Authors

Mikhail Akulov¹;  ¹ Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan

Discussion

I would like to explore the topic of social disruption and, in fact, “civilizational” collapse by looking at the experience of Kyiv and its “besieged” residents in the winter months of 1917-1918. My paper starts with a “rhetorical violence” – the war of slogans – which became more pronounced in the electoral politics in 1917. Parties old and new, vying for dominance at municipal and national levels, were combining radical demands with a growing recalcitrance, accelerating the erosion of popular consensus from the “springtime of the Revolution.”

The intensification of party struggle went hand in hand with a rapid rise in criminality in Kyiv. The physical violence brought by the criminalization of everyday life was directly linked to the rhetorical violence of politics because the revolutionary politics, like crime, was primarily concerned with the question of property and its legitimate ownership. Politics could and did offer a theoretical base for crime (thus decriminalizing it), while crime was graduating into a praxis of politics.

The interplay of crime and politics brings me to the crux of the paper: the three-week long Bolshevik [mis]rule in Kyiv in January-February 1918. Totaling up to 5000 victims, the mass executions occurring under their watch are conventionally seen as an early onset of the Red Terror. Departing from this interpretation, I argue that the internal city dynamics which eroded the social fabric and blotted out the boundary between permissible and illicit offers a superior explanation of those events. I will support my thesis by combining numerous and often graphic depositions found in the Kyiv city archives with maps showing changing gradations in property and income levels of the city denizens.

Although the paper does not explore explicitly any of the established ethnic or religious groups, it brings to light the process of creating an urban minoritarian identity stoked by sentiments of beleaguerment, social and cultural anxieties, but also a thinly veiled contempt vis-à-vis a nondescript outside world.