A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I by Peter s> Gatrell (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS I67 Gatrell, Peter. A WholeEmpireWalking: Refugees in RussiaduringWorldWarI. Indiana-MichiganSeriesin Russianand EastEuropean Studies.Indiana UniversityPress,Bloomington and Indianapolis,IN, 1999. xiv + 3I7 pp. Maps. Illustrations.Notes. Bibliography.Index. [24.00. THE literature on the Russian Revolution has, until very recently, focused predominantly on class affiliationas the markerof identity. This has largely precluded other perspectiveson the Russian Revolution as it might have been lived by women, provincials, or ethnic minorities, for example. The literatureabout the impact of the FirstWorldWar on Russian society is also relatively meagre. Peter Gatrell's study tackles both these deficiencies. The experiences of refugees during war and revolution in Russia are some of the most dramatic of the period. Such people often lost their homeland, their social status, and even members of their family in the displacement brought by war. Yetthe historyof this hithertosilentand excluded grouphas not been recovereduntil now. Refugees uprooted from the familiarand forced to make for themselves new lives in alien surroundings find their own identity shattered and subsequentlygo on to disruptthat of the host communitywhich sheltersthem. Questions of identityinformthisbook, for refugeeswere often the catalystfor communities to redefine themselves. In wartime Russia the massive refugee movement which contemporariesdescribedin termsof breakingboundaries as a deluge, flood, or avalanche subvertedboth old and new kinds of social categorization. Neither the old 'estate' (soslovie) nor the new 'class' paradigms could accommodate the figure of the refugee. The onset of refugeedom in 1915 was the firstof the calamitieswhich, in the space of less than ten years,changed Russiansocietybeyond recognition. Refugees disruptedsettled communities, they diluted previouslyhomogenous ethnicities, they made demands on popular charity, and raisedquestions about the state's ability to intervene. In this way they both destroyed and constructed identities. Gatrell shows how the refugee experience was one of the factors in the formation of modern nations within the former Russian Empireas displacedpeople banded togetheron the basisof ethnicity,a shared homeland, or shared memories. Where divisions of status, education, or wealth had existed before, displacementforged a common bond between the national intelligentsiaand the ordinaryfolk.Armenian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Jewish, even Ukrainian national identity (a much disputed concept) were, to an extent, forged by the experience of refugeedomin the FirstWorldWar. Reftigees also posed a challenge to the Tsarist state as voluntaryorganizations , often linked to the unions of towns and zemstva with their vision of a liberal democratic society, battled the conservative attitudes of the Tsarist bureaucracy.Gatrellskilfullyunravelsthe complex institutionalconflictsover refugee relief, and illustrates the ways in which zemstvo bodies, with their public-spiritedvision of the national interest,became objectsof suspicionand envy for the Ministry of the Interior which was determined to maintain its grip on Russian society. A third vision of how the public sphere should function inspired the work of the Tatiana Committee for the Relief of War Victims. Named after its patron, the Tsar's second daughter, the Committee i68 SEER, 79, I, 2001 began as a patriarchal-aristocraticrelief effort for soldiers' dependants, but soon took on the responsibilitiesof refugeerelief.It also supplantedthe unions of towns and zemstva in the taskof registeringrefugees.As partof thistask,the Tatiana Committee organized its local committees to record refugees' own accounts of their experiences. This remarkableexercise in oral history not only provided a resource for future historians, but also helped in the [re-] constructionof refugees'identity, for it represented'a projectwhose purpose was to confound the anonymity of "refugeedom" and to lay the basis for a dignifiedassertionof the self' (p. 206). In constructingthe image of the refugee, then, government and voluntary agencies were engaged in their own strugglefor power over Russia's future. Refugees themselves also participated in constructing such images for their own ends. Gatrelldeconstructssome of these images in order to demonstrate the ways in which refugeedom in pre-Revolutionary Russia constituted an arena for the interaction of politics and society. FollowingMichel Foucault's innovations in the study of state power, he looks at the relationshipbetween refugees and government in terms of the complexities of 'knowledge accumulation and classification'(p. 209). This theoretical dimension adds a conceptual sophisticationto the grippinghuman interestof the narrativeand the depth and breadthof historicalcontext. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies WENDY SLATER University College London Peris,Daniel. Storming theHeavens. 7The Soviet League oftheMilitantGodless. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London...