The nationalisation of the empire
The wartime propaganda was one factor in the polarisation of large parts of the imperial population along ethnic or national lines. As in other multinational empires, ethnic and class identities frequently reinforced one another; ethnic groups occupied particular socio-economic niches in the imperial political economy. The relative ethnic peace of the pre-war period was shattered by the war and its policies of ethnic discrimination and militarisation, beginning in the borderlands and moving quickly to the centre.[50] Above all, any Russian subject with German ancestry became a potential target of 'patriotic self- defence' groups, which were vigilante groups who destroyed property and injured or killed individuals. This was true even in the capitals where maximum security measures were ostensibly inplace. In one particularly violent outburst, Moscow mobs destroyed 800 'German' businesses in May 1915. During the first months of the war, the Volynian German population, which had resided in the area as peaceable agriculturists for decades, was brutally uprooted and resettled inland by military order. This was not, by the way, a trend encouraged by the court, who rather feared its consequences, given the German ancestry of the Empress Alexandra and even more distant members of the Romanov family. The number of Baltic and other German nobles who served in the officer corps and throughout the imperial bureaucracy fed a steady stream of rumours about the court's signing a separate peace with the enemy or, more ominously, working for Russia's defeat by the Germans.
The favourite scapegoat of the Russian nationalist Right, of course, had been the Jews, whose often German-sounding names presented the political anti-Semites with all the evidence they needed of the Jews' divided or nonexistent loyalty for the Romanov throne and the Russian Empire. The military command, too, was rife with vicious anti-Semites, beginning with Chief of Staff Ianushkevich, who banned Jewish employees in the public organisations that worked behind the front lines in support of the army. Anti-Jewish measures in occupied Galicia spread back into the rear as local military authorities, seemingly on their own initiative, refused to receive Jewish conscripts into their camps and fortresses. Despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of Jewish conscripts in the army, the tone set from above held that Jews were unsuitable soldierly material and incapable of genuine Russian patriotism. These already firmly held prejudices were not only given new life in the conditions of the martial law regime, but the 1915 retreat marked a historic break in imperial policy towards the Jews when the Pale of Settlement was informally ended. Hundreds of thousands of Jews from the western borderlands now sought shelter and new lives in interior provinces that had never seen any or such large numbers of non-Christian aliens. The military made the least provision for accommodating the Jewish refugees from the war zone and often put obstacles in their way.
As was true for nearly all the refugees who fled from the war zone to the relative security of the interior during the war, so, too, Jewish community leaders in the empire began to organise refugee relief for their co-religionists and co-ethnics.[51] These sorts of non-governmental organisations emerged to fill the gap left by the inadequate response of the imperial officials. (The Tatyana Society, symbolically headed by one ofthe emperor's daughters, made little dent in the massive social crisis provoked by the refugee problem.) But because most of these organisations defined themselves along ethnic lines, they had the unintended consequence of further reinforcing not just ethnic or national identities, but increasingly exclusivist ones. An applicant for aid had to demonstrate that she was a full-blooded member ofthe Jewish, Latvian, Polish or other nation. However much good these organisations were able to do for the refugee population, the presence of millions of uprooted human beings left them vulnerable to the often radical appeals of oppositionist parties. The politics of desperation - survival in conditions of economic disorganisation and loss of local control - found fertile ground among the displaced populations who had to leave behind their institutions of communal control and self- support.
The Poles were another popular target of the nationalist right, but the Russian government found itself in the curious position of competing with the Germans for Polish loyalties by promising ever-increasing measures of autonomy and unification for a post-war Poland. The Germans started the rivalry by promising to restore a united Poland after the Central Powers' victory; the Russians followed quickly with their own promise to return Poland to the map of Europe under Russian protection, of course. The Germans, in support of their war aims of detaching the 'borderlands' from the Russian Empire, supported oppositionist parties and movements in the League of Foreign Peoples of Russia that embraced Poles, Finns, Ukrainians, Georgians and many others. It was not only the Poles who took heart from this international rivalry for their loyalties; other nations of the empire, particularly the Ukrainians and Finns, began to point to the Polish example as appropriate for their aspirations too. When Nicholas II promised Armenians 'a shining future' on a visit to the Caucasus, they, too, expected dramatic changes in the post-war world. Still, many high-ranking military authorities, and their provisional allies in the public organisations, continued to hold Poles in considerable suspicion and resented the promises made to this periodically rebellious (and ungrateful) subject people. For those Russian nationalists who battled the Ukrainian (and, to a lesser degree, the Belorussian) national movement of the early twentieth century, it was the Poles who were primarily the instigators of any sense of distinct Ukrainian nationality that had emerged over the centuries. To 'win back' the Ukrainians from their Polonised culture and their Greek-Catholic faith, it was also necessary to battle the Roman Catholic and Polish influence in the western borderlands.
In support of the Polish 'project' of the Russian government, the army authorised the creation of separate Polish military formations early in the war. Elsewhere, exile communities in the Russian Empire, from Serbs to Czechs, were also offered the opportunity to organise their own national units to take part in the liberation of their people from the Germanic enemies. Before long, the Russian authorities were recruiting such national military units from among the numerous prisoners of war in Russian camps. Armenians similarly were permitted to organise volunteer military units after the entry of the Turks into the war, also in the name of national liberation. In retrospect, the arming of national liberation movements might have seemed a suicidal policy departure for the multinational Russian Empire, but it was following the practice of most of the belligerents. The Germans outfitted anti-Russian Finnish, Polish and eventually Ukrainian units; for the army of Austria-Hungary armed units manned by ethnic groups who had their counterparts across the border were not much of a departure, but a long-standing principle of military organisation, though much criticised. One of the consequences, nonetheless, of the Russian experiments along these lines was the rise of the politics of the nationalisation of the imperial army, which would split not only the army high command, but soldiers' organisations across the empire and civilian organisations and parties as well. During 1917, nearly every major non-Russian national movement began making claims for their own armed forces.
50
See Eric Lohr,
51
See Peter Gatrell,