This study is about three wars that took place in Eastern Europe between 1914 and 1945 and how Russian and Soviet Jews wrote about them. It focuses on the figures S. An-sky (1863-1920), Simon Dubnov (1860-1941), Isaac Babel (1894-1940), and Vasily Grossman (1905-1964). During the First World War, An-sky provided humanitarian relief to Jewish civilians along the Eastern Front, and Dubnov was a historian and Jewish national rights activist. In 1920 Babel was a propagandist with the Red Army during the Polish-Bolshevik War. Throughout World War II Grossman served as a frontline reporter with the Red Army. Each figure witnessed and wrote about Jewish populations that suffered from military violence in the multi-ethnic frontier between historic Poland and Russia that became sites of fighting in each war.

This is the first study to compare Russian and Soviet Jewish war writing from 1914 to 1945 from a historical perspective. It explores: 1) How the experience of war in the twentieth century has correlated with the expression of Jewish identity; 2) The multiple influences and constraints, including Russian and Jewish cultural values, political goals, and wartime censorship, that have shaped the representation of Jewish war history; 3) How different generations of Jewish intellectuals depicted Jews as a people, or nation, in a time of crisis; and 4) The ways that each of the writers' individual efforts to make sense of war related to their contemporaries' representations of Jewish civilians.

The sources for this study are non-fictional texts written in Russian and Yiddish during wartime or immediately after, including diaries, memoirs, letters, documentary anthologies and journalism. Russian and Soviet Jewish war chroniclers are viewed as active participants in the histories that they sought to describe. Their writings are interpreted as chronicles, or first drafts about the catastrophic events that they witnessed.

This study's main finding is that these chroniclers helped to forge a distinctly Russian Jewish historiography of war that preceded and encompassed the period of the Holocaust. This finding contributes to the study of historiography, modern Jewish history, and national groups in Imperial Russia and the USSR.

AbstractFrom Sieyès to Lenin: Labor, Class and the Quest for Social Inclusion Natalia Koulinka Different interpretations of the concepts of “the people” and “labor” lie at the core of the difference between liberalism and socialism, as argued by Lenin. The theoretical division results in opposing visions of the socioeconomic and political changes required to make a society just. It also underlies the rival answers to the question of what it means for the laboring classes to be socially included. One of the most important disagreements concerns whether political rights and civil liberties alone constitute the necessary and sufficient condition for democracy or whether they must be complemented, as socialists insist, by universal social, or economic, rights. This dissertation explores the ideas of “the people” and “labor/work” as they were employed and developed in the arguments for the right of “laboring/working classes” to be fully empowered members of society on the eve of two revolutions—the French Revolution of 1789 and the Proletarian Revolution in Russia in 1917. In particular, it closely examines the pamphlet by Sieyès What Is the Third Estate? published a few months before the French Revolution, in which its author contends that it is the labor of the Third Estate that gives it the right to demand its due place in the political system of France. Sieyès’ argument is counterposed by the socioeconomic and political analyses of Russian thinkers of the mid-nineteenth-the early twentieth century: Nikolai G. Chernyshevskii, Dmitrii I. Pisarev, Nikolai K. Mikhailovskii, and Vladimir I. Lenin. Special attention is given to Lenin’s controversy over the issue of “the laboring peasantry.” One contribution of the dissertation is that it introduces a number of previously untranslated primary sources to an English language readership, including significant works by Chernyshevskii, Pisarev, and Mikhailovskii. Most importantly, it contributes to the debates on democracy’s meaning and conditions of possibility by explicating Lenin’s analysis of hired labor under the capitalist organization of production as a specific form of labor with inherent inequalities that put a class of low-wage hired laborers at a permanent disadvantage.