Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

8. A glance at the biographies of the chief participants in the “Russian” Civil Wars will reveal a preponderance of men born in the 1880s, as the era of counterreform began to bite.

9. Robert B. McKean, Between the Revolutions: Russia, 1905–1917 (London: The Historical Association, 1998). It is worth recording here that the circumstances of the war also contained the germs of the various interventions in Russia of the civil-wars years, as invading Austro-German forces established control over former Russian territories in the Baltic, Belorussia, and Ukraine and various Allied military and technical missions were dispatched to the Eastern Front to shore up Russia’s war effort. Conversely, Russia’s own victories on the Caucasus Front gave momentum to expansionist ambitions there that took hold of Russian imperialists and Armenian nationalists alike. Equally, national military forces that would play key roles in the civil wars can date their foundation to the world war: the Czechoslovak Legion, the Latvian Riflemen, and Armenian volunteer detachments, for example. On the war, see Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914–17 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975). On internal migration and refugees, see Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). On economic and social problems in general, see Peter Gatrell, Russia’s First World War: A Social and Economic History (Harlow: Longman, 2005).

10. The zemstvos were the elected rural councils, at district and provincial levels, established by Alexander II in 1864. By 1914 they existed across most of European Russia and, by their nature, tended to attract progressive elements among the gentry and the peasant electors, as well as offering employment to professionals such as doctors, lawyers, veterinarians, agronomists, engineers, etc.

11. The best source on the February Revolution remains Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1917 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981). But see also Michael Melancon, Rethinking Russia’s February Revolution: Anonymous Spontaneity or Socialist Agency? (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, Center for Russian and East European Studies, 2000); and Semion Lyandres, The Fall of Tsarism: Untold Stories of the February 1917 Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

12. Daniel Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002), 152.

13. For the order, see A. R. Sadykov and A. Bermakhanov, eds., Groznyi 1916-i god: Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Almaty: Qazaqstan, 1998), 1:13; “Vosstanie v 1916 g. v Srednei Azii,” Krasnyi arkhiv 3 (1929): 48.

14. Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 352.

15. “Dzhizakskoe vosstanie v 1916 g.,” Krasnyi arkhiv 5 (1933): 63.

16. Kh. T. Tursunov, Vosstanie 1916 goda v Srednei Azii i Kazakhstane (Tashkent: Gos. izd-vo Uzbekskoi SSR, 1962), 320–21; Edward D. Sokol, The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1954), 159.

17. For a study of Central Asian affairs that cuts across the 1917 divide, see Marco Buttino, Revoliutsiia naoborot: Srednaiaia Aziia mezhdu padeniem tsarskoi imperii i obrazovaniem SSSR (Moscow: Zvenia, 2007).

18. Conditional upon the government not attempting to undo any of the gains socialists perceived in the victory over tsarism.

19. On foreign policy issues in 1917, see Rex A. Wade, The Russian Search for Peace, February–October 1917 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1969).

20. On the Ukraine issue in 1917, see D. Ia. Bondarenko, “Vremennoe pravitelʹstvo i problema Ukraina (iiul–oktiabr 1917 g.),” Otechestennaia istoriia, no. 1 (2006): 54–64.

21. On the Kornilov affair, see Jorgen L. Munck, The Kornilov Revolt: A Critical Examination of the Sources (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1987).

22. The Rada declared Ukraine to be autonomous on 3 November 1917 and then independent on 9 January 1918.