The Press and Propaganda in War and Revolution

Abstract

In 2019, the centennial observations of the First World War are drawing to an end. Over the past five years, an extraordinary number of exhibitions, memorials, art installations, oral history projects, films, and works of scholarship have been devoted to aspects of the war and its memory. These efforts have been individual and collaborative, private and public, and have been undertaken in virtually every country whose citizens took part in the war. In Russia, official involvement in centennial activities has included President Vladimir Putin’s dedication, in Moscow in 2014, of Russia’s first state-sponsored memorial to the First Word War. In November 2018, Putin joined 66 other heads of state in France for a solemn ceremony commemorating the centenary of the armistice that concluded formal armed hostilities of the war. Russia’s participation in the 2018 ceremony is quite interesting, since the centenary of its own First World War armistice had actually come and gone almost a year earlier, without governmental recognition. (The Bolshevik government’s conclusion of a separate armistice with the Central Powers in December 1917 is not an anniversary the Putin regime cared to highlight.) In a sense, these two commemorative acts—erection of a memorial to the war in Russia’s capital and Putin’s presence in France for the armistice observation —symbolize both the reintegration of Russia into the larger narrative of the Great War and the official reintegration of the war into Russia’s own history. Of course, historians’ engagement with Russia’s experience of the war predates these more official steps: Russian scholarship has undergone massive changes since the end of the Cold War. In the Soviet Union, the Russian Studies in History, vol. 57, no. 1, 2018, pp. 1–9. © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1061-1983 (print)/ISSN 1558-0881 (online) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10611983.2018.1586392