3

Antagonism and Political Satire:
The Cartoon and the Poster

The elements of artistic juxtaposition and political antagonism persisted throughout the art of the revolutionary period in Russia. Nowhere was this more- apparent than in the black-white contrasts (artistic and political) of graphic art. As early as 1905 graphic artists and cartoonists had engaged in sharp attacks on the Imperial Russian government and Russian society, a negative antagonism which was easily converted to more positive political propaganda after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Graphic artists were especially important in turning art to political use, since their art form reached a mass audience through lithography and printing; their medium was the newspaper, the magazine, and the poster. In a society where literacy was not yet widespread outside the cities, the visual messages of graphic artists reached a broader audience than the written word. The element of antagonism characteristic of Soviet propaganda art, with its we-they philosophy, originated not in 1917 but in 1905. New journals modeled on the Munich magazine Simplicissimus sprang up in Russia. The Russian revolutionary poster and cartoon of the Civil War days were born in Munich at the turn of the century.

I

By 1905 Sergei Diaghilev’s World of Art movement seemed to have achieved its goal of bringing European modernism to Russia. Launched in 1898 by some St. Petersburg schoolboy friends, then in their late twenties and early thirties and dissatisfied with the work of the Imperial Academy of Arts, the World of Art group organized exhibits of Western painting, published a lavishly illustrated journal, and generally aimed at acquainting Russians with the latest trends of Art Nouveau: the graphic work of Aubrey Beardsley; the paintings of Gustav Klimt and Claude Monet; the poetry of the French symbolists. The westernism of the World of Art clashed sharply with the Academy, dominated by the Moscow rebels of two decades earlier, the Wanderers, whose realistic canvases evoked a nationalist enthusiasm for pre-Petrine Moscow. Instead, the World of Art looked to eighteenth-century Petersburg and Versailles for a mannered style appropriate to a new national art of quality equal to that of the West. In their quest for closer bonds between Russian and Western art, the World of Art aesthetes were a great success in St. Petersburg. But in 1904 the journal ceased publication for lack of patronage, and a year later the group suffered the secession of younger, more provincial, and more Europeanized elements.¹

The secession of these younger artists reflected broader trends in Russian society, especially a population explosion which led to massive urbanization. Moscow and the southern and western provincial towns grew most rapidly. As the population of the Empire more than doubled between 1861 and 1914 (from 73 million to 170 million), its urban population tripled, and the population of Moscow and Petersburg quadrupled. The figures were even more striking in the provinces. The population of Kiev increased during the same period by a factor of seven, that of Tbilisi, Kharkov, and Odessa by a factor of five. These increases represented not simply inmigration from the countryside with its surplus and landless peasantry, but also an increase in the national birth rate and therefore of the proportion of young people crowding into the schools and universities. For every thousand Russian citizens, there were thirteen students in 1895 and seventy-five in 1914. The university population increased from 4,000 in 1865 to 22,000 in 1905, and 40,000 in 1912. Between 1905 and 1914 a flood of young people inundated the provincial towns and capitals in search of school and work.²

The Academy of Arts was not immune to this process of urbanization and provincialization. By 1904 more than half its Higher Art School students came from the Academy’s provincial art schools, established during the reform of 1894. But despite Ilya Repin’s introduction of private faculty studios as part of the curriculum, the Academy remained a place where very few young artists could develop their talent. Senile rectors, pseudo-classical exercises, long lectures, drawing from models, and the confusing rotation of faculty in and out of the studio each month combined to produce a training system that was neither efficient nor innovative. As early as 1896 Repin himself quietly began encouraging his students to seek a better education abroad in the art schools and studios of Paris and Munich.³

If young Russian art students had felt somewhat provincial at the Academy in St. Petersburg, they found in Europe an artistic modernism that made even the Academy seem provincial. In the 1890s they visited Paris, prowled the corridors of the Louvre, took courses at the Académie Julienne, toured Brittany in the summers, and discovered the world of French painting: the pastel murals of Puvis de Chavannes, the Tahitian scenes of Paul Gauguin, the speckled and light canvases of the Barbizon painters and the Impressionists. When they returned to Russia, often to provincial towns like Saratov, they brought with them the latest in French styles.

In 1898 one young Russian art student in Paris discovered that to come from Russia often meant to be a non-Russian from the provinces:

When we came to the Eiffel Tower, pointed at it, and began talking, the two men asked Zarubin what nationality we were. When he answered that we were Russians, they were incredulous. The Frenchmen found our language like Spanish. In fact, what kind of Russians were we? Kuindzhi—stocky and broad-shouldered with a great head of hair, an aquiline nose, and a face with a magnificent moustache and beard. The handsome Greek, Khimon, or Chumakov, sunburned as an Arab. Kalmykov, something between a Greek and a Crimean Tatar; Stolitsa, a Zaporozhian Cossack with a moustache, who looked like Taras Shevchenko. The tall, handsome blond Poles Rudisz and Wroblewski. The tall, heavyset Kurbatov, always aiming at things with his walking stick. I suppose I was the only real Russian type, a little Russian dandy with a little blond beard, a derby hat, a new ready-made suit the color of quail.⁴

Thus the experience of study abroad could accentuate a young artist’s sense of provincialism and non-Russianness.

Munich in the late 1890s could make a Russian artist feel as provincial as Paris. “Munich at the time,” recalled the painter K. S. Petrov-Vodkin, “was a nursery of the arts which influenced Moscow, and thus there were many Russians among the artistic youth, and the Russian colony on the whole was very extensive.” As to the non-Russians, “their fear of their native provincialism pushed them into another kind of provincialism, a faith in fashionable German modernism.”⁵ By imitating the latest in European art, it seemed, the provincial Russian artist could at one bound overcome his own sense of backwardness within the Russian Empire and achieve a feeling of “advanced” stature.

