“Did the First World War lead to…?” Seeing War and Revolution in a Continuum

It’s straightforward to ascribe a causal significance to the First World War in leading to Russia’s revolution of 1917. Follow the steps: war led to food shortages; which led to protests; which led to revolution.

In the past 20 odd years, however, something rather strange has happened amongst some historians of the Russian Revolution. For these historians, 1917 stopped being the important date. Or rather, it stopped being the only important date. And it all has to do with war.

As Peter Holquist phrased it in his enormously influential Making War, Forging Revolution, “war and revolution […] were not two discreet events but rather points along a common continuum.” War began for Russia in the summer of 1914 with the Great War. It didn’t end until at least 1921 with the end of the Russian Civil War. The revolutionary year 1917 was nestled within, and part of, that continued period of war.

This joined-up approach to war and revolution doesn’t just call on us to rethink where each is positioned in time. It also demands we reconsider the causal relationship between war and revolution. In this post, I’ll raise three observations historians have made about the “continuum of crisis” and how it not just led to, but shaped key aspects of, the Russian Revolution and subsequent Civil War.

Social Unrest and Political Culture

It is commonly taught that the outbreak of World War One led to a surge in patriotic sentiment. And in part this is true. Patriotic demonstrations broke out in major Russian cities, while the State Duma notoriously agreed to dissolve itself in order to support the war effort. In a rather absurd episode, the Germanic-sounding “St. Petersburg” was renamed to the more Slavic “Petrograd”.

Yet Joshua Sanborn points out that patriotism was just one of three main responses to war amongst Russians, “by far the most prevalent” of which was “a private response to the danger and disruption of war. The most common sound in Russia was that of men, women, and children weeping.” The other main response, rather alarmingly for the Tsarist regime, was “active public opposition”, including vodka riots and violent disorder.

In the war years after 1914, public disorder intensified. Anger over wartime conditions is a familiar story, given the outbreak of revolution in February 1917, which began with dissenting women and workers in the Russian capital, Petrograd. But its spread was widely evident even before this.

In 1916, the attempt to conscript Muslims in Central Asia sparked virtual civil war in the rear. Ethnic conflict would remain widespread throughout 1917 and the Civil War. Meanwhile, social historians including Sarah Badcock have pointed out the disruption of marginalised groups including soldiers’ wives, who raised angry protests against the inadequate state support for military families. Soldiers’ wives continued to forcefully raise their voices throughout the revolution of 1917 and later.

In popular culture, wartime images of “the enemy” also bled into revolutionary politics. Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii contend that "total war demanded total enemies”, encouraging forces on left and right to see "dark forces" threatening the nation and revolution. This, of course, echoed earlier fears of disloyal civilians in the First World War undermining the war effort (see below).

State Economic Intervention

Less dramatically, but arguably more profoundly, the role of the state was transformed and expanded.

Like all European warring powers, public organisations and economic bodies were entwined with the war effort. In 1915, Russian industrialists founded War Industries Committees to promote war production amidst a catastrophic shortage of munitions.

Voluntary self-mobilisation of industry was soon superseded, however, by forceful intervention in the economy by the Russian state. Historians of the wartime state and economy, including Lars Lih and Peter Holquist, emphasise that the challenges of managing food supply fed into a growing anti-capitalist and sentiment that favoured economic regulation and planning.

A wartime ideology of state control pointed the way towards the Bolsheviks’ “War Communism” in the Civil War, which, replete with forced grain requisitioning and rationing, was weaponised for the purposes of class war. (In the longer term, it could be seen as a point of origin for Soviet-era state planning in the 1920s and later.) Its roots, though, lay in the policies of the Tsarist government of the First World War.

Nationalism and Empire

War also encouraged the growth of nationalism, something which would both prove fatal to the old Russian Empire and formative to the Soviet Union that succeeded it.

Russian nationalism flourished in often ugly forms. As Eric Lohr notes, measures targeting non-Russian “enemy” civilians and suspect Tsarist subjects contributed to an aggressive Russian chauvinism. These ran from detention and expropriation to, at their most extreme, mass deportations targeting especially Germans (variously defined) and Jews, both suspected of aiding the enemy.

Anti-Jewish measures spilled over into grisly army-led pogroms, something that would be repeated on a devastating scale in the Civil War from 1918. Meanwhile, deportation of suspect civilian populations would be adopted and repurposed by the Bolsheviks in their campaign of “decossackisation” targeting Cossacks during the Civil War..

Wartime mobilisation encouraged a popular sense of national identity. Amongst Russia’s supposedly localist peasants, Aaron Retish notes war strengthened connections to the state and encouraged people to see themselves as active citizens. Paradoxically, the experience of wartime mobilisation also strengthened national identities amongst non-Russians. During the revolution of 1917, the nationalist aspirations of many of these groups progressed from demands for autonomy to full independence.

This wave of nationalism presented the Bolsheviks with a problem. As Marxists, having seized power in the name of the working class in October 1917, they were forced to come to terms with traditionally un-Marxist ideas of nationalism. Terry Martin notes, while Lenin (and Stalin) had taken the question of nationalities seriously before 1917, “the unexpected strength of nationalism as a mobilizing force during the revolution and civil war greatly surprised and disturbed him.”

By the 1920s, the Bolsheviks would commit to a policy of not just accepting, but actively promoting, non-Russian national identities. They remained fundamentally opposed (in most ways, at least) to Great Russian nationalism and chauvinism.

Key Considerations for Teaching

1. Point out the obvious (but often overlooked) fact that the Revolution of 1917 was temporally located within a continued period of war. Russia had gone to war in 1914; war would not end until 1921.
2. It's worth reframing the simple casual relationship between war and revolution, in which the former led to the latter due to growing public dissent. The relationship was actually much more complex.
3. War encouraged the spread of violence not just at the front, but also within Russia, from attacks on certain ethnic groups such as Germans and Jews to violent cultural imagery of "the enemy". 
4. War was profoundly destabilising from the very start. Whatever the patriotic sentiment of many in the Russian Empire, many also expressed shock, dismay, and resentment well before February 1917 and the start of revolution. 
5. War was also formative, in the sense that it led to new ways of ruling in Russia. It would have a deep and long-lasting impact on Civil War Russia and the Soviet Union well beyond 1918 (and 1921).

Potential Enquiry Questions

How could these historiographical developments be captured in the classroom? Here are a few ideas for some enquiry (or single-lesson) questions.

• How did “Russians” actually respond to war?
• How did war shape “Russia’s” revolution?
• Did war lead to revolution, or revolution lead to war?
• Why did war not end in 1917 (or 1918)?
• Why do some historians question the importance of 1917?
• Were Bolshevik policies a product of ideology or war?
• Why did the origins of War Communism lie in the First World War?

Further Reading

Sarah Badcock, Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History, Cambridge University Press (2007)

Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917, Yale University Press (1999)

Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis, Harvard University Press (2002)

Lars Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921, University of California Press (1990)

Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign Against Enemy Aliens during World War I, Harvard University Press (2003)

Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939, Cornell University Press (2001)

Aaron Retish, Russia's Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914-1922, Cambridge University Press (2008)

Joshua Sanborn, "The Mobilization of 1914 and the Question of the Russian Nation: A Reexamination", Slavic Review 59 (2000)

Jonathan Smele, The "Russian" Civil Wars, 1916-1926: Ten Years that Shook the World, Oxford University Press (2016)