Red Patriots against White Patriots: Contesting Patriotism in the Civil War in North Russia

Europe-Asia Studies. 2019. Vol. 71. No. 2. P. 183–202.

Novikova L.

This article uses the example of Arkhangel’sk province in North Russia to examine how the two main parties in the Russian Civil War—the Bolsheviks and the White armies—used elements of nationalism and xenophobia to delegitimise their enemies. It reveals the evolution of patriotic rhetoric, first used by the Whites to discredit the Bolsheviks as German agents, and then by the Reds to delegitimise the Whites as agents of the Entente. In the 1920s anti-Allied sentiments became the main trope in the memory of the civil war both among émigrés and in the Soviet North.

Keywords: патриотизм, Russian Civil War, nationalism, белое движение, Гражданская война в России, patriotism, the Red Army, Красная армия, White movement, имперский национализм, Первая мировая война, First World War

Publication based on the results of: War, Power and Society in the USSR, 1930-50s: Transformations of the Soviet System (2019)