Life on the Frontier of Death: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Ecosystem of War in Russia, 1914-1918

Joshua Sanborn, professor of history at Lafayette College, explained that the decisive blow leading to the collapse of the Russian Empire came with the outbreak of World War I, well before the Bolshevik Revolution. Speaking at a recent Kennan Institute talk, Sanborn described the effects of war on the multicultural border region in which the fighting was taking place, an area that from the beginning of the war had come under martial law.

Sanborn highlighted 1915 as the key year when Russian society began to come apart. The war displaced millions of people, and this explosion in the number of refugees led to a great deal of chaos, according to Sanborn. In addition, millions of soldiers entered this border region and had to be absorbed by local society. A large-scale program of ethnic cleansing took place in the region, most often targeting Jews, but also affecting ethnic Germans. A growing paranoia over espionage contributed to this ethnic cleansing and led to an increasingly hostile and threatening atmosphere that broke down social relations within society.

Sanborn identified economic disintegration as another key factor in the collapse. Prior to the war, the border regions of the Russian Empire had been economically vibrant, benefiting greatly from international trade. With the arrival of the military in 1914, trade gave way to requisitioning, according to Sanborn. A change also took place in sexual relations, with an increase in interaction between soldiers and the local population, in addition to a rise in prostitution and rape.

Sanborn said that what really caused the full collapse of society was the Great Retreat in 1915, during which the army instituted a scorched earth policy and soldiers were asked to burn the towns and villages in which they had been living. This transformed what had been a war zone crisis into an Empire-wide crisis, he said. A low-level civil war developed, as decommissioned veterans and deserters returned home with their weapons and began organizing small bands of marauders. These veterans, according to Sanborn, became important supporters of the Bolsheviks as the anarchic fighting spread from the towns and villages to the major cities in 1917.

Sanborn said he hoped to integrate this specific history into the larger narrative of the crisis of colonialism, which affected all of Europe during the First World War. The Central Asian rebellion in 1916 caused major problems for the Russian war effort, diverting soldiers from the front. Decolonization also affected the Russian effort in Eastern Europe, as non-Russian subjects of the empire became less and less interested in the success of Russia, and increasingly in favor of national independence.