Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Russian Research Center Studies): Eric Lohr
Harvard University Press | ISBN: 0674010418 | 2003-05-15 | PDF (OCR) | 256 pages | 7.42 Mb
In this compelling study of the treatment of “enemy” minorities in the Russian Empire during the First World War, Eric Lohr uncovers a dramatic story of mass deportations, purges, expropriations, and popular violence. An imperial campaign initially aimed at restricting foreign citizens rapidly spun out of control, sweeping up Russian subjects of German, Jewish, and Muslim backgrounds and driving roughly a million civilians from one part of the empire to another, becoming one of the largest cases of forced migration in history to that time. Because foreigners and diaspora minorities were prominent among entrepreneurial and landowning elites, the campaign against them also became an explosive element in class and national tensions on the eve of the 1917 revolutions. During the war, the imperial regime dropped its ambivalence about Russian nationalism and embraced unprecedented and radical policies that “nationalized” the economy, the land, and even the population. The core idea of the campaign–that the country needed to free itself from the domination of foreigners, internal enemies, and the exploitative world economic system–later became a central feature of the Soviet revolutionary model. Based on extensive archival research, much in newly available sources, Nationalizing the Russian Empire is an important contribution to the study of empire and nationalism, the Russian Revolution, and ethnic cleansing.
Review: Written for anyone interested in the First World War, this book tells the fascinating story of a major wave of ethnic cleansing that swept the eastern front between 1914-1917. “Nationalizing the Russian Empire” details how total war radicalized Russian politics, forcing Nicholas II to embrace a chauvinistic brand of populism that quickly undermined the imperial regime from within. Focusing on tsarist attempts to neutralize the domestic threat posed by foreign nationals (the so-called “enemy aliens”), Lohr reveals how these measures evolved to affect many Russian subjects of German, Jewish and Muslim background. Entire populations were sent into internal exile. Land and property were sequestered and seized. Ethnic Russians were encouraged to think about their society in the most nativist of terms. But instead of bolstering the empire, this campaign and the wave of interethnic hostility that it stirred up actually undermined the Romanovs’ hold on power. Although the 1917 Russian Revolution is traditionally linked to military reversals at the front and class tensions in the rear, Lohr suggests that it was also the empire’s clumsy attempt to engage in the modern politics of populist nationalism that compromised the stability of the society, the productivity of the economy, and the legitimacy of imperial rule itself.
Learning from History: A Black Christian’s Perspective on the Holocaust
Because the Holocaust, the author contends, was at its core an extreme expression of a devastating racism, it has special significance for African Americans. Locke, a university professor, clergyman, and African American, reflects on the common experiences of African American and Jewish people as minorities and on the great tragedy that each community has experienced in its history–slavery and the Holocaust.
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