Reactions

Weapon of the Weak (Apologies to James Scott):

Violence in Russian History*

Laura Engelstein

The essays gathered here offer case studies of violence in Russian history, without
defining the term. Violence, we naturally assume, involves the use of force or,
less dramatically, compulsion or constraint resulting in some kind of damage.
The OED identifies it with “treatment or usage tending to cause bodily injury or
forcibly interfering with personal freedom.” Under certain circumstances, as in
self-defense and wartime, violence is considered a justifiable choice. An essential
attribute of the state, in Max Weber’s famous definition, is its “monopoly of the
legitimate use of physical force.” The speech that includes this formulation was
delivered in Munich in 1918 and begins by citing Lev Davidovich Trotskii’s re-
mark at Brest-Litovsk, that “every state is founded on force.” 1 Soviet Russia was
thus on Weber’s mind when he made his general observations. This connection
brings us back to the subject at hand.
Violence can be routine or extreme, lawful or abusive. Standards measuring
atrocity, barbarity, or crime vary in time and across cultures, as the history of
warfare and slavery clearly shows. Such variations surface in the examples consid-
ered here, which span three centuries. They include periods of crisis and war, but
also relatively ordinary times, when violence played a role in the routine opera-
tion of state institutions. The autocracy applied violence in prisons and exile
colonies, in the form of corporal punishment, as part of military discipline and
on the battlefield, in colonial campaigns and administration. One might argue
that the Soviet regime fostered a chronic state of emergency as a mechanism of
rule, cultivating the sense of vulnerability as a reason preemptively to strike out.
But even in periods of relative calm, when the state’s existence was not in peril,
policies were often characterized by brutal methods and highly damaging results,
to say the least: among them collectivization, deportation, induced famine,
camps, prisons, forced labor, and physical torture. Victims number in the mil-

*
Thanks to Timothy Snyder and Michael David-Fox for useful comments.
1
“A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of
physical force within a given territory.” Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber:
Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1946), 77–128.

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4(3): 679–93, Summer 2003.
680 L AURA E NGELSTEIN

lions; the suffering is incalculable. The relevant questions are not if, but how and
why.
Is this, then, the usual story of Russian history through the ages, plagued by
authoritarian rule and marked by a preference for brute force in political life?
Has Russia always been “more violent” than other places? The gaps in coverage
here, especially for the modern period, and the random choice of themes are no
doubt accidents of selection, yet it is impossible to consider the problem of vio-
lence in Russian history with so little attention to the Soviet era. Indeed, for all
the stereotypes about the Russians’ alleged propensity for self-inflicted harm, the
centrality of sheer violence in defining and sustaining the Soviet regime is often
understated. 2 Yet, despite the gaps, the essays in their different ways suggest a
common theme: that power is abused when the institutions that wield it are not
powerful enough to do the job. Violence, odd as it may sound, is a weapon of
the weak.
Our episodic story begins not, as one might expect from the standard text-
book narrative, with Ivan the Terrible (1533–84), a notorious symbol of the
abuse of absolute power by a recognized sovereign, but with the Time of Trou-
bles, a crisis of sovereignty itself. In this conflict, which Chester Dunning charac-
terizes as a civil war, the contending parties fought for supremacy, but until the
election of Mikhail Romanov in 1613 none was able to eliminate his opponents
from the scene. With few exceptions, it seems, the competing forces resorted to
levels of brutality perceived even by contemporaries as excessive. The methods
they favored (impaling, dismemberment, torture, rape, pillage, flogging) were
nevertheless common to rulers of their day.
What the Time of Troubles offers, however, is not a normative old regime,
secure in its brutal operation (or as secure as any princely regime ever was). “Ter-
ror,” in this context, is a strategy that establishes, rather than exercises, the right
to rule. It might backfire: as, for example, when devastated populations turned
against the offending prince. Sometimes strategies that limited violence (inhib-
iting the rape, pillage, and murder of local inhabitants) had greater appeal. This
was the case of the two Dmitrii’s. Their enemies, by contrast, were distinguished
by lack of restraint. Whatever the revulsion against their methods, which pro-
voked popular reprisals, violence was, however, the name of the game. It is not
clear from this account whether the first Dmitrii’s moderation was a matter of
political calculation or a luxury permitted by access to supplies, allowing him to
do without plunder. Perhaps, as the son of Ivan IV, he felt he had a real claim to
authority. His self-discipline, Dunning believes, contributed to his popularity,
but this did not prevent his defeat at the hands of ruthless rivals.

