Dakota Irvin, ‘Regionalism, Local Government and the First Months of White Rule in Ekaterinburg, August-November 1918’

Dakota Irvin will discuss a chapter of his dissertation, which looks at the febrile experience of state building on the local level during the Russian Civil War. The lecture examines attempts by anti-Bolshevik forces (Whites) in Ekaterinburg to reconstruct a functioning system of local government after eight months of Bolshevik rule and the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Specifically, it focuses on the efforts by liberal Lev Krol’, who founded the Regional Provisional Government of the Urals, dedicated to establishing a federal system in a future anti-Bolshevik Russia, as well as offering a bulwark for the defense of democracy and civil liberties from encroaching military dictatorship. Krol’’s experience underlines the possibility, albeit circumscribed and ultimately unsuccessful, for a center-left, “third way” to emerge from a political climate marked by authoritarianism from the left and the right.

Irvin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.