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

This first-rate monograph is divided into six chapters. The first chapter looks at the Great War's impact on the demography of Warsaw, the third city of the Russian Empire in 1914. During the war's first year, Warsaw was a frontline city that experienced aerial, artillery, and gun violence, but also a constant movement of people, from soldiers to refugees and migrants. Warsaw was a city in tremendous flux that witnessed enormous shifts in population. Chapter two discusses the crisis and collapse of Warsaw's wartime economy. In the war's first months, industrial production in the city suffered greatly as a result of a major disruption in the supply of coal; the subsequent requisitioning of raw materials, industrial equipment, and even entire factories by the Russians and, more thoroughly, by the Germans — the "implacable occupier(s)" (15) — had a devastating impact on employment. Shortages of basic commodities, food first and foremost, became more and more acute as the war progressed. The imposition of controls by the authorities led to a rapid price inflation, widespread smuggling, flourishing black markets, and a dramatic fall of living standards. Food and hunger riots broke out in June 1916 and again in May 1917. Warsaw's economic crisis, Blobaum concludes, dwarfed those of Vienna, Berlin, and Petrograd.

The third chapter deals with social policy. The Warsaw Citizens Committee — the main philanthropic association — and, subsequently, the first elected city council (1916) faced a multitude of challenges, including sheltering orphans and refugees, budgeting for health care and education, and finding work for the unemployed, to name a few. These social-welfare activities did alleviate, but they could not address all the war's hardships, which were actually far greater than anticipated. With so many people relying in various degrees on public support and with needs escalating with each passing year, the institutions involved in the provision of public assistance ran out of funds; indeed, by the end of the war, the city's financial resources were stretched to the point where the city administration was unable to pay its own employees.

Relations between Jews and Poles, Warsaw's two main and competing national groups, were not good before the outbreak of the war. The Russian and German regimes adopted dramatically different attitudes toward the Jewish population. Most Russian Army commanders believed that Jews posed a security risk to their troops and engaged in espionage on behalf of the Central Powers; the Germans, for their part, were more interested in maintaining stability between the two ethno-religious groups in Warsaw.Many Poles, however, interpreted this approach as benefitting Jewish interests. The fourth chapter examines two occasions when these relations reached the breaking point — the summer of 1915 at the time of the Russian evacuation, and November 1918 when Polish forces took control of Warsaw.Despite these moments of great tensions, triggered by the deteriorating economic situation for which many Poles held the Jews responsible and inflamed by unrestrained press polemics, exceptional intercommunal violence was avoided; there were many cases of violence against Jews, including looting and rape.

The fifth chapter focuses on the intersection of gender and war in Warsaw; it examines in particular the peculiarities of women's experiences on the home front — the main location of women's visibility, protest, and power during the war. One result of the war that Warsaw shared with other European cities was the erosion and resetting of gender boundaries. Many women employed as industrial workers, sales clerks, and domestic servants lost their jobs; on the other hand, new opportunities presented themselves with the opening of higher education, the granting of equal political rights, and the presence of large numbers of troops in the city. Finally, chapter six shows how Warsaw's wartime culture wars highlighted increasing class divisions in the city. Pre-war Warsaw was a busy metropolis, proud of its classical high culture and nightlife. However, the exigencies of war — the imposition of...