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From Communism to Anti-Communism

 | 
Andre Liebich
, 
Svetlana Yakimovich

From the Revolution to the Comintern

Uritsky Square, Petrograd [1920?]

Lars Lih

Full text

The back of the document reads (in Russian and French): “Митинг на площади Урицкого” – “Miting [sic] [”] sur la Place Ouritzky”– [“Meeting at Uritsky Square”]. Black and white photograph; 13 x 18 cm.

1It may be assumed that the occasion which brings this huge crowd together filling Uritsky square is the ceremonial opening of the Second Congress of the Comintern on 19 July 1920.

2Starting at midnight, just across the Neva River, was performed ‘The Spectacle of Two Worlds’, a piece of mass theater with some three thousand costumed performers. Unfortunately, we have no photographs of this climactic stage production, which portrayed the ups and downs of the revolutionary movement from the Paris Commune in 1871 to the downfall of the Provisional Government in October 1917 and the declaration of soviet power.

3The German delegate Willi Münzenberg described the effect of such a dramatic spectacle: all this took place “at night, at two o’clock, while the red flags on the Winter Palace give their salute, and the brightly illuminated warships on the Neva display the Soviet star, and hundreds of thousands of workers watch, filling up all the streets. It was like a dream. As the sailors’ armored car drove up [as part of the final episode], we delegates stood, shouting, waving our arms, so enthusiastic we were quite overcome.”

4The next morning the delegates returned to Moscow, where the working sessions of the Congress started a few days later.

Bibliography

Kevin J. Callahan, Demonstration Culture: European Socialism and the Second International, Leicester: Troubadour Publishing, 2010.

John Riddell, ed., Workers of the World and Oppressed People, Unite! Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress of the Communist International, [vol. 2, The Communist International in Lenin’s Time], New York: Pathfinder, 1991 (Münzenberg quotation pp. 14–15)

Alfred Rosmer, Moscow under Lenin, Introduction by Tamara Deutscher, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973 [1st French edition, 1951].

List of illustrations

Caption The back of the document reads (in Russian and French): “Митинг на площади Урицкого” – “Miting [sic] [”] sur la Place Ouritzky”– [“Meeting at Uritsky Square”]. Black and white photograph; 13 x 18 cm.
URL http://books.openedition.org/iheid/docannexe/image/6601/img-1.jpg
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