Behind party lines
Published 09 October 2006
Piggy Foxy and the Sword of Revolution: Bolshevik self-portraits Alexander Vatlin and Larisa Malashenko Yale University Press, 224pp, £25 ISBN 0300108494
In Piggy Foxy and the Sword of Revolution: Bolshevik self-portraits (Yale University Press, 224pp, £25), Alexander Vatlin and Larisa Malashenko reveal how the Bolshevik leaders lampooned each other with crudely sketched caricatures drawn in notebooks and the margins of documents during Politburo meetings.
A drawing of Maxim Litvinov, commissar of foreign affairs, as a ballerina pokes fun at his nimble diplomacy (far right), while Pravda editor Lev Mekhlis is pictured clutching a hapless Bolshevik above the macabre inscription "Wait patiently until I finish eating you" (centre). Stalin's cartoon of Georgy Piatakov, deputy commissar of heavy industry, is signed "Koba" - a pseudonym Stalin took from his favourite Georgian folk hero.
The locker-room humour belies a chilling reality: for many subjects, comic humiliation anticipated their demise in the great purge of the late 1930s.
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