Many aspects of tsarist Russia's experience during the First World War have their counterpart in the history of other belligerent societies. The erosion of popular support for the war, problems of access to food, the growth of consumer hostility to profiteering middlemen, the challenge of meeting insatiable demand for munitions, the dilution of labor, the questioning of established gender roles, the detection of a moral collapse, the manifestation of “shell-shock” – these and other phenomena were no less marked in Russia than elsewhere. To that extent, and without wishing to be unduly flippant, it seems to me that one cannot speak of Russia's war as out of the ordinary, or fundamentally different from the emerging pattern in Germany, France, Austria-Hungary or Britain.^[1] A sustained comparison would, of course, reveal important differences – food supply did not reach critical levels in France or Britain, as it certainly did in Germany and Russia; the attempt to enlist organized labour in the industrial war effort in Britain, France and Germany had no parallel in the tsarist war economy, although this reluctance changed with the shortlived appointment of Konovalov after the February revolution.^[2] But Europe's “great war” gave rise to many more common features than it generated specific or unique results. In Russia, mass resistance to long-established political authority assumed its most dramatic manifestations in the 1916 revolt in central Asia and in February 1917. But other imperial powers were themselves not immune to destabilizing forms of resistance, as the challenges to British rule in central Africa, India and Ireland in 1916 demonstrated. Nor did Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman empire escape popular resistance to imperial rule; like Russia, each state was wracked by domestic upheaval before succumbing to the forces of change.^[3]
I do not want to labour this point, which deserves elaboration elsewhere and requires the incorporation of Russia's history into mainstream, comparative work on the First World War. Instead I wish to draw attention to one singular aspect of Russia's wartime experience which does deserve the epithet extraordinary. I have in mind the entire process of population displacement which in Russia gave rise to the term bezhenstvo or “refugeedom”.^[4] I had long been dimly aware of refugees when considering the dynamics of the industrial labour force during the First World War. Subsequently, Bob Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft drew my attention to a seminal work by the Soviet demographer Evgenii Volkov. Volkov estimated that the refugee population amounted to 7.4 million persons by July 1917, equivalent to around five per cent of the total population of the Russian empire. Wheatcroft himself regarded this movement (along with the displacement of POWs and Russia's armed forces) as a major contributory factor in the emerging wartime food crisis.^[5] Primary sources confirmed that the refugee population transformed some of Russia's largest towns, such as Samara, Ekaterinoslav, Pskov and Nizhnii Novgorod, with attendant consequences for public health, housing, fuel supply and food availability.^[6]
Against this background, new agencies were hurriedly improvised (in August 1915 the tsarist government established a special council for refugees with overall administrative responsibility for refugees), and Russia's emergent public organizations (the unions of towns and zemstvos) claimed jurisdiction over refugees. In the event, important responsibilities were also vested in a semi-official body (the Tatiana committee for the relief of victims of war), linked neither to government nor to the obshchestvennye organizatsii. These agencies coexisted uneasily throughout the war.^[7] But I wanted to go beyond the purely demographic, material and political dimensions of refugeedom to consider the social and cultural issues it raised. Nor can I disguise the fact that my interests were stimulated by the extent of displacement in the former Soviet Union and in other parts of the modern world, and by some of the approaches that seek to come to terms with it.^[8] Now that I have completed a lengthy monograph on the subject – one that draws upon a rich documentary source base (especially newspapers, diocesan journals, zemstvo journals and publications by the chief humanitarian agencies, as well as the archives of the relevant government authorities) – I should like to use this opportunity to set out the kind of approach I have adopted, the main conclusions I have reached, and the broader significance I believe that refugeedom has for historians of late imperial Russia.^[9]

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I soon realized that the very term “refugee” needed to be unpicked, and that to speak casually of a refugee “problem” was to duck the question of how refugeedom came to be problematized in the first place. I have tried to attend to the nuances of contemporary usage. A decree issued in 1915 stated that “refugees (bezhentsy) are those persons who have abandoned localities threatened or already occupied by the enemy, or who have been evacuated by order of the military or civil authority from the zone of military operations”. They were and remained subjects of the Tsar. The official statement added another dimension to refugeedom, stipulating that refugees included “also emigrants (vykhodtsy) from states hostile to Russia”, that is it extended the definition to include Ruthenians from Austrian-ruled Galicia and Armenian subjects of the Ottoman empire.