Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History (review)

This welcome contribution to the history of the 1917 Russian revolution uses a comparative study of two Volga River provinces, Nizhnii Novgorod and Kazan, to explore the responses of “ordinary people”— workers, peasants, townspeople, rural intellectuals, soldiers, and soldiers’ wives—to the political and economic challenges of the revolution. The study builds on a long history of scholarship; generously synthesizing the contributions of both Western and Soviet historians, Badcock adds evidence from an impressive mining of local archival and newspaper sources.

Using the methods of political and social history, Badcock organizes her book thematically. Chapters about the dissemination of narratives chronicling the February revolution and about efforts to “enlighten” the ordinary people of the provinces show the divergence between the interests of central revolutionary authorities and that of local populations. A case study of the populist Socialist Revolutionary Party in the two provinces indicates the shallowness of political identification, serving to caution historians to be wary of inferring “political opinion” from voting patterns in 1917. A chapter about soldiers emphasizes the violent potential of armed and disaffected reserves who answered to no authority and who contributed to the mounting breakdown of civic order in provincial towns and in the countryside.

Finally, Badcock looks at two of the most central political problems of 1917—the redistribution of land and the shortage of food. The two provinces differed in their economic status, but Badcock importantly emphasizes that the differences within provinces were much greater than those between provinces. Kazan province, in particular, was an ethnically diverse region. She notes also that the difference between provincial towns—with their overwhelmingly Russian populations—and their rural hinterlands was also more significant in shaping local responses than was the gap between center and “periphery.” Local heterogeneity makes generalizations sometimes difficult; Badcock duly notes considerable (but not systematic) variations across the two provinces.

Nonetheless, the evidence that Badcock presents clearly shows a huge gulf between the interests of the central government and those of the ordinary people in the provinces so far as land and food supply were concerned. The revolutionaries evinced a strong opposition to private property, that of both big landowners and “improving” peasants who had chosen to separate their farmsteads from the collective before 1914. Through legal means, new democratic institutions, intimidation, and occasionally violence, land in these two provinces became socialized, despite the opposition of their governments. Similarly, local residents rejected central decrees relating to the grain monopoly and took the marketing and distribution of foodstuffs into their own hands.

Badcock emphasizes throughout that what appeared to central observers as “dark” and “unconscious” behavior by ordinary people was in fact rational and calculating. What drove a wedge between “elites” and “people” in 1917 was not the ignorance of the people, but the significant conflicts of interest between a strong central government and provincial populations, which sought local solutions to local problems. In this way, Badcock reinforces the prevailing wisdom that the revolutionary process of 1917 led to unbridgeable polarization between those with power and those without it. Her important contribution is to demonstrate how this process worked from the perspective of the latter group, which had its own logical agendas.

Badcock is careful not to stray beyond her carefully assembled evidence. Nonetheless, her book suggests certain interesting continuities with Soviet-era policies that are usually blamed on the Bolsheviks but seem to have grown out of the larger political and social conflict begun in 1917: a hostility to the market but also to forced grain requisitions; an antipathy toward the richer peasants (labeled by Badcock as “separators” rather than “kulaks”); popular indifference to democratic institutions and processes; the marginalization of women from the class of political actors; and, finally, the ungovernability of vast stretches of the Russian lands.