Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918-1924

by Nick Baron, Peter Gatrell

Overview

This new volume, by a team of international scholars, explores aspects of population displacement and statehood at a crucial juncture in modern European history, when the entire continent took on the aspect of a 'laboratory atop a mass graveyard' (Tomas Masaryk).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781843311218
Publisher:	Anthem Press
Publication date:	08/10/2004
Series:	Anthem Series on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies
Edition description:	First Edition, 1
Pages:	257
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Nick Baron is a Lecturer in History at the University of Nottingham, UK. He works on Russian and East European history and historical geography.

Peter Gatrell is Professor of Modern History at the University of Manchester, UK. His main research and teaching interests are in the field of modern European social, economic and cultural history, with a particular focus on modern Russia.

Read an Excerpt

Homelands

War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia 1918-1924

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By Nick Baron, Peter Gatrell

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2004 Wimbledon Publishing Company
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-744-1

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CHAPTER 1

War, Population Displacement and State Formation in the Russian Borderlands, 1914–24

Peter Gatrell

The Russian revolution, the collapse of the Russian empire, and the ensuing Civil War (1917–21) had profound consequences for the displacement of population. In 1917, as a result of the world war, the number of displaced persons (defined as men in uniform, foreign prisoners of war, and refugees) in Russia exceeded 17.5 million, equivalent to more than 12 per cent of the total population. The revolution generated fresh population displacement, adding to Russia's woes. In towns and cities, the severe economic collapse in 1917–18 compelled tens of thousands of Russian workers to leave for the villages in search of means of subsistence, thereby reversing a generation of sustained urban in-migration before World War One. Millions of other men and women experienced the Civil War as population displacement – as conscripts in the Red and White armies, or as members of various irregular military units, including the numerous peasant armies that fought Reds and Whites with equal determination. Fresh population displacement also resulted from the German military occupation of the western borderlands of the former Russian empire that came to an end only in November 1918. The prolonged dislocation caused by the Russian Civil War, battles between Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian troops, the Soviet – Polish war, and continued turmoil in the Caucasus, all contributed to further migrations. Having failed to overthrow the new regime, anti-Bolshevik elements hastened to exit Russia. Most of them left, never to return, forming a large refugee and stateless population that was eventually scattered across three continents.

This chapter provides an overview of the causes and consequences of population displacement during the years 1914–24, when the old empire fragmented as a result of war and revolution. It looks at population movements during World War One, and then proceeds to examine the implications for population displacement of the collapse of the Russian empire, the conflicts unleashed by the Bolshevik revolution and the terms of the postwar peace settlement. Many of the issues it raises are taken up by other contributors to this volume.

WORLD WAR ONE: HUMANITY UPROOTED

The war that broke out in 1914 was widely expected to be of short duration. Huge European armies were thought likely to engage in military manoeuvres, without great consequence for civilian populations. This vision quickly evaporated. The armies of the belligerents had a seemingly inexhaustible capacity to absorb fresh manpower, transporting troops – often across great distances – in order to confront the enemy. For hundreds of thousands of these men, the war resulted in captivity and thus further displacement. Unexpectedly, civilians also experienced war as displacement. Civilian populations scattered as they sought to escape either punitive action or subjugation by enemy forces. Belgian civilians sought refuge in Holland or Britain; Serbian refugees made their way to Albania and Greece; Polish and Lithuanian refugees fled to the Russian interior. Belligerent states also contributed to population displacement by deporting entire groups that were deemed capable of aiding the enemy: the deportation of Armenian civilians by Ottoman Turkish troops was the most egregious example of state-sponsored migration. World War One turned into a prolonged conflict in which civilian suffering in Belgium, Serbia, Armenia, Lithuania, Poland and elsewhere registered alongside the trauma of the Somme and Gallipoli.

Nowhere was this unexpected drama of civilian population displacement more evident than in the Russian empire. The rapid German advance into Poland in 1914 prompted nervous tsarist officials to abandon their posts; civilians, fearful of enemy brutality, joined them in the journey eastwards. The simultaneous Russian occupation of Austrian-ruled Galicia was accompanied by the expulsion or flight of civilians opposed to the campaign of Russification. In 1915, the continued German onslaught in Russia's north-western territories, combined with Austria's reconquest of Galicia, created further waves of refugees. They had been forced to leave their homes, either by the threat of enemy violence or at the behest of the Russian high command. According to a decree issued in 1915, 'refugees (bezhentsy) are those persons who have abandoned localities threatened or already occupied by the enemy, or who have been evacuated by order of the military or civil authority from the zone of military operations.' Domestic military considerations, and not just enemy violence, created the conditions for displacement.

