‘Savages’ and ‘exploiters’: Exploring anti‐colonial violence in the time of war and revolution

Abstract

AbstractThe paper explores the nature of inter‐ethnic, anti‐colonial violence during the First World War and the Russian Revolution (1914–1921). It adopts a comparative approach by juxtaposing the 1916 uprising in Russian Central Asia – specifically, in the Semirech’e oblast – against the anti‐Mennonite pogroms carried out by the Ukrainian peasantry in 1919. The analysis demonstrates that the imperial state, although a significant factor, exercises a highly ambiguous influence: in one case it becomes an enabler of violence, whereas in another it poses an obstacle to it. Furthermore, the paper questions the conventional wisdom of presenting Russia’s long crisis as a two‐part process of state disintegration and subsequent state reconstitution; regional dynamics, especially the power relations between the colonized and the colonizers, need to be taken into account if one intends to construct a more comprehensive history of that period.