Back to the Bolsheviks

After a long gap, I have returned to my Russian Civil War forces with a new addition to bolster the Reds. Using my chosen rule-set, Red Actions! by The Perfect Captain, these will represent a company of Red Regulars. I didn't want them to look too uniform since the term 'regular' doesn't really refer to the state of their dress. A mix of Copplestone Castings 'BU03 Elite Bolshevik Infantry' in budenovkas and 'BU01 Bolshevik Infantry' in peaked caps did the job.

I tried something different with the flag this time. My previous flags were simply printed onto plain paper which gives perfectly acceptable results but doesn't reproduced the intensity of the original image colours particularly well. That's fine for representing battle-worn or faded flags, but I wanted something a bit more pristine this time. The answer was to print the flag as before, but then 'paint' it with artists' inks. I printed several copies so I could experiment and practice a bit. It needs a steady hand for some of the finer detail, but I found that with a bit of patience I could achieve an acceptable result. It's really just careful 'coloring in' over the existing printed colours, but the colour saturation is much improved. 

I chose not to represent a specific unit, so the flag is a generic design with slogans and symbols pulled together from various online sources and assembled in Word and Photoshop. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the text, but at this scale and at a distance on the tabletop I think it conveys the right look.

Ragged White Russians

My Russian Civil War project has been suffering from neglect of late, so I thought I'd better put that right.

Here are the latest recruits. A bunch of Ragged White Russians from Copplestone Castings.

They have a suitably battle-worn and irregular look about them with plenty of patched and torn clothes, worn-out boots and improvised footwear.

They're not intended to represent any particular unit so I've kept them fairly generic. That goes for the flag too. It started out looking far too pristine for such a ragged unit, so I distressed it a bit until I was happy with the look.

For some unexplained reason the bases gave me a headache and I struggled to achieve the effect I was after. This should have been the easy bit, but even following my tried and tested paint recipe I couldn't get a good match with my existing units. Much cursing and several repaints later, I finally got them looking how I wanted.

Vexatious Vexilology

In my last post I posed a question about correct flags for my Russian Civil War Izhevsk Rifle Division, having drawn a blank on useful references.

I also posted my question on the Lead Adventure Forum where forum members Mark Plant (of the splendid Pygmy Wars website) and Cuprum (of Studio Siberia) both offered some excellent suggestions and advice. Cheers guys! This included a link to www.kolchakiya.ru. The site is all in Russian, but fairly easy to navigate with the assistance of Google Translate. Here I found a mine of useful information on the histories, uniforms and flags of Admiral Kolchak's White forces in Siberia, including the Izhevsk Rifle Division.

The site describes several banners of the Izhevsk Rifle Division, including two St. George banners. According to the accompanying text only one of these, the "Battle flag of Izhevsk Division", was actually presented to the unit - so this is the one I chose:

'Battle flag of Izhevsk Division'. (source: www.kolchakiya.ru)

'Battle flag of Izhevsk Division'. Photo from the archives of the Museum of Russian Culture in San Francisco. Published in the book Efimov AG Izhevtsy and Votkinsky. The fight against the Bolsheviks1918=1920. M., 2008 (source: www.kolchakiya.ru)

The flag is described as a rectangular panel, divided into two equal parts. The left-hand part is white with a diagonal cross of St. George ribbon. The dates 7/VIII 1918 and 9/IX 1919 in gold are placed in the upper and lower quadrants respectively. The right part is White-Red-Blue (the colours of the Russian flag) with the letters "Izh" in gold on the centre blue band.

Unfortunately, no dimensions are quoted so I resorted to making my version 'wargames scale', i.e. large enough to look good on the wargames table. Using the two pictures for reference, I tinkered around in Photoshop until I had something I was happy with. As there is no description of the reverse side of the flag, I simply used the same design for both sides. I did ponder a bit about the colour of the St. George ribbon. These are usually black and orange stripes, but those in the picture are more of a golden yellow. Even allowing for fading, I doubt the original colour was far from what can be seen in the photo. Perhaps orange cloth was hard to come by! Anyway, here's what I came up with: 

After printing out on plain white paper, I carefully cut out the flag and applied a liberal coat of PVA glue to the reverse. After allowing a few minutes for the glue to soak into the paper, I folded the two halves of the flag together, wrapping the centre portion around a steel rod for the banner pole. The PVA made the paper quite wet and easy to shape into the desired folds, but once dry the shape is set and quite strong; good enough for the rigours of the games table at least. All that remained was to 'present' the banner to its unit by adding it to the standard bearer. 

Ready for action!