---
title: Bolshevik agitprop, 1917-1921:soviets, decrees, agit-trains and the ROSTA windows
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/bolshevik-1917-agitprop/
description: Between Lenin's April 1917 return to Petrograd and the end of War Communism in March 1921, the Bolsheviks built a message chain running from party…
section: Case studies
---

![Illustration: a First World War field-intelligence collage of trench maps, wireless transmission logs and aerial reconnaissance photographs.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-wwi.jpg)

[Case studies](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/)

# Bolshevik agitprop, 1917-1921:soviets, decrees, agit-trains and the ROSTA windows

At a glance

Between Lenin's April 1917 return to Petrograd and the end of War Communism in March 1921…

- **When:** 1917–1921
- **Actor:** The Bolshevik party…
- **Target:** Soldiers' and sailors' committees, the peasantry, urban workers, and, through the Decree on Peace…
- **Source:** Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- **Confidence:** **documented** Primary documents, court records, official disclosures
- **Techniques:** [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/) [Bandwagon](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/bandwagon/) [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/) [Plain folks](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/plain-folks/) [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/) [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/) [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/) [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/) [Euphemism / doublespeak](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/euphemism/)
- **Regime:** [Soviet Union under Stalin](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/soviet-union/)

Full details

- **Actor:** The Bolshevik party (from March 1918 the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)); Sovnarkom (the Council of People's Commissars); the Petrograd Soviet's Military Revolutionary Committee; VTsIK's Agitation-Instructional Department; the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA); the Central Committee's Department of Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop), formed 1920
- **Target:** Soldiers' and sailors' committees, the peasantry, urban workers, and, through the Decree on Peace and the published secret treaties, foreign publics and the armies of the other warring powers

On this page

- [What happened](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/bolshevik-1917-agitprop/#what-happened)
- [How it works](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/bolshevik-1917-agitprop/#how-it-works)
- [Then and now](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/bolshevik-1917-agitprop/#then-and-now)
- [Positions on the record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/bolshevik-1917-agitprop/#positions-on-the-record)
- [Same-method test](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/bolshevik-1917-agitprop/#same-method-test)
- [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/bolshevik-1917-agitprop/#how-to-spot-it)
- [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/bolshevik-1917-agitprop/#images)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/bolshevik-1917-agitprop/#sources)

On this page

> **Content note.** This page quotes the Cheka's 5 September 1918 "Red Terror" decree ordering that people "connected with White Guard organisations, plots and mutinies" be shot, and describes forced grain requisitioning, executions and a famine. The wording is quoted as the record under study, not endorsed.

**In one line:** Between Lenin's April 1917 return to Petrograd and the end of War Communism in March 1921, the Bolsheviks built a message chain running from party slogans through soldiers'- and workers'-committee resolutions to Sovnarkom's decrees, then out through agit-trains, agit-steamers, the state news agency ROSTA and its hand-stencilled street windows, and finally a standing Central Committee department (Agitprop, 1920) — the first version of a machine every one-party propaganda state after it would copy in outline.

![Diagram: soldiers' committees and soviets carry the slogans; Sovnarkom's decrees translate them into policy; the Civil War sends agit-trains and agit-steamers to the front; ROSTA and its windows carry the daily line to the street; the Agitprop department, founded 1920, sets it all centrally](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/bolshevik-1917-agitprop-diagram.svg)