2
See the intelligent introduction to Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday,
2003).
 WEAPON OF THE WEAK 681

Dunning rejects the Soviet view of the Time of Troubles as a class war, in
which the privileged would naturally have shown no mercy toward the lowly.
Finding no clear social agendas or well-defined social constituencies, Dunning
nevertheless designates some players as the “rebels.” He characterizes the years of
conflict as “the first powerful (if unconscious) popular reaction against the
growth of the increasingly cruel and coercive state” (494). Even if we accept the
term “popular” to include a variety of groups, from Cossacks and peasants to
gentry, this model assumes that some form of the state is pitted against an array
of social forces. Yet, until the accession of Mikhail Romanov, the situation was
characterized precisely by the absence of recognized political authority. Some
contenders for power represented themselves as heirs to the princely mantle, oth-
ers as challengers; all used theatrical brutality to intimidate, punish, and bolster
their claims. Dunning’s reference to an “increasingly cruel and coercive state,” in
the process of consolidation becoming more, not less bloody, does not seem to fit
this picture.
In the end, he argues, the Time of Troubles created a hunger for stability of
rule (the Romanovs) but also “accustomed the Russian people to the presence of
a considerable amount of arbitrary violence in their daily lives and to very high
levels of state violence” (512). This assertion is not very helpful. These “Russian
people” are not identified, either in estate, cultural, or geographical terms. And
however we might best describe them, how do we know they accepted violence
as the norm, especially since many often rebelled against it? Dunning character-
izes Mikhail Romanov as no different from the feuding princes, in relying on
violence to achieve political goals. Indeed, Mikhail’s initial ferocity successfully
established the new dynasty’s right to rule. Yet, Dunning observes, his ruthless-
ness also gave rise to resistance and upheaval. The goals of war and the goals of
government appear somewhat at odds.
What was indeed new in Mikhail’s reign was the institutionalization of vio-
lence and, in its endemic form, of coercion as an instrument not of battle but of
power. Dunning describes this contribution in a negative sense: “the speed and
zeal with which the paranoid Tsar Mikhail erected legal and bureaucratic ma-
chinery to pursue his real or perceived domestic enemies was unprecedented in
Russian history” (512). This formulation, like the reference to “the Russian peo-
ple,” is somewhat misleading. Mikhail’s reign was not an episode in the unfold-
ing of a history already understood as continuously “Russian,” but a moment in
the consolidation of a new sense of Russia as a coherent entity with a potentially
continuous future. The Romanov transition ended the civil war and established a
viable state structure. During the Time of Troubles extreme violence figured as a
symptom of instability, in the absence of a legitimate organized state. Once po-
litical authority was re-established, violence became routine.
682 L AURA E NGELSTEIN

The Time of Troubles was a time of war, but also a contest for power; the
population had to be won over, not merely subdued. The “population” itself was
composed partly of fighting forces (the Cossacks), so that military and civilian
elements (to use anachronistic terms) were intermingled. Contrast this situation
with the late 18th-century Pugachev revolt. Like the pseudo-Dmitrii and Tsar
Petr of the Time of Troubles, Pugachev was also a pretender; he inspired pillage
and slaughter. But Catherine was not fighting for her throne and did not doubt
the loyalty of her military forces. We may want nowadays to see the rebellion
more as a reaction on the part of the colonial frontier to the incursions of in-
creasingly rationalized state power and less as a war of peasants against the land-
owning class, but the continuity and legitimacy of Romanov rule (in the person
of the non-Romanov empress) was not in question. Catherine, as befit a “mod-
ern” autocrat, made a show of limiting the cruelty of her response: Pugachev was
beheaded before being dismembered. Even Cesare Beccaria, the Enlightenment
standard on just punishment, agreed that rebels deserved to die.
Returning to the 17th century, we are reminded by Georg Michels that even
after Romanov rule had been established, resistance, as in the Stenka Razin revolt
(1670–71), continued to take violent and dramatic form. Sometimes this vio-
lence was directed against representatives of the Orthodox Church. Michels
wonders what they did to provoke it. Examining the church’s role as moral stan-
dard-bearer and partner to the state, Michels develops a case in which violence
undermines, instead of bolstering, institutional authority. Differing with histori-
ans who view the church as a source of shared values in 17th-century Muscovite
society, he denies that Orthodox teaching strengthened social bonds and encour-
aged gentle habits. Rather, the habits of the world left their stamp upon the
churchmen. Far from laying the foundations of a moral community, Michels
concludes, “the bishops of the Russian church contributed to the social turmoil
of the 17th century by themselves unleashing violence against ordinary Musco-
vites, or by failing to prevent the violent attacks of their own officials. Not sur-
prisingly, bishops soon became the targets of popular revolt” (540).
As they gained in wealth, Michels claims, the bishops came to resemble their
secular counterparts, the great landowners. Levying high taxes on the peasants of
their considerable estates, they provoked rebellions that they punished with ar-
rests and floggings, prompting many of the victims to flee. Even in their capacity
as guardians of the faith, the bishops resorted to coercive methods. Failing in
their pastoral mission, they substituted compulsion for consent as a way of com-
bating religious error. In the effort to enforce obedience to Nikon’s liturgical re-
forms, they enlisted the state’s cooperation: “local representatives of the church,”
Michels writes, “began to use the orthodox idiom as a justification for military
repression and the destruction of peasant lives” (533). Only “a handful of bish-
 WEAPON OF THE WEAK 683

