Art of the Soviets

Art of the Soviets PDF Author: Matthew Cullerne Bown
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719037351
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
This work considers aspects of the art and architecture of the Soviet Union during the turbulent period of 1917 to 1922, covering a broad range of art, some modernist, some anti-modernist, but all to some degree guided by (and sometimes coerced by) the apparatus of the over-arching state.

Art of the Soviets

Art of the Soviets PDF Author: Matthew Cullerne Bown
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719037351
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
This work considers aspects of the art and architecture of the Soviet Union during the turbulent period of 1917 to 1922, covering a broad range of art, some modernist, some anti-modernist, but all to some degree guided by (and sometimes coerced by) the apparatus of the over-arching state.

Monumental Propaganda

Monumental Propaganda PDF Author: Vladimir Voinovich
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307426939
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
From Vladimir Voinovich, one of the great satirists of contemporary Russian literature, comes a new comic novel about the absurdity of politics and the place of the individual in the sweep of human events. Monumental Propaganda, Voinovich’s first novel in twelve years, centers on Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina, a true believer in Stalin, who finds herself bewildered and beleaguered in the relative openness of the Khrushchev era. She believes her greatest achievement was to have browbeaten her community into building an iron statue of the supreme leader, which she moves into her apartment after his death. And despite the ebb and flow of political ideology in her provincial town, she stubbornly, and at all costs, centers her life on her private icon. Voinovich’s humanely comic vision has never been sharper than it is in this hilarious but deeply moving tale–equally all-seeing about Stalinism, the era of Khrushchev, and glasnost in the final years of Soviet rule. The New York Times Book Review called his classic work, The Life & Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, “a masterpiece of a new form–socialist surrealism . . . the Soviet Catch-22 written by a latter-day Gogol." In Monumental Propaganda we have the welcome return of a truly singular voice in world literature.

The personality cult of Stalin in Soviet posters, 1929–1953

The personality cult of Stalin in Soviet posters, 1929–1953 PDF Author: Anita Pisch
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 176046063X
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 538

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Book Description
From 1929 until 1953, Iosif Stalin’s image became a central symbol in Soviet propaganda. Touched up images of an omniscient Stalin appeared everywhere: emblazoned across buildings and lining the streets; carried in parades and woven into carpets; and saturating the media of socialist realist painting, statuary, monumental architecture, friezes, banners, and posters. From the beginning of the Soviet regime, posters were seen as a vitally important medium for communicating with the population of the vast territories of the USSR. Stalin’s image became a symbol of Bolshevik values and the personification of a revolutionary new type of society. The persona created for Stalin in propaganda posters reflects how the state saw itself or, at the very least, how it wished to appear in the eyes of the people. The ‘Stalin’ who was celebrated in posters bore but scant resemblance to the man Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, whose humble origins, criminal past, penchant for violent solutions and unprepossessing appearance made him an unlikely recipient of uncritical charismatic adulation. The Bolsheviks needed a wise, nurturing and authoritative figure to embody their revolutionary vision and to legitimate their hold on power. This leader would come to embody the sacred and archetypal qualities of the wise Teacher, the Father of the nation, the great Warrior and military strategist, and the Saviour of first the Russian land, and then the whole world. This book is the first dedicated study on the marketing of Stalin in Soviet propaganda posters. Drawing on the archives of libraries and museums throughout Russia, hundreds of previously unpublished posters are examined, with more than 130 reproduced in full colour. The personality cult of Stalin in Soviet posters, 1929–1953 is a unique and valuable contribution to the discourse in Stalinist studies across a number of disciplines.