## What happened

- **1 March 1917 (Old Style, 14 March New Style).** The Petrograd Soviet issues Order No. 1, giving elected soldiers' committees control of a unit's weapons and requiring officers' orders to be countersigned. It is not a Bolshevik document — the Petrograd Soviet's leadership was then Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary — but it creates the network of elected committees the Bolsheviks spend the rest of 1917 working to win over, unit by unit.
- **3-4 April 1917 (16-17 April N.S.).** Lenin returns to Petrograd from Swiss exile through Germany in a train the German government allowed to pass, and the same evening reads out ten theses at the Tauride Palace calling for no support to the Provisional Government, "All power to the Soviets," an end to the war, confiscation of the landed estates, nationalisation of land and a single national bank. *Pravda* prints them on 7 April (20 April N.S.) as the "April Theses"; the paper's own editorial board, including Lev Kamenev, appends a note the same day calling them Lenin's "personal opinion".
- **Spring-autumn 1917.** Bolshevik agitators work the soldiers' and sailors' committees created under Order No. 1, and the party press — *Pravda*, *Soldatskaya Pravda* ("Soldier's Truth") and, at the front, *Okopnaya Pravda* ("Trench Truth") — prints committee resolutions calling for peace, land and "All power to the Soviets" as evidence the army and countryside were turning Bolshevik. The Kronstadt sailors' soviet, which in May 1917 declared itself the sole authority on the island, becomes one of the most quoted sources of such resolutions; Trotsky later called the Kronstadt garrison "the pride and glory of the Russian Revolution" (this later becomes relevant: see 1921, below).

![Poster: a shouting soldier holds a red banner reading 'War until victory' under the heading 'Liberty Loan'](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/zaem-svobody-voina-do-pobedy-1917.jpg)

*"Liberty Loan. War until Victory" (Zaem svobody. Voina do pobedy), 1917: poster for the Russian Provisional Government's war-bond campaign, by P. Buchkin, printed in Petrograd. Library of Congress, LC-USZC4-12688; public domain. See [Заём свободы. Война до победы (Liberty Loan. War until Victory)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/zaem-svobody-voina-do-pobedy-1917/).*