ops,” he adds, “used education rather than violence to discipline their flocks”
(534).
As managers of material resources, bishops no doubt behaved in worldly
ways, but Michels’s indignation seems to get the better of his historical judg-
ment. From the perspective of their age, the bishops do not necessarily emerge as
hypocritical tyrants, feigning piety to disguise an appetite for power and wealth.
They and their elite audiences may have seen no contradiction between the
homilies uttered in church and the exploitation and disciplining of peasants.
Michels believes that harsh treatment led some of these peasants to question their
allegiance to the Orthodox faith, but the evidence he offers does not prove it.
Paul Werth sees his story of 18th-century missionary activity as a continua-
tion of the pattern Michels lays out, a pattern Werth describes as the church’s
effort to extend its control over subject populations. While Michels in fact fo-
cuses largely on the abuse of powers the church already had (primarily in its
landowning capacity), Werth describes the actions taken by clerical authorities in
league with the state, in winning new converts to the flock. The missionary cam-
paign to spread Orthodoxy among the pagans of the Volga region relied on var-
ious forms of coercion (bribes, penalties) sometimes combined with intimidation
(the presence of soldiers) to induce non-Christians to convert. The state also pe-
nalized converts who resented being cheated of their promised rewards. It inter-
fered in the religious life of non-Christian communities, arousing resistance that
was in turn repressed by force.
What the Michels and Werth scenarios have in common is the contrast be-
tween professed ideals and authoritarian practices. In the first case, high-flown
sermons directed at the elite disguise rapacious treatment of lowly subjects. In
the second case, church and state condemn forcible methods of conversion. Yet,
in efforts to deepen and extend the Orthodox faith, these principles were often
ignored. In this joint endeavor, the church had “distinct institutional interests,”
Werth writes, but it “represent[ed] an administrative and ideological instrument
of the state nonetheless” (550). Church and state, in his view, work together to
achieve mutually compatible goals: spreading nominal Orthodoxy as the basis for
further edification; bringing wider populations under bureaucratic control.
The entire enterprise, says Werth, was part of the state’s attempt, on the
Cameralist model, to extend and reinforce its command of inhabited lands.
Religious purposes may have set the church in motion, but missionaries in pur-
suit of spiritual gains ended by serving the logic of secular expansion. If, however,
the campaign was supposed to enhance administrative control, the use of
violence undercut these goals, arousing resentment and resistance. Ministers and
bishops in St. Petersburg did not endorse the sliding scale of compulsion, from
material inducement to physical intimidation and armed force, on which “cor-
684 L AURA E NGELSTEIN

rupt” local officials and over-zealous missionaries in remote outposts relied for
success. The abuse of power in religious matters, Werth concludes, was not a re-
flection of how powerful the state was, but a sign of “the weakness of central rule
in the countryside” (565).
In the 17th century, to follow Dunning and Michels, rulers used violence to
assert or consolidate authority. For the early 18th-century, Werth describes a
monarchy divided between secular and clerical arms, between center and peri-
phery. Later monarchs, more secure in their command of loyalty and administra-
tive competence, preferred to rule by subtler means. Indeed, Catherine initiated a
policy of toleration toward Muslim communities, accompanied by the creation
of official Muslim institutions designed to bind those communities more closely
to the state and minimize resistance and conflict. Such measures also had the vir-
tue of drawing local elites into the secular administration.3
With Sally Boniece’s portrait of the SR activist Mariia Spiridonova
(1885–1941), we skip from the mid-18th century to the revolution of 1905 –
from a state imposing control to a state trying to regain it. Revolutions are by
definition crises of legitimacy. In the Time of Troubles, princes competed for the
loyalty of elite and popular followers. The revolution of 1905–7, by contrast,
pitted the state and its servitors against organized public opinion and the agitated
masses. It was famously an incident of state-inflicted violence – shooting into the
peaceful crowd on 9 January 1905, which became known as Bloody Sunday –
that transformed a condition of longstanding elite discontent and sporadic social
protest into an empire-wide challenge to imperial power. In the course of the
revolution, the regime’s attempts to repress the social movement only fanned the
opposition. Even when, as in the Moscow uprising of December 1905, the rebels
themselves took to arms, the state’s violent response was widely judged excessive.
The uprising itself was accepted by the respectable public as an extreme, but
understandable response to the state’s unreasonable use of force.
How did violence against the established order gain legitimacy in the public
eye, when violence in government hands had lost it? Boniece approaches this
question by examining the case of Spiridonova, who assassinated a state official
in 1906. Tried and convicted, she was released from prison after February 1917.
Modeling herself on the populist terrorists of the 1870s, Spiridonova adopted
two of their tactics: the murder of individual officials as a way to precipitate the
collapse of the autocratic state; and the myth of the revolutionary martyr who
sacrifices his or her life for the cause. The purity of the selfless act, inevitably
resulting in the terrorist’s own punishment or demise, created the moral under-
pinning for violent acts otherwise considered morally abhorrent.

