Red Star Over Russia

About a month ago an old friend from my Trotskyist youth sent me the beautiful and inspiring “Red Star Over Russia”, a massive, coffee table type book with text and images geared to the sensibility of my blog readers and Marxmail subscribers. It is a vast collection of photos and images of posters, artwork, etc. from the Russian Revolution until the USSR’s demise.

The author is David King who was the art editor of the Sunday London Times Colour Magazine from 1965 to 1975 and who amassed one of the world’s greatest collections of Russian posters, photographs, and graphics.

He collected this material out of an obvious sympathy for socialism. In the introduction, he refers to a brutal fistfight that took place on a Russian subway car in the post-Soviet era. He says that the look on the faces of the workers in the car evoked these words: “Things have changed. This should not happen in our Metro. This is what happens under capitalism This is capitalism. It would have not happened in the Soviet Union.”

David Walsh of wsws.org interviewed King when he was working on the book. Here’s an excerpt:

I asked King about the origins of his interest in Trotsky and the October Revolution. “How did I start? I worked for the Sunday Times, and I traveled widely. I was taking photos, collecting photos. I was always interested in left ideas, in socialism. I wanted to get the ideas of socialism across visually to a much wider audience, a much wider audience than there seemed to be at the time. And it’s continued.

“I began 40 years ago collecting material out of an overwhelming interest in discovering the truth about what happened to the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union. I wanted to uncover, through visual means, what happened, to collect visual evidence.

“Suddenly in the late 1960s here, everybody was interested in Trotsky and one or two other figures, as major alternatives to Stalinism. There was a crisis, and people were looking for alternatives. I determined to find out what really happened to Trotsky, who he was.”

King speaks passionately about these matters. “When I was growing up, everything to do with the USSR was cloudy, mysterious. I was intrigued. By the time I started on the first book, in 1970, with Francis Wyndham, it was like opening up Pandora’s box. In the USSR, I’d ask ‘What do you have on Trotsky?’ Trotsky didn’t exist. ‘Trotsky was a fascist,’ etc. It was crazy.

“I hunted around the world, while working for the Sunday Times, searching every second-hand bookshop, library, tracking down friends, relatives of Trotsky. I was trying to piece together the real history.

The book was too big for me to fit into my scanner but I wanted to share some photos with you that send shivers down my spine every time I see them. I took pictures of them with my trusty Panasonic camcorder that are obviously no competition for what you will see in the book. But they should motivate you to buy this essential book for the left.

Also, the last picture is of my great-uncle who was in the Czar’s army. I know nothing about him other than that fact. He looks a lot like the men in King’s photos and he also looks a lot like me, especially the vaguely Asiatic eyes. I always wondered when looking at him or myself in the mirror whether our eyes are inherited from some Cossack who raped a long-lost female ancestor.

The captions are from King’s book.

The vanguard of the Revolution. Fully armed Bolshevik sailors from the cruiser Aurora at the time of the October insurrection. During the storming of the Winter Palace blank shells were fired from the ship to frighten off Kerensky and those still supporting the Provisional Government.

Leon Trotsky addresses the latest recruits to the newly-formed Red Cavalry, 1918.

Women newly recruited into the Red Army for the defense of Petrograd in the Civil War, 1918

My great-uncle