Europe-Asia Studies

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Red Patriots against White Patriots: Contesting

Patriotism in the Civil War in North Russia

Liudmila G. Novikova

To cite this article: Liudmila G. Novikova (2019): Red Patriots against White Patriots:
Contesting Patriotism in the Civil War in North Russia, Europe-Asia Studies, DOI:
10.1080/09668136.2019.1571167

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2019.1571167

Published online: 05 Mar 2019.

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 EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES, 2019
https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2019.1571167

Red Patriots against White Patriots:

Contesting Patriotism in the Civil War in
North Russia

LIUDMILA G. NOVIKOVA

Abstract
This article uses the example of Arkhangel’sk province in North Russia to examine how the two main parties in
the Russian Civil War—the Bolsheviks and the White armies—used elements of nationalism and xenophobia to
delegitimise their enemies. It reveals the evolution of patriotic rhetoric, first used by the Whites to discredit the
Bolsheviks as German agents, and then by the Reds to delegitimise the Whites as agents of the Entente. In the
1920s anti-Allied sentiments became the main trope in the memory of the civil war both among émigrés and in
the Soviet North.

IN 1926, THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE SOVIET JOURNAL Proletarian Revolution

(Proletarskaya revolyutsiya) received the manuscript of the Bolshevik A. I. Mosorin’s
memoirs of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and Russian civil war as they unfolded in one
of the counties of Arkhangel’sk province in North Russia. In his memoirs, Mosorin
described in vivid and elaborate detail his arrest and interrogation by the White forces
who controlled the region together with Entente brigades for much of the civil war.
Mosorin included in the text his recollections of an exchange he had with White
investigators: it was a curious example of ‘Red patriotism’, or of what quite a few
participants in the conflict took it to mean during and after the civil war. According to
Mosorin, during the March 1919 interrogation, he succeeded not only in presenting the
Bolsheviks as Russian patriots, but in accusing the Whites of betraying the Motherland:

The interrogation wrapped up exceedingly quickly. ‘Are you a Bolshevik?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Did you work in
the soviet?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Did you participate in overthrowing the Kerensky government?’ ‘Do you

The author is grateful to Martin Beisswenger and to the participants of the international conferences ‘Patriotic
Cultures during the First World War’ (St Petersburg, 11–13 June 2014) and ‘Russia 1917 and the Dissolution of
the Old Order in Europe: Biographical Itineraries, Individual Experiences, Autobiographical Reflections’
(Basel, 13–15 September 2017) for their insightful comments on this article’s drafts. This article was
prepared within the framework of the Basic Research Programme at the National Research University
Higher School of Economics and supported within the framework of a subsidy by the Russian Academic
Excellence Project ‘5–100’.

© 2019 University of Glasgow

https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2019.1571167
2 LIUDMILA G. NOVIKOVA

acknowledge your guilt?’ They asked many of these kinds of questions, and my answer was roughly
as follows: ‘You can judge us, because right now we are in your hands … but we think it would be
fairer to judge you for your betrayal of the region when you facilitated the international vultures’
plunder. … We do not conceal that we expropriated the kulaks and the traders, the large-scale and
the petty bourgeoisie … we broke up the Constituent Assembly—we did all of this, and we think
that we were fully correct to do so and we carried out the will of the exploited and oppressed; but
you did something else, you brought forward a treason case—you are the traitors and, by all
rights, it should be you sitting in the dock’.1

Mosorin added that history had already reached a verdict regarding who had really ‘disgraced
Russia’ and had paved the way to an ‘Allied occupation’ of the country. He praised ‘the
Russian people who, through unbelievable sacrifices and suffering … attained their own
freedom’.2
Mosorin’s recollections were never published because, in the editors’ opinion, he narrated
‘not much and little of interest’ regarding his main subject, that is the establishment of Soviet
power in the North.3 Nevertheless, the text is exceptionally revealing for its mixture of class
and patriotic rhetoric that was by no means rare during the civil war and the early Soviet
period. The language of patriotism was used not only in Red and White propaganda but
also by the members of various military formations and witnesses to the conflict to make
sense of the civil war.
The emergence and evolution of the national and patriotic rhetoric of the civil war era and, in
particular, its regional dynamics, have largely remained outside the focus of historians. The
dramatic collapse of the Russian Front of World War I served for many contemporaries and
historians as a vivid demonstration of the weakness of mass patriotic feelings in Russia.
According to some researchers, the patriotic mobilisation of the World War I era, abundantly
evident in August 1914, disappeared well before the beginning of the civil war under the
pressure of defeat on the Front, battle fatigue, and growing social and economic strains in
the rear.4 As a result, the revolution and civil war that followed were interpreted, first and
foremost, as social and political conflicts that could not be explained in patriotic terms.5
Patriotic sentiments of the civil war era, if they are mentioned at all in historical works, are
often treated as the preserve of the military and educated elites. Scholars noted nationalistic
and statist traits in the ideology and propaganda of the Whites who borrowed these ideas from
the ideological repertoire of the late imperial period. Researchers also routinely acknowledge
the political cunning of Lenin who—once the revolution failed to spread swiftly across
Europe—did not hesitate to appeal to Russian patriotic sentiment to defend the Bolshevik
government against foreign intervention. His famous decree ‘The socialist fatherland is in
danger!’ of February 1918, as well as the Soviet press’s presentation of the Polish
invasion of Soviet Russia in spring 1920 as a Russian national war, helped generate a
wave of support to the Soviet regime among tsarist officers and the intelligentsia. At least

1
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii (hereafter RGASPI), f. 70, op. 3, d. 542,
ll. 19–20. Mosorin A. I. Kak organizovalas’ Sovetskaya vlast’ v Kemskom uezde (manuscript).
2
RGASPI, f. 70, op. 3, d., 542, ll. 8, 25–26.
3
RGASPI, f. 70, op. 3, d., 542, l. 1а. Editors’ notation.
4
See, for example, Jahn (1995, pp. 62–3).
5
The social history approach to the Russian Revolution is exemplified in Sheila Fitzpatrick’s study (1984).
 CONTESTING PATRIOTISM IN THE CIVIL WAR 3