In fact Munich, not Paris, was the major center of Russian art students before 1905. The arrival there in 1896-1897 of Vasily Kandinsky, Aleksei Yavlensky, and Marianne Verefkina is well known to art historians because of their subsequent involvement in the Blue Rider circle within German expressionism. But there were many more Russians in Munich at the time. As early as 1894, Police Chief Göhler had expressed his concern over the growing number of East European “nihilists” who were settling in Munich to study or to engage in revolutionary activity free from the observation of the Russian Okhrana.⁶ Even at that time Russian students and émigrés had established an Academic Slavic Embassy Club, a Polish Reading Circle, a Russian Student Fund, and a Russian Reading Society in a building on the Görrerstrasse. The local police suspected that these might well be more than friendly cultural organizations, a not unreasonable assumption when one recalls that by 1905 the Munich colony of Russian revolutionaries had included Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Parvus (Alexander Helphand). Between 1894 and 1905 the number of Russian students at the Munich Technical High School jumped from 76 to 243; by 1912 there were 552 Russians enrolled at the university as well, making up 39 percent of all foreign students there. In 1909 the Paris office of the Okhrana reported that Munich had become “within the last two years the most active center of the Russian colony’s student and political life in Germany,” estimating that some 800 Russians were living or studying in Munich at the time.⁷

Russian art students in Munich at the turn of the century headed for Schwabing, the bohemian student quarter near the university. They generally gravitated around two well known art schools run by Anton Ažbe (1862-1905) and Šimon Holločy (1858-1918) .⁸ Ažbe, a Slovak painter, was a friend of the Russian portrait painter V. A. Serov, a former Munich student now teaching at the Petersburg Academy. Holločy, a Hungarian, studied at the Munich Academy of Arts from 1878 to 1892 and then opened his own school there in 1896; he gave lessons in Munich in the winter and then took his students to his home town of Nagy Banya for landscape work during the summer. Most Russian art students worked with Ažbe, and after his death in 1905, with Holločy. When these students returned to Russia, they naturally brought with them many of the techniques and lessons learned in Munich. Ažbe, in particular, offered precisely what the Academy lacked: more unified training by a sympathetic teacher who worked closely with his students. For the first year every student spent most of his working day in drawing lessons using models, and in the evenings attended anatomy lectures at the university. Only during the second year did the student go on to painting. Ažbe emphasized the simplification of form. Students worked mainly with charcoal instead of the finer and harder “Italian pencil” familiar to most Russians; they mastered outline first and details later. In addition, students were taught to reduce human anatomy to geometry—the head to a sphere, for example—in order to understand the basic shapes inherent in nature. Even if Ažbe did not directly encourage abstraction, the use of charcoal—soft, malleable, providing better shading—tended to steer the student away from attention to detail.

The World of Art artists studying in Munich around 1900, who included M. V. Dobuzhinsky, Dmitry Kardovsky, Ivan Bilibin, and Igor Grabar, found Hollocy rather different from Ažbe. Hollocy emphasized feeling and emotion rather than technique, and encouraged his students to paint in the manner of the French impressionists, then in vogue in Munich. His students, too, were less technically oriented: mainly non- Germans who reveled in the artistic life of the “Athens on the Isar” with trips to the Alte Pinakothek Museum, beer and arguments at the Café Stephanie, the Jugendstil revolt against parental and artistic authority, and the general bohemian atmosphere of Schwabing, “kein Ort, sondern ein Zustand,” not a place but a state of mind. The atmosphere of Munich was often more important than the art schools themselves for the Russians who lived there. Munich both trained and politicized the artists and provided them with a model of avant-garde opposition to bourgeois society, which they employed in their own country during the 1905 Revolution.

II

To the thirty-year-old graphic artist Mstislav Valerianovich Dobu- zhinsky, the Revolution of 1905 brought both artistic innovation and political radicalism. As a graphic artist recently returned from Munich, he found new opportunities created by the revolution. With the lifting of the more onerous censorship restrictions after the October Manifesto in the autumn of 1905, some four hundred short-lived journals of political and social satire sprang up across Russia, utilizing new techniques of lithography and linotype to ridicule the government and bourgeois society through savage cartoons and caricature. In December 1905 Dobuzhinsky contributed two striking drawings to one of these, the journal Zhupel (Bugaboo). Both drawings evoked images of death imposed on innocent victims by an unjust and evil government. In “October Idyll” a doll lies flung across a blood-stained sidewalk, with only the glasses of the victim left lying in the street nearby. In “Pacification” the Kremlin sits in front of a glorious rainbow awash in a sea of blood. In the midst of revolution, Dobuzhinsky turned his art to political use and gave new meaning to his own life.

In the 1920s satirical graphics became a familiar and important element in early Soviet culture, focusing antagonism on enemies of the revolution. Capitalists, priests, generals, and European politicians all fell victim to the acid pens of Soviet cartoonists in Krokodil, Bezbozhnik, and Pravda. Bourgeois society, which had not died overnight with the revolution, was now destroyed on paper by graphic propaganda. The origins of Soviet satirical graphics can be traced to 1905, when the latest developments in European graphics returned to Russia from Munich along with the artists who had studied there.

October Idyll”

The Cartoon and the Poster

Two drawings by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, 1905. From E.P. Gomberg-Verzhbinshaia, Russkoe iskussivo i revoliutsiia 1905 goda (Leningrad, 1960).

