Holquist has written a good book on political violence and state-building. Focusing on the Don Territory, he examines the politics of food supply, surveillance and violence, and how the pressures of war led Reds and Whites to do similar things. Russians on opposing sides during their civil war behaved much like each other and not unlike Europeans. Accordingly, Holquist reminds us that it was the British who first organized concentration camps, that the French pioneered domestic propaganda campaigns, that the Germans started food requisitioning in March 1917, and that Romanovs and Habsburgs carried out massive government deportations of suspect populations. What distinguished the Bolsheviks was that they kept doing during peacetime what other European leaders did only during wartime. The author thankfully avoids neologisms except for “parastatal complex.” He prefers this term to “civil society” because Russia’s voluntary civilian organizations were not institutionalized in law nor as independent of the state as were their counterparts further west.
Particularly valuable is Holquist’s identification of the statist and anti-commercial prejudices of the educated. In light of this, we should not regard rivalry between state and society, but between those in government and those outside over how best to use the state, as the key theme in modern Russian history (284). He discusses the impact of these biases on policies and how they predisposed professors and professionals who did not agree with Bolshevism to support the Bolsheviks. Within this context, he reminds us that many Bolshevik policies had their roots in war-time tsarist practice and that often the same people did the same things before and after October.
Before the fall of the tsar government officials were as ambivalent about mobilizing the educated as the educated were about committing themselves to state-sponsored projects. Afterwards, because the educated did not want to destroy the state but rather to use it for what they thought was the good of society, their ambivalence disappeared. However, in the absence of a civil society professionals and professors in power found they had to rely on military and government institutions to a much greater degree than they would have otherwise and that, despite the fall of the tsar, the institutional gap between society and government remained (238). Many consequently came to regard wartime mobilization not as a necessary temporary expedient, but as the way to realize the good society. The new rulers used the institutions they staffed to implement anti-market policies. Russian policies, unlike those of their counterparts to the west, favored small producers, zemtsvos, coops, rather than the bankers and dealers who controlled silos, mills and distribution. When faced with shortages in marketed grain in 1917, instead of loosening controls on the latter group, and thereby making Russian practice more similar to the German or British, the Provisional Government tightened them. When this failed to increase the amount of marketed grain it resorted to force. Since similar state initiatives worked in Germany, the educated reasoned, they failed to work in Russia because the peasant was too backward to understand them and voluntarily cooperate. What now became apparent , Holquist notes, was that just as the February revolution had not bridged the institutional gap between government and society, it had not bridged the ideological gap between the educated and the common people either. While a shortage of manufactured goods contributed to the food supply problem, the attitudes of the educated aggravated it. Few could accept that Russia’s peasants, like their counterparts elsewhere, were like Adam Smith’s proverbial butcher who did not sell meat because he loved his fellow man, but because he wanted to make a profit. And not only were peasants more interested in pecuniary advantage than patriotism, but their idea about the good society differed from that of the educated to a greater degree than was the case in Germany or France (107, 142, 248). The government’s use of force against farmers, accordingly, had more deleterious consequences in Russia. The provisional government’s limited capacity and moral-legal considerations restrained it. The Bolsheviks could mobilize more manpower to implement their policies and recognized no philosophical or moral limits on their authority. What they did was not novel but a logical step on a continuum Holquist claims.
Until 1922, Bolshevik mobilization and violence “remained within the outer reaches of comparison with other states.” From 1922 the Bolshevik regime became fundamentally different from European states because it continued to use wartime measures during peacetime (288). This is an important issue and deserved elaboration. If the Bolsheviks had shared power with the SRs and Mensheviks during the early months of 1918 and agreed to their demands to loosen market controls, which reflected popular desires, would revolutionary Russia have had a food supply dictatorship that May? Just how comparable were Bolshevik policies to those of their rivals and other governments? Did the Whites have a state?
The author points to German policies as a Bolshevik model. Germany introduced a food monopoly in 1915 and Germans inevitably began trading illegally. But, its black market remained marginal and penalties were not excessive. In Russia “bagman” supplied as much as 75% of urban food, and in its attempts to enforce its monopoly the government eventually allowed shooting on the spot. Holquist draws attention to the lack of a civil society in Russia and its impact, but does not specify whether it was the war or the society as it existed that ultimately shaped Russian policies. According to the 1920 Russian census 12 million people lived in cities. That same year the NARKOMPROD issued rations to 22 million urban dwellers. Both totals can’t be right. What if Russia had Germany’s bureaucracy? What would German policies have been like under Russian conditions? Was not Bolshevik practice more similar to Germany’s Verkehrspolitik in the Ober Ost than its domestic policies? This radical attempt at total control with a skeleton administration was not based on a theory and had no equivalent in western or central Europe, European colonies, or pre-Bolshevik Russia. Were the Bolsheviks aware of it? Would a “Bolshevik Verkehrspolitik” fall within “the outer reaches of comparison”?
