The Russian

Revolutions

Russia under the Romanov’s

Russia and America in 1866

Modern Russia

• All three maps from www.drshirley.org/geog/map30b_russia.gif (accessed 9/27/09)

Translation (from top to bottom)

Tsar - "We reign over you" Ministers - "We rule you"

Clergy - "We fool you" Gendarmes - "We shoot

you" High Society - "We eat

you"

1900

Russia as St.

George

Russians would have been very familiar with images of St. George on his white horse

killing a dragon.

Russian Soldiers in The Great War

• What does the photo suggest about the hardships facing ordinary soldiers on the Russian front?

Translation:“Who are you

with? Us or them?"

• Poster depicting a soldier being asked to choose between the capitalists and the workers. See which way he is leaning?

• The high costs of the war are evident in the photograph below of a Russian field hospital. The army sustained nearly one million casualties in the summer of 1915 alone, with an equal number of soldiers taken prisoner. Note the women tending to the wounded, the priest blessing the soldiers, and the crowded, uncomfortable conditions for the soldiers huddled on the straw-covered dirt floor.Russian field hospital, 1915

Tsar Nicholas II takes personal

command of the Russian

Army.

• In the face of mounting criticism of the bungled war effort, Tsar Nicholas II rejected the overtures of the Progressive Bloc and instead assumed personal control of the military. The poster below shows the tsar as a heroic Christian knight, leading his army to battlefield victory. Linking the tsar so closely with the Russian cause proved to be a dangerous strategy, as the hapless leader became ever more closely associated with military defeat and ineptitude.

the civilian costs of war

• the civilian costs of war included refugees forced to leave their homes to escape the front lines of battle. Men, women, and children took to the roads as part of a massive dislocation of the population during the first year of the war.

Female Soldiers

“Workers of the world unite” in

Georgian.

• signaling the aspiration of the Russian Bolsheviks to extend their revolution throughout the empire.

Trotsky

• In this case, the hero is the Bolshevik leader Trotsky and the dragon a symbol of counter-revolution.