The satirical graphics of 1905 were certainly innovative in the Russian context. The very term grafika first appeared in transliteration from the German in the 1890s, at a time when linotype printing and color lithography in Europe were creating a whole new art of the poster, the book, and the newspaper cartoon. The models for Russians before 1905 were mainly western: the Yellow Book of Beardsley, the theater bills of Toulouse-Lautrec, and the works on graphic art by Walter Crane and Max Klinger. Most Russian books of quality were printed abroad; the type for a 1901 monograph on Van Dyck, for example, was set in Amsterdam and the illustrations were printed in Berlin, while a new edition of Gogol’s Dead Souls was printed later that year in Stuttgart with the plates engraved in Vienna. The heliogravures and phototypes for Diaghilev’s Mir iskusstva were done in Germany and the autotype set in Finland. In addition, the layout for Mir iskusstva was modeled after the lavish Berlin journal Pan, and the journal reproduced the drawings of European artists like Beardsley and the German cartoonist T. T. Heine.⁹

Despite the intelligentsia’s long tradition of social and political criticism of the autocracy, satire as a visual art was also relatively undeveloped in Russia before 1905. The European political cartoon began in eighteenth-century England, victimized by Hogarth and Rowlandson, and it was epitomized by the work of Honoré Daumier in nineteenth- century France. By the turn of the century Germany had achieved a leading position in the application of graphic art to political satire. The popular German humor magazines of the mid-century, Kladderadatsch and Fliegende Blatter, now competed with more lavishly illustrated periodicals such as Pan in Berlin and Simplicissimus in Munich. Yet in Russia satirical graphics was represented only by the older tradition of the eighteenth-century woodcut (lubok), itself not unlike the contemporary Dutch or English broadside cartoon, and by some more recent popular journals like Shut and Niva.¹⁰

Dobuzhinsky was one of the younger members of the World of Art, who constituted a “left wing” in 1905 by virtue of their support of the revolution. Like other members of that group—Ivan Bilibin, Igor Grabar, O. E. Braz, D. N. Kardovsky, and the editor Zinovii Grzhebin —Dobuzhinsky had studied in Munich at the turn of the century and had brought the spirit of Schwabing home with him. Like many of the other Russian artists abroad, Dobuzhinsky had a provincial background.¹¹ Again, like Diaghilev, he came from an army family; as a child he had traveled frequently with his father, an artillery officer. This geographic rootlessness was complicated by family problems; when Dobuzhinsky was four years old, his mother left his father to pursue her own career as a singer and actress, and the child shuttled back and forth between his father in St. Petersburg and his grandparents in Vilna. His father’s side of the family was Lithuanian, and Dobuzhinsky attended the gymnasium in Vilna, a cosmopolitan city of Poles, Lithuanians, and Jews. The baroque architecture of the Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran churches in Vilna later reminded Dobuzhinsky of Munich. As a Lithuanian and an educated child of middle-class intelligentsia parents, Dobuzhinsky felt that he “saw Russian cities and nature almost with a foreigner’s eyes.”¹² Even before he went to Munich, Dobuzhinsky did not really feel that he was a Russian.

Nor was Dobuzhinsky a revolutionary when he arrived in Munich in October 1899.¹³ His father had supported his academic pursuits, which included study at the Law Faculty of the University of St. Petersburg and at the Society of Fine Arts in the 1890s, and was now sending him abroad to study art as a luxury to be enjoyed, newly married, at age twenty-four, before deciding upon a career. Initially Dobuzhinsky sought to enter the Academy in Munich. To his chagrin he was rejected by an Academician who looked at one of his landscapes and asked: “Are those trees?” As a result, he joined the growing colony of young Russians studying in Munich’s private art schools. He began work at first with Anton Ažbe, in whose studio he discovered two friends who would later become fellow members of the World of Art, Igor Grabar and Dmitry Kardovsky. Later, studying with Holločy in the summer of 1900, Dobuzhinsky met Grzhebin, a drop-out from the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts who hailed originally from Odessa.

Technically, Dobuzhinsky learned a good deal from both Ažbe and Holločy. “Our ‘neo-academism,’ ” he later recalled, “had its beginnings in a German school with the principles of Abe, on which a whole generation of Russian artists was raised.” Abe’s emphasis on the reduction of objects to geometric forms was especially important. “I recall the works of some students in the school who drew only with straight lines —like future cubist drawings,” Dobuzhinsky added. “But they did not see this as an end in itself, only as an exercise or experiment.” Work with Ažbe also encouraged Dobuzhinsky to move toward the technique of the cartoon and the poster; “his principle of the ‘large line’ and ‘large form’ logically led to simplification, to ‘poster art,’ to the decorative, and in the end to the deformation of nature and a departure from reality.”¹⁴

What radicalized Dobuzhinsky politically in Munich was the satirical magazine Simplicissimus, which presented an example of how graphic technique could become a weapon of social criticism.¹⁵ Albert Langen had founded Simpl in 1896 on the model of the magazine Gil Bias in Paris, where Langen had lived in the early 1890s. The symbol of Simplicissimus was a bulldog and its anti-establishment bite was sharp. Some of the most talented graphic artists in Europe—T. T. Heine, Bruno Paul, Wilhelm Schulz, and the Norwegian Olaf Gulbransson—joined in creating savage drawings and cartoons that ridiculed Prussian generals, Bavarian clergy, self-satisfied businessmen, and other targets of the Second Empire. In 1898 these victims of ridicule were joined by the Emperor William II, with the result that Langen, Heine, and the future Simpl editor Ludwig Thoma found themselves in jail. In 1900 Munich artists were being politicized by Simpl, and were being prosecuted for it. Dobuzhinsky, too, was an avid reader of Simpl, which he found to be “the sharpest and most progressive journal of its time; [he] awaited impatiently the appearance of every issue.”¹⁶

Dobuzhinsky’s Munich stay was cut short in the summer of 1901 by a family tragedy, the death of his younger brother in Vilna. He returned to Russia in 1901 with new techniques, new friends, and an acquaintance with the latest in European satirical graphics. In the winter of 1901-1902 Dobuzhinsky was a married man of twenty-six in need of a career of his own to replace his father’s subsidies. He had not been very successful as an artist. In Munich the Academy had rejected him, and the journal Jugend had turned down a watercolor he had submitted for publication. He thought of giving painting lessons, but studios were far more expensive in Petersburg than in Munich, and he had no real teaching experience. There was an opening at the Hermitage as an art curator, but he knew no art history in any formal sense. To paint portraits for the wealthy he would have had to compete with Serov, Repin, or Levitan. In the end Dobuzhinsky was unable, as he put it, to turn creativity into money. He could find no market for his skills.¹⁷

