The Union of Regeneration: the Anti-Bolshevik Underground in Revolutionary Russia, 1917-1919
Abstract
The Union of Regeneration has been chosen as the main focal point of this thesis, a
study of underground political organisations in revolutionary Russia who came about
as a result of fragmentation of Russia's major political parties in 1917 and sought to
oppose the Bolshevik takeover of power. The thesis traces the origins of the
underground in the political turmoil of 1917 before detailing how each group was
formed, and how a number of plans were made, most of which hinged on the
extensive involvement of Allied interventionist forces, to form an anti-Bolshevik and
anti-German front in the wake of the signature of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The
efforts of the Union of Regeneration, the National Centre, and other groups such as
the Union for the Defence of the Fatherland and Freedom are presented as a series of
failures which took place mostly in 1918. By examining the reasons for each of these
failures, this thesis hopes to focus not on external factors, such as the lack of Allied
intervention to assist the underground groups or the machinations of reactionary
forces against them, in order to reveal the fundamental failings of the underground
movement as a whole. The underground lacked any organisational discipline or
coherence, its ranks were easily entered on a loose, `personal' basis and there was
little unity of purpose between its members, save the removal of Soviet power.
Consequently, plans made were too vague, agreements were too easily broken, and
alliances were too easily ruptured. This thesis, then, hopes to demonstrate that
although when considered together the anti-Bolshevik underground constituted a
genuine potential threat to the Bolshevik regime, that it failed to act as one
contributed greatly to it being easily marginalised by the extremes of left and right.
Authors
Wells, BenjaminCollections
- Theses [3706]