some members of Russia’s educated elites started to view the Soviet government as the
defender of the Russian state. One of the best-known examples of this conversion was the
Smenovekhovstvo or ‘changing signposts’ movement among Russian post-revolutionary
émigrés who were prepared to come to terms with the Soviet regime in the interests of the
Russian nation (Hardeman 1994; Duncan 1998).
But how prominently were patriotic themes represented in the propaganda of both Reds
and Whites, during and after the war, on a local level? How did ordinary participants in
the conflict—not just military elites or intellectuals—react to patriotic appeals? To what
extent did participants in the civil war use the language of patriotism to describe their
experiences? Also, what role did the patriotic mobilisation play on specific fronts of the
civil war and what particular local factors contributed to its intensity on a regional level?
Finally, how did the changing political and military situation affect the patriotic rhetoric of
both Reds and Whites? Although current historiography provides some generalisations
about Red and White patriotisms, it fails to capture its regional dynamics as well as the
evolution of patriotic discourse during and after the civil war.
This article on the example of one region—Arkhangel’sk province in North Russia—
analyses how patriotic rhetoric was used by Reds and Whites during the civil war, how it
changed over time, and what place patriotic motifs occupied in the memories of the civil
war among Russian post-revolutionary émigrés, as well as in the Soviet North in the
1920s. I examine patriotic mobilisation in the region using the period’s pamphlets, press
and state decrees as primary sources, as well as memoirs, correspondence, drafts of radio
transmissions and exhibitions about the civil war in the 1920s.6 Arkhangel’sk province
provides a fine example for analysing patriotic mobilisation. From 1918 through the first
months of 1920, it was one of the main fronts in the civil war. For the greater part of
1918, this territory remained at risk of German invasion. Furthermore, the area saw active
intervention by the countries of the Entente: from the spring and summer of 1918 to the
autumn of 1919, British, American, French, Italian and other Allied detachments
participated in military operations as part of an Allied expeditionary force. This region had
a primarily Russian population and there was little mobilisation of ethnic minorities in the
province.7 Therefore, when employing patriotic rhetoric, both sides in the conflict tried to
appeal to Russian ethnic or imperial patriotism.
Active involvement in fighting on the side of the Whites of the Entente expeditionary
forces made the Northern Front different from other anti-Bolshevik fronts. Consequently,
the Allied intervention in the civil war occupied a more prominent place in the local
patriotic rhetoric of both Reds and Whites. Still, despite this specificity of the civil war in
the North, its example reveals quite clearly how and why patriotic discourse developed
and evolved during the war years and in its aftermath. This regional material allows us to
trace how Red and White propaganda borrowed from the patriotic mobilisation of the

6
Although visual materials such as posters, postcards and film were used by both Reds and Whites in their
propaganda during the Civil War (see, for example, Bonnell 1999, pp. 188–207), visual materials were not very
widespread on the Northern Front and therefore are not discussed in detail in this article.
7
An exception is the Karelian national movement within some townships along the border with Finland,
which was not, however, an important factor in the struggle between Whites and Reds in the North. On
this, see Jääskeläinen (1965), Dubrovskaya (2005), Baron (2007).
4 LIUDMILA G. NOVIKOVA

World War I era. The Whites generally saw the civil war as the continuation and extension of
the epochal conflict with Germany. They emphasised the Bolsheviks’ ties to Germany, and
used elements of nationalism and xenophobia to define their enemies. The Bolsheviks’
propaganda also depicted their opponents as opportunistic agents of foreign powers and
enemies of the country’s interests. Still, as this article argues, their patriotic appeals
revealed as much continuity as evolution: it was not just foreigners but the ‘foreign
capital’ of Germany and the Entente that threatened the integrity and independence of the
Russian state. The Northern example illuminates both this continuity and change in the
patriotic discourse. It also reveals how the role of patriotism evolved with the changing
historical situation. It is argued here that the critical turning point was the end of World
War I on the Western Front in November 1918. The defeat of Imperial Germany
undermined the anti-Germanic discourse of the Whites and significantly helped the
patriotic mobilisation of the Reds, who assumed the role of defenders of the country
against ‘the imperialists of the Entente’ (Lenin 1974, p. 240). These patriotic motifs
survived the civil war and persisted in the memory of the conflict both among post-
revolutionary émigrés and in the Soviet North in the 1920s serving as one of the
precursors of the Stalinist-style national Bolshevism. Furthermore, it was not only political
and military elites but many ordinary participants in the conflict who used the language of
patriotism to describe their experiences in the civil war.

Arkhangel’sk province from World War I to the civil war

World War I provided an example for both Reds and Whites of how patriotic appeals could be
used as instruments of mass mobilisation. In the years of the global conflict, the unprecedented
scale of military mobilisation in Russia was accompanied by an equally unprecedented level of
patriotic mobilisation. Recent scholarship emphasises that World War I had a longer and deeper
nationalising influence in Russia than had previously been acknowledged. Mass mobilisation
and patriotic campaigns affected not only the army, but also public organisations and led to the
far-reaching dissemination of national and patriotic ideas among the urban and rural population
(Sanborn 2000; Lohr 2003; Retish 2008, pp. 22–63; Tumanova 2014; Stockdale 2016). This
was true not only for the central regions of the country but for the farthest reaches of the
empire. In distant Arkhangel’sk province, which stretched from the Finnish border to the
foothills of the Urals, 10.8% of all residents or 45.9% of all able-bodied male citizens were
drafted into general service in the army (Golovin 1939, p. 120). In the city of Arkhangel’sk,
home to many foreign merchants since the pre-Petrine period, the subjects of enemy
governments were arrested, the German school was closed and the Lutheran church was
forbidden to conduct its services in German (Troshina 2014, pp. 220–26). Even the
topographical landscape changed: following the change of Petersburg’s German name to the
Slavic ‘Petrograd’ in 1914, streets in Arkhangel’sk were also widely renamed on the orders
of the governor, to sever them from their German roots.8 Though the war’s economic

8
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Arkhangel’skoi oblasti (hereafter GAAO), f. 1, op. 4, t. 5, d. 1480, l. 138; f. 50,
op. 1, d. 1541, ll. 100–100ob. Correspondence and minutes of the Arkhangel’sk city duma sessions on the
renaming of streets, April 1916.
 CONTESTING PATRIOTISM IN THE CIVIL WAR 5

