Introduction

The twentieth century brought several waves of revolution that swept across Russia, each greater and more substantial than the last. Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 exposed military corruption and the widening gap between conservative and progressive forces in the Russian administra- tion. The first revolution had occurred already in January 1905 when on 9 Jan- uary a peaceful demonstration of between 50,000 and 100,000 workers were fired upon by troops while taking a petition to Tsar Nicholas II at the Winter Palace. But although several reforms were introduced following the uprising, in- cluding the establishment of a more liberal system of government and the opening of the first Duma in January 1906, these changes did not bring democracy to Russia. The massacre of striking workers at the Lena goldfields in April 1912 (which subsequently inspired Vladimir Ulianov’s pseudonym – Lenin), the destructive influence of Grigorii Rasputin on the imperial fam- ily and, consequently, on Russian military and foreign policy during World War I, all inspired first the February and then the October Revolutions of 1917. The declaration of press freedom by the October Manifesto and the subse- quent relaxation of censorship regulations by the new press laws of 24 Novem- ber 1905, established the long-awaited (although short-lived) legal liberation of the Russian press. Satirical journals that proliferated during the 1905 Rev- olution reached phenomenal distribution levels, estimated at close to thirty million copies and became the main vehicles for widely spread political propa- ganda. At the time, such leading Russian artists as Boris Kustodiev, Ivan Bilibin, Konstantin Somov, Sergei Chekhonin, Isaak Brodsky and Mstislav Dobuzhin- sky (many of whom were involved in the production of festive decorations for Petrograd in 1917-1920) were using caricature to express their dissatisfac- tion with and contempt for the political situation in Russia. In these journals artists commented on the political developments of the revolutionary period as a nightmare of demons, vampires, monsters, skeletons, executions, rapes and assassinations. Works such as Dobuzhinsky’s Pacification (depicting the Kremlin immersed in a sea of blood) and October Idyll (showing a blood stain and an abandoned doll as the only things left from a child who was killed and which appeared in the journal Bugbear [Zhupel]) are clear examples of the political commitment of one of the leaders of the World of Art [Mir Iskusstva] movement. The motifs of such illustrations as Kustodiev’s Moscow I. Entry (1905, Zhupel), which de-

Figure I.1 Boris Kustodiev, Moscow I. Entry. Illustration for the magazine Zhupel, no. 2, 1905, p. 4.

picted a giant skeleton advancing upon government troops from the workers’ barricades (fig. I.1), were used again in street decorations after the Bolshevik Revolution. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution aimed to destroy the old bourgeois society and to build a new homogenous socialist state. Like Fascist Italy or Germany, the new Bolshevik state needed a new foundation, and with it a corresponding founding mythology. In his book on totalitarian art, the art-historian Igor Golomstock observed that: ‘In a totalitarian system art performs the function of transforming the