Stalin poster of the week 100 (SPotW100)

**SPECIAL CENTENARY EDITION**
Pavel Sokolov-Skalia, The train is going from the station of socialism to the station of communism, 1939

Pavel Sokolov-Skalia (Соколов-Скаля, П.), The train is going from the station of socialism to the station of communism (поезд идет от ст. социализм до ст. коммунизм), 1939

Stalin makes an interesting and highly unusual appearance with Marx, Engels and Lenin in a notable 1939 poster by Pavel Sokolov-Skalia.

Sokolov-Skalia was a well-known painter as well as graphic artist, head of Okna TASS, theatre artist and cinema artist for Mosfilm. At the time of this poster, Sokolov-Skalia was teaching at the Grekov Studio of War Artists.

Marx heads the communist train, with Engels, Lenin and Stalin arrayed like carriages behind him

In ‘The train is going from the station of socialism to the station of communism’, Stalin appears with the other pillars of communist thought on a banner that decorates the side of a train pushing up a slope. The four heads appear so that it is Marx who is at the head of the train, and Stalin bringing up the rear.

The state is in safe and experienced hands!

Stalin is also portrayed in the window of the engine room as the train driver. The poster is sub-captioned ‘Tried and tested locomotive engineer of the Revolution, Comrade Stalin’.

The implementation schedule presents key events on the journey to socialism as train stations

Beneath the picture of the train is a graph with the title ‘implementation schedule of the movement of the Bolshevik train’ which shows the various stops on the journey to socialism, beginning with the foundation of the newspaper Iskra in 1900, progressing through the armed uprising of December 1905, the founding of the newspaper Pravda in 1912, and the October Revolution of 1917.


Another graph titled ‘current schedule’ shows the one-stop journey from socialism to communism.


This playful graphic depicts Stalin as both the last in the line of great communist thinkers, and as the man currently responsible for steering the nation’s journey to the final destination envisaged by Marx and Engels.


The trope of the locomotive driver is related to that of the helmsman. Due to the far more recent emergence of the train and the railroad, this metaphor cannot boast the same long history of use as the helmsman metaphor, although, for obvious reasons, it is related to (perhaps even an updated extension of) the helmsman metaphor, in keeping with the Soviet emphasis on modernity and progress.


There is one significant difference between the ship and the train: a helmsman must use all his knowledge and skill to navigate a safe route among many possible other routes, while the train driver has no choice of alternate routes and must follow the tracks.

The train is called the I. Stalin

The train driver’s role involves keeping the engine running, avoiding pitfalls, and managing speed and braking. The locomotive is often used as a metaphor for history, and there is inevitability about the destination along a route that was already laid out before the engine driver sat at the controls.


This makes the train a particularly apt metaphor for the communist journey. According to Marxist theory, scientific laws govern history, and the final destination of communism is inevitable. The leader is a caretaker of the state until it is no longer needed and withers away. Once the destination is reached, neither the train nor the train driver will be needed.