Willimott , Andy Living the Revolution: Urban Communes and Soviet Socialism, 1917–1932 (review)

Abstract

SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 378 meeting in a contact zone where Soviet victory could stall Central European nation-building projects. Ultimate Polish victory therefore safeguarded the formation of the state. In all cases, delineated frontiers proved insufficient for civilians, since remaining on the wrong side fostered fears of being considered alien. The one aspect of post-First World War national struggles that has not until now been examined — violence and crime committed beyond the battlefields — is featured here in a dedicated chapter. Most interesting is Böhler’s analysis of soldiers running wild, of disciplinary problems within the ranks of the young, heterogeneous Polish army. To illustrate this, the author highlights several warlords who took matters into their own hands in various eastern regions. Military insubordination led to incidents of abuse, criminality, corruption and banditry. Anti-Jewish excesses also occurred as Jews were viewed in terms of an imagined adversary, and as economic rivals and opponents of the Polish national project. A question which many soldiers struggled with was how to discern friend from foe in ethnic conflicts on a local level where mixed identities were a rule rather than an exception. Although a scholarly work, the monograph is not free of some minor mistakes. The term ‘Polish masters’, for example, is mistranslated as pani rather than pany. The same problem arises with the term ‘scythemen’, which is translated as kosznierzy not kosynierzy. Nevertheless, Jochen Böhler’s book is, without a doubt, important. Any scholar of twentieth-century European history will find it worth reading, and particularly useful when considering the question of the reconstruction and re-emergence of Central European nation-states after the Great War. Jagiellonian University Paweł Markiewicz Willimott, Andy. Living the Revolution: Urban Communes and Soviet Socialism, 1917–1932. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2017. xv + 203 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £60.00. With the Bolsheviks in power, some of the most dedicated revolutionaries looked for ways not to fight for socialism or to build the revolutionary state but simply to live the revolution. Living the revolution, though, was far from an unproblematic task. In this original and engaging book, Andy Willimott, a British historian at the University of Reading, analyses one of the environments in which idealists attempted to put revolution into practice: the urban commune. Organized in student hostels, or newly created communal apartments, or factory barracks, communes were experiments in the ‘new REVIEWS 379 way of life’ (novyi byt). Small groups of activists — perhaps a dozen, but sometimes only two or three — agreed with each other to live communally. The decision was spontaneous in that it was not made by higher authorities or with reference to the bureaucracy. These ‘communards’ occupied a shared space. Their resources were shared, too: they lived out of a ‘common pot’. This meeting place of lived experience, ideology, generation, urban space, the revolution and the state offers a laboratory in which Willimott writes a new social microhistory of the first decade or so of Soviet power. The communes were not official organizations, and ‘everyday life’ is never an official institutional category, so the evidence about this topic is scattered and fragmentary. Some communes were very small-scale and they lacked a formal institutional identity. In order to write their history, then, Willimott has worked hard to draw together disparate materials, sometimes reading them against the grain. Especially rewarding archival sources include personal files of particular communards from higher educational institutions in Petrograd/ Leningrad. But the range too of published sources — newspapers, memoirs, ideological tracts, state publications — is impressive and original. These allow Willimott to analyse communal life in three main contexts. The first is higher education institutes and student dormitories, where the case studies and ‘characters’ are especially vivid. This focus facilitates a wider point about the social significance of generation and the cultural importance of the activist in early Soviet history. The second context is ‘everyday’ apartment communes, again of the young, but this time of workers. Here issues of gender, sexuality — and their intersection with work, everyday living and living space — are especially interesting. Willimott’s third context is ‘production communes’, existing within factories, and acting as Communist-inflected and activistinspired...