Three weeks before taking power, Lenin in Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? made no reference at all to war as a reason why he would make the administrative apparatus as big and all-encompassing as possible. Did political leaders elsewhere or his rivals have such explicit ambitions? In December 1917, more than a year before the word appeared in the Don Region and seven months before the first known instance of mass White anti-Bolshevik terror, again with no reference to war, Lenin, in How to Organize Competition, dehumanized his opponents and called for their “extermination,” much as General Von Trotha some ten years earlier had called for the annihilation of the Hereros. Did rival leaders make analogous pronouncements? Thus, while “imperialists” had slaughtered “brutes” and “savages” in East Africa and the Congo before 1914, Bolsheviks began ridding Russia of what Lenin called “insects,” “parasites,” “vermin,” and “bugs,” after 1918 – indeed, Holquist cites documents from the Don that include these very words. Such statements deserve attention as no less than “Bolshevik Manicheism” they provided the “environment” for state-sanctioned “excesses” (176, 178). To appease public opinion Lenin, in May 1919, confirmed the death sentence on one Boguslavskii for executing cossacks according to Central Committee orders issued two months earlier but then revoked (191). Analogously, during the Boer War, Lord Kitchener had Breaker Morant executed for killing suspected guerillas although he was acting according to “unwritten orders.” The dilemma is common enough. But was there anything comparable in war-time Europe to what the Bolsheviks did in the Don between February and March of 1919 – or later in Tambov province where they used poison gas on civilians? Did British, French, or German military police kneel victims along a trench and then walk along the line beheading each in turn, sometimes letting bodies with half-severed necks fall in, as did the Whites in the Crimea? Differences of kind or only scale?
Holquist does not discuss national issues. In chapters 4 and 7, for instance, he fails to consider the relationship of Russian nationalism to the fate of the Provisional Government. Although he correctly observes that events in the Russian empire during those years were “civil wars,” he retains the term “dual power” when referring to the months between the fall of the tsar and the Bolshevik coup. Logically, “triple power” better describes the reality since alongside the Provisional Government and the Soviets, non-Russian national governments also emerged on the empire’s territory. Nonetheless, Holquist’s book directs attention to important unstudied aspects of the non-Russian national revolutions that deserve attention. Did the non-Russian educated share anti-commercial statist prejudices and did they influence their state-building? Did nationality in non-Russian regions provide a link between the educated and the peasants that apparently did not exist in Russia proper? Did national differences intensify violence?
Governments waged wars against their own peoples and deported entire populations before the twentieth century, just as they had expanded in size and scope under the pressures of wars. What is unique about the twentieth century is the scale and intensity of wartime mobilization and brutality against civilians. Holquist agrees with those who see the years 1914 through to 1922 as a distinct period in European history from the perspective of national state-building and violence, and considers it the proper context for Russian events. The Russian revolution was not only a Russian story but a European story, because the war changed Russia and its empire, much as it had changed all the other belligerents. From such a perspective, however, one might argue that this “common European deluge” or “European civil war” (2-3) did not begin when Gavrilo Princip shot Francis Ferdinand, but two years earlier, when Milovan Djilas’s father ordered his lead column of Montenegran troops across the Ottoman border into Albania. WWI did not begin in 1912 because Nicholas II refused to back Montenegro, and the Balkan Wars were too short to produce an appreciable expansion of government domestically in the countries involved. But they were long enough to produce a round of massive government sponsored brutality targeted against civilians not seen in Europe since the French revolutionaries had massacred opponents in the Vendee 115 years earlier. Opponent’s refusal during the Balkan Wars to consider each other’s populations as human and the resulting atrocities had no parallel in Britain, France or German occupied lands during WWI. Did Greeks, or Serbs, or Bulgarians need colonial African or Asian precedents for inspiration in this realm of activity? If we consider this Balkan state-sponsored mass violence against civilians as the European prelude to the “exterminations” described by Holquist, it would buttress the argument that the Russian Revolution is part of the European story. Russian excess thereby might be presented as quantitatively, but not qualitatively different from the Balkan excesses. If we date the beginning of the “deluge” to 1912 instead of 1914, we would have a ten year period of history beginning and ending with nationalist wars waged by small national governments led and staffed by nationalist intellectuals. Within that decade Communism would appear as but one factor, and Lenin’s Bolsheviks’s as the first national communists. However horrific those years were, the violence often ended successfully in so far as it resulted in new states. Consequently, the next generation of Russians and eastern Europeans held different opinions about war and political violence than did western Europeans.