‘WISH YOU WERE (NOT) HERE’: ANTI‐BOLSHEVIK POSTCARDS OF THE RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR, 1918–21

Abstract

During the Russian Civil War the Bolsheviks made extensive use of the postcard as a vehicle for transmitting political ideas. Their opponents, by contrast, largely ignored the medium and chose instead to concentrate on poster and newspaper production. This article looks at the reasons behind that decision, analysing a representative selection of the few anti‐Bolshevik postcards that were produced and showing how wider concerns about political unity, distribution networks and access to raw materials had a direct impact upon the Whites’ ability to use postcards for propaganda purposes.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Ernest Zitser and Alison Rowley for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

1. Many of these postcards were printed in secret and distributed illegally. This experience was to prove immensely useful to the Bolsheviks during the civil‐war period.

2. Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War 1, 39.

3. Zabochen′, ‘Otkrytoe Pis′mo 1917–1919’, 119.

4. Even these aims proved divisive. In particular many of the Cossacks, who were eventually to comprise the majority of the army, found the Whites’ overt Russian nationalism hard to square with their own aspirations for autonomy or independence. Conflicts over this and other matters were to continue throughout the existence of the White Army.

5. Lazarski, ‘White Propaganda Efforts’, 689.

6. Ibid., 696.

7. Denikin, Ocherki Russkoi Smuty, vol. 4, 232.

8. Ibid., 232.

9. Osvag had a number of smaller divisions spread out over the areas under White control around the Black Sea, including Crimea, the Don, Kuban and Terek‐Dagestan regions. See Lazarski, ‘White Propaganda Efforts’, 698.

10. Chapkina, Khudozhestvennaia Otkrytka, 179

11. Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War 1, 21

12. Russkaia Kul′tura also claims on the reverse of the cards to have offices in ‘Moscow and St Petersburg’, although this may be a reference to their activities during the pre‐revolutionary era.

13. Bullock, The Russian Civil War, 27.

14. Lazarski, ‘White Propaganda Efforts’, 702.

15. Ukraine for example, where in February 1918 a number of cards were printed satirising life under the Soviets, was subsequently protected by a pro‐German government (backed up by German forces until November 1918). The Baltic countries and Finland, meanwhile, may also have at times been wracked by war but there were large areas of resistance to the Soviets where postcards could be printed.

16. In the Baltics local photographers captured many images of pro‐independence troops, some of which were turned into postcards, while in Western Ukraine, for example, a set of three typographic postcards of the Ukrainian Galician Army were produced.

17. The only reference to a geographical location I have come across is in a card by Sergei Zhivotovskii that refers to bodies being dumped by the Bolsheviks in the Gulf of Finland.

18. Lazarski, ‘White Propaganda Efforts’, 700.

19. Shleev, Revoliutsiia 1905–1907, 109.

20. Denikin, Ocherki Russkoi Smuty, vol. 4, 233.

21. Postcards also played a particularly significant role in Bolshevik propaganda during these early years, in particular between 1905 and 1908 when the rules on censorship were partially relaxed. The Bolshevik publishing house Vpered produced over a hundred different cards for sale and, according to the activist Elena Stasova, these were crucial in helping raise money for the party. See Stasova, Vospominanii, 49.

22. Kenez, ‘Lenin and the Freedom of the Press’, 132.

23. White, The Bolshevik Poster, 19.

24. Ibid., 41.

25. Zabochen′, ‘Otkrytoe Pis′mo, 1917–1919’, 119.

26. Lazarski, ‘White Propaganda Efforts’, 703.

27. Belitskii and Glezer Rasskazy, 15.

28. The most common of the locally produced cards all have the Latin letters ‘BS’, followed by a number, printed on the front. They have captions in Russian but are printed on imported paper. The YMCA also published some cards of Allied troops in Vladivostok, although it is not clear where these were printed. The Russian Railway Service Corps, led by the engineer John F. Stevens (who had served as chief engineer on the Panama Canal), consisted of 350 American railwaymen, engineers and managers who had arrived in Siberia in February 1918 to improve the running of the Siberian and Manchurian railway network.

29. Zitser, ‘A Dirty Place’, 34.

30. Faulstich, Siberian Sojourn.

31. Novotny, The Field Post of the Czechoslovak and Allied Forces in Russia, 13.

32. Ibid., 32.

33. Ibid., 18.

34. See Norris, A War of Images, passim.

35. Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War 1, 13.

36. This particular card is from a series of anti‐Bolshevik images produced in Latvia by an unknown artist calling himself ‘Ciwi‐s’.

37. Lazarski, ‘White Propaganda Efforts in the South’, 699.

38. Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, 10–12.

39. Unsurprisingly, many in the academic world and the church were ardently opposed to the new orthography and continued use of the old spelling came to be seen as a sign of sedition, or resistance to the new world order. The White Armies printed their decrees using the old orthographic system and many émigrés continued to use the old system for years afterwards.

40. The satirical magazine Pulemet (‘Machine‐gun’) continued printing cartoons of Lenin until as late as 1918.

41. Kenez, ‘Lenin and the Freedom of the Press’, 141.

42. Bullock, The Russian Civil War, 78–79.

43. In this respect it is also worth noting that the only surviving depictions of the White leaders in postcard form were strictly regional efforts. For example, the posters that were copied for the Russkaia Kul′tura postcards were printed in southern Russia, while the images of Kolchak and his soldiers were printed in Vladivostok. On Kolchak see Smele, Civil War in Siberia.

44. For example on one Japanese postcard of a parade, a US serviceman has marked one of the figures with an ‘x’ and written on the reverse side: ‘With the mark is me. We were parading on the main str. Notice the packs on our backs.’

45. Most of the Czechoslovak cards bear captions in both Czech and Russian, suggesting that they were also aimed at the local population

46. Religious overtones in Russian political propaganda were explicit from the earliest days of the anti‐tsarist movement, particularly in the celebration of ‘martyrs’ who died for the cause. It is interesting to note that the Czechoslovak cards from the civil‐war period also helped to build personality cults around their dead heroes. See, for example, the image of Colonel Ushakov (Figure 12), which explicitly describes him as having been ‘martyred by the Bolsheviks’.

47. Lazarski, ‘White Propaganda Efforts’, 694.