The “Rus-sian” Civil Wars, 1916–1926: Ten Years That Shook the World by Jonathan D. Smele (review)

Jonathan D. Smele’s comprehensive account fits well into the prolonged centenary of the Russian imperial crisis marked by the Great War, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the protracted conflict that the author calls the “‘Russian’ Civil Wars.” The book is a valuable addition to the new body of literature that will, hopefully, bring about a better understanding of one of the bloodiest civil wars in human history, provide convincing answers to some of the many remaining questions about its causes and consequences, and uncover new blind zones in the plethora of events that unfolded in Northern Eurasia between 1916 and 1926.

Smele, who currently teaches at Queen Mary University of London, is one of the leading specialists in the history of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. Apart from his important contribution to the history of the conflict in Siberia,¹ which is a must-read for students and scholars of the period, Smele has published invaluable reference materials, including a comprehensive multilingual bibliography and the impressive two-volume historical dictionary.² As an editor of Revolutionary Russia (2002–2012), Smele facilitated the circulation of new studies in the field. The “Russian” Civil Wars, 1916–1926 draws on and summarizes Smele’s previous work, which makes it not only an ambitious but also a well-grounded undertaking.

The main argument of the book is featured in the title and explicated in the introduction (Pp. 1–8). Smele argues that the diversity of the participants of the postimperial conflict does not allow it to be called Russian without quotation marks; that the multitude of interwoven and overlapping conflicts that accompanied the collapse of the empire made the “civil wars” plural; and consequently, that the beginning and ending dates of the conflicts have to be shifted to 1916 and 1926 – the start and provisional settlement of the crisis in Central Asia. The proposed periodization, denationalization, and pluralizaton of the imperial crisis are certainly refreshing for the field of military history (which together with some incursions into political history is the book’s main genre) and provocative in terms of shifting the attention away from the warfare between the Reds and the Whites and the conflicts’ European theater.

After the well-written introduction, Smele follows a chronological approach and, with the exception of Chapter 5, which focuses on the problems of the Bolsheviks on the territories under their control and the opposition within their own ranks, provides an intelligible periodization of the conflict in six chapters (though Chapter 6 also discusses the events in Central Asia throughout the conflict). The opening stage of the Russian Civil War (Chapter 1) is dated to 1916–1918. Chapter 2 is devoted to the setbacks of the Soviet government following the organization of the White movement and Allied Intervention in 1918–1919, and Chapter 3 explores the advances and failures of the Whites in 1919–1920. Chapter 4 focuses on the warfare in the western borderlands of the former empire and the Caucasus, and Chapter 6 briefly explores the conflicts in the Asian part of the empire and wraps up some of the stories started in the previous chapters. The conclusion offers an interesting outlook on the legacies of the Russian Civil War and briefly discusses the art and propaganda that accompanied the collapse of the empire.

The proposed time frame of the Russian Civil War works only partly. Although Smele explores the connections between the 1916 events in Central Asia and later events (Pp. 17–21), there is a break with the rest of the narrative. Questions about what ideas remained relevant over the ten years of fighting (in Central Asia and elsewhere) remain unanswered. It is unclear how the Bolsheviks differed from the tsarist administration in dealing with the crisis. Besides, Smele devotes only a few pages (Pp. 223–236) to the period after 1921...