The paper explores the nature of inter‐ethnic, anti‐colonial violence during the First World War and the Russian Revolution (1914–1921). It adopts a comparative approach by juxtaposing the 1916 uprising in Russian Central Asia – specifically, in the Semirech'e oblast – against the anti‐Mennonite pogroms carried out by the Ukrainian peasantry in 1919. The analysis demonstrates that the imperial state, although a significant factor, exercises a highly ambiguous influence: in one case it becomes an enabler of violence, whereas in another it poses an obstacle to it. Furthermore, the paper questions the conventional wisdom of presenting Russia's long crisis as a two‐part process of state disintegration and subsequent state reconstitution; regional dynamics, especially the power relations between the colonized and the colonizers, need to be taken into account if one intends to construct a more comprehensive history of that period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]