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THE VISUALIZED DAILY LIFE OF THE CIVIL WAR IN SIBERIA: A SOURCE ANALYSIS OF THE AMERICAN NEWSREEL “ALLIED EXPEDITIONARY FORCES IN SIBERIA” (1918–1920) // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2020. Issue 3 (25). P. 9-26

The article focuses on daily life visualized by the video material “Allied Expeditionary Forces in Siberia”. The uniqueness of this newsreel is that it is the only historical source among the famous films of American and British intervention that reflects the cinematics of the Civil War period in eastern Russia. Historians have not comprehensively studied this newsreel; moreover, its earlier analysis contains errors and inaccuracies, which explains the relevance of this work. The authors aimed at identifying the filming locations; determining the daily routine features of soldiers of the interventionists’ armies, the Whites and the Reds; revealing the peculiarities of the life and behavior of Siberians in the areas of hostilities and front lines, clarifying the chronology and attribution of the events captured by the camera. The authors analyzed written sources to supplement video materials, which made it possible to verify the attribution of the film frames. On the basis of their method (“cutting scripts”), the authors were able to identify the following: places captured in the film; time of action; images of various groups of the Civil War participants. It has been established that the recording was conducted in Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Spassk, at the Pogranichnaya Station, Nikolsk (nowadays Ussuriysk), Harbin, on the Circum-Baikal railway, in Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Omsk, Yekaterinburg, Ufa, and at other places of the Trans-Siberian railway. The visual images of the military of several foreign states such as Americans and their allies in the Entente (British, Japanese, Canadians, Italians, and French) have been identified. The authors examined the images of Germans and Czechs as representatives of the Fourth Union as well as the visual images of representatives of the Russian White Army and Red Army forces. The documentary frames allowed evaluating the external manifestations of people’s feelings in the period of disruption. The newsreel frames visualize the everyday life of civilians in the front line and in the territories controlled by the Whites (including the characteristics of moving around the country, arranging life in temporary housing, supporting prisoners, and observing military parades of the interventionists). The models of child behavior in the front line zone captured by the camera are of particular interest. The authors analyzed the range of the emotional reactions of the participants in those events: the vivid manifestations of feelings among the interventionists and the restrained manifestations among Siberians. For most of the latter, the sense of what was happening was not so clear. The constituent parts of the empirical material and the method of the analysis contributed to the study of the everyday routine concerning the front and the front-line life: the emotions and behavior of the participants in the events as well as the details of Siberians’ and refugees’ life.

Keywords: film “Allied Expeditionary Forces in Siberia” (1918–1920), visual history, semiotics of cinema, Civil War in Siberia, American Expeditionary Forces, United States Army Signal Corps