Respecto del alegato de tortura y violaciones a la integridad personal de las

REvOLuTION

The Bolsheviks, led initially by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, sought a radical break with the traditions of the past as well as with the capitalist West, and launched a bold refashioning of what they saw as backward Russian society into a modern industrialized state grounded on Marxist principles.1 _{As a re-}

sult, the seventy-year Soviet domination of Russia inaugurated by the Com- munist revolution of November 7, 1917 (new style), proved on the whole dis- ruptive to the development of comics as an art form, consigning it to the margins of culture. Contrary to popular perceptions of comics (or their ab- sence) under communism, however, we should view this as the beginning, not the end, of the story.

Almost from the moment they wrested the country from the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky, the Soviets set off a wide-ranging pro- paganda war aimed at winning over the populace to the new order and dis- crediting the old regime (parts of which were still fighting the Reds in a civil war). As the historian Victoria Bonnell noted, for the Bolsheviks the issue was “not only the seizure of power but the seizure of meaning” (1). The new state embarked on a mammoth campaign to destroy the old czarist emblems of the Romanov Dynasty (toppling statues, destroying churches, assassinat- ing the former czar himself along with his family) and erecting its own sym- bols (the hammer and sickle, the heroic proletariat, the emancipated wom- an).2 _{This campaign encompassed all available means, from the old (posters,}

public speeches, gazettes) to the new (cinema, radio, street reenactments of history). Censorship was for the most part lifted, and artists of various per- suasions were encouraged to pursue their most radical visions. In so doing, the Soviets in the first decade of the revolution unleashed an unparalleled

era of social and artistic experimentation. As Richard Stites notes: “A whole ar- ray of new symbols and rituals were introduced and infused with anti-capitalism, the collective spirit, atheism, and machine worship. Bolshevik artists and propa- gandists went to the people with a culture for the people and in doing so they tried to combine the new with the old, self-consciously infusing circus, fairbooth, lubok, folk ditties, songs and dances with revolutionary content” (1992: 39). Few images better captured this spirit than Dmitry Moor’s iconic 1920 poster Have You Volunteered? which depicts a Soviet army soldier in blazing red, rifle in hand,

pointing at the viewer with a steely gaze, challenging him to join up and fight the Whites. Behind him stands a factory (also burning red), its smokestacks belching black—emblem of the new state’s industrial might. Moor’s poster repackages the old tropes of bravery, patriotism, and masculinity with the promise of a brave, new, electrified world.3

In short, visual culture formed a central front in the war of ideas. The turbu- lent condition of the arts in Russia after 1917, the emergence of proletarian culture as seen in such leftist groups as the Proletcult,4 _{and the continuation of projects}

from the prerevolutionary Silver Age all saw themselves reflected in the diversity of the comics and proto-comics language which survived into this time of great innovation. In this process, the dynamic visual strategies of the lubok, both in its traditional form and as reimagined by the Futurists, held strong appeal for its ef- ficacy as a mass medium. But, as noted, the lubok also represented a vestige of the old world the Soviets increasingly sought to expunge.

One arts movement from that era of particular interest, due to its focus on the interaction of word and image, is the Constructivists. This loose association of artists and theorists (chief among them Vladimir Tatlin and the husband/wife team of Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova) valorized the new values of utility, functionality, and the machine. As “artist-engineers,” they emphasized industrial materials (metal and glass), architectural forms, and pragmatic objects, all intended to bring art out of the museums and into everyday life.5

Yet by the end of the first Soviet decade, with Lenin dead, the country de- pleted, and the New Economic Policy (NEP)6 _{undermining (as some saw it) the}

hardcore principles of War Communism, the state began clamping down on free expression, particularly on the avant-garde—which it now accused of bourgeois obtuseness and “formalism.” Starting in earnest in the 1930s, with Joseph Stalin having eliminated his rivals, consolidated power, cancelled NEP, and launched the first Five Year Plan of crash industrialization, Soviet policies on the arts looked in- ward, casting an intolerant gaze on anything that bore traces of Western-type mass culture and, during the cold war, America. Comics, broadly speaking, fell victim to this political outlook; no comic book industry as such ever developed in the Soviet era.

