LA GRANDE GUERRE OUBLIÉE.

The untold history of a long-neglected major front of the Great War

What do we know of the 15 million soldiers of the Czar who fought against three empires? Do we know what they thought, endured and experienced, how the war effort was organized, and the degree to which populations suffered from the losses, the deportations, and occupations? Imagine a civil society standing up to a power that scorns it through its patriotic, economic, and philanthropic commitment, an empire whose people seek to throw off the chains of Russian domination, a capital where political parties plot to put an end to autocracy. As Lenin said, this war «catalysed history». Out of it emerged two revolutions—of February and October, 1917—which would give birth to citizenship, create a new agrarian equilibrium, and definitively confirm the refusal to fight on the front. The Great War ended here as well, in March 1918, but only to give way to a myriad of political and social struggles cumulatively known as the civil war. If we have forgotten this conflict or know very little about it, it is because the memory of it, however vivid at the outset, was deactivated under the communist regime and remains so today. And yet, this was the most murderous front of the First World War. Alexandre Sumpf is a lecturer in Contemporary history at the Université de Strasbourg. Agrégé in history, he studied at the Ecole normale supérieure. His research focuses on propaganda in Russia and in the USSR, especially cinema. He is the author of De Lénine à Gagarine. Une histoire sociale de l'URSS (Gallimard, Folio histoire, 2013).