Picturing Russia

Explorations in Visual Culture

Edited by

Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS I NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

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 CHAPTER

22

The Storn1ing of Kars

Stephen M. Norris

W ith war raging in the Balkans between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in 1878, the
peasants of Batishchevo, near Smolensk, e~thusiastically received a visit from a ped­
dler. The visitor, Mikhaila, carried with him images of the war to sell to the peasants, many of
whom had relatives and friends fighting. To entice his customers, Mikhalla pulled a few of his
favorite images from his collection and told his eager audience about their contents: «'Here you
have: he explains to the babas and day laborers who have gathered around him in the dining
room, 'here you have Skobelev, the general, he took Plevna. Here's the same Skobelev standing
and pointing to the soldiers with his finger so that they'll.run faster to take the gates to Plevna.
Here, you see, are the gates, here are our soldiers running. Here they're taking the Osman pasha
by their hands-look how he's hunched over!'"
Given the long, bloody struggle to take Plevna, the Turkish fortress, as well as the heroic
deeds of General Mikhail Dmitrievich Skobelev, who became a revered figure throughout
Russia during the war, Mikhaila's choices proved to be good ones. The peasants of the region
eagerly awaited news from the front and discussed the war with great interest. The Russian
owner of Batishchevo, Alexander-Nikolaevich Engelgardt, had been so surprised that the peas­
ants who lived near his estate seemed interested in the war that he wanted to find out how they
obtained their news. He discovered that they did so in part through pictures, and through the
scene he witnessed with Mikhaila, which he later published in his Letters from the Country.l
Engelgardfs Letters, published between 1872 and 1887, contain invaluable insights into the
workings of the Russian post-emancipation village. Engelgardt, sentenced to internal exile at
his family estate, set out to record events in his region for the Russian public. Although most
of his letters dealt with the problems of the Russian peasantry and the difficulties of gentry­
peasant relations, his sixth letter gave his impressions of the impact of the Russo-Turkish War
(1877-78). The whole district, according to Engelgardt, became acutely interested in the events
of the war. At one point, the wife of Engelgardt's steward burst into his study and announced,
"We've taken Plevna!" obviously joyous at the news. When Engelgardt inquired how she knew
of Plevna's conquest, he encountered Mikhaila and his pictures. He observed that "Mikhaila
knows all the pictures in great detail, and just as he previously explained the merits of his cot­
tons and scarves [the same peddler had appeared earlier in the war with patriotic scarves), so
he now describes his pictures."
 STEPHEN M. NORRIS

Engelgardt may have been surprised by the extent to which Russian peasants understood
historical events through popular prints, but the Russian form of image known as the lubok,
the type that Mikhaila attempted to sell to his audience, had established itself by 1877 as an
important information source for illiterate and bardy literate Russians. These popular prints,
as Jeffrey Brooks has written, can best be described as livdy illustrations similar to posters or
European broadsides with short texts, usually at the bottom of the picture. The term itself, as
well as its adjective, lubochnyi, derives from a Russian word meaning "bast," which is the soft
layer of wood taken from trees in the spring, then used to make baskets, shoes, and other con­
tainers. In early modern Russian culture, artists often used pieces of bast in place of expensive
parchment, and thus the crude woodcut images painted on them became known as lubochnye
kartinki, or "bast pictures." Russians eventually came to refer to these cheap prints as lubki and
even as narodnye kartinki, or "popular pictures." Originally produced as cheap icons in the
seventeenth century, the lubok was transformed by Peter the Great's reforms (reigned 1682­
1725). Beginning with Peter, lubki illustrated government reforms, folk-tales, and historical
events.
By the tum of the nineteenth century the lubok had established itsdf as an important
medium for understanding Russian national identity and wartime culture. Prior to 1812, Rus­
sian elites and artists had started to form a sense of national consciousness. Over the course
of the eighteenth century, antipathy toward foreigners (particularly the French and their man­
ners, which many Russian elites embraced), beliefs that authentic Russianness lay in the peas­
ant village and the Russian soul, a renewed interest in national mythology and history, and a
bdief that Russia possessed its own national character devdoped among Russian artists and
cultural figures. It took an event like Napoleon's invasion, however, to crystallize this early na­
tional consciousness. The war against Napoleon and the emotions that it produced led to a pro­
liferation of the lubok-more than two hundred images appeared between 1812 and 1814. The
growth of a national identity and the growth of the lubok as a form of Russian popular culture
. paralleled each other, and when war began in 1812, the two developments came together.
At the time of the Russo-Turkish War, lubok publishing had developed into a major cottage
industry centered in Moscow. The success of the 1812 images. combined with the introduction
of the lithographic process in nineteenth-century Russia, led to the explosion of the lubok
business. Publishers such as Peter Sharapov ran shops in Moscow and employed hundreds of
workers, including peasant women who colored prints, apprentices who helped produce the
images, salesmen who set up booths at major fairs, and peddlers who bought prints from the
publishers and sold them throughout Russia. Mikhaila, the traveling salesman that Engelgardt
observed in Batishchevo, represented one aspect of a major industry that catered to Russians
from all walks of life.
When Mikhaila displayed his prints on that day in 1878, he said, pointing to an image titled
The Storming ofKars, "Here our soldiers are taking Kars; do you see how our soldier has seized
the Turkish flag?" Engelgardt spoke up, saying that the two-headed eagle flag held by the soldier
on the wall of the fortress was the Russian imperial standard. Mikhaila replied, "No, it's the
Turkish flag. You see, there's an eagle drawn on it, and there'd be a cross on the Russian one"
(figs. 22.1 [color section] and 22.2).

