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In 1917, Russian soldiers and their wives demanded that the revolution represent and reflect their interests and concerns. Their actions and demands shaped the revolution and contributed to the confusion and sense of disorder that were defining features of 1917. The actions and impact of the unarmed soldiers' wives alongside the actions and impact of their armed and mobilised husbands demonstrates the commonality of the experience of war and highlights that troop mobilisation was perhaps the single most important factor in shaping experiences of the revolution. The recent work of Joshua Sanborn explored the role of military conscription in forming national identities and in transmitting the violence of war to civilian Russia in the course of the civil war. This chapter explores the role played by soldiers and their wives and illustrates in part Sanborn's thesis of conscripted soldiers as the source of escalating violence and collapsing authority in provincial life. Whether deserters, members of reserve regiments, prisoners of war, on leave or invalids, soldiers played a highly vocal and visible role in political life. This was partly because they were armed, and had clear and easily identifiable group identity. Regional power structures depended on soldier support, both for their own safety and for the maintenance of their orders. When force or violence occurred in civilian life, it almost invariably included soldier participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comrades! Public teachers! You gave the people literacy, now you must give them development! Make free Russia's conscious citizens out of yesterday's village philistines! This chapter looks at the methods used by the political elite to communicate with ordinary people and offers some explanations for the problems that they faced. Russia's political elite sought to educate ordinary people, and to transform their cultural lives, in the pre-revolutionary period. These attempts to communicate with and to educate ordinary people were intensified in 1917. So-called ‘cultural-enlightenment campaigns’ were high on the agenda of public life in the course of 1917. Correspondingly, ordinary people sought out and utilised information on the nature of the revolution, and of how they were to participate in the revolution. The Provisional Government and soviets, and educated society in general, sought to orchestrate popular education. For the Provisional Government, popular education had to be a success, as they relied on popular understanding and participation in the administration. Without popular support, their stated goals of overseeing democratic elections, keeping Russia in the war and preventing civic disorder were unachievable. Educational campaigns were undertaken with heartfelt faith from Russia's political elite that education could ‘transform’ Russia's citizens into newly fledged democratic citizens, who could participate in the building of an egalitarian, even utopian, state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]