scarce resources and shared the few opportunities that materialized in order to maximize chances for survival. For a time, these opportunities often necessitated physically changing personal and familial circumstances by relocating to a different area of the war-torn country. As food supplies evaporated and disease seized the urban population, Russians took to the rails to find food and a respite from epidemics of cholera and typhus in the countryside. Yet as the Soviet state endeavored to conserve precious fuel and funds by limiting travel and the number of civilian trains in use as the war progressed, such prospects became increasingly rare and a growing number of Russians were forced to remain stationary and de­ pendent upon local conditions. Whereas in the early stages of the Civil War, countless Russians were caught up in the vortex of war created by the necessity and experience of movement and mobility, in the conflict’s later stages, train travel progressively became the exclusive preserve of those with the necessary political connections to secure a jealously guarded rail ticket from a Soviet or party official. Given her standing within the revolutionary community and the contacts that she retained among many individuals with political influence, Vera belonged to this relatively small cohort. As her experience in 1919 and 1920 demonstrated, this privileged status proved decisive to the survival of her and the few remaining members of her family.

82

 Ibid., op. 4, d. 18, ll. 10, 12 (letter of Vera Figner to Tat´iana Sergeevna Stakhevich, 12 October 1920). Vera notes that she received 10,000 rubles a month from the cooperative publishing house Zadruga, and she received 40,000 for one article from Golos minuv­ shego (ibid., 10).



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During the Russian Civil War Vera Figner successfully utilized her per­ sonal and professional networks and negotiated the space of the country, moving between cities, villages, and towns in an effort to dodge disease and procure food and provisions at a reasonable cost. Her ability to do so depended upon an active agency that was predicated upon mobility, adaptability, and the ability to exploit personal connections. Although the changing fortunes of this internecine conflict occasionally circumscribed these opportunities, Vera managed to physically endure these relatively limited periods of isolation until the aid and assistance that she needed could materialize. In this respect, in spite of her weakened health and advancing age, Vera demonstrated a pragmatism and versatility that allowed her to survive the Civil War and ulti­ mately to outlive all of her siblings, most of her contemporaries and many of her radical progeny. In the years between the Civil War and her death in 1942, Vera lived her life as a privileged non-partisan public figure in the Soviet Union. Although she never joined the Communist Party, she nevertheless maintained a public loyalty to the Soviet state and coupled her fate to that of her country. Given her status as a legendary revolutionary figure, Vera enjoyed certain informal privileges that the Soviet government did not bestow on the majority of its citizens. In spite of her position as a member of the Council of the Republic and an elected member of the Constituent Assembly, Vera’s perquisites began soon after the October Revolution and were clearly in play during the Civil War. Yet because they were informal and driven by personal connections that needed to be actively cultivated and manipulated rather than an official standing within the Communist Party or the Soviet government, there were limits to the prerogatives she enjoyed. Though her significance as a heralded revolutionary figure of the past proved sufficient to ensure her personal survival in the Civil War, it was not enough to save many of Vera’s loved ones. As a result, like countless other families across the Soviet Union, the Figner family experienced the Russian Civil War as a devastating period of loss and suffering in which personal and familial catastrophe mirrored the catastrophe that gripped the nation.

The Zenith of Russian Progressivism: The Home Front during World War I and the Revolution Joshua A. Sanborn

One of the dangers of the term home front is that it may suggest a certain uni­ formity (or at least regimentation) of experience and emotion among noncombatants in a modern total war. Fortunately, no one reading this stimulating collection of 20 essays will miss the great diversity of Russia’s experience of war and revolution. Gracing these pages are nurses, monks, morphine addicts, aging revolutionaries and zemstvo activists, Jews, Muslims, philanthropists, communards, and the wives of mobilized reservists, all of them struggling to survive and create meaning in their worlds. As these works amply demonstrate, lives changed rapidly during the years of catastrophe, and with them the very notion of “home front,” a term that increasingly failed to describe anything at all as civil war spread across the entire territory of the former Russian Empire. Though there is no uniformity, there are certain patterns of the war years that emerge from this volume that deserve further comment. One of the most significant, in my view, was the consistent way in which Progressivism structured the thinking, behavior, and organization of Russian social activists during the war years. It is a curious aspect of our historiography that Progressivism plays such a muted role in discussions of social politics in the final prerevolutionary and first postrevolutionary years. There are some good reasons for this. As Daniel Rodgers noted in his seminal study of the transatlantic discourse of Progressivism, the ideologues and social activists of the Progressive movement “never shared a common name” and could be found in many different political parties and movements of the day.1 There is also perhaps some question as to whether the term can be usefully applied east of the Oder, as Rodgers limited his analysis to North America and Western Europe. Adele Lindenmeyr has already noted this lacuna, asking (and answering in the af-