Yet it would be wrong to label Russian “comicsophobia” an exclusively “top- down” phenomenon. Especially after 1931, Soviet edicts on reading, children’s up- bringing, and “foreignness” in their main points coincided with the preferences and prejudices of Russian literary culture.7

To the extent they pondered the question, the word/image interaction of com- ics indeed struck many educated Russians—reared on nineteenth-century classic authors—as “alien,” simplistic, and an impediment to “real” reading. (This atti- tude, as we shall see, remains alive to the present day.) The historical context is also relevant; the elimination of illiteracy in the first decades of Soviet power and the creation of an educated populace was one of the state’s major tasks. Certain “weighty” literary works (Tolstoy, Gorky) were valued far more highly than oth- er “lightweights.” The sort of mass-culture product represented by comics simply struck educators and ordinary Russians as antithetical to this mission.8 _Moreover,

as noted in our discussion of the prerevolutionary lubok, the small Russian intel- lectual class, or intelligentsia, had a long tradition of viewing popular culture or art meant chiefly for diversion and/or profit as suspect, even morally hazardous. (The Russian masses, eagerly consuming lubki and lubochnaia literatura in the nineteenth century, of course viewed the matter differently.)

In short, the upper-class antipathy to the lubok attached to modern comics; Soviet ideology and censorship practices enforced that posture as state policy.9 _As

Stephen Lovell has argued in The Russian Reading Revolution, both the leadership

and the ordinary citizen contributed to the emergence in this period of a power- ful “Soviet reading myth”—a self-image of Russians as “the most active readers in the world” (samyi chitaiushchii narod v mire). At best, then, comics were some- thing to grow out of; at worst, they were a mind-numbing capitalist diversion and impediment to learning. Mostly, they were absent. In general, comics culture as understood in the West remained a marginal phenomenon, particularly as the So- viet Union under Stalin developed into a full-fledged authoritarian state in the twentieth century. (As we will see, this ideological stance had consequences both economic—the lack of a comics industry—and aesthetic—the relative paucity of word balloons and sound effects in such Soviet-era comics and strips as did exist. Presumably, those comics devices seemed too identifiably “Western.”)10

However, the comics language did survive, even in the official sphere. At times it even prospered. This tended to happen during moments of national crisis, when aspects of the culture normally submerged or marginalized (such as pseudo-cap- italism or religion) were revived out of existential necessity, as during World War II. But even in quieter times, examples of a Soviet comics style never fully disap- peared from the satirical and children’s press, nor from the propaganda and adver- tising poster. In addition, during the postwar era there arose an underground of artists, the Non-Conformists, viewing banned foreign works and producing their

own, though with little chance of ever seeing them published or exhibited; some were punished for their activities. A subset of this group, the Conceptualists, in- corporated comics techniques as a not-infrequent element of their work, partly due to comics’ “subversive” cachet in mainstream Soviet culture.

The history of Russian comics under the Soviet regime thus falls into three main parts: the Revolutionary Era (1917–1934), Socialist Realism (1934–mid- 1980s), and, parallel with the latter, the Non-Conformists (1960s–1980s). Fur- thermore, this being an age of schism, when Russian culture was split in two, we will also note the work of comics artists of the diaspora—the “Whites” who fled the Red Communists during and after the Revolution. These figures in some cases made enormous contributions to the comics cultures of other countries (e.g., Yugoslavia), while comics in the USSR remained, by comparison, a “stalled medium.”

This was the general picture until the ascension of reformist Communist Party general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 and his policy of Perestroika, when comics finally shuffled off their customary shackles—though not the age-old prej- udices adhering to the form. This chapter provides (can only provide) a schematic survey, filling in some of that long, colorful, often tragic, history.

ThE REvOLuTIONARy POSTER

The first, most explicit and for a time most wide-ranging application of comics techniques in the Soviet era appeared in the crucial mass medium of the poster— the direct descendant of the satirical journals of the 1905 generation as well as the lubki of World War I; in fact, many artists, such as the renowned Moor, formed living links to the older traditions.

