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In a recent article inVoprosy istorii KPSSentitled “The Bolsheviks and Revolutionary Creativity in the Provinces (July-October 1917),” A. S. Smirnov analyzes those hotbeds of radicalism where events took a sharp swing to the left, at a rate often surpassing revolutionary developments generally, even those in Petrograd itself.1 In such diverse and far-flung places as Helsingfors, Lugansk, Shlissel'burg, Minsk, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Kazan', and Tsaritsyn, revolutionary politics bred endless crises, demoralizing the national government and at times embarrassing and perplexing leaders of revolutionary parties. One would think that Soviet historians and propagandists would seize eagerly upon the opportunities these case studies provide to show the degree to which revolutionary ideas had gained support from local populations across the country. But this is not necessarily the case.

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The Bolsheviks made civil war inevitable by forcing a showdown with the Kerenskii government in October 1917—and concomitantly with the moderate socialist parties, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and Mensheviks. The resulting conflict accelerated complex processes underway since February that exacerbated social polarization and fostered political and economic localism. Following the local Soviet's siege of the city duma in the provincial capital of Saratov in October, opposition forces began to contest Soviet power, which before long was reduced to Bolshevik and Left SR rule. As a result, the Saratov Soviet spent all of 1918-19 battling a variety of manifestations of discontent with the new political order. The calculus of civil war in the province involved the sustained threat to strategically located Saratov of White armies, which succeeded in striking against and taking the uezd (district) towns of Khvalynsk, Vol'sk, Serdobsk, Tsaritsyn, Balashov, Kuznetsk, and Kamyshin. Opposition from within the province proved every bit as formidable. Anti-Bolshevik forces, inspired by both the socialist and nonsocialist resistance, mobilized uprisings in all of the towns of Saratov province during the civil war; moreover, not a single uezd escaped the throes of peasant violence and resistance before this turbulent chapter in Russian history drew to a close.