Fragrant flowers

In the exhibition Hazy mountains, fragrant flowers – Traditional Chinese ink painting in the 19th and 20th centuries of the Kogart House in Budapest, nearly a hundred scroll paintings and calligraphy are on display from the Three Gorges Museum of Chongqing until 30 March. Almost all the paintings lent from China are from the late Qing era, academic works of conservative taste, which carefully imitate the great classical models. Perhaps only the three images by Liu Xiling (刘锡玲, 1848-1923) are truly original and exciting: their ragged brushwork and abstract forms already foreshadow the expressiveness of contemporary Chinese ink painting, as well as its ironic relationship to the classical canon.

This illustration is a different work by Liu Xiling; his exhibited works do not figure in the catalog.

However, nature compensates us for the low-key intensity of the paintings. The four magnolia trees in full bloom at the street front of the Kogart House reveal with explosive force what the masters at the end of the imperial era tried to sublimate from the paintings of an earlier century they deemed happier. The visitors stop in the garden, just like the passers-by outside the fence. They happily photograph each other in front of the sea of flowers.

Székely Mihály Street 12

A new day in the Crimea

“How does the new day start in the Crimea?”


“The sun, like the man, wakes up reluctantly. It looks around, one eye open. Then it closes it again for a few moments, until it eventually decides to come out…”


“…from the sea, like from under the blanket, which holds it back.”


“The moment of parting the water. I love to photograph this moment, when it seems as if the sun were followed by another sun… but no, it’s just a few seconds of an optical game.”


“Emerging from the sea, the sun slowly rises above the increasingly louder cries of the seagulls. The magic colors slowly disappear, to return at dusk again.
A new, ordinary day begins in the Crimea.”

Photos and text of this morning by Sergei Anashkevich

Dissolving: Hunters in the snow

Pieter Brueghel the Elder: The Hunters in the Snow, 1565

Piergiorgio Branzi: Alekseevskoe (Moscow), 1962

Riverside streets

Aleksei Fatyanov – Boris Mokrousov: На Заречной улице (On the riverside street). From the film Весна на Заречной улице (Spring on the riverside street, 1956).

Long live the Republic!

Among the photos of the Dicescu collection, presented yesterday, there is one – picture 13 in the first mosaic –, in which, it seems, we can discover the earliest example of the well-known Stalinist photoshop procedure.


In the photo, taken in the first days of the February Revolution, the soldiers posing for a group picture on St. Petersburg’s Liteyny Prospect with drawn swords, cheer the revolution. This is also emphasized by the inscriptions of the banner and flag in the background: В борьбе обретешь ты право свое – “In struggle you find your rights,” and Долой монархию! Да здравствует республика! – “Down with the monarchy! Long live the Republic!”

However, David King’s great overview, The Commissar vanishes: The falsification of photographs and art in Stalin’s Russia (1997) also publishes a previous version of this image.


The waving of the flag is much more natural here than in the previous photo, but we do not know what is written on it, if anything at all. And about the banner, it turns out that it was retouched onto the place of a shop sign in the background, whose original inscription was: Часы, золото и серебро – “Clocks, gold and silver”.

In David King, this beautiful circular story, as the earliest example of Communist photo retouching, ends here. However, there are some additional details that deserve attention.


On the Russian internet you can already find the heretofore unpublished archival original of this picture. The original photo clearly shows that the flag actually had an inscription, and it really began with Долой мо…


And in another photo, which displays the same soldiers in another pose, you can see not only the entire shop sign in the background, but also the inscription of the flag. And it reads the same as in the retouched picture, though somewhat erroneously: Долой монорхію. Да Здравствует Демократическая Республика – “Down with the monorchy. Long live the Democratic Republic!”

That even the previous image is still not completely retouch-free, is proven by this “more original” version, with a larger cut-out and handwritten caption, which suggests that it was also part of the Ion Dicescu collection.

But what is the other inscription retouched on the photo: In struggle you find your rights? For assistance, let us contact the classic:

“Koreyko was attentively watching Sinitsky’s new riddle. On the beautiful image of the goose there was also a sack, from which the following things were peeking out: a letter T, a pine tree, behind which the sun was rising, and a sparrow sitting on musical staves. The riddle ended with a comma upside down.
– This is certainly no child’s play to decipher – Sinitsky said. – You will have to rack your brains for a while!
– Come on, come on – Koreyko replied with a smile. – Only this goose disturbs me. What on earth does this goose do here? Aha! Got it! Done! In struggle you find your rights!
– Yes – said the old man, frustrated, in a drawled tone. – How did you get it so fast? You’re an incredibly talented person. One can immediately see that you’re a first-class bookkeeper.
– Second-class – corrected Koreyko. – But for whom did you make this riddle? For the press?
– For the press.
– Then it was a totally pointless work – Koreyko said. – In struggle you find your rights: this is the slogan of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Not suitable for print.”

Ilf-Petrov, The Little Golden Calf

The Socialist Revolutionaries – the esers (эсеры or “S.R.s”) – who, until the armed Bolshevik putsch in October, were the leading party of the revolution and the organizers of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, drew the slogan of their movement from the German jurist Rudolf von Jhering.

