THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION IN COLOR

Lenin was a headbanger, quite literally. As a baby he would bang his head repeatedly on the floor. His parents thought little Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov might injure himself or that his actions suggested something wrong. According to his biographerRobert Service, Lenin was a troublesome child—needy, demanding attention and resentful of his family and other children. He always wanted to be the center of attention and this he later achieved on a grand scale when he turned the events of the Russian Revolution to his advantage, and became head of government of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Lenin had campaigned and encouraged the revolution from afar, from his base in Switzerland, where he spent his days writing manifestoes and political pamphlets and his evenings watching DADAist performances offending the audience at the club Cabaret Voltaire, which left Lenin pondering who was the more revolutionary DADA or himself? The events of 1917 were to answer that.

These color images were uncovered by Russian-born photographer Anton Orlov when he was asked to clear out storage crates in the basement of a home in California. In amongst the personal items and assorted junk were hundreds of hand-colored glass slides taken by an American pastor named John Wells Rahill during the Russian Revolution of 1917. 

 

Pastor John Wells Rahill with three young boys at a Russian village.

 

Members of the YMCA entertain a crowd at a train station.

 

Soldiers at Omsk train station.

 

Damaged buildings in the center of Moscow.

 

Soldiers pose wearing gas masks in a bunker.

 

A glass slide of soldiers purchased by Rahill in Moscow from the Baranov studio.

 

Inside the ‘Soldiers House’ that Rahill helped set up in Valk.

 

The Russian Revolution in Colour is a TV documentary from 2007, which shows the Russian Revolution as an event that “changed the world forever” and how “[a]lmost overnight, an entire society was destroyed and replaced with one of the biggest and most radical experiments ever seen.” It’s a fine piece of tabloid TV with a considerable amount of good archive footage. For those who want a Marxist critique of this documentary check here.

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