Eastern Europe
Different, but at the same time somewhat similar – that was how Russia seemed to the West for many centuries. The similarities derived from a common Christian tradition; the differences concerned economic, social, and political aspects. The Russian intelligentsia was fascinated by the West but was unwilling to fully embrace this tradition. Both parts of Europe acted as counterpoints, attracting and repelling one another.
Posthumus is likely to have thought along the same lines and, like his contemporaries in the West, to have been fascinated by the great Russian writers from the nineteenth century and especially by the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and their consequences. These reinforced the bipolar mindset, both within the labour movement, which had to embrace or reject communism, and between the new Soviet Union and the old Europe, which remained the scene of ongoing turbulence. The authoritarian domestic changes under Stalin further heightened the tensions. The precarious states that emerged between Germany and Russia after the First World War largely became Soviet satellites following the Second World War. In the Cold War, the contrast seemed insurmountable between two ‘Empires of Evil,’ which used their nuclear arsenal to keep each other in check. Interpretation of the past was an important factor.
The IISH has made efforts to document Russian history from the outset. Opportunities to this end arose precisely from the polarization, because the Soviet potentates alienated their subjects in many different ways. Two Mensheviks exiled from Russia, Boris Nikolaevsky and Boris Sapir, for example, were pivotal prior to the war in gathering archives from all leftist movements persecuted by Stalin. These included both most pre-revolutionary socialist movements and his subsequent opponents in the Communist Party, especially Lev Trotsky.
Tsarist Russia
The magnificent Russian library at the IISH dates back to the eighteenth century and comprises complete series of proceedings from the Russian Academy of Sciences, established by Peter the Great in 1724 (75-76). Much is available here about the Russian colonial expansion toward the East and South, a topic that is also well-represented in monographs (77).
The same holds true for the immensely varied nineteenth-century opponents of the tsarist autocracy, from whom many archives reached Amsterdam as well. Until 1861 serfdom remained widespread in Russia, long after it had been abolished elsewhere in Europe, which meant that in addition to having no rights whatsoever, most of the population was poorly educated. Because the right to form associations and assemble was similarly non-existent, the opposition long revolved around courageous individuals such as Aleksandr Herzen (78) and Lev Tolstoy (79-80), many of whom spent much of their lives in exile. To the Russian intelligentsia, the lack of education among the populace remained a more serious problem than it had been for the Western liberals and socialists.
In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, ever more organizations (including underground ones) emerged that joined the struggle to modernize the country – a desire that some government leaders shared. In addition to the objectives, strategies toward achieving them caused serious differences of opinion between the first narodniki or populists (81-82), the Bund, a Jewish workers’ organization (83-84), the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (85-86), and the Mensheviks (87), who were the social-democratic majority, after the Bolsheviks had seceded in 1903. The Revolution of 1905 and the reactions to it highlighted the contrasts, in addition to revealing the relative weakness of the movement (88-89).
75 The Russian Academy
In modernizing Russia, Peter the Great (1672-1725) set up an Academy of Sciences in the new capital of St Petersburg (1724). The first part of its Proceedings rolled off the presses in 1729, with the Latin title Commentarii Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae. This work is part of the ‘classical’ library of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, which is in the IISH since 2005.
76 Russia’s expansion
Although groups of Russians had been moving to Siberia and building settlements there since the sixteenth century, members of Peter’s Academy conducted the first systematic explorations, especially from 1733 during the second expedition of the Danish Captain Vitus Bering (1681-1741). The Russian expansion went by land rather than by sea to the East and the South and still had a long way to go when this map appeared in the Proceedings.
77 Along the Amur River
In 1847 the appointment of Nikolai Muraviev (1809-1881) as governor of Irkutsk revived the Russian ‘discovery’ of Siberia. He equipped expeditions along the Amur (his portrait appears on the report by the nature researcher Richard Maak, 1825-1886), established the Eastern border with China, and promoted settlement of the area, after which he was assigned the title Amursky. His relative, the revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin, spoke highly of him and subsequently fled from his Siberian exile.
78 Criticising the tsar
Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), an influential early critic of czarism, lived in the West from 1847 and published political observations from London. He knew many politicians and authors, as revealed in his memoirs My Past and Thoughts (translated into Dutch by Charles B. Timmer, deputy director of the IISH from 1966-1982) and in an album of correspondence at the Institute. The album also features this caricature, in which a Russian farmer is pressured by his many higher-ranking compatriots.
