Civil war is a powerful concept that captures the dialectics of social cohesion and discreteness: by definition, civil war happens within a polity that is perceived as a whole but at the same time engenders incongruent visions of its future. The antithetical conditions of civil order and war paradoxically conflate in the phenomenon of civil war, which can spell doom for the old polity and inaugurate the creation of a new one. An increasingly ubiquitous phenomenon since the American Civil War (or at least as identified ever since by participants and observers of various conflicts),^[1] civil wars have become the subject of numerous empirical studies, albeit of surprisingly little historical reflection. A recent survey by David Armitage has documented the patchy and unsettled state of the field (the study itself all but ignores the Russian part of the story).^[2] Political scientists have been of little help to historians in conceptualizing the civil war phenomenon due to their presentist and inductive approach – attempts to build a general model by summarizing typical traits of historical civil wars (identified in this way by the participants themselves for a variety of political and cultural reasons rather than any “objective” criteria).^[3] The key question seems to be “What new can we see in the events when conceptualized as civil war” rather than “what is civil war as a thing”?
The latter question can hardly have a single comprehensive answer, particularly given the ambivalent role of civil war in constituting and upsetting sovereignty. Can a “pure” civil war take place in an empire, where it immediately acquires all the traits of an “international” war – and can a war of secession remain within some clear boundaries of a seceding province without spilling into neighboring territories in the process of re-creating a new sovereign polity? If civil war is intrinsic to modern disciplinary power and “politics is the continuation of civil war” as Foucault has claimed,^[4] why do civil wars break out in regimes that have demonstrated for quite some time the failure of modern disciplinary mechanisms and contested politics (and civil wars themselves embody the opposite of disciplinary practices – direct violence, often taking the form of genocide)?
Very few historians have studied civil wars in their dialectic ambivalence, as an indicator and a function of complex historical dynamics rather than an isolated phenomenon. One important exception is Jeremy Adelman, who conceptualizes imperial revolutions in the Iberian empires in the early nineteenth century as products of civil wars that manifested the crisis of the old sovereign authority and attempts “to reconstitute the elements, and at times foundations, of sovereignty, with new repositories of legitimacy.”^[5] Writing about a more recent period, Enzo Traverso has articulated a vision of the first half of the twentieth century as a thirty-year-long “European civil war.”^[6] Defying the hidden apologetic agenda in Ernst Nolte’s original usage of this notion (which normalized Nazism as a reaction to Communism),^[7] Traverso underscores the transnational thrust of the seemingly “domestic” civil war phenomenon and its inseparable entanglement with “international” wars.
These recent conceptual insights might have resembled mere truisms in the Russian historical context, given Vladimir Lenin’s mantra of “conversion of the … imperialist war into a civil war,”^[8] formulated already in the summer 1914 and repeated in many articles before the Bolshevik government implemented it in practice. Lenin’s sociology relativized national political boundaries, expecting the world war to be transformed into national civil wars, and a revolutionary civil war in one country to spark the world revolutionary war. However, the revisionist potential of the Leninist interpretation of civil war has had little practical impact on historiography. It is perhaps due to Lenin’s overwhelming theoretical authority that, out of thousands of historians who have written about the Russian civil war, very few have questioned the mechanisms at work in these entangled processes. What motivated people, who were already exhausted by years of World War I, to partake voluntarily in a new, civil war? How exactly did new institutions (or at least, new structures) of authority emerge on the ruins of the old imperial state? Where did the new cadres of administrators come from, and what were the roots of the emerging new governmentality? What explains the truly genocidal scale of violence unleashed by the Russian civil war (or by any other civil war, for that matter)?
