Over the course of the First World War, all combatant societies saw the emergence of what Michael Geyer has termed a “parastatal complex,” a dense network of professional and civic organizations that became closely intertwined with the state.^[1] But in Russia, society’s side of these efforts had been stunted before the war due to the autocracy’s opposition to almost any public involvement in policy. Leon Trotsky argued that Russia’s historical conditions produced a phenomenon of “combined development,” “the drawing together of different stages of the journey, a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms.” Backward countries like Russia adopt “whatever is ready in advance of any specified date, skipping a whole series of stages.” Laura Engelstein adapted Trotsky’s model of “combined development” and applied it to the discursive and socio-political realms. Analyzing the development of Russia’s professions in the period from 1890 to 1914, she has argued that this telescoping of stages produced a situation in which “the Old Regime survived almost unmodified into the era in which the modern mechanisms of social control and social self-discipline had already emerged.” Consequently, “the modern discursive measures did not produce the same effects as they did in the West.” Engelstein’s analysis, however, stops in 1914. Wartime Russia “amalgamated” the emergence of technologies of public intervention, not with the rise of a public sphere based on the observance of law, but with wartime mobilization. During the war, therefore, Russia developed a parastatal complex under the aegis of the state, without the prior development of a public sphere autonomous of it. Wartime mobilization in Russia telescoped the stages of the establishment of many public organizations, which existed in most other combatants before the war, with their reorganization to the ends of war mobilization.^[2]
In this paper I wish to examine the consequences of the “amalgamation” during 1917. I contend that the peculiar military-civilian hybrid that emerged in Soviet Russia was not entirely the product of Bolshevik ideology.^[3] It resulted, I contend, at least as much from the particular historical conjuncture out of which the Soviet state emerged. By tracing the trajectory of two state practices, wartime food supply and programs of revolutionary “enlightenment,” I will trace how over the course of 1917 non-Bolshevik civilian activists forged a specific hybrid of the military and civilian realms that would be the heritage for the Soviet state. This hybrid, as with many of the tools that have been identified as intrinsically “Bolshevik,” emerged during the First World War and became catalytically transformed during the course of 1917.^[4]
One of the defining features of total war was the self-mobilization of society for the ends of total war.^[5] In Russia, as in other European powers, the educated public and professional organizations contributed to mobilizing society under the aegis of the total war state. In Russia, however, this program coalesced with a widespread repudiation of the existing socio-political order, making the critique particularly radical. The particular parastatal complex that emerged in Russia was arrayed against the autocracy ostensibly heading that state and formed under the influence of the anticipatory critiques of liberal society.

Food Supply

Under pressures of war, the autocracy grudgingly permitted the circumscribed development of a Russian form of Geyer’s parastatal complex. The need to supply the population with food was one arena where a tight nexus was forged between state structures and educated society. From the very first days of the war the Imperial government’s food supply network, organized under the aegis of the reformist ministry of agriculture, actively sought to involve cooperative and zemstvo activists while excluding market and trade structures.^[6] To a large degree, this policy represented a wartime extension of Peter Stolypin’s post-1905 pro-producer, anti-capitalist reform agenda, which had sought to foster the individual peasant producer while shielding him from the corrosive forces of the market.^[7] The wartime acquisition system thus became suffused with the anti-market ethos that had informed the agriculture ministry’s prewar reformist vision. Many of the cooperative and zemstvo activists shared this antipathy to the market. Thus the war provided both members of society and government administrators with an opportunity for a collaborative effort to refurbish Russia’s political and social order. In mid-August 1914 Viktor Anisimov, one of Russia’s leading cooperative activists and a prominent Popular Socialist, convened a meeting of the Committee of Cooperatives. Its purpose was to determine how Russia’s cooperatives could aid the war effort. But, argued Anisimov, the war effort could also further the cause of cooperatives. He proposed that the government conduct all its purchasing operations for the army solely through cooperative organizations, thereby bypassing private trade structures.^[8] Government measures in food supply, and especially these measures’ anti-market bias, thus reflected not just the views of an isolated administration, but rather the program of a broad spectrum of public professionals as well.