79 A Christian anarchist
Lev Tolstoy (1828-1910), who wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, later became an ascetic, non-violent Christian anarchist. Enormously influential, he acquired an international following. On this photograph from 1910 he is sorting the mail on his estate Yasnaya Polyana at Tula with his secretary Valentin Bulgakov, author of The Last Year of Lev Tolstoy. The photographer was Vladimir Chertkov, Tolstoy’s right-hand man, who disseminated his ideas in myriad ways.
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80 Theory and practice
Tolstoy’s last year was rather turbulent, partly because of the deterioration of his relationship with his wife Sophia Andreyevna Behrs (1844-1919), who suffered deeply from the practical implementation of her husband’s views. In this letter of 10 July 1910, written a few months before his death, Tolstoy tried to strike a compromise, setting conditions and making promises. One crucial element was the position of Chertkov, who Sophia believed deeply influenced both their lives.
81 Moscovian students’ protest
In the 1870s Russian women students in Moscow teamed up to introduce socialist ideas in factories. After being convicted in 1877 in what became known as the Trial of the Fifty, they were featured on photo assemblies, such as this one in England. The upper section of the text reads: ‘Convicted, after two years of solitary imprisonment, for social-revolutionary propaganda.’ Below is a quotation from the Russian poet Nikolay Nekrasov: ‘Your crown of thorns outshines the victor’s crown.’
82 Violent opposition
The repression drove the Russian opposition slowly but surely to carry out terrorist assaults. Clandestine organizations such as Zemlya i Volya (Land and Liberty) advocated enlightenment efforts among farmers, but in 1878 one of its members, Sergey Kravchinsky (Stepnyak, 1851-1895), stabbed the chief of the secret police, Nikolay Mezentsev, on a street in St Petersburg. When the second issue of their underground periodical appeared two months after the first one, its circulation had doubled.
83 In exile
In the Spring of 1879 a correspondent for Vpered! (Forward!) wrote: ‘The tsar reads Z[emlya] i V[olya] systematically. It is said that after the third issue was published, he threatened to replace the entire Third Division [the secret police], if Issue 4 appeared. Issue 4 has been published, but the Third Division has not been replaced. Anyway, who would replace it?’ Vpered!, the journal of Petr Lavrov (left) was printed abroad, as were many opposition papers: the photograph was taken in London.
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84 The Jewish Labour Bund
The Bund, as the General Jewish Workers League was known for short, was a special type of Russian opposition. This organization was established in 1897 to serve the Jewish proletariat and – unlike the Zionists, who saw no future in Russia – aimed to achieve national and cultural autonomy in a socialist state. The Bund joined the Russian social-democratic movement but broke with it in 1903. This Zionist leaflet is about the rift. Ties were restored in 1906.
85 Socialist revolutionaries
In 1901 Russian populist and terrorist traditions gave rise to the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, which was popular among farmers thanks to its ideas about land redistribution. In 1906 the first PSR congress adopted a programme of which a draft is featured here. The party had a separate Fighting Organization that carried out attacks on representatives of the regime, even during the five years under the aegis of Evno Azef (1869-1918), an agent of the secret police.
86 Joining the government
In 1917 the PSR flourished, and one of its parliamentary leaders, Alexander Kerensky (1881-1970), became the head of the Provisional Government. But the party split, and despite obtaining an absolute majority in the elections at the end of the year, it was gradually neutralized by the Bolsheviks. Operations were moved to Prague and Belgrade, from where its archive and library (once started with Lavrov’s books) were transferred to Amsterdam in 1938.
87 Mensheviks
In 1903 the Russian social-democratic movement broke up into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, auguring the future differences between social democrats and communists in various respects. Here, three Mensheviks appear in exile in 1927: Vladimir Voytinsky (1885-1960), Pavel Axelrod (1850-1928), and Boris Sapir (1902-1989). Axelrod, who with Georgi Plekhanov was among the first Russian Marxists, had published the well-known journal Iskra together with Vladimir Lenin and others. In 1936 Sapir became head of the Russian cabinet at the IISH.
88 The revolution of 1905
The revolution of 1905, which coincided in part with the loss of the war against Japan, caused serious problems for the tsarist regime. This picture postcard depicts the barricades on Oruzheyny cross street in Moscow (where Boris Pasternak was born). It was sent on 10 April 1906 to the Swiss physician Fritz Brupbacher by his wife Lydia Kochetkova, who worked in Russia and was an active member of the PSR. The card took two weeks to reach Zurich from Saratov.