impact upon the province quickly became clear—the fishing industry declined, as did
deliveries of bread to this non-grain-producing region—the population’s belief in the
necessity of sacrifice to save the Fatherland was for the most part steadfast. As the district
gendarmes of the province reported, conscription into the army proceeded ‘with awareness
of the importance of the current moment’.9 Up until the revolution, instances of evading
military conscription were rare throughout the province.10
The collapse of the 300-year reign of the Romanov dynasty in February–March 1917 did
not initially influence the patriotic mood in Arkhangel’sk province. Throughout Russia, the
first months of the revolution saw outbursts of patriotism and mass volunteering into the army
(Stockdale 2004, pp. 80–1, 2016). In Arkhangel’sk province, too, the revolution spread under
the slogans of democracy and strengthening the collective struggle against ‘the Germans’.
Occupying leadership posts in the local organs of government, representatives of the
moderate socialist parties—Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and Mensheviks—took a
defencist (oborontsy) position. Only the local Bolsheviks advocated the necessity of
quickly ending the ‘imperialist war’ (Mymrin 1967, p. 34). However, they did not play a
significant role in the province’s politics over the course of 1917. Only in February 1918
did the Arkhangel’sk Bolsheviks manage, with direct intervention by the centre, to seize
control of the provincial government (Novikova 2018, pp. 47–8).
The Bolsheviks’ rise to power under anti-war banners in the centre of the country and
in the provinces did not, however, eliminate the threat of war. On 3 March 1918, the
Soviet government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany; officially, the
country withdrew from World War I. In many frontline provinces, however, and even
in those far away from the Front, such as the Northern region, fear of a German
invasion persisted. The peace treaty notwithstanding, German submarines continued to
prowl the northern seas. Moreover, the northern soviets feared the advance of Finnish
and German detachments into the region from the neighbouring territory of Finland
(Novikova 2018, p. 55).
In early 1918 even northern Soviet leaders were amenable to the idea of closer cooperation
with the Entente countries to defend the region from German aggression. The Murmansk
soviet concluded a verbal agreement in March with the Allies regarding their help to the
region, and later signed a formal treaty inviting Allied military assistance to forestall a
possible invasion by Finnish and German battalions. This agreement ultimately led the
Murmansk soviet to break with Moscow. In the summer of 1918, the Arkhangel’sk city
soviet was also considering reaching out to Russia’s Allies in the Entente for food
assistance (Kedrov 1930, pp. 115–65; US Department of State 1931, p. 475; Veselago
2006, pp. 117–29). Although in July 1918, Moscow emissaries attempted to organise
military mobilisation in the region to defend Arkhangel’sk against a possible advance of
Allied military forces, the local population was reluctant to fight the Allies. Violent
protests against mobilisation spread around the province. Resolutions by local peasant

9
GAAO, f. 1, op. 4, t. 5, d. 1336, ll. 31, 300–302; d. 1345. ll. 5, 83, 92. Reports of district gendarmes, July
1914–February 1915.
10
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter GARF), f. 102, op. 245, d. 167, ch. 4, l. 19.
Report by the head of the Arkhangel’sk gendarme administration A. Kormilev to the director of the
Department of the Police, 17 October 1916.
6 LIUDMILA G. NOVIKOVA

assemblies and district soviets declared that the population did not wish to fight against
‘trusted allies of Russia’, who were the only ones who could save the population of the
non-agricultural North from death by starvation (Kedrov 1927, pp. 71–3).
Under conditions of mass protests against unpopular Red mobilisation and inadequate
food supplies, an anti-Bolshevik uprising occurred in Arkhangel’sk on 2 August 1918.
The Supreme Administration of the Northern Region (Verkhovnoe Upravlenie Severnoi
Oblasti), later transformed into the Provisional Government of the Northern Region
(Vremennoe Pravitel’stvo), came to power in the city and in the province. It declared its
determination to defend the region from German aggression with the support of the
Entente troops, to establish a democratic government and resolve the food problem
(Novikova 2018, pp. 63–70).
Declaring the necessity of defending the country and the region from the Germans, the
anti-Bolshevik movement resurrected the World War I era image of the enemy. Even
though these fears of a German invasion were not realised,11 in the months that followed,
the White government actively fostered the myth of a German threat and did everything
possible to connect the struggle with Bolshevism within the country to an external
struggle with Germany.

The Northern Region and White patriotism during the civil war
The White movement’s main political objectives were to overthrow the Bolshevik
government and recapture the land that Russia had lost as a result of the Brest-Litovsk
treaty. By one means or another, these goals were upheld by all White governments
formed in the imperial peripheries in 1918 and 1919 (Kenez 1971, 1977; Smele 1996;
Katzer 1999; Smolin 1999; Brüggemann 2002). Although at first some Constitutional
Democrats, for example, hoped to uproot the Bolsheviks with the support of Germany
(Rosenberg 1974, pp. 301–23), an overwhelming majority of leaders and members of the
White movement still saw Germany as the main enemy of Russian nationhood. They
interpreted the civil war not as a new type of class or political confrontation, but as a
direct continuation of World War I, as the last struggle against Germany’s attempts to
establish rule over Russia through the Bolsheviks, who were considered German puppets.
All across the anti-Bolshevik periphery, White commanders reiterated claims that their
fight against the Bolsheviks was part of the war against Germany. This belief was shared
by the notorious Trans-Baikal Ataman Roman von Ungern-Sternberg and the White
General Konstantin Sakharov in Siberia (Smele 1996, pp. 220–21; Sunderland 2014,
p. 157). In South Russia, Petr Struve, a prominent Russian liberal politician, famously
noted in a speech in November 1919 that ‘everything … that we have experienced, and
continue to experience, is a continuation and transformation of the world war’ (quoted in
Holquist 2002, p. 2). Many Whites in the North, too, interpreted the civil war as the
extension of the European conflict. They sincerely believed that, without German support,

11
In the summer and autumn of 1918, under the conditions of renewed Allied attacks on the Western Front,
German activities in the Northern waters were reduced and German troops were gradually withdrawn from
Finland.
 CONTESTING PATRIOTISM IN THE CIVIL WAR 7

the Bolshevik Revolution would never have happened. As a result, for them, the struggle to
resurrect Russian statehood was inseparable from the struggle against the Germans.
The patriotic rhetoric of White governments in many respects was an evolution of the
patriotic discourse of World War I. In 1914, many political activists in Russia had decided
to abandon their opposition to the Tsarist regime and rally in defence of the interests of
the Russian government during the conflict with Germany. The 1917 Revolution further
reinforced this notion, transforming not only liberals but also many socialists into
supporters of the Russian state.12 After the Bolsheviks rose to power and conceded a
portion of imperial territory to the Germans at Brest, nationalism and statism became the
main slogans of the emerging anti-Bolshevik movement. In the spring of 1918 in the
capital, underground groups began to emerge with the aim of launching anti-Bolshevik
revolts in the provinces. Even the names of these groups—for example, the National
Centre (Natsional’nyi Tsentr) and the Union of the Regeneration of Russia (Soyuz
Vozrozhdeniya Rossii)—spoke of the necessity of saving the Russian national government
(Argunov 1919, pp. 3–7; Mel’gunov 1923, pp. 180–82; Velidov 1989, pp. 79–81).
The Supreme Administration of the Northern Region, established in Arkhangel’sk on 2
August 1918, consisted primarily of the members of the Union of Regeneration. Its
political programme reflected cabinet members’ understandings of themselves as leaders
of the patriotic front in the civil war. For example, in its first address to the population, the
Northern government accused the Bolsheviks of being ‘betrayers of Russia at Brest’, and
the first two points of its programme called for the restoration of ‘unified all-Russian
statehood’ and the defence of the Northern region and the country ‘from audacious
incursions upon its territory and the national independence on the part of Germany … and
other enemy states’.13 Attempting to explain how the Bolsheviks were able to establish
their power in the centre of the country without any resistance and even with the support
of some of the population, the head of the government, Nikolai Vasil’evich Chaikovskii, a
member of the Popular Socialist Party (Narodno-sotsialisticheskaya partiya), suggested
that the Bolsheviks were ‘a creature of Germany’ who artificially injected the ‘microbe of
class hatred … into the young national organism’. Only the unflinching attack of patriotic
forces with the support of the Allies would allow them to ‘cure’ the people of this
‘disease’ (cited in Mel’gunov 1929, pp. 23–5). The leaders of the Northern government
tried to organise a broad popular front—including both right and left elements—that
would be grounded on patriotic values, and they radically distanced themselves from the
internationalist Bolsheviks. For example, a Northern minister and member of the Socialist
Revolutionary Party, A. I. Gukovskii, suggested that the Bolsheviks had no right to call
themselves socialists because they lacked patriotism. He argued that ‘defence of one’s
Fatherland is something … that goes without saying’, that ‘socialist doctrine is still a
doctrine … that acknowledges the important role of the state’. Therefore, anyone who
could hand over part of the country to foreign invaders was ‘mistaken to consider himself
a socialist’ (Erofeev 2000, pp. 293–96).

