This will be a thread on the largest reference works that historian Jonathan Smele ever wrote, the two volume historical dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars. This will only be occasional posting, because the work is about as dense as you can get. But will put up rare infos.
Much of the first part of this work is more or less a restating of his history, which is $700 dollars cheaper, but I will post these relevant passages about the Red Army and it’s early ideological driven disasters and departure from “Democratic militarism model”
After the disasters of the ”11 day war”, the Czechoslovak Revolt, and an entire army dying in the Caucasus against a few thousand whites, the soldiers committees disappeared. Commissars and War Specialists became the organizational hierarchy of the Army. Still near half deserted.
The Red Army also began a conscription census policy, that was widely unpopular and shirked at the beginning, but as more critical accesses to food and government services/patronage were denied to draft dodgers, peasants flooded into the Red Army for money, food, and citizenship
The Whites had a problem with forming a civic base to implement things like the Bolshevik verification of the draft and the commissars for the unruly elements of their movement, much of this was bread in the trauma of February when the army became political only to collapse.
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In the interwar, there was an entire Emigre Cossack Archive and Press house in Prague, it had tens of thousands of documents, some of the State Voisko archives too evacuated from Crimea or through Georgia. It disappeared after 1945. I don’t think it’s been “reconstructed.”
George Fischer was one of the chief Americans overseeing the creation of the Russian Collection of the Hoover Institute, General Golovin who wrote a 7 volume Anti Denikin History was the purchasing agent for Europe.
They competed with the Czechoslovak Zemgor Archive
And the Zemgor Archive was for all Russia, I think the Kubantsy ran either a separate archive or a autonomous one under Zemgor.
Supposedly these are in 575 Fonds in GARF, which, if unmolested, would include hundreds of manuscript Civil War memoirs.
“Belyi Arkhiv” was published by Yakov Markovich Lisovoy, an odd character who repeatedly built and lost archives. During the war he collected thousands of newspapers, books, orders, and copies of documents. His intent with “White Archive” was to create a mirror to “Red Archive”
Red Archive would collect increasingly redacted and edited materials over the 30s, before being shut down in 1941. Still it had 106 volumes and the stuff before 1930 is somewhat more reliable. Lisovoy wanted to use his own massive collection he had saved from Crimea to compete.
Lisovoy had a traveling museum in the United States, he lived in Chicago but traveled around with his collection as “The Museum of Modern Russian Affairs.” But Lisovoy only put out two volumes of Belyi Archive (both are excellent primary source collections.)
Part of it is creating an ideological basis of the American people through the interpretation that American radicalism has yet to be fully realized. He’s better than Foner, in the Oxford history of the US series which he is the chief editor of, but I like this anecdote:
The Oxford History of the United States was started in the 1970’s and is still being written, most volumes are quite good information sources.
But what volumes have come out?
The easiest ones to write from their perspectives have come out first. The last was Reconstruction.
The Next in this year will be the “Reconciliation and Progressive Era” both are very hard to write from a liberal perspective who rejects Foner, but still possible in obvious ways from Wood’s perspective. The two volumes on Colonial History haven’t been announced at all.
Oliver Perry Chitwood was one of the greatest early 20th century colonial historian scholars, though he looks more at the evolution of political institutions and religious communities more than ethnology, which David Hackett Fisher is a good but incomplete study.
Another thing I imply is that British history, English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish history in specific regards to Ulster is key to the colonial American ethnos, some of that has to involve reading British history to modern times and colonial immigration waves.
After waiting for the better part of the year I got British Intelligence officer David Footman’s info pamphlets on the Russian Civil War and the Baltic.
Unlike most sources published in Britain, Footman does not attribute the Baltic Freikorps as being agents of the German state, which is found in works of much later date.
He says they are much like the young English men who joined the Black and Tans, and gets their POV correct.
Some pages are very worn, but still readable.
The Landeswehr was meant to contain Latvian troops, but they would not join these units to be lead by Germans.
Some of the Freikorps and Balts had strange ideas for fixing the situation, like making Latvia a protectorate of Sweden
Typical apologetic explanations of the policy have said that it was the conditions of the Civil War that set the methods of the future Soviet Union towards the social Volksgemeinschaft, Holquist argues that it was innate.
The peasant attitudes to the Cossacks became increasingly hostile, but it was the “materialist” and “class reductionist” intelligentsia-nomenclatura of the senior party that conceptualized the liquidation of the Cossacks as a zoological prerogative and not a class/cultural one.
The policy was crucial in solidifying the Don Cossack hostility. The more socialist minded upper stanitsas had let the Red Army through after Krasnov failed to take Tsaritsyn, they were rewarded with summary execution thanks to the circular order. This caused the Upper Don revolt