War in Peace Paramilitary Violence in Europe After the Great War
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
War in Peace Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War Edited by ROBERT GERWARTH AND JOHN HORNE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, 0X2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade matk of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2012 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2012 impression: 2 Ail rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Piess, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978—0—19—965491—8 Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn Acknowledgements This book is the result of collaborative efforts over a long period. Most of the authors assembled in this volume met at two themed workshops, held in Dublin in 2008 and 2010. The editors would like to thank the participants and commen tators at these workshops who provided extensive critical input. Over the last three years, the collaborative project between the Centres for War Studies in Trinity Col lege Dublin and University College Dublin that led to this volume has received generous funding, first from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS), then from the European Research Council (ERC). The editors of this book would like to take this opportunity to record their gratitude to these funding bodies. On a more personal level, we have benefitted greatly from working with the postdoctoral fellows affiliated with this project—Julia Eichen- berg, John Paul Newman, and, more recently, Ugur Umit Ungor, James Kitchen, and Tomas Balkelis—as well as from the skilled administrative help we received from Christina Griessler and Suzanne d’Arcy. We would also like to thank Elaine Cullen for drawing the maps. Robert Gerwarth and John Horne Dublin, October 2011 Table of Contents List of Illustrations ix List of Maps x List of Contributors xi 1. Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War: An Introduction 1 Robert Gerwarth and John Horne PART I. REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION 2. Paramilitary Violence in Russia’s Civil Wars, 1918-1920 21 William G. Rosenberg 3. Bolshevism as Fantasy: Fear of Revolution and Counter-Revolutionary Violence, 1917-1923 40 Robert Gerwarth and John Horne 4. Fighting the Red Beast: Counter-Revolutionary Violence in the Defeated States of Central Europe 52 Robert Gerwarth 5. Revolution, Civil War, and Terror in Finland in 1918 72 Pertti Haapala and Marko Tikka 6. Paramilitary Violence in Italy: The Rationale of Fascism and the Origins ofTotalitarianism 85 Emilio Gentile PART II. NATIONS, BORDERLANDS AND ETHNIC VIOLENCE 7. Bands of Nation Builders? Insurgency and Ideology in the Ukrainian Civil War 107 Serhy Yekelchyk 8. Turning Citizens into Soldiers: Baltic Paramilitary Movements after the Great War 126 Tomas Balkelis 9. The Origins, Attributes and Legacies of Paramilitary Violence in the Balkans 145 John Paul Newman 10. Paramilitary Violence in the Collapsing Ottoman Empire 164 Ugur Umit Ungor ..j Table of Contents 11. Soldiers to Civilians, Civilians to Soldiers: Poland and Ireland 184 after the First World War Julia Eichenberg 12. The British Culture of Paramilitary Violence in the Irish War 200 of Independence Anne Dolan 13. Defending Victory: Paramilitary Politics in France, 1918-1926. 216 A Counter-example John Horne 235 Index List of Illustrations 1. Red Army soldiers in front of the headquarter building at the Voronezh front in 1918. Russian State Documentary Film & Foto Archive (RGAKFD), Moscow. 22 2. ‘France would decline if it allowed Bolshevism to enter’. Poster used during a French industrialists’ campaign against Bolshevism, 1920. MHC-BDIC, Paris, by permission. 46 3. ‘Soviet Russia and the Hunger Catastrophe’. German poster of 1921 portrays famine as a key experience of Bolshevism. MHC-BDIC, Paris, by permission. 47 4. Poster of Rudi Feld: ‘The Danger of Bolshevism’, 1919. MHC-BDIC, Paris, by permission. 48 5. After the fall of the Munich Councils Republic in 1919, Freikorps soldiers march off arrested revolutionaries through the streets of Munich. SZ Photo Archive, Munich. 61 6. Hungarian White militias hang a revolutionary, 1919. Hungarian National Archives. 64 7. Finnish Red Guards and a Russian sailor pose before the Battle of Pekkala in February 1918. Courtesy ofVapriikki Photo Archives. 73 8. Victorious White Guards after the end of the Battle of Tampere. Courtesy of Vapriikki Photo Archives. 83 9. On the eve of the March on Rome Mussolini and his followers in Naples in October 1922. Private collection of Emilio Gentile. 