12
On the Mensheviks, see, for example Galili and Nenarokov (1997).
13
Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporyazhenii Verkhovnogo Upravleniya Severnoi Oblasti i Vremennogo
Pravitel’stva Severnoi Oblasti, 1, Arkhangel’sk, 1918, pp. 6–7.
8 LIUDMILA G. NOVIKOVA

Regardless of the bitter confrontation between the different political currents within
the anti-Bolshevik movement, the necessity of saving the country from the Germans and
the Bolsheviks united all. For example, Captain Georgii Ermolaevich Chaplin, one of the
main organisers of the anti-Bolshevik coup in Arkhangel’sk and the first commander of
the Northern White forces, harshly criticised the first anti-Bolshevik cabinet, formed in
August 1918, for the excessive ‘party mindedness’ of its members, that is, for their affinity
toward the SR Party. He even tried to launch another coup in autumn to overthrow this
cabinet (Chaplin 1928, pp. 19–20, 26–7). However, his main goal was simply a more
resolute struggle against the Bolsheviks who ‘handed over the Motherland to dishonour
and theft by the Germans’ (Chaplin 1918). These views were also shared by General
Evgenii Karlovich Miller, who in January 1919 de facto succeeded Chaikovskii as the
head of the administration of the Northern Region and who, for many of his
contemporaries, was the personification of the White ‘dictatorship’ in the North. In his
view, the main achievement of the Whites in the region was the establishment of a
‘Russian territory under a Russian government’ that made it possible to launch struggle
against ‘usurpers’—the Bolsheviks and Germany (Miller 1928, p. 6). Not only officers but
also elected members of the local self-governments underscored the necessity to harness
all powers to awaken national feelings among the masses and in that moment of great
danger to develop a love for the Motherland among the people.14
Pamphlets circulating in the summer and autumn of 1918, issued by the White and Allied
command and addressed to the population of the Northern Region and Red Army soldiers
fighting on the other side of the Front, claimed direct links between Germany and the
Bolsheviks. For example, one of these flyers read: ‘Russian people! We seek to save the
Russian land and Russian bread from Germans and their hirelings, the Bolsheviks’ (cited
in Rasskazov 1928, pp. 17–8). Another flyer, written on behalf of the Allied command,
claimed: ‘We, Allies, are ready to send colossal reserves of flour and food to Russia, only
we desire that you, peasants, should ally with us and not help the Bolsheviks, who are
working together with the Germans and who have sold Russia to Germany’ (‘Ob
Arkhangel’skom fronte’ 1922, p. 300).
These patriotic appeals did not go unnoticed by the population. Occasionally, the patriotic
motifs were reproduced in resolutions by peasant assemblies and in telegrams that were sent
to Arkhangel’sk in summer and autumn 1918 from towns and villages in the region and
greeted the Allied troops. A characteristic example is this report from Vlas’evskaya district:

greeting the Allies as liberators from the German yoke placed upon the Russian people by the Brest
treaty through the agents of Germany, the Bolsheviks, the Vlas’evskaya district assembly expresses
the hope that the Allies will provision the population with bread, of which, as a consequence of this
season’s bad harvest, there is very little this year.15

In the above example, the reproduction of official patriotic rhetoric served to bolster the
district’s request for food aid. The peasantry also resorted to the language of patriotism

14
GAAO, f. 1865, op. 1, d. 152, ll. 1ob–4ob. Minutes of the Provincial zemstvo assembly, 11 September
1918; d. 148, l. 6. Minutes of the sixth Onega district peasant congress, 12 August 1918.
15
Vestnik Vremennogo Pravitel’stva Severnoi Oblasti, 2 November 1918.
 CONTESTING PATRIOTISM IN THE CIVIL WAR 9

when demanding fairness in military conscription, shaming those ‘who do not want to show
their patriotism’.16 As these examples reveal, during the civil war, the patriotic rhetoric
expressed by the Northern population was also used to legitimise the defence of local and
group interests.
However, there was one weak spot in White patriotic rhetoric, which placed an emphasis
on the nationwide war against the Germans and the ‘traitorous’ Bolsheviks: the need to
constantly demonstrate the connection between the Bolsheviks and the Germans. In late
summer 1918 this had already become difficult because, on the other side of the Front,
White soldiers saw not Germans but Russian peasants in uniform. Additionally, the
German battalions located in Finland, which had presented a threat to the region, were
being withdrawn at this time. The biggest blow to White patriotic propaganda came with
Germany’s defeat on the Western Front of World War I in 1918. The formal end of World
War I significantly strengthened the Bolsheviks’ position as defenders of the Russian state.
The Whites’ claims that the Bolsheviks held on to power only with the support of the
now-defeated Germany lost any credibility in the eyes of many White soldiers and the
local population.
At first, upon the conclusion of the armistice on the Western Front, many participants in
the civil war in the North anticipated the breakdown of Bolshevik defences. Allied planes
flew over the Red front and distributed flyers calling upon Red Army soldiers to defect:

Germany was destroyed on the fields of France and Belgium. Now, Germany continues its war on the
fields of Russia. Your commissars are its hirelings. They have gotten you mixed up in this using
every kind of lie and using German money, they have devastated the country, handed over
Russian gold, Russian goods, and Russian bread to Germany, they are leading you to the
slaughter! … Join the detachments fighting for the just cause, for the liberation of Russia.
(Vetoshkin 1927, p. 20; Ironside 1953, pp. 41, 50)

