These posters on exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago until October 23rd were produced by TASS in the Soviet Union during World War II. They were hung extensively throughout Russia, but they were also mailed to the United States as a way of keeping their Allies up-to-date on what was going on. Russia lost an estimated 20 million citizens during the war, including three million soldiers who were starved to death as prisoners of war. They paid the highest price of all, and it their stenciled posters allude to an all out brutality--they needed to meet this fierce force with equal ferocity or they would be consumed.
These are not high art--what sets these images apart was that they represented the first time that Soviet poster art embraced “voyeuristic depictions of human suffering.” Odd mixes of eroticism and sadism was expressed in posters that showed beautiful women apparently ravaged and killed by grotesque Nazis. Bloody deaths by fire, hanging, or gunshot were vividly colored and drawn. The posters also reinforced anti-German rather than simply anti-Nazi sentiment: the editors were called upon to arouse hatred and mercilessness in the viewer. They demanded the deaths of Germans in general, and it is a rare poster that also shows the oppressed state of German citizens. German cartoonists and artists were at least as harsh, of course. A German poster depicting a dozen men, all of obviously different races and ethnicities, asks, “Serbs, Are Those Your Brother Slavs?” This collection at The Art Institute Chicago, however, demonstrates how similar propaganda techniques were in Russia.
It is a moving, thought-provoking, eye-opening, and worthwhile exhibit.
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