The Great War in Russian Memory

5 World War I and the Definition of Russianness

5 Q WorldWarIandthe DefinitionofRussianness Notions of religious faith, the construction of heroes and enemies, representations of manhood and womanhood, justifications of wartime violence, and articulations of national identity are all inextricably intertwined. Although the previous chapters have focused primarily on the themes of religion, gender , and violence, they have also touched upon many aspects of national identity . Religious interpretations of World War I understood death in combat as a sacrifice on behalf of the nation that would bring the soldier eternal memory and an eternal reward. While Soviet ideologists may have contested this idea, it nonetheless remained resonant in Soviet World War I and revolutionary discourse . Notions of military service on behalf of the nation and representations of heroic conduct in warfare were a constituent part of both tsarist and Soviet “nationalized masculinity” and gendered depictions of citizenship more generally. The violence of war was often intensified by ethnic hatred, ­ rivalry, and distrust; despite Soviet efforts to emphasize class over ethnicity, Soviet war memory revealed that ethnic difference heightened the violent nature of encounters among soldiers and between soldiers and civilians and that some ethnicities (Cossacks, for instance) were understood to be violent by their very nature. Building on these discussions of national identity, this ­ chapter considers the nature of “Russianness” in the late tsarist and Soviet period. It focuses on moments of self-­ mobilization to fight for the nation, instances of refusal to bear arms for the nation, the dilemmas of internationalism, and the role of ethnicity in defining external and internal enemies. 166 Q The Great War in Russian Memory World War I was greeted with a wide variety of emotions across Europe. Descriptions of the various nations’ enthusiastic reactions to the outbreak of war almost immediately became part of the process of national mobilization in the guise of “the myth of war enthusiasm.”1 Of course, the realities of mobilization were much more complex than the myth of the population rising as one in a blaze of pa­ trio­ tism to defeat the perfidious enemy. In all combatant countries, reactions to the war varied substantially along class, ethnic, regional , and gender lines.2 Throughout the war, both pro-­and antiwar advocates constantly attempted to measure morale and to assess the strength of their particular point of view. The extent of the population’s enthusiasm for war and its opposite, the famed civilian “stab in the back” that sabotaged the war effort, became key elements of contestation both during the war itself and in the European postwar order. In the Russian Empire, the patriots and the internationalist “defeatists” were mirror images of one another in their assessments of the mood of the population: patriots tended to emphasize and exaggerate the enthusiasm of the people for the war, while “defeatists” tended to emphasize workers’ strikes and riots during mobilization to demonstrate lower-class opposition to the war from the start. Each side also admitted, however, that the narod (the people) did not always behave in the way that their side desired. Analysts from both sides had a ready explanation for the population’s actions: the supposed “backwardness ” of the Russian people. “Backwardness” was used to explain both the narod’s failure to embrace a patriotic national identity, and its unfortunate propensity to do so when “intoxicated” by chauvinism. Because of these countervailing tendencies and conflicting contemporary interpretations, historians have sharply disagreed about the strength of patriotic identification with the Russian national project during World War I. In recent years there has been lively scholarly debate about the extent to which the Russian Empire was able to mobilize its multiethnic and peasant populations to identify with the Russian nation. Some scholars continue to uphold the older historiography’s claims that there was no Russian national consciousness or Russian nation during World War I. Others push the anti­ national argumentevenfurther,arguingthattherewasan“absenceof an articulate sense of national identity” not only during World War I, but all through­ out the 1920s, and even as late as the mid-­ 1930s when a “Russo-­ centric étatism” emerged.3 A number of historians have recently challenged this antinational historiography, arguing that because Russia was one of the “old, continuous nations,” it could draw on elements of “proto-­ national identity” and put them World War I and the Definition of Russianness Q 167 to new wartime uses.4 They argue that Russian cultural figures and the Russian public produced and consumed a variety of...