The attempt to identify the refugee population for administrative and legal purposes betrayed uncertainties about the origins of displacement – was it caused by the Tsar's troops who targeted particular groups, or by enemy troops who behaved in an uncivilized fashion, provoking civilians to lose a sense of self-control? According to one explanation, 'as soon as our troops withdraw, the entire population becomes confused and runs away.' Sometimes people fled lest they lose contact with relatives on Russian territory, including fathers and sons who were currently serving in the tsarist army. This did not necessarily imply a move to distant locations; during the initial phase of retreat refugees would often stay close by Russian troops, in the hope or expectation that the army would quickly recapture land from the enemy, allowing them to go home. Many peasants, however, despaired of continuing to farm when their horses and livestock had been badly depleted by requisitioning. They expressed a wish to seek a better life 'in the depths of Russia.' Other motives also came to the surface. Sometimes civilians were warned that 'voluntary' departure was the only alternative to almost certain conscription by the enemy. Civilians were also prompted to leave their homes by the fear of being terrorized by enemy troops. Nor were these fears misplaced: 'rumours are rife that the Germans have behaved abominably towards the local population.'

Yet displacement was by no means solely dictated by a fearful civilian response to punitive action by the enemy. Russian army regulations permitted the military authorities to assume absolute control over all affairs in the theatre of operations. This jealously guarded licence provided one of the main impulses behind population displacement. Within the extensive theatre of operations the Russian high command was accused of pursuing a scorched earth policy, and of driving civilians from their homes. General Nikolai Ianushkevich, Chief of Staff to the supreme commander of Russian forces, ordered the destruction of crops in Galicia and elsewhere; livestock, farm equipment and church bells were removed to the safety of the rear. Reports reached army headquarters that entire villages had been destroyed. The army sometimes removed civilians indiscriminately from districts close to the front. In the words of one group of refugees, 'We didn't want to move, we were chased away ... we were forced to burn our homes and crops, we weren't allowed to take our cattle with us, we weren't even allowed to return to our homes to get some money'. Ianushkevich singled out Jews for special treatment, encouraging what the Minister of the Interior termed 'a pogrom mood' in the army. But the crude and desperate measures employed by the Russian army were not applied exclusively to the Jewish population of the Russian empire. Gypsies were deported from the vicinity of the front in July and August 1915. German subjects of the Tsar were, like Jews, Poles and Ukrainians (the largest group in the province of Volynia), an object of military distrust. The German settlers' protestations of loyalty to Russia, manifested over several generations, did not spare them either deportation or the expropriation of their lands in 1915 and 1916. So widespread were the army's tactics that a leading tsarist official believed that 'refugees' constituted a minority of the displaced population, compared to the hundreds of thousands of those who had been forcibly displaced.

Population displacement also characterized the conduct of war on the southern borderlands of the empire. Turkey entered the war on the side of the central powers in November 1914. Six months later, Russian troops crossed the border. Held up by a Turkish counter-offensive, Russian commanders ordered troops to withdraw. In chaotic circumstances, some of the local Armenian population managed to flee to the relative safety of the Caucasus; others were left behind in the hasty Russian retreat. Turkish radicals blamed Armenians for the defeats already suffered by the Ottoman army in the winter of 1914 and early 1915, and charged them with having instigated uprisings against Turkish rule. Those Armenians who remained on Ottoman-controlled territory suffered a terrible fate. Emergency legislation provided for the deportation of communities suspected of espionage or treason. Hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenians were disarmed, arrested and deported, being forced to endure long and humiliating marches to the south from which many never recovered. Many were simply butchered. A minority of victims managed to escape to safety, either to Syria or to Russian-controlled Transcaucasus. A quarter of a million Armenians managed to flee across the Russian border during August 1915. Perhaps as many as one-fifth of them died en route. By the beginning of 1916105,000 ex-Ottoman Armenians sought refuge in Erevan, whose population in 1914 barely reached 30,000.

This wartime displacement of Russia's civilian population was, in all likelihood, unprecedented in its intensity. In the words of Eugene Kulischer, 'in two short years the movement of refugees and evacuees was as considerable as it had been during the migration to Siberia over a 25-year period' from 1885. Reliable estimates suggest that refugees numbered at least 3.3 million at the end of 1915. One careful calculation, taking account of under-registration, put the total number at just over six million by the beginning of 1917. As a result, refugees probably accounted for something like five per cent of the total population.

One of the striking features of Russia's wartime history was the extent of voluntary as well as governmental intervention. Municipal authorities, diocesan committees, private charitable activity, and the semi-official Tatiana committees (taking their name from Tsar Nicholas's second daughter) established schools, orphanages and other facilities for refugees. The main Tatiana Committee devoted resources to tracing family members who had become separated. Peasant communities and rural co-operatives harnessed their established mechanisms of self-help to the task of assisting the newcomers. Nor were these efforts confined to Russian activists. The British (and, later, the American) Society of Friends established hospitals, orphanages and workshops in Samara, as well as shelters in Moscow for refugees in transit. Granted, there were turf wars and confusion over lines of responsibility. Population displacement generated further political rivalry and intrigue. Nevertheless, the war brought about an impressive relief effort.

