Bolshevik posters offered utopian visions, often focused on the mundane, undergirded with an unmistakable message of power
Brunswick, Maine
How marvelous it must be to be certain that you are at the vanguard of both aesthetic taste and political ideology. You understand not only what the utopian future should be, but what it must be, and not only what it must be but what it shall be, quashing all opposition. Your will is supreme, your artistic vision compelling.
Constructing Revolution: Soviet Propaganda Posters From Between the World Wars
Bowdoin College Museum of Art
Through Feb. 11, 2018
Through Feb. 11, 2018
Such is the mental world of Bolshevik posters, slapped on walls in Russia beginning with the October Revolution of 1917 (now the focus of centennial commemorations). They were expressions of just such certainty; many bore warnings that any who defaced them would suffer as counter-revolutionaries.
Some 70 posters from the collection of Svetlana and Eric Silverman are at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, mounted with illuminating if partially restrained commentary, in “Constructing Revolution: Soviet Propaganda Posters From Between the World Wars.” Their impact remains daunting, their mental world surprisingly familiar. It has been embraced not just by other regimes but by contemporary political movements. But these posters, read closely, undercut such advocacy.
It might be tempting to treat them as aesthetic artifacts invoking Futurism, Constructivism and modernist montage. But these posters were meant to be populist not elitist, their meanings grasped instantly, and their mass-produced presence inescapable.
As utopian visions, they are also surprisingly preoccupied with the mundane. Through a megaphone, a woman hails a “proletarian park of culture and leisure” (1932). Another image proclaims: “Radio. Let Us Create a Single Will Out of the Will of Millions” (1925). (Titles here are translations of their bold-faced messages.)
Dmitry Moor’s ‘Did You Volunteer?’ (1920) PHOTO: COLLECTION OF SVETLANA AND ERIC
Images are also ominous, as if engaged in battle. In Gustav Gustavovich Klutsis’s “Development of Transport Is One of the Most Important Tasks in Fulfillment of the Five-Year Plan” (1929), a giant train speeds at us, dwarfing an ethnic citizen sauntering along on a camel.
The dialectic is ruthless. In these posters, proportions are distended, the vertical is skewed, space is split by pastiche. Utopia is a realm of power, not peace.
In one 1930 poster by Klutsis coal workers bear hammers and drills like weaponry, looming diagonally over us, prepared to stomp where needed. In many, gestures slash as a sword does in Dmitry Moor’s “Long Live the Worldwide Red October!”(1920): Bolshevik forces are in red, opponents in black—a mob of rapacious bankers, monstrous monarchists and conniving colonialists.
One stunning 1931 graphic shows a factory worker swinging a mallet that arcs through the air outlining a Communist sickle. We imagine a utopian clang as it lands slamming the head of a sleeping slacker.
Stalin, here, gets his due. Many poster artists fell out of favor, we read: “Mayakovsky committed suicide (or was assassinated) in 1928, Klutsis was executed in 1938, Dmitry Bulanov was arrested in 1941 and died while serving his sentence.” We see, too, a 1947 poster urging care for orphans that incorporates a 1936 image of Stalin holding a happy young girl. We learn that she later became a real orphan: Stalin had her father shot and her mother exiled. A companion exhibition here, “ Dmitri Baltermants : Documenting and Staging a Soviet Reality,” shows remarkable World War II photographs by Baltermants, whose journalism was also propaganda: ”I was the leader of staged photography,” he later confessed. “I made some truly grandiose stagings.”
But neither exhibition provides much context for the Bolsheviks. Descriptions really do make them sound just like slightly militant progressives, which is as they are often treated. . When the Museum of the American Revolution opened recently in Philadelphia, it illustrated late 18th century demands of American farmers and laborers by arranging their tools as a Communist Party’s hammer and sickle. Similar implications occasionally appear here. In some posters, women are portrayed as “active, strong, young, and often androgynous.” The Bolsheviks’ goal was “to liberate all women and men from discrimination and exploitation, from sexual prejudice, and gender stereotypes.” Such implied admiration is cherry picking as we can see from the posters’ sweeping absolutism, but even greater adoration persists in many contemporary street demonstrations that thrive on notions of fat-cat villainy being vanquished by populist militarism.
Installation view of ‘Constructing Revolution: Soviet Propaganda Posters From Between the World Wars’ PHOTO: COLLECTION OF SVETLANA AND ERIC
Lenin, who dominates many posters, accompanied by smiling marchers and smoke-belching industrial plants, also gets off too easily. But look more closely: These posters brook no opposition. In 1919, we read, the writer Leonid Andreev boasted: “In the matter of world propaganda and the art of fighting with the world, the Bolsheviks could teach even the Germans.” The Germans learned well.
And in March 1922, though never publicly acknowledged, Lenin privately noted that in some regions starvation is so rampant that people are eating human flesh and “thousands of corpses are littering the roads.” The solution? To “carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy.” Lenin advocated “crushing any resistance.” Of this, the posters are silent. But you can see their slashing swords and know that revolutionary ideals were steeped in blood.
—Mr. Rothstein is the Journal’s Critic at Large.
