West-Siberian Uprising 1921 in the post-Soviet Russian Studies

This article seeks to analyze English language historiography of the West-Siberian uprising (1921). Having acknowledged that the uprising was the largest rural mass movement of the Russian Civil War (1917 - 1922), western historians lack first hand experience of extensive primary sources related to its history, which makes them depend on evidence from works of Russian emigre publicists and Soviet historians for conceptualizing the West-Siberian events. As a result the uprising is now regarded in all general works on the Civil War era as akin to other movements of the period, e.g. Antonov uprising in Tambov province and Makno guerilla in Ukraine. Generally speaking, all explanatory frameworks developed by western scholars who work in the field of Russian Studies still betray a confrontation between the so-called "totalitarianism school" and "revisionist historiography", on the one hand, and low awareness of the recent research and findings of their Russian colleagues in the field of the early Soviet history. Such authorities of the field as R. Pipes or N. Werth keep fighting their old battles against the revisionists, choosing only works of anti-communist Russian speaking historians (M.S. Frenkin being the most telling example); social historians (O. Figes) try to fit all regional movements in yet another scheme which seems to for one region. Due to the unprecedented increase in the number of contacts among Russian and western historians some of these theoretical models were imported to Russian historiography. However, instead of transnational scholarly discourse much hoped for in the early 1990s there emerged a system of labor division once again segregating Russian historians from western scholars: while the former collect facts on the uprising scattered in more than dozen archives, the latter prefer to theorize using evidence from "still unsurpassed" works of historians who lived on either side of the iron curtain. This division of labor resulted in English language works, which contain very few facts and too many factual errors but are full of grand theories; at the same time Russian scholars often tend to tumble facts without risking independent generalizing. What both historiographies seem now to agree on is the Russian Civil War as a suitable analytical frame for the rural mass movements. Meanwhile it seems logical to conclude that to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of a single episode of the Russian Civil War (such as West-Siberian uprising 1921) we need a different level of professional dialogue with foreign colleagues.

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