The ethnic matrix of the Civil War in the North Caucasus

In post-Soviet years, the North Caucasus gained the reputation of a politically unstable, conflict-generating region, with specific problems rooted in the distant past. To better understand the essence of today’s problems, it is necessary to study the complex vicissitudes of North Caucasus regional history at crucial moments. The article aims to clarify the role of the ethnic factor at the early stage of the Civil War in the North Caucasus (1917-1918). It traces the dynamics of interethnic confrontation in the very complicated poly-ethnic and multi-confessional region and the impact of this dynamics on the struggle between the opposing political forces. How did the Bolsheviks and their opponents use the ethnic factor for their own interests? Understanding the impact of ethnic identities on the conflict is of broader relevance; it is through an ethnic matrix that unresolved social problems turn into irreconcilable interethnic contradictions. This case study from the revolutionary era is based on hitherto unstudied archival material from the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History

CK RKP(b)-VKP(b) i nacional'nyj vopros, 1917-1933 [Il Comitato centrale del Partito comunista e la questione nazionale, 1917-1933]

Decimo volume della serie Dokumenty sovetskoj istori

Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution

Book synopsis: When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they announced the overthrow of a world scarred by exploitation and domination. In the very moment of revolution, these sentiments were put to the test as antisemitic pogroms swept the former Pale of Settlement. The pogroms posed fundamental questions of the Bolshevik project, revealing the depth of antisemitism within sections of the working class, peasantry and Red Army. Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution offers the first book-length analysis of the Bolshevik response to antisemitism. Contrary to existing understandings, it reveals this campaign to have been led not by the Party leadership, as is often assumed, but by a loosely connected group of radicals who mobilized around a Jewish political subjectivity. By examining pogroms committed by the Red Army, Brendan McGeever also uncovers the explosive overlap between revolutionary politics and antisemitism, and the capacity for class to become racialized in a moment of crisis