1905, The Road to October

1905 ГОД, ПУТЬ К ОКТЯБРЮ - 1905, The Road to October by Valentina Kugalina, 1929

Commemorating the events of Bloody Sunday, January 1905, when over a thousand peaceful demonstrators were massacred as they marched on the Russian Tsar’s Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Unrest, including strikes, peasant revolts and military mutinies throughout the rest of the year forced the Tsar to establish a constitutional monarchy and laid the foundations of the October Revolution.

Valentina Nikiforovna Kulagina-Klutsis was a Russian painter and book, poster, and exhibition designer. She was a central figure in the constructivist avant-garde in the early 20th century alongside El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko other and her husband Gustav Klutsis. She is known for the Soviet revolutionary and Stalinist propaganda she produced.  

In 1931 she designed International Women Worker’s Day—A Battle Day for the Proletariat for International Womens Day.

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In 1917, after three years of devastating war, food shortages and government corruption, the workers and peasants of Russia rose up to overthrow the ruling elite and attempted to create the world’s first communist society under the slogan “All Power to the Soviets”.

Throughout the year there were riots, mutinies and strikes, influenced by and involving Mensheviks, Anarchists, Social Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks.

By October, the Bolsheviks, who promised to end Russia’s involvement in the war, were able to overthrow the provisional government, which had been established after the abdication of the Tsar in February.

As the Bolsheviks centralised power and tightened their control over the new state, civil war broke out across Russia as monarchists and liberals (known as the Whites), supported by Western capitalist democracies, fought back against the Bolsheviks.

At the same time, various non-Russian independence movements, anarchists and anti-Bolshevik socialist parties rebelled against Bolshevik imposed terror.

By 1923 the Bolsheviks had defeated the White Army and suppressed internal dissent. The Civil War concluded with a Bolshevik victory.

Before the Revolution and throughout the period of the existence of the Soviet Union, visual propaganda was considered a significant means to inform, educate and motivate people.