Germany’s Kriegswirtschaft provided many public activists with an idealized model of what the state could do if it harnessed the forces of “society.” This technocratic ethos would later lead many specialists in various disciplines to eventually support the Soviet state, less out of commitment to Bolshevism per se than in the belief that the Soviet state would carry out some of their progressive disciplinary agendas.^[9] In the decade after the Revolution, Soviet officials continued to situate their economic planning measures within the broader context of other European states during the Great War.^[10]
Food supply demonstrates the continuum that extended from wartime mobilization, to revolutionary measures of the Provisional Government, and finally to the policies of the Soviet state. The tsarist government had stymied programs for a state grain monopoly. In March 1917 the Provisional Government rushed to introduce such a monopoly, transposing large portions of existing German and Austrian wartime laws. Indeed, one reason the measure caused so little opposition was that people believed that it had already been tested and proven in Germany.^[11] This grain monopoly would remain in force longer than the government that had instituted it.
The Provisional Government at first placed its faith in agitation and enlightenment. In order to convince peasants to turn over grain as a civic duty, it dispatched agitators and created an information department for the ministry of food supply. Alexander Chaianov, Russia’s leading agronomist, lectured and wrote pamphlets to familiarize student “cultural-enlightenment activists” with the food supply situation, so the students in turn could edify peasant-producers. The Provisional Government’s first minister of agriculture, the Kadet Andrei Shingarëv, declared that “we sent everyone that we possibly could to the localities in order to instill among the population a sense of the terrible danger confronting the state’s food supply effort.”^[12]
Yet the Provisional Government confronted the same problem that had undercut tsarist food supply efforts: they had few industrial goods to offer in exchange for peasant grain. Prior to 1917, public activists had been able to blame the autocracy for conducting inefficient policies; after February 1917, they were left with only the peasantry to blame. Visiting the grain-rich Don Territory in May 1917, Shingarëv declared the situation “tragic.” “If we previously were able to condemn the tsarist regime,” he despaired, “now the food supply issue is entirely in your hands, and if it does not meet its required level, then the fault lies entirely on the local organizations.” In the face of faltering food supply deliveries, Shingarëv tried to convince the local food supply congress, dominated by cooperative activists brought into food supply efforts by the tsarist wartime food supply network, that private grain traders ought to be harnessed to food supply operations. His pleas had little effect on them.^[13]
Educated society — including many moderate socialists — now had clearly lost faith that the common people were gradually tutoring themselves to responsible citizenship. Given their irresponsibility (in May, Shingarëv charged peasants with holding a “feast” for themselves amidst the state’s “famine” in grain), public activists looked to the state as the one institution capable of imposing order on the immature and impulsive masses. By summer 1917 moderate socialist held many of the key posts in the Provisional Government. Confronting the food supply crisis, socialist ministers in the Provisional Government began increasingly to speak of using force against the rural population.
Both prime minister Kerensky and food supply minister Peshekhonov were impressed by a July 8th order issued by Lavr Kornilov, at the time commander of the South-west front. Kornilov’s order, noting that grain had been declared state property, threatened punishment for any actions preventing the orderly gathering of the harvest in areas of the front. Its legal basis derived from authority granted Kornilov by article 19 of the regulations for regions under martial law, but it was issued in consultation with the Provisional Government’s commissar for the front. When Kornilov was made commander-in-chief, he re-issued the order on July 31st to cover all regions of the front.^[14] With government food supply efforts flagging disastrously by summer 1917, Peshekhonov issued a circular directing local committees to employ “coercive measures, up to and including armed force,” should the population decline to turn over its grain. “Needs of state,” he insisted, “dictate these extreme measures.” In particular, he proposed that local committees, now obviously viewed as state executive organs rather than democratic structures, resort to military detachments to secure grain.^[15]
Divisions within the Provisional Government soon cast doubt on the firmness of government policy. In late August Kerensky doubled the fixed prices on grain. Peshekhonov, who had just threatened force to uphold requisitioning at these prices, felt so let down by Kerensky’s actions that he resigned in protest. Kerensky’s gamble on higher prices did not mean, however, that he eschewed the use of force. He too threatened “the most determined means of compulsion,” should peasants decline to turn over grain.^[16]