3
Robert Crews, “Empire and the Confessional State: Islam and Religious Politics in Nineteenth-
Century Russia,” American Historical Review 108: 1 (2003), 50–83.
 WEAPON OF THE WEAK 685

Revolutions, on one level, are struggles for moral superiority, but where does
the element of moral judgment enter the story of violence in Russian history?
Dunning thinks the brutality of 17th-century princes sometimes alienated their
followers or potential followers. But whether effective or counterproductive,
these were techniques of warfare current at the time. Neither the actors involved,
nor Dunning after them, judge them in moral terms. If Dmitrii’s moderation
made him more popular than his rivals, as Dunning contends, it was because he
limited the damage he inflicted. Michels, for his part, assumes that villagers fled
the parishes in revulsion at the gap between clerical practice and preaching. It is
not obvious, however, that, in leaving the church, they condemned its methods
as incompatible with the clergy’s mission. A loose grasp on Orthodox teaching
may have allowed them easily to abandon one set of precepts for another, when
they had exhausted their tolerance for abuse.
It is only with the 18th century that principled objections to the use of cer-
tain forms of violence enter the picture. In 1753 Empress Elizabeth issued a
decree abolishing the death penalty. It was unclear, however, whether she meant
to exclude the death penalty altogether or to reserve it as a measure of last resort.
Despite this ambiguity, the decree’s very promulgation elevated Russia in the
opinion of European thinkers to the ranks of the civilized nations. Later mon-
archs sanctioned executions despite the decree, but the association between judi-
cious use of violence and the state’s claim to civilized rule retained its force. The
existence of this standard enabled critics of autocracy to judge the regime’s be-
havior against the professed ideal. As a self-styled enlightened monarch,
Catherine argued that Russia deserved a place in the concert of civilized Euro-
pean nations because Russia was governed by the rule of law. The Charter of the
Nobility made exemption from corporal punishment a mark of social status. The
empress was conscious, in planning Pugachev’s execution, of how European
commentators would interpret the methods she chose.4
Catherine’s version of the rule of law was mostly for show. She not only col-
luded in the murder of her husband, Peter III, disbanded the Legislative Com-
mission, and punished unwelcome ideas with exile or prison. She continued to
sustain the institution of serfdom. Under this system of delegated authority,
landowners were authorized to inflict beatings (sometimes resulting in death);
exile their serfs or consign them to military service; impose marriage or sunder
families. The abuse inherent in such private powers supplied opponents of serf-
dom with strong moral arguments. In essence, they insisted the state reclaim its

4
On these themes, see Laura Engelstein, “Revolution and the Theater of Public Life in Imperial
Russia,” in Revolution and the Meanings of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Isser Woloch
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
686 L AURA E NGELSTEIN

