Revolving Doors of Power: Local Government in Russia’s Revolutions and Civil War, 1917-1923

My dissertation offers a political, intellectual, and social history of local government in Russia during the Revolutions of 1917, the Civil War, and the early years of Soviet power, told from a local perspective. It is the first case study to investigate continuities and ruptures in local institutions and practices under four regimes. To analyze these historical trends, I focus on the city of Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains. Founded by Peter the Great in 1723 to exploit the natural resources of the Urals, Ekaterinburg had more than 77,000 residents in 1917, a medium-sized city with a large concentration of factories and workers. The primary subjects of my investigation are institutions of Ekaterinburg’s local government, including the City Duma and City Soviet, and how they shaped the revolutionary experience and competing state-building efforts. I place the consequences of the cataclysmic and transformative period between 1917 and 1923, and the role of municipal institutions in Ekaterinburg, in the context of the prerevolutionary history of local government in the Russian Empire. Ekaterinburg provides the ideal case to examine transitions in power on the urban level, as it changed hands five times between Provisional Government, Bolshevik, and anti-Bolshevik (Whites) rule during the Russian Revolutions and Civil War. My project highlights successive attempts to resurrect the municipal administration amid war and state collapse, the emergence of an understudied regional government that articulated a liberal and federal vision for a future Russia, and the politics of local government under Bolshevik and White dictatorship. I argue that, after emerging victorious in the Civil War, the Bolsheviks embraced a system of local government that, ironically, most closely resembled the vision articulated by the prerevolutionary Russian conservative movement. This speaks to the importance of shared political culture among warring sides as well as the role of circumstances as a historical actor in Russia’s Revolutions and Civil War.Doctor of Philosoph