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THE FIRST WORLD WAR: A DOCUMENTARY RECORD

Series One: European War, 1914-1919, The War Reserve Collection (WRA-WRE)

from Cambridge University Library

Part 7: Economics, Finance and Socialism

Part : Russian Affairs, Bolshevism and the Eastern Front

Editorial Introduction by Professor J.M. Winter, Department of History, Yale University

Increasingly, students and scholars are recognizing the need to address the history of the Eastern front, and the fate of the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires.  Until now, very few published documentary collections have been available to help ground this interest in primary sources.  The varied material in the Cambridge collection is a step on the way towards an understanding of this vast geographical area in the throes of war and revolution.

Part 8 of the Cambridge war collection is an ensemble of rare and insightful writings on the post-1918 civil war in Poland, Russia, the Ukraine, and the Baltic states.  The point of view of virtually all these observers is the unpredictability of the outcome of the vicious and scattered fighting for control of the former Russian empire by revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces.  Here is history in the making; one in which the narrative of events moves from international war to a wide panorama of a multi-national population in almost permanent conflict.

We see here accounts by participants in the fighting in what are now Poland, the Ukraine, and Byellorussia.   We see justifications and counter-justifications for the harsh measures the Bolsheviks and their enemies took at the time.  We read first-hand accounts by visitors including the left-wing Labour MP and pacifist George Lansbury, and the American journalist turned Communist John Reed.  We learn of the tides that swept through the huge Jewish population in the old Pale of settlement, and the character of the half-hearted, ineffectual, but very visible Western military intervention in the Russian civil war.  

Later Soviet leaders, in particular Stalin, were obsessed with Western plots for the overthrow of the regime.  Paranoia here is based on historical experience: the Allies seated at Versailles did try in a limited way to bring the Bolshevik regime down.  They backed local forces which were just as brutal as the Bolsheviks; forces, which promised a return to an old order the bulk of the peasantry and urban populations clearly did not want.  Here in embryo is the new Soviet state: seeing enemies everywhere, both internally and internationally; a state wounded by war and civil war, and about to embark on a long and tragic attempt to wrench a backward society into the twentieth century.

In sum, this collection provides a unique window onto the chaos of the period following the Russian withdrawal from the war in 1918 and the progressive steps the Bolsheviks took to fill the political vacuum created by the fall of the old regime.  Historians have reached a consensus that the Great War did not end on 11 November 1918, but that it went on throughout the margins of the Eastern front.  This blurring of war into civil war is one of the characteristics of twentieth- century armed conflict, and the contours of this new kind of warfare emerge in these documents.  War, brutality, famine, and atrocity form a continuum which seems to be the pattern for later conflicts, in particular in what became the Soviet Union.  We can see here many of the elements of the degeneration of warfare into butchery in the period 1918-20.  That first confrontation between the Bolshevik regime and both local and Western interests intent on its overthrow set the stage for an even worse landscape of war to follow.

These documents enable anyone interested in the ‘Thirty Years’ War’ of the twentieth century to plot the stages from one monumental conflict to an even more terrible armed struggle.  This is the pre-history of Stalingrad as well as of Auschwitz: the limits on human brutality were raised, and the possibility of even worse things to come can be traced between the lines.  What is implicit here became visible in twenty years’ time.

 

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