Introduction

The essays in this collection were invited as part of a celebration of the career of Geoffrey Swain who retired from the Alec Nove Chair in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow in 2015. Most of the essays originate from papers delivered at the 7th CRCEES Research Forum at the University of Glasgow on 4–5 June 2015, the first day of which was devoted to a celebration of Geoffrey Swain’s career by his friends and colleagues from Glasgow and around the world. A few other papers were invited subsequently to make up this collection. All the authors are, to one degree or another, research colleagues whom Geoffrey Swain has exchanged views with, or supervised, or examined as PhD students. The collected essays thus bring together essays in his honour from several generations of scholars whose work is linked to that of Geoffrey Swain.

During the course of his career Geoffrey Swain has explored a wide range of themes in the history of Russia and Eastern Europe during the twentieth century, focusing in particular on twentieth century Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution and during the early years of Soviet power; Latvia during the early years of Soviet rule; and the career of Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia. Recently he has moved forward in time in relation to Soviet history with a biography of Khrushchev and also, along with his brother Nigel Swain, has produced their highly acclaimed textbook on the recent history of East Central Europe (Swain & Swain Citation2009).

There have been four main stages to Geoffrey’s research career.Footnote¹ First, at the LSE, under the supervision of the late Professor Leonard Schapiro, he worked for a PhD and subsequently produced a series of publications relating to the pre-revolutionary labour movement in Russia, most notably Russian Social Democracy and the Legal Labour Movement, 1906–14 (Swain Citation1983). This work explored what he suggested were the two main elements of Bolshevism, its commitment to revolutionary, rather than reformist, socialism, and an organisational system based around discipline and central control. He argued that while politically active workers supported Bolshevism as revolutionary socialism, they were far less attracted to Bolshevik attempts to impose centralised control: in 1914 Russian trade unionists backed Bolshevik slogans, but refused to accept Leninist discipline.

Geoffrey Swain’s interest in Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe more generally originated from the period of his career in the 1980s when he was a report writer for the BBC’s Monitoring Service at Caversham. During those years there were two dominant stories in Eastern Europe: the martial law crisis in Poland and the quiet disintegration of Yugoslavia after Tito’s death. For a while the Monitoring Service was the only source of information about events in martial law Poland and he worked on this story alongside other writers and editors, analysing not only the crisis itself but the build-up to it and its aftermath. Events in Yugoslavia, however, were his particular concern, and it was because of this interest in the unravelling Yugoslav system that, on taking up a post at Bristol Polytechnic, he decided to research the origins of Tito’s independent road to communism. That ambition was fulfilled in two major articles (Swain Citation1989a, 1992), based on archival research in Belgrade which explored the limits of freedom that Tito won for himself in the immediate post-war years. Essentially, he argued that Tito won for himself virtual autonomy in domestic matters in return for absolute loyalty in foreign policy; he then misjudged signals from Moscow relating to the possibility of Greece joining a Balkan Federation. At the heart of this foreign policy debate lay a dispute about differing roads to communism. This Yugoslav research enabled him to write a new interpretation to the first decade of communist rule in Eastern Europe, which had developed since 1945, and was the basis for a subsequent invitation to write his biography of Tito (Swain Citation2011a).

Research into Yugoslav history became increasingly problematic as that country descended into war, something which coincided with an invitation to write a volume on the Russian Civil War. In the event he wrote not only this volume—The Origins of the Russian Civil War (Swain Citation1996b), which was awarded the BASEES Alec Nove prize in 1996—but a second book Russia’s Civil War (Swain Citation2008). The aim of all these publications was to re-establish the Russian Civil War as a three-way contest, fought not only between Reds and Whites, but also between Reds and peasant socialists, which he described as Greens. This involved the rediscovery of the role played by the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1918 (written out of history by the heirs of both victorious Bolsheviks and vanquished liberals alike) who organised sporadic peasant insurgencies even during the fighting against White generals, and then staged widespread insurrections once the generals were defeated. The invitation to write a biography of Trotsky (Swain Citation2006a) followed logically from this work, and this account of Trotsky’s life was the first to give a full coverage to his time as Commissar for War.