However, as weeks went by there was no sign that Bolshevik defences were about to collapse.
Moreover, agitation among the Allied contingents began to emerge in Northern Russia. The
Allied expeditionary forces in Arkhangel’sk and the region were originally part of the
Entente’s operations in World War I: to protect Allied military goods stockpiled in the
northern ports, to create a barrier against a possible German advance from the territory of
Finland, and to promote Russian patriotic forces in the fight against the Germans and the
Bolsheviks. Germany’s defeat scuttled these plans. While in the Allied capitals politicians
speculated on the fate of the expeditionary forces, in their ranks flare-ups of discontent
became more frequent (Ironside 1953, pp. 58–9, 112–14, 205).
Not only did Germany’s defeat not lead to the weakening of Red defences, it also
disrupted White propaganda. Against all odds, a part of the Northern White press
continued to claim that even a defeated Germany presented a danger for the region and for
the country. The newspaper Severnoe utro wrote that, even with the onset of peace,
‘Germany undoubtedly would strive to get to Russia, including to the North’, and claimed
that ‘the Russian people should beforehand be fenced off from the advance of German

16
‘Postanovlenie obshchego sobraniya grazhdan Yumzenskogo obshchestva 19 avgusta 1918 g.’, Vestnik
Vremennogo Pravitel’stva Severnoi Oblasti, 11 October 1918.
10 LIUDMILA G. NOVIKOVA

colonisation … in the name of patriotic duty for our unfortunate Motherland’ (Severnyi
1919). Other publications and public organisations toned down their anti-German rhetoric
and called upon people to rally under national and statist banners. As the Union of the
Intelligentsia (Soyuz Intelligentsii) declared in April 1919, it was necessary to reinforce ‘in
the consciousness of society and the people the idea of the government, Fatherland,
nation, law, and culture’. In its appeal, the Union said that ‘the truth of nationhood should
be called the supreme worldview’ and it ‘should combine with a vivid feeling of
patriotism, with love for the Fatherland and one’s nation’.17 Nationalism sometimes even
bordered on racism, when, for example, the Arkhangel’sk press emphasised the symbolic
role of the North as a centre of the White struggle. One of the newspapers remarked that
there was no coincidence that the reunion of Russia occurred with the active participation
of ‘Northerners, the descendants of the first settlers from ancient Novgorod, that is, pure
representatives of the great Russian nation’. National ‘purity’ was thus connected with the
fact that the Northerners had not been ‘spoiled’ by the Mongols, who had brutally
controlled the south and central regions of Russia in the thirteen to fifteenth centuries. The
newspaper thus made explicit ‘anti-Mongol’ sentiments to underscore the purity of the
Slavic race in the North.18
In spite of the intensification of statist and nationalist motifs in White propaganda, on the
whole, it was deprived of one of its main foundations by the defeat of Germany in autumn
1918. Moreover, the Whites’ earlier accusations that the Reds had allied with foreign
powers started to work against them in the new circumstances. Now the Reds took over
the patriotic campaign and emphasised the dependence of the White governments and
armies on foreign aggressors, the Entente. As will be discussed below, xenophobia and
calls for the defence of the ‘socialist Fatherland’ gradually occupied a more visible place
in Red propaganda in the region, paradoxically coexisting with the internationalism of
Bolshevik ideology.

The national facets of Red patriotism

The Bolsheviks saw the civil war, first and foremost, as a major class conflict. However, in
Red propaganda in the North, national as well as class motifs were abundant. When thinking
about the opposing sides in the civil war, many, like the Bolshevik Mosorin, distinguished
between patriots and ‘traitors’ of Russia. A mirror image of White propaganda, the
Bolshevik narrative in the North portrayed the Whites as foreign stooges, in this instance,
the Allied invaders. Bolsheviks, too, made active use of elements of nationalism and
xenophobia to secure the loyalty of the population. In contrast to the Whites, however,
they also underscored the imperialist nature of foreign aggression against Soviet Russia.
These patriotic motifs had been present on the Northern Front since the start of the
military confrontation, and intensified significantly from November 1918. Now, the
Bolsheviks could dismiss accusations of receiving support from the recently defeated

‘Ot soyuza intelligentsii’, Severnoe utro, 5 May 1919.

17
18
Vestnik Vremennogo Pravitel’stva Severnoi Oblasti, 28 March 1919.
 CONTESTING PATRIOTISM IN THE CIVIL WAR 11

Germany. By fighting White and Allied forces, the Reds could portray themselves as
defenders of the Russian state.
One of the first to formulate the idea of a Red Northern Front as a bastion against foreign
invasion was M. S. Kedrov, first commander of the Northeast section of the so-called
‘curtain’ (zavesa), the regional Red defence units. On 6 August 1918, days after the anti-
Bolshevik coup in Arkhangel’sk, he appealed to the people of the northern Arkhangel’sk,
Vologda and Olonets provinces to safeguard the Bolshevik government and the Russian
people:

Our former allies, the British, the French, and the Americans, who talk so much about their love
and friendship for the Russian people, have now showed their true colours: they insidiously
captured Arkhangel’sk. … They replaced their supposed love with blatant rabid hatred of the
Russian people, because the Russians did not want any more to take part in their predatory
war … because the Russian people drove out the landlords, grabbed back the wealth that the
factory owners had taken from the poor, and established the Soviet power—the power of the
poor over the rich. The Russian rich, having lost their power and their hopes of returning to
their former position of strength, appealed to foreign tsars, generals, and other predators for
help … they are shamelessly selling our free Russia, our worker-peasant Fatherland. (Ioffe
1982, p. 194)

In this interpretation, the Russian rich were not only the class enemies of workers but also
national traitors of the Russian people.
Kedrov’s patriotic appeal, according to which the class revolution gave rise not to
international solidarity but to the national revival of the Russian people in defence of the
Fatherland, was echoed in many Red pamphlets. Like the Whites, the Reds tried to appeal
to the patriotism of soldiers on the other side of the Front. In the summer and autumn of
1918, they flooded frontline areas with their pamphlets, which stated:

Whites! You write that you are defending your motherland from Bolsheviks. But do you know well
who these Bolsheviks are? The Bolsheviks in essence are Russia. But whom do you have? You,
yourselves, agree that you fight alongside the Allies, and that means that you fight against
Russia. … You don’t have your own power, you have the power of the Allies and the bourgeoisie.
(Bogovoi 1923, p. 69)

Another pamphlet with the signature of the chairman of a collective of communists from a
Red regiment, A. Larionov, asked White soldiers what they were fighting for:

For the motherland that you don’t have? For the freedom which foreign capitalists and Russian White
Guardists most brazenly trample upon … ? Who do you fight with, the Germans? No, in the Red
Army we do not have Germans, your enemies … . In the Red Army there is no one besides poor
people and workers. (Bogovoi 1923, pp. 70–1)

