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Contribution short abstract:

This paper explores the battlefields of the Russian Civil War not as spaces of military conflict, but as sites where distinct culturally-determined perceptions and practices came into contact, examining the ways in which its different participants experienced and understood cold.

Contribution long abstract:

In 1918, the area of northwestern Russia between the Finnish border and the White Sea became a battlefield of the Russian Civil War, where several different national and ideological groups came together in conflict and alliance. This paper shows that even though physically all participants of this conflict were affected by the cold weather in similar ways, their attitudes toward cold were based on their pre-existing cultural conceptions.

The British soldiers and officers, stationed in northwestern Russia as part of the Allied force, were inscribing themselves into a narrative of British imperial exploration of Arctic and Antarctic, and their presence in Karelia had a meaning beyond immediate political-military objectives. A similar narrative began to appear in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, but during the Russian Civil War the Red Army soldiers did not yet have this mythology to fuel their fighting in North Russia.

The region's native population - a Finno-Ugric people called Karelians, who physically suffered from the climatic extremes as much as the foreign soldiers in the region, were nonetheless used to them, and have developed a more intimate and personal understanding of this phenomenon.