- **July 1917.** After the "July Days" street clashes, the Provisional Government's justice ministry releases material accusing Lenin of taking German money; he goes into hiding. This episode, and the U.S. Committee on Public Information's own 1918 use of the same charge, are covered on FRAME's [Russia's war of words: tsarist lubki, the Liberty Loan and the fight over 'German agents' (1914-1918)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/russia-1914-1918/) page.
- **25-26 October 1917 (O.S.; 7-8 November N.S.).** The Petrograd Soviet's Military Revolutionary Committee, whose day-to-day work Trotsky directed, coordinates the seizure of government buildings. At the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets that evening, Mensheviks and Right Socialist-Revolutionaries walk out in protest at the seizure — Julius Martov's Menshevik-Internationalists call it "a criminal venture" — leaving the Bolsheviks and their Left-SR allies to pass the night's resolutions by a vote presented in the Bolshevik press as the will of the Congress.
- **26 October 1917 (O.S.).** The Congress adopts two decrees drafted mainly by Lenin. The **Decree on Peace** calls on "all the belligerent peoples and their governments to start immediate negotiations for a just, democratic peace" without annexations or indemnities, and appeals over the heads of the Allied and Central Powers' governments to their "class-conscious" workers. The **Decree on Land** abolishes private ownership of land without compensation — adopting, almost word for word, the peasant land programme the Socialist-Revolutionary Party had compiled that August from 242 local peasant mandates (*nakazy*) published in *Izvestia*, rather than the Bolsheviks' own pre-October programme of nationalisation through large state farms.
- **27 October 1917 (O.S.).** Sovnarkom's Decree on the Press closes newspapers found guilty of "poisoning the popular mind" by "sowing confusion through slander" or resisting the new government, calling the measure temporary. Maxim Gorky's paper *Novaya Zhizn* ("New Life") runs a column, "Untimely Thoughts" (*Nesvoevremennye mysli*), attacking Bolshevik methods through the spring of 1918, until it too is shut down that July.
- **Late November-December 1917.** Commissar for Foreign Affairs Trotsky orders the publication, in *Izvestia*, *Pravda* and as pamphlets, of the tsarist government's secret wartime treaties with its Allies — the documents dividing up Constantinople, the Straits and Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian territory among the Allied powers — presenting them as proof of the "imperialist" aims the Decree on Peace had denounced and embarrassing the Allied governments before their own publics.
- **5 September 1918.** After an assassination attempt wounds Lenin and the Petrograd Cheka chief Moisei Uritsky is killed, Sovnarkom issues its "Red Terror" decree, published in *Izvestia*: "it is necessary to protect the Soviet Republic from its class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps" and that "all persons who are involved in White Guard organisations, conspiracies and mutinies are to be shot" (translation as reproduced in Bunyan and Fisher's 1934 documents collection). Local Cheka boards publish lists of hostages shot in reprisal in the following weeks.
- **From August 1918.** Agit-trains begin running to the Civil War fronts, organised by VTsIK's Agitation-Instructional Department under Yakov Sverdlov, chairman of VTsIK until his death in March 1919. The first, named for Lenin, and later trains such as the *October Revolution*, each carried a printing press, a film-projection car, a library, pamphlets and speakers; Mikhail Kalinin — a peasant-born Bolshevik whom the party's own publicity called the "all-Russian peasant elder" (*vserossiysky starosta*) after he became head of state in 1919 — toured repeatedly by train to address village meetings in person. Trotsky, as war commissar, ran his own armoured train continuously from August 1918, moving between fronts with a printing press, a radio transmitter, a small library and a film-projection car; by his own and his biographers' account it covered on the order of 100,000 kilometres over the Civil War (Trotsky, *My Life*, 1930; Volkogonov, *Trotsky*, 1996).
- **1919.** The agit-steamer *Krasnaya Zvezda* ("Red Star"), with Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya aboard as head of its political department, tours towns along the Volga and Kama rivers, screening films, distributing literature and holding public meetings and literacy classes.
- **7 September 1918.** Sovnarkom's decree establishes the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA), merging the old Petrograd Telegraph Agency and the Union of Journalists' press bureau into a single state news agency subordinate to VTsIK, tasked with distributing official announcements and news bulletins nationwide by telegraph.
- **September 1919.** The first "Okna ROSTA" ("ROSTA Windows") appears in a shop window at ROSTA's Moscow office on Kuznetsky Most: a hand-drawn, stencilled poster commenting on the day's war news, credited by most historians to the artist Mikhail Cheremnykh. Vladimir Mayakovsky joins within weeks and becomes the format's most prolific contributor, writing captions in short rhyming couplets and often drawing the panels himself; the windows, unlike the standalone poster art of the same years, were mostly issued unsigned, as agency output rather than as an individual artist's work. Cheremnykh's stencil technique let one master design be hand-copied dozens of times for simultaneous display, and captions and layouts were wired by telegraph to ROSTA's provincial branches so that towns without lithographic printing plants could still reproduce the day's Window locally. Estimates of the total run for 1919-21 vary — Mayakovsky's own later count of his personal output alone ran past 1,100 designs — but historians put the combined output of all ROSTA branches at several thousand individual Windows (White, *The Bolshevik Poster*, 1988; Kenez, *The Birth of the Propaganda State*, 1985). *The posters themselves are being catalogued for FRAME's image gallery by a separate research thread and are not reproduced on this page; see Image gaps, below.*

![Poster: a top-hatted capitalist seated on heaps of coins among church spires and factory chimneys, with verse below](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/kapital-deni-1919.jpg)

*"Capital" (Kapital), 1919: Bolshevik state poster by Viktor Deni with verse by Demyan Bedny, published in the RSFSR during the Civil War. Public domain (published before 1931). See [Капитал (Capital)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/kapital-deni-1919/).*

- **1920.** The Central Committee's Department of Agitation and Propaganda — Agitprop — is formally established, consolidating direction of party agitators, the agit-trains and the wider network of local propaganda cells under one Central Committee department (Kenez, 1985). The same year Narkompros sets up Glavpolitprosvet, the Chief Political-Educational Committee, combining adult literacy work with political education; Krupskaya becomes its head that November.
- **August 1920.** During the Polish-Soviet War, ROSTA bulletins and agit-train materials present the Red Army's advance on Warsaw as the start of revolution spreading into Europe; after the Polish counter-attack at the Battle of Warsaw (the "Miracle on the Vistula") routs the Red Army that month, the same channels shift back to Civil War themes at home without publicly revisiting the earlier claim.

