scholarly journals The “Class Ration” and Food Reserves during the Civil War

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikhail Khodyakov

This article examines the evolution of the system of rationed food supplies in Russia. The author focuses on specific forms of food distribution during the Civil War, such as “class rations” and food reserves. At the same time, it is emphasised that a rationing system was already in effect in Russia during World War I, and the practice of fixing prices for bread and providing special food norms for certain categories of workers had begun taking shape long before the Bolsheviks came to power. Describing the introduction in 1918 of the “class ration” in Petrograd, the author proposes that the initiative was largely due to the authorities’ attempts to mitigate the growing crisis between the Bolsheviks and some industrial workers. Although the “class ration” dominated among the principles of food distribution, its economic importance should not be overestimated – even the deprivation of the “exploiters” of food could not significantly improve the nutrition of the working population. From this point of view, the introduction of “class rations” only had political significance. In most cases, the local food authorities failed to develop clear criteria to categorise the population. Using documents from the Russian State Archive of the Economy, the author demonstrates that the idea of “class rations” was developed after the establishment in November 1919 of a special commission for the supply of workers at the People’s Commissariat of Food Industry. The formation of the commission was a consequence of policies meant to centralise all aspects of life in Soviet society. Having received emergency powers from the government in supplying the population with food, the commission formed monthly lists of plants and factories and determined groups of enterprises in various sectors of the economy. As a matter of priority, the reservation of food supplies was made to provide workers. However, the norms of state supply were not always implemented and were significantly lower than the needs of the population. The idea of “class rations” was rejected only after the adoption of a decree on 30 April 1920, which declared the transition to a new form of incentives for workers, labour rations.

Author(s):  
Giulio Bartolini

Abstract The centennial anniversary of World War I has generated renewed interest in the complex relationship between this event, international law and its community of scholars. In this regard the largely unexplored Italian context may represent a stimulating source of material from the point of view of both contemporary scholarly debate and current research, as Italy was one of the leading states involved in the conflict and boasts a vibrant and influential community of scholars of international law. As a result this article will focus on the shifting and active role played by Italian scholars in relation to the conflict, not only in their traditional academic and scientific activities, but also through their involvement in public debate, propaganda activities, contributions to newspapers and non-specialized journals, as well as their support to the Government.


Author(s):  
D.D. Saparov ◽  

The article is devoted to one of the most interesting personalities in the history of Russian railways – railway engineer Alexander Nikolaevich Kulakov (1875–1928), a prominent specialist in the field of construction and rehabilitation of railways. From 1898 to 1918, he worked on the Nikolaev, Chinese-Eastern, Ryazan-Ural, Warsaw-Vienna, Podolsk, South-Western railways, having gained vast experience in the field of restructuring, construction, restoration of the road and artificial structures in the Russian-Japanese, World War I and the Civil War. The personality of the railway engineer Kulakov is an example of courage and loyalty to his profession in Yugoslavia, where he was forced to emigrate after the end of the Civil War in Russia. The author analyzes the surviving documents of the personal fund transferred to the Central Museum of Railway Transport of Russia and archival materials of the Russian State Historical Archive, on the basis of which the biographical article was prepared.


2017 ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
I. Rozinskiy ◽  
N. Rozinskaya

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.


2020 ◽  
pp. 461-471
Author(s):  
Andrey V. Ganin ◽  

The memoirs of general P. S. Makhrov are devoted to the events of 1939 and the campaign of the Red army in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. Pyotr Semyonovich Makhrov was a General staff officer, participant of the Russian-Japanese war, World War I, and the Russian Civil war. In 1918, Makhrov lived in Ukraine, and in 1919-1920 he took part in the White movement in Southern Russia, after which he emigrated. In exile he lived in France, where he wrote his extensive memoirs. The events of September 1939 could not pass past his attention. At that time, the Red army committed approach in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. Contrary to the widespread Anti-Sovietism among the white emigrants, Makhrov perceived the incident with enthusiasm as a return of Russia to its ancestral lands occupied by the Poles.


