Терновый венец свободы: Либертаризм в идеологии и революционной практике российских левых радикалов, 1917–1918 гг по В. П. Сапон (review)

385 Ab Imperio, 3/2010 Gleb J. ALBERT В. П. Сапон. Терновый венец свободы: Либертаризм в идеоло- гии и революционной практике российских левых радикалов, 1917–1918 гг. Нижний Новгород: Издательство Нижегородского государственного университета, 2008. 332 с. ISBN: 978-5-91326050 -5. The two revolutions of February and October 1917, which transformed Russia and went down as pivotal moments of the beginning “short” twentieth century, have traditionally been a central topic of Soviet studies. Today, however, elaborations on the Soviet Union and its modes of rule focus primary on Stalinism. The monograph by Vladimir Sapon, which goes back again to the classical perspective of 1917, does not claim new insights on the Soviet Union as a whole, yet it offers a novel perspective on the foundational phase of Soviet Russia – something that is rare in current scholarship, especially in Russian historiography where substantial sectors of research on the revolution are still largely preoccupied with normative valuations and the search for the Bolsheviks’“German money.” Sapon’s book is concerned with one particular, yet central, aspect of revolutionary Russia – libertarianism – more precisely, socialist libertarianism , which the author defines as “theoretical elaborations and sociopolitical practices aimed at the liberation of the individual and the collective from all kinds of social oppression and exploitation” (P. 6). With this focus, Sapon pleads for a new periodization of the revolutionary period – instead of focusing on the events of February, October, and post-October separately, he regards the time span between February 1917 and the autumn of 1918 as a “Great Russian libertarian revolution ” (P. 8). This perspective allows one to see continuities rather than breaks between February and October . For this time span, the author sets out to map within the libertarian paradigm the theoretizations and actions of the three key political groups of the radical left – Anarchists, Left Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs), and Bolsheviks. Sapon, who is known for his previous research on anarchism in the Russian provinces, takes a perspective that explicitly does not focus on Moscow and Petrograd exclusively, and draws heavily from provincial material (using regional archives of Nizhnii Novgorod, Vladimir, and Voronezh) to present a rich and representative picture of the revolutionary period in Russia. Even though Russia had been the birthplace of Mikhail Bakunin and Petr Kropotkin, by the time of the 386 Рецензии/Reviews early twentieth century, anarchism in Russia was a rather marginal and highly fragmented movement. If there was a major unifyng factor for the anarchists in 1917, it was their ultralibertarianism, including the denial of the state as such. With the anarchists being the libertarian current within the Russian revolutionary movement, it makes sense that Sapon deals with them first and most extensively. In the wake of February 1917, anarchist groups participated in the new organizational forms of politics “from below” – Soviets , factory committees, and trade unions – where their libertarianism was not only a unifying factor among the various anarchist groups but also the cohesion that brought them together with other radical left currents against the “traitors” and “patriots” within the workers’movement – the moderate socialists. And even though anarchists remained marginal in the central political organs of “revolutionary democracy,”1 in individual cases they managed to achieve notable success in the provinces. For example, in mid-1917 there were 25–30.000 workers participating in an anarchist-syndicalist union in Debal’tsevo (in the Donbass mining area), and in one of the Siberian mines, anarchists roused workers to expropriate their mine and run it via self-management (and even granting the ex-owner a pension ) (P. 45). During the “July Days,” perceived as a “Bolshevik putsch” by many contemporaries, the anarchists ’ activities reached a peak. They played the lead in instigating the masses, and left the Bolsheviks perplexed and even intimidated (as Sapon demonstrates through Bolshevik correspondence from the provinces, P. 68). Sapon shows how during the “July Days” the borders between the radical currents seemed to diffuse: anarchists were often mistaken for Bolsheviks at rallies, while, on the other hand, many rank-and-file Bolsheviks joined anarchist activities. The achievement of anarchist activists in June was that without proper organizational structures and with hardly any funding for propaganda they managed to ride on the rebellious mood of the “masses” and to imbue it with an ideological touch. Contrary to the Left SocialistRevolutionaries , while the anarchists were not the driving force...