“In struggle you find your rights!” Socialist Revolutionary posters, 1917

The retouched photo has therefore nothing to do with the Communists; on the contrary, it comes from the party which they considered their most powerful rival, and whose memory after the civil war they condemned to oblivion. And the purpose of the retouching was also not that kind of falsification of history, the Orwellian retrospective change of the past, what we know from the manipulated photos of Stalinism.

Think about it: these photos were distributed right after the well-known events, in the form of postcards. Their purpose was propaganda: to popularize the achievements of the revolution and the party standing behind them. They do not alter the events depicted in them, but, in the manner of folk luboks, they make their message unambiguous for recipients who are familiar with this visual formula. One of the two retouched inscriptions makes clearly visible the slogan which was really carried by the soldiers, and the other represents the one which must be somewhere in the picture in order to make it clear, to whom the republic is due. It could also be placed in a caption, but when there is space for it in the place of the absolutely irrelevant shop sign, let it be there, as in the luboks. Just as in that other picture from the Dicescu collection, of which the postcard version was also complemented with a flag labeled Long live the Republic! with the purpose of disambiguation.



“Absolutely irrelevant shop sign”, I say,  in full awareness that, in the later decades of the Russian revolution it is prophetically relevant that you read “Clocks, gold and silver!” in the place of the slogan of the Red Army. Just like the fact that the signs betraying this pursuit are carefully retouched from the picture, which we have already written about in connection with Yevgeny Khaldei’s 1945 Reichstag photo.

Women's Day Revolution

“The days of the revolution. Filling out police travel documents”

Everyone knows when the October Revolution was. In November. But when was the February Revolution, which preceded it? Naturally, in March. Namely on March 8, Women’s Day.

Demonstration of the female workers of the Putilov Plant in Petrograd (today St. Petersburg) on 8 March 1917 (according to the Julian calendar, 22 February). The banners read: “Feed the children of the defenders of the motherland!” “Increase payments to the soldiers’ families – defenders of freedom and world peace!”

Women’s Day was first held on 8 March exactly a century ago, in 1914. Although female workers all over America and Europe had celebrated it since 1908 on one of the first Sundays of March, increasingly linking it to the clamor for women’s voting rights, this fell on 8 March for the first time in 1914, on the eve of World War I. And for the second time in 1917, on the eve of the revolution.

On that Sunday nearly fifty thousand female workers of Petrograd – the places of the men who had been called up were largely occupied by women in most factories – took to the streets, demanding bread and the end of the war. The protests continued the next day, and on the third day all the Petrograd plant workers went on strike. The Duma vainly sought help from the Tsar on the front, but he did not perceive the danger, and furiously dissolved the Duma. The troops ordered to defend the capital were increasingly sympathetic to the protesters. On 13 March, recalling the practice of the revolution of 1905, workers’ and soldiers’ councils were formed. At the request of the Duma representatives, the Tsar resigned, and a provisional government was established. And ten day later, Germany, to further destabilize the situation in Russia, sent home from Swiss exile, with German passports and at German state expense, Lenin and his companions, who in the April theses proclaimed the continuation of the revolution until the final victory of communism.

“The days of the revolution. The sleigh-car of the former Tsar”

The following 54 photos, documenting the first, hectic days of the February Revolution, were only recently published on the internet. The originals are preserved in the Russian State Museum of Political History, and according to the meagre data available, they come from Ion Dicescu’s collection.

“23 March. The funeral of the victims of the revolution. An overall picture of the flags”

Ion Dicescu, Russian name Ivan Osipovich Dik (1893-1938), was born the son of a house-painter in Bucharest. At the age of 18 he joined the Social Democratic Party, and became a journalist for the party’s newspaper. In 1916, when Romania entered WWI, he fought in Transylvania. He was wounded during the retreat, and he was treated in one of the Romanian field hospitals established in allied Russia. At the beginning of 1917 he was taken to St. Petersburg, where he got in contact with the Bolshevik Party. In April he joined the party, and became a journalist for Pravda. From the October Revolution on he fought with the Red Guards. In 1924, together with other Romanian communists in exile, he made a formal proposal for establishing the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova, which at that time was only a narrow strip – roughly today’s Transdnistrian Republic – in preparation for the re-annexation of Romanian Bessarabia. In 1938, he was executed on charges of spying.

The photos preserved in the so-called Dicescu collection were probably not taken by Dicescu himself. Their excellent compositions speak of first-rate press photographers, of which – as we will later write – there were more than one in St. Petersburg at the beginning of the century. The captions written on the pictures might suggest that they are editorial duplicates of press photos made or sold to Pravda. It would be worth checking to see if they were published in Pravda or in other dailies. It is certain that after the October Revolution some of them were published in postcard format. But about this we will write more in a subsequent post.

“The days of the revolution. Nevsky Prospect”

“23 March. The funeral of the victims of the revolution. Funeral procession on the Nevsky Prospect.” The banner reads: “You fell victim in the fatal combat”, the opening verse of the workers’ funeral march. On its various versions see our earlier post.

