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[A CIVIL WAR AGITATION PAMPHLET] Obmanutym brat'yam [i.e. To the Deceived Brothers]

Item #2861

Moscow: Vseros. TS. I. K., [1918-1919]. 21,8x14,5 cm. 8 pp. Minor tears along the fold mark, but otherwise near fine.

Scarce. Text in Russian. The front wrapper features a black-and-white illustration of a worker clubbing the many-headed hydra of counter-revolution, whose heads represent the crowned tsar, an officer, a cleric, and a capitalist. The image is signed by the famous Soviet artist Alexander Apsit (1880–1944). Before the Revolution, Apsit worked as an illustrator for Niva and Rodina and illustrated editions of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gorky. In 1918, he became one of the first major masters of the Soviet political poster, creating some of the genre’s defining images, including the worker-bogatyr, the hydra of counter-revolution, and the trampled crown. He left for Latvia in 1921 and died in Germany in 1944.

A rare piece of Civil War agitation verse, addressed to peasant conscripts serving in the White Army and written by Demyan Bedny, the most widely circulated Soviet poet of the war. The poem is dated “Moscow, 12 October 1918,” three months after the execution of the imperial family and at the height of fighting on the Volga and Don.

Demyan Bedny was the pen name of Yefim Pridvorov (1883–1945). His verse appeared constantly in Pravda and Bednota and was actively reprinted in leaflets, pamphlets, and posters for the Red Army. He was among the most privileged writers of the early Soviet state, living in an apartment in the Kremlin beside the Bolshevik leadership. In the 1930s, however, the party press and Stalin personally accused him of “slandering the Russian people” and “spitting on the nation’s past.” In 1938, he was expelled from both the Communist Party and the Union of Soviet Writers on the grounds of “moral degeneration.” He was evicted from the Kremlin and his work ceased to be published, but he was not arrested.

The poem addresses soldiers in the White trenches, arguing that they have been deceived into fighting their own people. It recalls the costs of the old regime and portrays Nicholas II in deliberately contemptuous terms, before ending with a direct appeal: to come to their senses and drive their bayonets into the ground.

The final page records the resolution of a meeting at the Presnya Lenin Communist Club. On 17 October 1918, during an evening dedicated to the Third International and Karl Liebknecht, the poem was read aloud from the platform. The workers present unanimously resolved to endorse Bedny’s appeal, urging the “deceived brothers” to join the workers and poor peasants of Soviet Russia against the world bourgeoisie.

Overall, a fragile survival of the propaganda war of 1918 printed by the press of the Soviet government itself.

No copies found in Worldcat.

Price: $750.00