Authors

Thomas Stevens¹;  ¹ University of Pennsylvania, United States

Discussion

This paper asks how the world’s first socialist state – beset by economic collapse, popular rebellion, the challenges of revolutionary state-building, and the expectation of an imminent showdown with the forces of capitalism – demobilized its military. In contrast to other states’ post-war “return to normalcy”, in the Soviet Union wartime techniques of control, surveillance and mass mobilization were ingrained into the lifeblood of the state apparatus and turned inward in the service of social transformation. Demobilization did not and could not proceed in this mobilizational state as it did in other post-war spaces. 

The paper argues that Soviet demobilization at the end of the civil wars constituted a re-mobilization and explores the contingencies, tensions, and violent confrontation that accompanied this transition. For all that the Soviet Union did not “demobilize” economically, bureaucratically, or culturally, or did so only very partially, millions of Red Army soldiers were demobilized, released from the ranks to return to their villages, where they were engaged by the state in new ways and within different institutional frameworks. The paper places the Soviet experience of demobilization in comparative perspective and explores its consequences for the state’s relationship with its peasant population.