Russian Empire fought in the First World War as a member of the Entente but was separated from its Allies by more than 2000 miles, which made the information exchange between the Western and the Eastern fronts especially difficult. As the result, in Russia, the understanding of the nature of the fighting in France and Flanders remained limited and flawed. For instance, in 1915 many Russian soldiers and civilians did not fathom why France and Britain could not simply break through the enemy lines to help the retreating Russian army, as the knowledge of trench warfare was not widespread. Yet, a hundred years later it is the imagery of mud and blood in the trenches that is predominantly associated with the First World War in Russia. This paper attempts to trace the origins of that perception and argues it emerged as a result of the political use of the image of the Western Front landscape by the Soviet government. The Bolsheviks used the imagery of trench warfare at the Western front to demonstrate the brutality of the ‘imperialist war’. At the same time, they suppressed the memory of the Eastern front in 1914-1917 that was eventually overshadowed by the tragedies of the Civil War and the Second World War and disappeared from collective memory. Consequentially, when the interest in the First World War arose again in the 1980s, it was the imagery of the Western front that was the most accessible to the Russian public.