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89 Deported to Siberia
In the repression that followed the revolution, many socialists were arrested and sentenced to exile. This photograph, taken on 9 August 1906, shows a group leaving St Petersburg for Siberia. At the rear are the Menshevik Lev Deutsch (1855-1941, wearing a hat) and Alexander Parvus (1867-1924), next to him, holding a cap), who had devised the ‘permanent revolution’ theory. Both escaped en route. Trotsky, who does not appear on this photograph, had been arrested and sent into exile at the same time as Deutsch and Parvus and escaped as well.
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Communist Russia
The February Revolution of 1917 seemed at first to place a West European-style government in power, but the October Revolution later that year, a coup by the Bolsheviks under the aegis of Lenin and Trotsky, entirely changed the course of events (90). This happened at the end of the First World War, when the collapse of the Russian Empire was followed by that of the German, Habsburg, and Ottoman ones. Amid the massive confusion, without even the slightest prospect of stability, severe unrest ensued in several places. In Hungary the first communist government outside Russia was briefly in power (91-92). In Russia overt and bitter civil war raged for many years, with drastic consequences for millions of people (93-95).
After the smoke had lifted, and Lenin’s succession had been determined, Stalin issued his own response to the modernization question, nationalizing all economic, social, and cultural life with a view toward bringing about forced industrialization of the Soviet Union in very ambitious five-year plans. The process, supported by sophisticated, ambitious propaganda in word and image (96-99), led to an almost exhaustive mobilization of labour to establish socialism throughout this vast country (100). The transition to massive forced labour swiftly followed (101-103). A new state education system was introduced to reverse the lack of schooling among the masses (104).
The end of the Second World War brought the Red Army to large parts of Eastern Europe. In all these areas, which basically came under Soviet occupation, the Stalinist model was imposed, with local variations and a colonial flavour. Industrialization plans, mobilization campaigns, and purges like those in the Soviet Union were soon forthcoming in Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia (105), and the German Democratic Republic (106).
90 Lenin and Trotsky
The October Revolution of 1917 was followed by an extended civil war, in which Lev Trotsky (1879-1940) was the commander of the Red Army. In this telegram exchange – part of a series of 800 documents that the IISH purchased in 1936 – Lenin writes in late August 1918 that he is “shocked and disconcerted” that the attack on Kazan has been delayed. The enemy must “be destroyed mercilessly.” Trotsky responds that the assumption that he is sparing Kazan is unfounded. The enemy was too strong, but he hopes for a swift resolution.
91 Hungarian communists
The revolutions of 1917 had an instant international impact, if only because the old socialist parties were divided everywhere into supporters and adversaries. In addition, many foreigners had come to Russia because of the world war. Some would figure in the Communist International. The foreign POWs included the Hungarian socialist Bela Kun (1886-1938), who sided with the Bolsheviks in the civil war that broke out and in Moscow established the foundation for the Hungarian Communist Party.
92 The Hungarian Soviet Republic
In late 1918 Kun returned to Hungary, which was reduced to a fairly small republic following its defeat in the world war. An energetic speaker, he agitated against the new government. In March 1919 social democrats teamed up with communists and proclaimed a soviet republic under the aegis of Kun. Hungary thus had the first communist government after Russia, although this government fell in August, following intervention by the Romanian army. Kun continued his career as a revolutionary outside Hungary but vanished in Stalin’s purges.
93, 94, 95 The Russian Civil War
The civil war that followed the October Revolution raged for years in large areas of Russia; only in 1923 did the Bolsheviks prevail. The battle claimed many millions of lives and caused a severe famine in 1921-1922. This instigated an international aid campaign, supported by the American Relief Administration under the future President Herbert Hoover, who had set up the Hoover War Collection in Stanford in 1919. These photographs are from the papers of the anarchist Emma Goldman, who lived in Russia in 1920-1921.
96, 97, 98 The first five-year plan
In the late 1920s Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) consolidated his power and initiated the first five-year plan (1928-1933) to industrialize the Soviet Union. The effort coincided with a major propaganda campaign, glorifying heavy industry in a style that would evolve into ‘socialist realism,’ as depicted here in the periodical Proletarskoe Foto from 1932. The photographs feature a coke factory in Magnitogorsk and the steelworker Lukashov, who worked his way up to an engineer at the Hammer and Sickle factory in Moscow.