“The days of the revolution. Barricades on the Liteyny Prospect”

La Revolución del Día de la Mujer

«Los días de la revolución. Rellenando documentos policiales de viaje»

Todo el mundo sabe cuándo fue la Revolución de Octubre. En noviembre. Pero ¿cuándo fue la Revolución de Febrero que la precedió? En marzo, por supuesto. Exactamente el 8 de marzo, el Día de la Mujer.

Manifestación de las trabajadoras de la planta Putilov de Petrogrado (hoy San Petersburgo) el 8 de marzo de 1917 (según el calendario juliano, 22 de febrero). Las pancartas dicen: «¡Alimentad a los hijos de los defensores de la patria!» «¡Subid el sueldo a las familias de los soldados – defensores de la libertad y la paz mundial!»

El Día de la Mujer se celebró por primera vez el 8 de marzo de hace exactamente un siglo, en 1914. A pesar de que las mujeres trabajadoras a lo largo de Estados Unidos y Europa lo celebraban desde 1908 en uno de los primeros domingos del mes de marzo, vinculándolo cada vez más al clamor por los derechos de voto de las mujeres, cayó el 8 de marzo por primera vez en 1914, en vísperas de la Primera Guerra Mundial, y por segunda vez en 1917, en vísperas de la revolución.

Aquel domingo casi cincuenta mil trabajadoras de Petrogrado —los puestos de los hombres reclutados los ocupaban principalmente las mujeres en la mayoría de fábricas— salieron a la calle, exigiendo pan y el final de la guerra. Las protestas continuaron al día siguiente, y al tercer día todos los trabajadores de la planta de Petrogrado se declararon en huelga. La Duma buscó en vano la ayuda del zar en el frente, quien sin percibir el peligro disolvió la Duma airadamente. Las tropas organizadas para defender la capital se mostraban cada vez más favorables a los manifestantes. El 13 de marzo, recordando la práctica de la revolución de 1905, se formaron consejos de trabajadores y soldados. A petición de los representantes de la Duma, el zar abandonó y se estableció un gobierno provisional. Y diez días después Alemania, para desestabilizar aún más la situación en Rusia, enviaba a casa desde el exilio suizo, con pasaportes alemanes y a expensas del Estado alemán, a Lenin y sus compañeros que en las tesis de abril proclamaron el mantenimiento de la revolución hasta la victoria final del comunismo.

«Los días de la revolución. El coche-trineo del antiguo zar»

Las siguientes cincuenta y cuatro fotos, que documentan los primeros, agitados días de la Revolución de Febrero, se han publicado solo recientemente en Internet. Los originales se conservan en el Museo Estatal Ruso de Historia Política, y según los escasos datos disponibles, provienen de la colección de Ion Dicescu.

«23 de marzo. Funeral por las víctimas de la revolución. Visión del total de las pancartas»

Ion Dicescu, de nombre ruso Ivan Osipovich Dik (1893-1938), era hijo de un pintor de brocha gorda de Bucarest. A los dieciocho años ingresó en el Partido Socialdemócrata y se convirtió en reportero del periódico del partido. En 1916, cuando Rumania entró en la Primera Guerra Mundial, luchó en Transilvania. Fue herido durante la retirada y lo atendieron en uno de los hospitales de campaña rumanos establecidos en la aliada Rusia. A principios de 1917 fue trasladado a San Petersburgo donde entró en contacto con el Partido Bolchevique. En abril se unió al partido, y se convirtió en periodista de Pravda. Desde la Revolución de Octubre luchó con los guardias rojos. En 1924, junto con otros comunistas rumanos en el exilio, redactó una propuesta formal para el establecimiento de la República Socialista Soviética de Moldavia, que en ese momento era sólo una estrecha franja —aproximadamente la actual República de Transdnistria—, en previsión de la re-anexión de la  Besarabia rumana. En 1938, fue ejecutado por cargos de espionaje.

Las fotos que se conservan en la llamada Colección Dicescu no fueron probablemente tomadas por él mismo. Sus excelentes composiciones apuntan a fotógrafos de prensa de primera categoría, de los cuales —como veremos más adelante— había más de uno en San Petersburgo a principios de siglo. Las leyendas que acompañan a las imágenes podrían sugerir que son duplicados editoriales de fotos de prensa producidas por o vendidas a Pravda. Valdría la pena comprobar si se publicaron en Pravda o en otros diarios. Es cierto que después de la Revolución de Octubre algunas de ellas fueron publicadas en formato de tarjeta postal. Pero sobre esto escribiremos en una entrada posterior.

«Los días de la revolución. Avenida Nevsky»

«23 de marzo. Funeral por las víctimas de la revolución. Cortejo fúnebre en la Avenida Nevsky. La pancarta dice: «Cayeron víctimas en el combate mortal», versículo de inicio de la marcha fúnebre de los trabajadores. Para sus diferentes versiones, ver nuestra entrada anterior.

«Los días de la revolución. Barricadas en la Avenida Liteyny»