Red Cross social assistance on the Eastern Front of Civil War in Russia evidenced by analyzing US photographic documents

About the author:

Eugenii A. Vonog, a Senior Lecturer, Department of Journalism and Literary Studies, Institute of Philology and Language Communication, postgraduate of the Department of History of Russia, World and Regional Civilizations, Siberian Federal University, Krasnoyarsk, Russia

vonog.ea@gmail.com

Abstract:

Large-scale armed conflicts at the beginning of the 20th century brought enormous human suffering. In a series of bloodshed in the people’s memory of our state, a special focus is drawn to civil confrontation. A situation was negatively affected by the fact that the Civil War in Russia dated 1918–1922 began during the period of the First World War, without any temporary pause and, except for the territory of Europe, covered all regions of the former Russian Empire. The already difficult economic situation began to worsen catastrophically. The surge in violence and epidemics, which broke out against the backdrop of widespread unsanitary conditions, led to incredible hardships and additional human losses. All these facts could not leave indifferent a group of people in the structures of the «Red» and «White» state entities, private, public and international humanitarian organizations, such as the Red Cross. This work was aimed at highlighting the activities of the Red Cross in providing social assistance to the population of Ural, Siberia and the Far East territories, which are considered to be the center of the events of the Eastern Front of the Civil War in Russia, based on the use of visual historical sources. The scientific novelty of the article is explained by comprehensive research of the nature of social assistance of the Red Cross during the Russian civil strife due to the «view from the outside» — the American National Red Cross photograph collection dated 1918–1920, transferred for storage to the Library of Congress. This study results in a revealed wide range of services of this humanitarian organization in Russia, complementing the overall picture, previously having been formed by narrative sources. Currently, the Russian Federation is conducting a special military operation that began in 2022, that made the theme of social assistance to the population, found itself in the zone of armed conflict, relevant again.

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