![]() Women are urged to vote and to fight, men to unite, their strong faces vast against the new industrial cityscapes. Perspective is radicalised compositions tilt at sheer angles and in scimitar curves the sans serif typeface and red, colour of the proletariat, predominate. With the revolution, these one-colour images have their heyday with the posters of the Soviet news agency Rosta, which enlisted some of the great artists of the time, including Aleksandr Rodchenko and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Bloody Sunday prompted some brilliantly mordant counterblasts – a gigantic skeleton shrieking its way through the snowbound streets a square where the crowds turn out to be a throng of red skulls. ![]() The show opens in 1905 with the massacre of unarmed protesters by tsarist troops in St Petersburg. Photograph: Courtesy the David King Collection Nina Vatolina’s Fascism: The Most Evil Enemy of Women, 1941. Many images are on display for the first time, such as the grainy photographs of secret police emerging from the shadowy interior of unmarked vehicles to the notorious Bolshevik show trials of 1936-8, the victims about to be executed by the dazed young soldiers undergoing execution training in the neighbouring photograph. The range is phenomenal: from glamorous female fighter pilots to peasants studying Lenin in the fields, from a monumental Stalin watching Soviet planes fly past his eyes like gilded insects to athletes hurtling up the picture plane towards a finishing line of communist slogans. Selected from almost a quarter of a million graphic images zealously collected by artist and designer David King until his death in 2016, it is a condensed vision of five decades of Soviet hopes ending in devastation and despair. ![]() It would be hard to overstate the visual impact of Red Star Over Russia at Tate Modern. Mayakovsky said that a Soviet poster should be able to bring a running man to a halt ![]()
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