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.

The February Revolution Reconsidered: Part 2, An Undemocratic Revolution

The February Revolution of 1917 developed its own rich political mythology. Untangling this from the realities of events is one of the key challenges facing History teachers instructing students in this topic today. This is the third of a string of three posts on the February Revolution that attempts to do so.

In my last post, I suggested that the February Revolution – often seen as a largely peaceful event – actually involved very significant violence.

In this post, I’ll propose another interpretation which I think has been underplayed and largely submerged beneath another myth. That myth is that the February Revolution was a fundamentally democratic moment in Russian history. By contrast, the interpretation I’ll propose is that February 1917 in many ways heralded a distinctly undemocratic series of developments, developments which, set against a standard of free, universal, and inclusive politics, fall considerably short of democratic ideals.

The Provisional Government of 1917, in its first iteration. "Elected by the revolution"? Credit: public domain, via Wikimedia commons.

The "Spontaneous" and "Leaderless" Revolution: Two Myths of February 1917

In a matter of days at the end of February 1917 (dated to the "old-style" Julian calendar), the 304-year-old Romanov dynasty was suddenly and spectacularly overthrown. The February Revolution set in motion a series of fundamental transformations which would shape Russian, European, and wider world history for decades to come. It would also develop its own mythology, key elements of which survive today in standard textbook retellings of the events.

Crowds in Petrograd burn the Tsarist royal insignia during the February Revolution. Credit: Karl Karlovitch Bulla (1853 - 1929), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Myths have their uses in History, in particular to reveal the biases and beliefs of the societies in which they are found. But myth telling (and retelling) itself rarely makes for good History.

This post examines and appraises two enduring myths of the 1917 February Revolution: that it was "spontaneous" and that it was "leaderless". Both have long pasts in different historiographical trends. Both contain a seed of truth. And both are fundamentally misleading as to the actual events of February 1917.

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".

The Russian Empire at War: The Central Asian Revolt of 1916

When Europe went to war in 1914, its empires went to war with it. For Britain and France (and, to a lesser extent, Germany) this meant mobilising overseas territories and peoples for conflict. For Russia, it meant mobilising a vast imperial hinterland linked contiguously to its centre.

When Russia went to war, its military mobilisation impacted firstly the Russian and Slavic heartlands, bringing a range of responses from patriotism to protest. In 1916, however, Muslims of Turkestan in Russia’s Central Asian provinces were called up. At the same time as Britain and France’s empires were enabling them to fight on against foreign adversaries, Russia’s attempted mobilisation of Central Asian Muslims triggered an armed uprising and virtual civil war within its empire.

The Central Asian Revolt of 1916 strikes at the very heart of what it meant for Russia to be an empire. If the experience of Britain suggests Empire is something distant and overseas, the experience of Imperial Russia, as a contiguous land empire, suggests something rather different. During the Great War, when Russia’s Central Asian province of Turkestan rose up in revolt, the challenge of managing a land empire at war would be vividly illustrated.

Russian Responses to the Great War: Reconsidering Textbook Narratives

In July 1914, Russia entered the First World War. It was a momentous decision, which would ultimately seal the fate of the Tsarist government and shape the revolutionary and Soviet regimes that succeeded it.

But how did the people of the Russian Empire respond?

This post provides an explanation and outline to teaching the question of the response of Russians (and non-ethnic “Russians” and non-Russians) to the outbreak of war. Lesson resources can be found in the link here.

“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.