These decisions were taking place as the Kornilov affair was unfolding. In its immediate aftermath Kerensky, who took over the post of commander-in-chief from Kornilov, issued an order on September 8th that repeated, almost word-for-word, Kornilov’s July 31st order banning any obstruction to state food supply efforts.^[17] Yet while Kerensky issued the order, its origin lay elsewhere. It was prompted by the fervent appeals of N. A. Gavrilov, who throughout the war had served in the reformist ministry of agriculture’s food supply apparatus. Throughout 1917 Gavrilov was the ministry of food supply’s special agent attached to the army’s commander-in-chief. Gavrilov became concerned that Kornilov’s arrest would lead the population to doubt the validity of the July 31st order issued in his name. Attaching great importance to this order, Gavrilov sent a telegram on September 4th to Kerensky, pleading with him not only to confirm the order, but also to re-issue it under his own name. In addition, Gavrilov proposed that the Provisional Government extend the authority for enforcing the decree from provincial commissars to local food supply committees. To give them the “real force” required to carry out this task, Gavrilov — a civilian with a long history in the tsarist regime’s agriculture ministry — proposed that the committees be required to appeal to the army’s quartermaster for armed detachments. Kerensky’s order, issued four days later, incorporated all of Gavrilov’s suggestions.^[18]
While taking Kornilov’s earlier orders as its foundation, Kerensky’s order went much further in conflating the military and civilian spheres. Kornilov’s earlier orders had been issued on the basis of powers granted him in regions under martial law, and had covered only areas of the front. Kerensky’s order, issued by him in his capacity of supreme commander-in-chief but while he also occupied the post of prime minister, did not invoke any legal foundation. In effect, it extended to the entire political space of the former empire an order originally intended exclusively for the front and derived from martial law powers. Whereas in his order Kornilov had invoked only “the interests of the army,” Kerensky expanded the justification to include preserving the nation’s economy and the need to supply the country’s entire civilian population. Previously, the only civilian authority sanctioned to summon military force had been centrally appointed provincial commissars.^[19] Kerensky’s decree extended this authority to a new civilian organ, local food supply committees, for addressing essentially civil concerns. Indeed, the order obligated the committees to use such force. The right of such committees to summon military force would become a key feature of Soviet food supply policy. The impetus for this shift came under the Provisional Government, from Gavrilov, a civilian and longtime food supply technocrat.
Gavrilov was no lone fanatic. By mid-September former zemstvo and cooperative activists such as Viktor Anisimov had lost faith in organic democratic development and placed their hope instead on force. Anisimov had advocated increased participation by cooperatives in the war effort in order to foster new cooperative structures. From 1917 he entered the Provisional Government’s ministry of food supply. Addressing a gathering of food supply inspectors on September 25th, he described his disillusionment in democracy. “The initiators of the law on the grain monopoly,” he declared, “demonstrated too great a fascination with a democratic system for organizing the cause of food supply.” They had, he argued, placed too much hope on the ability of the local population to understand the tasks of state. “We ought to acknowledge that the gamble on the autonomous activity by broad sectors of democracy and their statist outlook has failed.” Anisimov – cooperative activist and leading Popular Socialist – argued that food supply would have to rely instead on “organs that are capable of taking a statist point of view.” Anisimov’s embrace of the state and his skepticism of the common people’s of ability to mature “autonomously” prepared the ground for his future service as a cooperative specialist for the Soviet state, until his death by typhus in 1920.^[20]
By autumn 1917 the Provisional Government, with the backing of many cooperative and professional activists, was preparing to use force to obtain grain from the countryside. In September the non-party socialist Sergei Prokopovich, Peshekhonov’s replacement as minister of food supply, explained the necessity for force. Declaring that exhortation had failed due to the Russian people’s excesses and ignorance, Prokopovich concluded: “we must cease our attempts at persuasion. A shift to compulsion is now absolutely necessary. It is necessary, and without this shift we will not be able to save either the cause of our homeland or the cause of our revolution.”^[21] In the following week the ministries of war, interior, and food supply worked out measures for providing government food supply officials with armed detachments so as to compel Russia’s citizens to meet their “State obligation.”^[22]
