Peter Gatrell

Government, industry, and rearmament in Russia, 1900-1914 : the last argument of tsarism

1. Defence and the economy on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War 2. War and revolution, retrenchment and recession 3. The defence burden, 1907-14 4. The economics and politics of industrial recovery 5. The armaments industry: the search for identity and influence, 1908-14 6. The economics and politics of defence procurement 7. Military preparedness on the eve of the first world war.

Refugees and Forced Migrants during the First World War

Although most informed observers anticipated a short war, the First World War lasted more than four years. European armies were expected to engage in military manoeuvres, without significant costs for civilians. This vision quickly evaporated. Civilians no less than military personnel experienced war as displacement, partly because of the eruption of fighting across large swathes of territory on the European mainland, with a resulting flight of populations, but also because the fraught conditions of prolonged war disposed states to engage in the mass deportation of civilians who were believed to threaten military freedom of manoeuvre and to undermine the war effort more broadly. These crucibles of displacement stretched from Belgium to Armenia, taking in France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, the Russian empire and Serbia. The German occupation of Belgium, Poland and Lithuania provoked the flight of civilians on a large scale; so too did the Russian invasion of East Prussia in 1914. The Austrian and Bulgarian invasion of Serbia resulted in humanitarian disaster. In the Russian empire, the displacement of civilians assumed a level of intensity that took many people by surprise. Turkish troops targeted Armenian residents of the Ottoman empire, many of whom lost their lives in a terrible blood-letting, leaving the survivors struggling to escape from further danger. Nor did the cessation of hostilities bring about peace. The complex process of repatriation and resettlement affected soldiers and civilians alike and rarely took place in stable or peaceful circumstances. Beyond the scale of involuntary population displacement and the human anguish that it entailed even more was at stake. One issue related to the assistance that might be offered to refugees who were caught up in the maelstrom. What form should this support take and how would it be resourced? These apparently prosaic issues had potentially profound

Population displacement, state-building and social identity in the lands of the former Russian empire, 1917-1923

The East European successor states to the Russian empire were shaped by their early experience of war and peace, imperial collapse and new state-building, population displacement and resettlement, and the dissolution and reformation of traditional social identities and affiliations. In the course of World War I, several million people, both Russians and non-Russians, had been dispersed from the tsarist empire’s western borderlands throughout its European and Siberian territories. 1 The war ended in a crescendo of revolutionary upheaval and the assertion of a new national politics on the periphery of the unravelling imperial polity. The peace treaties and territorial arrangements of 1918-20 marked the birth of a new era of nationalist and revolutionary conflict, extensive social dislocation and intense ethnic discord, grand visions of reconstruction and regeneration, and renewed population movements on a massive scale. This article explores the nature of the wartime and postwar displacement, diaspora, and resettlement of populations and their impact on processes of state construction, nation-building, and identity formation in the space of the former Russian

Introduction: World Wars and Population Displacement in Europe in the Twentieth Century

This special issue of Contemporary European History is devoted to the impact of the two world wars on civilian population displacement in Europe. Each contributor has brought fresh material to bear on specific instances of involuntary migration that are either unfamiliar or poorly understood. The contributors seek to establish the origins of population displacement and the assistance provided by governments, non-government organisations and individuals and, where possible, also to reflect on the ways in which displacement was understood both at the time and subsequently.

From ‘Homelands’ to ‘Warlands’: Themes, Approaches, Voices

The displacement of population during and immediately following the Second World War took place on a global scale and formed part of a longer historical process of violence, territorial reconfiguration and state ‘development’ stretching back to the First World War and earlier still. This book explores one important part of this bigger picture by focusing on the profound political, social and economic upheavals in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. This territory had been bitterly contested in 1914–21 (the world war having given way to civil war and the Polish-Soviet War); it witnessed massive population shifts as a result of collectivisation in the Soviet Union (1929–32) and Stalinist deportations of national minorities, notably between 1936 and 1944; and it became the major site of the Nazi deportation, incarceration and extermination of Europe’s Jewish population. During the war, substantial numbers of ethnic Germans were also ‘called home’ to the Reich from their homes in the Baltic States and eastern Poland. The long shadow cast by Hitler also manifested itself in the wartime transfer of forced labourers from Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic States to work in Germany, where they were in effect stranded at the moment of the Nazi capitulation. The situation in 1945 was further complicated by the decision of the victorious Allies to agree a series of territorial adjustments, which extended Poland’s frontiers westwards at Germany’s expense as compensation for apportioning Poland’s eastern borderlands to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Feet of clay? The Soviet economic giant in recent historiography

This review considers Soviet economic history in the light of recent contributions to the historiography. Many of the latest studies in Soviet economic history take the form of archive-based treatments of economic policy and economic administration, the causes and consequences of periodic economic crises (notably famine), and the behaviour of workers, managers, and consumers within the constraints of the planned economy. As a result, we now have a clearer idea of the functioning of the economic system, the extent of coercion at various levels, and the scope of reform initiatives. Disagreement remains over important issues, notably the causes and timing of the Soviet economic collapse.