monopoly on social discipline. They also demanded the state itself conform to
the moral standards disseminated by Enlightenment thought.
Thanks partly to the pressure of public opinion, in the decades leading up to
emancipation and the judicial reforms the regime began the process of adjusting
its disciplinary habits. When Count Dmitrii Nikolaevich Bludov (1785–1864)
recalibrated the so-called ladder of punishments in 1845, in connection with re-
vision of the penal code, he had to explain why penalties differed not only with
respect to the nature of the crime but to the criminal’s social condition. The
common people, he noted, lacking the moral sensibility and rights attached to
civil status, could not be deprived of honor and privileges they did not possess.
While noblemen might suffer the shame of degradation, common folk under-
stood only the language of physical pain. In 1863, as a consequence of the
emancipation and even before the judicial reform, most methods of corporal
punishment were eliminated from the code.5 By the second half of the 19th cen-
tury, then, the state had strengthened the respect for law and accepted the need
to limit the use of corrective violence.
The Great Reforms were a watershed: diminishing the distance between the
social estates, reinforcing the role of due process. Not only did they also expand
the scope of public opinion, but they provided new standards by which the
state’s exercise of power might be judged. Violence was not in itself the issue. In
the ordinary execution of duty, officials resorted to compulsion and violence as a
matter of course: the military fought wars; the police arrested criminals; prisons
and penal colonies incarcerated offenders sentenced by the courts and by admin-
istrative decree; gendarmes and troops were mobilized in the suppression of do-
mestic unrest. All these were the state’s legitimate functions. The public now ob-
jected, however, when the regime disregarded or circumvented its own rules, as
when it shifted cases from civil to military courts, imposed emergency decrees, or
used troops to suppress domestic disorder.
It is the struggle for the moral high ground that Boniece examines in her
anatomy of the Spiridonova case. The concept of revolutionary terror, pioneered
by the People’s Will, had motivated Vera Zasulich (1849–1919) when she at-
tempted to assassinate a state official in 1878. He had administered a beating to
an imprisoned radical, in violation of the law. Tried in criminal court, Zasulich
was acquitted. A sympathetic public endorsed her violent crime as an act of
moral heroism, while denouncing the state, in the person of the abusive official
and as the abstract embodiment of arbitrary power, as criminal itself. Lawyers
such as Anatolii Fedorovich Koni (1844–1927), who presided over the trial, may

5
See Abby M. Schrader, Languages of the Lash: Corporal Punishment and Identity in Imperial Russia
(DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002) and Bruce F. Adams, The Politics of Punish-
ment: Prison Reform in Russia, 1863–1917 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996).
 WEAPON OF THE WEAK 687

have admired Zasulich’s motives. Koni, however, regretted the acquittal. In his
mind, due process, not answering lawlessness, was the antidote to autocratic rule.
By the time Spiridonova came to imitate Zasulich, most of educated society
had turned in revulsion against the regime. State violence had been discredited,
while violence against the state was accepted by large segments of the public as a
positive moral statement. How did this happen? Boniece’s contribution is to ana-
lyze the way Spiridonova, her SR colleagues, and the liberal press cooperated in
the manufacture of a myth of heroic self-righteousness. The myth depended on
Spiridonova’s profile as a virtuous young woman, sexually pure, physically attrac-
tive, and ethnically Russian. Implying she had been the victim of improper sex-
ual advances, perhaps even rape, at the time of her arrest, Spiridonova suppressed
the truth about her earlier sexual experience. Successfully translating the illusion
of sexual purity into political capital, her carefully cultivated self-presentation re-
inforced the image of the terrorist movement as a moral response to the state’s
assault on the virtuous common people.
The Populists had also capitalized on the special capacity of women to sym-
bolize victimhood and virtue. Spiridonova’s version cast the state as the rapist,
the assassin as the violated maiden. It recontextualized her act of murder as a pre-
emptive attack against an assault yet to come. As though avenging an insult to
patriarchal honor, SR militants later assassinated the arresting officers she had
implicated in the alleged offense. Spiridonova herself was no innocent, but an
activist who helped produce a story that served political goals. Her aura as rev-
olutionary martyr, reinforced by incarceration in tsarist prisons, survived until
1918, when she lost favor with the Soviet regime. In 1941, she fell victim to a
different terror, exercised on behalf of a new revolutionary myth. The story of
her execution is beyond the scope of Boniece’s essay, but it takes us to the ques-
tion of how the Bolsheviks came to associate terror, not with the condemnation
of an existing political regime, but with the defense of a new one.
In the transition from autocracy to communist rule, the experience of World
War I is crucial. Eric Lohr’s examination of the Moscow anti-German riots of
May 1915 concludes that violence gets out of hand when the state fails to exer-
cise its monopoly on violence. In this case, public opinion assumed that state
officials had played a role in stimulating the mob attacks on resident foreigners
and their property. In fact, as Lohr demonstrates, the government did not organ-
ize the pogrom. It tried instead to conceal the evidence of its own inability to
prevent or suppress it. In short, the state failed to mobilize appropriate violence
on its own behalf, resulting in damage to its already impaired reputation. The
erosion of legitimacy, along with the incapacity to maintain law and order, char-
acterized the beginning of the revolutionary crisis on the home front.
688 L AURA E NGELSTEIN

