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"Russian Civil War"
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Syria
In this fully revised second edition of his acclaimed text, Samer Abboud provides an in-depth analysis of Syria's descent into civil war, the subsequent stalemate, and the consequences of Russian military involvement after 2015.
Book
A small corner of hell
Chechnya, a 6,000-square-mile corner of the northern Caucasus, has struggled under Russian domination for centuries. The region declared its independence in 1991, leading to a brutal war, Russian withdrawal, and subsequent \"governance\" by bandits and warlords. A series of apartment building attacks in Moscow in 1999, allegedly orchestrated by a rebel faction, reignited the war, which continues to rage today. Russia has gone to great lengths to keep journalists from reporting on the conflict; consequently, few people outside the region understand its scale and the atrocities—described by eyewitnesses as comparable to those discovered in Bosnia—committed there. Anna Politkovskaya, a correspondent for the liberal Moscow newspaper Novaya gazeta, was the only journalist to have constant access to the region. Her international stature and reputation for honesty among the Chechens allowed her to continue to report to the world the brutal tactics of Russia's leaders used to quell the uprisings. A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya is her second book on this bloody and prolonged war. More than a collection of articles and columns, A Small Corner of Hell offers a rare insider's view of life in Chechnya over the past years. Centered on stories of those caught-literally-in the crossfire of the conflict, her book recounts the horrors of living in the midst of the war, examines how the war has affected Russian society, and takes a hard look at how people on both sides are profiting from it, from the guards who accept bribes from Chechens out after curfew to the United Nations. Politkovskaya's unflinching honesty and her courage in speaking truth to power combine here to produce a powerful account of what is acknowledged as one of the most dangerous and least understood conflicts on the planet. Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated in Moscow on October 7, 2006.
eBook
Making Sense of War
InMaking Sense of War,Amir Weiner reconceptualizes the entire historical experience of the Soviet Union from a new perspective, that of World War II. Breaking with the conventional interpretation that views World War II as a post-revolutionary addendum, Weiner situates this event at the crux of the development of the Soviet--not just the Stalinist--system. Through a richly detailed look at Soviet society as a whole, and at one Ukrainian region in particular, the author shows how World War II came to define the ways in which members of the political elite as well as ordinary citizens viewed the world and acted upon their beliefs and ideologies.
The book explores the creation of the myth of the war against the historiography of modern schemes for social engineering, the Holocaust, ethnic deportations, collaboration, and postwar settlements. For communist true believers, World War II was the purgatory of the revolution, the final cleansing of Soviet society of the remaining elusive \"human weeds\" who intruded upon socialist harmony, and it brought the polity to the brink of communism. Those ridden with doubts turned to the war as a redemption for past wrongs of the regime, while others hoped it would be the death blow to an evil enterprise. For all, it was the Armageddon of the Bolshevik Revolution. The result of Weiner's inquiry is a bold, compelling new picture of a Soviet Union both reinforced and enfeebled by the experience of total war.
eBook
The Destruction of the House of Chernobyl: New Sources on Ukrainian Hasidism during the 1919–21 Pogroms
The Russian Civil War pogroms and Ukrainian Hasidism have been extensively researched. Yet little is known about their convergence, that is, the impact of the pogroms on Hasidism and its most popular Ukrainian school, Chernobyl. The following eyewitness testimonies of the 1919-21 pogroms, preserved in the Elias Tscherikower Collection of the YIVO Archives, reveal the experiences of Chernobyl Hasidic leaders, or rebbes (Heb. tzaddikim), and their families during these catastrophic events. They reveal Hasidic rebbes as the primary targets of pogromists; yet record instances of aid and protection from secularist Jewish youth and certain Christian neighbors.
Journal Article
The geography of ethnic violence
The Geography of Ethnic Violenceis the first among numerous distinguished books on ethnic violence to clarify the vital role of territory in explaining such conflict. Monica Toft introduces and tests a theory of ethnic violence, one that provides a compelling general explanation of not only most ethnic violence, civil wars, and terrorism but many interstate wars as well. This understanding can foster new policy initiatives with real potential to make ethnic violence either less likely or less destructive. It can also guide policymakers to solutions that endure.
The book offers a distinctively powerful synthesis of comparative politics and international relations theories, as well as a striking blend of statistical and historical case study methodologies. By skillfully combining a statistical analysis of a large number of ethnic conflicts with a focused comparison of historical cases of ethnic violence and nonviolence--including four major conflicts in the former Soviet Union--it achieves a rare balance of general applicability and deep insight.