Swain’s interest in modern Latvian history arose from his work on the Russian Civil War and the role played in that conflict by the Latvian Riflemen regiments. Visiting Latvia led to contacts with Daugavpils University, and increasingly he became interested in Daugavpils itself and the unique experience of that town during World War II as it experienced Soviet annexation, Nazi occupation and Soviet re-annexation. All of the Baltic states suffered this fate, but the experience of Daugavpils was unique. The town had an extraordinary ethnic mix—a thriving Jewish community, a Russian Old Believer community, and its own unique Latgalean catholic culture—as well as the social extremes of an industrial proletariat and poor peasantry; this was the tinder for an explosion of ethnic and class violence which both communists and fascists sought to ignite. Swain’s book Between Stalin and Hitler: Class War and Race War on the Dvina, 1940–46 (Swain Citation2004a) was partly inspired by meeting Professor Iosip Šteimans of Daugavpils University, whose life mirrored many of the larger-scale events of Latvian history of the twentieth century: a young Jew in Daugavpils in the 1930s, he had been on the fringes of the communist youth movement before Soviet annexation, became a Young Communist in 1940, fought with the Red Army and returned to Daugavpils in 1944, where he investigated the local holocaust before becoming a university lecturer in Marxism–Leninism. Swain’s most recent Latvian research has been into the ‘national partisans’ who at the end of World War II looked to the British to support their resistance to renewed Soviet occupation.

A central theme running through all of Swain’s work has been the need to question received or standard versions of the history of communism in power in Russia and Eastern Europe. This has involved pursuing historical enquiry in directions that go against the grain of commonly accepted views, and especially those that either perpetuate the outlooks of the winners, the victorious Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War and the ruling communist regimes that emerged subsequently in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, or the heirs of the liberal opposition to them. More specifically Swain’s work has involved exploring the strength or coherence of some of the alternatives that emerged to the paths actually taken, whether in the socialist alternatives to Bolshevik/Communist power in the Revolution and Civil War in Russia, or the alternative within Bolshevism that Trotsky might have offered, as revealed by his role in the Civil War, or the alternative pursued by Latvians in the period after World War II, or the path pursued by Khrushchev in the immediate post-Stalin period, or the alternative form of communist rule offered by the Yugoslav communist leadership under Tito. These themes of exploring alternatives and going against the grain are also pursued in their own ways by the contributors to this collection of essays.

This edited collection comprises two kinds of essays. The first section is made up of seven pieces of original research in honour of Geoffrey Swain by historians who have exchanged ideas with him at various points in his career. They reflect in turn Swain’s interests in Russian, Yugoslav and Latvian history. Four of these essays are on Russian history in the revolutionary years of 1917 and after. Ian Thatcher explores the discussion of constitutional issues in the pamphlet literature of 1917 and shows how pamphlet writers of differing non-Bolshevik persuasions sought to create a political culture that would frame and underpin the republican democratic revolutionary settlement they hoped to establish. Murray Frame examines the debate that was taking place at the same time on the kind of policing that would be adopted in the new post-revolutionary society, arguing that despite the radical implications of the militia system that emerged in 1917, and the Bolsheviks’ view of the militia as ‘the people in arms’, the civilian police force that was adopted was similar to its predecessors, and is better understood within the wider context of pan-European historical models of policing. Matthew Rendle then focuses on the question of how the emerging Bolshevik regime dealt with counter-revolution through an examination of the statistics produced by revolutionary tribunals during the Civil War period. In contrast to the standard stress on repressive organs such as the Cheka in dealing with counter-revolution after the October Revolution, Rendle shows how the figures offer a view of revolutionary justice also reacting in more nuanced ways to the counter-revolutionary threat. Again offering insights into aspects of the revolution that offer a nuanced understanding of the complexities of the history of the Revolution, Alistair Wright traces the development of the Bolshevik revolution in Karelia in the town of Petrozavodsk, showing how, in contrast to the situation in Petrograd, Bolshevik influence in the north was initially weak, and rather than domination by the Bolsheviks, there was a conflict of interests between the centre and Petrozavodsk over the policies introduced by the central Bolshevik government, and the Civil War was pursued by a united local soviet resistance to the economic and military crises faced by the regime.