1

 Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 52. Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2016, 497–507.

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firmative) whether the Progressivism Rodgers described could be analyzed in the same terms in autocratic Russia.2 The biggest impediment to the study of Progressivism, however, has been the field’s recent fascination with the concept of “civil society,” another term that raises questions about the easy transferability of political terms and concepts across national borders. On the one hand, analyzing late impe­ rial Russia through the lens of civil society or “the public sphere” holds out the possibility for a greater understanding of the clash between “state” and “society” that contemporaries believed to be central to the political develop­ ment of the empire. On the other, as Joseph Bradley puts it, “the concepts of civil society and the public sphere, never easy to define in the first place, have been faulted in many national histories and cultural traditions of late for their Western ethnocentricity, basis in individualism and liberalism, and claims to universality.”3 Bradley’s response to this dilemma—an attempt to change the emphasis from “what did not happen to what did”4—seems appropriate here as well. What we discover in this volume is similar to what Bradley found with his study of voluntary associations. People who “framed the practice of science as a tool for the public good in order to promise practical solutions to a wide range of economic problems and social pathologies” found that they were not always irreconcilably alienated from the state but instead that, on occasion at least, their “goals and state goals were one and the same.”5 Though we can see significant congruence between “civil society” and the Progressive movement, they are not the same things. In the most substantial work on Progressivism in Russia, Ilya Gerasimov provides a useful definition of the phenomenon. Progressivism meant both participation in an international, transatlantic discourse about social politics and a “technocratic approach to solving the global problems of society.”6 This technocratic approach 2

 Adele Lindenmeyr, “Building Civil Society One Brick at a Time: People’s Houses and Worker Enlightenment in Late Imperial Russia,” Journal of Modern History 84, 1 (2012): 2. 3

 Joseph Bradley, “Subjects into Citizens: Societies, Civil Society, and Autocracy in Tsarist Russia,” American Historical Review 107, 4 (2002): 1095. 4

 Ibid., 1105.

5

 Ibid., 1101, 1110.

6

 Ilya V. Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia: Rural Professionals and Self-Organization, 1905–30 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 18. Gerasimov is not the only scholar to consider the intersection between “Progressivism” and “civil society,” but he foregrounds it most explicitly. See, for instance, Peter Holquist, “’In Accord with State Interests and the People’s Wishes’: The Technocratic Ideology of Imperial Russia’s Resettlement Administration,” Slavic Review 69, 1 (Spring 2010): 151–79.

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was attractive prior to the war in part because it could transcend entrenched political conflicts. “Progressivism,” he continued, “advanced a more efficient scheme of ‘network mobilization’ as a system of multiple campaigns for individual causes. This ‘apolitical politics’ implied a de facto different concept of citizenship, based not on guaranteed formal belonging to the enfranchised political community, but on optional and active participation in a public self-mobilization campaign.”7 This differs from civil society not only because Progressives did not necessarily link civic belonging to formal enfranchisement, but also, more importantly, because studying Progressive politics does not imply or require “a common essentialist approach toward civil society as an actual ‘thing,’ a formal institution that can be measured against some normative ideal.”8 In short, Gerasimov suggests (and I agree) that it may be more fruitful to ask not whether a particular individual or group is a member of an (imagined) civil society, but whether one acts according to Progressive ideals. Doing so shifts the focus from social belonging to political practice, as some of the most interesting works on Russian civil society had already begun to do.9 Studying Progressivism during the Great War adds another level of com­ plexity. First, for many Progressives, the outbreak of hostilities dashed hopes of political reform; the “collapse of the Progressive social agenda seemed at first absolute and universal” in 1914.10 It soon became apparent, however, that the “collapse” of the Progressive agenda in 1914 was instead a reorientation. In the United States, “social progressives were brought en masse into government and quasi-government service,”11 and the same phenomenon occurred in Russia. Second, the very term progressive became exceptionally prominent in the war years after the creation of the self-proclaimed “Progressive Bloc” in 1915. That group drew members from every political party except those on the extreme right and left wings, consolidated support in the Duma, the State Council, and the Council of Ministers, and found allies outside of the 7

 Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform, 18.

8

 Ibid., 22.

9

 One can read in this light Laura Engelstein’s comment that “[i]n struggling to pro­ duce what they thought of as the civil society they lacked, Russians de facto enacted its possibility at home” and Peter Holquist’s observation that “[a] parastatal complex developed under the aegis of the state, without the prior development of a civil society autonomous from it.” Laura Engelstein, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 81; and Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 21. 10

 Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 273–74.

11

 Ibid., 283.

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political class as well. “Progressive” could mean many different things in 1915: commitment to the cause of social equality, membership in the Progressive Party (one of the largest centrist parties in the Fourth Duma), or “Progressive” in the sense defined above. Much work still needs to be done to tease out these various strands of “Progressivism,” but it is plain that though these categories overlapped, they were not coterminous.12 Not all members of the Progressive Bloc were “Progressive,” in other words. But it bears noting that one of the few legislative achievements of the Progressive Bloc was the passage of an income tax law, a key plank of fiscal policy for Pro­gressive activists worldwide.13 Progressivism mattered to the historical actors we study both discursively and in legislative program, and the fact that no one challenged the label of “Progressive Bloc” at the time demonstrates “the wide spread of Progressivist political discourse and imagery in Late Imperial Russia.”14 The articles in this collection show conclusively that Progressivism came of age in the Great War in Russia, just as it did in many other places. It had a startling early success when the government rashly decided to impose “dry laws” at the very outset of the war. Anti-alcohol campaigns were a hallmark of Progressivism internationally. Reformers identified a social problem, located its source in an irrational habit of the “masses,” and promoted specific state policies to remedy the problem and improve the welfare of society as a whole. The anti-alcohol campaign backfired badly in Russia (as it did elsewhere). Many historians have pointed to the disastrous effects of Prohibition upon state finances (revenue from alcohol before the war accounted for 28 percent of all state revenue),15 but Igor Narsky and Yulia Khmelevskaya argue here that the policy was a failure on its own terms as well. Far from reducing alcoholism in Russian society, the Progressive anti-alcohol campaign (spearheaded by a coalition of technocratic doctors, social activists, and military officers) in fact contributed to an expansion of alcohol’s role in Russian culture. A country that had been rather average in terms of alcohol consumption by European standards became one in which the “drinking culture became more radical” 12

 See here too Ilya V. Gerasimov, “What Russian Progressives Expected from the War,” in The Empire and Nationalism at War, ed. Eric Lohr, Vera Tolz, Alexander Semyonov, and Mark von Hagen (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2014), 189–216.

13

 Michael F. Hamm, “Liberal Politics in Wartime Russia: An Analysis of the Progres­ sive Bloc,” Slavic Review 33, 3 (September 1974): 459; and Yanni Kotsonis, States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Union (Toronto: University of To­ronto Press, 2014), especially 13–14.

14

 Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform, 19.

15

 Kotsonis, States of Obligation, 217, 235; Peter Gatrell, Russia’s First World War: A Social and Economic History (Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2005), 136.

