The Russian Revolution: The Events and the Men (1918)

In 1918, Ezequiel Endériz, a journalist for the Madrid newspaper El Liberal, published a book titled The Russian Revolution: Its Events and its People with a cover illustration by José Izquierdo Durán. The Civil War and Francoist persecution would shorten the lives of both men. Endériz went into exile in France in 1939 and would never return to Spain. Izquierdo died in Madrid’s Porlier prison that same year. 

Endériz’s account covered only the February revolution and was left behind by the revolutionary maelstrom of October. Even so, by including in his illustration  the worst nightmare of people of order, the armed revolutionary, Izquierdo captured an iconic and enduring image of that event that shook the world. Its features, as Izquierdo represented them: red shirt, gun in hand or bandoleer, wild beard, disheveled hair, fierce and bloodthirsty look, hung over Europe for decades, appearing in books, drawings, caricatures and novels.

Now, seventy-two years after Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, the phantom of communism was indeed haunting Europe, embodied in the ferocious revolutionary ready to destroy whatever he found in his path. While it drew on image that came from Russia, this fear also drew on an imaginary that had been established in the 19th century: Garibaldi and his men with their red jackets, the Communards of Paris, the workers’ internationals, anarchism, recurring peasant revolts.

The revolutionaries had demonstrated thar it was possible to bring down the political and social order after by the liberal revolutions. And they had declared internationalist intentions that went well beyond mere rhetoric. In 1919, they succeeded in proclaiming Soviet republics in Hungary and Bavaria that were quickly killed off.

When the end of the Great War and the reconversion of the war economies provoked a wave of worker mobilization across Europe, conservatives feared that it was only the prelude to a revolutionary apocalypse. This is why in many countries this period of conflict was given a name inspired by the Russian Revolution. In Italy, it was called the Red Biennium and in Spain, the Bolshevik Triennium. Reds and Bolsheviks would disturb the sleep of many Europeans until deep into the 20th century.

MML