^[10] Official parlance thus acknowledged that domestic military considerations as well as enemy violence had created the conditions for displacement. Contemporaries sometimes switched between the two terms bezhentsy and vyselentsy without much discrimination; more commonly, the former was used to describe those who left their homes as a result of the German, Austrian and Ottoman advances during 1915, whereas vyselenie described the process whereby the tsarist army forcibly displaced German settlers and Jews who were suspected of actual or potential subversion and espionage (the image of the “Jewish spy” quickly became embedded in military consciousness). Fairly soon, however, most commentators dropped the term vyselenie and adopted bezhenstvo; in part, this reflects the fact that the plight of German colonists almost completely disappeared from view by 1916.^[11]
I quickly developed an interest in the crystallization of the concept of bezhenstvo. I learned from recent critical theory to be suspicious of essentialist approaches to social identity.^[12] From this perspective, it should not be taken for granted what it “means” to be a refugee, as if he (more commonly, she) displays some irreducible, unproblematic and ultimately recoverable characteristic. The term conceals multiple differences of ethnicity, gender, age, occupation, and social status, which are (and were) obliterated in the process of constructing refugeedom. How and why did this construction become widespread? In part, I believe, the very urgency and scale of displacement helped to produce a composite image of the weary, sick and dispossessed refugee, an image that was the necessary precondition to the release of resources to provide for immediate needs.^[13] I would also argue that the creation of the refugee category had much to do with a fear that European Russia was in imminent danger of being overwhelmed (there are countless expressions of anguish by provincial governors and local authorities); fears of pollution often generate essentialist constructions.^[14] The refugee also became a metaphor for broader societal anxieties about the collapse of hierarchy; refugees had become detached from existing mechanisms that anchored the Tsar's subjects to a particular position in society.^[15]
Nevertheless, in the course of formulating strategies for refugee relief some distinctions did become apparent. “Educated” refugees were frequently found superior accommodation or could pay a premium to escape the more debilitating consequences of enforced flight.^[16] Young refugee women were afforded special attention lest they fall into the “trap” of vice and commercialized sex.^[17] Working-class organizations (sick clubs, trade unions, cooperatives) mobilized themselves in order to attend to the needs of plebeian refugees.^[18] Such initiatives contradicted – although they did not supplant – widespread attempts to “collectivize” refugees, such as those associated with the public organizations, the special council for refugees, and the Tatiana committee.^[19]
The construction of a shared narrative that had the capacity to inscribe or invent a common awareness of affliction proceeded most obviously at the level of ethnicity. Specific institutional arrangements were devised by and on behalf of Jewish, Polish, Latvian and Armenian refugees. Many hastily improvised schools, workshops, orphanages, clubs, canteens and barracks came to be organized along “national” lines. Membership accordingly implied some sense of what it meant to be Polish, Latvian, Armenian, or Jewish. Much of the cultural and educational activity that took place in these institutions encouraged the belief that each nationality “always and everywhere possessed a core of discernible, ethnically determined qualities” and sought to validate “historically sanctified claim(s)” to particular lands.^[20] To take one example, the leaders of Latvian refugee organizations attached enormous importance to promoting a sense of loyalty to the “homeland”, by reminding refugees that they should not settle permanently in the Russian interior and thus contribute to a dilution of Latvianness. They were invited to think of themselves as crusaders who would eventually return home. Some migrant communities had evidently already been “lost” through assimilation in the Russian interior. What if refugees followed a similar path? If they did, Latvians would suffer the fate of Jews and Armenians, condemned to wander the globe in peace and war.^[21]
Yet ethnicity – whatever the exponents of ethnic difference may have said – was not an exclusive, let alone a fixed attribute. Whilst having the capacity to override other forms of identity, ethnicity could itself be overridden, above all by the claims of class consciousness that exercised such a compelling force during 1917. Patriotic leaders mapped one route to liberation, but not all refugees necessarily accepted their cartography; those of modest means may have associated homeland with class domination, whereas the elite recollected refugeedom in more pastoral terms.^[22] From this point of view, the constant emphasis upon loyalty and attachment to homeland and putative nation can also be interpreted as uncertainty on the part of the patriotic intelligentsia about the entire national project. During the war, certainly, the opportunities for proselytization expanded considerably, but nervousness about ethnic dispersion and competing loyalties increased with each wave of displacement.
