Captions

Above left: Joseph Stalin dressed as a tsarist-era policeman (unknown author). The inscription reads “The Will-Supressing, All-Party Policeman Stalin and his Bloodhound Yaroslavka.” The latter is a reference to the party historian Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, head of the Central Control Commission at the time, a group that, in the early years of Stalin’s consolidation of power, was instrumental in collecting compromising information on other party members. Stuffed in Stalin’s boot is a “Resolution of the 15th Party Congress,” the Congress where Stalin vanquished the left-opposition. Above the barred window reads “Prison of the Party Apparatus.”

Above: Sergo Ordzhonikidze at a session of the Defense Committee where he was to battle for funds to develop heavy industry. (unknown author) Once head of the NKVD (secret police), Odzhonokidze committed suicide in early 1934 after heated disagreements with Stalin about the conduct of the purges. His death was reported at the time as caused by a heart attack. The inscription reads, “A rare moment of calm before the battle.”

Below: Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin’s widow) at a Politburo session on education (her portfolio), June 1, 1933. (The unflattering drawing was done by Nikolai Bukhari.) After she criticized collectivization in 1929 and 1930, she became vehemently attacked. She died at the age of 70 in 1939.

Left: “Comrade Kamenev dissects himself” reads the inscription on this crude drawing (unknown author). The reference is to Lev Kamenev’s historic speech at the 17th Congress of the Bolshevik Party, February 5, 1934, in which he said, “I have no problem dissecting myself as a political cadaver.”

This Congress, commonly called “The Congress of Victors,” was set so as to mark the 10th anniversary of Lenin’s death and was an unabashed climax in the Stalin cult. At the Congress, Kamenev, as all delegates, publicly prostrated himself before Stalin, exclaiming that the Stalin “epoch” of 1925-34 would go down in history as equal to the Lenin epoch of 1917-24 (interestingly, recent research has shown that as many as 10% of delegates at the Congress voted against retaining Stalin on the Central Committee). Kamenev had been expelled from the party for “oppositionism” in 1932, then reinstated in 1934 after reconciling with Stalin. But less than a year later, in January 1935, Kamenev, along with Grigory Zinoviev and seven others, would be secretly convicted in a cooked-up case of forming a “Moscow Center” that inspired the December 1934 murder [which Stalin himself carried out] of Leningrad leader Sergei Kirov. Kamenev, Zinoviev and 14 others were executed on August 25, 1936 following the first massive show-trial of the purges.

Left: In the mid-1920s, heavy industry was being financed (successfully) with proceeds from state-monopolized vodka sales, a policy which Stalin himself sactioned as a way to avoid reliance on foreign capital. This cartoon (unknown author) was a less than subtle criticism of that policy, which abetted the growing tide of alcoholism in Russia.

Right: Joseph Stalin at the sessions of the Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee, February 2, 1928. (drawing by Nikolai Bukharin) In 1928, Stalin had clinched power unequivocally, had begun to lay plans to eradicate his former rivals and the first Five Year Plan was begun.

Left: Yuri Pyatakov at a session of the Defense Committee (between 1931 and 1932). (unknown author) Falsely implicated by defendants at the first show trial, Pyatakov, along with Karl Radek and others, was the subject of a January 1937 show trial. Pyatakov testified at the trial that their group had organized “wrecking” and plotted to overthrow Stalin, directed by Trotsky in exile since the early 1930s.

Left: “The Essence of My Babushka,” reads the label on this drawing of a bar of soap. The drawing (author unknown) was a criticism of the poor state of Russia’s consumer goods industry. The description below the picture reads, “On the proposal of comrade Shleyfer about the use of substandard raw materials in the soap making industry.”

Right: This drawing, done on stationary of the Chairman of the Higher Council of the National Economy depicts a typical Soviet apparatchik, purged by the party on political grounds and awaiting a firing squad. The inscription reads: “Jar’s muzzle [an allusion to a Gogolesque phrase for a common bureaucrat] of the new formation after a Party purge of the All-Soviet Council of the National Economy.” Artist unknown.

Above: A portrait (artist unknown) of A.N. Andronnikov, chairman of the Urals Council on the Economy. The caption reads: “I don’t give a damn about the economy. I want our own chemistry from the Urals!” The cartoon was a criticism of a narrow, regional approach to industrial development.