War Without Fronts Atamans And Commissars In Ukraine 19171919 2013 Mikhail Akulov by Mikhail Akulov instant download after payment.

(PhD dissertation, Harvard, 2013)

The double Revolution of 1917 buried the old Romanov Empire without installing anything
definite in its stead. It did, however, attenuate authority to the extreme, producing a climate
propitious to the emergence of socio-political projects each with a claim upon the present and
the future. One of such projects was the revolutionary warlordism known under the name of
atamanshchina. Reaching greatest scope and complexity on the territory of modern-day
Ukraine, this predominantly peasant phenomenon represented, on one hand, an effort of the
countryside to fill in a power vacuum by institutionalizing the rural insurgency. On the other
hand, as an efficient form of military self-organization, it embodied a factor of paramount
importance in the ongoing Civil war – to be courted and reckoned with. The Bolsheviks
appeared to have been the most successful in that task, establishing a type of joint dominion
with the warlords over Ukraine in the months following German departure (Nov. 1918).
Experiment for all those involved, this alliance attempted to reconcile the atamans’ suspicion
of disciplinary regimes with the Bolshevik war-making imperatives. Ultimately, this
experiment proving disastrous, the notion of party-state centralism collided against the
practice of revolutionary particularism and compelled the partners to split under the dramatic
circumstances of the Grigoriev’s uprising. Drawing heavily from archival sources, this work
looks, therefore, at the manner whereby major players came to recognize their own political
identities and ends – not in the least the Bolsheviks themselves, who evolved from the unsure
parvenus to the seasoned Staatsmachthaber (“state power holders”) in the course of their
interaction with the forces of rural revolt.