Greetings from the Barricades: Revolutionary Postcards in Imperial Russia

Abstract

Ephemera, by definition, are not designed to last and be preserved. Libraries and archives are still struggling to collect contemporary ephemeral material, as it requires physical and intellectual effort to find, evaluate and select what might become an invaluable resource for future historians. Moreover, ephemera are a nightmare to catalog and to conserve. However, any scholar would agree that ephemera offer a vast and unpredictable supply of facts, opinions and views. Hitherto, collecting ephemera has been mainly the passion and mission of private collectors. For example, one of the most famous collections of ephemera – the 2,200 bound volumes of French Revolutionary tracts now held at the British Library – had been first put together by the politician and writer John Wilson Croker and only later was acquired as historical rather than contemporary material. Visual products of popular and mass culture in general and picture postcards in particular are in an even worse situation. Until recently they had been overlooked as a historical source by both librarians and researchers, as Alison Rowley states, “certainly in Russian history, but also in European history more generally”. While “the wartime postcard was rediscovered by scholars in Germany and Austria in the 1980s”, the Russian 20-century postcard has only recently started attracting the attention of researchers, who complain that “[t]oday, a large number of Russian postcards remain in private hands rather than in public collections maintained by libraries and archives”. The book by Tobie Mathew is an ideal response to this omission. In the Prologue he explains that the book “owes its existence to [his] collecting habits” (20). Thus, the book presents a thorough examination of a vast number of revolutionary postcards with opposition imagery and brings together material from the author’s own and other private collections, as well as collections held at various libraries, museums and archives, such as the Museum of Contemporary History and the Russian State Library. Moreover, the angle Mathew decided to choose is original. Leaving aside most of the pictorial analysis, he sets himself the task of focusing on production. The amount of new archival research done largely in the Russian archives, but also at the Hoover Institution on War (Stanford), the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam), the Leeds Russian Archive and the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine (Kyiv), allows the author to tell a comprehensive story of how postcards with political images were made, censored and distributed and what role they played in creating the opposition discourse.