Mark von Hagen

After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires

* How Empires End Charles Tilly. * The End of Empires E. J. Hobsbawm. Collapse Of Empires: Causes * Thinking About Empire Alexander J. Motyl. * The Ottoman Empire Caglar Keyder. * The Habsburg Empire Solomon Wank. * The Russian Empire Mark von Hagen. * The Soviet Union Victor Zaslavsky. Collapse Of Empires: Consequences * Thinking About Consequences of Empire Karen Barkey. * The Ottoman Empire Serif Mardin. * The Habsburg Empire Istvn Dek. * The Russian Empire Ronald G. Suny. * Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples Rogers Brubaker. * Conclusion K. Barkey and M. von Hagen.

Soldiers in the proletarian dictatorship : the Red Army and the Soviet socialist state, 1917-1930

Historians have long debated the factors most responsible for the fundamental transformation of Soviet social and political structures which occurred between the October Revolution and the emergence of the Stalinist police state. With this social and institutional history of the Red Army, Mark von Hagen provides a valuable new perspective on this critical first decade in the history of the Soviet Union.

Stephen Velychenko. Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red: The Ukrainian Marxist Critique of Russian Communist Rule in Ukraine 1918-1925.

Book review of Stephen Velychenko. Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red: The Ukrainian Marxist Critique of Russian Communist Rule in Ukraine 1918-1925 . U of Toronto P, 2015. viii, 280 pp. Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. Index.

From Imperial Russia to Colonial Ukraine

45.00, cloth.

The Romanian Battlefront in World War I by Torrey, Glenn E

After the end of the Soviet Union and its eastern European empire and — inspired to a very large degree by the work of Said — the emergence of the subaltern school of south Asian history,1 as well as the publication of Gayatri Spivak’s understanding of ‘postcoloniality’2 and other developments, cultural anthropologists and others have joined with colleagues in comparative literature and made connections between postcolonialism and postsocialism.3 One of the first to propose applying the label ‘postcolonial’ to post-Soviet Ukrainian literature was an Australian scholar of Ukrainian ethnicity, Marko Pawlyshyn.4 Following his ‘postcolonial’ lead, a Canadian scholar of Ukrainian ethnicity, Myroslav Shkandrij, wrote a wonderfully entangled history of Russia and Ukraine in modern literature.5 All the scholars discussed so far are primarily known as literary historians. Literary historians of this post-colonial orientation are a particular subset of cultural historians and are usually held in some suspicion by other historians, who often accuse them of anachronistically reading back into history their own contemporary multicultural politics. But more conventional and mainstream historians, especially those who interrogate categories of identity in national and imperial states, have begun to appropriate some of the commonplaces of the literary scholars and anthropologists who have been the most ardent ‘postcolonialists’.

New Directions in Military History, 1900–1950: Questions of Total War and Colonial War

Most of the attention of historians in writing and teaching about World War I, or even the Eastern Front, has focused on the behavior and performance of the great European powers, so we know a lot about Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary, probably in descending order, much less about the Ottoman Empire, but even less about the states, armies, and societies of southeastern Europe. Serbia, among the recently independent states, is probably best known among the group, partly because Serbia’s refusal to accede to Austria-Hungary’s ultimatum after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo was the immediate cause of the outbreak of the war, and partly because of more recent wars of Yugoslav succession that have created new audiences for the prehistory of the modern conflicts. Romania, by contrast, has suffered relative neglect, so the volume under review is a welcome contribution to understanding how the non-great powers nonetheless were able to exert much more influence on the outcome of events than is generally understood. Romania started the war in an alliance with the Central Powers, which had been renewed as recently as 1912, but declared its neutrality until August 27, 1916, when it switched sides and declared war on AustriaHungary. Despite what turned out to be quite accurate intelligence about the secret negotiations with the Entente and the military buildup, the German High Command refused to believe that Romania’s Hohenzollern King Ferdinand would betray his dynastic and ethnic ties. Like Bulgaria, which also entered the war late but chose to ally with the Central Powers, Romania’s entry into the war was motivated above all by hopes for postwar territorial gains, above all in Transylvania. Also, like Bulgaria, Romania’s independence as a sovereign state was relatively young, dating to 1881, and Bulgaria entered the war against Russia, which had helped ‘liberate’ it from the Turks in 1878. The Romanian chapter is also important in the history of the postwar peace settlement that rewarded Romania with a state twice its prewar size, but also one full of hostile minorities and embittered neighbors in Bulgaria, Hungary, and the Soviet Union, all of whom wrought their revenge on

The first world war, 1914-1918

In this essay I survey some, though by no means all, recent publications and projects in the military history of Russia and the Soviet Union in the first half of the 20th century. The major wars of the Soviet and Russian army since World War II—the Afghan war and the Chechen war—have been treated by individual historians but are probably more effectively captured in journalist accounts, fiction, and film. I also propose a rather catholic understanding of military history; I review books that certainly can be identified with an older type of military history that treats wars from the standpoint of armies and commanders and that guides readers through decisions about campaigns and the travails of military supply, especially in weapons and ammunition. But I also want to include new books about army and society more broadly, whether conscription, refugees, prisoners of war, or other manifestations of the “collateral damage” of modern combat. I want to draw attention to a relatively new subfield, that of history and memory, where wars figure prominently in the official and popular images and narratives of a very violent 20th century. Several of the authors to be discussed choose to situate “their” wars in either a total war or colonial war model, thereby tying their own scholarship to a broader community of historians who are studying colonialism in other parts of the world and trying to evaluate the impact of especially the two world wars on state systems, societies, and cultures. These welcome trends situate Russian and Soviet military history in transnational and comparative history. One of these welcome trends has been the recovery of “lost” wars, starting with the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. In a situation strangely parallel to

Review Article: Pairing Off Dictatorships

The Russian Empire entered what became known as the First World War in the summer of 1914 as a Great Power on the Eurasian continent. During the first months of the war, the eastern front formed north-south from the East Prussian marshes to the Carpathian Mountains. The armys admission that 500,000 soldiers had deserted during the first year of war, most of them into German and Austrian prisoner-of-war camps, effectively surrendering to the enemy, raised alarm among the military and political elite. The wartime propaganda was one factor in the polarisation of large parts of the imperial population along ethnic or national lines. The war shaped a dramatic transformation of political life in the Russian Empire. Under the cover of the Russian occupation, several politically engaged hierarchs of the Orthodox Church, notably Archbishop Evlogii, launched a new campaign for the reconversion of the Galician population to its traditional Orthodox faith from its Greek-Catholic apostasy.

Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930

Richard Overy. The Dictators: Hitlers Germany and Stalins Russia. London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 2004. Pp. xl, 848. £25.00.Richard Overy. The Dictators: Hitlers Germany and Stalins Russia. London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 2004. Pp. xl, 848. £25.00.