Viktor Deni, “With the banner of Lenin we won in the battles for the October Revolution...", 1930 ![]() Viktor Deni (Виктор Дени), “With the banner of Lenin we won in the battles for the October Revolution. With the banner of Lenin we achieved decisive success in the battle for socialist construction. With the same banner, we will win in the proletarian revolution all over the world”. I. Stalin (“со знаменем ленина победили мы в боях за октябрьскую революциюю. со знаменем ленина добилиь мы решаюших успехов в борьбе за победу социалистического строителства. с этим же знаменем победим в пролетарской революций во всем мире.” и. сталин.), 1930 Despite the fact that charismatic leadership hinges on binary codings of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and on salvation narratives in which the leader identifies enemies and saves the populace from them, Stalin was rarely depicted in posters with the enemy or alongside any kind of brutality, even during the Second World War. This 1930 poster by Viktor Deni, ‘With the banner of Lenin we won in the battles for the October Revolution …’ is one of Stalin’s rare appearances with enemies. In these early days of his leadership, not quite a decade on from the end of the Civil War, Stalin saw the USSR as still being engaged in class war. In fact, he saw class war as intensifying, and this provided one of the major justifications for the Great Terror from 1936 to 1938 in which whole classes of people were exiled or executed. Enemies of the people included Trotskyists, the Right, the Left, Mensheviks, spies, traitors, kulaks (wealthy peasants), priests, drunkards, bureaucrats, shirkers, saboteurs, capitalists, White Guardists and skeptics about the first Five-Year Plan. In November 1918, Martin Latsis, Chairman of the Eastern Front Cheka (state security organisation), stated: We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against Soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are: To what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education or profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused.* Deni’s 1930 poster features small caricatures of a priest, a capitalist, an ‘oblomov’**, and a Menshevik, lined up down the left side of the poster. They gesture angrily at Stalin, who faces them off from the right with an unperturbed gaze, and the machinery of Soviet industrialisation and construction bolstering him. * Martin Latsis quoted in Klaus-Georg Riegel, ‘Marxism–Leninism as a political religion’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 2005, 6:1, p. 106.
** The terms ‘oblomov’ and ‘oblomovism’ derive from Ivan Goncharov’s popular novel, Oblomov (1859). The central character, Oblomov, is indecisive and apathetic, and takes the first 50 pages of the novel to get from his bed to his chair. ‘Oblomovshchina’ (oblomovism) refers to a condition of fatalistic apathy and sloth. Chonghoon Lee notes that the condition was a central concern of Soviet psychiatric and neurological research and was viewed as a ‘national disease’ which was denounced in the drive for industrialisation and the search for heroes of labour (See ‘Visual Stalinism from the perspective of heroisation: posters, paintings and illustrations in the 1930s’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 8:3–4, 2007, pp. 503–21, p. 503).
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Dr Anita PischAnita’s new, fully illustrated book, The personality cult of Stalin in Soviet posters, 1929 -1953, published by ANU Press, is available for free download here, and can also be purchased in hard copy from ANU Press. Archives
April 2019
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SPotW56 Litvinov 1949
SPotW57 Serov 1942 SPotW58 Pinchuk 1943 SPotW59 Petrov 1952 SPotW60 Podobedov 1939 |
SPotW61 Babitskii 1944
SPotW62 Pen Varlen 1942 SPotW63 Bayuskin 1942 SPotW64 Belopol'skii 1950 SPotW65 Belopol'skii 1952 SPotW 81 Koretskii 1950
SPotW 82 Pravdin 1950 SPotW83 Vatolina 1938 SPotW 84 Deni 1938 SPotW85 Koretskii 1945 |
SPotW66 Dlugach 1933
SPotW67 Zhitomirskii 1942 SPotW68 Toidze 1949 SPotW69 Mikhailov 1937 SPotW70 Cheprakov 1939 |
SPotW76 Toidze 1943
SPotW77 Futerfas 1936 SPotW78 Mukhin 1945 SPotW79 Golub' 1948 SPotW80 Karpovskii 1948 SPotW 96
SPotW 97 SPotW 98 SPotW 99 SPotW 100 |