This Russian poster celebrates not the First World War, but the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (note that the date looks like the red flags of communism).

Russia, in an attempt to prop up its waning policy of Pan-Slavism in the Balkans and in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was one of the prime instigators of the Great War. The war went badly for an ill-prepared Russia from the beginning; she was cut off from her Allies in the west and suffered unimaginable casualties at the front. On the homefront affairs were no better, with massive food shortages and rampant inflation.

Thus the scene was set for the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. We must remember that Soviet Communism, which has preoccupied world politics from 1917 until the recent dissolution of the USSR, was one of the most important, if unforeseen, results of World War I.


 A Film of Lenin