The Propaganda Warriors

The Propaganda Warriors PDF Author: Daniel Uziel
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039115327
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
It has been generally assumed that the driving force behind German propaganda in World War Two was the Propaganda Ministry headed by Josef Goebbels, or the initiatives of various Nazi party organizations. There has been little research on the specific role of the Wehrmacht propaganda machine in this connection, even though it was the source for the bulk of German wartime propaganda material. This book deals with the history of the propaganda troops of the Wehrmacht, created shortly before WWII as a result of lessons learned concerning the importance of psychological warfare during WWI. This unique branch of service proved to be indispensable to the German propaganda effort during WWII. The products of its Propaganda Companies - better known as «PK», a term that became synonymous with high-quality war reporting in Germany - formed a crucial and popular part of wartime propaganda. The military propaganda organization worked closely with Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry and their cooperation contributed to the success of this young service. The veterans of the propaganda troops and their wartime and postwar products continued to influence the image of the Wehrmacht and WWII long after the war.

Monumental Propaganda

Monumental Propaganda PDF Author: Vitaly Komar
Publisher: Independent Curators International
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
Artwork by Komar & Melamid. Contributions by Dore Ashton, Remo Guidieri, Andrei Bitov.

Monumental Names

Monumental Names PDF Author: Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000815994
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
What stands behind the propensity to remember victims of mass atrocities by their personal names? Grounded in ethnographic and archival research with Last Address and Memorial, one of the oldest independent archives of Soviet political repressions in Moscow and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the book examines a version of archival activism that is centred on various practices of documentation and commemoration of many dead victims of historical violence in Russia to understand what kind of historicity is produced when a single name is added to an endless list. What do acts of accumulation of names of the dead affirm when they are concretised in monuments and performance events? The key premise is that multimodal inscriptions of names of the dead entail a political, aesthetic and conceptual movement between singularity and multitude that honours each dead name yet conveys the scale of a mass atrocity without reducing it to a number. Drawing on anthropology, history, philosophy, and aesthetic theory, the book yields a new perspective on the politics of archival and historical justice while it critically engages with the debates on relations and distinctions between names and numbers of the dead, monumental art and its political effects, law and history, image and text, the specific one and the infinite many.

Lapidari

Lapidari PDF Author: Department Eagles
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 0692363424
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
In June and July 2014, philologist Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei and photographer Marco Mazzi undertook the Albanian Lapidar Survey, a project to map, document, and photograph the large majority of Albanian lapidars, a particular type of monument, mainly produced in the period that the communist Labor Party of Albania ruled the country (1945-1990) to commemorate the partisan victims, battles, and military units from the National Anti-Fascist Liberation War (which coincided with World War II), as well as historical figures from before the liberation and the accomplishments of socialism in Albania afterward.These lapidars, which can still be found, albeit in ever decreasing numbers, all over the country --- in cities and villages, alongside roads, in forests and on mountain passes --- are witness to an enormous expenditure of labor and resources to turn the landscape into a site of what was called "monumental propaganda." The Albanian Lapidar Survey aimed to capture these monuments as fact.The results of this project are collected into a three-volume, dual-language (English and Albanian) catalogue, under the title Lapidari. The first volume comprises a series of critical reflections on Albanian monumentality of the period 1945-1990 from a variety of perspectives, as well as historical documents and a full indexation of all inscriptions found on the documented monuments. Volumes 2 and 3 feature the photographic documentation of all 649 recorded monumental sites by photographer Marco Mazzi.Table of ContentsVolume 1: TEXTS: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei // Introduction -- People's Republic of Albania, Ministry of Education, Directorate of Culture // Circular to the Prefectural Executive Committee (Section Education): Regarding Lapidars (1946) -- Ramiz Alia // Report on the State and Measures for the Development and Further Revolutionizing of Monumental Propaganda (1968) -- Kujtim Buza & Kleanth Dedi // Dignified Symbols for Historical Events (1971) -- Muharrem Xhafa // Natural and Cultural Monuments during the Years of Socialism -- Gëzim Qëndro // The Thanatology of Hope -- Raino Isto // "We Raise Our Eyes and Feel as if She Rules the Sky": The Mother Albania Monument and the Visualization of National History -- Kosta Giakoumis & Christopher Lockwood // Pilgrimage Centered at Text and Memory: The Lapidar in Qukës-Pishkash -- Matthias Bickert // Lapidars and Socialist Monuments as Elements of Albania's Historic Cultural Landscapes -- Julian Bejko // About the Film Lapidari -- Ardian Vehbiu // Texts Chiseled on the Calendar: A Semiotic Reading of Inscriptions on the Commemorative Monuments for the Period of the National Liberation War -- Monument Descriptions: Index of Names, Index of Places, Index of DatesVolumes 2-3 feature the photographic documentation of all 649 recorded monumental sites by photographer Marco Mazzi.

