Domestic campaigns for the hearts and minds of the population took place in all belligerent states during World War I. An important element of this process was the dissemination of images of friend and foe. Tsarist Russia shared in this tendency. To be sure, not all enemies were immediately and irrevocably demonised, but the strains of war increasingly produced an insidious current of hatred. Accompanying the formal patriotic fervour was a more insidious undercurrent of persecution that exten..

Gatrell, Peter

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 Cahiers du monde russe
Russie - Empire russe - Union soviétique et États
indépendants 
44/4 | 2003
Varia
Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire
Peter Gatrell
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/4103
ISSN: 1777-5388
Publisher
Éditions de l’EHESS
Printed version
Date of publication: 1 October 2003
Number of pages: 704-707
ISBN: 2-7132-1833-0
ISSN: 1252-6576
 
Electronic reference
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44/4 | 2003, Online since 19 June 2009, Connection on 03 May 2019. URL : http://
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© École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris.
Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian
Empire
Peter Gatrell
REFERENCES
Eric LOHR, Nationalizing the Russian Empire. The campaign against enemy aliens
during World War I. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2003, XI-237 p. (Russian
Research Center Studies, 94)
1 Domestic campaigns for the hearts and minds of the population took place in all belligerent
states during World War I. An important element of this process was the dissemination of
images of friend and foe. Tsarist Russia shared in this tendency. To be sure, not all enemies
were immediately and irrevocably demonised, but the strains of war increasingly produced an
insidious current of hatred. Accompanying the formal patriotic fervour was a more insidious
undercurrent of persecution that extended to ethnic and religious communities. Material
grievances helped to turn sentiment into violent action. Economic nationalism became a
means of settling old scores and transferring economic assets to “loyal” populations. The
campaign against the German “yoke” (zasil´e) was targeted at German ownership of land, and
industrial and financial assets. The Russian High Command deported German farmers from
the land on which many of  them had settled for  generations,  and conducted a  vicious
campaign against Jews and other minorities.  German residents in towns and cities faced
opprobrium  and  even  violence  from  their  neighbours.  Subsequently  this  hostility  was
translated into legalised expropriation. It is with radical developments such as these that this
important and timely monograph is concerned.
2 Eric  Lohr  has  already  published  several  original  articles  on  aspects  of  Russian
government policy and on ethnic conflict in urban centres during World War I. In this
short, concise monograph he has brought together the fruits of his research in Russian
archives (particularly the Rossiisskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, the Rossiisskii
gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv and the Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi
Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire
Cahiers du monde russe, 44/4 | 2003
1
Federatsii). Lohr makes excellent use of the modest secondary literature, including Karl
Lindeman’s well-known study of the legislation that provided for the expropriation of
German  settlers,  Boris  Nolde’s  standard  work  on  Russia  in  the  economic  war,  which
appeared under the auspices of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1928,
and  V. S.  Diakin’s  work  on  German  capital.  Little  published  work  has  escaped  his
attention,  an  exception  being  a  study  by  B. M.  Vitenberg,  “P. B. Struve  i  Komitet  po
ogranicheniiu  snabzheniia  i  torgovli  nepriatelia,  1915-1917 gg.,”  in  Sankt-Peterburgskoe
nauchnoe obshchestvo istorikov i arkhivistov: Ezhegodnik, 1997: 217-228.
3 Lohr’s work raises important questions about the widespread pernicious demonisation of
“enemies within” during the world wars of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that
this process had several dimensions in tsarist Russia during World War I. Initially the
government took steps to deport and intern citizens of enemy states, but the campaign
quickly extended to embrace Russia’s ethnic minorities, with German settlers and Jews
– subjects of the Tsar – being its most prominent targets. Lohr traces the process whereby
they too were deported and expropriated. The main driving force behind these campaign
against foreign nationals was a perception that “enemy aliens” owed exclusive allegiance
to a foreign power. There were nineteenth-century precedents for these actions – France,
for example,  interned around 30,000 Germans during the Franco-Prussian War.  What
distinguished tsarist  Russia,  argues Lohr,  is  the role that many foreign nationals and
naturalised immigrants played in Russia’s economic life. Russian nationalists played to
public opinion during the war and – combined with the suspicious minds of the Russian
High Command – acted as the driving forces behind a new nationalizing ethos. Tsarist
officials and generals began to target and strip foreign nationals and immigrants alike of
their assets. This further encouraged mass hostility and violence. The author insists that
these virulent forms of ethnic absolutism and differentiation originated in the cauldron
