Internationalists and Latvian Rifles in the Russian Revolution and the Civil War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2008
More or less by definition, civil war refers to an armed conflict between citizens of the same country. However, the two outstanding European examples of this century, the civil wars in Spain and Russia, were in fact complicated by foreign intervention. Indeed, in the case of Spain, intervention by foreign powers proved decisive.
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12 I.e., since the military reforms of 1874; before that time the Russian army included so-called “inorodnye voiska” or “troops of different nationalities”, Curran, S. L. and Ponomareff, D., “Managing the Ethnic Factor in the Russian and Soviet Armed Forces: An Historical Overview”, in: Conflict, IV (1982), pp. 239–300, especially pp. 241−47.Google Scholar
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34 Bernshtam reckons the Latvian Rifles among the internationalists.
35 Bernshtam, “Storony v grazhdanskoi voine”, loc. cit., p. 332.
36 Ibid., p. 333.
37 Bernshtam takes “Socialist” and “Communist” to be synonymous.
38 Ibid.
39 Bernshtam claims to have left out several other categories of internationalists.
40 Ibid., p. 332.
41 Maksudov, “Internatsionalisty i russkaia revoliutsiia”, loc. cit., pp. 221−62.
42 Ibid., pp. 233f.
43 Ibid., pp. 230f.
44 Ibid., p. 238.
45 Ibid., pp. 229, 242–46.
46 Id., “La composition nationale de l'Armée rouge d'après le recensement de 1920”, in: Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique, XXIV (1983), PP. 483−92. Bernshtam's reply to Maksudov's article of 1980: “Mikrob kommunizma ili tifoznaia vosh'?”, in: Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizheniia, No 131, PP. 263−324; Maksudov's reaction: “O nekorrektnom ispol'zovanii istochnikov”, Ibid.
47 For instance, 30,000 to 40,000 Chinese: Eckson, J. Erickson, “The Origins of the Red Army”, in: Revolutionary Russia, ed. by Pipes, R.: (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), pp. 224–56, quote on p. 253; on p. 229, however, Erickson considers the internationalist units “small in number but potent in influence”.Google Scholar
49 Kennan, G. F., The Decision to Intervene (London, 1958), pp. 73f.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
50 Péter Sipos (Budapest) in a discussion during the symposium on Internationalism the Labour Movement before 1940, Amsterdam, September 1985.
51 See, e.g., Istoriia Iatyshskikh strelkov, op. cit., pp. 13, 722.
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