Europe: Early Modern and Modern
In 1942, the Nazis raided the Paris headquarters of the
Russkii Obshche-Voinskii Soiuz/Russian General Military Union (ROVS), the central organization of the
White Army in exile, and arrested the landlord of the
building, S. N. Tret'iakov. Tret'iakov, a former minister of the anti-Bolshevik Kolchak government, was
found to have installed hidden microphones in the
building in order to pass information about his tenants
to Moscow. He was subsequently shot as a Soviet spy.
This sorry tale reveals much about the tortuous fates
and fissiparous fealties of members of the White
emigration in interwar Europe as they struggled, in
isolation and in economic hardship, and with mounting
paranoia, to come to terms with the growth of fascism:
a phenomenon many of them found to be at once so
attractive in its anticommunism and so repellant in its
threat to Russian nationhood and patrimony. It is just
one of the gems to be found in Paul Robinson's
splendid book.
Utilizing the ROVS files from the Bakhmeteff Archive in New York, as well as materials from the
Hoover Institution, Russian and French archives and a
host of rare and contemporary printed sources, Robinson expertly traces the history of the tens of thousands of soldiers from the armies of Anton Denikin
and Peter Wrangel as they dispersed into European
exile. Specifically, he examines in detail the wideranging and often conflicting activities of the ROVS
leadership as it attempted to instigate underground
struggles against Soviet Russia while providing humanitarian aid and cultural and professional support to its
members, and simultaneously endeavored to claim a
leadership role among the emigrants, in the face of the
competition and even hostility of other agencies
(former ambassadors of a variety of Russian governments, local and regional authorities, Romanov pretenders, political parties, etc.). Robinson traces, too,
the factional, personal, and ideological struggles
within ROVS. In so doing, he considerably enhances
our understanding of the first wave of emigrants from
Soviet Russia. After all, as the author notes, studies of
the interwar emigration have almost invariably focused
on the intellectual and cultural elite, the Tsvetaevas,
Bunins, Chaliapins, Chagalls, Rachmaninovs, and Berdiaevs of that unfeasibly talented world. But most
interwar Russian exiles were soldiers: "More than
anything else, Russia abroad was a society of military
men, and the largest organizations within it were
military ones" (p. v).
Not all readers with some expertise on the nature
and conduct of the White forces during the civil war
period may be entirely convinced by the author's
claims that his study of the interwar years should lead
to a modification of the accepted view of the prevalence of anti-Semitic, reactionary, and monarchist
sentiments within the White movement. Nevertheless,
as a former army officer himself, Robinson is very well
placed to explain and to analyze the motivational
forces behind the "White Idea" both during and after
the civil war. In particular, he reveals the emigre
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
295
officers' sense of betrayal (by the Russian people, by
the Russian intelligentsia, and by the Allies) and the
messianism engendered among them by having survived a series of shared ordeals (the Ice March, the
evacuation, and the internment camps provided for
them by the Allies at Gallipoli). In fact, one of the
great strengths of this book is its argument that
traditional concepts of honor, duty, sacrifice, and
discipline meant more to the White officers than did
those of politics and class struggle, which everything in
their education, training, and experience had led them
to regard as base and as having no part to play in the
considerations or activities of the "knightly order of
monks" that ROVS sought to be. The debilitating
impact of this credo on the Whites' effectiveness as
civil-war soldiers and post-civil-war diplomats, terrorists and counter-terrorists is also well adumbrated.
If Robinson's book has a weakness, it is that, apart
from the listing of references to other works on the
emigration in the notes to the introductory chapters,
the author's efforts to accommodate his findings within
the existing historiography of the subject are inconsistent and sometimes unconvincing. Why, to take but
one example, in the section dealing with the fate of
Boris Savinkov (p. 133) is the reader referred to
Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky's KGB: The
Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to
Grobachev (1990) but not to Richard Spence's excellent biography, Boris Savinkov: Renegade on the Left
(1991)? In general, however, this is a very well written
and thoroughly researched book that will be of great
utility to anyone interested in the history of the
Russian Civil War and the first wave of the Russian
emigration.
JONATHAN D. SMELE
Queen Mary,
University of London
MARKKU KANGASPURO. Neuvosto-Karja/an taiste/u itsehallinnosta: Nationalismi ja suomalaiset punaiset Neuvostoliiton vallankiiytbssii vuosina 1920-1939 [The Soviet Karelian Struggle for Self-Government:
Nationalism and the Finnish Reds in the Soviet
Union's Exercise of Power, 1920-1939]. (Bibliotheca
Historica, number 60.) Helsinki: Suomalaisen KirjalJisuuden Seura. 2000. Pp. 402.
Markku Kangaspuro's dissertation on Soviet Karelia's
aspirations for autonomy in the 1920s and 1930s is a
useful contribution to the growing number of studies
on center-periphery relations in the interwar USSR.
We are now obtaining a considerably fuller and more
nuanced picture of the Soviet scene, and it is especially
important that this work focuses on an administrative
entity below the rank of union republics (i.e. an
Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic). The author
makes effective use of newly available archival sources
in Moscow, St. Peterburg, and Karelia, although some
key materials remain inaccessible.