All too often, the Provisional Government is presented as having passively ceded power to the Soviet rise. While the government’s measures to deal with the post-summer crises did not save it, the measures were significant as the institutional legacy directly inherited by the Bolsheviks. A neat line between governments and policies can be drawn no more for October 1917 than it can be for February. Contemporaries themselves understood the Soviet state’s revolutionary food supply measures as an extension of wartime policies.^[23] Nikolai Kondrat’ev, a leading economic specialist and expert on food supply, observed in 1922 that “under Soviet power, the basic principle of food supply policy — the monopoly — remained the same as under the Provisional Government. But qualitatively and in its relative significance it had changed radically. As much as the Provisional Government presumed freedom and persuasion, Soviet power increased compulsion by an unprecedented degree.”^[24]
Kondrat’ev rightly suggests that what distinguished the two was not so much their policy, as the ability of Soviet power to mobilize support for coercive measures to carry these policies out. Throughout September and October, local commissars and food committees flooded the civilian chancellery of the supreme commander’s headquarters with requests for military units to use in securing grain for the state. Kerensky’s September 8th order #911 provided the legal justification.^[25] After the Soviet seizure of power, government commissars, ministry of food supply emissaries, and provincial food supply committees — all initially appointed by the Provisional Government — continued to request armed force from the army to secure grain.^[26] In January 1918 the Soviet government dissolved the old army in order to establish its own Red Army. When it did so, it transferred the functions of the military agency responsible since before October for dispatching armed force for civilian requisitioning, FRONTKOMSNAB, to the ministry of food supply.^[27]
Under the Soviets, the ministry of food supply would rely not only on armed units placed at its disposal by the military. Instead, it had its own “food supply army.”^[28] From the extensive loan of military force to civilian ministries under the Provisional Government, the Soviet state would provide certain civilian ministries with their own military formations. Arguably, the Soviets only radically extended a preexisting tendency in Russian political culture, one in stark contrast to German political culture, to subordinate the military to civilian control.^[29]

“Political and Cultural Enlightenment”

Michael Geyer has observed that “it is indeed not war or ‘militarization’ that organizes society, but society that organizes itself through and for war.” In this sense, “militarization originated in civil society, rather than being imposed on it.”^[30] In Russia and other combatants, it was this self-mobilization of society that incomparably extended the reach of the state and led to the revolutionary reordering of society. As the autocracy turned to public organizations to help with the war effort, the previously firm barrier between the state and non-state spheres became increasingly permeable.
In February 1917 the Old Regime collapsed. Famously, it was replaced by dual power: the Provisional Government and soviets. While empowered to exercise power only until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, the Provisional Government set itself a very clear task: to secure a great and democratic Russia, while avoiding the “anarchy” born of revolution. The period of the Provisional Government was, in Alessandro Stanziani’s apt phrase, the “age of specialists in power.”^[31] Defenders of the Provisional Government saw themselves as caretakers for the continuing heritage of the Russian state. Correspondingly, they described soviet organs as “public organizations,” thereby refusing to see them as claimants to political power.^[32]
The Provisional Government’s bureau for socio-political enlightenment exemplifies how public activists attempted to anchor their prewar agendas in the revolutionary state. An ideal example of this phenomenon was the “Central Committee for Socio-Political Enlightenment,” which crystallized in the summer of 1917 but whose roots lay in a public organization formed in late 1916. During the war, twenty-three societies of the technical professions – the society of Russian electrical engineers, the Russian society of civil engineers, the Russian metallurgical society, the Russian technical society, the society of technologists, the Russian society of physical chemistry – formed a “committee of military-technical assistance” to aid the war effort. In the February Revolution, members of this committee established a “committee for organizing morale,” which set itself the task of securing the revolution’s achievements by enlightening Russia’s new citizens. It immediately began conducting large meetings and holding courses to train lecturers on new political topics. Among its earliest speakers were luminaries of the moderate left and future stalwart defenders of dual power and the Provisional Government: Lev Deich, Nikolai Chaikovskii, V. F. Pekarskii, and Peter Pal’chinskii. All had been involved in the revolutionary movement for decades but during the war had become outspoken defensists, propounding the need to defeat Germany first rather than overthrow the regime.
