Contesting the Russian Borderlands: The German Military Administration of Occupied Lithuania, 1915-1918 By Christopher Alan Barthel B.A., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004 A.M., Brown University, 2005 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2011 © Copyright 2010 by Christopher Alan Barthel This dissertation by Christopher Alan Barthel is accepted in its present form by the Department of History as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date ____________ ______________________________ Omer Bartov, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date ____________ ______________________________ Deborah Cohen, Reader Date ____________ ______________________________ Maud Mandel, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date ____________ _______________________________ Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii Curriculum Vitae Christopher Alan Barthel completed a B.A. in History at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in May 2004 and received an A.M. in History from Brown History in May 2005. At Brown he specialized in the social and cultural history of modern Europe with an emphasis on Germany, France, and Russia. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am profoundly grateful to the many people who provided the support and guidance that helped me complete this project. Omer Bartov has been an insightful and supportive advisor whose advice and encouragement were indispensible. His example as a teacher, scholar, and mentor has directed my intellectual development throughout graduate school. I was fortunate to have Maud Mandel serve as the director of a field and as a reader for my dissertation. Her encouragement and trenchant observations have made a world of difference. Deborah Cohen likewise offered crucial analytical insights that strengthened my work and suggested new avenues of research. Other members of the Brown University History Department whose help and input I greatly appreciate include Joan Richards, Mary Gluck, Tom Gleason, Ethan Pollack, and Ken Sacks. Volker Berghahn generously assisted me during my time as an Exchange Scholar at Columbia University. Julissa Bautista, Mary Beth Bryson, and Cherrie Guerzon all helped me clear innumerable hurdles along the way. I could not have completed my research without the assistance of archivists and the use of collections at the Geheimes Staatsarchiv preussischer Kulturbesitz, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, the Lithuanian State Historical Archive, and the Manuscript Department of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. I am thankful to the archivists at the Lithuanian v institutions in particular for their endless patience negotiating occasionally difficult linguistic obstacles. I am indebted to the friends and colleagues whose intellectual and emotional support has helped me throughout the development of my project. Oded Rabinovitch, Derek Seidman, Adam Webster, Michael Furman, Leonidas Stefanos, and Robert Sparacino have all provided absolutely essential encouragement and input. Mo Moulton, Farid Azfar, Fatema Dalal, Joyce Liang, Gill Frank, Aaron Hermann, Stephen Downey, Alex Kunst, and Adam Sacks have all contributed a great deal. I could never have undertaken this project without the limitless support, encouragement, understanding, and patience of my family. My parents, Marlene and Randall Barthel, and my brother and sister-in-law, Brandon and Deanna Barthel, never shied away from helping me address the inevitable difficulties of graduate school. My grandparents, Vivian and Adolf Porak, and Mildred and Richard Barthel, contributed in manifold ways. Eliane Sandler and Gisela Adamski have both provided illuminating perspectives on history as well as warm and welcoming homes away from home. Shiri Sandler experienced the vicissitudes of graduate school with me every step of the way. I relied upon her emotional support and intellectual contributions throughout and I am endlessly grateful for them. I could not have had a better partner to accompany me throughout the process. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: German Rule in Occupied Lithuania, 1915-1918 1 Chapter 1: The Initial Encounter: The Invasion of Russia in 27 Diaries and Memoirs, 1914-15 Chapter 2: Instituting German Rule in the Occupied Borderlands 80 Chapter 3: The German Administration Press and the 131 Cultivation of Deutschtum Chapter 4: Heer, Heimat, Bevölkerung: The Intersection of 191 Culture, Politics, and Policy Chapter 5: Ethnicity and Social Change in the Borderlands, 254 1917-1918 Conclusion: Enduring German Visions of the East 323 Bibliography 328 vii Introduction: German Rule in Occupied Lithuania, 1915-1918 Vast tracts of Russia’s western provinces came under the purview of the German military after its overwhelming victories on the Eastern Front in 1915. Two to three million soldiers and thousands of administrators served in the East between 1915 and 1918, the majority encountering the Russian Empire’s neighboring lands for the first time. Personally experiencing the Russian Empire profoundly affected them. They felt they had entered a fundamentally different land. Great differences in agriculture, industry, and infrastructure were seen as manifestations of eastern backwardness and interpreted in an overwhelmingly negative light. Dilapidated homes, poor roads, and cities plagued by infectious disease were examples that highlighted Russia’s apparent inferiority to Germany in all regards. 1 Although an insignificant percentage of the region’s native residents were ethnically Russian, they were nonetheless all thought to be as backward as the lands they inhabited. Notwithstanding incipient national movements among Lithuanians and Latvians, and the long-standing national aspirations of Poles, the German conquerors did not regard local civilians as capable of taking care of their own affairs. The logical response appeared to be the permanent extension of German influence to the borderlands in order to provide the region a promising future. The scope of this first mass-scale experience of the Russian Empire during the First World War was indeed quite novel and impactful, but it also entailed the continuation of longer trends in the history of the German and Russian relationship. 1 Emphasis on Russia’s inferiority was part of a general European tendency to view “the East” or “Eastern Europe” as fundamentally different, backward, and Oriental. See Hans Lemberg, “Zur Entstehung des Osteuropabegriffs im 19. Jahrhundert. Vom ‘Norden’ zum ‘Osten’ Europas,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 33 (1985): 48-91; Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 1 The German military administration of conquered Russian territory (abbreviated “Ober Ost” from the “Supreme Commander of the East”, the Oberbefehlshaber Ost ) must be viewed as an episode of Germany’s imperial history, one influenced both by the exigencies of the first total war and also by the German Empire’s previous efforts to create a homogeneous national whole from ethnically distinct populations. The German attempt to impose a new vision of order in the imperial borderlands is not merely the story of occupation policy; it is also the lived experience of expanding the empire’s power abroad. Soldiers and administrators who implemented German policy were highly conscious of the attempt to substitute German rule for Russian in the imperial borderlands, influenced both by the firsthand experiences of their travels and duties and by the officially promoted image of the East as depicted in Ober Ost policies and propaganda. The interplay of official directives and personal experience – both of which were influenced by imperial Germany’s past attempts to achieve ethnic homogeneity – together shaped perspectives on the project of extending German order to the eastern borderlands. These issues were inextricably linked to Russia’s ethnic composition; both Germany and Russia struggled to safely channel nationalist movements within their multiethnic empires. Prussia, Germany’s politically and industrially dominant state, included considerable numbers of ethnic Poles who became subjects when Prussia, Russia and Austria partitioned Poland at the end of the eighteenth century. All three empires dealt with the consequences over the next century; in Germany, for example, the desire to quell Polish nationalism and to ethnically homogenize the empire factored into 2 the Kulturkampf and fueled debates on labor and immigration policy. 2 Germany’s ethnic conflicts did not begin and end with Poles, but Russia’s much larger empire certainly entailed a far greater degree of ethnic heterogeneity. Russia’s western borderlands alone included substantial minority populations of ethnic Latvians, Lithuanians, Germans, Belarusians, Poles, Jews and Ukrainians. When the borderlands came under German administration during the First World War, German administrators were challenged by the ethnic mix that confronted them. They lacked deep knowledge about political and social conditions in the borderlands, but they relied on a long tradition of anti-Russian stereotypes to make sense of their position. Clearly distinct from their ethnic Russian rulers, the minority populations of the borderlands were nevertheless understood in the context of the clash of the Russian and German Empires. As