2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 791-793
Author(s):  
Dina Rizk Khoury

I write this piece as Iraq, following Syria, descends into a civil war that is undermining the post–World War I state system and reconfiguring regional and transnational networks of mobilization and instrumentalizations of violence and identity formation. That the Middle East has come to this moment is not an inevitable product of the artificiality of national borders and the precariousness of the state system. It is important to avoid this linear narrative of inevitability, with its attendant formulations of the Middle East as a repository of a large number of absences, and instead to locate the current wars in a specific historical time: the late and post–Cold War eras, marked by the agendas of the Washington Consensus and the globalization of neoliberal discourses; the privatization of the developmental and welfare state; the institutional devolution and multiplication of security services; and the entrenchment of new forms of colonial violence and rule in Israel and Palestine and on a global scale. The conveners of this roundtable have asked us to reflect on the technopolitics of war in the context of this particular moment and in light of the pervasiveness of new governmentalities of war. What I will do in this short piece is reflect on the heuristic and methodological possibilities of the study of war as a form of governance, or what I call the “government of war,” in light of my own research and writing on Iraq.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-277
Author(s):  
Olga V Churakova

The article analyzes the problems and prospects of using written sources of World War I period for a gender studies approach to Russia’s past, in line with the history of emotions in cultural-historical anthropology. The terms “emotions” and “feelings” are viewed as synonyms. The article states that what the historian encounters in the sources is mostly an emotional state or mood (personal or collective) as well as experiences, passions or sensations, rather than “pure” emotions and feelings. The corpus of “gender-marked” written sources of the 1914-1918 period is huge and varied, and includes materials from archives, collections of party commissions, published memoirs, letters, diaries, the women’s press, as well as profile documents (“self-census”) of female students. However, these sources unevenly reflect the feelings and the emotional background of the era. Following the conceptual framework developed by Barbara Rosenwein, we can speak of several emotional communities defined by the social affiliation and the “audibility” of the particular voices in history, i.e. the representativeness of the sources. The first category of emotional communities comprises the women of the Romanov family and noblewomen more broadly. Russian and foreign archives boast extensive collections of their personal documents. The second category includes “frontovichky” - frontline women-soldiers. Urban women belong to a third category, and are represented by memory-based stories, the women’s press, female students’ profiles, and documents from regional archives. From the point of view of emotions, the biggest yet least represented community were peasant women. While their everyday life and values have been well researched, only very few notes and diaries from their hands have survived. Letters to the front were partially preserved (esp. those intercepted by the authorities) and are now stored in the State Archive of the Russian Federation). For the identification of the psychological matrix of the era it is crucial to use the full set of these sources.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-235
Author(s):  
Olga S. Porshneva

This article examines how the historical memory of World War I emerged and developed in Russia, and also compares it to how Europeans have thought about the conflict. The author argues that the politics of memory differed during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. In the wake of the 1917 Revolution, Bolshevik efforts to re-format the memory of the Great War were part of its attempt to create a new society and new man. At the same time, the regime used it to mobilize society for the impending conflict with the 'imperialist' powers. The key actors that sought to inculcate the notion of the war with imperialism into Soviet mass consciousness were the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Communist Party, the Department of Agitation and Propaganda, and, in particular, the Red Army and Comintern. The latter two worked together to organize the major campaigns dedicated to war anniversaries, which were important both to reinforce the concept of imperialist war as well as to involve the masses in public commemorations, rituals and practices. The Soviet state also relied on organizations of war veterans to promote such commemorative practices while suppressing any alternative narratives. The article goes on to explain how, under Stalin, the government began to change the way it portrayed the Great War in the mid-1930s. And after the Second World War, Soviet politics of memory differed greatly from those in the West. In the USSR the Great Patriotic War was sacralized, while the earlier conflict remained a symbol of unjust imperialist wars.


1974 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 1152
Author(s):  
Lewis Perry ◽  
Gail Thin Parker
Keyword(s):  

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