The Civil War, Migration, and Humanitarian Disaster in Russia between 1917 and 1922

Abstract

The movement of the Russian population in the years of the Revolution and the Civil War was characterised by an unprecedented dynamic and had a formative character. The article analyses factors that influenced the movement of the population between 1917 and 1922. They are roughly divided into factors connected with birth rates and death rates (either natural or violent) or linked to (forced) migrations inside and outside the country. Despite the fact that the statistics on the population movement are very inaccurate, incomplete, and unreliable, the quantitative data on the state of the country and the course of various social processes that employees of statistical services collected during the Revolution and the Civil War help draw an approximate idea of the demographic aspects of the Russian Revolution. Methodologically, the paper is based on the “spatial” approach, i.e. the distinction between geographical territories and social spaces. Among the main forms of migration of the population within the country in the years of the Revolution and the Civil War, the author singles out the first movements of armies and the concurrent waves of refugees, and secondly, population movements between rural and urban areas, including profiteering in grain and scarce merchandise and peasants’ flight from the countryside to the city to save themselves from hunger; and, thirdly, the interregional movements of citizens, and especially of peasants, in search of fertile lands. The migratory practices of the population were largely based on the rich experience of the past and, consequently, allowed it to remain in the framework of its own culture under the extraordinary conditions of the Revolution and the Civil War. However, the onset of a demographic catastrophe and the growing proportion of marginalised population point to the fact that the migration processes in Russia between 1917 and 1922 did not prove entirely successful.