The Russian Civil War: Primary Sources by A. B. s> Murphy (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS I57 tatarovedenie, focused on the development of a national consciousness, at the expense of religion. As the author reminds us, the term 'Tatar', like 'Turk', has had many a meaning in modern times. Noack is also concerned to distinguishhis analysisfrom that which has come to predominate in the postSoviet period, with its focus on the cultural,linguisticand social, dimension of nationalism:he insistson the centralityof Islam in this regional nationalism. He is also at pains to show how this Muslim consciousness in the Volga-Ural region was, while aware of what was happening elsewhere, in the newly conquered Central Asia and in the Ottoman empire, a distinctivelyregional one. To complete the argument, he also questions how far the Muslim nationalism that emerged in this period could be seen as drawing on a prenationalist 'substratum',based on the Tatar state or on myths denoting the area as a sacred one, and invoking the conversion of these lands to Islam on the orders of the Prophet Mohammad and accounts of saints and heroes buriedthere. Noack's historyis, therefore,one that combines an account of the internal, discursivedevelopment of thisMuslimnationalismwith analysisof the context in which idea and movement of nation developed: he gives a detailed picture of the changing character of Tatar society, and the social background of political activists,but also of something too easily omitted from endogenous accounts of the emergence of nationalism, the role of the broader political context and, very crucially, of the Tsarist state in both stimulating and inhibiting this consciousness. Parallels suggest themselves both with other reform and national movements within the Tsarist empire, notably that of Jews, but also the way in which imperial domination and state intervention prompted the development of nationalism in European colonies. This is a signal contribution to the study of nationalism, the analysis of early modern Islamicmovements and the historyof TsaristRussia alike. Department ofInternational Relations FRED HALLIDAY London School ofEconomics Murphy, A. B. (with the assistance of F. Patrikeeff). TheRussianCivil War. Primagy Sources. Macmillan, Basingstoke and London, and St Martin's Press, New York, 2000. XViii + 274 pp. Glossary. Select Bibliography. Maps. Index. ?45.00. THIsbook is mysteriously- indeed, misleadingly- entitled. It emphatically is not a general collection of primary sources on the history of the Russian civil war which might compare, for example, with Martin McCauley's T7he Russian Revolution andtheSoviet State,I9I7-I92I. Documents (Londonand Basingstoke, 1975). Rather, it might best be regarded as a rather peculiar postscriptto an earliervolume with which the author was involved as ajoint editor:Swain, G. R. etal., TheRussianCivilWar: Documentsfrom theSoviet Archives (London and Basingstoke, I996). That volume collected materials from a number of Russian archives relating to a variety of aspects of the civil war. This volume, in open defiance of itstitle, isvery narrowlyfocused on events in just one theatre, South Russia (or, even more specifically, the Don), and I58 SEER, 8o, I, 2002 includes materialsfromjust two archives:RTsKhIDNI and GARO (Gosudarstvennyi arkhivRostovskoi oblasti). In fact, the overwhelming majority of the materialsincluded come from the latter. The mistitling of the volume is carried over to the individual chapters. Chapter One 'I 9 I8: GermansRout Reds' is actuallyabout the experiences in I9 I8 of the Don Cossacks;not a single document included in it relatesdirectly to the Soviet-German conflict. Chapter Two, which is bafflingly entitled 'I9I9: Whites', is also entirely devoted to the Don Cossacks (specificallyto low-level squabblesand petitionsover pay, food suppliesand accommodation in Novocherkasskand elsewhere). Chapter Three 'I919: Red Strategy' does contain some interesting,high-level documents authoredby Trotsky,Vatsetis and Smilga, considering issues of Red strategy on the Southern Front in summer I9I9; they serve to illuminate both the depth of the crisisperceived by the Red leadership and how it came to be resolved. The chapter also, however, contains long sections on the Greens, on food supplies (down to April I92I), on the role of commissarsin the Red Army and other issues of personnel and management. These are, in part, also interesting, but they hardly deserve to be subsumedunder that chapter title. Chapter Four 'I9I9: Who Will Win?' is almost entirely devoted to the Don Cossack Rebellion of I9 I9 and to the case of Colonel Mironov. Fascinatingstuffbut, at...