Landed Property, State Authority, and Civil War

Abstract

Twenty years after the publication in these pages of Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, Leopold Haimson has expanded and deepened his analysis of Russian society on the eve of revolution and civil war. As my own views generally accord with his, my comments are intended to supplement rather than challenge. First of all, the large social phenomena he describes need to be anchored in the peculiar social evolution of Russian state and society. Second, along with the vertical division of social identity into groups, sosloviia and incipient classes, equally deep horizontal divisions sliced through the body politic along regional and ethnic lines and imposed a multidimensional character on the civil war. To summarize Haimson's argument is to violate its subtlety, but its compelling force derives from his focus on three complex historical processes that underlie the disintegration and reintegration of the state from 1917 to 1920. In capsule form they are the fragmentation of Russian society, the particularism of its separate parts, and the general revolt against superordinate authority. Their combined effect when accelerated by the war was to disrupt and smash the existing socioeconomic and political structures, to plunge the country into a smuta for which the term civil war is an anemic description. Whatever the composition of the new regime might have been, it would have faced the same problem of creating a new body politic in order to win at least the tacit support of the warring groups in the population. In his vivid analysis, Haimson reminds us that there was, and still is, no satisfactory social vocabulary to define the various entities of prerevolutionary Russian society. But there were powerful pressures and inducements for its members to accept or reject identities imposed by the coercive power of the state or by the moral authority of the intelligentsia. In other words, definitions of social identity had become a form of political statement. The government used, as Gregory Freeze has recently pointed out, a revived concept of soslovie as both an administrative convenience and a social bulwark against the development of classes and their inevitable conflict.' Particularism deeply marked all groups from the peasantry and nobility at opposite ends and the merchantry in the middle of the social scale. It too was in part a legacy of soslovie mentality. The state lacked the resources and trained personnel to govern, but it feared the alternative of sharing power. So it offered self-administration to the sosloviia which perpetuated long-standing social and legal barriers based on duties and privileges. Particularism was also fostered by the slow and uneven development of capitalism. While it created economic differentiation among the emancipated peasantry, for example, it did not break the reciprocal ties between kulak and commune even after the Stolypin reforms. Nor did capitalism spawn a common mentality, social consciousness, or political allegiance among the propertied classes. Consequently, the ideologues of the Whites