The poster or plakat (as advertisement, as public service announcement, as

breaking news vehicle) became a major tool for the Bolsheviks to spread informa- tion far, wide, and in a form they could control. Capitalizing, as the icon-makers had done, on Russian culture’s penchant for the visual, the producers of posters could cast their message more cost-effectively than film, more quickly than news- papers, more lastingly than radio or the telegraph, all while making an emotionally engaged appeal to the eye. Between 1919 and 1922, over 7.5 million posters, post- cards, and lubok pictures were distributed, while in 1920 alone the state publish- ing house Gosizdat released more than 3.2 million copies of 75 different posters (Bonnell: 5).11 _{The need for a modern, progressive, and “dialectical” design of these}

visual materials was met by new art groups eager to serve the revolution, in par- ticular the Constructivists.12

But the plakat, as noted by several scholars and Sovietologists, did much more than disseminate news or showcase modern art techniques. It played a critical role in explaining, visualizing, and shaping a new civilization, Bolshevism, at a time

when its symbols, culture, and “look” were still nascent and very much in flux and when vast swathes of its population could not, or could barely, read. Calling the plakaty “the continuation of politics by visual means,” Klaus Waschik and Nina Baburina argue they helped to produce the unprecedented “reality” they depicted: “The poster . . . became a space in which the visual model of this civilization was created, a space which became its proving ground, its picture exhibit. Along with the illustrated children’s book, it was called upon to inculcate representations of the new society into people’s consciousness. In this sense the Soviet poster met one of the greatest communications challenges of the 20th _{century” (85).}13 _This

does not mean that the process of “inculcation” flowed smoothly. For one thing, poster artists (plakatisty) had to invent novel imagery, metaphors, and slogans (or at least revamp old ones), often at a feverish pace, with little consistent guidance from above. The initial overseer of plakat production, the State Publishing House (GIZ) demanded only that artists adhere to chief principles of clarity, simplicity, directness, and accessibility14_{—though the vagueness of such terms led to a great}

diversity of styles in the early posters: realism, Suprematism, allegory, Construc- tivism, satire, lubok.

Above all, and especially during War Communism, the leadership wanted eye- catching, compelling works that exalted the saints and demonized the enemies of the new society. The plakat, thought uniquely suited to such a task, was indeed elevated to star status among the arts. As Commissar of Education Anatoly Luna- charsky wrote in 1924: “The masters of ‘great’ art, too, not only can but must take up agitational art, for his results will often turn out not worse but better, than a master of the literary, theatrical, painting, musical, etc., agit piece. A great honor to the master painter who manages to create a vivid poster!” (quoted in Waschik and Baburina: 87).

We can see the variety of artists’ responses to such calls through a comparison of some well-known early posters. Viktor Deni’s 1920 Every Blow of the Hammer is a Blow Against the Enemy! depicts a proletariat smith hammering away at an

anvil; instead of “sparks” this produces bullets showering an astonished, bewhis- kered man in czarist general’s dress. Deni’s work clearly follows the strategies of

2.1. Every Blow of the Hammer is a

Blow Against the Enemy!, propaganda

the satirical press, with its easily recognizable “types,” cartoony effects, and Man- ichaean worldview.

Indeed, many early plakatisty simply applied the techniques of prerevolution- ary caricature or redressed entire compositions to address the new Soviet condi- tions. Nikolai Kochergin’s 1920 Capital and Co., for example, shows a pyramid-

like structure allegorizing the world economic order: priests, petty merchants, et cetera, form the bottom tier; military officers and lackeys the middle; the leering Clemenceau, Wilson, and Lloyd George near the top; and looming over all a re- pulsively fat Jabba the Hutt–like creature representing capital, its royal robe spread out to swathe the others. All sit on a huge pile of moneybags. “This is the bour- geoisie’s ‘icon,’” growls the accompanying poem by the proletarian poet Demian Bedny. “Here are all the pillars of their law.” Kochergin’s piece is a direct reinter- pretation of Alexei Radakov’s 1917 The Autocratic Order, which puts the czar at the

top of the pyramid and the proletariat (“You work!”) at the bottom. Radakov’s work, in turn, recrafts a 1901 lithograph, The Pyramid, by Nikolai Lokhov (the

first Social Democrat print).15 _{The Soviet poster artists were tapping the familiar-}

ity of popular imagery for new goals.