In the Spiridonova case, unlicensed guardians of public virtue – a kind of

ideological morals squad – took the protection of public interest into their own
hands by assaulting agents of the state. The Moscow mobs, by contrast, saw
themselves as promoting state interests. Yet, they too acted to compensate for
what they viewed as the state’s moral and political abdication. The autocracy
indeed consistently favored order over ideology, discouraging violence targeted at
Jews, no less than attacks on residents of foreign extraction during wartime. Yet
its wartime encouragement of patriotic sentiment and the widespread anti-
German rhetoric in the press, along with the insidious role of individual govern-
ment officials, created an atmosphere that favored the mob. The government had
enacted rules restricting German-owned business in Russian cities but failed to
enforce them. “To a certain extent,” writes Lohr, “the riots can be seen as the
crowd taking implementation into its own hands” (624).
The problem was not only that the state failed to stop amateurs from usurp-
ing its role. Internally divided between civilian and military authorities, Lohr
explains, the state had trouble governing itself. The military, which enjoyed con-
siderable autonomy from civilian control, pursued a policy with regard to inhabi-
tants in front-line areas that actively encouraged brutality and destruction.
Cossack units, who in their turn enjoyed relative autonomy under military com-
mand, took a leading role in these actions. Moreover, front and rear were no
longer entirely separate. It was not, however, the authorities who provoked the
outburst in May 1915. Nor had they used excessive force to repress it (as they
had, contemporaries argued, in response to the Moscow uprising of 1905 or in
the punitive expeditions of 1906). They were, to the contrary, not forceful
enough. Because the Ministry of Internal Affairs had imposed restrictions on vio-
lent methods of crowd control, Moscow Police Chief Aleksandr Aleksandrovich
Adrianov, himself a firm supporter of the rule of law, could not command the
troops to fire and was in any case unsure of their willingness to obey.
“This is one example of many in the long span of Russian history,” Lohr
concludes, “in which the state puts on a public face of autocratic or totalitarian
ability to manipulate and control, but behind the façade is brittle, divided, and
even close to collapse” (626). It was the war, he says, that “exacerbated the im-
portant problem of the disunited state” (625), in which the military was able to
implement policies detrimental to the interests of the regime as a whole. The
ministers condemned the abuse of populations near the front but were unable to
prevent it, while the model of violence against civilians inspired copycat violence
in the rear, tearing at the social fabric. The weakness of public authorities in
1915 thus took opposite forms: both excess and hesitation.
Peter Holquist’s take on the impact of World War I is somewhat different.
He argues, in contrast to Lohr, not that the regime was internally divided
 WEAPON OF THE WEAK 689

between pragmatic civilian authorities and the lawless military command, but
that the war had the effect of imposing military styles of rule on the entire ad-
ministration. In unifying society and regime, this modern form of total war did
not encourage anarchy and mob violence, but introduced a higher degree of
organization in all spheres of life, transforming the operation of domestic govern-
ment in fundamental ways. In reshaping the character of regimes throughout Eu-
rope, the war enlisted civil society in support for the war, while allowing the state
to penetrate deeper into the business of society.
Total mobilization was accompanied not only by increased rationalization
and intensified control but also by heightened levels of violence. Holquist does
not interpret the deportations and depredations visited upon the front-zone pop-
ulations by the tsarist armies as an example of primitive military tactics befitting
an archaic absolute regime. European powers in their colonial capacity had mani-
pulated local inhabitants – counting, deporting, displacing, punishing,
rewarding, even slaughtering – for reasons of state; Russia had done so in relation
to its own conquered territories. Now Russia did so as part of the conduct of
war. Bolshevik tactics, both in relation to subject populations and in regard to
food supply and military mobilization, merely extended the legacy of the wartime
administration.
During the Civil War, Holquist notes, all parties to the conflict – Red,
White, and Green – used many of the same war-driven emergency techniques
and showed the same ruthless disregard for the welfare of local people. One won-
ders, however, whether the atrocities committed by all sides on a massive scale
belong to the new style of modern warfare and wartime administration or to the
old-style ferocity of civil war? The Bolsheviks innovated, Holquist believes, not
in their role as combatants but once they had won. Intensifying the violence at-
tached to the enforcement of state policies, they applied the techniques learned
in wartime to the goal of social transformation. As in Fascist Italy and Nazi Ger-
many, he points out, the war became the model for a new kind of regime: in
Russia, total war became total revolution. “What distinguished the Bolsheviks is
the extent to which they turned tools originally intended for total war to the new
ends of revolutionary politics” (651).
Holquist thus posits World War I as the moment in which wartime
mobilization, of a modern, unprecedentedly thorough sort, penetrated all aspects
of social organization, reshaping society itself as a function of war. His analysis
derives from Michael Geyer’s oft-cited article on the militarization of Europe. 6

