---
title: Russia's war of words:tsarist lubki, the Liberty Loan and the fight over 'German agents' (1914-1918)
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/russia-1914-1918/
description: In four years Russia's war messaging moved from comic prints that mocked the enemy by nature, through a hunt for enemies at home, to a revolutionary…
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/)

# Russia's war of words:tsarist lubki, the Liberty Loan and the fight over 'German agents' (1914-1918)

At a glance

In four years Russia's war messaging moved from comic prints that mocked the enemy by nature, through a hunt for enemies at home, to a revolutionary government selling war bonds as "liberty"…

- **When:** 1914–1918
- **Actor:** Tsarist Russian publishers, press and army command…
- **Target:** Russian civilians and soldiers; Allied publics watching Russia leave the war
- **Source:** Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- **Confidence:** **documented** Primary documents, court records, official disclosures
- **Techniques:** [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/) [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/) [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/) [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/) [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/)

Full details

- **Actor:** Tsarist Russian publishers, press and army command; the Provisional Government (1917); the Bolshevik party; and, for the 1918 Sisson Documents, the U.S. Committee on Public Information

On this page

- [What happened](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/russia-1914-1918/#what-happened)
- [How it works](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/russia-1914-1918/#how-it-works)
- [Then and now](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/russia-1914-1918/#then-and-now)
- [Positions on the record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/russia-1914-1918/#positions-on-the-record)
- [Same-method test](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/russia-1914-1918/#same-method-test)
- [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/russia-1914-1918/#how-to-spot-it)
- [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/russia-1914-1918/#images)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/russia-1914-1918/#sources)

On this page

> **Content note.** This page quotes a 1914 Russian slur for Germans and describes the 1915 anti-German riots in Moscow and the wartime deportation of Jews and ethnic Germans. They are described as the record under study.

**In one line:** In four years Russia's war messaging moved from comic prints that mocked the enemy by nature, through a hunt for enemies at home, to a revolutionary government selling war bonds as "liberty", and ended in a contest in which each side called the other Germany's agents.

![Diagram: the 1914 lubok prints mock the enemy; spy mania turns inward in 1915; the Provisional Government's Liberty Loan recasts the war as the revolution's; the Bolsheviks campaign for peace; rivals, and then the U.S. CPI, call them German agents](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/russia-1914-1918-diagram.svg)

## What happened

- **August 1914.** Russia goes to war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. On 31 August (18 August in the Russian calendar) St Petersburg is renamed Petrograd, dropping the German-sounding name.
- **Autumn 1914.** A Moscow publisher, Segodniashnii Lubok ("Today's lubok"), issues war prints in the style of the lubok, the traditional woodcut broadside, drawn by avant-garde artists including Kazimir Malevich and Aristarkh Lentulov, with verses by Vladimir Mayakovsky. They show the Kaiser and the Austrian army as cowardly, clumsy or ridiculous. The series ran for only a short time.
- **1915.** After the defeats and retreat of 1915, the army expels hundreds of thousands of Jews and ethnic Germans from front-line provinces, often on collective accusations of spying or disloyalty (Lohr, 2003). In Moscow, at the end of May 1915, crowds loot and burn German-owned and German-named shops and businesses over several days.
- **1915-1916.** Rumours of treason at court, many aimed at the German-born Empress Alexandra, circulate widely. War Minister Vladimir Sukhomlinov is dismissed in 1915 and later tried; Colonel Sergei Myasoedov was hanged as a spy in March 1915 in a case historians regard as unsound.
- **March 1917.** The February Revolution ends the monarchy. The Provisional Government keeps Russia in the war.
- **Spring 1917.** The Provisional Government launches the Liberty Loan (Zaem svobody). Its posters replace the cavalry charges of earlier tsarist loan posters with red banners and citizen-soldiers under slogans such as "War until victory".
- **April 1917.** Lenin returns from Switzerland through Germany in a train arranged with the German government. German Foreign Ministry records, published by Zeman in 1958, show money set aside for propaganda in Russia; how much of it reached the Bolsheviks, and through whom, is still argued over.
- **July 1917.** After the July Days, the Provisional Government's Minister of Justice releases material accusing Lenin of working for Germany. Lenin goes into hiding. The Bolsheviks call the accusation a slander.
- **1917.** Bolshevik campaigners and papers at the front, such as *Okopnaia Pravda* ("Trench Truth"), call for an end to the war and for fraternisation with enemy soldiers.
- **8 November 1917 (26 October, Russian calendar).** After seizing power, the Bolsheviks issue the Decree on Peace, calling on all warring peoples and governments to open talks for a peace "without annexations or indemnities".
- **March 1918.** Soviet Russia signs the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers.
- **September 1918.** The U.S. Committee on Public Information releases the "Sisson Documents" as proof that Lenin and Trotsky were German agents. In 1956 George F. Kennan concludes that they were forgeries (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/)).