The claim that Russian statehood was threatened, first and foremost, not by the Germans,
but by the Allies gained even more weight after the armistice on the Western Front.
Pointing to the continued presence of Allied forces led by the British, Red
propagandists now stressed that the British were in the North not to fight the
12 LIUDMILA G. NOVIKOVA

now-defunct German threat but to pursue their own colonial ambitions. The Reds argued
that Russia could now become a victim of British imperialism, which aspired to gain
control of the country’s rich natural resources. In fact, there were no Allied plans for
colonising Russia, although Allied officials, politicians and entrepreneurs tried to turn
the British and American presence in the territory during the civil war to their
countries’ economic advantage, in particular, attempting to enhance access to the
Russian market (Kolz 1976; Kettle 1992; Foglesong 1995, p. 8). Still, Red
propagandists and even ordinary participants in the conflict often quoted Allies’
imperialist desires as the main reason for the intervention. Thus, speaking at the first
conference of the Arkhangelsk provincial Communist Party organisation in July 1919,
a Comrade Lindeman described the international situation as follows:

German imperialism … is fleeing Russia’s sick body … tearing off for itself the best possible pieces,
as it did with the Brest peace treaty. But the colossus of the Entente is not far behind … hurrying to
tear itself some titbits. This imperialism of the Entente took first the Murmansk coast and, in August,
it captured Arkhangel’sk.19

After the end of World War I, notions of the Entente’s colonial goals began to spread even
into the territories controlled by the Whites. In the spring of 1919, dissatisfaction with the
intervention was growing in the North, in particular among workers’ circles that were
getting more suspicious of the Allies’ true goals. Arkhangel’sk workers reproached the
local White government for cooperating with an external enemy. For example, in March
1919, at a rally in Arkhangel’sk on the anniversary of the February Revolution, shipyard
workers

openly criticised the local authorities as the humble servants and executors of the will of the Allied
imperialists, selling themselves for a ‘case of canned food’, desperate for the crumbs that fall from the
table of foreign guests. They admonished the authorities who sold the entire population of
Arkhangel’sk to British imperialists.20

Over time, even the liberal White press more openly wrote about the dangers of British
‘imperialism’. The newspaper Russkii Sever stated that the Allies were now trying to
exploit the temporary helplessness of the Russian North, to rob it, to grab ‘a choice
morsel’ and thus doom the region to poverty and extinction in the future.21
Toward the end of the civil war, many members of White armies, seeing that the
Bolsheviks, step by step, were bringing Russia’s peripheries under Moscow’s control,
started indirectly to recognise the role of patriotic Reds in rebuilding the country and to
sympathise with those officers of the tsarist army who fought on the Bolsheviks’ side. For

19
Otdel dokumentov sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii Gosudarstvennogo arkhiva Arkhangel’skoi oblasti
(hereafter ODSPI GAAO), f. 1, op. 1, d. 26, l. 4. Stenograms of the First Arkhangel’sk province conference
of the RKP(b), 13–14 July 1919.
20
ODSPI GAAO, f. 1, op. 1, d. 44, l. 41. Report of Comrade Turk, ‘Arkhangel’sk during the occupation,
August 1918–May 1919’, not later than 1 August 1919.
21
Russkii Sever, 5 March 1919.
 CONTESTING PATRIOTISM IN THE CIVIL WAR 13

example, Admiral V. K. Pilkin, one of the closest associates of General Nikolai Yudenich on
the White Northwestern Front, wrote in his diary on 7 March 1920:

All of my colleagues now serving the ‘Land of Soviets’, can say to me: ‘You, along with Estonians,
Finns, British … are against Russia, which we are defending with deeds and not just in words. We
restored it to its former borders … . If you are nationalists, you should be with us too, not with
predators, foreigners, and aliens’. (Pilkin 2005, pp. 295–96)

Pouring his torment into his diary, Pilkin wrote that he could not cooperate with the
Bolsheviks and ‘shake hands with people who are stained with heinous crimes’ (Pilkin
2005, p. 296). But, as his words demonstrate, what held him back were primarily moral
considerations, not ideological differences: he admitted that the Bolsheviks, probably even
more than the Whites, were defending Russia and had the country’s interests at heart.

White and Red patriotism in memories of the civil war in the 1920s
The year 1920 saw the collapse of the last White fronts. In the summer and autumn of 1919,
the Allied forces left Northern Russia following demoralisation in the expeditionary corps’
ranks and growing protests against the intervention in the Allied countries (Novikova
2018, pp. 106–7, 192–93). White Northern mobilised forces and volunteers held out until
February 1920, when the final defeat of the other major anti-Bolshevik armies forced them
to stop resisting. Taken together, the White movement in the Arkhangel’sk region was a
much broader phenomenon than the Allied intervention. Even in terms of military force,
the Allied troops did not play a decisive role on the Northern Front from the spring of
1919. Nevertheless, the intervention occupied a central place in the memoirs of the civil
war, among both Russian anti-Bolshevik émigrés and in the Soviet North.
Among Russian émigrés who evacuated to Europe from the Northern region, the Society of
Northerners (Obshchestvo Severyan) was founded at the initiative of General Miller, the former
commander of the Northern Front, in Paris in September 1924. This society, existing until the
second half of the 1930s, played a key role in shaping the memory of the White struggle on
the Northern Front.22 It collected memoirs from the members of the White movement in the
North, organised charity initiatives and held veterans’ meetings. At one of these meetings in
1926, Miller himself gave a report in which he discussed the relationship between the White
movement and the Allied intervention in the North. Speaking about the Whites, he
emphasised their heroism and their selfless attempts to reconstruct Russian statehood.
Meanwhile, he laid the main blame for the defeat of the White movement at the feet of the
Allies. He wrote that after World War I, the British had the choice either to leave or to stay,
and they stayed ‘not to fight the Bolsheviks, but for the political and economic seizure of the
region in order to colonise it, to convert it into a British concession, teeming with
immeasurable natural wealth’. In Miller’s opinion, it was the White government’s determined
attempts under his leadership to counteract this policy that lost it Allied support (Miller 1928,
pp. 6–7, 9–10). Other participants in the White struggle echoed Miller’s view. For example,
General Vladimir Marushevskii was confident that ‘the sons of the proud Albion could not