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and in which Russian men articulated a “modern ‘right to drink.’” While Narsky and Khmelevskaya are careful to note that no direct causation can be established between the dry laws and the more radical drinking culture that developed in the Great War and Civil War, their analysis of the expansion of moonshining and of the class conflict that developed around alcohol con­ sumption show that the Progressive effort was counterproductive at best. We can see a similar pattern at work in Pavel Vasilyev’s excellent essay on drug abuse and drug policy between 1914 and 1924. Drug abuse was defined as a social problem and then was rapidly criminalized in increasingly draconian ways. Again, the intersection of the war and Progressivism is crit­ ical to understanding these developments. The intellectual framework for un­ derstanding the issue of drug abuse was Progressive in that it combined the moral and the medical, and it predated the war. Above all, reformers shared the basic Progressive concern with the effects of modern industrial capitalism on “decadence” and “psychic and physical degeneration.” But if drug abuse had been birthed by capitalism, it matured through war. Most notably, the vastly increased demand for narcotics to treat war casualties led to an expansion of supply that went not only to addicted invalids (and the medical staffs who treated them) but also throughout society as a whole. Intriguingly, Vasilyev also argues that morphine, cocaine, and opium were something akin to an import substitution for alcohol, especially in urban areas. Though the anti-drug campaign took a different trajectory from the anti-alcohol campaign (leading from unease to criminalization between 1914 and 1924 instead of the reverse), the ideas and policy makers involved were largely the same. If the war allowed Progressives to flourish, it also changed Progressivism. As Gerasimov argued, one of the prewar appeals of the movement (again, not just in Russia but more generally) was its ability to transcend “politics” through issue-based self-mobilization campaigns that engaged the state without being a part of it. We see ample evidence in this collection that these self-mobilization campaigns flowered during the course of the war. Some of these were campaigns linked to new wartime conditions, such as the organizations formed with patrons from the imperial family to provide succor to invalids and refugees. As Jude Richter highlights, these new committees, formed “from above” in Petrograd, quickly branched downward, building roots in provinces and districts far away from the center of power (and in many cases from the fighting as well). More commonly, however, existing institutions responded to the national crisis by expanding their work and by linking their (long-standing) priorities to wartime needs. This combination of the pursuit of institutional self-interest and a strong desire to comfort the afflicted was visible not only among the (mostly) secular “social” organizations but also in conservative religious circles. As Scott Kenworthy shows, monas-

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ticism showed tremendous vitality during the war, especially among women. Despite a reduction in income, most monasteries served the war effort either by providing chaplains for the army or by establishing infirmaries on their grounds as part of the larger growth of hospitals and clinics during the war years. All of these organizations engaged in public “self-mobilization,” and it was only after the February Revolution that the Provisional Government established a Ministry of State Welfare in an effort to regularize and rationalize the provision of aid to needy citizens under a single state umbrella. Citizens self-mobilized not only to ease the pain of the war, but also to actively and patriotically contribute to the Russian army’s morale and material supplies. There is clear evidence for this in Matthias Neumann’s piece on chil­ dren and patriotic war culture. Neumann argues that despite significant worry on the part of leading pedagogues “concerned about the harmful effects of the emerging war culture on children,” such a war culture did in fact develop. Just as significantly, Neumann suggests that areas nearer the battle front (such as Kyiv) witnessed an even more explosive growth of a juvenile “war culture” because of the greater presence of the war itself. That presence was not benign, as the destruction of war was evident to Kyivans very early on. Nevertheless, it seems that children (much like their adult compatriots) were able both to fear the war and to express belligerent patriotism. Not all of this “self-mobilized” patriotism was focused on violence, however, as Christine Ruane’s revelatory essay on the “Kitchen Gardening Campaign” makes clear. Food supply was an important issue throughout the war, of course, and it played an even more critical role in the events of 1917. It was also an area in which Progressives were heavily involved, as many studies of key food supply bureaucracies have shown.16 Ruane’s study is a terrific look at the issue from a different angle. There are many interesting directions of research suggested by this essay, in­ cluding the key point that the forming of a huge and hungry army required the development of “industrial food processing” on a scale not yet seen in the empire. Enthusiastic agronomists had been around for a long time, but the conjunction of the forced autarky of the war years, the scale of change needed in the food industry, and the rise of the Progressives to power made something like a “Kitchen Gardening Campaign”—aimed not only at getting through the war years but also at permanently transforming farming in Russia—almost overdetermined. Here too we can see the imaginative and practical failures of the Progressive movement. Not only did the food supply system collapse at the end of the day, but one can also see the depths of the culture clash that occurred on a daily basis around these modernizing movements. No matter how much we may sympathize with the technocratic urge to rationalize and 16

