Canadian Slavonic Papers

The End of the Russian Imperial Army. Volume II: The Road to Soviet Power and Peace byAllan K. WildmanReview by: John KeepCanadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 31, No. 3/4 (September-December 1989), pp. 347-349Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40869099 .

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Vol. XXXI, Nos. 3-4 Book Reviews | 347

intervals" (p. 4). This is fine as far as it goes, but McDaniel pays insufficient attention to the state's regulation of factories and their owners. Industrialists, too, were limited in their freedom to organize autonomously, and if their wealth and social standing gave them considerable advantage over the workers, their political and economic

autonomy was not to be compared with their Western European counterparts. The fruit of autocracy was the blockage of social modernization in toto, weakening the entire fabric of the civil society that should have emerged. In this sense the autocracy was class-blind.

But McDaniel 's greatest problem is in dealing with "the labour movement."

Drawing his insights "from Tocqueville on despotic states and Marxism, especially Trotsky's variant," he postulates the existence of an identifiable labour movement. But as an intelligent and punctilious researcher he also notes that neither mass nor conscious workers, nor revolutionary intelligentsia led this movement (p. 165), i.e., that it was largely stychic. Here is the crux. There was certainly an incipient prole- tariat, but autocracy (until its collapse) denied the workers any significant continuity of those roles and institutions that would have constituted a labor movement. Faced with the immediate and painful needs of 1917, the workers had no effective mod-

erating institutions. Nevertheless, McDaniel treats the workers as an organized and

solidary body that gave rise to "the closest approximation in history to a proletarian revolution" (p. 407).

This thesis of immanent class war as the determining factor in the failure of the

February revolution may also be challenged. In the Donbass, workers' representatives and coal producers came to agreement. The metallurgy industrialists hung tough and

prevented an agreement, but the workers' representatives were willing to go a long way toward compromise. Without the war and consequent economic crisis, the democratic revolution might well have survived, despite the fact that neither side had experience in democratic bargaining. As McDaniel notes, but discounts, the Provisional Government had neither the time nor the resources to make a real try at solving Russia's problems.

Tim McDaniel has set forth a thoughtful and provocative thesis that deserves careful consideration. If parts of it arouse disagreement, that is all to the good, for his premises are explicit, his evidence is forthrightly argued, and many of his insights, particularly into the nature of autocratic capitalism, are valuable additions to the scholar's store of analytic tools.

Theodore H. Friedgut Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Allan K. Wildman. The End of the Russian Imperial Army. Volume II: The Road to Soviet Power and Peace. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987. xv, 443 pp. $55.00.

Volume I of this distinguished work, published in 1980, examined the Russian army's decisive role in the February Revolution. In the sequel Professor Wildman tells the

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348 I Canadian Slavonic Papers September-December 1989

story of its collapse between April 1917 and late November, when fighting on the Eastern front gave way to the first battles of the civil war. Based on an exceptionally thorough scrutiny of all available sources, including archival materials, it is the first

study in English to make sense of the complex course of events at the front as anarchy took hold. Since generalizations are necessarily misleading, Wildman explores the

rapidly changing situation in as many units as possible and focusses, as before, on the common soldier- rightly so, for it was pressure from below rather than any external force that undermined the army's fighting capacity.

Taking it for granted that it was right to try to end the war from below, Wildman

probes the men's mentalité, showing that they engaged in wild irrational actions such as pogroms and sabotage as well as making skilful use of the committee machinery. Those commanders and government commissars who tried to come to terms with these self-appointed bodies to maintain "revolutionary discipline" were initially not unsuccessful, but their efforts were frustrated by two events in particular: first the disastrous June offensive, of which we are given an admirable account (which supple- ments that by Louise Heenan in her recent book on this topic) and then the Kornilov affair. This alleged "counter-revolutionary plot" fortified the soldiers' exaggerated suspicions of authority and gave the maximalists their chance. By September the earlier distinction between spontaneous "trench bolshevism" and the party-oriented ("conscious") variety had been bridged. Although the insurgents' military organi- zations lacked cohesion, the war-weary soldiers engineered a series of "committee revolutions" which, especially in the north and west, gave power at unit level to left-

wingers who stood for immediate peace and "Soviet power" under an all-socialist coalition government- not a purely Bolshevik one! The senior committees belatedly sought to accommodate this radical spirit but were swept away, along with the relics of the old command structure, by the revolutionary flood.