Iconography of Power

Iconography of Power PDF Author: Victoria E. Bonnell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520924062
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Masters at visual propaganda, the Bolsheviks produced thousands of vivid and compelling posters after they seized power in October 1917. Intended for a semi-literate population that was accustomed to the rich visual legacy of the Russian autocracy and the Orthodox Church, political posters came to occupy a central place in the regime's effort to imprint itself on the hearts and minds of the people and to remold them into the new Soviet women and men. In this first sociological study of Soviet political posters, Victoria Bonnell analyzes the shifts that took place in the images, messages, styles, and functions of political art from 1917 to 1953. Everyone who lived in Russia after the October revolution had some familiarity with stock images of the male worker, the great communist leaders, the collective farm woman, the capitalist, and others. These were the new icons' standardized images that depicted Bolshevik heroes and their adversaries in accordance with a fixed pattern. Like other "invented traditions" of the modern age, iconographic images in propaganda art were relentlessly repeated, bringing together Bolshevik ideology and traditional mythologies of pre-Revolutionary Russia. Symbols and emblems featured in Soviet posters of the Civil War and the 1920s gave visual meaning to the Bolshevik worldview dominated by the concept of class. Beginning in the 1930s, visual propaganda became more prescriptive, providing models for the appearance, demeanor, and conduct of the new social types, both positive and negative. Political art also conveyed important messages about the sacred center of the regime which evolved during the 1930s from the celebration of the heroic proletariat to the deification of Stalin. Treating propaganda images as part of a particular visual language, Bonnell shows how people "read" them—relying on their habits of seeing and interpreting folk, religious, commercial, and political art (both before and after 1917) as well as the fine art traditions of Russia and the West. Drawing on monumental sculpture and holiday displays as well as posters, the study traces the way Soviet propaganda art shaped the mentality of the Russian people (the legacy is present even today) and was itself shaped by popular attitudes and assumptions. Iconography of Power includes posters dating from the final decades of the old regime to the death of Stalin, located by the author in Russian, American, and English libraries and archives. One hundred exceptionally striking posters are reproduced in the book, many of them never before published. Bonnell places these posters in a historical context and provides a provocative account of the evolution of the visual discourse on power in Soviet Russia.

Monuments for Posterity

Monuments for Posterity PDF Author: Antony Kalashnikov
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501768654
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Monuments for Posterity challenges the common assumption that Stalinist monuments were constructed with an immediate, propagandistic function, arguing instead that they were designed to memorialize the present for an imagined posterity. In this respect, even while pursuing its monument-building program with a singular ruthlessness and on an unprecedented scale, the Stalinist regime was broadly in step with transnational monument-building trends of the era and their undergirding cultural dynamics. By integrating approaches from cultural history, art criticism, and memory studies, along with previously unexplored archival material, Antony Kalashnikov examines the origin and implementation of the Stalinist monument-building program from the perspective of its goal to "immortalize the memory" of the era. He analyzes how this objective affected the design and composition of Stalinist monuments, what cultural factors prompted the sudden and powerful yearning to be remembered, and most importantly, what the culture of self-commemoration revealed about changing outlooks on the future—both in the Soviet Union and beyond its borders. Monuments for Posterity shifts the perspective from monuments' political-ideological content to the desire to be remembered and prompts a much-needed reconsideration of the supposed uniqueness of both Stalinist aesthetics and the temporal culture that they expressed. Many Stalinist monuments still stand prominently in postsocialist cityscapes and remain the subject of continual heated political controversy. Kalashnikov makes manifest monuments' intentional attempts to seduce us—the "posterity" for whom they were built.

Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts

Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts PDF Author: United States. Central Intelligence Agency
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : World politics
Languages : en
Pages : 734

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Book Description