99 A present for Stalin
In recognition of the first five-year plan, the 17th congress of the Communist Party was named the ‘congress of the victors’ in 1934. Workers brought gifts symbolizing the results of the Plan. This was the last congress attended by the popular Leningrad party leader Sergey Kirov, who was assassinated later in 1934, after which the great purges began. Over half the congress participants were arrested during the years that followed. This album, of which only a few copies exist, was produced especially for Stalin.
100 Women forward
In the non-European parts of the Soviet Union revolution and industrialization gave rise to modernization and secularization. These processes greatly influenced the status of women, who obtained more rights and became involved in manufacturing in massive numbers. As always, many worked in the textile industry. This photograph, taken around 1930, shows a cotton worker in Azerbaijan, which together with Armenia and Georgia formed the Transcaucasian Federative Republic in those days.
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101 The veils cast off
Soviet Asia experienced major consequences as well. This photograph published in 1926 reveals the contrasts, showing a court in Tajikistan. Among the judges is a woman who – according to the caption – “is the first to remove her headscarf after the Revolution.” In front of her is a woman “in a shapeless blue sack,” who is accusing her husband of abuse.
102 Forced labour
Toward the end of the first five-year plan in 1933, the Belomor Canal opened, a waterway from the Baltic to the White Sea, extending over 200 km. At the time this was the largest project where the Soviet Union deployed forced labour: about 150,000 prisoners had spent two years building it and had thus been ‘re-educated.’ The author Maxim Gorky edited a showy monograph about the project, which gave a first taste of socialist realism to the participants at the 17th party congress, to whom it was presented.
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103 Belomor Canal cigarettes
Remarkably, the Belomor Canal is commemorated to this day in Russia by an eponymous cheap cigarette brand.
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104 New children’s literature
Education was a cornerstone of the Soviet Union, and pre-revolutionary instructional materials were obviously no longer satisfactory. Children’s books were redesigned as well. Artists, such as the constructivist Mikhail Tsekhanovsky, illustrated educational stories. In Topotun and the booklet (1926), by Ilya Ionov (1887-1942), a brother-in-law of Grigory Zinoviev, a small boy learns from a robot how to put away his books neatly.
105 Stakhanovites
As a consequence of the Second World War, the Stalinist model was introduced in much of Eastern Europe. In all cases this included campaigns to increase productivity in the recently nationalized industry, which in the Soviet Union were associated with the record-breaking miner Stakhanov. ‘Honour the shock workers, the heroes of labour!’ reads this poster from 1949, a year after the Communist Party seized power in Czechoslovakia.
106 East Germany
When the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic were founded in 1949, the GDR was aligned with the traditions of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, indicating that the GDR – unlike the Federal Republic – was to be regarded as an anti-fascist model. Ernst Thälmann (1886-1944), the pre-war KPD leader, and Wilhelm Pieck (1876-1960), who had served as the general secretary of the Communist International, decorated the ‘honorary flag’ of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, the new Communist Party.
Anti-communist opposition
After the Second World War, the IISH had difficulty collecting materials in Eastern Europe for a long time. This was due in part to Nikolaevsky’s departure for the United States, but it was mainly the universal censorship and the fall of the Iron Curtain that quickly closed the usual channels for obtaining documentation. Much was acquired only later on, thanks to Western journalists and other travellers with some freedom of movement in the post-war years.
The Soviet Union did not occupy and transform Eastern Europe without any struggle or resistance. In 1953 workers revolted in Berlin (107), as well as in Hungary in 1956 (108-109). Despite the purges carried out, national communist parties often proved to be untrustworthy and disobedient, as the Prague Spring demonstrated in 1968 (110-111). The détente in the Cold War and especially the glasnost introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev, who allowed social life in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe greater freedom, gave the Institute the opportunity to keep up with the course of events again from the mid-1980s, thanks in part to bases in Prague (early 1990s) and Moscow (from 1992). This revival of activity led to the acquisition of valuable documentation on the Polish Solidarność (112) and the downfall of communism in Romania (113) and Hungary (114). In Russia major collections about forced labour and repression were recorded on microfilm after 1991. In addition, much was collected from the new ‘alternative’ press and the older underground samizdat (115-117). When Yugoslavia disintegrated, the IISH made a special effort to secure the material from different peace movements (118); much of it was massively digital for the first time. Amid these developments, Cuba, once regarded by some as a non-Stalinist alternative, seemed increasingly like a ‘survivor’ (119).
