The Day of Soviet Propaganda and the So-Called Greens: Envisioning Lateral Authority

In 1920 Commissar of Enlightenment Anatole Lunacharsky wrote, “It is absolutely inarguable that the most important artistic outgrowth of the Revolution always was and always will be the mass festivals.” As a means of representing the nonhierarchical form of political authority that underwrote Soviet power, nothing compared to these demonstrations of mass participation. This paper looks closely documentary evidence of an early example of one such festival, the “Day of Soviet Propaganda,” which was organized in 1919 in numerous sites within Bolshevik-controlled territory in the still-unsettled political landscape of the post-revolutionary civil war. I consider the ways in which documentation of local festivities—both photographic and written—functioned to polarize local residents who may have had little interest in politics, by investing them in the eventual success of Soviet power. I contextualize this effort within the context of the politics of “the so-called Greens,” a term employed briefly by the Bolsheviks to conceptualize apolitical peasants who did not ally themselves with the (Bolshevik) “Red” army, the (tsarist) “Whites,” or the (anarchist) “Blacks.” One of the strategies of the “so-called Greens” in avoiding conscription was to destroy documents of their own existence. Thus, this paper asks questions about the politics of representation in the constitution of authority based in broad lateral relationships of power.