Cartoons
The main color in Communist propaganda was red. This is interesting, because in America, due to our associations with both Communism and Fascism, red seems like a more 'bad guy' color.
Much propaganda art was captioned with similar messages, with repeated words, like 'forward,' 'victory,' and 'calls.' The first two are meant to apeal to people's patriotism, in order to make the target audience feel proud of their strong nation. The second to personalize it, and in order to make the audience feel individually needed by 'Mother Russia.' Another thing I noticed was that the art had more exclamation points than condescending birthday party invitations for 8 year olds. This is probably meant to excite people and make the announcements seem more intense and regal, also instilling patriotism into the audience. Click on the images to view the below posters in full. |
Photographs
With the invention of photography came a new and unprecedented version of propaganda, one that the soviets became masters at. Stalin used it quite often, in hopes of changing history 1984 style. When people fell out of his favor, he'd simply airbrush them from his photos and release the photographs to the public.
This image, the most famous of all, shows how over time, as every member of Stalin's Communist Club would simply be deleted from the pictures and from history as they fell out of favor with the leader. This photograph also shows how much control the Orwellian dictator had over his country. As soon as he decided that he didn't like someone, he just had to say the word, and not only would they 'disappear in the night,' thanks to his KGB, but all records of their existence could be completely removed. The original picture (left to right): Nikolai Antipov (formerly the People's Commissar for Posts and Telegraphs of the USSR), Joseph Stalin,Sergei Kirov, and Nikolai Shvernik. |
Nikolai Yezhov was the water commissioner at the time this picture was taken. He had been a loyal supporter of the Red army, joining it to fight in the Russian Civil War when he was 24. After the war, he joined the government, he quickly rose through the political ranks. In 1935, he wrote a paper that would become the basis of the Purges in the future, arguing that political oppression would lead to violence and terrorism. Yezhov eventually became head of the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB) and allowed the Purges to reach their height, killing roughly half of the Soviet political and military establishment. He finally fell out of Stalin's favor in 1939, being imprisoned, then shot, then removed by censors.
The man airbrushed from this photograph is Alexander Malchenko. At the time of the photograph, Malcheko was an engineering student woh'd joined the Petrograd chapter of Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class. At the time, his mother was letting Lenin hide out in his home, but soon after, all members of the chapter were caught by the Okhrana and arrested. After returning from his arrest, Malchenko went to Moscow, abandoning the revolution in favor of being an engineer (and not getting arrested). The USSR leaders would remember this: in 1929, he was arrested under the Soviet charge, "wrecking" (sabotaging the revolutionary regime in any way) and executed the next year.
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This one's a little harder to see because of the zoom difference between the two photos. It was taken during a celebration of the second anniversary of the October Revolution. Once standing to the left of Stalin (and the right of the tall-hatted guy) were Trotsky, Lev Kamenev. Trotsky, who's idea of Communism differed extremely from Stalin's, was exiled first from the Party, then from the USSR. He was assassinated by a Soviet agent in Mexico with an ice ax. In 1934, Kamenev was put on trial for a murder (he was not involved in) of a Communist leader and forced to confess to "moral complicity." He was in prison for fifteen years until a carefully rehearsed mock trial found him guilty... of something... and as a result, he was executed by shooting. Kamenev's imprisonment was the beginning of Stalin's Great Purges.
During the October Revolution, a lot of photographs were taken of victorious revolutionaries celebrating their successes. The more dramatic of these photographs were made into Soviet postcards after the Civil War. The image above was one of these postcards. To dramatize the event into (mass produced, conveniently) propaganda, things were changed around a little. A sign in the back saying, "Watches: gold and silver," was changed to "Struggle for your rights." A flag was changed into a poster reading "Down with the monarchy, long live the republic."
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