107 Open resistance
Following the death of Stalin on 5 March 1953, the GDR became the first ‘people’s democracy’ to encounter overt resistance, instigated by an increase in production requirements. On 17 June the situation spun out of control, and Soviet troops were called in to suppress the revolt. This photograph, which like the next ones is from the archive of Het Vrije Volk, was taken at the border of the Russian sector in Berlin, where a kiosk had been set on fire.
108 The Hungarian Revolution
In 1956 the Hungarians revolted against the regime that the Soviet Union imposed on them. Earlier that year, Khrushchev had launched a de-Stalinization campaign, and over the summer riots in Poland had led to some liberalization in that country. Throughout Hungary, councils seized power, and a new government was formed under Imre Nagy (1896-1958). Then Soviet troops intervened, and order was restored. This photograph shows a Russian soldier with a machine gun on a Budapest street.
109 Soviet repression
Suppressing the Hungarian uprising involved heavy fighting and considerable destruction. This photograph from December 1956 shows ruins on Ländler Jenö Street, along the southeast edge of Budapest. The repression was extensive. Nagy was secretly convicted and hung. Many tens of thousands fled to Austria. The uprising, depicted by the Soviet Union as fascist, nonetheless dealt a serious blow to the prestige of communist parties, in Eastern and Western Europe alike.
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110 The Prague Spring
In early 1968 in Czechoslovakia Alexander Dubček (1921-1992) launched a reform process that was not immediately associated with anti-Soviet violence. The communist party announced that it would pursue ‘socialism with a human face.’ Censorship was abolished, decentralization introduced in various forms, and a transition from heavy industry to more consumer-oriented production promised. Still, this liberalization led to demands that the process be accelerated. The photograph was taken in Prague on 1 August 1968.
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111 No Prague Summer
In the night of 20 to 21 August 1968, troops from five Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia to end the reform process. Despite the resistance – the photograph shows a Russian tank burning in front of the Radio Prague building – the Prague Spring was over. Many fled to the West, where even some communist parties condemned the invasion.
112 Solidarity
In 1970 rising prices in Poland caused turmoil that brought the government down and ushered in a new policy to improve the standard of living. In 1976 this proved impossible to achieve without additional price increases, which led to new riots. In 1980 the process repeated itself, but this time an independent labour union arose named Solidarność, which proved capable of pressuring the communist party, until the army intervened in December 1981. Solidarność continued to exist underground and to publish magazines.
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113 Romania 1989
After Mikhail Gorbachev initiated reform in the Soviet Union in 1986 and proclaimed the end of Soviet interventions in Eastern Europe in 1988, the communist parties there soon lost control of the events. In Romania riots in Timişoara in December 1989 culminated in an uprising that ended the regime and the life of Nicolae Ceauşescu (1918-1989), who had been in power since 1965. The Student Voice appeared the day before his death.
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114 Hungary 1989
In Hungary the changes began in 1988 with the resignation of Janós Kádár (1912-1989), who had run the country since 1956. The communist party dismantled the system itself, and in October 1989 a multi-party system was introduced. Previously, on 19 August, the Iron Curtain started to come down during a demonstration presented as a picnic along the Austrian border; the barbed wire was cut at this time. Later, the ‘last breath of communism’ was sold in tins.
115, 116, 117 A clandestine publication
In August 1991 the violent attempt to end Gorbachev’s reforms led to the demise of the communist regime in the Soviet Union. From 1986 the new open policy enabled the IISH to intensify Russian collection development. Since then, for example, the samizdat collection – illegal publications issued privately – was expanded considerably. This is a page from the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980), of which the Russian version was published in New York in 1970 and the English one in 1971.
118 Former Yugoslavia
Meanwhile, Yugoslavia had started to disintegrate gradually following the death of Josip Tito in 1980. This process continued with a lot of bloodshed in the 1990s. The IISH collected a wealth of material from peace movements there at the time. “A heart attack is preferable to a pact,” reads the front page of the anarchist Feral Times from Split. The drawing depicts Croatian President Franjo Tudjman (1922-1999) and his Serb counterpart Slobodan Milošević (1941-2006), in a broken heart.
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119 Listen to Fidel Castro
Because of the rise of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ after the death of Mao and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the number of communist countries in the world dwindled considerably in the 1990s. One of those that remain is Cuba, long regarded as an ally by opponents of the United States. Fidel Castro, in power since 1959, resigned as president in 2008. The poster appealed to the public to come hear one of his famous speeches on 1 May 1965.