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Volume 10: Women and Gender in Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914-22
For most of the twentieth century Russia’s Great War of 1914-18 was a historical afterthought. Overshadowed by the Bolsheviks’ revolution, the Civil War, and the consolidation of Soviet power, the First World War suffered from relative neglect within professional scholarship, as Soviet and Western experts alike focused their energy on explaining either the decline and fall of the autocracy or the origins and rise of Russian Communism.
Since the early 1990s, however, researchers in Russia and elsewhere have started to re-examine and re-evaluate the war’s significance and meaning in the history of that state and society. Encouraged by the opening of access to the Russian archives and freed from the ideological baggage of earlier historical debates, they have begun to investigate and reassess Russia’s Great War not simply as a prelude to “Red October,” but in its own right. Increasingly, the war is seen as the fulcrum which set into motion a chain of events that transformed Eurasia and much of the world. Instead of treating “1917” as a watershed moment in Russian and global history, many scholars now perceive a "continuum of crisis" between 1914 and the early 1920s.
In the years preceding the one-hundredth anniversary of the First World War interest in Russia’s involvement became much more engaged not just among scholars, but also in public discussions among Russian leaders and citizens. The centennial of the war’s outbreak also challenged historians of Russia to raise public awareness of Russia's contributions to the Great War and of the war’s impacts on Russia. In response, Slavica’s series “Russia's Great War and Revolution” was conceived in 2006 as a long-term project to promote and disseminate such research. With over 250 contributing authors from across the globe and a projected total of 11 volumes with 20 individual books, it has become unquestionably the biggest multinational scholarly effort to mark the War’s centennial in relation to Russia. It seeks to provide readers of English with a broader understanding of the war’s place in Russian history and, as important, the place of Russia’s involvement in the history of the Great War and its consequences.
