War or Revolution: Russian Jews and Conscription in Britain, 1917 (review)

In the twenty-first century two concepts have become alienated from people’s thoughts. The first idea is total war. Few of us understand what the term entails. We look at wars as isolated instances that are far removed from normal life. Consequently, for the public to sacrifice all for the sake of defeating a hated principle is beyond most of our reasoning. The second concept is conscription, to be enlisted in an armed force involuntarily. Both ideas went hand in hand in the early twentieth century and, to the public, showed a citizen’s grasp of nationality, a life and death struggle, and commitment to a greater ideal. In this book, Harold Shukman does an excellent job of showing how Russian Jews who had emigrated to the United Kingdom had trouble reconciling one concept with the other when the society they were told to support in a total war had discriminated against them to such a degree that they felt little affinity to it.

By 1916 British casualties had reached such alarming levels that the government had to resort to conscription to fill the depleted ranks. Until that time the British army had relied on volunteers but stories, often quite true, spread by those who returned from the trenches and the appalling high death rates had deterred many from enlisting. Shukman’s first chapter discusses the dilemmas that the government had to overcome to bring about the program of involuntary enlistment and how the public resisted. But his real accomplishment in this chapter is to describe how a select group of society, the Russian Jewish population in and around London, many of whom were workers, saw the government’s actions. Under the law, as citizens of an allied nation, they had a choice of either enlisting in the British army or returning to Russia for enlistment in the hated Russian army. In chapters 2, 3, and 4, the author describes the depth of discrimination that Russian Jews had undergone in their long history in that country, how they had organized themselves to bring about political change, and the indecision that plagued many of the workers’ minds. Even the British government felt the indecision but that changed when the tsar was overthrown in early 1917 by a democratic government that promised to grant civil rights to all minorities. Both parties saw that a decision had to be made and in the case of many of the workers the decision was to go back to Russia.

When the workers, including the author’s father and uncle, arrived in Russia they found a land in political turmoil. The Bolsheviks had replaced the February Revolution’s Provisional Government and civil war tore the countryside apart. The new government had no need of the workers. Consequently, for the majority of the workers their one goal was to get back to Britain and the families they had had to leave behind. The numerous personal stories the author gleaned through interviews with those who had been involved are riveting. Hardships abound as does the ingenuity used to survive. Many never made it back. Shukman rounds out the entire saga with an epilogue which lionizes the families left behind.

On the whole, Shukman’s work is an excellent read in that it provides an overview of the Russian Jewish workers’ world of the early twentieth century in Britain and their dilemma in supporting a war which might have allowed continued persecution of their Jewish brethren in Russia, which was the goal of the book. Historians need to continue to look at such social historical works to ascertain the depth of the Great War’s impact on societies.