Red Star over Russia: A Visual History of the Soviet Union from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin

Red Star Over Russia is a visual history of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the death of Stalin, using an array of material including posters, photographs, paintings, magazine covers, book jackets, advertisements, and other ephemera to illustrate the dramatic birth and eventual decline of the Soviet Union. Its urgent, cinema verite style plunges the reader into the center of the shattering events that brought hope, chaos, heroism, and horror to the citizens of the world's first workers' state. Revolutionary upheaval turns into civil war and famine, and Stalin's Great Terror of the 1930s is followed by the brutal onslaught of Nazi invasion. The story ends with the intrigue surrounding the dictator's gruesome death in 1953.
The Russian Revolution produced some of the most important advances in the fields of art, photography, and graphic design in the twentieth century; its impact on Modernism was immeasurable and is still felt today. More than 550 of these widely influential posters, photographs, and graphics are reproduced here to the highest quality. These images, many of them never before published, are accompanied throughout by a clear, accessible text that traces the development of polemical images in Russia, from a simple handbill distributed on the morning of the 1917 October Revolution to the sophisticated photomontages of Rodchenko and Klutsis.
Iconic posters of heroic figures are displayed alongside the original photographs from which they are adapted, and painted portraits of Lenin are shown to draw on the traditional skills of Russian religious iconography. Zooming in from the epic to the particular, the author rescues from obscurity many lost heroes and villains through the work of the most brilliant Soviet designers, artists, and photographers of the twentieth century, many of them anonymous or long forgotten.