The available scholarship provides useful but scattered insights in lieu of complex answers to these questions. Peter Holquist’s concepts, such as Russia’s “parastatal complex” or “continuum of crisis, 1914–1921,” offer a language to analyze the post-1917 civil war as a complex phenomenon but not an elaborated explanation of it.^[9] For one thing, the very continuity of institutions and cadres (and hence their mindset) across the revolutionary divide is a hypothesis that still requires empirical verification. Most studies of early Soviet government agencies and bodies of authority neglect their late imperial predecessors, and vice versa.^[10] Prosopographies of the personnel of various political and administrative bodies throughout the alleged “continuum of crisis” are extremely rare for any generalized conclusions.^[11] For a meaningful discussion of the Russian civil war and the mechanisms for unleashing mass violence, we still do not even know the biographies of rank-and-file Cheka operatives and their path to the war with their compatriots – Lenin’s pronouncements cannot substitute for this basic field research.^[12] Likewise, Lenin’s theorizing and the generalizations of modern historians cannot compensate for the lack of textual analysis of the emerging Soviet governmentality, beginning with basics such as the new conventions of paperwork.^[13]
This issue of Ab Imperio, “Civil Wars in Empires and Nations,” registers the current state of studies of the topic: the emerging new directions of research and the conceptual problems encountered along the way. In the “History” section, Alexey Golubev and Alexander Osipov guest-edit the forum “From a Province to the State, and Back: The Russian Northwest and Finland during the Revolutionary Years.” As the title readily reveals, the articles of the forum and the editors’ introduction address the key historiographic problems outlined above.
In his contribution to the forum, Dmitrii Ivanov offers a microhistory of revolutionary militia units (the Red Guards and the workers’ battalion) organized by workers of local military enterprises in the wake of the February Revolution of 1917 in one locality – Shlisselburg near Petrograd. The article traces the social and ideological mechanisms of popular mobilization that caused the workers to join these units, while also paying close attention to the biographies of leaders and known rank-and-file militiamen. A key factor in the escalation of civil war in the country, the Red Guards, evolved in Shlisselburg from the workers’ militia legalized by factory management in March 1917 as a much-needed security force for a strategic military object in the situation of revolutionary chaos – nominally, a nonpolitical force. The Shlisselburg Red Guards were disbanded in summer 1918, before the beginning of the full-scale civil war, which was fought by the regular Red Army rather than volunteer militiamen. Thus, any simplified teleological interpretations of the Russian civil war’s roots become problematized by a microhistorical study of one location. Ivanov shows that workers’ enthusiasm about joining revolutionary militias was driven as much by various pragmatic considerations as by ideology and began waning rapidly as the country slid into open civil war in the spring of 1918. With their military potential limited or dismal, volunteer revolutionary militias proved themselves a political rather than a military force, which suggests that by itself, without centralized coordination, revolutionary self-organization does not lead to large-scale civil war and mass violence.
Red Guards were also not a spontaneous invention of the 1917 Russian Revolution: the name and the concept were borrowed from the realities of Finland in 1905. This aspect is central to other articles in the forum: revolution and civil war relativize the clear distinction between domestic and international in the process of redrawing the boundaries of national groupness. Sami Suodenjoki studies an unusual historical source – brochures containing collections of songs, a widespread format of popular culture in Finland in the early twentieth century. Specifically, the article focuses on song collections published in 1917–1918 as an affective medium that contested old forms of political legitimacy and reinforced ideas of class solidarity, national unity, and ethnic stereotypes. While demonstrating strong anti-imperial sentiment, the songs also revealed the implicit integration of the Finnish popular imagination in the Russian imperial context, both political and cultural. Thus, a popular song from that period that is still performed in Finland, “Ai, ai Kerenski” (Oh, oh Kerensky), mercilessly mocked Alexander Kerensky’s attempts to maintain the imperial grip on Finland in the summer and fall of 1917. Not only does the song’s text reveal a detailed map of the decolonizing former empire and occasionally include Russian words (e.g., “vot kak”).^[14] The tune of this dance hit was borrowed from a Russian two-step dance (usually identified as a “quadrille”), “Karapet,” popular at the turn of the century and further popularized in the early 1910s by the crooner Yuri Morfessi.^[15]
The same paradoxical entanglement of independent Finland with the former metropole is discussed in Aleksi Mainio’s article. Contrary to the official foreign policy of the country, the predominant public opinion, and the interests of a former Russian province that cherished its independence, throughout the 1920s and 1930s Finnish military intelligence supported the anti-Soviet activities from Finland’s territory of various Russian émigré groups – some of which would have pursued imperialist policy in case of coming to power in Russia. Finally, the article by Marina Vitukhnovskaja-Kauppala reconstructs the complex dynamics of a postimperial civil war, using the example of White Sea Karelia. Russia’s Grand Duchy of Finland was among a few imperial regions recognized by the former metropole as a sovereign country on its initial territory. Yet the logic of the domestic Finnish civil war and the Finnish ethnocultural national project that legitimized the country’s sovereignty in its aftermath encouraged Finnish volunteers to go to war with Russia in 1918–1920. The “wars for kindred peoples” were intended to bring Karelians, among others, into the Finnish nation-state. Most Karelians showed little support for these plans or any other project of national mobilization. However, the political and economic collapse brought about by Russian civil war eventually compelled eleven counties (volosti) of White Sea Karelia to form a self-proclaimed independent state. The Bolshevik government and the Red Army crushed the nascent Karelian statehood but had to recognize rising Karelian national solidarity and grant Karelia autonomy within the RSFSR.