Kangaspuro argues that nationalism-interpreted
FEBRUARY 2003
296
Reviews of Books
and manipulated in varying ways, to be sure-dominated relations between Moscow and Karelia as both
engaged in the task of state building. In assessing the
Karelian case, he highlights its distinctive features as
well as the ways in which it conformed to a common
Soviet pattern. Karelia's strategic geopolitical location,
bordering on Finland and commanding the recently
built St. Petersburg-Murmansk railroad, along with its
significant timber resources made it a region of special
concern for the Soviet authorities. Above all, Finland's
territorial claims on Karelia during a time when the
Bolsheviks were fighting for their very survival on a
wide range of fronts forced Soviet Russia to act with
circumspection. Peace with Finland was seen as essential, and granting autonomy to Soviet Karelia would
placate the League of Nations and help ward off any
new threat of Finnish intervention. By happy coincidence, the Bolsheviks also had a ready-made vanguard
available to administer the Karelian Working People's
Commune (the forerunner of the Karelian ASSR):
exiled Finnish Communists, who had just lost a civil
war in Finland. It is striking that both Red and White
Finns had a similar vision of Karelia as part and parcel
of the Finnish cultural and historical space and saw its
future inevitably linked to the West. Indeed Edward
Gylling, the leading Red Finn ideologist in Soviet
Karelia, viewed his new place of residence as a kind of
Piedmont for the Finnish working class and a natural
base for transporting the Bolshevik Revolution to
Finland and Scandinavia.
During the 1920s, buoyed by Moscow's support,
Finnish-led Soviet Karelia maintained a unique level
of economic autonomy based on local control of its
massive timber resources. Nevertheless, the centralization inherent in the Five-Year Plans put an end to this
situation by 1930. In cultural policy, Karelia followed
the overall Soviet pattern more closely, as the 1920s
and early 1930s were dominated by "indigenization"
(korenizatsiia), or state support for non-Russian cultures and the training of native cadres. In this sphere,
the Karelian case presented a serious dilemma. No
established written language existed, and the three
main Karelian dialects differed considerably from each
other, although none was that distant from Finnish.
Under the circumstances, the Red Finn leadership, not
without a sense of cultural superiority, opted for
Finnish as the means to unify the Karelian population
and solidify ties with its kinfolk to the west. This policy
had some success in the northern regions, but in the
south and east, where cultural russification had already
proceeded quite far, it provoked resentment and resistance. Indigenization had limited impact on the
Karelians; they remained the most rural and least
educated of the nationalities in the republic.
During the 1930s, Karelia fell more and more into
step with centralized rule directed from Moscow and
Leningrad. As elsewhere in the USSR, forced collectivization and purges dominated the decade. Regarding nationalities policy, Kangaspuro sees Ukraine as
the main model for developments in Karelia. By 1933,
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
the Soviet leadership viewed "local nationalism" as the
main danger and increasingly emphasized the integrating role of the Russian language and culture. Thus, in
Karelia the Finns were blamed for holding back the
development of the Karelians and for artificially dividing them from the rest of Soviet culture. All things
Finnish now became increasingly suspect, leading to
the disappearance of the Finnish-language press and
of Finnish as a means of instruction in the schools. In
this xenophobic atmosphere, the Soviet view of Karelia
had changed from a base for revolution in Finland to
a dangerous potential bridgehead for counterrevolution from abroad.
This very solid work concentrates on high politics
and the role of the party elite in both the center and
the periphery, showing that a considerable measure of
local control and initiative did function in the 1920s in
the Karelian case. The book could have been strengthened by paying more attention to the social context in
which the "struggle for autonomy" took place. For
example, demographic issues and especially the extensive Russian immigration that greatly altered the ethnic composition of Soviet Karelia in this period are
only mentioned in passing. The ethnic Karelian population, in the early stages of forming a national identity, also remains on the fringes of this study.
Tmvo U. RAUN
Indiana University
MATTHEW J. PAYNE. Stalin's Railroad: Turksib and the
Building of Socialism. (Pitt Series in Russian and East
European Studies.) Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press. 2001. Pp. x, 384. $37.00.
The subject of Matthew J. Payne's book is the building
of the Turkestano-Siberian Railroad (Turksib) in the
Soviet Union. Turksib was one of the Soviet government's great construction projects during its industrialization drive of the late 1920s and 1930s. The
railroad ran from Siberia through Kazakhstan to
Turkestan and hence allowed cheap Siberian grain to
be shipped to Central Asia, freeing up land there for
cotton cultivation. Soviet leaders saw the railroad as an
important economic link and also as a means to bring
modernity and socialism to Kazakhstan. They hoped
not only to build railroads and factories but to create
new people: the New Soviet Person devoted to socialism. In the case of nomadic Kazakhs, such a transformation required the inculcation of industrial work
habits, a settled lifestyle, and a collectivist consciousness, all of which their labor on railroad construction
was to foster. Turksib was to be the "forge of the
Kazakh proletariat."
With a number of good monographs on Soviet
industrialization already in print, one might ask
whether another is needed. But Payne does a good job
of engaging existing scholarship and of bringing new
evidence to bear. Moreover, his research on rural
Kazakhstan helps to balance previous studies, which
for the most part have focused on urban centers in
FEBRUARY 2003