86 10. Otaman Yukhym Bozhko with his officers and the writer Osyn Makovei, April 1919. Courtesy of the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine. 108 11. A group of Lithuanian Riflemen posing in 1920. Central State Archive of Lithuania. 127 12. Jovan Babunski in full Cetnik regalia. Private collection of John Paul Newman. 146 13. Armenian paramilitaries in the South Caucasus, 1919. Private collection of Ugur Umit Ungor. 165 14. Beat the Bolshevik! Polish Poster during the Russo-Polish War, 1920. 185 15. Polish Insurgents in Upper Silesia, 1920. SZ Photo Archive, Munich. 186 16. Group of three Black and Tans. National Library of Ireland, Hogan Collection, HOGW 123. Courtesy of National Library of Ireland. 201 17. A ‘culture of victory’ threatened with defeat. Drawing by Maxime Real del Sarte on the front cover of the journal of The League for the Union of Frenchmen Who Have Not Reneged on Victory, 9 March 1924. Private collection of John Horne. 217 List of Maps 1. Freikorps activity in the ‘shatter zones’ of East Central Europe, 2. Ukraine as imagined by Ukrainian nationalists. 3. The Balkans after the First World War. 4. Turkey and the Caucasus. List of Contributors Tomas Balkelis is a European Research Council funded Postdoctoral Fellow at the UCD Centre for War Studies. After gaining his PhD from the University of Toronto he worked as a lecturer at the University of Nottingham and as an AHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Man chester University. He is the author of The Making of Modern Lithuania (London, 2009) which was recently translated into Lithuanian. He has published articles in Past and Present and Contemporary European History. He has a particular interest in the history of national ism and violence in Eastern Europe (Baltics, Russia, and Poland). Anne Dolan lectures in modern Irish history at Trinity College Dublin. She is author of Commemorating the Irish Civil War: History and Memory, 1922—2000 (Cambridge, 2003), and, with Cormac O’Malley, is co-editor of ‘No Surrender Here!’: The Civil War Papers of Ernie O’Malley (Dublin, 2008). She is currently working on a book on violence in post war Ireland. Julia Eichenberg is a DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow at the Humboldt University Berlin. She has published articles on Irish and Polish paramilitaries and has recently published her first book on Polish veterans of World War I, Kämpfen für Frieden und Fürsorge: Polnische Veter anen des Ersten Weltkriegs und ihre internationalen Kontakte, 1918-1939 (Munich, 2011). Emilio Gentile is Professor of History at Sapienza University of Rome. He is an inter nationally recognized historian of fascism whose books, such as the The Sacralization of Poli tics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA, 1996) or Politics as Religion (Princeton, NJ, 2006) have appeared in various languages. Robert Gerwarth is Professor of Modern History at University College Dublin and Direc tor of UCD’s Centre for War Studies. He is the author and editor of several books on the history of political violence in twentieth-century Europe, including, most recently, the biography Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Reinhard Heydrich (New Haven and London, 2011) and (with Donald Bloxham), Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cam bridge, 2011). Pertti Haapala is Professor of Finnish History at the University of Tampere, and Director of the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Historical Research. He is the author and editor of several important publications on the Finnish Civil War, most recently of the book Tampere 1918: A Town in a Civil War (Tampere, 2010). John Home is Professor of Modern European History at Trinity College Dublin and board member of the Research Centre of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Peronne. He has published widely on the history of the Great War, most recently (ed.) A Companion to World War One (Oxford, 2010), and (ed.), Vers la guerre totale: le tournant de 1914-1915 (Paris, 2010). John Paul Newman is Lecturer in Modern European History at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He works on the social and cultural history of war in the modern Bal kans and is currently preparing a monograph on South Slav veterans of the First World War and their impact on state and society in interwar Yugoslavia. William G. Rosenberg is Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan. He has published widely on the Russian Revolution, including the book, Liberals in the Russian Revolution and (with xü List of Contributors Marilyn B. Young; Princeton, 1974) Transforming Russia and China: Revolutionary Struggle m the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1982).