Riga, Liliana. The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire Smith. Jeremy. Red Nations: The Nationalities Experience in and afer the USSR (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 565 pool where Biondich looks for his overarching argument. His model focuses on the long, and frequently ‘abortive’, modernization process undergone by the region, starting from the early national independence wars of the nineteenth century and going all the way to the recent crises in Yugoslavia. Seen through this overstretched, but not unappealing, explanatory framework, the wars of the 1990s were ‘in actual fact the culmination of a process of state-building that had been initiated in the nineteenth century’ (p. 195). The key link here is the slightly vague concept of the ‘modernizing’, ‘nationalizing state’ (pp. vi) and its elites, which opt for violence always as a calculated choice in order to establish and affirm their authority. The book charts how again and again, in conflict after conflict, local actors made specific choices that led to specific forms and acts of violence. Despite its relativizing tendencies, Biondich’s argument leaves Balkan exceptionalism without any oxygen on which to breathe, political choice being the author’s answer to the stereotype of primordial instincts. Although the nebulous spectre of ‘Europe’ is never far away (see p. 156), nonBalkan players have a secondary role in this story. They are present mainly diplomatically, while the foreign occupation regimes of the two World Wars receiveonlyabriefmention.Butthisisanoddomission.Balkanexceptionalism cannot be understood outside the European comparative framework on which it is judged. Nor can a complete analysis of Balkan violence avoid an integrated history of local actions in constant dialogue with the foreign factor, whose interventions have been the catalyst in generating and/or ending the most important violent outbursts in Balkan history. Bader International Study Centre E. Michail Queen’s University, Canada Riga, Liliana. The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2012. xiii + 313 pp. Tables. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Indexes. £60.00: $99.00. Smith. Jeremy. Red Nations: The Nationalities Experience in and after the USSR. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2013. xix + 391 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £19.99: $34.99 (paperback). As a graduate student I would quip, ‘parochialists of the world, unite!’ It seems that this was not so wide of the mark, for as Liliana Riga argues, it is in the local context that ‘a revolutionary narrative takes root, embeds itself in particular social locations, or experiences, and then organizationally moves across them’ (p. 21). The most fruitful starting point for understanding imperial Russia and its politics, Bolshevism’s included, is therefore the reality SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 566 of empire. In an ambitious move, Riga intends to get ‘right the essence of Bolshevism’ (p. ix) by challenging ‘both the Russianness and the class basis of Bolshevism’s political mobilization’, and offering ‘an account of how a revolutionary class-universalist ideology was materially organized around — and indeed was itself constituted by — socioethnic particularlism’ (p. 4). The method is two-fold. First, there is recourse to sociological theory to understand the sense of grievance that permeated the borderlands. The central idea here is that the: ‘radicalizing political dynamic […] was classically Tocquevillian: the non-Russian Bolsheviks’ radicalism was characterized by the promise of social mobility and access upon assimilation or Russification, but by the reality of ethnopolitical exclusion’ (p. 35). Set against this sense of ethnic alienation, Riga contends that Bolshevism’s ‘Russian-inflected classuniversalism ’ (a key term never properly defined) had a particular appeal: ‘in its secularist and universalist theory of an implied Rossiiskii or imperial state, in its ecumenicalism, and in its seeming indifference to ethnicity’ (p. 7). Second, Riga draws upon the work of Michael Mann to examine the pre-Revolutionary biographies of ninety-three leading Bolsheviks from the years 1917–23 to ‘explore how socioethnic experiences influenced routes to socialist radicalism through an interpretive use of historically situated or embedded biographies’ (p. 13). The biographies are examined in separate chapters around Jewish, Polish and Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Latvian, South Caucasian and Russian Bolsheviks. This is an impressive book that draws upon a very wide range of secondary sources. It is elegant and cohesive, yet there is a suspicion that ‘evidence’ is produced to fit the theory. It is not clear to me, for example, that ethnic ‘identity’ and ethnic...