 See here Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution; and Lars Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

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“modernize” agriculture, surely we must save a little sympathy for those poor wounded peasant-soldiers housed in urban infirmaries who formed the captive audience for Elagin’s finger-wagging denunciations of “traditional” agriculture. Progressivism was equally strong among the scholars and scientists described in the suite of articles by Anastasiya Tumanova, Joseph Bradley, Eduard Kolchinsky, and Sharon Kowalsky. Taken together, Tumanova, Bradley, and Kolchinsky provide an overlapping and mutually supporting account of the key scholarly and scientific associations during the years of war and revolution. Tumanova highlights the scale of this scholarly mobilization well: “[the projects sponsored by the Free Economic Society, MOSKh, and the Chuprov Society] included charity appeals for aiding wounded and disabled soldiers, and the population living at or near the front; measures against economic disruption and price increases for industrial goods and food; efforts to aid the peasant economy … and monitoring and modeling of the nation’s economic life.” These were efforts that were “national in scale,” and they soon got caught up in national politics. The vision of sacred union that had informed the early phase of mobilization gave way in 1915 to increasingly strident and desperate criticisms of the government’s management of the war effort. With the destruction of the sacred union, the prewar demands and desires for political liberalization returned with added urgency. Bradley points out that many of these organizations disappeared quite quickly after the Bolsheviks took power, with only 10 percent of voluntary societies present in Petrograd in early 1917 surviving until 1920. Like Tumanova, Bradley focuses on a few of the most important societies in his analysis, including (like her) the Free Economic Society, but also a variety of other organizations, among them the remarkably important Pirogov Society of physicians, which helped organize resistance to the autocracy in the darkest days of 1916 and then suffered suffocating persecution at the hands of the Bolsheviks. Kolchinsky focuses on one organization in the midst of the Great War—the Imperial Academy of Sciences. The “mobilization of intellect” has been an important theme for Europeanist scholars of World War I for many years now, and it is helpful to have Kolchinsky’s summary of events in Russia here.17 It is a story that will sound familiar to many readers aware of that broader lit17

 For overviews, see Andrew Donson, “Schools and Universities,” in 1914–1918 Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel et al., doi: http://dx.doi. org/10.15463/ie1418.10346 (accessed 8 October 2015); and Angela Schwarz, “Science and Technology (Germany),” in Daniel et al., 1914–1918 Online, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.15463/ ie1418.10413 (accessed 8 October 2015). For a thoughtful monograph on the subject, see Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers during the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

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erature. Some professors and scientists were proud of their cosmopolitanism and resistant to purges of their colleagues along ethnic lines, but many others were willing participants in the wave of patriotic nationalization, whether in the production of propaganda, the (re)writing of history, or work in defense industries. There was, indeed, no practical contradiction between maintaining a cosmopolitan attitude and fierce patriotism, and many scholars partook of both. One of Kolchinsky’s most interesting points is that it was the years of war that saw the move towards “Big Science” and the corresponding valorization of scientific and technical pursuits at the expense of humanistic ones. Sharon Kowalsky studies a particular group of these scholars and scien­ tists, the Russian criminologists who eagerly engaged with the transnational debate regarding the relationship between war and crime. Scholars like E. N. Tarnovskii, who studied historical data to suggest that short wars had lit­ tle impact on crime while long ones “influenced crime significantly,” could only become more anxious as the Great War proceeded. They predicted that the number of soldiers (and civilians) with mental illness would increase and warned that more generally, in the words of one postwar criminologist, war “broke down the nervous system, weakened mental control centers, under­ mined belief in the inviolability of human life, and made it easier to end it.” In a typical Progressive fashion, these criminologists not only presented sta­ tistical data, they provided policy recommendations. Again these (largely postrevolutionary) efforts were failures. Kowalsky focuses here on family law and domestic violence, where she observes that the “social and legal transfor­ mations of the family initiated after the revolution contributed to rather than decreased the commission of family violence.” The study of gender in the period of the Great War is also well established, but the authors here extend these investigations even further. Kowalsky shows that the apparent increase in female criminality was a major issue that criminologists tried to explain. Ruane has interesting things to say about the gendering of particular forms of agricultural practice. Liudmila Bulgakova and Susan Grant each focus on the study of particular groups of women both as a means of conducting social history and of reconsidering the key gender questions of the war. Bulgakova demonstrates that gender ex­ pectations played a large role in the understanding and treatment of soldier wives during the war. Long seen as victims (and historically as outcasts), they were the “beneficiaries” of victimhood at the outset of the war, when the government implemented its 1912 law providing for allowances for families of mobilized reservists. Before long, however, ever greater numbers of citizens felt that they too were entitled to state support, and this only strengthened the development of a welfare state in Russia (as the war did across the continent). Susan Grant takes on the daunting task of investigating nurses during the