Dobuzhinsky now went to work for the government, which he would later attack in his drawings. He took a job as a clerk in the Waterways and Ports section of the Ministry of Communications. He had found the position through the aid of a benevolent uncle and was unhappy with it from the start. It consisted of routine desk work with colleagues he considered “hemorrhoidal” bureaucrats, and he would not receive a full salary for two years. Still, he did not have to be at the office until noon, which gave him considerable free time for art. Ironically, Dobuzhinsky found a market for his art through his job; a fellow employee turned out to be an artist for the magazine Shut, and through him Dobuzhinsky arranged to do a weekly cartoon-page for thirty rubles a month. He signed the drawings “M. D.” While the money was not much more than a student stipend of the time, it was Dobuzhinsky’s first real income as an artist.¹⁸

By the winter of 1902-1903 Dobuzhinsky’s prospects were improving. Although he still drew only a partial salary and was dependent on his father, the Ministry had shifted him to its main office, which was closer to home and provided more interesting work under the direction of Lunacharsky’s older brother Mikhail. In addition, his friend Igor Grabar had now returned from Munich and introduced Dobuzhinsky to the World of Art circle. Here he met those members of the group who would produce the best satirical art of 1905.

III

The stormy events of the 1905 Revolution politicized many Russian artists. Bloody Sunday, the first event to galvanize them into action, was commemorated by the painter V. E. Makovsky in his work “January 9, 1905.” Many artists and writers were outraged by the shooting down of innocent workers in Petersburg. Gorky spoke out publicly against the atrocity and was promptly arrested. Well-known painters like Repin, V. A. Serov, and V. D. Polenov joined students in protest at the Academy of Arts; Serov resigned his position when the Academy took no stand on the matter. The St. Petersburg Conservatory expelled music students who demonstrated against Bloody Sunday and even ousted the composer Rimsky-Korsakov when he demanded that the director of the Conservatory resign. Autumn brought further upheaval. Russia suffered a final defeat in the war with Japan, a national railroad strike turned into a general strike, and the October Manifesto with its promise of civil liberties and a parliament failed to prevent armed violence in the streets of Moscow in December. Throughout this period artists signed petitions, attended public demonstrations, went on strike, and wrote letters of protest. Some resolved to commit their art to the revolution.¹⁹

The hundreds of satirical journals which sprang up in 1905-1906 in Russia were one obvious manifestation of artists’ involvement in revolution. Many were little more than crude leaflets of a few pages brought out in a single issue; others were well funded and artistically sophisticated in their format. All of them went beyond the letter of protest, the petition, or even the political painting, for they were intended not merely to express the artist’s antagonism to the government but to reach and persuade a mass audience. One of the earliest such journals, Zritel” (Spectator), featured a cover showing a woman, blindfolded and in tears, holding the scales of justice. Another showed a crowd with red flags massed in a demonstration. Still others portrayed government leaders and right-wing politicians as marionettes; plans for a Russian constitution were drawn as a house of cards. In the journal Signal a group of ministers were shown playing leapfrog; in Maski a firing squad was shooting its already sheeted victims.²⁰ Death and violence were everywhere in 1905, and graphic satire sought to fight back against their perpetrators.

The best satirical graphics of 1905 were produced by the young Russian artists who had studied in Munich and admired the art and wit of Simplicissimus. There were many other satirical journals produced by less well known and less “bourgeois” artists, as Soviet historians point out, but the tone was set by the younger World of Art satirists, and their model was Simplicissimus. Simpl itself mocked Russian defeats at the hands of Japan and the attempts of Nicholas II to preserve autocracy in the face of revolution.²¹ Inside Russia it had immediate imitators. Within a week of Bloody Sunday, Grzhebin conceived the idea of publishing a Russian version of Simpl under the title Zhupel (Bugaboo). He quickly enlisted the support of his friends in the World of Art, including Dobuzhinsky, Bilibin, Lanseray, and Boris Kustodiev. In April this group held a series of strategy sessions in Dobuzhinsky’s apartment in St. Petersburg, but both the tight censorship and lack of money prevented the immediate realization of their scheme.

In June 1905 Dobuzhinsky and his friends managed to persuade Gorky to support their satirical journal. At the time, Gorky was also planning to launch the first Bolshevik legal journal, Novaia zhizn’, and to produce a “cheap library” of books for workers. On July 10, 1905, some forty artists and writers, including Dobuzhinsky and Grabar, met at Gorky’s summer home in Kuokalla, Finland, just north of Petersburg, to plan the new journal. (The police were satisfied that the meeting concerned only “literary and artistic matters.”) At the meeting Gorky agreed to help finance the new journal Zhupel in the autumn under the editorship of Grzhebin.²² Gorky’s money made Grzhebin’s Russian Simplicissimus a reality.

With the lifting of the censorship after the October Manifesto, the publication of more liberal journals became possible. But it was not long before they exceeded their limits. On December 2 Novaia zhizn ’, was closed by the censor. The first issue of Zhupel was distributed on the same day; all remaining copies were immediately confiscated by the police. The journal included poems ridiculing Nicholas II, a caricature of a double-headed eagle drawn by Grzhebin, a painting by Serov of Cossacks charging a crowd of demonstrators, and Dobuzhinsky’s “October Idyll”—his drawing of the doll in the street. If this were not enough, a note observed mockingly that “the contributors of Zhupel send greetings via the chiefs of the Russian police to their talented comrades of Simplicissimus, which is still not permitted in Russia by the censorship.”²³

Despite police surveillance and the fate of the first issue, the censorship permitted a second issue of Zhupel to appear on December 24. Its most controversial item was the Dobuzhinsky drawing “Pacification,” showing the Kremlin awash in a sea of blood; the drawing was later reprinted in Simplicissimus. The second issue, like the first, was quickly confiscated; so was the third and final issue, which came out in January 1906 and included Bilibin’s drawing of a donkey surrounded by a royal border, entitled “Equus Asinus 1/20 Scale.” Grzhebin and Bilibin were arrested. A few months later the same group of artists organized another journal, subsidized by Gorky’s money, called Adskaia pochta (Mail from Hell). To gain the censor’s approval Lanseray was listed as editor, but Grzhebin was the real manager. This time they succeeded in putting out four issues before the journal was closed down.

