Wings of Revolution

Abstract

This essay examines the motifs of wings and flight in public interpretive practices during the revolution, which were ubiquitous but rarely recognized. At the empirical center of this story is a once famous memorial plaque, featuring a large winged figure symbolizing the revolution, installed on the first anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution on Red Square above the graves of the martyrs of October. Exploring such imagery, including possible sources and resonant parallels, this paper asks what the religious and the sacred meant at the level of revolutionary ideas, emotions, and lived experience. Resurrection, transcendence, utopia, the superman, and the Marxist “leap” out of the “kingdom of necessity” are key interpretive themes.