"WORLD WAR I PRODUCED A NEW BREED OF HERO—THE WAR PHOTOGRAPHER": FIRST EDITION OF BLOOD STAINED RUSSIA, 1918, WITH NEARLY 200 LARGE PLATES FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY PHOTOJOURNALIST DONALD THOMPSON.

(RUSSIAN REVOLUTION) THOMPSON, Captain Donald C. Blood Stained Russia. New York: Leslie-Judge, 1918. Tall quarto (9 by 12-1/2 inches), original russet cloth, color plate affixed to front board.

First edition of one of the first photobooks of WWI and the Russian Revolution, featuring 198 exhibition-size black-and-white plates from photographs by Donald Thompson, whose "place in the history of war photography should not be underestimated," in original cloth with color plate affixed to front board.

"World War I produced a new breed of hero—the war photographer." One of its most fearless and most respected was American photojournalist and filmmaker Donald Thompson—"among the few American cameramen to bring back usable footage of the Revolution" (Fielding, American Newsreel, 76). Thompson covered the war from the German front and was wounded in France before heading to Russia. When Thompson and Canadian reporter Florence MacLeod Harper were unable to travel through war-ravaged Europe, they crossed Siberia to arrive in Petrograd (today's St. Petersburg) in February 1917. It was "a critical juncture in the war" (Dubbs, American Journalists, 173). As Harper writes in her introduction to Blood Stained Russia, when they suddenly found themselves "in the midst of the February revolution which overthrew the Czar," Thompson said: "I am going to record the story of this revolution in pictures."

The Russian Revolution of February 1917 is especially notable for "the remarkable rapidity with which the Russian state fell apart. It was the greatest empire in the world… [but] the whole structure collapsed in a heap." By March Lenin declared: "Russia has been conquered by the Bolsheviks" (Pipes, Russian Revolution, 336-40). ). Blood Stained Russia affirms that "Thompson's place in the history of war photography should not be underestimated… Russia was a long way away, news traveled slowly, and few Americans knew much about the issues… Thompson was one of the few American cameramen to return with" images that made the Russian Revolution vivid and important (Mould, Donald Thompson, 167, 230). Featured in this photobook, one of the first to bring the war and the Russian Revolution home to America, are stark images of soldiers stricken by gas, civilians killed in the streets, and battles between the army and Bolsheviks, as well as a picture of Rasputin at court, and a group photograph that reportedly includes Lenin and Trotsky. With photographic frontispiece of "Maria Bochkarieva—the Joan of Arc of Russia."

Plates generally very fresh, only lightest foxing mainly to preliminaries, mild edge-wear, faint soiling to original cloth. A desirable near-fine copy.