Corinne Gaudin Rural Echoes of World War I: War Talk in the Russian Village

This article explores some of the ways Russian peasants’ engagement with war news during World War I transformed internal village politics. The war was extremely disruptive, not only be-cause of the mobilisation of men, livestock, and grain, but because the broadly disseminated lan-guage of patriotism, sacrifice, and internal enemies coloured peasants’ readings of developments within the village and of their neighbors’ actions. Villagers were swept up in the national obsession of defining the enemy, turning it inward in an effort to link local disputes to larger loyalties. Con-flicting perceptions of who bore the greatest burden of war, exacerbated by rumour and fear, threat-ened to disrupt the already delicate local balance between rights and obligations. The war reconfig-ured long-standing disputes – over taxes, over land, and over welfare provisions – by linking them to understandings of service, sacrifice, and loyalty. The result was to open the door to the politicisa-tion of quotidian economic and social relations.

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