![Poster: a Red Army soldier points at the viewer beneath the words 'Have you volunteered?'](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/did-you-volunteer-moor-1920.jpg)

*"Have You Volunteered?" (Ty zapisalsya dobrovoltsem?), June 1920: Red Army recruiting poster by Dmitry Moor, RSFSR. Public domain (published before 1931). See [Ты записался добровольцем? (Have You Volunteered?)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/did-you-volunteer-moor-1920/).*

![Poster: a large red horned figure crouches over the Kremlin wall above a scene of executions](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/mir-i-svoboda-v-sovdepii-1919.jpg)

*"Peace and Freedom in Sovdepia" (Mir i svoboda v Sovdepii), 1919: poster from the opposing side of the same war, produced by White-movement propaganda; artist unidentified. Public domain (published before 1931). Content note: antisemitic caricature and a depiction of killing. See [Миръ и свобода въ Совдепіи (Peace and Freedom in Sovdepia)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/mir-i-svoboda-v-sovdepii-1919/).*

- **28 February-18 March 1921.** Sailors at the Kronstadt naval base — the same garrison Trotsky had praised in 1917 — rebel against Bolshevik rule, calling for "soviets without Communists". The Tenth Party Congress, meeting in Petrograd as the rising is crushed, calls the rebels "White Guards" and agents of foreign and émigré intervention; the same label ("White Guard") that ROSTA windows and agit-train bulletins had spent three years attaching to the Whites of the Civil War is now applied to the Bolsheviks' own former standard-bearers.
- **March 1921.** The same Congress ends grain requisitioning (*prodrazvyorstka* — literally "apportionment of surplus," the contemporary term for what in practice meant armed detachments, *prodotryady*, seizing grain by force, including from peasants with none to spare) and adopts the New Economic Policy, closing the War Communism period this page covers. Requisitioning, drought and the dislocation of the Civil War combine to produce a famine in the Volga region in 1921-22; death-toll estimates for it are contested (see What is contested, below).

## How it works

- [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/): "Peace, Land, Bread" and "All Power to the Soviets" name what listeners wanted without stating who would hold the land, how peace would be made with an enemy still at war, or which soviet — local, provincial or national — "all power" meant. The Decree on Peace's own language, "a just, democratic peace," carries the same open-ended appeal.
- [Bandwagon](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/bandwagon/): Bolshevik-run papers printed a growing stream of soldiers'- and sailors'-committee resolutions through mid-to-late 1917 as evidence that "the front" and "the fleet" had already decided; the Second Congress of Soviets then passed its decrees by a vote taken minutes after roughly half the hall — the Mensheviks and Right SRs — had walked out, and the Bolshevik press reported the result as the Congress's near-unanimous will rather than as a vote of the remaining half.
- [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/): the same committee-resolution traffic that fed the party press before October kept running after it — a small number of standard resolutions, often drafted or steered by Bolshevik agitators, circulated through garrison and front congresses and back into print as if each new unit had reached the same conclusion independently.
- [Plain folks](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/plain-folks/): the agit-trains and the agit-steamer *Krasnaya Zvezda* put party figures in front of village and garrison audiences in person, and Kalinin's tours in particular traded on his own peasant background — the party's press called him the "all-Russian peasant elder" — to make the message land as one villager speaking to another rather than a directive from Moscow.
- [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/): ROSTA's charter task was distributing telegraphed news; the Okna ROSTA it produced from September 1919 carried no artist's name and no party imprint, appearing under the same institutional voice as ROSTA's ordinary news bulletins rather than as declared party or Cheka material.
- [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/): the August 1920 advance on Warsaw was carried by ROSTA and agit-train material as the leading edge of a European revolution; the defeat that followed weeks later was not walked back in the same channels with anything like the same prominence.
- [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/): "White Guard" (*belogvardeyets*), used throughout the Civil War for the anti-Bolshevik armies, was applied without a change in method to the Kronstadt sailors in March 1921 — the same label, aimed this time at Bolshevism's own former "pride and glory."
- [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/): prodrazvyorstka and the 1918 Committees of the Poor Peasants campaign placed the blame for food shortages on "kulaks" accused of hoarding grain, a label attached to a broad and shifting range of peasant households rather than to a proven act of hoarding.
- [Euphemism / doublespeak](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/euphemism/): *prodrazvyorstka* ("apportionment of surplus") named as bookkeeping what *prodotryady* carried out at gunpoint; the Red Terror decree's own language — "isolating," "class enemies" — sits beside its own plain instruction, in the same sentence, to shoot people for association with "conspiracies and mutinies."