22
See, GARF, f. R-5867. The collection of the Society of Northerners; Novikova (2005).
14 LIUDMILA G. NOVIKOVA

imagine the Russians other than as a small, savage tribe [similar to that] of Indians or Malays or
something’. He believed that the British had ‘behaved in the North as if they were in a
conquered, not a friendly, country’ (Marushevskii 1926, pp. 28–9, 1927, p. 3). Colonel
Viacheslav Zhilinskii formulated the idea of British colonialist ambitions even more explicitly
in his letters. He argued that ‘British policy in the region was colonial policy, i.e. the one
they used against coloured peoples’ and that, in general, ‘foreign representatives pursued
their own interests and their own goals, sometimes to the detriment of Russian statehood’.23
When speaking of British hostility to Russia’s interests, the Northern Whites partly
continued in the tradition of Anglophobia that had quietly persisted in Russia during World
War I (Kolonitskii 1999). More important, however, was the desire of White officers and
commanders to explain the failure of the White movement by focusing not on their own
mistakes and miscalculations but on how the Allies had ‘stabbed them the back’. In
émigrés’ interpretations, the civil war in the North took on the characteristics of a patriotic
war on two fronts: against the internationalists, the Bolsheviks, on the one hand, and against
the ‘colonisers’, the British, on the other. In contrast to the war with the Reds, White
Northern veterans considered themselves victorious in this second fight because they had
been able to defend the North from complete submission to the interventionists.
The theme of defending the Fatherland from foreign intervention was also a persistent motif in
the Soviet North in the 1920s following the White defeat. Local newspapers and magazines, the
memoirs of participants of the civil war in the Arkhangel’sk region, commemorative monuments
and exhibitions, as well as public celebrations of the anniversaries of the revolution and the
victory of the Reds, all depicted the struggle against foreign intervention as a key episode in
the civil war in Russia’s North. Since the beginning of the 1920s, Soviet historical
publications had stressed that, during the civil war, there was a real danger of British
imperialism subduing the North. It was argued that the British ‘skilfully exploited the
weakness and helplessness of the borderlands’, seeking to draw ‘the rich region of Murmansk
and the White Sea into their colonies’ (N. N. 1923, pp. 23–35). In a 1927 Festschrift for the
anniversary of the revolution, 1917–1920: The October Revolution and the Intervention in the
North, published by the Arkhangel’sk Regional Commission on the History of the Communist
Party (Istpart), the word ‘intervention’ replaced ‘civil war’ in its title. Moreover, the authors
explicitly stated that, in the North, there was a ‘very real foreign occupation’, a ‘colonial
order’ had been introduced, and that the White Government was present only as a veneer for
actual foreign overlordship (Istpartotdel Arkhangel’skogo Gubkoma VKP(b) 1927, p. 244).
Many leading Northern Bolsheviks who published their memoirs and historical essays at
that time in Istpart collections and other editions upheld the myth of a colonial occupation of
the region by the interventionists. Just as the Whites shifted the blame for their own failures to
the Allies, local Bolshevik leaders tried to pass off their mistakes and miscalculations onto the
invaders. According to them, it was not their own actions or the unpopularity of Bolshevik
policy that was to blame for the collapse of Soviet power in the region in 1918 but a
large-scale foreign intervention. The Arkhangel’sk Bolshevik A. Metelev emphasised in
his memoirs that the Allies deliberately launched considerable forces into the North:
‘Arkhangelsk was an extremely important strategic and geographic point for the Allies’,

23
GARF, f. R-5867, op. 1, d. 4, ll. 20ob.–21ob. Letter of V. Zhilinskii to S. Gorodetskii, 11 February 1925.
 CONTESTING PATRIOTISM IN THE CIVIL WAR 15

who tried to clear the way for further ‘operations against the Soviets’ (Metelev 1926, p. 101).
A Vologda Bolshevik, M. Vetoshkin, also argued that Arkhangel’sk was, in fact, ‘occupied’
by the British; they turned it into a colonial possession, and ‘under the guise of war siphoned
off cheap export goods from the region’ (Vetoshkin 1927, pp. 3, 14). These authors omitted
the fact that the original Allied landing in Arkhangel’sk was so small that it would not have
been able to overthrow Soviet power on its own, or that export of natural resources could not
have been quite so extensive because of the collapse of the Northern export industry and that,
moreover, this export was largely offset by the import of supplies for the White army and food
for the local population.24
This version of the events was quite self-serving for the local Bolsheviks and covered
political mistakes and miscalculations of the local party and Soviet elites. But, quite
revealingly, the story of the Allied ‘occupation’ met with widespread support among the
population of the North, which had an interest in not recalling the large number of local
conscripts and volunteers who had fought in the White army.
Many memoirs of ordinary participants in the civil war, preserved in the Istpart archives or
published in the central and local presses, reproduced the tale of a foreign invasion. For
example, V. Chuev wrote in 1923 that ‘the enemies of the working people, like black
crows, flew to the North, serving as pathetic toys in the hands of [the commanders of the
Allied forces] Ironside and Poole, the British colonialists’. He assigned responsibility for
all the violence that occurred in the civil war to the Allies, and claimed that, in the North,
‘representatives of the democratic countries of the West and America relied upon
shootings and brutality’ (Chuev 1923, p. 17). Another memoirist, K. Klyuev, wrote in
1922 that the crimes that happened in the North will forever remain a ‘shameful stain …
upon the “cultured” governments of the Entente’ (Klyuev 1922, pp. 38–9). Memoirists not
only criticised the Allies for their support of the anti-Bolshevik regime but also talked
about ‘Western’ notions of ‘democracy’ and ‘culture’ with an obvious sense of their own
superiority.25
These memoirs contained unfounded and even farfetched claims about the intervention.
For example, A. N. Kotel’nikov, in an essay sent to the newspaper Pravda, claimed that
the interventionists in the North ensured that all citizens ‘seen in any protest or displaying
any sympathy for the Bolsheviks were immediately arrested and transferred … [to the
prison camp] on the island of Mudyug or shipped to Africa for hard labour’. While the
Mudyug camp did exist, sending Arkhangel’sk protesters to Africa was a product of
Kotel’nikov’s anti-colonial imagination. He also accused the ‘occupiers’ of the rape of
Russian women. According to him, it was not the fictitious Bolshevik ‘nationalisation
of women’ but the actions of the interventionists that had, in fact, undermined the
‘foundations of morality’ and shamed ‘the honour of Russian women’. Kotel’nikov
claimed that the Allied command had summoned ‘the best ladies of Arkhangel’sk high
society’ onto foreign ships and there had ‘mad orgies … they got up to the degenerate
liaisons of the time of the last French Louis’. He even reported that ‘during a medical

24
For data on the scale of exports and Allied material support to the Whites, see: Gorlenko and Prokopenko
(1961, docs. 57, 59), Mints (1931, pp. 136–40) and Ullmann (1968, pp. 366–67).
25
This attitude is consistent with demonstrations of the superiority of the USSR within the framework of
‘cultural diplomacy’, as demonstrated by Michael David-Fox (2011).
16 LIUDMILA G. NOVIKOVA

examination at a girls’ school in Arkhangel’sk, it was discovered that an unusually high

percentage of schoolgirls were pregnant and had been infected with syphilis’. He believed
it was a direct consequence of Allies’ stay in the North.26 His largely unfounded
accusations and fears of the moral degradation of Russian women at the hands of
foreigners resembled the anti-colonial discourse of nationalism that emerged in Britain’s
colonial possessions (Ray 2014, pp. 78–110).
During the 1920s, the Arkhangel’sk Istpart organised exhibitions in the city and factories
to celebrate the anniversaries of the liberation of the North by the Red Army. These
exhibitions included ‘materials covering the period of occupation of the North by the
British’ (Yurchenkov 1924, p. 254) and were attended by groups from factories, schools,
Party organisations and district towns (Yurchenkov 1925, pp. 263–64). Judging by the
correspondence between Arkhangel’sk Istpart and its central counterpart, it is clear that
the special attention to the intervention was largely a local initiative. While the
instructions from Moscow Istpart were to collect materials about the revolutionary
movement, the history of the Party and the revolution and civil war, the Arkhangel’sk
Istpart focused on the history of the intervention. In its descriptions of exhibitions and in
its work plans, the civil war was often not mentioned at all, presented instead as a period
of ‘intervention’.27
Images of the intervention were also used in propaganda aimed at foreign sailors visiting
the northern ports. It demonstrated the national unity of the Soviet people in the face of an
external threat. For example, on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution in 1927,
a special exhibition at the Museum of the Revolution in the city of Arkhangel’sk was
organised, where the local audience and foreign visitors were presented with wooden
mannequins of White Guards and interventionists, dressed in fur coats, hats and uniforms.
As stated in an explanatory note from Istpart:

