The “Vendee” of the Russian Revolution of 1905-1907? The Western Provinces and the Black Hundreds

Abstract

The western French department of the Vendee has acquired a certain regional identity in the politics of historical memory not only of the French Revolution but also of the Russian Revolution of 1917-1922. The royalist rebellion of the Vendee peasants between 1793-1796 has become a synonym for a region of mass lower-class counter-revolution. Not surprisingly, both supporters and opponents of the Bolsheviks tried to find parallels with the French Revolution to explain the massiveness of anti-Bolshevik opposition in certain regions of the former Russian Empire. Often both Reds and Whites called the Cossack lands, especially the Don, the Vendee of the Russian Revolution. However, it is impossible to place an equal sign between the Vendee peasants, fighting for king and church, and anti-Bolshevik Cossacks and peasants because the Cossacks and peasants were not fighting for the restoration of the monarchy. One can find a Russian equivalent to the Vendee regional concept of mass counter-revolution in the nine western provinces of the Russian Empire in the Revolution of 1905-1907. These provinces, along with six other provinces, comprised the Jewish Pale of Settlement and became bastions of the Union of the Russian People and other Black Hundred organizations. Unlike the interior Russian regions, the western provinces were multiethnic and multireligious. The western provinces had mass protest movements and outbreaks of terrorism where ethnic, religious and social factors intersected. The amorphous populist Black Hundred ideology could attract mass support in the western provinces from all those seeing themselves as victims of all different variations of exploitation and injustices from the hands of different establishments.