Smele, Jonathan D. The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 1916–1926: Ten Years That Shook the World (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 760 Reviewers sometimes use the word ‘judicious’ when what they mean is ‘boring’. However, there is nothing tedious about this careful exposition of a potentially emotive subject. Destivelle may betray little hint of the longstanding rivalries within and beyond the episcopal hierarchy that undoubtedly underlay many of the conciliar debates. In that respect, his analysis remains oddly impersonal, despite the profusion of names. But nowhere else will the reader find such a clear discussion of the Council’s resolutions. The translation occasionally strikes a false note: ‘indigenous philosophers’, for example, is not the conventional rendering of pochvenniki (p. 12) and seems unlikely to convey the essence of the native-soil movement. For the most part, however, the text reads smoothly and convincingly. Within its limited compass, there is no room for the full-scale study that the Moscow Council deserves (a particularly fertile set of comparisons and contrasts could be drawn with the Council of Trent). Yet there could be no better introduction to it than this cogently organized and exceptionally well indexed book, which thoroughly deserves the wider student readership that this new edition seems destined to attract. Perhaps some of those new readers will ultimately help to give the Moscow Council its equally merited place in the wider scheme of Russian Revolutionary history. UCL SSEES Simon Dixon Smele, Jonathan D. The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 1916–1926: Ten Years That Shook the World. Hurst & Co., London, 2015. xxxiv + 423 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £35.00. Jonathan Smele has written a very fine book on what he intriguingly labels ‘The “Russian” Civil Wars, 1916–1926’. Note the plural ‘wars’, the Russian in quotation marks, and the dates, all of which set the book apart from most studies of the civil war(s). The first two are central to his book, the last, the dating, less so. Smele is correct that the plural ‘civil wars’ is rarely used, and quite correct that it is a better term than the singular (disclaimer — he cites me as one of the few to use it, while also, properly, criticizing my limited usage). The plural takes on especially great significance here because of the extensive space that he devotes to the many civil wars going on among various ethnicities in Siberia, the Baltic, Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as Russians against various minorities of the former Empire and, of course, the more frequently described conflicts among the various Russian armed forces, especially the Reds, Whites and Greens. ‘Russian’ in quotation marks is closely related to the previous point. Smele gives extensive space to conflict between non-Russian ethnicities as well as REVIEWS 761 between Russians and non-Russians, much more than do other writers on the civil wars. One of the main and innovative features of the book is the diversity of ‘civil wars’ that he discusses: Russian-Russian, Russian-Ukrainian, Ukrainian-Ukrainian, Polish-Ukrainian, Georgian-Armenian and others. Moreover, he stresses that who fought who was itself continually changing. Still, the ultimate decisive outcome came from the Reds versus Whites conflict, to which he gives good space. Once that ended the winning ‘Russian’ side, the Bolsheviks, were in a position to suppress most of the non-Russian forces and reestablish control over most of the former Russian Empire, a process he traces very well. (Ironically, after 1991 many ethnicities that fought in the civil wars finally became fully independent, although for Russians like Putin that and borders remain in dispute today just as they were then.) The 1916–26 dating, making a nice decade of length, is one of the most intriguing but ultimately perhaps less convincing aspects of the book, which overwhelmingly focuses on the traditional 1917/18 to 1921/23 years. He starts the bookwithaseriousdiscussionofwhenthecivilwarsbeganthatlargelydismisses the significance of the revolution of 1917, making 1917 just a small portion of the civil wars. He lays forth a variety of possible dates, including a lengthy discussion of my own ‘insightful’ dating of the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 as the breaking point between ‘revolution’ and ‘civil war’. He dismisses that time frame, however, and also rejects the common 1918 to 1921...