Wildman admires the skill which the men displayed in negotiating local armi- stices with the enemy at Sovnarkom's urging (p. 388), but overlooks the conditional, not to say fraudulent, nature of the "peace" they secured. The Germans, not the Bolsheviks, held the trump cards, as Brest-Litovsk soon showed. Tragically, the

pacifists of 1917 turned into the class warriors of 1918. The October Revolution was a gamble: the Bolsheviks won state power but were denied security through international socialist revolution. Today even the more reflective Soviet historians

recognize this. Wildman is therefore wrong-headed in making continual sarcastic

jibes against those democrats, in and out of uniform, who tried so desperately to halt the drift to civil war and dictatorship. He should also have provided more background information on the supply situation and on events in the crucial Petrograd military district (excluded here as part of the rear) in order to make the front's reactions to them more comprehensible. His treatment of political developments in each unit from north to south is encyclopedic rather than selective and makes for tedious

reading. There is not even an organizational chart to help identify the various corps and divisions (although some corps' positions are localized on the maps). The word

"plebiscite," which occurs in one chapter title, is misspelled throughout. Nevertheless

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Vol. XXXI, Nos. 3-4 Book Reviews | 349

Wildman's deep-ranging study, taken together with the works of the former Soviet historian M.S. Frenkin, fills in a blank page in the history of 1917.

John Keep University of Toronto

Donald J. Raleigh (Ed.). A Russian Civil War Diary. Alexis Bobine in Sa- ratov, 1917-1922. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1988. xxxix, 240 p. $29.95.

Alexis Babine, auteur de ce journal de la guerre civile russe, est originaire d'une

petite ville de province de Russie. Il a complété deux années d'études de philolo- gie et d'histoire à St-Petersbourg et vécu vingt ans aux Etats-Unis où il a obtenu une maîtrise en histoire américaine et travaillé comme bibliothécaire dans différentes universités de même qu'à la bibliothèque du Congrès. De retour en Russie en 1910, il publiera une histoire des Etats-Unis et travaillera, au moment de la guerre civile, comme professeur d'anglais et bibliothécaire à l'université de Saratov, sur la Volga. C'est principalement dans cette ville qu'il tiendra son journal entre 1918 et 1922, date à laquelle il retournera aux Etats-Unis de façon définitive.

Le récit de Babine constitue vraisemblablement le seul document non bolchevi-

que qui relate la totalité de la guerre civile dans une ville de province russe. Il

présente un compte rendu de la vie quotidienne pendant cette période et témoigne très bien, à cet égard, de l'extrême pénurie à laquelle les Russes, quelle que soit leur origine sociale, ont alors été confrontés. Le document fait ressortir les effets des politiques bolcheviques sur les bourgeois et permet également de mesurer l'isolement et l'autonomie quasi complets dans lesquels la province s'est alors retrouvée par rap- port aux capitales. Le journal offre aussi au lecteur une perspective autre que celle de Moscou et Petrograd, l'éloigné des fluctuations politiques majeures, des grands événements et des leaders connus pour mieux lui faire sentir le rythme de vie de la petite ville et des gens anonymes. Contrepoids à la vision bolchevique, la chronique de Babine illustre le monde sans illusion d'une bourgeoisie résignée et impuissante.

Même s'il constitue un apport indéniable à la connaissance de la guerre civile russe, le journal de Babine n'en laisse pas moins le lecteur sur son appétit. Le récit plutôt terne, truffé d'allusions antisémites, se résume souvent a une complainte, par- fois nostalgique des anciens privileges, et n'apporte pour ainsi dire aucune analyse de la situation. L'éditeur prévient dans son introduction que Babine ne peut être qualifié d'observateur social exceptionnel. On s'attendrait malgré tout de la part d'un homme mûr disposant de son baggage culturel, de son expérience de la vie dans un système politique différent et de sa compétence professionnelle d'historien, à une approche plus nuancée et aussi plus critique face aux multiples rumeurs qui ne manquent pas de circuler en pareilles circonstances. Babine ne s'interroge qu'extrêmement rarement sur les attitudes et les comportements tant des hommes politiques que du milieu uni- versitaire ou des gens de la rue. Il glisse à la remorque des événements sans jamais

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