“The basic ideas will be established, and uprooting them will not be easy”: Images and symbols of the Russian Civil War (1917–1922) in the past and present

For over 70 years, the “leading and guiding force of Soviet society”, for whom the October 1917 Revolution was a “foundational myth”, dictated priorities, provided assessments, and established its own version of these events, pushing competing interpretations to the periphery and consigning them to oblivion, along with the signifying systems and symbolic universes they represent. However, what happens when images and symbols formed in one political and sociocultural context find themselves in another context? How resilient are they in new conditions, predisposed to replacement or reinterpretation? The authors aim, on the one hand, to identify key points in the formation and transformation of symbols and images that shape Soviet and contemporary Russian society’s understanding of the Civil War (1917-1922), characterizing the parameters and direction of their changes; and, on the other hand, using the thematic textual content of the Russian social network VKontakte, to identify the key meanings relied upon and reproduced by “Red” and “White” online communities positioning themselves as such. The authors conclude that a holistic understanding of the Civil War, combining a clearly defined ideological stance, a shared and unified historical interpretation, imagery, recognizable symbols, channels of transmission, tools, and methods of representation, was established in the 1920s and 1930s. In post-Soviet Russia, the events of the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War ceased to be about creating a new world, becoming instead perceived as a politically unsuitable past for building a new civic identity, one about which there is no societal consensus. While the prevailing interpretation of the Civil War has significantly shifted over several decades from Bolshevik heroism toward a recognition of it as a national tragedy, the symbolic repertoire and imagery related to the representation and identification of “Reds” and “Whites” have remained largely unchanged, essentially remaining Soviet in essence. This is clearly evident in the discourses of thematic virtual communities on VKontakte. The discourse about the “Red” past is detailed, filled with numerous fragments taken in isolation, cliches, and loosely connected ideas. Events of the Civil War are mentioned alongside episodes of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Great Patriotic War, and contemporary Russian history. Supporters of the “Reds” seem unwilling to discuss the past in the past tense, actively incorporating it into the present. Representations of the “Whites” are more holistic and profound, but also more tragic. The key motif of the “White” discourse is “Russia that we lost”. A core element in the representations of both “Whites” and “Reds” is Bolshevism, which irrevocably altered Russia’s fate. However, while the “White” discourse revolves around an ongoing (and essentially onesided) debate with the “Reds”, the latter focus on the Soviet past itself, without a fixed focus on their opponents. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

Keywords

Authors

References