## Then and now

The template — a party organ that sets the line, a nominally separate "telegraph" or "information" agency that carries it as news, and mobile units that put the message in front of people who will not read a newspaper — reappears wherever a one-party state builds its first propaganda ministry. The early Chinese Communist Party's Jiangxi Soviet, a decade later, copied the outline directly: its own agitprop network, traveling drama troupes and a party press modeled explicitly on Soviet practice.

The differences in scale and consequence are large even within this page's own four years. Order No. 1 and the April Theses were persuasion inside a country still holding elections and a plural press through most of 1917; the September 1918 Red Terror decree and the 1921 requisitioning famine were coercion backed by a security police empowered to shoot people by administrative order, in a state that had by then closed its opposition press. The chain described here runs, within a few years, from slogans competing for soldiers' votes to a decree naming who could be shot without trial — the same institutions carrying both.

## Positions on the record

- **The Bolshevik position at the time.** Lenin's *April Theses* and his 1917 pamphlet *The State and Revolution* argue that soviets are a higher form of democracy than a parliamentary republic and that "all power" to them is the revolution's proper form; the Decree on Peace frames publication of the secret treaties and the appeal to foreign workers as ending "secret diplomacy." The Red Terror decree frames itself, in its own text, as a defensive measure against "White Guard organisations, conspiracies and mutinies" following an assassination attempt and a political killing.
- **Contemporary critics' position.** Julius Martov's Menshevik-Internationalists called the October seizure "a criminal venture" from the floor of the Second Congress itself. Gorky's *Novaya Zhizn* column "Untimely Thoughts" (1917-18) called Bolshevik rule a "cruel experiment" on the Russian people conducted "with no more pity than a chemist has for the material he is analysing," before the paper was closed in July 1918.
- **What is documented.** The dates and texts of Order No. 1, the April Theses, the Decree on Peace, the Decree on Land, the Decree on the Press, the publication of the secret treaties, the 5 September 1918 Red Terror decree, the founding dates of ROSTA (1918) and Agitprop (1920), and the existence and general form of the agit-trains, the agit-steamer *Krasnaya Zvezda* and the Okna ROSTA are set out in the primary-source collection edited by Bunyan and Fisher (1934) and confirmed by later archival historians, above all Kenez (1985) and White (1988).
- **What is contested.** How far the wave of 1917 committee resolutions reflected genuine, independently arrived-at radicalisation in the army and countryside, as Rabinowitch (1976) and later social historians of 1917 argue from local records, versus how far it was steered by Bolshevik agitators working the committee network Order No. 1 had created, as earlier accounts including Pipes (1990) emphasise — historians differ on the balance, not on whether both processes occurred. The 1921-22 Volga famine's death toll is also disputed: contemporary Soviet and relief-agency estimates and later historians' figures range from roughly 1 million to 5 million deaths, and how much of the toll to attribute to requisitioning as against drought and the wider dislocation of seven years of war is argued over by economic historians including Malle (1985).
- **Not ruled on here.** Whether the October seizure of power was legitimate, and whether War Communism's economic policy was a war-driven necessity or an ideological choice pursued past the point of necessity. This page scores how the message chain was built and run, not the merits of the revolution or the civil war fought over it.

