Sacredness in Russian Socialist Iconography before and after 1917. Invention of a new revolutionary tradition, starting from the old one

Abstract

My investigation aims at describing how a particular miscellany of symbols and typologies, crossing the Christian legacy (i.e. icon painting), exploded in revolutionary Russia and increased at the outbreak of the Civil War (1918−1921). For this purpose I will draw attention not only to selected posters of the period, but also to a film chronicle recorded in November 1917. This footage shows how the Bolsheviks first drew on the bloody October in Moscow in order to cast the revolutionary experience as a personal sacrifice in the cause of collective ‘redemption’. Bolsheviks actually continued a practice of syncretism which was previously widely exercised in propaganda for the war loan, not only by the Provisional Government, but even by the tsarist establishment. In the period between February and October, very popular sacred archetypes drawn from Last Judgment iconography tended to be modified and adapted to revolutionary themes by various Russian socialist elites in the context of a battle for conquering the old symbols. The keynotes of the Second International were equally reasserted through religious images by the Bolsheviks in power, to reach the peasant soldier.