Stephen M. Norris A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity 1812–1945. Northern Illinois University Press DeKalb, IL 2006. ISBN: 0-875-80363-6.

Stephen M. Norris A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity 1812–1945. Northern Illinois University Press DeKalb, IL 2006. XIII, 277 S., 31 Abb. ISBN: 0-875-80363-6.

Did the Russian Revolutions of 1917 demonstrate the weakness of Russian national identity in the face of social, especially class conflict? Did imperial politics undermine the emergence and definition of a Russian nation? In this book, Stephen Norris challenges those historians who have asserted the inchoate character of Russian national identity. Arguing that the analysis of visual culture in wartime can illuminate those “moments when Russians have attempted to articulate a sense of nationhood” (p. 7), he surveys the history of the war-time lubok, the cheaply made and popular prints sold by peddlers across the Russian empire that first emerged as a major patriotic genre during the War of 1812 and that ultimately shaped Soviet visual iconography as late as World War II.

The book is organized into nine chapters, including the introduction and the conclusion. Each substantive chapter, with two exceptions, devotes itself to a particular conflict: the ‘Patriotic War’ of 1812; the Crimean War; the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78; the Russo-Japanese War; and World War I. An early chapter considers the development of the censorship law of 1851, which had a significant impact upon the production of the lubok, and the final chapter covers the entire Soviet period through 1945. In this sense, the promise of the title to tell the story of Russian national identity from the Patriotic War of 1812 to the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45 is technically met, though readers should be aware that the analysis of visual culture in World War II is only some six pages long and that the weight of the book is devoted to the pre-revolutionary period.

Norris’s approach relies fundamentally upon his reading of the visual evidence, and two interlocked perspectives guide his inventory of the war-time lubki: representations of the ‘other’ as a means to represent the ‘self’; and direct representations of the nation. In the first category, Norris traces negative caricatures of enemies, beginning with Napoleon and the French in 1812–13 and ultimately including an array of religious, racial, and national ‘others’, especially the Ottoman Turks, the Japanese, and the Germans. Alongside several set patterns, such as the depiction of the enemy as foolish, he identifies a series of innovations and particularities. The casting of the Turks as religious opponents thus helped to bring Orthodoxy to the centre of Russian national symbolism; in contrast, racial and racist motifs underpinned visual representations of the Japanese as animal-like and devious. The other analytic category includes the explicit attempts to represent the ‘self’. Most prominent is the persistent imagery of the loyal, clever, and heroic peasant and/or Cossack, who, Norris argues, came to function as a popular icon of the nation. Images of the tsar, he explains, were much more controlled and hence rare, though certainly not unknown. The centrepiece of his analysis is the chapter on the ‘Great War’, which witnessed complex combinations of the established imaginaries of the Russian nation and its enemies.

In addition to describing a large number of lubki, Norris brings in a range of other evidence to illuminate the dynamics of production and distribution. Following the 1851 censorship law, which imposed censorship on the lubok partly due to concerns about images produced by Old Believers, the industry was commercialized, becoming a business under the leadership of such well-known entrepreneurs as Ivan Sytin. Another consequence of the 1851 law was the development of self-censorship among publishers; Norris did not find controversies over lubok images, which instead conformed to the parameters desired by the state. The main problem he encounters in his analysis is well-known: while historians can peruse cultural products themselves (in this case, the visual evidence), the assessment of its reception is much more difficult. A market mechanism was certainly at play: these images were part of commercial industry, and the decision to purchase them does indicate some affinity on the part of the consumer. Unsurprisingly, however, information on print runs and sales is lacking. To his credit, Norris has located scattered sources that describe the popularity of the images, especially but not only among peasants. In the end, however, this reader was left feeling somewhat doubtful about the claims being placed on the visual evidence. Norris is certainly right to see national and patriotic identities as highly complex and evolving, and he joins a growing number of historians who are painting a much more nuanced landscape of national, local, and religious identities in nineteenth-century Russia. He likewise identifies both continuities and changes in lubok imagery and fleshes out the broader commercial context of their production. Yet, as he admits in places, his sources illuminate more the attempts of the elites to define and disseminate images of the nation than the shifting contours of national identity itself. Indeed, it would have been interesting to learn more about the broader context of the war-time lubok, both its place within the visual lexicon of the genre as a whole and its relation to other artefacts of popular patriotism and identity. While the final chapter does suggest how the lubok shaped Soviet visual iconography and its imagery of enemies, it focuses attention on the propaganda itself rather than the complex relationship between Russian and Soviet identities. In sum, Norris adds new evidence to the debate over Russian national identity, but the debate itself will certainly continue.

This book is a welcome contribution to the literature on national identity and empire in nineteenth and twentieth century Russia. It is also well suited for use in the undergraduate classroom, and the many illustrations (unfortunately all black and white) will certainly prompt discussions among students.

Susan Morrissey, London

Zitierweise: Susan Morrissey über: Stephen M. Norris A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity 1812–1945. Northern Illinois University Press DeKalb, IL 2006. ISBN: 0-875-80363-6., in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. Neue Folge, 56 (2008) H. 4, S. 600-601: http://www.dokumente.ios-regensburg.de/JGO/Rez/Morrissey_Norris_A_War_of_Images.html (Datum des Seitenbesuchs)