## Same-method test

The same scoring applies to a contemporaneous democracy's own wartime machine. The United States' Committee on Public Information (1917-19; see [The Committee on Public Information: how the U.S. government sold the First World War at home (1917-1919)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cpi-creel-committee/)) sent some 75,000 volunteer "Four Minute Men" to address cinema audiences from a standard script issued in Washington — a plain-folks, direct-address device built for a mass audience much like the agit-trains', running in the same years. And the 1950-71 Crusade for Freedom (see [The Crusade for Freedom: Truth Dollars for a CIA-funded radio, 1950-1971](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/crusade-for-freedom-radio-free-europe/)), which asked Americans to fund Radio Free Europe with "Truth Dollars" as if it were an independent citizens' station while most of its money came from secret CIA budgets, is [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/) built on the same principle as ROSTA carrying party material as ordinary news: a state hand kept out of a channel that depends on looking independent of it.

The scale and the stakes were not comparable. The CPI was a temporary wartime agency, wound up within a year of the Armistice, operating inside a country that kept contested elections, a plural press (however hard the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917-18 pressed on it) and courts that could and did hear challenges to its methods. Ban on opposition papers, extrajudicial execution by administrative decree, and a permanent one-party security apparatus had no American Four-Minute-Man equivalent. ROSTA and Agitprop, by contrast, were built as standing organs of a state that had by 1918 closed its rivals' press and by September 1918 had put shooting people for association with a hostile organisation into a published decree.

## How to spot it

- Ask who was still in the room when a "unanimous" resolution was passed. A vote taken after an opposing bloc has walked out is not the same fact as a vote taken with everyone present.
- Check whether the "news agency" or "telegraph agency" carrying a story is organisationally separate from the government the story favours, or whether its charter (as ROSTA's did) makes it an organ of the same state from the outset.
- Notice when a new government adopts a rival movement's own popular programme word for word — as the Bolsheviks did with the SR land mandate — and ask whether the adopting party's prior, less popular position quietly survives in how the policy is carried out.
- Read past a decree's soft verbs. "Isolate," "apportion" and "requisition" can sit in the same document, even the same sentence, as an instruction to shoot or seize by force; the plain instruction is the one that took effect.
- Track a label across time. When the group a state most praises — Kronstadt's sailors in 1917 — becomes, using the same machinery and the same enemy word, the group it crushes four years later, the label was never describing a fixed set of people.

## Images

| Image | Source | Licence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Mechanism diagram (above) | Drawn for FRAME from the sources below (`make_diagrams_rtp_bolshevik.py`) | CC BY 4.0, FRAME |
| "Liberty Loan. War until Victory", 1917 | [Заём свободы. Война до победы (Liberty Loan. War until Victory)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/zaem-svobody-voina-do-pobedy-1917/) (Library of Congress LC-USZC4-12688) | Public domain (published before 1931) |
| "Capital", Viktor Deni and Demyan Bedny, 1919 | [Капитал (Capital)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/kapital-deni-1919/) (gallery) | Public domain (published before 1931) |
| "Have You Volunteered?", Dmitry Moor, 1920 | [Ты записался добровольцем? (Have You Volunteered?)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/did-you-volunteer-moor-1920/) (gallery) | Public domain (published before 1931) |
| "Peace and Freedom in Sovdepia", White-movement poster, 1919 | [Миръ и свобода въ Совдепіи (Peace and Freedom in Sovdepia)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/mir-i-svoboda-v-sovdepii-1919/) (gallery) | Public domain (published before 1931) |

### Image gaps

- **The Okna ROSTA (ROSTA Windows) themselves, 1919-21, and other Bolshevik Civil War posters** other than those embedded above. A separate FRAME research thread ("Pre-1931 world posters") is cataloguing this material into the image gallery with full provenance; rather than duplicate that work, this page cites and describes the Windows without hosting them. See [Soviet montage cinema as state film: Battleship Potemkin and October](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/soviet-montage-cinema/) and check the gallery once that thread's ingestion lands.
- **Photographs of the agit-trains and the agit-steamer *Krasnaya Zvezda*.** Period photographs exist and, because they were published before 1923, most would sit outside the URAA foreign-copyright-restoration question that affects later Soviet material (unlike the 1966-67 Chinese material discussed on FRAME's Cultural Revolution page). This session could not reach Wikimedia Commons or loc.gov to identify, verify and download a specific, correctly licensed file — both hosts returned rate-limit errors to every request made while building this page — so none is hosted here pending a session with working access.
- **A photograph of Lenin delivering the April Theses or addressing the Second Congress of Soviets.** The best-known 1920 Sverdlov Square photograph of Lenin speaking, with Trotsky and Kamenev on the podium steps, is documented (and later altered) on FRAME's own [Glavlit and the retouched photographic record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/soviet-glavlit-photo-retouching/) page; no equivalent 1917 photograph was sourced for this page.
- **A facsimile of the Decree on Peace, the Decree on Land or the Red Terror decree as printed in *Izvestia* or *Pravda*.** Scans likely exist on Commons or in Russian state digital archives; none was verified and sourced within this session's access.