Differences of language, culture or religion did not prevent Russia's refugees from being socialized within a broader context than the refugee community. Local relief agencies sometimes went out of their way to encourage closer contact between refugees (at least, those who were not “diseased”) and the native population. Some refugees willingly dissolved their peculiar status and adjusted to Russian provincial life. In Riazan', Polish refugees made use of local medical services, learned Russian at local schools, and worshipped at the local Catholic church. Many found quarters in Russian neighbourhoods. Officials who toured provincial towns expecting to find refugees in tight-knit groups complained that they had to look hard in order to contact national minorities.^[23] Several thousand refugees committed themselves to settlement on farms in distant corners of European Russia and Siberia, rejecting the status of temporary residents in an attempt to discard the label of refugee and to become invisible. Yet others, particularly non-Russian refugees, sought to avoid being swallowed up in the vast Russian interior. They opposed attempts to settle them on remote farms, where carefully cultivated urban solidarities could easily be ruptured and from which subsequent “liberation” might be rendered difficult. Others found that Russian peasants treated refugees as temporary residents in their midst. These varied histories show how difficult it is to arrive at a summary of refugee ambitions, even when they were amalgamated into a common narrative by public organizations, government or national committees, all of whom discovered the “pleasure of speaking for the oppressed”.^[24]
Collective action was crucial in helping to dispel the demeaning aspects of refugeedom that might otherwise have been internalized. That is, the possibility arose of actually deriving some dignity and pride from the condition of being a refugee. At times, therefore, it was important for refugees themselves to emphasize the universality of the refugee experience, since it was in these terms that shame could be avoided and charitable relief unlocked. But a search for the archetypal “refugee” will be fruitless; she or he assumed human shape in the minds of some relief workers and tactically astute refugee leaders who constructed an archetype for their own purposes. We cannot hope to find that “experience” automatically generated a uniform refugee consciousness. Many refugees managed various kinds of identity and to avoid the “heroization of a single collective identity”. The historian should accordingly be aware of the multiple meanings that attached to the refugee construct.^[25]
We also need to explore more fully the implications for the individual of the move from an established community to a new world. To what extent did this relocation entail the abandonment of “community”? Contemporaries of various political persuasion maintained that displacement dismantled communal authority, leaving refugees bereft of leadership and promoting a rudderless and “spontaneous” drift to the Russian interior. In this connection, more work needs to be done to relate ideas about social memory to the experience of ruptured communities.^[26] As one theorist succinctly puts it, “if we are to play a believable role before an audience of relative strangers we must produce or at least imply a history of ourselves: an informal account which indicates something of our origins and which justifies or perhaps excuses our present status and actions in relation to that audience”.^[27] There was no need for this kind of presentation of the self in established communities, which relied on daily practices, shared knowledge, and gossip to create a common awareness of social space and a sense of continuity. War disrupted the capacity of individuals to “remember in common”. Refugees began in difficult circumstances and in a short space of time – albeit from different perspectives – to devise new forms of remembrance that helped to restructure broken lives and to reform shattered communities. The remarkable initiatives taken in 1916-1917 by the Tatiana committee, whereby individual refugees were encouraged to articulate their experiences and to supply evidence of their contribution to the host community suggest the emergence of a project whose purpose was to confound the anonymity of “refugeedom” and to create a documentary basis for its history.^[28]
What, then, did it mean to be a refugee? To be more explicit, is it possible or permissible to interpret refugeedom as the source of yet another kind of antithesis in early twentieth century Russia? We are familiar with the emergence of polarities in revolutionary Russia that derive from class position, and from the opposition between “educated society” (tsenzovoe obshchestvo) and the narod. In his classic study of war and memory, Paul Fussell introduced another dimension – what he terms “the versus habit” – that destroyed ambiguity and thrived on binary opposition, pitting British against Germans.^[29] Did refugeedom confirm this practice by inculcating a sense that refugees were “not like us”; did their difference (the result of being amalgamated into bezhenstvo) condemn them to be strangers? Or did refugeedom introduce a new kind of ambiguity, in so far as refugees were neither purely friend nor purely foe, neither wholly familiar nor wholly foreign, neither part of the front line nor the home “front”? It seems to me that refugeedom had the potential to introduce ambiguity, but that “national” refugee projects frequently operated on the basis of the “versus habit”.^[30] Whether non-refugees became accustomed to the liminality of refugees is more difficult to establish, because within a few years other projects of social (re)construction and state-building took pride of place. Did anyone, after all, remember refugeedom during the chaotic collectivization drive when an even more concerted state-driven process of population displacement transformed the Soviet economy, in part by identifying antagonistic social categories?^[31]
