Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 by Peter Holquist (review)

466 Рецензии/Reviews proach to issues of national formation of certain scholarly circles in the post-Soviet space. It is also one of the rare attempts to make some original theoretical contribution to the debates on nationalism coming from that cultural space. We may hope that Myl’nikov’s book will stimulate new discussions and will challenge other scholars to engage in debate. Stephen VELYCHENKO Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921 (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 2002), 359 pp. Index, bibliography. ISBN: 0-674-00907-X. Holquist has written a good book on political violence and state-building . Focusing on the Don Territory, he examines the politics of food supply , surveillance and violence, and how the pressures of war led Reds andWhites to do similar things. Russians on opposing sides during their civil war behaved much like each other and not unlike Europeans.Accordingly , Holquist reminds us that it was the British who first organized concentration camps, that the French pioneered domestic propaganda campaigns, that the Germans started food requisitioning in March 1917, and that Romanovs and Habsburgs carried out massive government deportations of suspect populations. What distinguished the Bolsheviks was that they kept doing during peacetime what other European leaders did only during wartime. The author thankfully avoids neologisms except for “parastatal complex.” He prefers this term to “civil society” because Russia’s voluntary civilian organizations were not institutionalized in law nor as independent of the state as were their counterparts further west. Particularly valuable is Holquist’s identification of the statist and anti-commercial prejudices of the educated. In light of this, we should not regard rivalry between state and society, but between those in government and those outside over how best to use the state, as the key theme in modern Russian history (284). He discusses the impact of these biases on policies and how they predisposed professors and professionals who did not agree with Bolshevism to support the Bolsheviks. Within this context, he reminds us that many Bolshevik policies had their roots in war-time tsarist practice and that often the same people did the same things before and after October. Before the fall of the tsar government officials were as ambivalent 467 Ab Imperio, 3/2003 about mobilizing the educated as the educated were about committing themselves to state-sponsored projects. Afterwards, because the educated did not want to destroy the state but rather to use it for what they thought was the good of society, their ambivalence disappeared . However, in the absence of a civil society professionals and professors in power found they had to rely on military and government institutions to a much greater degree than they would have otherwise and that, despite the fall of the tsar, the institutional gap between society and government remained (238). Many consequently came to regard wartime mobilization not as a necessary temporary expedient, but as the way to realize the good society. The new rulers used the institutions they staffed to implement antimarket policies. Russian policies, unlike those of their counterparts to the west, favored small producers, zemtsvos, coops, rather than the bankers and dealers who controlled silos, mills and distribution. When faced with shortages in marketed grain in 1917, instead of loosening controls on the latter group, and thereby making Russian practice more similar to the German or British , the Provisional Government tightened them. When this failed to increase the amount of marketed grain it resorted to force. Since similar state initiatives worked in Germany, the educated reasoned, they failed to work in Russia because the peasant was too backward to understand them and voluntarily cooperate. What now became apparent , Holquist notes, was that just as the February revolution had not bridged the institutional gap between government and society, it had not bridged the ideological gap between the educated and the common people either. While a shortage of manufactured goods contributed to the food supply problem, the attitudes of the educated aggravated it. Few could accept that Russia’s peasants, like their counterparts elsewhere, were like Adam Smith’s proverbial butcher who did not sell meat because he loved his fellow man, but because he wanted to make a profit...