![A Sausage-Maker Came to Łódź (1914)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/sausage-maker-came-to-lodz-1914.jpg)

*[Подошёл колбасник к Лодзи (A Sausage-Maker Came to Łódź)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/sausage-maker-came-to-lodz-1914/), Segodniashnii Lubok, Moscow, 1914. Kazimir Malevich (image), Vladimir Mayakovsky (verse). Public domain.*

## How it works

- [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/): Mayakovsky's verse for Malevich's print calls the Kaiser a *kolbasnik* ("sausage-maker"), a Russian slur for Germans. A companion print by Lentulov calls the Austrian soldiers hares and crayfish backing away. The label explains the battle, and the fighting itself is not described.
- [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/): in 1915, military defeat, shortages and the retreat were explained by hidden enemies, and the blame fell on whole groups: Jews and ethnic Germans in the front zone, German-named firms in Moscow and the German-born empress. The collective charge took the place of evidence against named people.
- [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/) and [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/): the 1917 Liberty Loan poster puts "War until victory" on the red flag of the February Revolution. The flag's meaning is borrowed for a war-bond drive, and the word "liberty" stands in for what a buyer receives, a 5 percent government bond.
- [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/): the charge that Lenin and Trotsky were German agents reached Allied readers in 1918 on the vouch of an official U.S. release and two historians' endorsement, not on tested documents. The earlier Russian accusation of July 1917 also rested on an official release rather than a public trial.

## Then and now

![Liberty Loan. War until Victory (1917)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/zaem-svobody-voina-do-pobedy-1917.jpg)

*[Заём свободы. Война до победы (Liberty Loan. War until Victory)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/zaem-svobody-voina-do-pobedy-1917/), Provisional Government Liberty Loan, 1917. Public domain.*

In the United States the Treasury also called its war bonds "Liberty Bonds" in 1917-1918, and its posters paired the Statue of Liberty and the flag with the purchase ([That Liberty Shall Not Perish from the Earth: Buy Liberty Bonds](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/that-liberty-shall-not-perish-1918/)). The device is the same on both posters: a political ideal is attached to a government bond. The contexts differed. The American loan was sold by a government whose constitution was not in question, while the Russian one was sold by a provisional government months after a revolution, in the middle of an open argument over whether Russia should stay in the war at all. That argument ended with the government's fall in November 1917.

The 1915 riots and deportations can be compared with the U.S. ['Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry' (exclusion order posted in San Francisco)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/exclusion-order-japanese-ancestry-1942/), in which a whole group was removed from a zone on collective suspicion. The scale, the legal form and the outcomes were different, and this page does not claim they were the same.

## Positions on the record

- **The tsarist government and army:** presented the removals from the front zone as military security measures against espionage.
- **The Provisional Government:** presented the war after February 1917 as the defence of a free Russia, and accused the Bolsheviks of serving Germany.
- **The Bolsheviks:** presented the war as an imperialist war of all the powers, and called the German-agent charge a slander meant to crush the revolution.
- **Historians:** agree that Germany helped Lenin return and set aside funds for anti-war propaganda in Russia (Zeman, 1958). How much money reached the Bolsheviks, and how much it mattered, is disputed. The 1918 Sisson Documents were forgeries (Kennan, 1956). Lohr (2003) documents the mass deportations of 1915 and the collective charges behind them.
- **Not shown:** that any single print or poster changed events. The lubok series ran briefly and its reach is not measured.