6
Michael Geyer, “The Militarization of Europe, 1914–1945,” in The Militarization of the Western
World, ed. John R. Gillis (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989). See also James C.
Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), chap. 3 (“Authoritarian High Modernism”).
690 L AURA E NGELSTEIN

Holquist applies Geyer’s insights to identify the underlying character of the So-
viet regime in its full maturity. According to this model, the Civil War was not
an aberration, but the first instance of the root dynamic of Soviet rule. It was the
opening move in the regime’s project of penetrating the social organism, by re-
lentlessly mobilizing society to combat the enemy threat. The Bolsheviks did not
invent the enemy of the people, but they endowed the concept with a long life.
Identified with German entrepreneurs in the Moscow city riots of 1915, after
February 1917 the enemy was not only the German, but also the much despised
bourgeoisie.7 The image was embodied in the Whites of the Civil War and in the
ominous series of wreckers, traitors, and class villains of the 1930s. It emerged
during World War II in the actual figure of the Nazi soldier, but also in the sus-
pected domestic traitors concealed in occupied zones. The Soviet Union was for
most of its existence on a war footing.
Lenin was acutely aware, however, that revolution was a dangerous business
– from the point of view not only of the old regime, but of the revolutionary one
as well. Violence must be mobilized against the enemy. No mercy must be
shown the political or social opponent, identifiable not merely by his deeds but
by his objective interests. Lenin had no scruples about obliterating the enemy of
the revolution. 8 The Red Terror was necessary also because the violence of revo-
lution, once unleashed, could easily be turned against its leaders. The Party
existed to control not only the ideological direction of the masses but also the
deployment of their destructive force. Terror was a means of self-discipline, a
way of channeling violence while preserving it as a weapon of choice.
As reflected in the pattern established by these essays, Russian rulers seem to
have abused their right to administer violence at times when their authority to
rule was itself in doubt. The Time of Troubles, the revolutions of 1905 and
1917, and the Civil War stand out as moments of crisis. The Provisional Gov-
ernment might seem to be an exception. Continuing to prosecute the war, it
enhanced the degree of state control over the mobilization of resources. Its agents
had difficulty, however, extracting grain from the reluctant population and even-
tually turned to the military for help. The Provisional Government did not,
however, employ a strategy of terror in its own defense. In the end, it lost its
shaky hold on power and was overthrown without a fight. Like the law-abiding
Adrianov faced with rabid crowds, the leaders of the February Revolution were

7
Boris I. Kolonitskii, “Antibourgeois Propaganda and Anti-‘Burzhui ’ Consciousness in 1917,”
Russian Review 53 (April 1994), 183–96; and Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the
Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999),
chap. 6 (“Images of the Enemy”).
8
The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archives, ed. Richard Pipes, with David Brandenberger;
trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 50, 56, for example.
 WEAPON OF THE WEAK 691

hamstrung by their own principles and by the absence of reliable military and
popular support. Perhaps it was weakness that did them in. Kerenskii attempted
a coup, in the person of Kornilov, but the effort failed. Kornilov had, for one
thing, threatened to restore the death penalty, a move that affronted the politi-
cized masses.
Holquist stresses the continuity between the procurement policies of the
Provisional Government and those pursued by the Bolsheviks, noting, of course,
that the latter used more violent methods in getting people to comply. Perhaps
the liberals and moderate socialists might have come to this point had they re-
mained in charge. It seems to me, however, that the differences outweigh the
similarities. Coercion and terror are not the same thing. The Bolsheviks’ ferocity
can be explained in part by the fragility of their hold on state institutions after
1917, but, as Holquist recognizes, their violence was not merely defensive. They
had a principled commitment to violent social transformation.
While Italy and Germany eventually succumbed to fascism as an after-effect
of World War I, other Western powers managed to combine methods of techno-
cratic management with participatory political regimes. Not so the Soviet system,
where violence became a hallmark both of rhetoric and political practice. Hol-
quist acknowledges the role of ideology in shaping this outcome, although he
does not discuss the particular culture of intellectual intolerance and authori-
tarian leadership generated in the Bolshevik Party. He insists, however, that the
character of the new state can be understood only as the continuation of insti-
tutions and processes already developed by the wartime state and common to all
participating nations. He nevertheless concedes that the Red Terror, directed
against the state's own citizens, “was a signal departure in state use of violence”
(646). We return to the question of what made the Soviet Union different.
Kenneth Pinnow’s discussion of early Soviet responses to suicide addresses
the question of how attitudes toward violence affected everyday life. He notes
that Soviet denunciations of suicide in the 1920s rejected the individual’s right to
dispose of his or her own life. Only the collective had the authority to impose
ultimate solutions; in short, murder was a monopoly of the state. He concludes
that “[m]any of the practices associated with the problem of party ‘illnesses’ such
as suicide – including the ritualistic isolation and exclusion of ‘unhealthy’ ele-
ments – later found expression in the physical suppression of ‘alien’ social groups
and the violent terror of the 1930s” (675).
Certainly, the reaction to suicide was one of many examples of the state
deciding who was fit to belong, that is to live, and who deserved to be excluded,
a sentence often synonymous with death. The power over life and death that all
states exercise within certain bounds was exercised by the Soviet regime without
regard to legal restraints or rule-governed institutions. The arbitrary exercise of
692 L AURA E NGELSTEIN

