The East European successor states to the Russian empire were shaped by their early experience of war and peace, imperial collapse and new state-building, population displacement and resettlement, and the dissolution and reformation of traditional social identities and affiliations. In the course of World War I, several million people, both Russians and non-Russians, had been dispersed from the tsarist empire’s western borderlands throughout its European and Siberian territories. 1 The war ended in a crescendo of revolutionary upheaval and the assertion of a new national politics on the periphery of the unravelling imperial polity. The peace treaties and territorial arrangements of 1918-20 marked the birth of a new era of nationalist and revolutionary conflict, extensive social dislocation and intense ethnic discord, grand visions of reconstruction and regeneration, and renewed population movements on a massive …