The contributors to this fine edited volume examine how those living during the Russian Revolution and Civil War understood the events around them by closely analyzing the political language of the period. The authors each take a central and contested term or terms like civil war, leader (vozhd΄), democracy, and Bolshevism and delicately unpack them to show how they reflected and even promoted Russia's growing political and social polarization in 1917. As Boris Kolonitskii explains in his lucid introduction, the conceptualization of these terms helped to legitimize revolution, discredit regimes, and encourage the legitimization of violence.
The book is divided into four sections. The first two take a broad view of words that defined the whole period. Konstantin Godunov unpacks “civil war” to reveal how people across the political spectrum as early as February 1917 used the term to express their fears about the path of the revolution. Anatolii Shmelev continues this line of reasoning in his study of how people in 1917 labelled the revolution. Socialists looked to the French Revolution and its political possibilities while those on the right and several expat political philosophers and writers saw Russia entering a new time of troubles. Dmitrii Ivanov, in his study of anarchy and anarchism argues that there was a “rhetorical coalition” (102), including parties from the left and right that denounced anarchy and defined it as chaos and metonymic for crime, especially in the fall. Anarchists in turn promoted anarchism as pure political freedom.
Most of the chapters paint a picture of an unstoppable escalation to political breakdown and full-scale civil war in Russia, but Ivan Sablin and Mikhail Razin΄kov tell us that there were voices who called for alternative directions that would lead to peace and civil harmony. Sablin employs the widest lens of all the contributors to examine how Duma leaders after the 1905 Revolution evoked words like civil peace and inclusivity to counter the threat of civil war. Conservatives championed this idea before 1917 and Mensheviks and most Socialist Revolutionaries adopted it in 1917. The Bolsheviks later appropriated the language of internal peace at the end of the Civil War.
The final two sections study the development of language that legitimized the state and undermined its opponents. Aleksandr Reznik expertly shows how the word vozhd΄ started as a dyslogistic description in the aftermath of the February Revolution and developed into a positive term for leaders like Aleksandr Kerenskii; then the Bolsheviks adopted its usage once in power. In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Vladimir Lenin in July 1918, Soviet leaders used the term to sacralize Lenin and state power and it became an instrument to promote state power during the Civil War. Ikeda Yoshiro carefully charts the popularization of the word citizen (grazhdanin) in spring 1917 and how it became linked to the Provisional Government. Socialists by the fall preferred comrade and class and labelled citizen as bourgeois. Ivanov closes the section with an analysis of the changing understanding of the word republic. Like citizen, republic was a popular term after the fall of the tsar that emphasized Russia's progressive democratic governance but soon became a lightning rod for people across the political spectrum to criticize the Provisional Government for being opposed to federalism, not acting like a democracy, and being imperialist.
The final section looks at what the word Bolshevism meant in 1917. Konstantin Tarasov's well-crafted two chapters on Leninists, Bolsheviks, and Bolshevism show how the party's opponents defined Bolsheviks as extremists. If most political commentators, especially after the July Days, used the term anarchism to describe the chaos around them, they also used Bolshevism to paint political enemies to discredit others, like the Socialist Revolutionary Viktor Chernov. However, Mensheviks and Anarchists offered nuanced views. They defined Leninists as militant radicals and even defended Bolshevik ideas while deriding the actions of the Bolshevik Party. Pavel Rogoznyi finishes the volume with a chapter on the seemingly contradictory term church Bolshevism, a term that originated in April 1917 and meant both clergy and laity who supported Bolshevism and those who opposed the church leadership. It was used by the church to label and ostracize opponents.
All eleven chapters offer complex and insightful studies, and the authors draw on a wide array of newspapers, brochures, and writings from peasants and soldiers, philosophers, and authors from across the political spectrum. The contributors build on Kolonitskii's pioneering scholarship on the language and symbols of the 1917 Revolution. Like Mark Steinberg and Michael Hickey do in their collections of documents, the contributors of Slova i konflikty spotlight the emotion, dreams, and fears of participants in the Russian Revolution. They also take people's interpretations at face value, avoiding earlier scholars’ dismissal of peasant and worker's “misunderstanding” of revolutionary terms. The authors miss a few important angles, though. None of them discuss how gender affected the understanding and use of language, a category of analysis essential to understanding terms defining contested political membership like citizen or to terms linked so closely with masculinity like Bolshevism. Most nod to events outside of Petrograd, but they do not discuss how language varied across Russia or in Central Asia and the Caucuses.
This volume reveals exciting details about how people in Russia understood the political crises they were living in, which is itself an important contribution to the scholarship. It could be read as adding a cultural perspective to Leopold Haimson's classic argument of growing social polarization that led Russia to civil war. The volume also embraces Jonathan Smele's conceptualization of Russia's Civil War beginning in 1916 so the debates over language in the following year marked an escalation of tensions that then exploded into organized military conflict. That might explain why, despite the title, only Reznik and Sablin offer substantive discussions that extend past spring 1918, which has traditionally been seen as the start of Russia's Civil War. Put another way, the book sets up the framework for a sequel that would examine how the controversial political language developed after the closure of the free press, the establishment of the Soviet state, and through the rest of the Civil War. I would be eager to read that book as well.
