Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire

By Joshua A. Sanborn

Oxford University Press, 2014

Reviewed by Melissa K. Stockdale, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 89, #1

News of the Tsar's Abdication Arrives

In 2014, as various nations commemorated the centennial of the outbreak of the Great War, those activities mostly maintained the customary focus on the conflict’s Western Front. Flanders Fields, Verdun and the Somme, the Treaty of Versailles—these remain the iconic names and events of the war, not Tannenberg, Gorlice-Tarnow, and Brest-Litovsk. Though scholars are increasingly exploring the understudied war experience of the Eastern Front—essentially, the territory of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—that experience tends to remain off the public radar. One goal of Joshua Sanborn’s terrific new book  Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire, is to help raise consciousness of the war in the east and the collapse of empires there. It is his provocative argument that the Great War should be seen as a war of European decolonization, noting that “the fact of decolonization in Eastern and Southeastern Europe was one of the most tangible and significant outcomes of the conflict.”

For a variety of reasons, mass national movements were relatively slow to develop in the multinational Russian empire; as Sanborn notes, although the 1905 revolution revealed high levels of discontent within non-Russian populations in the borderlands, they did not pose a serious threat. And in the aftermath of 1905, the Russian state and economy grew stronger while the imperial project gained in public popularity. It was Russia’s Great War experience in the borderlands that ignited a two-fold imperial challenge—serious critiques of empire on the periphery and in the metropole—as well as initiating the process of state failure.

Chapters 2, 3, and 5, which outline this destructive process, are the most compelling parts of the book. With the outbreak of war, governing power in the war zones was transferred from the civilian to the military authorities, who proved disastrously incapable of wielding it. As Sanborn puts it, “No single act did more to lay the conditions for comprehensive state failure in the borderlands than did the edict of martial law” (40). Competent local authorities were superseded or undercut, creating power vacuums and promoting corruption and crime. Misguided economic policies premised on suspicion of capitalism and Jews devastated local economies, fueling shortages, black markets, and resort to coercion and theft. Spy mania and ethnic and religious hostilities resulted in pogroms, hostage-taking, and outright ethnic cleansing. By March 1915, the imperial state’s ability to maintain law and order in these regions, or even protect conduct of basic economic activity, was seriously impaired and its legitimacy correspondingly weakened.

From spring 1915, the worsening in Russia’s military fortunes imported many of these problems into the interior as the front “migrated”—one of the many strengths of Sanborn’s approach is his insistence on the importance of the war’s military-operational story for understanding larger developments. Retreating armies, deserting soldiers, and millions of dispossessed refugees streamed into the heartland, bringing with them disease, hunger, violence, and crime; social relationships broke under the strain. The scope of the calamity and the government’s apparent inability to handle the crises reanimated political critiques, further undercutting regime legitimacy.

Treaty of Brest-Litovsk Signing

Interestingly, Sanborn begins his chapter on the Russian revolution in summer 1916, with the massive anti-colonial rebellion that rocked Turkestan. Triggered by an ill-conceived decision to conscript noncombat labor from the Muslim population, the rebellion and its savage suppression undermined confidence in the “civilizing” rationale of the Russian imperial project in Central Asia. Sanborn explicitly links the anxiety evoked by this collapse of control, and all the other failures in order in 1915–16, as causal factors in revolution: “The pangs of fear and the visceral sense of chaos and impending doom felt by citizens across the country provided the radical edginess needed to transform disgust and protest into the violent acts of mutiny and rebellion” (175). After revolution toppled the discredited regime (a process in which discontented soldiers played an outsized role), the new Provisional Government and Petrograd Soviet found they were no more able than the tsarist authorities to exercise the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Instead, the unraveling of the imperial armies, rapid decentralization of power, and growing anarchy encouraged the long-delayed burgeoning of national movements.

Initially, most of these movements demanded autonomy rather than independence. The Bolsheviks took advantage of the refusal of most Russian elites even to contemplate concessions to non-Russian populations, proclaiming their adherence to “self-determination”—a commitment they soon revised as the post-Brest-Litovsk Russian state devolved into warlordism, civil war, and full-blown social catastrophe. Once again, men with guns—this time, millions of demobilized, brutalized soldiers ready to take whatever they wanted—had a big role to play in the process.

Ultimately, the case for decolonization is not as persuasive as it might be. That is in part because the two chapters on military and societal innovations in response to wartime problems—fascinating though they are—have not been integrated into the overall argument and do little to advance it. More significantly, Sanborn does not define “decolonization,” or review any of the theoretical literature surrounding this crucial concept, a particularly surprising omission for a scholar who has shown himself well versed in and comfortable with theory in his previous work.

Nonetheless, his work Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire succeeds powerfully on many levels. Sanborn’s command of his vast primary source base lends his narrative authority, his prose is unfailingly engaging, and his insights numerous. The many personal stories he tells of humble citizens caught up in this imperial “apocalypse” provide moving illustrations of the broad processes he charts. Above all, no previous treatment of Russia’s Great War and revolution makes so palpable the scale of chaos and misery endured by the population as war-induced violence spun out of anyone’s control.

Melissa K. Stockdale