Review

General Books

Although there has not been an international war in Europe since 1945, the number of European refugees and displaced persons has not declined. If we add to it cohorts from wars in Asia and Africa, civil wars in Latin America and the Middle East, and civil strife on a global scale, it is obvious that the magnitude of population displacements in the world, in the twentieth century, has grown and grown, and does not seem likely to diminish soon in the twenty-first. The commonality of problems (social, political and economic) engendered by this displacement, the various attempts to deal with them as well as the long-term effect of such attempts, and the moods and movements responding to the displacement, are summed up in the somewhat awkward but meaningful abstraction Gatrell uses to encompass it: "Refugeedom." While the subject of refugees is not exactly new, it has rarely been treated comprehensively, nor have its ongoing implications been deeply probed. Gatrell's study is a solid example of what needs to be done to explore it. Although Russian historians have been aware of its massive scale, they have not considered its impact on an insecure and embattled government, and there has been no previous attempt to trace the ongoing effects of refugees on what was to become the major calamity of Russian history or the malign fate of interwar Europe.	1
In Imperial Russia the western borderlands were inhabited by populations acquired, sometimes roughly, through imperial enterprise. The loyalty of these peoples to their imperial government was in grave doubt. Poland had a dramatic history of rebellion. Jews, subject to restrictions (geographical, social and economic) and for the most part living in dire poverty, were not to be trusted--a distrust which was reinforced by the ideological anathema felt for them by the right-wing Russian nationalists of the upper echelons of the officers' corps. German farmers settled in the Ukraine were probably loyal enough, but after all, they were German. Austrian propaganda for an independent Ukraine had some impact in a region where Ukrainian, denied the status of a national language, had been relegated to the condition of being a mere dialect of Russian, and where aspirations for autonomy had been disappointed. Russian field commanders like the notorious General N. N. Ianushkevich, had in a number of instances ordered great swathes of the local population removed even before any war-time fighting took place. On the Turkish front great numbers of Armenians poured into Russian territory to escape Turkish persecution. With the Russian defeats of 1915 and 1916 and German occupation of the Baltic and large parts of Poland, the flood-tide of refugees swelled. Estimates of their number vary, but there were millions. Russian railroads were already overstrained by the needs to supply the front and urban areas. Gatrell's metaphor of "a whole empire walking" is quite apt.	2
Like the railroads, the government was subject to severe overstrain. The process of accommodating this "walking empire" was complicated by a political struggle that had been going on in Russia since the Reform Era of the 1860s, and had been exacerbated rather than resolved by the 1905 Revolution. It was a struggle between a nascent civil society and an entrenched centralized bureaucracy; between administrative centralization under an autocrat and local autonomy. On one side there was the Union of Zemstvos along with the Union of Towns; on the other, autocratically appointed committees. During the war years, both sides did some remarkable work and trained many people to deal professionally with mass-scale displacement, a training that came in handy in the later, even more turbulent years of revolution and civil war. Nevertheless, their intense political rivalry and mutual mistrust could hardly have benefited refugeedom. Nostalgia for a lost native land and anxiety that national traditions might be lost to children growing up in refugeedom could not but be intensified among refugee parents as the war lumbered on. The displeasure of the central government could not prevent schools being founded that taught in the national languages and promulgated the historico-mythical claims of the minor nationalities. Sometimes class rather than national identities took deeper hold. In some borderlands of the Empire, social class and nationality were not separate identities. As social turbulence increased in Russia with the disasters of the war, refugees added to the turmoil.	3
Gatrell's research is broad and meticulous, though he ends his account in 1918, and he does not go into the further displacements of revolution and civil war. Of course, it is not possible to demonstrate precisely what elements of refugeedom contributed what to the civil war, the Soviet Union, or the formation of post-Versailles Europe. Yet Gatrell makes it more than clear that it cannot be overlooked as a meaningful factor. He is lucid and articulate. He demands of the reader a certain considerable background in modern European and Russian history, which makes his book more suitable for upper-class collegiate seminars and almost indispensable for graduate students in modern Russian and European history, rather than for more introductory lecture courses, where however, it should be useful to the instructor.	4
Sidney Monas University of Texas at Austin

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.