The Baron’s Cloak: A Study in Dynamic Continuity?

In my previous post, I made the case for a more dynamic understanding of historical continuity. Having tried to illustrate what this might look like in practice, I now want to turn to one story in particular. That story is told in Willard Sunderland’s The Baron’s Cloak.

This brilliant book details the extraordinary and troubling life of Baron Roman Feodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg, an eccentric mystic, reactionary nationalist, and ruthlessly violent Russian nobleman of Germanic origins. It follows Ungern’s life, from his birth in Graz to his family’s settling in Estland (modern-day Estonia) via Georgia, through his stuttering induction into the Russian army before the Great War to his career as a military commander in the anti-Bolshevik White movement during the Russian Civil War.

The book can be read in a several different ways: as a riveting story in its own right, as a tale of competing nationalism and radicalisms, as an exploration of huge upheaval and change. In Sunderland’s own words, it is “a study of the Russian Empire told through Ungern’s life” (p. 5), especially in its final years, as it collapsed and was then (partially) reconstituted by a new Soviet state.

However, reading this book, I found it to provide a highly stimulating narrative of dynamic historical continuity.

Here, using several short excerpts, I’ll retell key parts of the narrative in order to draw out some of the examples of continuity it seems to reveal. As I go, I’ll return to the diagrams of historical “paths” which I provided in my previous post, illustrating how I think the excerpts illustrate these.

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?

Making the Political Personal: Bergelson’s Birobidzhan

Huge thanks to Ed Durbin for his feedback on an earlier draft of this post! This is another rather long read. If you’d prefer to download it and read offline, a PDF copy can be found here. A lesson text resource and PowerPoint presentation accompany this post, and can be found here.

What makes stories in History powerful?

A few weeks ago, I suggested in a post on Trotsky that the personal is political in History teaching, by which I meant that those individuals whose stories are told in our lessons are given enormous power over our narratives.

Now, I’d like to reverse the equation to suggest that we should try to make the political personal.

What I mean by this is that, rather than telling the history of politics and power through state policy and statistics, we should try to tell it through the words and experiences of individuals who lived through, were impacted by, and in their own ways helped shape it.

These stories are, I believe, powerful. They can both bring potentially dry History to life and empower people whose experiences deserve to be told, but are often overlooked. At the same time, I will argue that the power of individuals’ stories also lies in the ways we choose to narrate them.

There’s nothing particularly original in what I’m suggesting; and I’ll flag up a number of important works by other History teachers and educators to show where my thinking is really coming from.

At the same time, I also want to take the opportunity to bring to light a fascinating and almost entirely overlooked story. This is the story of the Jewish homeland no-one has heard of: Birobidzhan. And it is also the story of one of its most prominent proponents and activists, a long-forgotten Yiddish writer called David Bergelson.

We Need to Talk About Leon: Trotsky and the Dilemmas of Representation

A huge thanks to Claire Holliss for her thorough and careful critique of an earlier draft of this post. This draft is certainly fuller, and better, for her thoughts! It is also very long – if you would prefer to download it as a PDF and read offline, a copy can be accessed here.

 

As the feminist slogan goes, “the personal is political”. This strikes me as doubly true when thinking of representation in History teaching.

Firstly, our personal decision, as teachers, about who we give representation to in our teaching grants certain groups and individuals from the past the power and right to be seen and heard. This is of course not only political in a sense of abstract interpersonal power relations, but also in that it has become highly politicised, by groups and campaigns today who actively contest over which people should be included in the History curriculum.

Secondly, and more directly relevant here, when we select individuals to represent a wider group from the past in our History lessons, we grant those individuals remarkable power. Think about it for a moment: almost always posthumously, and certainly without their knowledge, these individuals in effect are authorised to speak, and even act as proxy, for others whose experiences we consider similar to theirs.

This means that we need to talk about representation. Beyond just which groups we encounter in History teaching (which is certainly important), whom we empower as representatives of those groups by giving weight and voice to their life stories and identities really matters. (What I mean by “representation” and “identity” is explained in a short post-script at the bottom of this blog post.)

For this reason, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with the prominence of one individual in our course textbooks.

Problematising Pogroms: Reassessing Antisemitic Agency in Russia, c. 1881-1921

By the beginning of the 20^th century, Russia was the most antisemitic country in Europe. The hatred of Jews was manifested more violently and more frequently than anywhere else in the continent, through regular outbreaks of pogroms.

Why? While we might be tempted to blame an arch-reactionary, Jew-hating government under the last Tsars, we should also be wary of simplistic, monocausal explanations of Russian antisemitism and pogroms. On closer examination, the picture is much more complicated.

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.

The Empire Strikes Back? How Ethnic Violence Became a Part of Soviet Communism

At the height of the Great Terror (c. 1937-1938), Stalin’s secret police began systematic campaigns targeting certain ethnic minorities in the USSR. Poles, Latvians, Estonians, ethnic Germans, Romanians, Greeks, Afghans, Iranians, Chinese, Bulgarians, and Macedonians were arrested en masse, deported, or executed.

According to official statistics, 335,500 people were arrested and almost 250,000 killed in what became known as the National Operations. These were not soldiers, spies, or traitors; they were ordinary civilians. Before the Second World War, this was a high-point for repression of ethnic minorities in Russia and the USSR.

This event is almost as troubling analytically as it is morally. As Marxists, Soviet Communists should have (and generally portrayed themselves as doing so) judged socioeconomic class to be the principal identity determining treatment by the state.

When we teach Russian and Soviet History, it makes (some kind of) sense to explain to students that the USSR targeted the “rich” peasant kulaks, the bourgeoisie, and the old nobility. By contrast, campaigns targeting ethnic minorities seem distinctly out of place. It was in the Tsarist Russian empire before 1917, after all, that repression against non-ethnic Russians was committed as part of “Russification” campaigns.

So why did a Communist state target its ethnic minorities? It's tempting to view this as a return to age-old imperial policy, embodied in the Russification and persecution of Tsarist Russian Empire. But Soviet ethnic violence had its own logic and patterns of development.

This post traces Soviet ethnic violence back to the Russian Civil War and the little-known case, studied by historian Shane O'Rourke, of the Terek Cossacks, simultaneously linking this policy further back to the Tsarist imperial legacy and forward to the Stalinist "National Operations".