Reds
Who are the Reds? Those who know something about the Russian Revolution would say that “the Reds” are not a soccer team or any other sport team. In the Soviet and Russian contexts, this label applies or is self-applied to the supporters of the Bolshevik regime.
In the early years of the Soviet power, the revolutionary regime was involved in a Civil War. The history of this war, as of any other war, is a history of complex interactions between multiple actors. Neverthless,the logic of the war, and the need for some analytical categories have imposed a certain framework of interpretation. In this framework, some of the actors are more important than others. In the Soviet Russian context, those who supported the Bolsheviks were called Reds.
Below you can see a black and white photograph from the Digital Collections of the New York Public Library:
The image is from August 1925, and in the Russian original it is entitled “Na ucheniakh krasnykh komandirov.” On the source website, this title was translated in English as “Commanders of Red Academy.” Presumably, because of the need to process thousands of images, the NYPL is not always accurate in the translation of its metadata. This translation grossly misrepresents the people from the image.
I would attempt an alternative translation, which in my view is more complex. So, my proposal is to rename this image to “During the Military Training of the Red Commanders.” In this way, the soldiers from the image are not some abstract figures, who are the Commanders of a Red Academy. The soldiers gain their legitimate place at the center of the image, while the Red Academy disappears from the title and from the image as such.
From Reds to Greens?
From the black and white image, one might assume that the Commanders were “Red” because they weared red clothes. Turning to the colorized version of the same image, the same person will notice that if the clothes were the key markers of their names, then “the Red Commanders” would sooner be called “the Green Commanders.”
In this way, the color of the clothes had a secondary importance in their self-representation. The chromatic aspect comes from the importance attributed by the Bolsheviks to their Red ideology.