The committee’s secretary was Dr. Sergei Chakhotin, a Kadet and biophysicist (he had been a student of Röntgen in Würzburg.) Chakhotin studied under Röntgen because he had been expelled from Moscow University for his role in the 1902 student unrest. He returned to Russia in 1912 at the insistence of I. P. Pavlov. During the war Chakhotin had served earlier as general secretary of the committee of military-technical assistance.^[33] (Chakhotin would later head the anti-Soviet surveillance and propaganda department, OSVAG, only to repent and recognize the progressiveness of the Soviet state in Smena Vekh.) The committee for organizing morale was committed to dual power as a program rather than simply a compromise, and made education about and agitation for the Constituent Assembly its central task. In the summer of 1917, the “committee for organizing morale” rechristened itself the “central committee for socio-political enlightenment.”^[34]
The Russian Revolution occurred at a critical moment in the world conflict, just as all combatants were seeking new, more intensive techniques for conducting the war, a development John Horne has termed “re-mobilizing” societies for war. In several respects, the origins and initial goals of the Provisional Government’s committee for socio-political enlightenment mirrored the French “Union des Grandes Associations contre la Propagande Ennemie” (UGACPE). The UGACPE derived its greatest impetus from the Ligue de l’Enseignement. Like the committee for military-technical support, the Ligue was a voluntary body. Unlike the Russian committee, however, the Ligue had existed for several decades. It was part of the republican establishment that had crusaded for the secularized primary school system, the foundation of the French republican political order.^[35] Thus the Ligue was already deeply embedded in French society, while the central committee for socio-political enlightenment was very much an organ of the post-February political elite, which was keenly aware of the lack of any such a web of institutions permeating society. Indeed, the “bureau for organizing the spirit” set itself the task of overcoming “the popular masses’ socio-political illiteracy,” which derived (it charged) from “the tsarist regime’s criminal unwillingness to grant the people light and knowledge.”^[36]
So, although the central committee for socio-political enlightenment emerged out of a wartime public organization, it set itself a fundamentally political task: enlightening the population so that it would, of its own accord, support the Provisional Government as guarantor of revolution. To this end, however, its members deliberately selected the army as their instrument. Not incorrectly, the “bureau” identified the greatest threat to “the motherland and the revolution” (in the form propounded by the Provisional Government) as coming from “those dark elements of the popular masses who lack consciousness and who are armed” — in other words, Russia’s soldiers. Enlightenment could overcome this grave danger.
But if the army represented a threat, it equally represented an unparalleled opportunity. The committee argued that “the country’s cultural forces” ought to focus on the army for a purely practical reason: “the fastest way to implant knowledge in the country is through the army.” The Russian army, it continued, “having become an armed people, now concentrates within itself the nation’s most vital and robust forces, its most active element.” The army’s organization, technical and communications resources, and instruments for “unifying millions of citizens” led the committee to conclude that precisely through the army they could “introduce and disseminate those principles of political knowledge without which we will be unable to handle the immense tasks standing before Russia.” Because it lacked “authority” and any institutional framework upon which to build, the committee therefore lobbied the Provisional Government to attach it to the “political directorate of the War Ministry, the pinnacle [golovnoi punkt] of the military organization.”^[37] The democratic army, these public men were arguing, provided the best surrogate for Russia’s non-existing civic institutions. It concentrated Russia’s new citizens in one establishment, and provided the ideal institutional tools for working upon them. Michel Foucault described the early modern army as a key site for working on subjects’ “docile bodies.”^[38] Members of the central committee of socio-political enlightenment envisioned Russia’s new democratic army as a forum for working upon citizens’ malleable minds. To this end the committee organized courses to train lecturers, sent out speakers to promote the 1917 Liberty Loan, conducted lectures and performances in army regiments, and compiled daily summary reports tracing the Provisional Government’s declining popularity.^[39]
The post-February civilian and military leaders eagerly welcomed this initiative. The revolutionary restructuring of institutions over the course of 1917 played a critical role in conflating the political and military spheres. Until February 1917, the war minister in Russia had always been a career military man. Under the Provisional Government, the war minister was a civilian. From early May until the end of the Provisional Government, the man in charge of the military was not just a civilian but a self-styled revolutionary democrat: Alexander Kerensky. From mid-summer his ministerial posts significantly blurred the boundaries between the military and civilian realms. From the time he became Prime Minister in the second coalition (July 25th-August 27th) until the collapse of the Provisional Government, he united supreme civilian authority with leading military posts. In the second coalition Kerensky served as both Prime Minister and war minister. In the aftermath of the Kornilov affair he surrendered the post of war minister, but in its place took over the post of supreme commander-in-chief, uniting it until the collapse of the Provisional Government with his continued role as Prime Minister.