We also need to take into account the susceptibility of individuals to the organizing, surveillance and information-gathering capacities of external authorities, whether of the state, its local representatives or professional bodies. Refugees were counted, described, photographed, organized, confined (for their “protection” and that of local residents), and even put on display for visiting dignitaries and well-wishers, as if to advertise the benefits of charitable relief.^[32] Relief agencies devoted enormous time and energy to the dissemination and completion of forms that registered refugees; many of the displaced – particularly if they had not hitherto been in possession of the passport for internal travel – encountered such documentation for the first time. This paperwork had in part a benign purpose, forming the necessary prelude to attempts to reunite families that were rent asunder by war. But it also gave voluntary agencies, and semi-official bodies such as the Tatiana committee, practice in the registration and accumulation of detailed information about individuals. The Tatiana committee maintained files on millions of refugees. Hesitantly at first, then with energy and enthusiasm, relief agencies developed greater administrative capacity and sophistication. Refugees queued obediently at welfare offices in order to supply personal details that were the sine qua non of receiving money or of improving the prospects of being reunited with other family members.^[33] The person of the refugee, one might say, now belonged to an impersonal agency to an unprecedented degree. Whereas the tax official or recruiting officer had not been directly concerned about an individual's obligation to pay taxes or serve the Tsar – what mattered was the levy on a village, not its precise apportionment or the individual's liability – the new agencies had a direct and immediate interest in the person over whom they claimed jurisdiction or competed for control; a person who embodied the various attributes of refugeedom.
Refugeedom also implied the possibility of social reconstruction. Public organizations and provincial Tatiana committees established “colonies” for refugee children and adolescents. Children with disabilities were provided with special schools. The “mentally defective” offspring of refugee parents received special attention from expert medical authorities.^[34] In the process of drawing these distinctions, liberal practitioners sought to create entirely new communities, which they justified in terms of improved social welfare and public order. The magnitude of refugee displacement encouraged direct intervention by experts – doctors, psychiatrists, teachers, and social workers. They intervened in such a way as to redefine public duty and to reshape society in their own image. There was little in this project to suggest any recognition of the possibility for individual refugees to assume responsibility for their welfare. In a similar vein, when individuals were given the dignity of a personal name in the published record it was not to allow them a voice, but rather to emphasize that no-one would be overlooked in the project of constructing a better world.^[35] I would argue that, in wartime Russia, the state hoped to exercise its traditional and overt instruments of power, but their failings soon exposed it to public criticism and obloquy; this regime subsequently yielded to an intense scrutiny by the professional intelligentsia of the refugee subject. The First World War created a moment and space in which public and national organizations established their own “mechanisms of disciplinary coercion”. In constructing refugeedom they also articulated their own sense of purpose, as cultural guides, humanitarian visionaries and potential political leaders.^[36]

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What, then, was extraordinary about refugeedom? First, in its intensity and scale, wartime displacement had little in common with mass migration before 1914; migrants normally knew their destination, chose when to leave and return, and made use of established migrant networks of support. Few refugees, by contrast, had sufficient contacts, resources or the prospect of secure employment. Second, refugeedom offered unprecedented scope for the play of competing versions of what might loosely be called “social control”, in other words between the apparatus of the Polizeistaat and the methods of professional specialists who were active in the public organizations.^[37] The respective claims of the tsarist state and educated society to promote social welfare had already been advanced before 1914, but without the same kind of urgency, imminent collapse of established hierarchies and risk of widespread social breakdown.^[38] Third, the peculiar status of refugees challenged more modern kinds of group affiliation such as those that attached to occupation and class. To be a refugee was to stand outside established boundaries of society. I think we should take account of this indeterminacy when rethinking the nature of social upheaval in Russia before and after 1917; Michel Foucault's suspicion of teleology is relevant here. Fourth, refugeedom legitimized and transformed the possibilities for national agitation by a resurgent patriotic intelligentsia, amongst whom were many of the leaders of independent states after 1917-18. Refugeedom trained them in the art of government, as well as accustoming some refugees to think in “national” terms. Last but not least, no other major belligerent power had to confront these extraordinary issues of displacement.^[39] Of course, as Hannah Arendt emphasized long ago, the postwar peace settlement yielded its own harvest of sorrow, as successor states categorized those who “belonged” and those who did not. Involuntary displacement in Europe and on a global scale has been a defining feature of the twentieth century. From this point of view, the extraordinary in Russia's wartime soon became depressingly commonplace.^[40]