The satirical journals receded along with the revolutionary wave in 1906. By that summer most of them had disappeared, leaving instructive examples of the possibilities for political satire. Gorky had departed for his fund-raising trip to America, and the symbolist publishing house Fackel had taken over what was left of Adskaia pochta. But an important precedent had been set. In the spring of 1908 another Russian satirical journal, Satirikon, appeared and lasted until the 1917 revolution. Like its short-lived predecessors of 1905, it declared war on “all illegality, falsehood, and banality” and modeled itself after Simpl; Satirikon soon became known as “the Russian Simplicissimus.” Later, another satirical journal, Budil’nik (The Alarm Clock), also followed Simpl; its leading cartoonist, D. Moor (D. S. Orlov), came to be known as “the Russian Gulbransson.” Both journals helped strengthen the influence of Munich’s satirical graphics on Russian artists.²⁴

Dobuzhinsky achieved considerable success after his notorious political drawings of 1905. He became well known not only as a graphic artist and political cartoonist, but as a painter and book illustrator as well. In later years he turned from political satire to urban themes, as in his famous painting “The Man with Glasses” (1905-1906; Tretiakov Gallery) and in his series of drawings entitled “The City,” which appeared in Satirikon. In addition he did book illustrations for the works of Dostoevsky, Leskov, and Pushkin, taught art in Petrograd during and after the 1917 revolution, and finally emigrated to America in 1924. Yet in his graphic art and political satire he remained a product of the the years of study in Munich and of the revolutionary year 1905 in Russia.

Death was a central theme of Dobuzhinsky’s graphic art from 1905 through World War I. His innovative political works were more of a protest against the inhumanity of death than a call for revolution. “October Idyll” and “Pacification” contain no human figures; the dropped doll and the sea of blood surrounding the Kremlin remind the viewer of the cost of 1905 in human life. In his later works Dobuzhinsky concerned himself with the fate of the individual caught up in an emerging mass society haunted by the impersonal forces of revolution and urbanization. His weakest paintings and cartoons were his portraits; he continually avoided the human face by drawing masses of identical figures, or individuals with their backs toward the viewer. His cityscapes lacked the urbanist enthusiasm common to the futurists; they portrayed only the alienated individual at the window, or the street crowd beneath the skyscrapers.

In 1905 Dobuzhinsky’s artistic stance was perhaps more humanitarian than political in any direct sense. His works evoked a rage against impersonal forces and inhuman individuals who destroy the innocent, a statement about life that anticipated subsequent expressionist outrage. As Lunacharsky wrote in a review of Dobuzhinsky’s works in 1907: “ ‘Man has been forgotten!’ cries Dobuzhinsky to us, and his cry brings with it real terror.”²⁵ It seems fair to say that Dobuzhinsky was continually fascinated with death, the senseless death of the victims of 1905, or the psychological and spiritual death of man alone in the modern urban anthill. His art was a protest against evil, the kind of sharp comment on society characteristic of Simplicissimus, but not an answer to its problems.

Like Lunacharsky, Dobuzhinsky belonged to the generation of the aesthetes; like that generation, his ties were closer to St. Petersburg and the World of Art than to the provinces. But as a Lithuanian artist influenced by European modernism, his involvement in artistic protest in 1905 through satirical graphics anticipated a later antagonism to bourgeois society common to many other artists in Russia. If Dobuzhinsky shared the symbolist brooding over the inexorable forces of fate and death, it was not without a cry of opposition more characteristic of the emerging Russian avant-garde.

IV

In the application of graphic arts to political satire, 1905 was a prelude to 1917. In 1905 the enemy was the Imperial regime and bourgeois society; during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1921 it was the White armies and their Allied supporters. Faced with an exhausted population and limited military resources, the Bolsheviks, after they had seized power in 1917, utilized all available forms of mass persuasion in their effort to survive. In 1905 the satirical journals had served as a medium of mass persuasion. But at a time of paper shortage and desperate necessity, the Bolsheviks relied increasingly on the wall poster as a weapon of agitation. Cheaper than a newspaper or a journal, it required only a single sheet of scarce paper. Its abrupt and telegraphic captions literally screamed at the literate viewer, while its visual content left even the illiterate with little doubt concerning how they might help good triumph over evil. Revolutionary artists now found a new market for their art through the designing of such posters.

The color lithograph poster had come of age in Europe long before 1917 in the Paris of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec during the 1890s. As an art form it was greatly influenced by the flat, outlined designs of the Japanese woodblock print, especially the work of Utamaro, then very popular in Europe. Although color lithography had been used in wall-paper during much of the nineteenth century, it became inexpensive only in the 1880s when posters could be manufactured using four or five blocks with separate colors on each block. From its inception the purpose of the wall poster was persuasion; it invited the viewer to attend a play at the Moulin Rouge, or to buy a Waverley bicycle, or to eat Coleman’s mustard. By 1900 the poster was as much a collector’s item as a form of street art, and its masters, men like Aubrey Beardsley and Alphonse Mucha, were developing it into a significant and original art form throughout Europe.

During World War I the poster became a major propaganda weapon. Many artists used their talents to exhort citizens to sacrifice their lives in the interests of king and country. In each belligerent nation St. George appeared slaying the enemy dragon, the enemy was accused of unspeakable atrocities, and men were asked to volunteer. In an era of total war, the poster became a crucial device in mobilizing public opinion, and artists found new employment manufacturing social hatred and guilt. These two functions—the advertising of goods and services and political propaganda—were the main legacy of Western poster art to Russia in 1917.

