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Citizenship and the Russian Nation during World War I: A Comment

2000; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 59; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2697053

2325-7784

Stephen A. Smith,

Central European national history

Historians of late imperial Russia have been categorical in asserting that Russian peasants lacked any form of national identity. Scholars as diverse as Orlando Figes, Geoffrey Hosking, John Keep, Bruce Lincoln, Richard Pipes, Robert Service, Ronald Suny, and Allan Wildman have agreed that Russian peasants were too rooted in Gemeinschaft, too particularistic in their social identities, to be capable of identifying with the polity and territory of Russia. John Keep expresses the consensus concisely when he writes: At the beginning of the twentieth century the Russian people lagged behind many others in the tsarist realm (Poles, Finns, even Baits and Ukrainians) in the development of a modern national consciousness. The social elite identified with the multinational empire; in the terminology of the day their thinking was rossiiskii rather than russkii. Ordinary folk either opted for a social class orientation or else had none at all, in that their horizons were limited to the local community. This helps to explain why Russia was defeated in World War One, why the Bolsheviks with their Utopian internationalist creed won mass support in 1917 and why the Whites failed to worst the Reds in the ensuing civil war.