Russian Peasants and Soldiers during World War I: Home and Front Interacting

Abstract

This issue presents a set of articles that examine, from different points of view and drawing on very different sources, the manner and extent to whic World War I alienated Russia’s soldiers and peasants from the tsarist regime. Historians generally deal with soldiers and peasants separately, which on the face of it is odd: since 84–88 percent of the Russian soldiers who took part in the war were peasants (I take that figure from the article by Aleksandr Astashov published in this issue), one might postulate that soldier and peasant responses to the war must in some way have been linked. Viewed from another perspective, the ways in which soldiers and peasants experienced and suffered from the war were so radically different that perhaps wartime life in combat units and villages should be treated separately. The articles published here, however, suggest to me that soldiers’ and peasants’ attitudes toward the war evolved together: what peasants thought affected soldiers, and vice versa. The first selection, “The General Mobilization of the Russian Army in 1914 and the Peasantry (Based on Documents from Saratov Province)” (2002), by Anton Viktorovich Posadskii (Volga Institute of Management), is a summary of the principal findings Posadskii presented in a monograph of the same title (also published in 2002). The monograph was immediately recognized as methodologically exemplary and a departure from the lingering Soviet-era interpretation of the riots by mobilized reserves that broke out across Russia. One of Posadskii’s achievements was to demonstrate that provincial archives (holding local police and court records, for instance) reveal far more mob action by reserves being mustered into the army than historians working in the central military and police archives had Russian Studies in History, vol. 56, no. 2, 2017, pp. 65–72. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1061-1983 (print)/ISSN 1558-0881 (online) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10611983.2017.1372983