As war minister and supreme commander in chief, Kerensky introduced new, specifically political organs to the army. Due to the occupation of enemy territories and the proclamation of vast swaths of Russian territory under military rule, from October 1914 the Russian army had established a “chancellery for civilian administration.” It involved itself with ruling the population, not engaging it. Two days after Kerensky took over as war minister in May 1917, he established an “office of the war minister.” The “office” bearing this nondescript title embodied within it a political department, a surveillance department, and a department for liaison with the troops. In early August, the political department of this office was made into a separate “political directorate of the war minister” existing alongside the office of the war minister. After the Kornilov affair, with Kerensky simultaneously occupying the post of Prime Minister and supreme commander-in-chief, the Provisional Government reformed the office of the war minister into a “military office of the Prime Minister and commander-in-chief.” Kerensky thus carried the war ministry’s office with him when he left that post. The “political directorate of the war minister” was then made into an entirely independent entity. Thus the Prime Minister gained a military office, and the war minister — a political directorate. Both were dissolved after the October Revolution, but the Soviet state reformed the directorate of civilian administration, which had continued to exist from 1914, into its own “military-political and civilian directorate under the commander in chief.”^[40]
To head the war ministry’s new political directorate, Kerensky did not appoint career military men. Instead he selected public men who had become officers in the course of the war. The first director, V. B. Stankevich, was a lecturer in criminal law and political activist who had known Kerensky before the war. When he resigned, Kerensky appointed Fedor Stepun, who before the war had been a lecturer in idealist philosophy and who came to Kerensky’s and Stankevich’s attention due to his political activity as a delegate from the army committee of the Southwest front. By late summer 1917 the political directorate had become “one of the most significant posts in the system of military administration,” “a quite solid state institution.” Among its primary functions was to ensure the promotion of officers loyal to the Provisional Government and to coordinate the government’s military commissars, yet another extension of civilian political control over military affairs.^[41] In April 1918 the Bolshevik regime would follow this precedent and establish an “all-Russian Bureau of military commissars,” later subordinated to the Red Army’s own “political administration.”^[42]
Kerensky did not have to force his vision of a politicized army upon the military. Many officers opposed the politicization of the army, symbolically represented by the Petrograd Soviet’s “Order #1.” Yet many officers opposed to committees and “Order #1” not on account of the army’s politicization per se so much as the fact that it was the Soviet, rather than the Provisional Government that was politicizing the army. Many officers in fact welcomed the February revolution as an opportunity to transform Russia’s obedient but passive troops into committed citizen-soldiers, something some had been advocating since the army’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War.^[43] Such officers not only did not fear politics; they positively sought to inject it into the army. The revolution thus fostered a new military-cum-political hybrid in both the civilian and military spheres.
Army “political departments” demonstrate most clearly how such military men sought to suffuse the army with political efforts. As early as mid-March 1917 the Moscow military district established its own “political-civic department.” Its founder, serving in the directorate of the General Staff, argued in July 1917 that such “civic-political departments” should be extended to all military districts in the rear. “The immensity of the unfolding events,” he argued to his superiors, “has advanced the public element to prime significance in state construction.” Closely paralleling the attitudes of the non-military public activists, this officer argued from the military side that “the War Ministry cannot and must not evade this development. The necessity for the very closest ties between military and civilian life can no longer be subject to any doubts and ought not to meet any opposition.” In order to manage this amalgamation of the civilian and military spheres, he further insisted that “we must have the liveliest contact with active public forces, on the one hand, and on the other hand we must have precise and regular information on the internal life of our units, on their moods, and on the currents of socio-political thought that are acting in their milieu.” He closed by suggesting the formation of a special political organ under the War Ministry, a proposal realized less than one month later with the creation of the War Ministry’s separate political directorate.^[44] By September military-political departments had been established in the Moscow and Petrograd military districts, and plans had been drawn up for introducing them to other internal military districts. The general staff argued that these departments were so important that they should be created for the front regions as well. The goal of these organs was not simply to identify and track popular sentiments in the army, but rather to direct them.^[45] To this end the War Ministry’s political directorate in September introduced universal compulsory education throughout the army and established a department for distributing popular literature and organizing libraries.^[46] Again, the army had come to be seen as the surrogate for an educational infrastructure that the autocracy stood accused of neglecting. The Red Army’s own political departments would engage in a nearly identical “cultural-enlightenment” endeavor.