## Same-method test

A print that called the Tsar's soldiers cowards by nature, a government that blamed its defeats on a whole ethnic group, and a war-bond poster that sold a bond as "freedom" would be tagged the same way whichever country issued them. The German, British and American posters in this archive's WWI gallery are scored by the same definitions.

## How to spot it

- When an enemy is explained by nature (cowards, animals, sausage-makers), look for what the image leaves out: the actual course of the battle.
- When a defeat is blamed on a group rather than on named people with evidence, the blame has become collective.
- When a bond or a tax is sold as a value ("liberty", "victory"), swap in the terms (rate, maturity, purpose) and see whether the appeal still works.
- When a political rival is called a foreign agent, ask for the documents, their provenance and whether a court tested them.

## Images

| Image | Source | Licence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Mechanism diagram (above) | Drawn for FRAME from this page's sourced facts (`make_diagrams.py`) | CC BY 4.0, FRAME |
| *A Sausage-Maker Came to Łódź* (1914) | FRAME gallery, from the Library of Congress | Public domain in the U.S. (published before 1931) |
| *The Austrian Surrendered Lvov to the Russians* (1914) | FRAME gallery, from the Library of Congress | Public domain in the U.S. (published before 1931) |
| *Liberty Loan. War until Victory* (1917) | FRAME gallery, from the Library of Congress | Public domain in the U.S. (published before 1931) |
| "Lenine-Trotzky German Agents", *Barre Daily Times*, 16 September 1918 | [Chronicling America, Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn91066782/1918-09-16/ed-1/?sp=3) | Public domain (U.S., published 1918); cropped by FRAME |

![The Austrian Surrendered Lvov to the Russians (1914)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/austrians-surrendered-lvov-1914.jpg)

*[Сдал австриец русским Львов (The Austrian Surrendered Lvov to the Russians)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/austrians-surrendered-lvov-1914/), Segodniashnii Lubok, Moscow, 1914. Aristarkh Lentulov (image), Vladimir Mayakovsky (verse). Public domain.*

![Lenine-Trotzky German Agents, Barre Daily Times, 16 September 1918](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/cpi-creel-committee-sisson-release-1918.jpg)

*The Sisson Documents as reported in* The Barre Daily Times *(Barre, Vermont), 16 September 1918, p. 3. Chronicling America, Library of Congress. Public domain; cropped by FRAME.*

### Image gaps

- **Photographs of the Moscow riots of May 1915.** Photographs exist in Russian archives; none with a confirmed public-domain status was found on loc.gov or Commons from the build environment. **May be fillable.**
- **Boris Kustodiev's Liberty Loan poster (1917).** Public domain (Kustodiev died in 1927), but not found in the Library of Congress collection, and Commons was rate-limiting requests. **Fillable.**
- **A copy of *Okopnaia Pravda* or a Bolshevik fraternisation leaflet.** None found in an openly licensed scan. **May be fillable.**
- **The Decree on Peace as printed in *Izvestiia*, November 1917.** Published before 1931, so public domain in the U.S., but no scan was reachable. **Fillable.**

## Sources

- Hubertus F. Jahn, *Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I* (Cornell University Press, 1995).
- Stephen M. Norris, *A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812-1945* (Northern Illinois University Press, 2006).
- Eric Lohr, *Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I* (Harvard University Press, 2003).
- Z. A. B. Zeman (ed.), *Germany and the Revolution in Russia, 1915-1918: Documents from the Archives of the German Foreign Ministry* (Oxford University Press, 1958).
- George F. Kennan, "The Sisson Documents", *Journal of Modern History* 28, no. 2 (June 1956): 130-154.
- Peter Kenez, *The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929* (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
- Allan K. Wildman, *The End of the Russian Imperial Army*, 2 vols. (Princeton University Press, 1980-1987).
- William C. Fuller, Jr., *The Foe Within: Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia* (Cornell University Press, 2006).
- Decree on Peace, Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, 26 October (8 November) 1917.
- ["Lenine-Trotzky German Agents", *The Barre Daily Times* (Barre, Vt.), 16 September 1918, p. 3](https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn91066782/1918-09-16/ed-1/?sp=3). Chronicling America.
- Library of Congress catalogue records for the gallery prints (linked from each gallery entry).