violence, disguised as class warfare, was the hallmark of revolutionary terror and
became the defining feature of Stalinist rule. But there was a logic nevertheless to
the justification of violence. If all social processes were modeled on military
campaigns, then suicides were deserters from the front lines. It was not so much
the victims’ abuse of violence that earned them censure, as their withdrawal from
the fray. In the ideologically saturated world of state socialism, death must have a
meaning; self-sacrifice must benefit the cause; executions must protect the Party’s
interests. Suicide in any context, as Irina Paperno has pointed out, frustrates the
victim’s survivors because its meaning is hard, if not impossible, to discern.9 The
Soviet collective rushed into the vacuum of meaning and imposed a moral and a
morality of its own. Many of the responses to the individual cases quoted by
Pinnow sound not very different from the terms in which we react to suicide
ourselves. But the Party’s view of suicide as a form of protest or insubordination
was a comfort: it kept the regime and its values at the center of the tale.
Clearly, the function of violence in Soviet everyday life cannot be judged on
the basis of this one example. The puzzle remains. Processes common to all the
combatants in World War I in Russia contributed to shaping a political system
distinctive in the scale of violence it directed at its own members (think only of
the Gulag and the toll on the Party itself). These methods, focused largely on
internal targets, rival, in their scope and bestiality, the horrors inflicted by the
Nazi regime on actual, not fantasied, outsiders. If this judgment remains contro-
versial, it is because Soviet ideals still inspire admiration in some quarters. The
regime’s “achievements” are still applauded, not least by many of its survivors.
For all their secularism, Soviet apologists have always claimed the moral high
ground. So did Spiridonova, despite her twisting of the truth in the service of a
truth she considered more important.
As for historians, we have buried the Russian Sonderweg, and along with it
the model of the chronically over-powerful and therefore abusive authoritarian
state: from Ivan the Terrible to Joseph Stalin. Based on this set of essays alone, it
would seem that the legacy of violence is a function not of overweening state
power, or of some culturally embedded genetic code, but of an underdeveloped
state – of the disproportion between imperial ambition and administrative com-
mand. The character of state institutions has a direct impact, moreover, on the
extent to which violence affects social relations. Here, Dunning, to some extent,
as well as Lohr and Boniece, touch on the question of when and why inhibitions
against brutality lose their vigor. The survival of revolutionary-style domestic rule
into the postwar Soviet decades, a subject barely addressed here, emphasized the
arbitrary, unpredictable, and multi-directional character of violence, encouraged

9
Irina Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia (Ithaca, NY and London:
Cornell University Press, 1997).
 WEAPON OF THE WEAK 693

from above and implemented from all sides. This kind of state-driven violence
was not so much inflicted upon a passive social organism, as it was exercised by
society against itself. The Soviet Union’s inhabitants were at once its greatest
perpetrators and its greatest victims.10 Yet, the participatory dimension of the
Terror, so essential to its radical thrust, does not make it “democratic,” nor does
it diminish the role and responsibility of the leaders and ideologues who
conceived and sustained it. But these are issues for another discussion.

Dept. of History
Yale University
P.O. Box 208324
New Haven, CT 06520-8324 USA
laura.engelstein@yale.edu

10
Jan T. Gross argues that the weakest members of the community suffer most from the state’s
failure to regularize the power it wields. He also suggests that Soviet-style rule involved what he
calls the privatization of the state: social coherence is destroyed when individuals use the state appa-
ratus for private ends. This does not mean, however, that individuals – or groups – achieve political
power. All remain potential victims as well as agents, though some more than others. See his Rev-
olution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).