REVIEWS 579 of his distinguished radical past, and in the 1920s he took an active part in what Eklof and Charushin call the ‘Memory Wars’ — that is the struggle to preserve and promote the contribution to revolution made by men and women who refused to join the Bolshevik Party or endorse its vision and policies. One of the most valuable aspects of these later chapters is the extensive use made by Eklof and Saburova of archival material to reconstruct Charushin’s life and views in his later years. There are inevitably a few shortcomings in A Generation of Revolutionaries. The use of a methodology derived from the (amorphous) genre of Memory Studies is rather ad hoc and undeveloped. Nor are Eklof and Saburova entirely convincing when seeking to define their understanding of ‘generation’ as a chronological, ideological and experiential phenomenon. Yet such weaknesses should not be exaggerated. The scholarly literature on Russian Populism in English has always been somewhat unsatisfactory, often focusing on questions of ideology and tactics, rather than setting the phenomenon in its full historical complexity. A Generation of Revolutionaries will be of value to all historians interested in the longue durée of the Russian Revolution. It deserves to be read widely. Department of History Michael Hughes Lancaster University Stockdale, Melissa Kirschke. Mobilizing the Russian Nation: Patriotism and Citizenship in the First World War. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2016. xvii + 284 pp. Illustrations. Chronology. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £75.00. The intertwining of the Russian Revolution with the First World War makes analysis of the Russian wartime experience a particularly complex task. Melissa Stockdale’s richly textured book discusses how Russian — and, by extension, Soviet — identity was fashioned by the war, showing how a variety of very different groups were instrumental in creating a patriotic discourse that had an impact even after the war had ended. In the summer of 1914 a rhetoric of ‘sacred union’ was deployed to encourage national unity right across the Russian empire. Stockdale emphasizes that this was based not just on the traditional bond between tsar and people, but that it was intended to develop a much wider conception of national unity, drawing together the empire’s varied national and social groups to develop a discourse that could accommodate Russia’s polarized politics. The government itself SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 580 promoted support for the war by press campaigns and widespread publicity for its war loans, while the Orthodox church marshalled its extensive resources to promote the virtues of service and sacrifice, as well as providing material help for soldiers and their families. Wartime patriotic discourse extended beyond the traditional institutions of state and church, however, as a variety of public and voluntary organizations acted to support the war effort. The tsarist regime was compelled to accept that wider society must play a major role in the war effort and at both national and local level a wide variety of organizations provided assistance for Russia’s armies. Stockdale argues that this helped in developing the concept of citizenship, with the fostering of expectations that work for the war effort would provide the opportunity for real engagement in the ‘national community’ once the war was over. More than 15 million Russians served in the armed forces during the war, and the direct engagement of so many people in the conflict extended its impact into every corner of the empire. Soldiers’ families received state aid, while those disabled in the war would receive pensions and, for soldiers who were killed, the question of memorials quickly came to the fore. The Society for RemembrancewasestablishedinApril1915andrewardingandcommemorating Russia’s soldiers, Stockdale argues, was a central way in which common ground could be established right across the empire. In trying to cement the ‘sacred union’, the regime also tried to identify groups — such as Russia’s German population — that could be used as scapegoats who could be blamed for the shortcomings in the war effort. But this focus on internal betrayal proved to have fatal consequences for the Romanov regime: as Stockdale emphasizes, it was the imperial family that became the eventual target for accusations...