Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Martin Sixsmith: The Russia Conundrum: How the West Fell for Putin’s Power Gambit – And How to Fix It

Abstract

the transnational ‘culture of counterrevolution’ (pp. 13, 16) that coalesced in the wake of the revolutions, defence of the Christian nation appeared to justify both a forceful restoration of traditional gender and family roles and the merciless persecution of allegedly subversive aliens, particularly Jews. Ablovatski rightly stresses that the pernicious Judeo-Bolshevik myth emerged much strengthened from the Hungarian and Bavarian revolutions, although by explaining the myth’s appeal with reference to ‘racial’ thinking, she neglects the persistence of cultural anti-Semitism in central Europe at the time. While the political right dominated both Hungary and Bavaria in the interwar period, leftists nurtured their own communities of remembrance, celebrating martyred revolutionaries such as Eugen Leviné in Munich and challenging rightist interpretations of events in memoirs and the press. The author dwells mostly on similarities between the two contexts, although she is also sensitive to differences. For instance, law courts in Bavaria were more lenient than their Hungarian counterparts in trying those accused of revolutionary crimes. Although aging conservatives dominated the judiciary in both places, German judges evinced a greater willingness to accept young defendants’ ‘idealism’ as a mitigating factor. In Hungary, where an openly counterrevolutionary regime under Admiral Horthy was established following the Soviet republic’s collapse, courts handed down harsh sentences based often on dubious hearsay and denunciations. Ablovatski’s careful conclusions throughout this engaging study rest on meticulous research in court records, police reports, newspapers, and memoir literature. Nonetheless, in accounting for the desperation of the revolutionaries and the intemperance of their counterrevolutionary foes, greater emphasis ought to be laid on the impact of the world war. Fin-de-siècle anxieties about revolutionary plots or gender chaos sharpened after 1914 and again after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Moreover, the anti-urban discourses that counterrevolutionaries deployed as they reclaimed the ‘sinful’ metropolis, particularly in the Hungarian case as Ablovatski shows, had acquired potent new meaning during the war years as agrarian hinterlands felt victimized by a state provisioning regime designed to maintain urban consumption, particularly for industrial workers. For these reasons, the ‘existing stockpile of stereotypes and ‘myths’’ (p. 207) through which Hungarian and Bavarian publics grasped 1919 events were not identical to pre-war cultural structures. Too much had changed. Nor did the ubiquity of battle-hardened, scarcely demobilized troops have any real parallel in pre-1914 central Europe. These critical remarks should not detract from Ablovatski’s considerable achievement with Revolution and Political Violence in Central Europe, which surely ranks among the best recent comparative histories on twentieth-century central Europe.