Paul Goble
Staunton,
September 28 – The Russian Civil War from 1917 into the 1920s was one of the
most fateful conflicts in the history of the country, but unfortunately, under
the Soviets and even now, it was first simplified as a conflict between the
Reds and the Whites and now is ignored almost altogether, some historians say (nakanune.ru/articles/114316/).
And that makes a new portal prepared
by the Memorial human rights organization especially important because it makes
clear with interviews with the descendants of those who fought that “for those
who remember, there weren’t Reds and Whites but only their own people and those
who came from outside” (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5BAD1870B8116).
The portal, warandpeasant.ru/, which was
launched this week, is devoted to reports of some 200 interviews the
organization’s volunteers did with people in the regions of the two largest
peasant uprisings in 1920, the Tambov (Antonov) and Western Siberian (Ishim) and
features both those interviews and analytic articles.
Artem Kravchenko,
one of the leaders of the project, says that people in these places can be
divided into two groups, those who retain some memory of these risings and
those who don’t. “For those who remember, there were no Reds and Whites, there
were only their own people and those who came from outside.”
Moreover, he says, this attitude affected
not only their views of the Civil War but also of ensuing events in Soviet and
even post-Soviet Russian history especially because the leaders on both sides
of those conflicts suffered much the same fate: they were shot or confined to the
GULAG, and their stories were reduced to ideological schemas.
And even more than in the cities,
the people in these regions often have put up monuments not to one side or the
other but to both sides, with memorials devoted sometimes to the peasants and
sometimes to the Red Guards who suppressed them. Today, Kravchenko says, many
of their descendants don’t know how they are supposed to view this past.
In an article posted on the new
portal (warandpeasant.ru/dossier/13), Kravchenko focuses more deeply on these
issues to explain why Memorial is focusing on these two peasant uprisings and
not on other all-too-often neglected or ideologized events of that complicated
period such as the atamanshchina.
He says that “the majority of those
who fought and died in [the Russian Civil War] were peasants or people closely
connected with the peasant milieu,” either because they had been mobilized as
soldiers for World War I or because outside forces, Red, White, or
interventionist, came into their lands, sparking resistance.
“A special place in the history of
the Civil War is occupied by the major peasant risings in which rural residents
began in massive numbers to show military resistance to ‘the powers that be’
regardless of whether they were Red or White,” Kravchenko says. Soviet
historians reduced these to kulak risings led by the Socialist Revolutionaries,
but that view is wrong and has been rejected by most post-Soviet investigators.
“All peasant risings of the time of
the Civil War were suppressed,” he acknowledges, “but they exerted an influence
on the policy of the Soviet authorities and pushed the country to make the
transition from war communism to the New Economic Policy.” But that was far from their most important
consequence.
Instead, the peasant risings because
they did not fit into the ideological straightjacket of the Bolsheviks became
the basis for the imposition of an official version of history in which certain
events were celebrated and remembered while others became “prohibited” and were
seldom discussed except to be condemned.
That
is a problem that has extended far beyond these two massive peasant revolts,
Kravchenko points out; and consequently, restoring the popular memory about
them is about far more than just these two popular actions of almost a century
ago. It is about reclaiming the past for the present and future.
No comments:
Post a Comment