“The Redemptive Sacrifices of Liberated Humanity”: the Memory of Vladimir Volodarsky and Moisey Uritsky in Petrograd during the Civil War (1918–1922)

The murders of Vladimir Volodarsky and Moisey Uritsky, commissars of the Petrograd Commune, in the summer of 1918, provided a starting point for their glorification after death as leaders and revolutionary martyrs. Memorials honoring these individuals served as a means of legitimizing the power of the Bolsheviks. This article examines the pragmatic aspect of memorial rhetoric and commemorative practices within the context of propa-ganda campaign of the military struggle against the Soviet government’s opponents. The main sources for the study were official periodicals published in Petrograd, which featured obituaries, funeral resolutions, poems, memoirs, slogans, and other writings related to Volodarsky and Uritsky. For four years following the assassina-tions, their lives and activities were used by Soviet propaganda as models for revolutionary fighters. The class struggle in the form of the civil war was presented as a “testament” to the murdered leaders on the one hand, and as a consequence of “betrayal” of the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, who supported the idea of the Constituent Assembly, on the other. Respect for the murdered leaders and the struggle “bequeathed” by them was strengthened among the proletariat through statements about the equivalence of victims on both the “inter-nal” and “external” fronts of the Civil War. In addition, the figures of the dead leaders acquired a sacred status, becoming the embodiment of the eternal idea of social revolution and class struggle. This sacredness of the fig-ures of the martyred leaders was asserted through the use of religious and mythological metaphors, such as the project to create a “pantheon” of revolutionaries who had died in the struggle, with Volodarsky and Uritsky the given the first places. The terrorist acts against the leaders and attempts to defame their memory were interpreted as actions that unleashed a civil war.