In Russia the poster, like satirical graphics, did not develop as an art form until after 1905. The eighteenth-century woodcut known as the lubok is often cited as a predecessor of the Russian Civil War poster or the poster “windows” produced by the Russian Telegraph Agency, ROSTA.²⁶ Yet the lubok was a hand-colored satirical broadside in which the text knit together the strands of one or more pictures; the poster emphasized a single figure and a single, short message. Until the 1890s posters were almost unknown in Russia. In 1905 the satirical journal, not the poster, became the agitational weapon of radical artists. In fact, before 1914 the best Russian posters were often produced abroad, for example, V. A. Serov’s lovely portrait of the dancer Anna Pavlova done in Paris for the Diaghilev production of Les Sylphides in 1909. Russian World War I posters were still generally of inferior quality by lesser known artists. Occasionally Malevich would produce an anti-German poster in lubok style, or Leonid Pasternak a humanitarian poster (such as the one concerning aid for the wounded reissued by the Bolsheviks under a different caption in 1918). But these were exceptions. In 1917 Russia had no indigenous tradition of the color lithograph poster.

V

The outstanding poster artist of the Russian Revolution and Civil War was Dmitry Stakhevich Orlov, better known by his poster signature, “D. Moor.” Although dozens of artists produced several thousand posters between 1918 and 1921, the most famous poster was created by Moor in a single evening in late June 1920. In this poster a Red Army soldier stands holding his rifle against a background of factories, points directly at the viewer, and asks : “Have YOU volunteered?” The poster suggests a nation in danger, portrays a heroic soldier in its service, and exhorts the viewer to ask himself whether he should not do likewise and volunteer for the revolutionary cause. Moor’s poster appeared in the intense atmosphere of civil war Russia. But its origins as a work of political art, like Dobuzhinsky’s satirical graphics, lay in prewar Munich and, subsequently, wartime British lithography. Like Dobuzhinsky, Moor found artistic fame through political revolution in his thirties.

Dobuzhinsky belonged to what we are calling the aesthete generation and absorbed the influences of Munich graphics first hand as a student there at the turn of the century. Moor, bom in 1883, belonged to the futurist generation of the avant-garde and followed the work of the Sim- plicissimus artists second hand, from Russia. Dmitry Orlov was a Cossack from Novocherkassk on the Don River. During World War I Moor’s editors had to assure their readers that “D. Moor” was not German but Russian; Orlov apparently took his pseudonym from the name of the hero of Schiller’s The Robbers. Moor came from an old Don Cossack family; his father, a rising mining engineer and administrator, was a member of the newly emerging professional classes associated with Russia’s industrialization. Moor himself came from a generation whose student years coincided with the 1905 Revolution, and from a social class sufficiently well off to tolerate the Imperial regime but sufficiently educated to criticize it.²⁷

Like many artists of his generation, Moor migrated from a provincial town in south Russia to Moscow. Novocherkassk, with a population of 67,000 in 1914, prized its local statue of the the sixteenth-century Cossack explorer Yermak and its Don Museum with rooms of old Cossack banners and trophies. The town was also a winemaking center, in addition to being part of the industrialized Don Basin. Moor attended school in Novocherkassk through the gymnasium years, and in later life he referred to himself as a Cossack. Virtually nothing else is known about Moor’s early fife, except that his father’s career took the family to Kiev, Kharkov, and, in 1898, to Moscow. In 1902 the nineteen-year-old Moor finished his gymnasium education and entered the Physical-Mathematical Faculty of Moscow University to study science.

Like many other artists drawn to the revolution, Moor was not very successful in his early adult life. Prior to 1905 he seems to have been a rather unmotivated young man interested in no particular career. He had once been expelled from Moscow University for nonpayment of tuition (he was subsequently readmitted). Money itself was not a problem, since Moor’s father had become the head of the Moscow Experimental Station, which conducted research on mining for the entire empire. As a student Moor spent his university years reading Marxist literature and working on a student newspaper named Parus (The Sail). He showed no interest in art.

In 1905 Moor was caught up in the revolution. He attended mass workers’ meetings, watched the barricades go up in Moscow in December, and saw his best friend, Sergei Dneprov, arrested. Moor took no more active part in revolutionary events in 1905 and joined no political group. But in early 1906 he became involved in the printing and distribution of illegal political leaflets. He also shifted from the mathematics faculty at the university into law. He married Dneprov’s sister and took a job with the publishing house of the wealthy Moscow merchant and art patron, Savva Mamontov. Like Dobuzhinsky, he lived on the boundary between society and its revolutionary opponents.

The Revolution of 1905 may have affected Moor politically, but it did not make him an artist. It was his job with Mamontov that provided a stimulus for his previously unknown artistic talent. A newspaper editor who saw some of Moor’s sketches suggested that he do something for the paper. Moor promptly produced a drawing, for which he was paid three rubles. In 1907, at age twenty-four, Moor decided to become a professional artist. He undertook no formal training at first, but began to do more drawings and cartoons for Moscow journals. In 1908 he produced his first cartoon for Budil’nik, the journal of humor and literature, to which Moor now added a new note of political satire. He left the university and soon acquired a reputation doing satirical drawings directed against both the government and the liberals; he portrayed Duma candidates as priests, ridiculed ministers, and engaged in a constant game with the censor to find permissible limits for his art work. But when he and a friend, Ivan Maliutin, tried to edit a more radical political journal, Volynka (Bagpipe), on their own, the censor refused to permit any of the four issues. Except for a few months at the private studio of the portraitist P. I. Kelin, Moor remained an untrained but quite successful amateur.

