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Tuesday, January 04, 2011

Soviet Art and an Over-Active Imagination


The poster says "To Defend... USSR" and was done in the time of The Great Fatherland War, which we call World War II on this side of the pond.
When I first saw this poster as a child ( I had a very Charles Dickens - Oliver Twist childhood: orphaned early on, I was adopted by a Soviet Jewish family. The novel Hard Times comes to mind.) I thought the aeroplanes - actually they are outlines of World War I bi-planes - were some sort of electronic communication gizmos that were working to co-ordinate an army of giant robot soldiers; the bayonets of the soldiers' rifles that were sticking up behind their helmets I interpreted as aerials which received the controlling radio transmissions from the white electro-gizmos. I was all very Yevgeny Zamiatin in those days, and used to read scienti-fiction by the glow of the nightlight.
Easy to see why the Nyemets  (German) army was stopped in its tracks at Moscow with these suckers patrolling the Kremlin walls! (I thought the inclined shadow area where "CCCP" or "USSR" is painted was the Kremlin... maybe it is. I thought the shadows between the feet of the robotic soldiers were heads of the leaders viewing the square on May Day.)

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