Clearly, the Provisional Government’s program, especially in light of Kerensky’s gamble on the failed June offensive to unite the cause of revolution and that of the war effort, must be seen within the more general “remobilization” of combatant societies for the war effort. The strains of war compelled other states to seek to mobilize their own home fronts. From late 1916 German military authorities had been arguing for “enlightenment activities” to win not only the obedience, but also the willing and informed support of both the troops and the civilian population. These proposals led to the development of a program of “enlightenment activity,” carried out by the commands of military districts for their own troops as well as the civilian population, and from late July 1917 to the establishment of “patriotic instruction” in the Germany army.^[47] The Germany army’s “enlightenment officer” [Aufklärungsoffizer], conducting both indoctrination and more generalized adult education, might thus be seen as the German analogue to the Provisional Government’s commissars, serving under the new political directorate. However in Germany, unlike Russia, it was the old-time military that oversaw the extension of surveillance and propaganda, leading to a militarization of the socio-political realm, but without the corresponding civilianization of the military realm.
But developments in Russia were not simply an epiphenomenon of the Great War. From 1917 a reciprocal relationship existed between war and revolution. Russia’s revolution politicized the discussion of the war’s aims and conduct in all combatant societies. The Russian example heightened concerns among all combatant powers about how committed and informed their own populations were about the struggle, and led these authorities to increase surveillance and propaganda efforts directed at their own citizens. Other combatants’ wartime mobilization efforts – the surveillance and enlightenment programs in France, Britain, and Austria-Hungary, for instance – emerged not only from wartime exigencies, but also as a response to the political threat represented by the Russian Revolution. For much of the rest of Europe these anticipated fears in fact proved greater than any reality. Yet such fears caused governments to initiate particular policies to address the perceived threat.^[48]
During the ensuing civil wars, Red and White alike employed this took kit bequeathed them by the Great War.^[49] Soviet surveillance efforts undoubtedly extended techniques forged in the general European wartime context. In Russia, however, these techniques became refracted through the experience and expectations of millenarian revolution. Differing understandings of revolution accounted, in large part, for the failure of the Russian political class’s vision of wartime surveillance as a proxy for its longstanding mission as Kulturträger — that is, for the failure of anti-Soviet agitation and enlightenment projects. This class understood “revolution” as a structural opening for its preexisting dream to enlighten the masses. This vision clashed with a more expansive vision of revolution as ongoing project for social justice embraced precisely by those whom Russia’s political class wished to tutor as citizens. Indeed, the disproportionate role of the intelligentsia in staffing both the Provisional Government’s and White movement’s surveillance efforts undercut these very projects by giving them a class face. Russia’s workers and peasants viewed such institutions, not incorrectly, as embodiments of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia’s aspirations, aspirations which they had by now passed beyond.
Soviet surveillance thus differed in important ways from its competitors. While equally motivated in the abstract by the Russian intelligentsia’s enlightenment mission, its sociological profile reflected less the old intelligentsia than the new revolutionary enlightenment institution — the Communist Party. Soviet state surveillance, for good or bad, was identified not with the prerevolutionary intelligentsia, but with the revolutionary regime’s own institutions: the Cheka, the Red Army, and the Communist Party. Soviet surveillance thus was not a set of institutions and practices limited to wartime, but rather became embedded within the new state’s permanent civilian structures. Russian society’s “remobilization” for war ended in 1917. The remobilization of society for revolution continued for several decades longer.
The Revolution thus provided a new matrix for practices that were emerging out of total war. Whereas these tools had originally been devised for use against external foes, and intended for use only during the extraordinary period of wartime, the Revolution transformed the ends to which these practices were deployed. A state committed to the cause of revolution could extend the total war practices from their previously limited goal of waging war against external enemies to a new, more all-encompassing – and open-ended – goal: the forging of a revolutionary society. One way of conceiving the Soviet Union, then, is as a polity whose revolution fixed, or froze, techniques of total war and total mobilization as enduring, rather than transient, features of its political order.