In the first of two essays on aspects of Yugoslav history under Tito, Vladimir Unkovski-Korica investigates the origins of the failed claims for the autonomous status of Vojvodina in post-war Serbia and Yugoslavia. He argues that as an outcome of Nazi Germany’s racial war national tensions in Vojvodina were radicalised, and the defeat of the Nazis resulted in the expulsion of Vojvodina’s Germans, and the emergence of the Serbs as the majority in Vojvodina’s population. Consequently, the region’s claim to autonomous status in post-war Yugoslavia came into conflict with the national-territorial principle applied by the Yugoslav Communist version of federalism, causing frequent friction and instability. This is followed by an exploration by Richard Mills of the symbolic role played by football when Tito’s Yugoslavian version of communism began to diverge from that of Stalin’s Soviet Union. By focusing on football, and, in particular, reactions to the Yugoslav national team’s victory over the Soviet Union at the 1952 Olympics, Mills offers a nuanced understanding of how Yugoslav sports administrators, athletes and the press contributed to a shift within Yugoslavia from emulation of the Soviet Union to hostile opposition. Finally in this section, Michael Loader examines the ultimately discarded tendencies towards national communism that gave more weight to members of the titular nationalities during the contest for power between Beria and Khrushchev after the death of Stalin. He shows how the two rivals temporarily cooperated to launch an indigenising nationality policy in the Soviet republics leading to the adoption of the ‘New Course’ for the Soviet periphery. In this essay Loader examines in particular the repercussions of the ‘New Course’ in Latvia where it provoked anti-Russian sentiment and the removal of Russians cadres from leading Party and government positions and their replacement by ethnic Latvians.

The second section of this collection consists of three essays in which colleagues of Geoffrey Swain offer reviews of his work and his contribution in turn to aspects of Russian, Latvian and Yugoslav history. Jonathan Smele offers a critical analysis of Swain’s contributions to the history of the Civil War setting his work in the context of broader developments in the field. He argues that Geoffrey Swain’s work has ‘cut against the grain in many respects’, but that the case for the potentiality of an alternative outcome to the Civil War struggles—a ‘Third Way’—remains to be proven. Marina Germane then explores the way Swain has shed light on the ‘forgotten voices’ of Latvian history from the role of the Latvian Riflemen in the Civil War, to the ‘special character’ of Latvian socialism, from its ideological origins within the Social Democratic movement to the National Communists of the 1950s. She argues that Swain’s contribution has been ‘to identify gaps and inconsistences in existing accounts—that which “does not quite fit” in historical narratives—and at making links and connections that were previously missed, thus emphasising the contingent nature of history’. Cathie Carmichael then examines Swain’s contribution to the history of Yugoslav Communism and the role of Tito ‘as a problematic figure’, embodying contradictory tendencies from pursuit of revenge against those he regarded as enemies or opponents and his cultivation of a cult of the personality similar to more orthodox communist leaders, to his role as a ‘disloyal Bolshevik’ willing to pursue a more decentralised version of communist rule to that adopted by the Soviet leadership.

Finally, it should be said that this celebration of Geoffrey Swain’s career should be seen very much as the story so far, up to the landmark of his retirement from the Alec Nove Professorship. As an emeritus professor at the University of Glasgow, however, the work goes on, with further work to be published and we hope, further research to be completed, perhaps in answer to criticisms that, while going against the grain, some of his interpretations remain open to debate.