New Terrains and New Chronologies: The Interwar Period through the Lens of Population Politics

All three articles in this Forum concern themselves both with the impact of state policies on space and peoplesand with the lived experience that resulted for individuals who partook in such policies, either as its agents or objects. Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell examine the post-1917 state-building projects in the territories of the former Russian empire, including those states that did not enter into the Soviet Union. They treat the societies and citizens that resulted from the extended experience of war, revolution, and displacement as well as from the self-conscious attempts to forge new societies by both the Soviet "revolutionizing" and newly-independent "nationalizing" states. Lynne Viola examines the dynamic between fastidious utopian planning and its dystopian, untidy results in the 1930s, with particular attention to the "special settlements" for dekulakized peasants. Alfred Rieber views the wartime and postwar conflict in the "borderlands" through the lens of civil war, thus relating the experience of Nazi occupation with postwar Soviet "pacification" as well as situating this convulsion of violence within the broader sweep of the history of imperial borderlands.

In terms of periodization, the articles by Baron and Gatrell and by Rieber also seek to reconfigure traditional chronological parameters. They do so by moving beyond recognized events and examining broader processes. Both articles demonstrate the extent to which waging and experiencing war became transformed into revolutionary processes. ¹ Baron and Gatrell productively treat the period of World War I, revolution, civil war, and subsequent consolidation of new states and societies as a dynamic continuum rather than discrete events. Alfred Rieber places wartime occupation and postwar strife firmly within the ambit of Soviet history and indeed situates this episode within a much longer history of state conflict and social violence in the imperial borderlands. The tendency to treat wars &#8212 and especially World War II &#8212 as discrete events, extracted from the preceding and succeeding "peacetime," misses much of this dynamic. ² One might situate the wartime-like mobilization and state violence, described by Viola, within this broader sweep of revolutionary mobilization and geopolitical stress. In terms of the geographic focus, the articles by Baron and Gatrell and by Rieber explicitly concentrate upon peripheries and borderlands. ³ Viola, one might say, examines a complementary process, that of the "internal colonization" of the Soviet Union during the 1930s. ⁴ All are refreshing in terms of the extent to which they ground their analyses in spaces outside the traditional metropolitan centers: the newly-independent Baltic states and Poland for Baron-Gatrell; the local perspective from Vologda for Viola; and, Belorussia, Ukraine, and the Baltic States for Rieber. Moreover, the articles by Baron and Gatrell and by Rieber incorporate work by non-Western scholars outside of Russia proper. The cosmopolitan nature of their references corresponds to the multinational regions they study and allows them to view the processes under investigation "in the round," rather than from one fixed institutional or national perspective.

These are also articles that, to a greater or lesser extent, seek to integrate a discussion of official discourse and state ordering while retaining a sense of contingency and individual agency. ⁵ All three articles suggest that any supposed contrast between "discourse" and "agency" can be brought together in a fruitful analytic manner. Thus Baron and Gatrell propose the "itinerant perspective" as an antidote to replicating the state's own documentation of individual subjects' experiences. Viola treats the dynamic between statist planning aspirations and their dysfunctional realization, suggesting that these two poles are in fact dialectically related.

While all articles engage in comparative analysis, the result, it seems to me, is to underscore the particularity of Soviet forms of rule. Baron and Gatrell provocatively seek to compare the new "nationalizing" states of Eastern Europe with the Soviet Union as a "revolutionizing" state. The result of this comparison is very...