Research seminar: First World War POWs and Humanitarian Governance in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia, 1914-1922

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they inherited responsibility for hundreds of thousands of foreign prisoners of war captured during the First World War. This included more than 200,000 interned in Russian Turkestan between 1914 and 1921.

This roundtable discusses how the state in late-imperial and early-Soviet Russia managed this population, which became a major administrative and humanitarian challenge in the midst of Russian imperial collapse, the Bolshevik reconstitution of authority, and the Russian Civil War. Speakers Dr Hanna Matt and Dr Peter Whitewood show how Russian approaches to POW relief operated on different scales, as metropolitan policymaking had to contend with international humanitarian norms and organisations such as the Red Cross, pre-revolutionary civil-society institutions, and volatile local conditions.

Drawing on archival documents from Uzbekistan, Switzerland, and Germany, as well as memoir literature, Dr Matt examines how POWs and international humanitarian actors navigated challenges and opportunities created by the shifting landscape of Revolution and Civil War in Turkestan, with a focus on the uneven implementation of Bolshevik policy and the improvised forms of authority and relief that emerged. Dr Whitewood explores how Soviet authorities attempted to construct a centralised system for regulating prisoner welfare, labour, and repatriation, asserting centralised state control over POW administration while continuing to engage with international and civil-society organisations. Both speakers emphasise how the management of foreign prisoners reveals important continuities across the revolutionary divide, highlights the emergence of humanitarian governance as a component of early Soviet state-building, and demonstrates how developments in the locality provide new perspectives on how the First World War shaped the emergence of the international humanitarian order.

Dr Hanna Matt recently completed her PhD in Humanitarianism and Conflict Response at the University of Manchester. Her dissertation examined the history of humanitarian relief in late Imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union by considering different groups of displaced persons, including refugees, prisoners of war, and famine refugees in Central Asia. She is currently teaching in the School of History at the University of Leeds.

Dr Peter Whitewood is an Associate Professor and Head of History at York St John University. He is author of The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Soviet Military (University Press of Kansas, 2015) and The Soviet-Polish War and its Legacy: Lenin’s Defeat and the Rise of Stalinism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).