The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Russian Anti-War Movement, 1914-1917 by MichaelMelanconReview by: Maureen PerrieThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 73, No. 2 (Apr., 1995), pp. 340-341Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4211815 .

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340 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

Melancon, Michael. The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Russian Anti-War Move- ment, 19I4-I9I7. Ohio State University Press, Columbus, I 99 I. xii + 368 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $42.50.

MICHAEL Melancon's monograph is a welcome addition to the slowly growing literature on the Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) Party. It focuses on the SRs in in the period from the outbreak of war in I9I4 through to the February Revolution of I9I7, with a brief first chapter on the party from I907 to I9I4, and an even briefer Epilogue on February-October I 9I7. Melancon argues that the majority of SRs, both in Russia and in the emigration, were opposed to Russia's participation in the war, and conducted active anti-war and anti- government propaganda. The anti-war SRs - whose views ranged from internationalism to defeatism - had much in common with the anti-war factions of the other revolutionary parties: the Menshevik-Internationalists, the Mezhraiontsy, the Bolsheviks and the anarchists; and Melancon suggests that these anti-war socialists comprised a wartime 'left bloc' that prefigured the leftist coalition of late I9I7. Melancon's last two chapters are devoted to the role of the SRs in the winter of I 9I6-I 7 and in the February Revolution. Here he develops a revisionist analysis that rejects conventional wisdom about the spontaneity of the February Revolution; he attributes a major causative role in the downfall of tsarism to the left bloc in general and to the SRs in particular.

Melancon has made use of a wide range of primary material from various sources and this enables him to paint a fuller picture of SR wartime activities than has previously been available to us. His conclusions, however, tend to be more radical than his evidence really warrants. In view of the widespread arrests of SRs and other anti-war activists that Melancon describes, it is difficult to accept that their influence on the 'masses' was as great as the author claims. The SR organization in Petrograd, for example, was destroyed by police raids in July I9I6, but Melancon argues that an informal workers' committee headed by the left-wing SR P. Aleksandrovich played an important part in the revival of party committees in some districts and factories. The evidence for this is rather scrappy, however, as the author's wording indicates: 'Iurenev ... reported thatjust before the February Revolution the SRs carried out strong agitation in the Nevskii and Moskovskii districts and somewhat less systematic agitation in the Vasileostrovskii District ... SR party organizations of some kind therefore existed in the Moskovskii, Nevskii, and Petrogradskii districts and probably in the Vasileostrovskii District ...' (p2I0); 'On the evening of 23 February, the SRs and SDs of the Vyborg District held a joint conference, which suggests the existence ofan SR district organization' (p. 2 I I).

The author's argument about the role ofSR activists in the February Revolution is equally unconvincing. Historians agree that the mutiny of the Petrograd garrison, on 26 and 2 7 February, was the critical event in the development of the revolution, yet Melancon can only speculate about the role of the SRs in the soldiers' mutiny: 'Clear evidence about socialist activities within the Petrograd garrison on 26 and 27 February is scarce, but logic suggests that the SRs and other Left socialists would hardly have failed to encourage and direct the Petrograd soldiers' uprising when it came' (pp. 257-58). Finally, as Melancon

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REVIEWS 34I

himself recognizes, his claims about the influence of leftist and anti-war socialists in the winter of I9 6- I 7 accord ill with evidence of mass support for the moderate socialist bloc of 'revolutionary defensist' Right SRs and Right Mensheviks immediately after the February Revolution. The author's attempts to resolve this 'historiographical dilemma' (p. 277) are plausible, but too brief to be entirely convincing. Melancon's revisionist arguments are not always persuasive, but his study is nevertheless thought-provoking, and it raises some interesting new questions about the politics of 19 I 7.

Centre for Russian and East European Studies MAUREEN PERRIE

University ofBirmingham

Kemiliiinen, Aira. Suomalaiset, outo Pohjalan kansa: Rotuteoriat ja kansallinen identiteetti. Historiallisia Tutkimuksia, No. I77. Suomen Historiallinen Seura, Helsinki, I 993. 4 I 7 pp. Notes. Illustrations. Tables. Bibliography. Index. FIM I20.00 (paperback).

THE title of this book translates as The Finns, the Strange Nordic Nation. Since the beginning of recorded history the Finns have lived in their present homeland as a small deviant community, with a wholly distinctive language and culture, between the Scandinavians to the west and the Russians to the east. They have been a problem and a challenge to racial theorists because they are difficult to fit into their broad classification. The Finnish people are also one of the group of European peoples who, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, sought to establish a national identity and subsequently to set up their own national sovereign state. This aspiration was realized by the Finnish people after 1917. It was natural and inevitable that current theories about racial identity played a part in establishing the international image of the Finns and their own self-image. For these reasons alone the subject matter of this book is potentially useful and important for the understanding of Finnish history. The stated intention of the book is first to survey what the racial theorists have said about the Finnish people and then to analyse how this has created images of the Finnish nation and, furthermore, how the Finns reacted to the theories and used them in the process of establishing their national identity. It has to be said that the execution of the project has been flawed and it has not realized its full potential.

A minor problem is that the author is emotionally involved with the subject matter of the book and has found it difficult at times to maintain the necessary level of academic detachment. For example in chapter i 8, which discusses the place of Finns in German racial theories from the I 920s, the author is critical of Finnish commentators who have asserted that between the wars a large section of Finnish bourgeois intellectuals were racist chauvinists and sym- pathetic to Nazi race theories. This is an assertion that can be discussed on an objective, academic level. Instead it is dismissed in emotive terms (pp. 292-

94), as for example, 'the Finns were the targets of racism, not its supporters'. History affords many examples of how communities can be, at the same time, the objects of racist prejudice and racist themselves. Such lapses, and this is not the only one, into emotive polemic undermine confidence in the book's

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