Toft concludes that only by understanding how legitimacy and power interact can we hope to learn why some ethnic conflicts turn violent while others do not. Concentrated groups defending a self-defined homeland often fight to the death, while dispersed or urbanized groups almost never risk violence to redress their grievances. Clearly written and rigorously documented, this book represents a major contribution to an ongoing debate that spans a range of disciplines including international relations, comparative politics, sociology, and history.
eBook
Slutsk in 1920: Entangled Fighters, Locals, and Conflicts
This article examines the armed fighting that took place in Slutsk, in present-day Belarus, in November and December of 1920, primarily between local forces and the Red Army. In contrast to existing understandings of the insurrection, this article situates the incident within more recent scholarship dedicated to better understanding the post-WWI period, the collapse of the Russian Empire, and experiences at the local level. In doing so, the goals are two-fold: to detangle the story of Slutsk from existing nationalist interpretations and to examine Slutsk as a site witnessing a series of clashes between centers of power and periphery, among different ethno-national groups, soldiers, and ideas. Ultimately, those participating in the Slutsk insurrection sought to resist any outside dominance and control. Though on the surface the insurrection in Slutsk has been interpreted as rather marginal in the longer history of Belarus and the region, the events that occurred manifested as a clash of some of the most critical processes underway in the early to mid-twentieth century. Through Slutsk, this article seeks to better understand the experience of the “periphery” during this time.
Journal Article
From the Ground Up
Japan’s Siberian Intervention was the nation’s most significant strategic and political failure between the Russo-Japanese War and the Asia-Pacific War. While historians have focused on its military and diplomatic aspects, the individual experiences of soldiers in this messy “forgotten war” remain little explored.
This article foregrounds the perspective of ordinary Japanese soldiers dispatched to Siberia between 1918 and 1922. In particular, it draws on archival material left by Takeuchi Tadao, a conscripted farmer who spent six months in the Russian Far East in 1920. A talented artist, Takeuchi produced two richly illustrated accounts, the only examples of non-photographic visual narratives of the Intervention available today. These provide a unique view of the conflict “from below.” For the higher echelons of the Imperial Japanese Army, the occupation of Siberia had the potential to increase Japan’s influence in Northeast Asia, and to showcase the army’s might and efficiency. To the rank-and-file servicemen, however, the rationale for combat was unclear. Their frustrations were compounded by impossible logistics, excruciating cold, and uncertain allegiances in a zone of lawlessness and brutality. Mounting public opposition at home and the failing military strategy in Siberia made 1920 an especially challenging time. Takeuchi Tadao’s records reveal an implicit criticism of the Siberian operations, highlighting the strategic and situational confusion surrounding them, and hence the prospect of a meaningless death that confronted ordinary soldiers in Siberia that year.
Journal Article
Children of Rus
InChildren of Rus', Faith Hillis recovers an all but forgotten chapter in the history of the tsarist empire and its southwestern borderlands. The right bank, or west side, of the Dnieper River-which today is located at the heart of the independent state of Ukraine-was one of the Russian empire's last territorial acquisitions, annexed only in the late eighteenth century. Yet over the course of the long nineteenth century, this newly acquired region nearly a thousand miles from Moscow and St. Petersburg generated a powerful Russian nationalist movement. Claiming to restore the ancient customs of the East Slavs, the southwest's Russian nationalists sought to empower the ordinary Orthodox residents of the borderlands and to diminish the influence of their non-Orthodox minorities.
Right-bank Ukraine would seem unlikely terrain to nourish a Russian nationalist imagination. It was among the empire's most diverse corners, with few of its residents speaking Russian as their native language or identifying with the culture of the Great Russian interior. Nevertheless, as Hillis shows, by the late nineteenth century, Russian nationalists had established a strong foothold in the southwest's culture and educated society; in the first decade of the twentieth, they secured a leading role in local mass politics. By 1910, with help from sympathetic officials in St. Petersburg, right-bank activists expanded their sights beyond the borderlands, hoping to spread their nationalizing agenda across the empire.
Exploring why and how the empire's southwestern borderlands produced its most organized and politically successful Russian nationalist movement, Hillis puts forth a bold new interpretation of state-society relations under tsarism as she reconstructs the role that a peripheral region played in attempting to define the essential characteristics of the Russian people and their state.
eBook
The Geopolitics of International Reconstruction: Halford Mackinder and Eastern Europe, 1919-20
This paper aims to reassess the role played by Sir Halford Mackinder (1861-1947) in the reconstruction of Eastern Europe after the First World War, highlighting a key issue behind the formation of his popular geopolitical ideas about the Eurasian 'heartland'. Influenced by the democratic spirit of the early inter-war years, Mackinder used his geographical expertise in support of a loose federal reorganisation of the vast region between Germany and Russia, hoping to create a new, balanced international system capable of guaranteeing freedom and stability on the European continent. In 1919-20, this ambitious design became the basis of a short diplomatic mission to South Russia, where Mackinder tried to create a large regional defensive alliance against the Bolshevik regime externally supported by the Western powers. But the military weakness of local anti-Bolshevik forces and the political inconsistency of the British government led to the complete failure of this great imaginative project, revealing all the strategic limits and ideological flaws of Mackinder's geopolitical views on Eastern Europe.
Journal Article