The February Revolution Reconsidered: Part 1, A Violent Revolution

In my last post, I challenged two myths of Russia’s 1917 February Revolution which removed Tsar Nicholas II from power: that it was “spontaneous” and “leaderless”.

Over the next two posts, I’ll put forward two rather different interpretations. Both are commonly overlooked when teaching the Russian Revolution. Both, however, deserve serious attention.

In this first post, I’ll examine the case for the February Revolution being a violent event. This directly challenges a common myth that February was peaceful, especially when compared the previous outbreaks of revolutionary unrest, such as 1905’s Bloody Sunday massacre or the 1912 Lena Goldfields massacre.

In fact, February 1917 witnessed considerable violence. This took several forms, including killings of protestors; bloody reprisals against military officers and police; public disorder and mob justice; and iconoclasm.

Comrade Stalin, Destroyer of Nations? Approaching the Complexities of Soviet Nationalism(s) in the 1930s

Given the avowed internationalism of the communist movement, it’s surprising how favourably Soviet politicians viewed the idea of nationalism.

As I’ve previously written, in the early 1920s the Soviet Communist Party had decided – after much internal wrangling – to embark on a policy of promoting national identity amongst the non-Russian peoples of the USSR. National cultures, including language, dress, and literature, would now be promoted amongst non-Russian peoples, especially inside their own designated territories within the USSR. Non-Russians would be actively promoted as Communist cadres within the Soviet state.

This policy reversed the old Tsarist policy of Russification, in which Russian cultural and ethnic identity was imposed on non-Russian ethnicities in an imperialist attempt to assimilate and control. It also reversed much Marxist thinking which had anticipated that, with the construction of socialism, national identities would wane and be superseded by class.

From the 1930s, however, important aspects of these policies appeared to be shifting. Our school textbooks commonly indicate a swing away from the promotion of minority, non-Russian nationalisms, and back towards the kind of Greater Russian chauvinism seen under the Tsars.

According to one textbook, “Stalinist policy in the 1930s veered towards greater centralisation and less tolerance of the ethnic groups [of the USSR] as he [Stalin] sought to create a single ‘Soviet identity’. Nationalism meant Russian nationalism and the leaders of the different republics that formed the USSR were purged as ‘bourgeois nationalists’ if they deviated from the path laid down in Moscow.”

Another, summarising Stalinist nationalities policies after the Second World War, states even more baldly: “Stalin was as keen on Russification as the Tsars.”

Was he?

Of Gods, Demons, and Devils: Popular Religion and Church Power in Imperial Russia

When Belarussian-born US journalist, Maurice Hindus visited the USSR in 1929-30, he expressed his amazement at the transformation of peasants’ beliefs. After interviewing young people in one village, he noted, dumbstruck, that “peasant boys and girls should not even know what a rusalka was!”

Hindus’ account, given in his memoir Red Bread (1931), can be read as an attempt to explain how the Russian revolution was transforming the Russian peasant from a superstitious, pre-modern being rooted in backward beliefs into an enlightened citizen. Yet the reference to rusalkas – water-nymphs long believed to inhabit rural rivers, lakes, and ponds – can be read in a rather different way. In revealing the non-belief in these magical creatures of local youth, Hindus was also offering a glimpse into the recent past of what might be called Russia’s “popular religion”.

Hindus recalls that “in my days, children…were afraid of the rusalkas…who were supposed to be the lost souls of drowned girls… With the very milk of our mothers we imbibed the notion that there was no resisting the rusalkas.”

The rusalkas were, in fact, only one rather strange and surprising aspect of the religious world of Russian Orthodox peasants, a religious world which was (for most peasants) Orthodox Christian but which maintained its own idiosyncrasies. This world would be understood by many writers and academics at the time and afterwards to constitute one of “dual faith”, in which ancient pagan and Orthodox Christian faiths coexisted. But the idea of “dual faith” has fallen out of favour since the 1990s, as historians have begun to reconceptualise the Christianity of Russia’s peasants.

Ivan Kramskoi, Rusalki (1871). Credit: Wikimedia Commons. 

In this post, I’ll consider what this peasant Christianity looked like by the early 1900s and this means for one question in our teaching of Russian history in particular: the power of the Orthodox Church in late-Imperial Russia.

Finding the national in the communist: Soviet ethnic policies in the 1920s

A second teach of a topic can always help clarify thoughts, as can a good book.

This week, I finally returned to a part of our A-Level Russia/USSR course that has fascinated me, and had sparked considerable debate amongst our outgoing Year 13s – Soviet nationalities policy.

Brigid O’Keeffe’s fantastic recent book, The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise has helped clarify and challenge my thoughts over the past year. The book is aimed primarily at undergraduate students but gives a superb introduction to any teachers wanting more context and clarity on this topic. It builds on a number of other works, notably including a seminal 1994 article by Yuri Slezkine and ground-breaking 2001 book by Terry Martin, which are referenced below.

This summary narrative, which provides the basis of this independent reading resource for students, is drawn from the ideas in one of the chapters in Brigid O'Keeffe's book. It aims to provide another way in which the questions of class and ethnicity could become conflated in a socialist state, something I explored in a previous post.

“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.

Conveying the Emotion of Revolution through Song

There’s an intangible challenge to teaching History that seems distant and unrelatable today. We can give students the facts, assess and test them for knowledge, and ask them about their causes, consequences, significance, etc.

But when all’s said and done, do they know what it was really “like” at the time?

“The First Love of the Russian Revolution”: Alexander Kerensky and the Cult of Personality

In his recent book, Dictators (2019), Frank Dikötter places the “cult of personality at the heart of tyranny”. The phrase, “cult of personality”, invoked by Nikita Khrushchev during his 1956 Secret Speech, has been most obviously associated with Stalin. Yet the cult of personality in revolutionary Russia goes back all the way to 1917 and one man, in particular: Alexander Kerensky.

Telling the Soviet Story Through Posters

Google Images is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it’s now almost embarrassingly easy to find a vast array of visual sources from a historical period. On the other, typing key words into a search engine and clicking on an eye-catching picture requires so little thought that it can lead us to overlook the true significance of a source.

Posters provide some of the richest visual material on the Soviet era, giving fascinating insights into the preoccupations and mindsets of Soviet political elites. We might be tempted to use visual sources as a way of easily conveying messages to students who are reluctant, or lack the skills or confidence, to read extended historical texts. But these sources can also give what has been called a “sense of period” by highlighting the nature of how messages were conveyed at the time.

This post provides an explanation and outline of one approach to using posters from the Soviet period, c. 1917-1964, as a tool to (re-)tell the story of the period.