A Revolutionary Locality in a Revolutionary State: The Changing Geography of Power in Central Siberia, March-October 1917

Abstract

This article examines the attempts of revolutionaries in the central Siberian city of Krasnoiarsk to transform the ‘geography of power’ by extending local autonomy within the context of the wider revolutionary state. It examines their efforts to do so through local challenges to the central appointment of a regional commissar (gubernskii komissar), the re-election of the municipal Duma, and the establishment of unions of local soviets across Eniseisk province and Siberia more generally. Considering these three cases, it challenges the idea that demands for local autonomy in Siberia were primarily pressed during this time by self-professed regionalists (oblastniki) whilst being shunned by socialists. Instead, it demonstrates that groups from across the political spectrum – foremost amongst them local socialists – adopted and developed their own agendas for local autonomy. It further contends that the idea of local autonomy did not express local actors’ desire to break away from the wider all-Russian state, but rather to reposition themselves within it, in the process refashioning the ‘geography of power’ on a more egalitarian basis. The article provides a contribution to understandings of Siberia in revolution, and to the role and self-conceptualisation of local actors in reconstructing state power.