of war; they were not the product of a prior evolutionary process.
4 This argument is elaborated by means of four case studies. The first concerns the riots
that occurred in Moscow in May 1915, when German shops and warehouses in Moscow
were subject to frenzied looting and arson over several days. “The era of dynastic war is
at an end, and the era of popular participation has arrived,” observed M. A. Tokarskii in
the first issue of Izvestiia Moskovskogo voenno-promyshlennogo komiteta in 1915 – an ironic
comment, in view of the violence and murder that was taking place as he spoke. Women
workers played a leading role in the riots, conveying their anger at the exemption from
military service given to enemy aliens. Lohr sets the riots in the context of rising anti-
German sentiment elsewhere in Europe, as a result of the sinking of the Lusitania and the
loss of the fortress at Przemysl. Tsarist officials had an ambivalent attitude, welcoming
public demonstrations of patriotism but being simultaneously anxious about public order.
Some observers argued that the lesson to be learned was that the government had to take
a more aggressive stance towards enemy aliens. As to the economic impact of the riots,
Lohr calculates that total losses amounted to 72 million rubles, equivalent (according to
my calculations) to one quarter of annual investment in industry in 1914.
5 The second case study deals with the expropriation of German businesses. Before the war
Moscow merchants denounced foreign economic penetration. The war offered them an
opportunity to proclaim their patriotism and simultaneously rid the country of German
“domination.”  Calls  for  a  boycott  of  German  enterprises  – not  just  in  Moscow,  but
throughout the Central Industrial Region – soon turned into more aggressive action. The
Duma captured the public mood, agreeing on 3 August 1915 to establish a commission to
Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire
Cahiers du monde russe, 44/4 | 2003
2
“fight the German yoke.” When he entered office two months later, the Minister of the
Interior A. N. Khvostov leant his vigorous support to this campaign, which culminated in
sequestration and the transfer of ownership to Russian individuals. Perhaps Lohr does
not  emphasise  sufficiently  strongly  how  these  measures  anticipated  the  Bolshevik
campaign  against  private  property  (the  Bolsheviks  inherited  and  utilised  the  tsarist
liquidation commissions). He does however quantify their results, which liquidated and
transferred two per cent of share capital in industry by February 1917.
6 The third  case  study  addresses  the  expropriation of  landowners,  as  provided for  by
legislation in February and December 1915. A merit of Lohr’s analysis is that he again
shows the interplay of bureaucratic and military thinking. He points to the willingness of
Russian liberals to countenance expropriation as part of a strategy to develop Russian
civic engagement, although he gives no space to Miliukov’s misgivings about government
legislation, which (Miliukov argued) set a poor example to Russian peasants, amongst
whom expectations  had  now been  aroused  of  more  radical  measures  to  expropriate
property  owners.  Lohr  again  spells  out  the  economic  implications  of  the  wartime
campaign.  The  combined  landholdings  of  German  farmers  probably  exceeded  three
million hectares. In terms of the total area sown to crops their farms accounted for a tiny
fraction, but their output of cereals contributed around 3.3 million tons. Put another way,
this was equivalent to half the recorded decline in grain output during 1915. The settlers’
land had gone unplanted as a consequence of the measures taken against them.
7 The final case study looks at the deportation of ethnic minorities. Again Lohr carefully
juxtaposes civilian and military policies. He shows how the basis for deportation had been
created before the war, by the collection of statistics for the Russian army in its search for
potential  spies.  The riots  in Moscow directly resulted in new rules  rendering enemy
aliens  liable  to  deportation to  remote parts  of  the empire.  Lohr  carefully  traces  the
intensification of military action against enemy nationals and then German settlers and
Jews. He points out that Alekseev differed but little from Ianushkevich in pursuing an
aggressive policy towards these groups. He draws attention to lesser-known campaigns,
for example against the Muslim population of Kars and Batumi and the Crimean Tatars.
8 Lohr has performed a valuable service in showing how far the campaign against “German
economic dominance” called upon the support of a broad swathe of Russian political and
public opinion. If there is a criticism, it is that contrary opinions are hardly registered.
More broadly, Lohr has established beyond doubt that the war witnessed a shift from the
“traditional” imperial politics of assimilation to the more “modern” style of categorical
exclusion. As indicated above, a particular strength of his book is the juxtaposition of
military and civilian thinking and practice. Its value is further enhanced by the author’s
readiness  to  draw  appropriate  and  informative  comparisons  with  other  belligerent
powers during World War I. He has made a notable contribution to our understanding of
the dynamics of late imperial Russia and of state practices in modern war.
Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire
Cahiers du monde russe, 44/4 | 2003
3


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