A new exhibition by Russia's Federal Archives

Nov.15.- The exhibition, titled "1917: Myths of Revolution," opened last Friday at the exhibition hall next to the enormous State Archive, housed in a gray building decorated with sculptures of revolutionary figures. The display stands are set up in a claustrophobic zigzag, with the "myths" – often quotes from one-sided historical sources, such as the Short Course of the History of the All-Union Communist Party of 1938 – pasted up on red banners.
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The exhibition quotes such dubious historical facts as the Short Course's statement that the Aurora battleship attacked Petrograd's Winter Palace "with the thunder of its cannons," while in fact only one shot was fired. A photograph shows the resulting damage – a lampshade hangs askew in a room of the palace next to a hole in the wall, but a china knicknack stands intact on a nearby table.

The process of mythmaking is shown visually in the juxtaposition of two paintings by Konstantin Yuon, showing Lenin speaking at the Extraordinary Session of the Petrograd Soviet on Oct. 25, 1917, when he made his first public appearance after fleeing the city in July.

One was painted in 1927 and shows a less polished-looking Lenin with Lev Kamenev, Alexei Rykov and Leon Trotsky in close attendance. A new version, from 1935, shows Lenin attended by Vyacheslav Molotov and Stalin, with the disgraced Bolsheviks erased from the scene.

In the revised version, the crowd changes as well as the political leaders, Mironenko pointed out. "In the first picture, there are Jews, Russians, soldiers, ... In the second picture, they are already a single nucleus, there is almost no difference between their faces." [The second version of Yuon's painting (left) showed a simplified crowd and a more idealized portrait of Lenin, not to mention the disappearance of disgraced activists such as Trotsky and Rykov]

Gathered for the first time in a large exhibition are drawings by Yury Artsybushev, an artist who sat in on meetings of political parties -- not only of the Bolsheviks -- and drew wicked but lifelike sketches of the prominent speakers. Lenin looks wily and disheveled, a far cry from his later canonic depiction. But the most interesting aspect of the drawings, Mironenko said, is that one figure doesn't appear in any of them -- Stalin -- indicating his minor role in the revolutionary events, which later would be grossly inflated.

In terms of myths that go against Soviet ideology, the exhibition examines in particular detail allegations that Lenin was financed by Germany, which were widely circulated in the summer of 1917 by his opponents and even led to the launch of an official investigation. Caricatures from the period show Lenin as Judas and a rude limerick calls him an "oaf who sold Russia to the Germans."

Several documents are labeled as falsifications -- such as a statement to an investigator by a Russian officer, Yermolenko, in which he said that German intelligence officers promised him that he would become as rich as Lenin if he became a spy.

However, letters between Bolshevik officials talk about the fact that one Karl Moor gave the Bolsheviks around $30,000 in 1917 and chronicle his attempts to get the money back, right up to 1925.

Historian Albert Nenarokov, who is a researcher at the State Archive for Social and Political History, helped put the exhibition together. In a telephone interview on Wednesday, he stressed that questionable donors to political parties are nothing new, and conceded that it was impossible to say for sure that Moor was not an agent of the German government …

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