## Sources

- V. I. Lenin, "The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution" (the "April Theses"), *Pravda*, 7 April 1917 (20 April N.S.): [marxists.org](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/04.htm).
- V. I. Lenin, *The State and Revolution*, written August-September 1917: [marxists.org](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/).
- "Decree on Peace" and "Decree on Land," adopted by the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, 26 October 1917 (O.S.): [marxists.org, Decree on Peace](https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/1917/10/26.htm); [marxists.org, Decree on Land](https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/1917/10/26b.htm).
- James Bunyan and H. H. Fisher, eds., *The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1918: Documents and Materials* (Stanford University Press, 1934), and its companion volume James Bunyan, ed., *Intervention, Civil War, and Communism in Russia, April-December 1918: Documents and Materials* (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1936) — for the texts of the Decree on the Press, the Red Terror decree of 5 September 1918 and the founding decrees of ROSTA.
- Petrograd Soviet, "Order No. 1," 1 March 1917 (O.S.), English translation in Robert P. Browder and Alexander F. Kerensky, eds., *The Russian Provisional Government 1917: Documents* (Stanford University Press, 1961).
- Leon Trotsky, *My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography* (1930), for the account of his armoured train, 1918-20: [marxists.org](https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/).
- Dmitri Volkogonov, *Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary*, trans. Harold Shukman (HarperCollins, 1996).
- Peter Kenez, *The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929* (Cambridge University Press, 1985) — the standard institutional history of the agit-trains, ROSTA, Glavpolitprosvet and the Agitprop department.
- Stephen White, *The Bolshevik Poster* (Yale University Press, 1988) — the standard study of the Okna ROSTA, Cheremnykh's and Mayakovsky's roles and the stencil-and-telegraph production method.
- Victoria E. Bonnell, *Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin* (University of California Press, 1997).
- Richard Pipes, *The Russian Revolution* (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990).
- Alexander Rabinowitch, *The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd* (W. W. Norton, 1976).
- Orlando Figes, *A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924* (Jonathan Cape, 1996), for Order No. 1, the April Theses and the 1917 slogan campaigns.
- Silvana Malle, *The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918-1921* (Cambridge University Press, 1985), for prodrazvyorstka and the contested scale of the 1921-22 famine.
- Maxim Gorky, "Untimely Thoughts" (*Nesvoevremennye mysli*), *Novaya Zhizn*, 1917-18; English translation by Herman Ermolaev, *Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture, and the Bolsheviks, 1917-1918* (Yale University Press, 1968; reissued Eyewitness/Paul S. Eriksson).
- Julius Martov's floor statement at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, 25 October 1917 (O.S.), as recorded in N. N. Sukhanov, *The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal Record*, trans. and ed. Joel Carmichael (Oxford University Press, 1955).
- Resolutions of the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), March 1921, on the Kronstadt rising and on replacing prodrazvyorstka with a tax in kind (the start of the New Economic Policy): [marxists.org](https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/1921/03/x-congress/index.htm).
- FRAME case studies [Russia's war of words: tsarist lubki, the Liberty Loan and the fight over 'German agents' (1914-1918)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/russia-1914-1918/), [Soviet montage cinema as state film: Battleship Potemkin and October](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/soviet-montage-cinema/) and [Glavlit and the retouched photographic record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/soviet-glavlit-photo-retouching/), for adjoining material on 1914-18 Russian propaganda, Soviet cinema and Soviet photo retouching this page does not duplicate.