Focusing on the Northwestern region of the former Russian Empire without rigidly imposing spatial and chronological boundaries, the forum highlights the important aspects of the civil war as an ambivalent process of upsetting and reestablishing authority and groupness. The seemingly clear hierarchical taxonomy embodied by Karelia, Finland, and Russia was deconstructed and reshuffled in 1917–1920, demonstrating the possibility of various arrangements. Those who started civil war as a political process in 1917 (the Red Guards) showed reluctance to participate in the actual warfare in 1918. In fact, most Red Guard units were liquidated by the fall of 1918, which means that the Russian civil war was fought on the Red side not by self-organized volunteers driven by ideas or pragmatic considerations. This conclusion further problematizes the notion of the “continuation of crisis” and persistence of the “parastatal complex.”
A different aspect of the problem of civil discord is tackled in another thematic forum, “Anatomy of Genocide: The Imagined Community and Its Neighbors.” Initially designed as a discussion of the book by Omer Bartov, the winner of Ab Imperio’s 2018 annual award, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (New York, 2018), the forum’s focus was subsequently changed. Bartov’s study tells the story of the Galician town of Buczacz, in which Jews, Ukrainians, and Poles had lived together for centuries, until former good neighbors – local gentile residents – became active perpetrators of the Holocaust, and later of the Ukrainian–Polish ethnic cleansings. The forum still refers to Bartov’s book, but centers on the two key questions that Bartov leaves unanswered: Why was the Holocaust so deadly in a region that had no prehistory of anti-Jewish violence (if “neighbors” were its most numerous perpetrators, as Bartov argues)? And why did gentile “neighbors” so massively turn against the local Jews (if the Holocaust was orchestrated and supervised by the Nazis, as the book demonstrates)? Essentially, the forum addresses the problem of the roots of genocide in civil war, and the typicality of neighbors’ participation in genocide.
This thematic focus places the forum in the issue’s “Methodology and Theory” section. It opens with the Russian translation of the introduction and conclusion of the pathbreaking anthropological study by Lee Ann Fujii Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Cornell University Press, 2009). The Armenian genocide of 1915 and the Holocaust did not allow for comprehensive fieldwork in their aftermath, and the ability of social sciences to conceptualize and analyze these catastrophes was quite limited at the time (the very notion of genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin only in 1944). As a professional anthropologist conducting a long-term study in two locations in Rwanda, Fujii benefited from being able to interview multiple participants in genocide – surviving victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. In a country with a mixed population and a high rate of interethnic marriages, the perpetrators of genocide were literally neighbors and even family members, rather than foreign occupiers from afar. Fujii explains this phenomenon and offers the analytical language that allows students of other genocides to tackle the issue while avoiding the usual trap of essentialization and historicization of the narrative.
Three of the essays in the forum do not deal with Bartov’s book at all or the region he studied. Instead, they discuss the cases of other societies that, like Eastern Galicia, could boast a history of tolerance toward their numerous Jewish communities until the Nazi occupation. Afterward, most of them demonstrated a much more rigorous implementation of the Holocaust than neighboring countries that had a much more pronounced history of anti-Semitism. Moreover, in all of them, the main perpetrators of the Holocaust were locals, often literally neighbors of the persecuted Jews.
Simon Levis Sullam presents the main findings of his recent book The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy (Princeton, 2018). Modern Italy has been known for its tolerant attitude toward local Jews, and even the Mussolini regime did not alter this situation until the mid-1930s. Quite a number of fascist functionaries were Jews. The situation radically changed in the fall of 1943, after the Allied landing in Sicily, the arrest of Mussolini and the ban of the Fascist Party, his escape, and the occupation of the northern part of Italy by the German army. The Mussolini puppet state outlawed Jews. Members of the Republican Fascist Party, police, the military, and ordinary citizens were responsible for the arrest of about 20 percent of Italian Jews in 1943–1945 (and a much higher proportion counting just the occupied territory). Apparently, the Holocaust in Italy was not driven by any historical animosity toward Jews and was not carried out by the Nazis. Rather, it became possible on such a scale due to the combination of several profound crises that stirred up severe moral panic: Italy’s loss in the world war, the escalation of civil war with the antifascists, the country’s split into two, and the German occupation of the northern part of Italy.
