A Minor Apocalypse: Warsaw during the First World War by Robert Blobaum (review)

Robert Blobaum’s excellent and captivating new monograph, A Minor Apocalypse: Warsaw during the First World War, is a welcome and necessary contribution to the otherwise scant historiography of the Polish experience during World War I. The first history of Warsaw during the Great War to appear in decades, and the first ever of its kind in English, A Minor Apocalypse demonstrates the precariousness of life, the difficulty of wartime privation, and the hardships ordinary Varsovians experienced during the war.¹ Following the example of historians Roger Chickering, Belinda Davis, and Maureen Healy, Blobaum focuses his study not on high imperial politics but on citizens’ behavior in Warsaw’s streets and private homes as they staged food riots, searched for work, and walked barefoot in protest.² Blobaum has tenaciously scoured archives for extant sources and expertly makes use of the wartime Varsovian press, personal correspondence, rare government papers, and “ego-documents” (especially memoirs) to explain the war’s impact on the lives of everyone from the ordinary worker to the most sophisticated noblewoman. The result is a remarkably rich study that is sure to become, like Blobaum’s other scholarship, mandatory reading for scholars and students of Poland, the First World War, and the history of everyday life.

As is evident from the title that he borrowed from Tadeusz Konwicki’s novel, Blobaum sees the Varsovian experience during the First World War as “a minor apocalypse” compared to the nearly total destruction that the city would face just a generation later.³ Though Warsaw saw the end of the war nearly unscathed, Blobaum claims that the side effects of the Great War—food and coal shortages, rampant disease, and growing ethnic tensions—were calamitous for ordinary Varsovians whose desperation only grew as living conditions worsened. To bring these concerns to the fore, Blobaum guides his readers on a walk through Warsaw’s streets as we encounter hordes of refugees from the heavily destroyed countryside and eastern territories, out-of-work laborers, and poor women and children. Despite these initial hardships caused by the war, Varsovians were overwhelming supportive of the Russian Empire as men flocked to join the ranks of the military and upper-class women joined the Women’s Section of the Warsaw Citizens Committee. The result of this early support, Blobaum argues, was “the convergence of Polish ‘nationalism’ with imperial ‘patriotism’” (54), a claim that revises historians’ traditional focus on Polish Legionnaires’ fight for independence.

By the time of the German occupation of Warsaw in the summer of 1915, city residents were less likely to embrace their new imperial overlords. Indeed, German leaders’ inability to provide adequately for Varsovians resulted in increased public health crises, outbreaks of women-led food riots, and a rising crime rate. Though the Warsaw Citizens Committee was initially established to provide wartime aid, German policies that deprived Warsaw of revenue and food purchases crippled the committee’s efficacy, leading to worsening living conditions. To make matters worse, the uneven distribution of aid, however little it was, resulted in rising ethnic and class tensions. Devoting an entire chapter to wartime Polish-Jewish relations, Blobaum demonstrates how Catholic Varsovians imagined Jews as swindlers and hoarders who profited off the scarcity of goods and were thus responsible for out-of-control prices. Indeed, the Barefoot Movement during the summers of 1917 and 1918, when the city’s youth walked without shoes, was as much a statement protesting wartime living conditions as it was an example of economic anti-Semitism against Jewish cobblers. However bad ethnic tensions became, Blobaum makes it a point to show that they resulted in no pogroms like those in wartime Lwów and Vilnius, though perhaps more could have been said to explain the lack of anti-Jewish violence. Blobaum explains that though German leaders treated Jews more favorably than had the previous Russian occupiers, they were content to allow anti-Jewish sentiment to flourish in the city...