Humanitarian initiatives provided additional evidence of a newly emerging professional ethos in late imperial Russia, giving social workers, doctors, psychiatrists, lawyers and others extensive practice in observing, counting, examining and managing the Tsar's subjects. This body of expert opinion helped to crystallize a popular image of the sick, desperate and sometimes depraved refugee, whose 'essence' enabled professionals to constitute in turn a sense of their own purpose and identity. We can trace this process through the medium of specialist journals, but it was also evident in newspaper articles of a purely factual kind, dramatic tales of refugee journeys, and the calculated use of photographs and other images. Refugees themselves found it difficult to challenge that categorization, because the humanitarian efforts were couched in pervasive terms of degradation and disease. As we shall see, similar devices were at work in postwar eastern Europe.

Crucially, because resources were thinly stretched, the tsarist state devolved some of the responsibility for refugee relief on to newly formed 'national committees' (Latvian, Armenian, Polish, Jewish and Lithuanian – but rarely Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, still less German). These committees mobilized 'national' opinion at home and abroad. This aspect of refugeedom inspired among an emerging patriotic elite a sense of national calamity which itself gave rise to a vision of national solidarity. Deliberate action was needed, in the words of the Latvian activist Janis Goldmanis, to ensure that Latvians avoid 'the lot of the Jews, to be scattered across the entire globe.' Polish activists spoke of 'preserving the refugee on behalf of the motherland'. Goldmanis was not alone in articulating a vision of a reclaimed homeland, whose farms should in due course be repopulated by 'people who think and act in a Latvian manner'. The leader of the Lithuanian Welfare Committee, Martynas Yeas, a lawyer and former Duma deputy, boasted in his memoirs that his organization had 'prepared the people for future action and created the foundations for a future cultural and political edifice. It unearthed the buried name of Lithuania and forced even non-Lithuanians to recognise that we ourselves were masters of our country.' Members of the Committee proclaimed the need to ensure that Lithuanian refugees retained a sense of what it meant to be 'Lithuanian', meaning that they needed to stay together. These elites had both cause and opportunity to engage in a new politics, designed to instruct the refugee population in their rights and responsibilities. Refugeedom gave the elites direct access to a nascent national community. Refugee relief instructed the displaced farmer or labourer about what it meant to be Armenian, Polish, Jewish or Latvian. Several contributors to the present volume take up this theme, confirming that population displacement during World War One helped to breed and to legitimize national politics upon which they could capitalize during the early years of independence. Even where, as in the case of Ukrainian and Belarusian refugees, the tsarist state frustrated attempts by a patriotic elite to create dedicated national organizations, the very act of denial fostered both a sense of disappointment and a readiness to confront official discrimination.

In sum, the wartime displacement of population in the Russian empire transformed political space and debate. The conduct of politics assumed a nationalist aspect, as leading members of the non-Russian intelligentsia seized the new opportunities that were created by refugeedom. The old regime battled to cope with the social and economic consequences of refugee population movements, but found itself exposed to public obloquy. Local authorities expressed alarm about the 'flood' of refugees that threatened to 'overwhelm' provincial towns and cities. Professional experts and volunteer relief workers discovered a sense of purpose and identity in fresh forms of humanitarian intervention. Refugees did not 'cause' the Russian revolution, but they exposed political power struggles and transformed the terms of public debate about 'space', borders, and territory.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Homelands by Nick Baron, Peter Gatrell. Copyright © 2004 Wimbledon Publishing Company. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

List of Maps, List of Tables; Acknowledgements; Contributors; Introduction; 1. War, Population Discplacement and State Formation in the Russian Borderlands, 1914-1924; 2. Latvian Refugees and the Latvian Nation State During and After World War One; 3. In Search of National Support: Belarusian Refugees in World War One and the People's Republic of Belarus; 4. In Search of a Native Realsm: The Return of World War One Refugees to Lithuania, 1918-1924; 5. Population Displacement and Citizenship in Poland, 1918-24; 6. The Repatriation of Polish Citizens from Soviet Ukraine to Poland in 1921-2; 7. 'Sybiraki': Siberian and Manchurian Returnees in Independent Poland; 8. Refugees in the Urals Region, 1917-1925; 9. Armenia: the 'Nationalization', Internationalization and Representation of the Refugee Crisis;  Conclusions: On Living in a 'New Country'

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'An exciting collaborative effort… There is no available study with this scope and intellectual boldness... This volume will be a sure hit with a broad set of reading publics, appropriate for specialists in the field and a very attractive introduction for undergraduate students in history, human rights, international relations, and many other fields.' —Mark von Hagen, Professor of History, Columbia University

'Well defined, authoritative, disciplined and topically innovative… A pioneering publication in an academic field which is just opening up.' —Raymond Pearson, Professor of Modern European History, School of History and International Affairs, University of Ulster