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Citizenship and the Russian Nation during World War I: A Comment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

S. A. Smith
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Historians of late imperial Russia have been categorical in asserting that Russian peasants lacked any form of national identity. Scholars as diverse as Orlando Figes, Geoffrey Hosking, John Keep, Bruce Lincoln, Richard Pipes, Robert Service, Ronald Suny, and Allan Wildman have agreed that Russian peasants were too rooted in Gemeinschaft, too particularistic in their social identities, to be capable of identifying with the polity and territory of Russia. John Keep expresses the consensus concisely when he writes:

At the beginning of the twentieth century the Russian people lagged behind many others in the tsarist realm (Poles, Finns, even Baits and Ukrainians) in the development of a modern national consciousness. The social elite identified with the multinational empire; in the terminology of the day their thinking was rossiiskii rather than russkii. Ordinary folk either opted for a social class orientation or else had none at all, in that their horizons were limited to the local community. This helps to explain why Russia was defeated in World War One, why the Bolsheviks with their Utopian internationalist creed won mass support in 1917 and why the Whites failed to worst the Reds in the ensuing civil war.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 59 , Issue 2 , Summer 2000 , pp. 316 - 329
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2000

References

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4. As Josh Sanborn points out, the claim that peasants lacked any sense of nationhood almost always comes from intellectuals, who fail to recognize any sense of nationhood other than their own. Yet if we accept that renditions of the nation are always plural, we can begin to investigate peasant notions without prejudice. In her account of peasants in Sierra de Puebla in Mexico, Florencia Mallon argues that “few nineteenth-century social groups, whether in Latin America or elsewhere” could be defined as possessing national identity if the nation is understood as “an already defined, integrated community with territory, language and accepted set of historical traditions.” She suggests that such aversion of the nation is that of the victors who seek to suppress the contests over citizenship and liberty that go on in the attempt to expand and make real the universal promises of nationalism and democracy. She shows how, beginning with the 1858-61 civil war and continuing through the French intervention, peasant guerrillas forged an alternative vision of the Mexican nation in which property rights were tempered by a commitment to solidarity and social justice while the status of citizen was tied to honorable actions rather than to birth, social class, or education. Mallon, Florencia E., Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley, 1995), 3, 9.Google Scholar

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10. Geoffrey Hosking recognizes the existence of “proto-national awareness” and discusses it in an illuminating fashion, but he, too, insists on a radical disjunction between this and modern national identity. Moreover, he emphasizes the dichotomy between two kinds of Russianness: russkii, which was connected with the people, the language, and preimperial principalities, and rossiiskii, which was associated with the territory, the multinational empire, the European great power. To my mind, the relationship between these two terms was at times closer than Hosking suggests—since rossiiskii could serve as a way of politicizing russkii. Hosking, Geoffrey, Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917 (London, 1997), 210, xix.Google Scholar

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20. This is how I read the evidence put forward in the innovative piece by Yulia Mikhailova, “Images of Enemy and Self: Russian ‘Popular Prints’ of the Russo-Japanese War,” Acta SlavicaJaponica 16 (1998): 30-53. She shows how “traditional” elements, such as Ivan Krylov's fables, were mobilized in the discourse of national defense.

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24. Even among the Cossacks, detachment from the ideal of service to the person of the tsar was perceptible, if only embryonically. Shane O'Rourke, “The Don Cossacks during the 1905 Revolution: The Revolt of Ust-Medvedevskaia Stanitsa,” Russian Review 57 (October 1998): 583-98. After 1905 advocates of military reform contrasted the “patriotism, enthusiasm and self-sacrifice of Japanese private soldiers” with their Russian counterparts and urged a militarization of the school curriculum. See William C. Fuller, Civil- Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881-1914 (Princeton, 1985), 195, 198. For a general argument that military factors were as important as economic ones in promoting national integration, see Barry R. Posen, “Nationalism, the Mass Army and Military Power,” injohn L. Comaroff and Paul C. Stern, eds., Perspectives on Nationalism and War, International Studies in Global Change, vol. 7 (Luxembourg, 1995), 135-85.

25. Hosking, Russia, 376, 397.

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30. I stress that I am not arguing that national and class identities are mutually exclusive. There are plenty of historical examples where national and class identities have been mutually constitutive. In the democratic states of western Europe and the United States, for example, labor movements promoted the interests of their members largely through the political structures of the nation-state; see Vogler, Carolyn M., The Nation Stale: The Neglected Dimension of Class (Aldershot, 1985), xii.Google Scholar

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43. John Home, “Introduction: Mobilizing for ‘Total War,’ 1914-18,” in Home, ed., State, Society and Mobilization, 5.

44. Ibid., 16.

45. Breuilly, “National Idea,” 572.

46. Wilhelm Deist, ‘The German Army, the Authoritarian Nation-State and Total War,” in Home, ed., Stale, Society and Mobilization, 170.

47. Blackbourn, Long Nineteenth Century, 266; Breuilly, “National Idea,” 570.

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