One reason for Moor’s success was his emulation of Munich graphic artists. Budil’nik, as we have seen, was one of the many Russian satirical journals that modeled themselves after Simplicissimus. In the pages of Simpl Moor saw the clean lines and biting portraits of the Norwegian cartoonist Olaf Gulbransson, and soon began imitating him. Gulbransson provided an excellent model, both in his graphic economy of line and in his political acuity. Moor’s imitation was so evident that he became known as “the Russian Gulbransson.” This is acknowledged even by Moor’s Soviet biographer: “The study of Gulbransson for Moor was a substitute for the professional schooling he never had.”²⁸ In the Russian context, imitation meant innovation.

Portrait of Lev Tolstoi by Olaf Gulbransson, 1903.
From D. Gulbransson-Bjornson, Olaf Gulbrannson: Sein Leben (Pfullingen, 1967).

Portrait of Lev Tolstoi by D. Moor, 1918. From I. Khalaminsky, D. Moor (Moscow, 1961).

During World War I Budil’nik, like many other Russian journals, became more patriotic and lost its sharply antagonistic stance toward the government. Satire previously directed against Nicholas II and his ministers now turned its guns on the Emperor William II and the Germans in general. Moor changed with the times and produced a number of chauvinistic drawings for Moscow journals in order to support himself. In 1916 he moved leftward once again, reviving his old drawings of Nicholas and joining the newly constituted, and more radical, Budil’nik editorial board. One of his more novel inventions to evade the censor was a black square which, held to the light, revealed a savage cartoon otherwise unacceptable.

The February 1917 revolution gave Moor, now thirty-four, new opportunities in art. Budil’nik’s attacks on the Provisional Government, the liberals, and General Kornilov were, as a result of the revolution, virtually free of any censorship. Moor felt revitalized. “I always preserved my youthful dreams of 1905,” he recalled, “which determined forever my role as a political cartoonist.” He also remembered the “special influence on me” of the work of Gulbransson and other Simpl artists.²⁹ With the October Revolution, antagonism to the Provisional Government gave way to propaganda for the Bolsheviks, and the satirical journal cartoon to the wall poster. For Moor, a friend of his later wrote, “the transition from antigovernment caricature under tsarism to revolutionary caricature and the poster was an organic one.”³⁰ The 1905 Revolution had been the crucial experience of Moor’s youth; the revolutions of 1917 caught him entering middle age and gave him a new role to which he responded with new enthusiasm.

VI

In 1918 the enthusiasm of many artists for the new Soviet Russia could not overcome the deplorable conditions for art. Many of the established art institutions had neither money nor personnel, journals were shutting down for lack of paper, and studios went unheated and unused. Yet for less well-known artists like Moor, the Bolsheviks provided new opportunities, new patronage, and a sense of participation in the defense of the revolution. During the May Day festivities in 1918, the first post-October revolutionary festival, Moor was given the job of decorating the façade of the Historical Museum on Red Square in Moscow. This marked the beginning of his artistic involvement with the Bolshevik Revolution.

Moor’s commitment to the revolution deepened during the Civil War. In the summer of 1918, as the uprising of Czech troops along the TransSiberian Railroad initiated the more serious phase of the war, Moor was hired to paint the first agit-trains. The agit-trains were a form of propaganda on wheels directed toward the military front by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) under the supervision of Ya. I. Burov. Bearing names like “Red Cossack,” “October Revolution,” and “Red Star,” the trains, seven or eight railway cars long, had facilities for distributing literature, showing movies, reproducing Lenin’s speeches on gramophones, and providing the latest news from the front and the capitals. Under the direction of I.I. Nivinsky, a Polish graduate of the Stroganov School of Applied Arts in Moscow, Moor and a number of other artists found employment painting frescoes, or rospisi, along the wooden sides of the cars, for which they were paid in bread, tea, and sugar.³¹

For Moor, painting the agit-trains was a means of making ends meet in desperate times. He was much more interested in the art of the revolutionary poster. Moor conceived of the poster as a graphic equivalent of the revolutionary orator, who accompanied the trains and gave fiery lectures at towns and villages along the way. In 1918 he did his first poster for VTsIK, entitled “Before and Now,” in which he established the principle of stark and simple contrast between opposites: we and they, good and evil, Red and White, the past and the future. In the summer of 1919, after producing more such posters, Moor went to work for the Red Army, or, more specifically, for the Political Administration of the Revolutionary Military Committee (PUR-Milrevkom) under the direction of Viacheslav Polonsky. In this capacity Moor soon became famous as the most talented poster artist of the Civil War.

By 1919 posters had become an important substitute for newspapers throughout war-tom Soviet Russia. Artists turned them out at a feverish pace in order to keep up with the battles and events of the day. In the autumn of 1919 General Denikin’s armies were near Orel, and Moscow was in danger; by the time Moor finished his poster, “Everyone to Moscow’s Defense!” the Whites had been driven back and the poster was never used. Between June 1919 and June 1920, Moor completed about twenty more posters of a symbolic and allegorical nature, utilizing models from tsarist movie posters, wartime posters, and lubok. He now went to work for the Russian Telegraph Agency, where he encountered a new form of agitational art.

In the autumn of 1919 ROSTA’s director, P. M. Kerzhentsev (Lebedev), commissioned Mikhail Cheremnykh to produce a wall newspaper (stennaia gazeta) for distribution throughout the country. Instead, Cheremnykh devised a new form of agitational art, which would become known as the ROSTA “window.” It consisted of a series of cartoons and captions that would fit into the ordinary store or house window and make up a kind of magnified comic strip. Wall newspapers were usually posted in the corridors of institutional buildings and were thus not accessible to the mass population; a series of drawings put up inside shop windows would be seen from the street by the ordinary passerby. Moor, along with his friend Ivan Maliutin, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and other Moscow artists, was soon involved with Cheremnykh in producing the windows.³² Most of the collaborators were young ex-cartoonists from Satirikon or Budil’nik with little formal art training. Within several months there were groups of artists throughout the country designing and drawing windows to be distributed in hundreds and thousands of copies.

