Victoria E. Bonnell

This study of the Soviet political posters issued between 1918 and 1953, describes the archetypal images they featured, such as the worker, the peasant woman, the enemy and the leader. It analyzes these Bolshevik icons and explains how they defined the popular outlook in Soviet Russia.

Soviet Political Posters Under Lenin and Stalin

Iconography of Power

Ann Cooper

Gregory Freidin

What does the Congress do? How does it do it? Is the Congress up to the challenges ahead? This primer offers students an introduction to Congress and the role it plays in the US political system. It explores the different political natures of the House and Senate, and examines Congress's interaction with other branches of the Federal government.

Eyewitness Accounts of the August 1991 Coup

Russia at the Barricades: Eyewitness Accounts of the August 1991 Coup

Thomas B. Gold

While attention has been focused on high-level struggles over control of giant enterprises in China and the former Soviet bloc, a remarkable but underreported revolution has been occurring at the grass-roots level. This volume examines the profiles of entrepreneurs and the patterns of business development in the post-socialist countries Bringing together the perspectives of all the social science disciplines, from anthropology through economics and political science to sociology, the contributors identify the criteria for survival and success of independent businesses in different environments. Their findings shed light not only on the "transition from socialism" at the micro-level, but also on the conditioning effects of different economic, historical, legal, and social conditions on the conduct of independent economic initiatives.

Patterns of Business Development in Russia, Eastern Europe and China

The New Entrepreneurs of Europe and Asia

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1983.

Workers' Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900-1914

Roots of Rebellion

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.

Victoria E. Bonnell

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