Family, Masculinity, and Heroism in Russian War Posters of the First World War

This book chapter in in the edited volume Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870-1930 explores the gendered visual language of Russian war posters druing World War I. The essay focuses on the representations of the Russian Empire as family in Russian World War I broadsides and literary sketches. Artists and writers articulated class, hierarchy, and racial and religious difference through representations of inclusion and exclusion from the tsarist family and through contrasting depictions of heroes and cowards. The representation of Russia as a family was a central tenet of the Russian imperial ideology. While the definition of the Russian Tsar as "the Father of the Fatherland" had existed since the time of Peter the Great, the explicit articulation of a patriarchal ideology of family occurred during the reign of Nicholas I (1825-1855).