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 THE STORMING OF KARS

22.2. The Capture of the Turkish Fortress of Ardahan, ca. 1878. Lubok print. The imperial Russian
double-headed eagle banner is recognizable.

Engelgardt's account is a wonderful window into how the Russian peasantry viewed the
wartime lubki, as well as the role the images played in inspiring the countryside to follow the
events of the conflict. Engelgardt expressed doubt about the ability of the peasants to under­
stand the war and later wrote that the peasants believed in rumors about the conflict that were
inspired in part by the images. "Knowing how ignorant the peasants are, knowing that they do
not possess even the most elementary geographic, historical , and political knowledge ... you
cannot imagine that these people could have any kind of comprehension of current political
events." Further, "It seems unlikely that one would be interested in something one does not
know, that one could sympathize with the war, understand its significance, when one does not
know what Tsargrad [the Russian name for Constantinople) is." To this member of the gentry
class, the ignorance of the Russian peasantry about the historical background of the war and
its aims excluded them from grasping its true significance.
Yet we could look at the information presented by Engelgardt in a less patronizing way.
Engelgardt never doubted that the peasants and villagers in his district expressed a great deal
of interest in the war and continued to follow its events, but he clearly responded differently
to lubki depicting those events. Mikhaila's belief that a Russian flag should have a cross on it

III
 STEPHEN M. NORRIS

indicates that he conceived of himself as Russian and that this identity revolved around the
Orthodox religion, a point stressed in the war imagery of the time. His lack of knowledge about
the double-headed eagle might indicate that this symbol of Russian identity had less resonance
.\,.. for him than the religious imagery also present in the wartime lubki. In fact, the peasant's view
may have been more accurate about the meaning of the double-headed eagle- Russian troops
went into battle with regimental flags, not with the imperial standard. Engelgardt believed
that he understood the· iconography of the wartime imagery correctly, but his peasants knew
differently. After all, they had to supply the troops for the army and thus knew far more about
its workings.2 At the same time, several wartime prints titled The Storming of Kars (as well as
images that depicted the storming of such other fortresses as Ardahan and Plevna) featured
Russian troops placing the imperial standard on top of Turkish fortresses. Other images de­
picted Russian troops taking down Turkish flags, while some (including fig. 21.1) were more
difficult to read clearly.
Far more instructive in the encounter between the peddler and the landowner is Mikhaila's
ability to view himself and his audience as Russian. Peddler and peasants alike had a sense
of patriotism and a clear ability to view the Thrks as non-Orthodox-and thus non-Russian.
Mikhaila's tales of Skobe1ev's heroism prompted the peasants to later ask him to join them in a
toast to the White General. By displaying a keen interest in the war and its events, gathering in
the local tavern to discuss their views, and buying Mikhaila's lubki, the peasants of Batishchevo
showed that they grasped the basic patriotic views depicted in the popular prints, however
different their understanding was from EngeIgardt's.
Engelgardt's and the peasants' encounter with The Storming ofKars demonstrates the power
that visual sources had in imperial Russia. The "act of eyewitnessing," to borrow a term used
by Peter Burke, that Engelgardt recorded suggests that Russians from two very different worlds
had different views of what it meant to be Russian. Even though Engelgardt and Mikhaila
disagreed about what a Russian flag should have on its field, both were able to use an image
to think about their sense of national identity. The lubok in particular, as B. M. Sokolov has
argued. represents a multifaceted art form, and its importance rests on the openness of inter­
pretation that each image contains. Pictures such as The Storming of Kars can show us how
national identities are constructed and contested according to the visual worlds in which their
audiences live.

NOTES-I. Aleksandr Nikolaevich EngelgardtHetters from the Country, 1872-1887, ed. and trans. Cathy Frier­
son (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 138. The letter originally appeared in Otechestvennye zapiski
(March 1878): 5-42. All quotations involving Mikhaila the peddler and Engelgardt are taken from this source.
2. I thank Dominic Lieven for bringing this information to my attention.

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