The avant-garde posters evince another strategy. The Leningrad artist Vladi- mir Lebedev’s 1920 One Must Work with a Rifle Nearby (Rabotat’ nado vintovka

riadom) adheres much more to the strategies seen in the Futurist anti-books, espe- cially in its blurring of drawing and text. The words “work” (rabotat’) and “must” (nado) follow the line of an iconic, faceless proletariat’s arm as he saws a board, a rifle intersecting it to form an X. Bright primary colors, particularly red for the worker’s shirt, identify the poster’s Suprematist leanings. The height of this ap- proach was reached by El Lissitzky’s noted 1920 Beat the Whites with a Red Wedge,

in which text and geometric shapes dynamically clash (a visual correlative to the ongoing Civil War).

2.2. One Must Work with

a Rifle Nearby, poster by

Over time plakatisty incorporated photography in their works. Rodchenko, among other things, pioneered the use of dynamic photos for advertisements, as seen in his famous 1925 poster for the Lengiz Bookstore: the stylized word “books” (knigi) seems to burst directly from the mouth of model Lily Brik. Later, photo- montage plakaty such as those of Gustav Klutsis became synonymous with the era of the first five-year plan of the late 1920s and early 1930s.16 _{Some series, like the}

agitational “poster newspapers,” combined caricature and photos.

But whatever the style or technique, plakatisty relied on clearly recogniz- able, politically approved imagery, motifs, and character “types” such as the fat, top-hatted capitalist; the venal, often drunken priest; the stalwart worker; the emancipated woman. They also drew Lenin and other leaders. In the 1930s the exemplary “shock worker” Alexei Stakhanov became a staple of posters, as well as several other media. Viktor Deni, responsible for popularizing many of these types, captured the appeal of this strategy in his celebrated 1920 Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Earth of Scum. This shows a “cartoony” behatted Lenin astride the

globe, sweeping smaller figures off the planet: a priest, a capitalist with a money- bag, and two crowned regents.17 _{Demonstrating its utility for different themes,}

Deni would reuse this “sweeping” motif during the war against rising bureaucrat- ism, in his 1931 Red-tape Monger, Bureaucrat, Saboteur, Out of the Soviet!, which

depicts the named (and labeled) parties, along with a “Loafer,” being swept out a window by a titanic pair of red hands. The stylized, allegorical economy of these works clearly derives from the satirical press.

Despite their continuities with the past, the posters were theorized and cele- brated as something new, and particularly Soviet. V. S. Zemenkov, writing in 1930, argued, “the compact, concrete image—this is how the Soviet poster defeats the often extreme symbolism and conventionality of the bourgeois and petty bour- geois intelligentsia’s satire” (38). Similarly, El Lissitzky contrasted the plakaty’s in- novations with the Western illustrative approach (in which, he opined, image only

illustrates text): “As opposed to the Americans, our posters were created not so as

to be quickly caught by the eye from a rushing car, but for reading and explication up close” (57). However, Lissitzky’s celebration of the poster’s complexity (with its swipe at the West) clashed with the view of a poster production official, who in 1931 wrote, “the eye of the peasant finds it easiest to comprehend the lubok and gets lost in the details of the usual ‘city’ poster” (Bonnell: 111).

Whatever the innovations of the Civil War–era plakatisty, it is telling that their White opponents resorted to much the same techniques: clear, eye-grab- bing imagery, a communication of the urgency of victory, and demonization of the Reds. White posters depicted their enemies as reptiles, sadistic brutes, and trolls. An anti-Semitic 1919 poster, Peace and Freedom in Sovdepya, capitalizes on

the widespread belief that the Communists were a power-hungry Jewish cabal. The unknown artist shows Leon Trotsky, at that time head of the Red army, as

a mammoth red devil wearing spectacles and a gold chain with a red star shaped like the Star of David. He (it) sits atop the Kremlin walls, dripping blood from its hands and feet, overseeing a mountain of skulls as Chinese troops execute a pris- oner and shovel remains.

Others proved no less direct: Retribution (1918–1920) depicts Lenin and his

followers being driven by an archangel and the White army down to the pit of hell. A central composition shows a cavern in flames, where the Communists cow- er before demons, a huge snake-like monster, and an enthroned Satan. The bottom tier shows five panels of varied tortures, for “lies,” “betrayal,” and so forth. In its religious iconography and form the poster recalls the hagiographic icon, as well as the three-tiered narrative approach of the Novgorod school’s Icon of the Battle Between the Men of Novgorod and the Men of Suzdal (mentioned in the previous