The world-wide web of humanitarianism: NGOs and population displacement in the third quarter of the twentieth century

Abstract Non-state organisations were important actors in the international refugee regime after the Second World War. This article traces connections between refugee crises and geo-politics by focusing on the interaction of three NGOs with the new Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the 1950s. One non-state actor, the World Council of Churches (WCC), highlighted the suffering of German expellees as illustrating the limitations of the refugee regime. The second non-state organisation, Jami’at al’ Islam (JAI), asserted its right to represent all Muslim refugees in Europe. Along with its anti-Communist stance it adopted an anti-colonial rhetoric and denounced the limitations of UNHCR’s mandate, but it was later exposed as a front for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The third organisation, Comité Inter-Mouvements Auprès des Evacués (CIMADE), formed in 1939 to help French Jews escape deportation during the Vichy era, subsequently aided Algerians who suffered persecution by the French authorities. Like WCC, this began a long ‘career’ in humanitarianism. In its dealings with these NGOs, UNHCR trod cautiously, because it was constrained by its mandate and the governments that contributed to its budget. Each example demonstrates the challenges of ‘non-political’ efforts to offer humanitarian assistance to refugees and the limits to the autonomy of non-state organisations.

Trajectories of Population Displacement in the Aftermaths of Two World Wars

The death, destruction and displacement wrought by the Second World War are topics of undiminished interest to historians and to a wider public. The historiography frequently emphasises the transformative impact of the war in Europe, not only in terms of territorial adjustment but also in a series of social calamities, including the destruction of European Jewry, huge military losses (particularly in Soviet Russia), the rupturing of social ties in Central and Eastern Europe where social upheaval prefigured the formation of Communist governments, and the mass expulsion of people who were deemed not to ‘belong’.1 Recent scholarship suggests that these calamities had antecedents in programmes, practices and ideologies that can be traced back to the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the state entertained ideas about social and demographic engineering and population management, by conceiving of a ‘social body’. The modern state’s pursuit of perfection through reshaping social organisation and refashioning behaviour culminated in organised efforts to rid society of unwanted elements that did not correspond to that utopian vision.2 These projects, as is well known, came to terrible fruition in Hitler’s European empire.3 The 1940s also witnessed continued Soviet social and ethnic cleansing. The Bolshevik leadership targeted class enemies and engaged in a series of mass deportations, whose purpose was both punitive and developmental, in that remote regions of the Soviet land mass were opened up for economic transformation.

Displacing and Re-placing Population in the Two World Wars: Armenia and Poland Compared

During the twentieth century Armenia and Poland alike were sites of widespread population displacement, which brought into sharp focus arguments about national ‘survival’ advanced by patriotic leaders who found in refugees the embodiment of recurrent national suffering. Population displacement also attracted external support from sympathetic foreigners and from the Armenian and Polish diaspora, who regarded it as an affront to civilisation. Among Armenians a groundswell of support for repatriation gathered momentum after both world wars, because Soviet ‘protection’ offered the most realistic chance for national survival. In contrast many Poles opted not to return to Poland after 1945, regarding the communist takeover as a betrayal of Polands struggle for independence.

War, Refugeedom, Revolution. Understanding Russia’s refugee crisis, 1914‑1918

This article examines the refugee crisis in Russia in the era of war and revolution. It considers the historiography and the reasons for historiographical neglect; and asks questions about its political, social and cultural significance. The refugee crisis posed fundamental questions about the scope, purpose and outcomes of attempts to manage people who were on the move on an unprecedented scale and in an unforeseen manner. The article also asks to what extent refugees were able to express themselves, whether to lament the circumstances leading to their displacement, to criticise the arrangements made on their behalf, or to articulate a sense of their future. The first part of the article discusses some of the extant source material, including anglophone accounts. It goes on to consider the politics and practice of relief work, including by semi‑official bodies such as the Tatiana Committee, by public organisations (notably Zemgor), and by new national committees that claimed the refugee on behalf of the “nation.” Attention is also devoted to the ramifications of population displacement in 1917 and beyond, including the repatriation of refugees. The final section addresses directly the issue of personal testimony, and who claimed the right to speak on behalf of the refugee.