Summary Of Decolonization By Joshua Sanborn

Joshua Sanborn’s book changes the framework for Russia during the First World War to a war of decolonization. He argues that the Russian Empire decolonized during the war due to the altered view of war, the rise of nationalism, and the new states formed after the end of war. Moreover in framing decolonization, Sanborn provides a brief history of imperial Russia and the early twentieth-century while ultimately focusing on 1914 to 1918. In this period, he aims to describes the wide variety of actors and analyze Russia’s decolonization. The decolonization process is further broken down into stages of decolonization: imperial challenge, state failure social disaster, and state-building. These stages aid Sanborn in describing the experiences of

Soldiers’ influence on the decolonization process is prominent throughout the work. The soldiers’ viewpoint and experience supports Sanborn’s thesis because there is never a chapter that does not reference either the soldiers’ relationship to an aspect of the war or society generally. One of his best pieces of evidence on the effects of the war comes from a commander in 1914 named Aleksandr Uspenskii; Sanborn describes how this war changed soldiers’ perspectives of warfare. Hence he articulates how the horrors of war appear in the soldiers’ nightmares and “Uspenskii spent one awful night in a barn, watching his soldiers screaming and thrashing in their dreams as they slept, producing an unwelcome feeling that their lodging had become a mental hospital” (35). This “shock of combat,” that Sanborn articulates aids in understanding the mental constraints of soldiers fighting in a war that they already felt inadequate for. This inadequacy of the soldiers is from the incompetency of command and lack of arms which Sanborn demonstrates throughout his

The violence, societal collapse, and state failure are successfully demonstrated throughout the work through the numerous examples of ethnic groups being targeted. Whether he is describing the military using ethnopolitics for allies or discussing how refugees were deported based upon their ethnic group to the culmination that Sanborn describes the situation as forced migration or cleansing. The ethnic groups’ experiences varied with the failure of the state demonstrated by the Armenian genocide and targeted violence throughout the war targeted at Germans and Jews. Ultimately Sanborn shows that the experiences of some ethnic groups results in state-building like Poland and to an extent Ukraine. The argument for decolonization is the strongest when examining the experiences of various ethnic groups because their experiences reveal the process of state failure and social