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Civil War. While good work on nurses in the Great War has been done (most recently by Laurie Stoff), there is far less on the Civil War period.18 She finds that whatever cohesion (institutional or otherwise) nurses enjoyed during World War I rapidly disappeared after 1917. Nursing communities were dis­ banded, schools were taken over by the Commissariat of Public Health, and nurses themselves were overwhelmed by waves of epidemics and combat across a wide front. Three essays address the issue of ethnic issues and groups during the war. Polly Zavadivker and Reinhard Nachtigal study the two major pariah groups of the war—Jews and Germans—while Norihiro Naganawa treats the issue of Muslim philanthropy in the Volga-Urals region. Zavadivker and Nachtigal fill in more of the picture sketched by many recent authors who have noted the “nationalization” of the Russian Empire in the war years, a nationalization that simultaneously persecuted particular groups and provided them the impetus and resources to develop even greater communal solidarity.19 Naganawa takes a slightly different approach with his Muslim subjects, arguing that the Russian “confessional state,” alive and well in 1914, was utterly transformed by the war. The Russian imperial state, tied together for centuries through loyalty to the tsar and participation in a multiconfessional realm, made Muslim patriotism increasingly difficult when the state nationalized so dramatically after 1914. Put another way, the “self-mobilization” so important to Progressive movements such as the one that Muslim philanthropists participated in (note here Naganawa’s observation that “fundraising activities that occurred outside mosques profited the charities the most”), moved them away from expressions of loyalty to the Russian state as surely as scholarly self-mobilization took the physicians of the Pirogov Society and many scientists in the Imperial Academy of Sciences into opposition at the same time. Whatever else Muslim philanthropists learned about wartime society, they learned that survival of all sorts (personal and institutional) depended upon the strengthening of networks outside of the state. This “network” focus was one of the aspects of Progressivism highlighted by Gerasimov, and we can see it in many of the essays in this volume. Most notably, the two microhistories of the Civil War by Lynne Hartnett and Mark Conliffe show how webs of interpersonal relationships often made the vital difference between life and death. Even Vera Figner, revolutionary hero, on several occasions had to contact friends or family members to get her a train ticket or to house and 18

 Laurie Stoff, Russia’s Sisters of Mercy and the Great War: More than Binding Men’s Wounds (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015).