While working on the ROSTA windows, Moor continued his poster work for Polonsky and the army. Between June 1919 and December 1920 Moor drew thirty-three posters, which were distributed across Russia in production runs of more than one million copies each.³³ Like his earlier posters, these were agitational, sharp, demanding action from the viewer, caricaturing the enemies of Russia and her revolution. But Moor’s style was now less symbolic and more heroic. It also appears that Moor, through Polonsky, discovered another European tradition from which to borrow: the wartime British poster.

VII

One of Moor’s students, A. A. Deineka, once wrote that “with his first poster he became the commissar of propagandists revolutionary art.”³⁴ Actually, Moor’s real fame came only in the summer of 1920 when he produced his best posters, which circulated throughout Russia and earned him national acclaim.

In 1920 the poster was at the height of its popularity in Russia; 1,719 posters were produced that year, five times as many as during 1919.³⁵ Under the direction of the Red Army, posters had become a major propaganda weapon. Moor’s poster “Wrangel Still Lives!” drawn in June, had a circulation of 65,000 copies, for example. The major producer of posters in the summer of 1920 was the literary editing section (litizdatotdel) of the Revolutionary Military Council, for which Moor now worked. Under its auspices, Moor produced the most famous poster of the Russian Civil War.

Moor completed the poster “Have YOU volunteered?” in a single night in late June 1920. A Red Army soldier stands against a white background with a row of red factories, pointing directly at the viewer with his right hand and holding his rifle in his left. The question, with its YOU in capital letters at the top of the poster, leaps at the viewer. The red-on-white provides a striking color contrast as simple and direct as the outlines of the figure and the buildings. Like his earlier posters “The Third International” and “Everyone to the Front!” this poster contains a single dominant human figure. The Red Army soldier is stylized, generalized to all soldiers and none in particular; he is a collective type. Initially, Moor asked the viewer “Will YOU volunteer?” but then decided to change the tense, thus implying that others, like the soldier in the poster, had in fact already volunteered. What led Moor to draw this impressive poster?

Moor’s poster probably owes more to the British recruiting poster of World War I than to any native source. Polonsky may have overstated the case when he wrote later that in early Soviet Russia “the idea of the poster is borrowed from wartime English lithography,” inasmuch as posters were rather universal by that time.³⁶ Moor’s poster bore a strong resemblance to two particular British posters. The first, an anonymous poster of 1914, shows John Bull pointing at the viewer with a row of unequally spaced soldiers in the background, and asking: “Who’s absent? Is it You?” The pointing finger and the size of the human figure are much smaller than in the second, more famous poster, by Alfred Leete (1915), entitled “Your Country Needs YOU!” Here, Lord Kitchener points directly at the viewer with a gloved hand almost identical to the one in Moor’s poster, and the YOU is emphasized by huge capital letters. Whereas Leete commands, Moor inquires, but the visual similarity is striking.

There were a number of ways Moor might have seen British posters in Russia during or after the war, and a number of reasons why he would not wish to stress the fact. In 1916 the Academy of Arts in Petro- grad held an exhibit of 217 British lithographs from the collection of a Russian businessman, S. V. Krasitsky. Although there is no evidence that Moor attended the exhibit, he probably heard about it from Polonsky and may have seen photographs or reproductions. At a time when the British were giving military aid to the White armies, it was certainly prudent to avoid comparison of Moor with Leete’s Kitchener poster. Yet Leete’s poster was well known and widely imitated throughout Europe by this time, with identical pointing fingers directed at the viewer. In America, for instance, the Uncle Sam of James Flagg told the observer “I want YOU for U.S. Army!” Leete’s poster, one scholar concluded, “is the archetype of all wartime father figures, crib-source for a host of mimics.”³⁷ Among them, it would seem, was Moor.

Whatever its specific origins, Moor’s poster had an enormous impact in Soviet Russia in 1920 and afterwards. Some 47,455 copies were run off, and the poster quickly became the visual symbol of the Red Army in its final days of victory. Moor himself realized this only later. “In this poster,” he recalled, “the Red Army soldier, pointing with his finger, fastened his eyes directly on the viewer and turned in his direction. I had many conversations about the poster. Some even told me they were ashamed by it, that it inspired shame if one did not volunteer.”³⁸ It certainly established Moor’s fame.

Moor’s contribution to Soviet art did not end with his Civil War posters. After 1921 he returned to his original art form, the caricature. During the war he had continued to draw for Krasnoarmeets and other Red Army journals. Now, as a civilian living under the relative leniency of the New Economic Policy, he helped organize the humor magazine Krokodil in 1922 and the antireligious journal Bezbozhnik (Atheist) a year later. In these journals, as well as in Pravda and Izvestiia, Moor continued to establish himself as perhaps the foremost Soviet cartoonist of the day. Completely self-taught, he ended by teaching others poster and graphic art at the Higher Art Workshops and the Moscow Polygraphic Institute until his death in 1946. Like Dobuzhinsky, he had transformed the satirical graphics of Munich into a revolutionary weapon.

Poster by Alfred Leete, “Your Country Needs YOU,” 1914. From M. Rickards, Posters of the First World War (London, 1968).

Poster by D. Moor, “Have YOU Volunteered?” 1920. From B. S. Butnik-Siversky, Sovetskii plakat epokhi grazhdanskoi voiny 1918-1921 (Moscow, 1960).

Satirical graphics by its very nature contains an element of simplification and antagonism. It draws out the weaknesses of its victims and makes them humorous. There is no way to measure its ultimate effect in shaping opinion, revolutionary or otherwise. In both 1905 and 1917 it became an important weapon of revolutionary propaganda. Both Dobuzhinsky and Moor found that it provided them with a new audience, a new market for their art, and fame in their thirties. Revolutionary involvement coincided with personal success.