Abstract
Reviewed by: Francis King, University of East Anglia, UK
As long as the USSR existed, the revolution(s) of 1917 were generally seen in Western historiography as pivotal events, marking the closure of one chapter and the opening of another in the history of Russia and its empire. Since the demise of the Soviet Union there has been more emphasis on the continuities between the pre- and post-1917 periods, rather than on the discontinuities. Present-day Russia’s failure to conform to the template of ‘democratic transition’ solicitously provided by Western specialists after 1991 has reinforced this downwards revision of the significance of 1917 as a turning point. Now, with the centenary year fast approaching, Jonathan Smele has produced a history which seeks to show that it was not the ‘ten days’ of the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in October/November 1917 (pace John Reed), but rather the ‘ten years’ of civil war that ‘shook the world’ (2).
Before considering that argument, I should state at the outset that this is an excellent history of the wars which convulsed the Russian empire over that 10-year period. Smele does an outstanding job of unpicking the baffling complexity of the interlocking conflicts of the period and setting them out in an easily digestible way. The story starts and ends in Central Asia: the large-scale rising of Central Asian natives in the summer of 1916 against an attempt to mobilize the men for war service marked the beginning of the large-scale civil strife within the Russian empire. It was not until 10 years later that the last of the ‘Basmachi’ rebels fighting near the Afghan border were suppressed and the ‘Turkestan Front’ was officially converted into the ‘Turkestan Military District’ (252).
The book’s eight chapters are thematically subdivided into sections on individual conflicts, campaigns or military theatres. The structure is clear and logical; this is a volume in which the reader can look things up. Anyone seeking a brief account of the 1918 Transcaspian Provisional Government (230–1), the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion that year (67–9) or the Petrograd strikes and the Kronstadt revolt of 1921 (200–9) will be well served by Smele’s comprehensive approach. Moreover, he writes very stylishly, using alliteration (‘[Tsar] Nicholas’ alternately timorous and tyrannical tsardom’ (12)) and dry humour (‘[Nestor] Makhno was chased out of the country with so much lead in his body it was a miracle he was able to float across the Dniestr’ (243)). Touches like these can add much-needed levity to very depressing subject-matter.
As for Smele’s argument that it was the 10 years of civil wars, rather than what was once known as the ‘Great October Socialist Revolution’, that ‘shook the world’ – well, yes and no. Certainly, as Smele says at the very end of his narrative, many of the issues over which wars were fought between 1916 and 1926 on the periphery of the former empire, ‘having been unfrozen by the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the USSR, are still very much alive’ (253). ‘Reds’ and ‘Whites’ involved themselves in almost all these wars, but the issues involved cannot be reduced to the simple ‘revolution’ versus ‘counterrevolution’ binary. Smele also reminds us that we cannot say that, overall, the ‘Reds’ won. The Red Army won some of the wars it fought, but lost others decisively, most notably in the west of the former empire.
And yet, Smele’s demotion of the significance of October has its problems. Whether as event, process or myth, ‘the revolution’ was surely of crucial importance to the whole story. The Bolshevik claims to be defending the revolution, the effort they expended in painting all their opponents as counter-revolutionaries, the problems their socialist rivals had in finding ways to ‘defend the gains of the revolution’ while opposing Lenin and his party – all this testifies to the centrality of ‘revolution’, if only as an idea. The removal of the Tsar in February 1917 and the toppling of the Provisional Government in October may have been small-scale affairs, but the significance of the myths they engendered – both in Russia and around the world – can hardly be overstated.
None of this, however, detracts from the value of Smele’s work as a fresh and thorough account of the civil wars, for which it deserves a wide readership. It is marred only by the frequently sloppy proofreading and numerous typos in the book. These even extend to dates (‘from December 1918 to June 1918’, (152)) and need to be eliminated in any reprints or subsequent editions.