No 2 (2023)

In this article the author focuses on the semantic and substantive aspects of the colonial conflict analysis model presented in the work of the British Army Major General Charles Edward Collwell, “Small Wars: Their Principles and Practices”, which became the most notable British treatise on the subject at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A distinctive feature of the work is the comparative approach to the analysis of the British colonial wars fought in the Victorian era. It is established that the Russian case (the annexation of Central Asia and the pacification of the North Caucasus) is a golden thread running through all sections of the work, serving, along with similar examples from French, Spanish, and US history, as a kind of tuning fork for the universal principles of successful small warfare that Callwell laid out in his work. The aim of the paper is to form a more substantive account of the significance of comparative colonialism for British military thinking and the place of the Russian experience in its evolution. The study has shown that “Small Wars” reflected a course towards the normalisation of the Russian Empire within a professional discourse. In addition, the historiography focuses on Callwell's selective approach to the choice of factual material and its place in the evolution of British counterinsurgency. In this article, the author focuses on identifying the reasons for differences in the forms and ways of systematizing the experience of small wars in the colonial and frontier policies of both the Russian and British empires. Particular attention is paid to the circumstances that led to the gradual loss of Callwell's work to its former importance on the eve and after the Great War.

The author explores the history, formation and successful development of the only French-speaking foreign colony on the territory of the Russian Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century, established by the Swiss from the canton of Vaud near Ackerman and Odessa. While there is considerable historiography on the history of the Shabo (Shabagh) colony, this study, based on documents from the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA) that are being introduced into the academic circuit for the first time, demonstrates concrete examples of interaction between the Russian authorities and the colonists. Founded in 1822, the Swiss colony had managed to establish effective self-government and become a successful wine-making enterprise in the south of the Russian Empire by the mid-nineteenth century. It was made possible by the support given to the colonists by Russian authorities at all levels. Louis-Vencent Tardent's project is an excellent example of such support, as it received approval despite the fact that it was submitted after the introduction of a new ban on the resettlement of foreign colonists. The authorities made an exception due to the intervention of influential Swiss, namely Louis de Saloz, a physician, and Frédéric-César de La Harpe, Alexander I's tutor. The author shows convincingly that during the reign of Nicholas I, as in the preceding period, the Russian government cooperated with the colonists, helping them to solve everyday problems while taking into account the interests of the local population. These favourable conditions contributed to the progressive economic growth of Shabo, which by the mid-nineteenth century had become a thriving community.

In the article the author examines the attitude of Russian anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists to the 1922 Genoa Conference and the participation of representatives of Soviet Russia in it. This subject has not received much coverage in the works of anarchism scholars, who have so far focused primarily on the study of the general stance of Russian anarchism towards the Soviet regime and the issue of the New Economic Policy, on the problem of anti-anarchist repressions in Russia and on the ideological and organisational processes in the Russian anarchist emigration. The author made it his task to identify the place that the critique of the “Genoa policy” of the Soviet government enjoyed in the ideological concepts and political work of the anarchists, and to trace the main line of their reasoning. The main source for this article was the original, mainly émigré, press of the Russian anarchists between 1922 and 1923.The author demonstrates that the Russian anarchists' view of the Genoa Conference was primarily determined by ideological motives and their general analysis of the course and fate of the Russian Revolution itself. Being anti-statists, the anarchists had no particular conception of foreign policy and were indifferent to so-called state interests. The “Genoa policy” was perceived by them as a manifestation and confirmation of the new Bolshevik course, in which they saw an orientation towards restoring the positions of private capital within Russia itself and towards subordination to world capital on an international scale. Planned or real concessions on the part of the Soviet delegation at the Conference and repression of Russian anarchists and socialists were, in their eyes, two sides of the “Bolshevik counter-revolution”. The criticism of Bolshevism mounted by the anarchist emigration in connection with and after the Genoa Conference contributed to the demarcation in the international trade union revolutionary-syndicalist movement and the founding of the anarcho-syndicalist International.

The author examines the policies of the Comintern in the context of the Soviet foreign policy in 1921–1922. He demonstrates that the dynamics of the former was not directly tied to the course of the latter and the turn to the NEP in March 1921. The Comintern had its own internal logic of development. With its help the communist leadership could manoeuvre between a more radical probing of the readiness of the capitalist world for a new wave of revolutionary destabilisation or a moderate policy of prolonged “siege” of capitalism, which involved rapprochement with social democracy under the banner of a “united workers' front”. By early 1922, following sharp discussions on the eve and during the Third Congress of the Comintern, its policies were gradually synchronised with the foreign policy course of Soviet Russia, which allowed rapprochement with West European Social Democracy to be exploited in Soviet foreign interests. However, there was little diplomatic gain from this, and after the failure of the Genoa Conference the Comintern continued to pursue a “united front” policy, no longer directly linked to the objectives of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, but as the basis of the Communist strategy for the struggle to ascend to power in Western Europe. At the same time, both in negotiations with the Social Democrats and in planning at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, the Communists prioritised their monopoly on power, regarding the policy of alliances and concessions as tactical and temporary, rejecting the “political NEP” and the pluralist model of multiparty democratic socialism.

The Soviet-Chinese rift in the international communist movement in the 1960s led to the emergence of Maoist communist parties in almost every country in the world, most of which broke away from the communist parties. In a number of places Maoism gained more support than Moscow-backed parties, notably in Peru, where the Maoist movement demonstrated mass appeal and political strength. Within this movement a radical, dogmatic wing emerged which absolutised violence as the only method of political struggle. It was the Peruvian Communist Party Sendero Luminoso (“The Shining Path”) which plunged the country into a decade-long civil war with thousands of victims. In this article the author analyses the ideology and political praxis of the movement, which was a project of militant totalitarian egalitarianism and a left-radical terrorist dictatorship. Sendero Luminoso is an extreme political project, the explanation of which requires not only a political and social but also a psychological approach. The Sendero Luminoso Party grew from a coterie exploring the ideas of José Carlos Mariátegui in the 1960s into a powerful underground insurgent movement in the 1970s and 1980s, which sometimes managed to successfully resist the Peruvian government with all its apparatus of violence, the army and the police. The tactics of the movement were based on the concept of a “protracted people's war” and the encirclement of the city by the countryside, and in practice on all-out violence, declared to be the main creative force of the revolution. The Maoist idea of “service to the people” and the self-sacrifice of revolutionaries was able to capture significant groups of young people, especially students, who devoted themselves wholeheartedly to the cause of the Senderist revolution. Excessive secrecy and rejection of the mass character of the movement made the leadership of the party, led by Abimael Guzmán, invulnerable for many years. The civil war unleashed by the Senderists did indeed bring Peru to the brink of collapse, becoming the starting point of neoliberal political and economic reforms that gained significant public support, explained only by the shock from the left-wing project proposed by the Senderists.