There’s an old joke, often wrongly attributed to the Chines politician Zhou Enlai. When asked what the significance of the Russian Revolution was, fifty years after the events of 1917, he was said to have replied “It is too soon to say.” This apocryphal sums up the intense debate between historians over the major events that have shaken human history. It is perhaps for this reason the major exhibition in the British Library in London, about events leading up to and immediately after the October 1917 Russian Revolution is subtitled “Hope, Tragedy, Myths.”
The exhibition is wide ranging, covering the events from the fall of Russia’s last Tsar; the February 1917 revolution; and to the October 1971 and the rise of the first communist state. Looking back one hundred years on the curated content seeks to present books, pamphlets, audio recordings, posters and diaries from various sides of the conflict: monarchists, democrats of various shades, and Bolsheviks. To see the events as simply being about three sides ignores the factions at play within each camp.
The exhibition is fairly well balanced, politically. On display is a first edition of the Communist Manifesto alongside extracts from the captive Tsar Nicholas II’s diary and a first edition of Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel spanning pre and post-revolutionary Russia.
There are also Vladimir Lenin’s interpretative texts placed alongside anti-Bolshevik propaganda. The exhibition is also nicely set up, with short video footage and audio recordings breaking up the series of posters, photographs and letters on display.
In a way the exhibition provides visitors the experience of walking through a history book.
As well as big names, such as the Tsar and Romanov family to Lenin and Trotsky there are many tales of ordinary people living through the extraordinary times. Some of these recount fear and others hope for a Utopian society; some of these feelings as reappraised during the later times of terror under Stalin.
There is a huge collection of photographs and art work on show, from Russo-Japanese War cartoon posters to photographs of the charlatan healer Rasputin; and from White Russian counter-revolutionary propaganda posters to photographs of those who visited the early socialist state, such as War of the Worlds author H.G. Wells. Add to this posters depicting villagers fleeing from the White Army or Japan made out to be a giant monster, the art, often in realist and modernist designs, is striking.
The exhibition also examines events from an international perspective, showing how different countries first lent support to the initial democratic government that replaced the overthrown monarchy, and then the quick withdraw of support when the Bolshevik’s took over and nations like the U.S. and U.K. fretted about Russia pulling out of World War I.
Being hosted by the U.K.’s leading library there is a strong book-related element, including modernist fiction centered on events around the revolution (and the influence upon writers like Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Somerset Maugham) and journalistic reportage from foreign correspondents who witnessed the events unfold.
There are also some interesting curios, such as Lenin’s handwritten application (signed with his then pseudonym, Jacob Richter) for a Reader Pass at the British Library from the years when the revolutionary was exiled and living in London. A similarly odd item is a letter, written in 1922, from the British police to the British Museum Library requesting that a selection of Bolshevik literature is not made public due to its incendiary nature. The request was adhered to and the said books were banned for a decade or so.
As to the significance of the exhibition, it’s impossible to understand events in the world today without appreciating the seismic impact of the revolution. However, it’s the interpretation of what unfolded that continues to be hotly debated.
The exhibition runs until August 29, 2017.
