Title
The Shaken Lands. Violence and the Crisis of Governance in East Central Europe, 1914–1923


Editor(s)
Balkelis, Tomas; Griffante, Andrea
Series
Lithuanian Studies without Borders
Published
Extent
258 S.
Price
€ 130,95
Reviewed for H-Soz-Kult by
Klaus Richter, School of History and Cultures, University of Birmingham

The time period of 1914 to 1923 transformed East Central Europe – the region between Germany and Russia – profoundly. Imperial rule lost legitimacy, World War I brought devastation, both in human and economic terms, and nationalism grew in strength. Both Russia’s struggling military and Germany’s occupation regime addressed these challenges with ever increasing violence. Russia collapsed into Civil War, the Habsburg Empire disintegrated, and Germany only narrowly avoided a prolonged, violent revolution; meanwhile East Central Europe became a battleground for social revolutionaries, paramilitaries, troops of the Ancien Regimes that refused to accept defeat, and newly established armies fighting for nation states in these former imperial borderlands.

This new and valuable book, edited by Lithuanian historians Tomas Balkelis and Andrea Griffante, takes these turbulent and transformative times into view. It is a product of an international conference organised by the Lithuanian Historical Institute in Vilnius in 2020. The editors and authors of this edited volume investigate this history as structured and driven by violence. This is not necessarily a new approach – we can look at least as far back as to John Horne’s and Alan Kramer’s landmark study on the German occupation of Belgium for a similar approach.1 What sets this book apart is that it deploys an expansive perspective on violence, which takes into account a broad range of very different perpetrators and victims. This lends the findings huge significance both for the history of East Central Europe during the First World War and during the crucial phase of the consolidation of nation states in 1918 to 1923. This is in line with the time frame of the “Greater War”, which has successfully de-centred the history of the First World War away from the experience of the Western Front.2

A dual argument flows through the book’s individual chapters: first, that violence in East Central Europe was produced by the disintegration of state power (violence as a symptom of state weakness); second, that violence was ingrained into state-building, as the newly emerging nation states asserted their monopolies of violence within contested borders.

The final chapter considers the potentials and limitations of comparative history and violence. The volume makes a strong case to study East Central Europe as a coherent region, where “similar violent actors engaged in similar types of violence because of similar causes and under similar historical circumstances.” (p. 9) This should not be taken for granted, given that revisionist Hungary was very different from its political adversary Romania (a “beneficiary” of the war’s territorial settlement), and highly industrialised Czechoslovakia had superficially little in common with rural Lithuania. Yet across the region, acts of violence were startingly similar, often swaying between crime and plunder on the one hand and political violence on the other.

Vytautas Petronis looks at wartime banditry in Lithuania and argues that it had its direct cause in the repressions under the Russian and German military regimes and in the proliferation of gangs of Russian POWs who escaped from German internment camps. New criminal networks emerged (which, astonishingly, occasionally even included Catholic priests). The violence brought about by these networks proved “a major cause for the post-traumatic condition of Lithuanian society after the war”, Petronis argues. Vasilijus Safronovas, Vygantas Vareikis, and Hektoras Vitkus zoom in on experiences of violence on both sides of the Russo-German border, with a focus on the border section of East Prussia and Lithuania. The chapter is impressive in terms of how it cuts through the fog of wartime propaganda and politicised post-1918 historiography, arguing that representations of violence “served the pragmatic objectives of their creators” (p. 75).

Darius Staliūnas examines pogroms carried out by the military in Lithuania between 1919 and 1920. Staliūnas explains the low level (relatively speaking) of anti-Jewish military violence with the lack of traditions of pogroms, the cooperation between Lithuanian and Jewish political elites and the (again, relatively speaking) low level of terror against civilians. Mart Kuldkepp’s chapter looks at a largely unknown aspect of the Estonian war of independence, i.e. the involvement of Scandinavian volunteers. These, “influenced by superficial impressions of local chaos and lawlessness” (p. 132), engaged in criminal and violent behaviour, often with impunity. This is not merely an anecdote, but demonstrates the desperate need for manpower in the context of what was perceived as a large-scale, pan-Eastern European war that “small” nations could not survive without external help.

Looking at the Hungarian Freikorps (Szabadcsapatok) Béla Bodó argues that political violence in Hungary was “both ephemeral and systematic”, growing out of the pressures of post-war poverty and social chaos, but also pursuing the strategic objectives of Hungarian far-right nationalism, e.g. the expulsion of Jews from economic and political life. As Bodó shows, these units, as opposed to other paramilitaries in Eastern Europe’s “Greater War”, were decidedly elite in character and at liberty to commit both plunder and atrocious violence against political enemies. The chapter stands out in terms of how Bodó contextualises casual, extreme violence in long-term nationalist agendas and socio-economic conflicts. Jochen Böhler looks at how a Polish Army was forged from a diverse range of paramilitary units, often against the diverging local interests of the units themselves. Not least, these units were divided by the traditional fault lines of Polish politics, i.e. between National Democrats and the Piłsudski government. With armoured trains, Maciej Górny looks at a rather unknown feature of Eastern European warfare (with the exception of Trotsky’s famous train). Acts of crime and violence exerted by train personnel was rife (especially, again, against Jews), and the speed of trains, Górny argues, was the main cause for why violence against civilians could spread so quickly across vast distances.

The book is by no means without flaws. It is very strongly weighted towards Lithuania (three chapters). There is reason to welcome this depth, given the dearth of research on the history of the Baltics. But this means the book includes only three other national case studies (Estonia, Hungary, Poland). Julia Eichenberg’s final, conceptual chapter focuses on contexts of violence, the role of ideologies in escalating violence, and on practices of violence.

This chapter, which is an excellent discussion of the value of comparisons for the study of violence, is slightly disjointed from the rest of the book. It may have worked better as either an introductory chapter, given that it lays out a clear and very useful methodological framework, or as a proper conclusion, which contextualises the findings of the individual chapters within this framework.

This means that this not a perfect and comprehensive appraisal of the history of violence in early 20th century East Central Europe. Thankfully, such an appraisal is not what we need at this stage anyway, given the depth of studies already published since the First World War’s centenary. The book is, on the other hand, highly successful as a series of case studies that shine new light on the history of a part of Europe that, due to its diversity, is still very much understudied as a coherent region.

Notes:
1 John Horne / Alan Kramer, German Atrocities 1914. A History of Denial, New Haven 2001.
2 Robert Gerwarth / John Horne (eds.), Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War, Oxford 2013; Robert Gerwarth / Erez Manela (eds.), Empires at War, 1911–1923, Oxford 2015.

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