Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. 359 pp. $45.00
This stimulating book is a welcome addition to the already voluminous
literature on the Russian Revolution. Unlike the majority of works written in
recent years, Holquist places the revolution, as the title suggests, within a
wider historical context: the continuum of crises (war, revolution, and civil war)
from 1914 to 1921. This perspective alone may not be entirely new—some
recent books deliberately downplay the singularity of the revolution and depict
it merely as a byproduct of the First World War—but Holquist goes much
further than any other recent author on the Russian Revolution and the
founding of the Soviet state and makes two important claims. First, he argues
that the Bolsheviks' actions, characterized by mobilization and violence, were
not a radical departure from the past but emanated from practices common to
all warring powers in Europe. The "violence of the Russian civil wars," he
avers, "appears not as something perversely Russian or uniquely Bolshevik,
but rather as the most advanced case of a more extended European civil war,
beginning with the Great War and stretching years after its formal conclusion"
(p. 3). Second, he contends that, despite these similarities, the Russian
(Bolshevik) experience did make an important departure from the European
"norm." After the fighting ended, the other European countries, including
Germany, did not perpetuate the measures used during the war (mobilization
and violence), whereas the Bolshevik government in Russia did. This
peculiarity of Russia, Holquist maintains, stemmed from the Bolsheviks'
Marxism-Leninism: "What distinguished the Bolsheviks was the extent to
which they turned tools originally intended for total war to the new ends of
revolutionary politics, during the civil wars but especially after their end," the
new ends signifying "the revolutionary transformation of society" (p. 287).
Holquist's description and analysis are admirably detailed yet lucid and are
supported by extensive research in newly opened Russian archives. His
theoretical propositions are well borne out by his empirical work. To prove his
points, Holquist focuses on the Don Territory, the region of the Don Cossacks
in southern Russia. His choice is deliberate. It was in this region that the antiBolshevik forces gathered their troops to fight against the Bolsheviks (indeed,
Holquist's Ph.D. dissertation, from which this book emerged, is titled "The
Russian Vendée"), and the Don Territory provides an excellent setting in
which to analyze and compare the political practices of the two camps.
Holquist focuses his analysis on three areas of political practice: "state
management [End Page 191] of food supply," "the employment of official
violence for political ends," and "state surveillance of the population for
purposes of coercion and 'enlightenment'" (p. 6). This choice of topics is again
not accidental. Holquist believes that these issues reveal, more clearly than
others, the commonality in the practices of the ideologically opposed camps.
Indeed, Holquist's analysis demonstrates astonishing similarities in the
political practices of the two sides. In all three cases, none of the Russian
(whether Red or White) practices was in fact peculiar to Russia. Every warring
power in Europe resorted to similar measures to fight a total war. Even within
Russia, the Reds and the Whites used state power and violence in strikingly
similar ways. Nevertheless, Russia's case was peculiar. Because Russia,
unlike West European countries, lacked a true civil society, it fostered peculiar
political attitudes (irrespective of ideological stances) that strongly favored the
transformational power of the state. Both the Reds and the Whites considered
the state an instrument not only for transforming society but also for
establishing order. Alluding to the observation of the famous Russian scientist
Vladimir Vernadskii (an influential member of the liberal Kadet party who
nonetheless stayed in Soviet Russia and continued his scientific work for the
Soviet state he detested), Holquist describes these attitudes as characterized
by an aspiration to impose a "political organization of society" on a chaotic
"democracy" (pp. 40, 110, 285).
Holquist is careful, however, not to overstate the sameness of the Reds
and the Whites. Bolshevik violence was much more open-ended than White
violence. The Bolsheviks perpetuated mobilization and violence for the sake of
transforming Soviet society according to their image of a socialist society.
Their utopian ideology, Marxism-Leninism, distinguished them from all others.
The reader will find much food for thought in this book. Holquist's emphasis
on ideology is a welcome corrective to the recent emphasis on social and
cultural factors. Yet one wonders whether the book is too deterministic. As in
the pre–social history era, Holquist runs the danger of reifying ideology,
elevating it to an all-encompassing concept that ultimately explains everything.
To be sure, Holquist is aware of this danger and carefully studies practices as
well. Still, it is telling that his narrative ends rather abruptly in 1921 when mass
violence began to subside (if only temporarily). Even though he stresses that
the Bolsheviks' use of mobilization and violence rose to new highs "especially
after their [civil wars'] end," the complex history of the following decades may
not be explained so neatly. Holquist states that Bolshevik violence was
"invested with a redemptive and purifying significance" (p. 287), which may
explain the scope and the depth it would later take (e.g., in dekulakization and
collectivization), but the violence was often as mundane and prosaic as
political violence used in other countries. Surely, the political leaders used this
kind of rhetoric to glorify violence and the policies of the time. Holquist's
emphasis on the rhetoric of violence runs the risk of downplaying its mundane
origins and practices (e.g., the power struggle) and overinterpreting Soviet
terror, thereby re-creating a history sui generis.
These caveats aside, Holquist's book presents a large framework for
interpreting the Russian Revolution and Soviet history and should be read by
anyone interested in the subject.
Hiroaki Kuromiya
Indiana University