“Civil War is the Key Word of Our Days”: the Term “Civil War” in the Rhetoric of Grigory Zinoviev

The article examines the usage of the concept of “civil war” by Grigory Zinoviev, one of the key figures in the Bolshevik Party during the 1914–1918 period. The article uses the approach proposed by scholars of the Cambridge History of Ideas and draws on a variety of sources, including Zinoviev's writings, stenographic rec-ords of his speeches at various meetings, and newspaper reports on these events. Bolshevik discursive practices differed from most such practices of other political forces at the time. Before World War I broke out, Zinoviev used the concept of “civil war” as a mere statement. However, from the end of 1914 he, following Lenin, pro-duced a series of party slogans. The most famous of these was “the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war”, which the Bolsheviks working in Russia adopted ambiguously. Recognizing its unpopularity, Lenin and Zinoviev removed it from the agenda by 1917. Upon his arrival in Russia, Zinoviev stopped using the term “civil war” in public speeches as well as in intra-party discussions, preferring related terms such as “revolution-ary war” and “socialist revolution”. However, this changed by July 1917, when Zinoviev was engaged in polem-ics with spokesmen of other parties, denying their accusations of “fomenting civil war” against the Bolsheviks and delegating these accusations to his opponents. Zinoviev's use of this term in this context peaked in Novem-ber 1917 – March 1918, during the discussions surrounding the Brest Peace. As a categorical supporter of the peace, Zinoviev used the term “revolutionary war”, which was popular among “left communists” and left SRs. He first peripheralized the Russian civil war, attributing it as a regional conflict in Finland and Ukraine, before internationalizing it. The term “civil war” was actively used by Zinoviev during a time when it was necessary to decisively separate from the Social Democrats who took a patriotic stance and put forward the slogan of “civil peace”. Later, after he returned to Russia from exile, Zinoviev avoided using the term “civil war” in explaining Bolshevik strategies and tactics. As chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he legitimized mobilizations for the Red Army, constantly emphasizing the participation of foreign forces in the civil war against Soviet government. Using images and concepts from the language of the Russian Revolution, he referred Clemenceau as “the French Kornilov”.