Local studies of revolutionary Russia: towards a third wave

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Notes

1. This field is often referred to as one of “regional” or “provincial” studies. However, I would suggest the term “local studies” is more useful, since it allows for consideration of Russia’s capital cities, Petrograd and Moscow, as distinct locales in their own right during this period alongside other, farther-flung areas of the Russian empire. Classic localized studies of Moscow and Petrograd in war and revolution include Koenker, Moscow Workers; McAuley, Bread and Justice, and works by Rabinowitch, including his relatively recent The Bolsheviks in Power. In the volume under review here, Rendle’s chapter discusses Moscow and its surrounding province as a local case study: “The Problem of the ‘Local’ in Revolutionary Russia,” 19–44. On “local history” in the Russian and Soviet context, see Raleigh, “Introduction,” 1–5. In this review, I focus primarily on studies which have appeared in the English language, in order to highlight the particular contribution to scholarship that these have made.

2. Wade and Seregny, eds., Politics and Society in Provincial Russia, 2.

3. Suny, The Baku Commune, 1917–1918; Snow, Bolsheviks in Siberia, 1917–1918; Getzler, Kronstadt 1917–1921; and Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga.

4. See particularly Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga; and Suny, Baku Commune.

5. Raleigh, “Doing Soviet History,” 16–24.

6. Key works include Raleigh, ed., Provincial Landscapes; Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War; Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution; Sarah Badcock, Politics and the People; Retish, Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War. For useful overviews, see Badcock, “The Russian Revolution,” 243–62 and Novikova, “Russian Revolution from a Provincial Perspective,” 769–85.

7. Henceforth called simply Russia’s Revolution in Regional Perspective.

8. Badcock, Politics and the People, chap. 4; Hickey, “The Rise and Fall of Smolensk’s Moderate Socialists,” 14–35; and Dickins, “Krasnoiarsk, 1917,” chap. 2.

9. Badcock, “Women, Protest, and Revolution,” 47–70; and Baker, “Rampaging Soldatki, Cowering Police, Bazaar Riots and Moral Economy,” 137–55.

10. Badcock, Politics and the People, 11–20; Novikova, “Russian Revolution from a Provincial Perspective,” 771–4; and Dickins, “A Revolution in March,” 11–31, esp. 28–30.

11. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War, 26; and Suny, Baku Commune, 73.

12. On the administrative dynamics of local revolutionary power, see Dickins, “Rethinking the Power of Soviets;” Hickey, “Provisional Government and Local Administration,” 223–50 and 251–74. See also important observations in Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, 56–7, on the relationship between Petrograd’s district soviets and municipal dumas after October 1917.

13. Badcock, Politics and the People, 20–2.

14. See, for example, the role of Moisei Il’ich Frumkin and Social-Democratic leaders with administrative expertise in linking Krasnoiarsk’s Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies with the City Duma (Dickins, “Rethinking the Power of Soviets,” 239–40, 247–9), and the importance of skilled clerical and administrative personnel in Kazan’ and Nizhnii Novgorod (Badcock, Politics and the People, 100–5).

15. The importance of multiparty coalitions at a local level supports recent findings on the national Bolshevik-Left SR coalition. See Melancon, “Left Socialist Revolutionaries,” 59–82; and Douds, “The Dictatorship of the Democracy?,” 32–56.

16. The term “paramilitary” is used by Retish in his analysis of the Izhevsk revolt (p. 300).

17. See also Hickey, “Revolution on the Jewish Street,” 823–50.

18. This finding complements research into Muslims in Baku and Russian Turkestan, where angry and often violent exchanges with ethnic Russians became alarmingly frequent in 1917: Suny, Baku Commune, 110–5, 139–40; and Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, chap. 8.

19. Quote from Badcock, Politics and the People, 2.

20. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War, 25; Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga; Badcock, Politics and the People; and Hickey, “Local Government and State Authority in the Provinces,” 863–81.

21. Matsuzato, “Interregional Conflicts and the Collapse of Tsarism,” 243–300.

22. Amongst a large number of studies, see Porter and Gleason, “The Democratization of the Zemstvo,” 228–42; Gleason, “The All-Russian Union of Zemstvos,” 365–82; and Lih, Bread and Authority, 39–41.

23. Orlovsky, “Reform during Revolution,” 104–6. See also the important documentary collection of the Provisional Government, including state directives on local government reform: Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government, 1917, 243–316.

24. On central governmental viewpoints of the grain crisis, see Lih, Bread and Authority.

25. Retish, Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War, chap. 4.

26. For an elaboration of this approach to local identity, see Appadurai, Modernity at Large, ch. 9.

27. Here, I take “discourse” to mean both the language and day-to-day social and political interactions through which different groups and actors relate to one another: Laclau, On Populist Reason, 68–9.

28. This continues a shift in scholarly literature on nationalism during this period away from essentialist notions of national characteristics and towards nationalism as a socially and politically constructed movement. Suny and Martin, “Introduction,” 7.

29. On Validov’s relationship with the Reds, see Schafer, “Local Politics and the Birth,” 165–90.

30. This supports the findings on central Asian Jadidism of Adeeb Khalid, who notes that ‘Russian/native or Bolshevik/nationalist dichotomies cannot explain the transformation of Central Asia in the early Soviet period.’ Khalid, “Nationalizing the Revolution in Central Asia,” 145–62, quote on 146. See also Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, epilogue.

31. See, esp., Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire.

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Alistair Dickins

Alistair Dickins completed his PhD at the University of Manchester in 2015, examining changes in local government and state structures in the Russian Revolution. He currently teaches Humanities at Parrs Wood High School, Manchester, UK.