The War That Ended Peace

To mark the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, has joined forces with major international museums, state archives and private collectors in Russia, France and Italy to present the multimedia project ‘The War That Ended Peace’, reconstructing the events of 1914 to 1918 and showing the war through the eyes of participants in the conflict, focusing particularly on everything connected to the part Russia played in this terrible global tragedy.

The exhibition takes its name from the book ‘The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914’ by eminent historian and Oxford University professor Margaret MacMillan, great-granddaughter of David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922.

For Russia the First World War began on 1 August 1914. Controversy continues to this day as to whether it was possible to avoid this war that became the first worldwide catastrophe; a war involving 38 different countries with a total population of more than 1.5 billion, in which more than 22 million people perished, of which over 11 million were losses to the civilian population; a war, where weapons of mass destruction were used for the first time; a war that divided history into ‘before’ and ‘after’ for all time...

The exhibition showcases unique photographs, stereo pairs and stereo projections, autochromes and colour photographs, newsreels and audio recordings, Russian and French wartime journals, leaflets and caricatures, as well as posters and lithographs by Kazimir Malevich, Aristarkh Lentulov and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Co-organisers of the project include: ECPAD (Etablissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Défense), France; the Albert-Kahn Museum and Gardens, Boulogne-Billancourt, France; Foundation for Preservation of the Russian Heritage in the European Union, Brussels; Royal Museum of Army and Military History, Brussels; Russian State Archive of Cinema and Photo Documents, Moscow; International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva / Moscow; Museum of Nicéphore Niépce, Chalon-sur-Saone, France; Archive of Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; State Literature Museum, Moscow; Imperial War Museum, London; Polish Army Museum, Warsaw; Museum of Military History, Vienna; Archive of Renault, France; private collections in Russia, private collections from France, private collections from Italy.

The aim of the exhibition is to not only reconstruct events that occurred on all the First World War fronts, but also to show the suffering endured by civilian populations. The exhibition also allows us to see how, in the course of four years, attitudes to war altered among the direct participants in military action, the mass media and civilians.

The exhibition displays photographs taken by professional photographers (the profession of war photo-correspondent first appeared during the First World War), and also the testimony of amateur photographers, including the celebrated physician Sergei Ivanovich Vavilov, later President of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and Italian Princess Anna Maria Borghese, one of the first women photographers to work practically in the vanguard. Like most women of her circle, the princess worked for the Red Cross from the very start of the war, ministering to the wounded, and witnessed the terrible ordeals endured by volunteer and conscripted participants in military action.

The activities of the International Red Cross were inextricably linked to all participants in the military conflict. Austrian writer Stefan Zweig wrote that throughout the war the Red Cross was the heart and soul of Europe, confronting the inhuman horrors of war with human compassion, and Roman Rolland, who himself worked as a volunteer for the International Prisoners-of-War Agency, contributed half of his Nobel Prize award to the Red Cross.

‘Mankind has never before found itself in such a situation. Unable to attain a higher degree of virtue or a wiser leadership, for the first time people have in their hands weapons with which they can without fail destroy the human race. Such is the achievement of all their glorious history, all the glorious deeds of previous generations. People would do well to stop and think about this, their new responsibility.’ (Winston Churchill)