The museum of the North’s models are of a great value because the city of Arkhangel’sk is a trading
port, which is visited by thousands of sailors from foreign vessels in summer and, in order to promote
communist ideas, we must have model figures of the soldiers of all nations at the Museum of the
Revolution in Arkhangel’sk, including the Russian White Guards who participated in the
occupation of the North.28

That same year, grand monuments to the ‘victims of the intervention’ were built on the island
of Mudyug at the mouth of the Northern Dvina river and the Iokanga encampment on the
northern coast of Murman, the sites of White prison camps during the civil war.29 The
head of the provincial Istpart, Yurchenko, wrote in 1929 that ‘with the opening of
shipping season in the summer, tours to these monuments are organised for local
organisations and foreign seafarers’, and that in the summer of 1928 alone, Mudyug was
visited by up to 40,000 people. He saw in these monuments ‘clear warnings for the next

26
RGASPI, f. 70, op. 3, d. 417, ll. 6–7. A. N. Kotel’nikov, ‘Istoricheskie fakty v kartinkakh (vospominanie
k semiletiyu interventsii Severa)’, July 1925.
27
ODSPI GAAO, f. 240, op. 1, d. 21, ll. 46–52. Report of Arkhangel’sk Istpart’s work in 1927.
28
ODSPI GAAO, f. 240, op. 1, d. 39, l. 30. Estimates of the exhibits in the Museum of the Revolution, 1927.
29
ODSPI GAAO, f. 240, op. 1, d. 35, ll. 71–72, 85ob. Protocols of the meeting of the provincial
commission for preparations for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, 1927.
 CONTESTING PATRIOTISM IN THE CIVIL WAR 17

generation reminding of the atrocities that the “cultured” peoples of Europe committed during
the intervention in the North’.30
By the mid-1930s, the intervention had almost completely replaced the memory of the
White movement and the civil war in the official memory of that period in the North.
Ceremonies and radio programmes to mark the anniversaries of the end of the civil war
were devoted to the region’s liberation from the intervention.31 During the following
decades, until the fall of the Soviet Union, the intervention dominated the writings of
historians of the civil war in the North. Even in the most authoritative late Soviet account
of the revolution and civil war in the region by M. I. Shumilov, the author assessed the
value of the revolution as follows: ‘the power of the workers and peasants that was born
in the Revolution saved our country from national disaster and the threat of enslavement
by foreign capital’ (Shumilov 1973, p. 3).

Conclusion
The notion of the civil war as a patriotic war against foreign domination was widespread
during the years of conflict in Arkhangel’sk region and persisted in the memory of the war
formed both among post-revolutionary émigrés and in the RSFSR’s North in the 1920s
after the end of the war. Patriotic slogans were put forward not only by the Whites, who
from the outset of the war rallied around national and patriotic ideas, but also by the
Bolsheviks, who managed simultaneously to ‘speak patriotically’ and ‘speak Bolshevik’,32
seeing no contradiction in this. For both the Whites and the Reds, the threat of foreign
domination was a way to bolster mass mobilisation. Arguments about patriotism were also
an attempt to retain more familiar mental coordinates in an unprecedented, extraordinary
civil confrontation. Numerous examples reveal that it was not unusual for both Red and
White combatants and witnesses to the conflict to use patriotic language to make sense of
the civil war. This was true not only for representatives of Tsarist military and educated
elites, but also for many low-ranking political activists, members of armed formations and
for ordinary Northerners.
Furthermore, the case of the North clearly demonstrates that the patriotic rhetoric of Reds
and Whites did not remain constant but evolved when the historical situation changed.
Initially, the Whites believed that the civil war was an extension of the conflict with
Germany and tried to discredit Bolsheviks as German hirelings. When the civil war
continued after the German defeat on the Western Front, the Whites became increasingly
disoriented and disillusioned. The end of World War I was also a crucial turning point for
Red patriotic propaganda: the Reds made ever stronger efforts to discredit the Whites as
agents of the Western Allies. This rhetoric survived the civil war. In the 1920s, patriotic
motifs occupied a firm place in the memory of the civil war in the North. Émigré Whites

30
ODSPI GAAO, f. 240, op. 1, d. 60, l. 13. Note from Yurchenko to the presidium of the Provincial
executive committee (Gubispolkom), not later than October 1929.
31
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Murmanskoi oblasti, f. P-102, op. 1, d. 5. l. 84. Announcement of the public
radio programme ‘Fifteenth anniversary of the liberation of Murmansk from the intervention’, Murmansk,
February 1935.
32
The term ‘speaking Bolshevik’ was coined by Stephen Kotkin (1995).
18 LIUDMILA G. NOVIKOVA

explained their defeat in terms of betrayal by the Allies. In the Soviet North, the history of the
civil war was told and retold, first and foremost, as a narrative of foreign intervention and a
war of national liberation. This interpretation of the war was supported by Bolshevik leaders
avoiding any blame on their side, and by many Northerners who had fought in the White
troops during the civil war and who now sought to shift blame for this primarily internal
conflict onto the Allies. To a large extent, the myth of the intervention, which brought
together both the Bolsheviks and their opponents, served as a mechanism for integration,
helping to turn the former ‘counter-revolutionary’ province into a Soviet ideological,
cultural and political space. The most distinctly patriotic motifs in the memory of the civil
war appeared in the 1920s on the Soviet periphery, on the former White fronts and the
sites of Allied intervention. In the 1930s, with the rise of ‘National Bolshevism’, patriotic
rhetoric moved from the periphery to the centre of Soviet ideological and cultural
discourse (Brandenberger 2002).33

LIUDMILA G. NOVIKOVA, Deputy Director, International Center for the History and Sociology
of World War II and Its Consequences and Senior Lecturer, School of History, National
Research University Higher School of Economics, Russian Federation, Staraya
Basmannaya, 21/4, Moscow 105066, Russian Federation. Email: lnovikova@hse.ru
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3162-8872

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