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Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin

By Victoria E. Bonnell

University of California Press

Copyright © 1998 Victoria E. Bonnell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520087127


Introduction

The critical issue facing the Bolsheviks in 1917 was not merely the seizure of power but the seizure of meaning. The Russian revolutions challenged old ways of comprehending the world and aroused profound uncertainty over the meaning of the past, present, and future. At no point was this crisis more severe and widespread than in October, when the Bolsheviks proclaimed the new Soviet state. As Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders understood, there was no consensus, even among their own supporters, about many fundamental issues of interpretation. In the turbulent months following the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks attempted to gain control over the sphere of public discourse and to transform popular attitudes and beliefs by introducing new symbols, rituals, and visual imagery. Their aim was nothing less than the redefinition of "all social values by an immense message designed to liberate, but also to create a new mystique."1

Furet makes this statement with reference to the French Revolution of 1789. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge and London, 1981), 114.

The medium for the message was what Eric Hobsbawm has characterized as "invented tradition," that is, "a set of practices … which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past."2

Hobsbawm, introduction to The Invention of Tradition. ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge and London, 1984), 1.

Invented traditions, according to Hobsbawm, can perform three (possibly overlapping) functions.3

Ibid., 9.

First, they are created for the purpose of "establishing or symbolizing

social cohesion or the membership of groups, real or artificial communities." For the Bolsheviks, whose claim to power was based on an ideology that accorded world-historical importance to the proletariat, it was critically important to establish in public discourse the heroic position and collective identity of the working class. The party urgently needed to convey to the population at large an image of the new worker-heroes, the "conscious" workers who were the chosen people of Marxism-Leninism. Equally important was the need to inculcate the concept of "class" as the central epistemological element in the new official ideology. Class, rather than nationality, religion, gender, or ethnicity, was to serve as the basis for social and political solidarity. During the immediate postrevolutionary years and well into the 1920s, the Bolshevik party wrestled with the problem of defining collective identities and making policies consistent with these definitions.

Invented traditions perform a second function of "establishing or legitimizing institutions, status or relations of authority." Revolutions, such as the one in Russia in October 1917, discredit and destroy existing institutions and relations of authority, opening up the discursive field for an entirely new definition of the social order of political power. The key problem for the Bolsheviks in the months following the revolution was to legitimize the new party-state and a novel set of relations between subordinate and superordinate groups. The former dominant classes, and the Provisional Government that had ruled Russia since February 1917, lost power as a consequence of the October Revolution. In their place was the Bolshevik party and the new Soviet state, with its commissars, secret police, Red Army, and a small but vociferous band of true believers, fellow travelers, opportunists, and henchmen. The Bolsheviks recognized very early that power without legitimacy provided a precarious basis for a new regime. A key element in their legitimation strategy was the formulation and dissemination of their own master narrative of world history, which justified the establishment of a "dictatorship of the proletariat" under Bolshevik leadership and fortified the party's authority among the population.

A third major function of invented traditions is to promote "socialization, the inculcation of beliefs, value systems and conventions of behavior." In the years before seizing power, the Bolsheviks, under

Lenin's leadership, were distinguished from most other left-wing radical parties and groups in Russia by their profound commitment to a monolithic view of the truth. After the October Revolution, this readily translated into an effort to reorder all of individual and social life in accordance with ideological precepts proclaimed by the Bolshevik party. Although comprehensive socialization and indoctrination remained beyond their reach until the 1930s, from the very inception the Bolsheviks aimed at reconstituting the individual citizen so that eventually everyone would think, speak, and act Bolshevik as well.

Invented traditions, to be effective, must be invariant and repetitive, and they must convey ideas in a way that will be comprehensible to the intended audience. In the course of 1918, the Bolsheviks put into motion a propaganda apparatus designed to transmit the party's ideas to the population by means of words (both spoken and written) and images.4

Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929 (Cambridge and London, 1985); Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York and Oxford, 1989); James von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917-1920 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993).

By any previous standard, the effort was impressive and extensive. Within a year of taking power, they had created compelling emblems and symbols (for example, the hammer and sickle, the red star, and the image of the heroic worker), new or reconstituted rituals (the November 7 [October 25] and May Day celebrations),5

A legislative act of January 13, 1918, replaced the Julian calendar (followed by the Russian Orthodox church) with the Gregorian calendar. After the shift to the Gregorian calendar, the revolution of October 25 was celebrated on November 7, but was still known as the "October" Revolution.

and novel devices for transmitting their message (agit trains and ships, village reading rooms, instsenirovki ).6

Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 31, describes the instsenirovka as "an adaptation of nondramatic material, usually prose, to the stage." One notable example was the large-scale reenactment of the taking of the Winter Palace on the occasion of the third anniversary of the revolution.

In addition, they used political posters, monumental sculpture, books, newspapers and journals, and film to bring their ideas to a broad audience. Not since the French Revolution of 1789 had there been a regime so unequivocally committed to the transformation of human beings through political education.

Mass propaganda took many different forms during the early years of Soviet power, but there was a privileging of the eye in the task of political education. This meant that a great deal of effort and ingenuity went into the production of visual propaganda of all types. Visual methods for persuasion and indoctrination appealed to Bolshevik leaders because of the low level of literacy in the country...