Authors

Discussion

During the ‘Russian’ civil war of 1918-1921, approximately two million POWs were held in makeshift prison camps in Soviet Russia. In most cases, the Bolsheviks inherited these POWs, chiefly German and Hungarian soldiers from the First World War, after seizing power in 1917 but they now had an immensely complicated problem on their hands. Leading Bolsheviks were keenly aware that Soviet treatment – or mistreatment – of POWs could impact the experience of the similarly high number of Russian POWs held in camps outside Soviet Russia. Moreover, at a time when revolutionary enthusiasm was still running high, the Bolsheviks sought to turn captive foreign soldiers to their cause. These efforts would fail without some considerations of POW welfare. The now-Soviet-controlled Red Cross also regularly claimed that the new regime acted entirely in line with existing humanitarian conventions. This paper will interrogate the realities of the POW experience in early Soviet Russia. It will show that even though large numbers of POWs were routinely poorly treated and lived in appalling conditions, the Bolsheviks understood the relationship between the fate of Russian POWs overseas and the lives of POWs under Soviet control. But the subject should not be reduced to a simply transactional exchange. This paper argues that some Bolsheviks, and not just the Soviet Red Cross, were genuinely animated by a sense of humanitarianism, even if this operated most often with class-based parameters.