A new beginning

I first came accross Russian Revolutionary postcards in a shop in Estonia about ten years ago. The imagery appealed greatly, and I bought a couple then to add to a steadily growing collection of ephemera from the period. Over the next few years I began to add haphazardly to the nascent collection and before long they had became a central focus of my studies and I started to actively search them out. Over the years they have become rarer, and much more expensive, but the immediacy and vitality of these postcards still holds sway over me, however much I try to resist it.

The phenomenon of the Russian revolutionary postcard was much studied in Soviet times, but despite the current popularity of deltiology in Russia there has been little new research. In the West there have been several scholarly articles written about the propaganda postcard, but much still remains to be done, not least to correct the Bolshevik bias of the communist historians. In particular, more needs to be written about the cards produced by the Socialist Revolutionaries and perhaps even more crucially, about those printed by the anti Bolshevik forces during the Civil War.

This blog is nothing more than a start. It makes no claim to be authoritive, but merely provides a way of showing these cards to a wider audience and of collating all available knowledge about them. I hope too, to be able to learn from my readers and share a little of the knowledge I have picked up.

The images that I will be discussing will be almost exclusively Russian. Although many anti-Tsarist images were produced in France and to a lesser extent in other European countires, I have chosen only to represent those produced in Russia or the former Russian Empire. This is partly to reflect my own collecting boundaries, but it is also because it is these cards, over and above any others, which helped to influence the opinions of the indigenous population and indeed shape the course of history.