Social conflict and Soviet counterinsurgency in the western borderlands, 1944-1950

ENThis dissertation examines the Soviet fight against rural insurgencies between 1944 and 1950 in the regions annexed after the Nazi-Soviet Pact - Eastern Poland and the Baltic states. It focuses on the nature of this conflict, nationalist guerrilla movements, Soviet pacification doctrine and the major means to enforce it: agrarian reform, deportations, amnesties and local militia. The dissertation also addresses the relationship between state and peasant, class consciousness and nationalism, and the political attitudes of the rural population in East European borderlands. It provides a case study in the establishment of Soviet power, and the communist approach to counterinsurgency. The Soviet government downplayed nationalism as a cause for these insurgencies and overrated its class factors, attributing them primarily to resistance by the rural bourgeoisie. Such an interpretation, the experience of the Civil War and a social system allowing a centralized strategy and a wide range of pacification means, shaped a unique Soviet counterinsurgency doctrine, making it more coherent but also more rigid than the doctrines of other states. Facing guerrilla war in the countryside where populations were indifferent or hostile towards communist values, the Soviet state combined populist reforms and coercion, seeking to win some peasants to its cause and force the rest to neutrality. Soviet leaders viewed radical agrarian reform as a key to peasant hearts but, unlike counterinsurgents in other states, not as a means to stabilize society.On the contrary, carrying out the reform with unprecedented vigour and extensively using local volunteer militia to enforce it, they deliberately fomented tensions among peasants and partially succeeded in splitting them along class lines and prompting the beneficiaries of the reform to fight the guerrillas. Meanwhile, the government drained the manpower of the resistance by deportations coupled with amnesties and propaganda. Compared to the pacification policies of other states, most Soviet methods were fairly rational tools to attain the desired objectives. However, the government also made serious mistakes when it misinterpreted insurgency's nature, rushed collectivization without the resources to fund it before it had established control over the countryside, and failed to eliminate random violence by police and lower-level executives. The Soviet state faced an equally ruthless enemy who, being unable to fight the security forces, focussed on terror against rural administrators, but primarily against the peasants defined as collaborators. A growing understanding that the resistance was futile, the government's reforms polarising rural society and disrupting its traditional hierarchy, and the endless turmoil stirred by guerrilla attacks and counterinsurgency operations made peasants increasingly side with the stronger opponent, the state, in hope that it would bring law and order.