Ido de Haan surveys studies of the so-called Dutch paradox – how a country renowned for its tolerance and large Jewish community demonstrated the worst record of Jewish survival during the Holocaust in Western and Central Europe. Only 27 percent of Dutch Jewry survived the Holocaust, as compared to 75 percent of French Jews or 60 percent of Belgian Jewish survivors, just across the border. Once again, all the perpetrators were Dutch, not some German agents.
Darius Staliūnas summarizes his study Enemies for a Day: Antisemitism and Anti-Jewish Violence in Lithuanian under the Tsars (Budapest; New York, 2015) for Russian-language readers and presents his explanation for the deadly nature of the Holocaust in Lithuania that was perpetrated in large part by local gentile residents. Like Eastern Galicia, Lithuania had had a centuries-long tradition of peaceful interconfessional coexistence: in his meticulous research of the Holocaust’s historical roots in Lithuania, Staliūnas was unable to find any sustained pattern of anti-Semitic actions or Jewish pogroms similar to those that happened in other regions. And yet, like Eastern Galicia, Lithuania became the site of the most gruesome anti-Jewish violence after 1941. Of the vast prewar Jewish populations in both regions, 90–95 percent did not survive the Holocaust. Staliūnas argues that history played little role in unleashing genocide, which became a result of the crisis that rapidly developed over the several years before and including the Soviet annexation of the country in 1940. It is also not accidental that the Holocaust became possible only after the Nazi occupation in 1941.
The next three contributions to the forum directly discuss Bartov’s book.
Yuri Radchenko comments on the book from his vantage point as a Ukrainian historian of the Holocaust. He endorses the overall premise of the book but calls for a more nuanced approach to the analysis of its main collective protagonists. Even among Ukrainian nationalists the differences between the main factions – the OUN(B) (Banderites) and OUN(M) (Melnykites) – were formidable and directly affected their stance vis-à-vis the Nazis, the Jews, and the Poles. As a social historian of Galicia, Vladyslava Moskalets also questions Bartov’s nondiscriminating and generalizing approach to constructing social groups. Moskalets regards the book more as a longue durée synthesis than an “anatomy” of the complex society of Buczacz. The book describes the actions of the homogenized “neighbors” but avoids explaining them.
Ilya Gerasimov brings together the main themes raised by all the forum participants. He offers an alternative to Bartov’s explanation of the fratricidal violence in Buczacz. This explanation is based on a model of genocide that corresponds to Fujii’s fieldwork in Rwanda and views the participation of longtime members of the same social network (“neighbors”) in genocide as a typical factor rather than a scandalous aberration. In this model, the driving force behind genocide is not entrenched hatred of the Other based on potent nationalism. Rather, it is a desire to join a kindred community at any cost by the aspiring members of a crumbling national project – compromised by the wartime threat to national sovereignty and the absence of political institutions of participatory democracy due to a foreign occupation or dictatorial regime; a national project, whose promise of unity is shattered by civil war and the absence of a common language capable of formulating and communicating the criteria of national belonging. It is not ancient xenophobic animosity that leads to genocide but a very recent and rapidly developed longing for membership in a legitimate national community. Hence the central role of “neighbors” in genocide as an instrument of “negatively” drawing new boundaries of a political community by stigmatizing those former members of the old polity who could be most easily identified as “aliens” or “enemies of the people.”
Omer Bartov, whose book served as the point of departure for this forum, has written the concluding piece in response to his critics.
The already complete issue was extended at the very last moment to accommodate a tribute to our recently deceased colleague, Sonja Luehrmann (1975–2019). Jeffers Engelhardt, Valerie Kivelson, Zhanna Kormina, William G. Rosenberg, and Victoria Smolkin share their recollections of personal and professional contacts with Sonja, a perceptive and prolific anthropologist and historian. The editors of Ab Imperio dedicate this issue to her memory.