SUMMARY:

This is the final section of the history course A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia, which began being published in Ab Imperio in issue 1/2014. The revised version of the course is now being prepared for publication as a separate book, in Russian and in English.
The last part of Chapter 10, “The Twentieth Century: Empire in the Era of Mass Society,” covers the period of World War I, the Revolution of 1917, and the disintegration of the historical Russian Empire. Modern historical studies of the roots of the Great War confirm the rise of irreconcilable tensions only within the countries that began the war, whether the parliamentary impasse in Austria-Hungary, the landslide victory of the left in the national elections in France, the deadlock of negotiating Home Rule for Ireland and the social reform legislation in Britain, the demise of Prussian supremacy within the German Empire, or the failure to reconcile Russian ethnocultural nationalism with the imperial principle in Russia. International relations were characterized by growing economic and cultural globalization and were no tenser than they were five or ten years earlier. Even the military of the “great powers” invariably prepared for defensive actions and deemed offensive campaigns against each other all but technically impossible. This is why it took European political leaders a whole month to make the fatal decision to use one of the international crises as the pretext for the big war. Each country had powerful forces that perceived the war as a lesser evil compared to complete sociopolitical reconstruction along the lines of global progressivism, which demanded social reform and openness to the global movement of capital, labor, and culture. The ideal of the nation-state (even embraced by the multicultural Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires) was incompatible with the rising globalization, and the war seemed a logical solution that promised to halt globalization and foster national mobilization and isolation.
In reality, the war only enhanced the processes that it was supposed to derail: the modern “total war” was not so much about military successes (which virtually did not occur during the four years of war) but about sustained mobilization of societies and economic resources in combatant countries. Negatively, however, this meant answering the challenge of globalization by surviving the global war. In the Russian Empire, this could be achieved only through cooperation among the relatively compact central government, the parliament based on a restricted franchise, and self-organization of the imperial nation of obshchestvennost’. None of them alone was capable of mobilizing support and coordinating resources and efforts on the all-imperial scale. The promise for such an alliance appeared in the summer of 1915, with evident prospects of subsequent radical political reform. Nicholas II opted to consolidate his authoritarian regime by assuming the high command. This decision and its political implications alienated all the main political actors in the country, including Russian nationalists and patriotic monarchists, which made it only a matter of time until the regime would collapse.
The most surprising effect of the February Revolution of 1917 was the “persistence of empire,” but not in the usual understanding, as a forceful restoration of imperial control over the peripheries. In revolutionary Russia, it was the determination of “national borderlands” to stay within the imperial space (of course, under the modern political regime of federation or at least cultural autonomy). Even the Great Duchy of Finland, which legally became independent the moment Nicholas II abdicated the throne, merely requested greater autonomy in its internal affairs while leaving all strategic matters, including foreign relations, to Petrograd. The failure of political elites in Petrograd – both conservative and revolutionary – to envision the new political arrangement of the country became the main factor of disintegration. Still, it was not before the Bolsheviks’ October coup, their “Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia” announcing the right to secession, and the beginning of their open war against the Ukrainian People’s Republic that former regions of Russia began announcing independence. The Russian Empire disintegrated because its “metropole” was no longer able to accommodate its multifaceted diversity and support the arrangements offered by its subjects.
The total civil war that followed in a way reproduced the original situation of self-organization of Northern Eurasia, “back to square one” of the first millennium CE. Using violence as the main universally comprehensible “language” and relying on modern technical means, it became possible for one center of power to consolidate much of the former imperial territories in the course of several years (not centuries). However, the new polity was based on very different social structures and mechanisms, and accommodated the fundamental imperial situation very differently from the historical Russian Empire. Even though many institutions, practices, and individuals safely survived the rupture of the civil war, the story of the rise and fall of the Soviet Union requires a different conceptual language and should not be seen as a direct continuation of the previous era.