CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/7/2019

Defiant humor in 'Greetings from the Barricades: Revolutionary Postcards in Imperial Russia'

The 1905 Russian Revolution—which included worker strikes, mass peasant unrest and military mutinies leading up to the 1906 October Manifesto, in which Tsar Nicholas II was forced to concede basic civil rights and an elected parliament—preceded the Bolshevik Revolution by twelve years. During this time, revolutionaries began to use printed postcards as a cheap, effective conduit for their political ideas. This week, Four Corners Books has released Greetings from the Barricades, a beautifully designed and printed, 480-page hardcover collection of revolutionary postcards from Imperial Russia, compiled by Tobie Mathew. "Over recent years the internet has transformed the organization of subversive activity," Mathew writes. "Through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, opposition parties and terrorist groups have acquired instant access to citizens the world over. A hundred years ago the Russian revolutionaries were not so very different from today's militants and freedom fighters—a small band of committed individuals who needed to convince a nation to act against what they perceived to be a morally bankrupt regime. The medium they used may have been less technologically advanced, but it was no less effective in communicating partisan tales of popular resistance." Featured image, a hand-drawn caricature of Tsar Nicholas (c. 1905) which appears in the book and comes blown-in as a beautiful stand-alone postcard, is entitled "Engrossed in Reading," after Georgii Erastov.