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Book Review
Europe: Early Modern and Modern
| Jörg Baberowski. Der Feind ist überall: Stalinismus im Kaukasus. Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. 2003. Pp. 882.
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| Regional studies is a growing field in Soviet history. This is a welcome trend, spurred by the opening of archives and libraries long inaccessible to foreign researchers. As Jörg Baberowski rightly notes, the Soviet Union was a multiethnic state with a large Muslim population and much more than merely Moscow and Leningrad. Yet the field has its own pitfalls. The Soviet empire consisted of numerous regions, unique to one degree or another and all worthy of historical studies in their own right, but overemphasizing their uniqueness risks losing sight of the larger picture. Since no single region was truly representative of the country as a whole, generalizing on the basis of one region threatens to render its particular significance almost moot. |
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Baberowski's massive tome of nearly 900 pages is a somewhat mixed study of one region in the former Soviet Union. Baberowski focuses on the Transcaucasus, particularly Azerbaijan (with the oil city Baku as its capital), which he notes "represented the imperium in a miniature—all elements that afforded tense relations to the Tsarist state and the Soviet Union were combined here'' (p. 17). Baberowski begins his study in the first half of the nineteenth century (when Russians came as "civilizers''), but as the subtitle of this volume suggests, he is interested in Stalinism as manifested in the Transcaucasus. |
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The October 1917 Revolution, which the Bolsheviks staged to gain power in Petrograd, led to a bloody civil war in the country, including Azerbaijan. Unlike that of Russia proper, the revolution in Azerbaijan assumed the character of what Baberowski calls "ethnic cleansing." The revolution excluded the Muslims (who accounted for the majority of the urban poor and the rural population) from power, leading to massacres of Muslims (including women and children) committed mainly by Armenians, according to Baberowski. Taking issue with the classic The Baku Commune, 1917–1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (1972) by Ronald Suny, Baberowski maintains that the famed Baku Commune was no commune at all for Muslims: it was a "stronghold [Hort] of terror and pogrom'' (p. 138). |
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After the civil war, there as elsewhere, the Bolsheviks sought to secure civil peace (instead of civil war) by way of "indigenization'': the promotion of native languages, cultures, administration, and education. Baberowski sees the experiment carried out in Nakhichevan from the mid-1920s as the beginnings of Stalinism. Nakhichevan, an autonomous republic within Azerbaijan bordering Armenia, Turkey, and Persia, had a mixed population of Azerbaijani, Armenians, and Persians. It was a strikingly "backward'' enclave where, in the mid-1920s, there was no telephone or telegraph service, and eighty-seven percent of the urban population were infected with syphilis and typhus. The center had no control over this area, which was ruled by feudal clans and family circles. Even Aleksei Rykov, a moderate within the Bolshevik Party, saw no other solution than a resort to terror in order to bring the region to "reason'' (p. 544). After extensive purges amid stubborn local resistance, however, nothing appears to have changed in Nakhichevan. All the same, the Bolsheviks believed in the power of political terror with which they, like their tsarist predecessors, were determined to transform ("civilize'') "backward'' society. Indeed, according to Baberowski, this is how history developed from the late 1920s in the campaigns for cultural revolution, dekulakization, wholesale collectivization, and rapid industrialization. |
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