19

 See especially Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

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feed her in difficult times. Conliffe similarly argues that Aleksandr Nesvitskii’s journal is full of records of personal connections that serve to demonstrate (and create) a sense of community in Poltava. Similarly, Vladimir Korolenko created and mediated community through his charitable labors. These men were, in Conliffe’s words “well known and progressive,” but they appear also to have been Progressive in many important respects. Finally, one of the most interesting aspects of the chapters of this book is the argument made by several authors that space is important to mobilization. This is not a new observation, but it is an important one. Many years ago, Jane Dawson argued that one of the key levers of power of the late Soviet regime was its monopoly on “mobilizational resources,” including the space in which groups could mobilize,20 and we can see the development of the relationship between space and mobilization in the formative years of Soviet power clearly in these essays too. Scholarly societies fought hard to keep control of their buildings and rooms, for instance. The pieces by Lynn Sargeant, Andy Willimott, and Yoshiro Ikeda are particularly interesting in this regard. Sargeant’s essay evokes the passion that physical space invoked among the partisans of “People’s Houses.” Buildings are expensive propositions, but the experience of the Khar´kov Literary Society showed that the costs were worth it, as it fulfilled its promise to become a center of community life. Pro­ gressive activists hoped that these venues would draw workers away from the disruptive violence of taverns by providing a space for tea drinking, reading, concerts, lectures, and theater. Even if new People’s Houses did not eliminate alcoholism, they certainly provided a space in which public-spirited activists could perform their civic dreams. By the time of the war, the cause of adult education was foremost in their minds, and the upsurge in interest in literacy and global issues on the part of citizens dovetailed nicely with their aims. There was perhaps no better example of the importance of this sort of institution than the attempt of N. A. Maklakov to bring the Houses under the patronage of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1915, an effort that both flattered the activists and angered them, as the ministry was unsurprisingly prone to “attempt to micromanage affairs and … to limit the involvement of zemstvos and cooperatives.” The communes described by Andy Willimott can be seen, perhaps sur­ prisingly, as a parallel development—spaces in which activists could “selfmobilize” in line with goals of the state and society but on their own terms. The Bolsheviks welcomed the support but instinctively (and correctly) per­ ceived these independent spaces as threatening. “At a time when both the Komsomol and the party were concerned about their ability to stimulate the 20

 Jane I. Dawson, Eco-Nationalism: Anti-Nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 13.

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mass participation necessary for the construction of communism in Russia, the urban communes were not an unwelcome development, but de facto inclusion of these groups within official operations was sometimes seen as a step too far.” They thus sought to discipline them in the same spirit as Maklakov had done with the People’s Houses, with varied results, at least at first. Ikeda’s essay invokes two linked but separate spaces: Russian health resorts and the (Russian) natural world. The state had become involved in promoting health resorts even before the war, and nationalist discourse framed the imperial landscape as a rejuvenating force. Thus it was not totally surprising that “[i]n Russian public discourse during the war, health resorts came to represent the curative power of the homeland’s bountiful nature.” Ikeda is wise to note that this formulation “naturally led to a vital question: Who may participate in this space?” The answer is that, largely due to the massive influx of war casualties, the upper-class health resorts became a space in which the lower classes could also take advantage of the national forces of renewal. At the same time, the war, by increasing demand (and by fore­ closing the option of visiting foreign resorts) also led to the transformation of those resorts, a task important enough that the busy minister of war, V. A. Sukhomlinov, felt compelled to lobby for the expansion of sanatoria less than two weeks after the declaration of war. Tellingly, one of the key aspects of this expansion and democratization of health resorts was the decision to house patients in barracks, a neat physical representation of what wartime Progressivism meant on the ground. Those who have read these very stimulating chapters already know that there is far more to them than the Progressive angle I have described here. It is, nevertheless, remarkable that in an extremely diverse, indeed fractured, pol­ ity we find Progressivism establishing itself as a central discourse in so many places and in so many ways during the Great War and then dwindling away in the years of revolution and civil war, in part because of the very real political failures of the Progressive movement. Both the autocracy, most notably in its rebuff of the Progressive Bloc and persecution of the “public organizations” in 1915–16, and the Bolshevik regime distrusted the “self-mobilization” of citizens in networks not fully governed by the state bureaucracy, and the Progressive urge petered out. But its presence, especially between 1914 and 1917, should be taken into account in our consideration of those transformative years, not least because it left concrete legacies to the early Soviet regime in the form of centralized state welfare, institutionalized science, and the general belief that scientific attempts to solve social problems were both appropriate and necessary.

Notes on Contributors

Joseph Bradley is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Liudmila Bulgakova is a Senior Researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Mark Conliffe is a Professor in the Department of German and Russian at Willamette University, Oregon. Susan Grant is a former Irish Research Council/Marie Curie COFUND Post­ doctoral Fellow at University College Dublin and the University of Toronto, and currently a Lecturer in Modern European History, Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom. Lynne Hartnett is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Villanova University, Pennsylvania. Anthony Heywood is a Professor of History at the University of Aberdeen. Yoshiro Ikeda is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology at the University of Tokyo, Japan. Scott M. Kenworthy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Religion at Miami University, Ohio. Yulia Y. Khmelevskaya is a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Cultural History Studies at the South Ural State University in Chelyabinsk, Russia. Eduard I. Kolchinsky is the Director of the St. Petersburg Branch of the S. I. Vavilov Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg. Sharon A. Kowalsky is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Texas A&M University–Commerce.

Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution 1914–22, Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution. Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2015, 509–11.

510 Notes on Contributors

Adele Lindenmeyr is the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a Professor in the Department of History at Villanova University, Pennsylvania. David MacLaren McDonald is the Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Professor of Russian History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Reinhard Nachtigal is a Research Fellow in Eastern European History at Freiburg University, Germany. Norihiro Naganawa is an Associate Professor at the Slavic and Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University, Japan. Igor V. Narsky is the Director of the Center for Cultural History Studies and Professor of History at the South Ural State University in Cheliabinsk, Russia. Matthias Neumann is a Senior Lecturer in the School of History at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. Christopher Read is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. Jude C. Richter is the Social Media Community Manager and a Historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. Christine Ruane is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Joshua A. Sanborn is a Professor in the Department of History at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania. Lynn M. Sargeant is a Professor in the Department of History and the Associate Dean for Student Relations in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at California State University–Fullerton. John W. Steinberg is a Professor of History at Austin Peay State University, Tennessee. Anastasiya S. Tumanova is a Professor at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Pavel Vasilyev is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany.

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Peter Waldron is a Professor in the School of History at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. Andy Willimott is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Polly Zavadivker is a Research Fellow at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania.

Figure 1. Poster by K. Klever: Society for Aid to Victims of War, Oak Leaf Fundraising Day to Aid Refugees and Child War Victims, 30–31 August 1915, Moscow.

Figure 2. Poster by Sergei A. Vinogradov: Help Disabled Soldiers, 25–26 March 1916.

Figure 3. Postcard of Vladivostok People’s House..

Figure 4. Collecting contributions for the Red Cross, Petrograd, 1915. Photo courtesy of Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotodokumentov.

Figure 5. Poster: Collecting for Soldiers in the City. Courtesy of Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotodokumentov.

Figure 6. Poster by Avram E. Arkhipov: Russian Red Cross Fundraising Drive, December 1914, Moscow

Figure 7. Second Nurses Detachment Comprised of Workers of a Kostroma textile factory on their way to the front, 1919. Source: Rabotnitsa, no. 4 (1933): 7.

Figure 8. Children’s festival at Sokolniki Park, Moscow, Summer 1915. Source: Zhenskoe delo, no. 16 (1915): 4–7.

Figure 9. Postcards from the World War I period (clockwise): “In young hands the pile of shirts for our heroic warriors grows”; “Be patient Cossack and you will become an ataman”; “A sister’s consolation for us on the battlefield.”

Figure 10. Postcard from the World War I period: “The noise of the cannon doesn’t cease. The enemy is noticeably weakening.”

Figure 11. “Today’s Children’s Games: Execution of a German Spy.” Source: Niva, no. 51 (1915): 965.

Figure 12. Poster by V. Lebedev: Help Soldiers’ Children. The Society to Combat Child Mortality, 9–10 November 1914.

Figure 13. Soldiers’ Wives in the Office of the 3rd Municipal Guardianship, Petrograd, February 1916. Photo by Karl Bulla. Tsentral´nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotodokumentov, D3388.

Figure 14. Il´ia Repin, Portrait of Writer Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko (1912). https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Korolenko#/media/File:Vladimir_Korolenko.jpg

Figure 15. The Figner family, 1915. Seated (right to left): E. N. Figner-Sazhina, V. N. Figner, M. N. Figner (niece of V. N. Figner), L. N. Figner-Stakhevich, T. N. Figner (niece of V. N. Figner), O. N. Figner-Florovskaia. Standing (right to left): N. N. Figner with his wife, R. E. Figner, P. N. Figner with his wife A. I. Figner, T. S. Stakhevich (niece of V. N. Figner), M. P. Sazhin.