Patriotism and Culture during World War I

Abstract

Patriotism and Culture during World War I Colleen M. Moore V. B. Aksenov, Slukhi, obrazy, emotsii: Massovye nastroeniia rossiian v gody voiny i revoliutsii (1914–1918) (Rumors, Images, Emotions: The Mass Moods of Russians in the Years of War and Revolution [1914–18]). 992 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2020. ISBN-13 978-5444812105. K. A. Tarasov, ed., Kul´tury patriotizma v period Pervoi mirovoi voiny: Sbornik statei (Cultures of Patriotism in World War I: A Collection of Articles), ed. B. I. Kolonitskii. 318 pp. St. Petersburg: Izdatel´stvo Evropeiskogo universiteta v Sankt-Peterburge, 2020. ISBN-13 978-5943802850. During World War I, Russian officials seemed obsessed with assessing popular moods. The police were required to compile monthly reports that summarized the moods of the population under their jurisdiction, in addition to the separate incident reports that documented criminal activities.1 Starting in October 1915, the Ministry of the Interior ordered the empire's provincial gendarme administrations (the secret police) to fill out a monthly questionnaire that solicited Russian subjects' attitudes on a wide variety of issues connected with the war effort: the food supply situation, the resettlement of refugees, the presence of prisoners-of-war in the rear, and the spread of the cooperative movement, to name just a few.2 [End Page 425] Still reeling from the events of 1904–6, during which Russia experienced a disastrous defeat in its war against Japan and a revolution that weakened the power of the autocracy, the tsarist regime's objectives in surveilling public opinion were twofold: to ensure Russia's victory in the current war, and to stave off another revolution.3 Based on subsequent developments, the regime appears to have failed on both accounts. Russia was not alone in conducting such assessments. Most belligerent powers, to a greater or lesser degree, attempted to gauge popular attitudes during the war. This preoccupation with moods stemmed from the fact that World War I required the mass mobilization of civilian populations that were deeply divided politically, economically, and often ethnically. To overcome the atomization associated with modern society and unite the people, to each other and to the state, for the realization of war aims, political and military leaders tried to foster and appeal to their subjects' patriotic sentiments. Similarly, political parties, classes, and ethnic or national groups participated in patriotic demonstrations to solidify their membership in a given polity or community at war. But what does patriotism look like, and how does one harness it? These questions concerned Russia's ministers and military high command, who debated whether their country's mostly peasant conscripts would fight for a Russian national idea or required material enticements.4 They have also concerned historians. Writing in 1995, Hubertus Jahn argued that the failure of Russian patriotic culture to articulate a unified vision of the Russian nation explained the success of the revolution: in popular imaginations, there existed no concept of Russia worth preserving.5 Subsequent English-language histories of World War I in Russia evaluated the tsarist regime's (in)ability to foster a Russian national identity, whether through military conscription, the identification of enemy aliens, or the resettlement of refugees.6 The two books examined here offer new approaches and answers to these questions [End Page 426] and suggest that patriotism assumed complex, sometimes paradoxical, and often unpredictable forms. ________ Cultures of Patriotism originated from an international conference that was held on the occasion of the centenary of World War I in June 2014 at the European University in St. Petersburg and organized by Laura Engelstein and Boris Kolonitskii. The volume includes chapters on patriotic culture in Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Belgium, France, the United States, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire, which, taken together, highlight three key patterns or trends in wartime manifestations of patriotism across national (or imperial) borders. The first of these trends concerns the coexistence and interdependence of loyalty to a national community and loyalty to an imperial polity. The postwar creation of new nation-states across much of East-Central Europe retroactively imposed a false antagonism between national and imperial identities that did not necessarily exist during the war proper. Conversely, for some national minorities, allegiance to an imperial...