If you're Near Canberra - Partisan Eagles and Fascist donkeys, at the AWM

by fulltimestudent 2 Replies latest social current

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  fulltimestudent

  I guess that few here would remember any detail of WW2. Not sure whether I should be sad or happy to be old enough to remember those days and the absence of my father who was blown up by a German bomb during the seige of Tobruk, but who happily survived.

  Even more likely to be forgotten in the fog of anti-Russian and contemporary Cold War propaganda, was the heavy price paid by Russians, with between 8 and 14 million military deaths and millions of civilian deaths.

  The sustained Russian resistance against the German war machine was a major factor in the Allied victory. I doubt that there would have been a successfull landing in Normandy if the Russians on the eastern front had not tied up so many German Armies. And, in the closing days of the war, after Germany's surrender, the Russian troops were able to sweep the Japanese from China and were within a few kilometres of invading the main Japanese Islands.

  So its rather fascinating to see this collection of patriotic Russian posters from WW2 exhibited at the Australian War memorial in Canberra

  

  
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  fulltimestudent

  From the Australian War Memorial Site:

  http://www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions/partisan-eagles-and-fascist-donkeys-soviet-stencilled-propaganda-posters/

  Partisan Eagles and Fascist donkeys: Soviet stencilled propaganda posters

  

  Until February 2015
  Second World War Galleries

  Established in 1925, the Telegraphic Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) was the country’s official state news agency. In June 1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany, a group of artists and writers in Moscow set up a studio under the TASS for the production of propaganda posters.

  For the next four years the TASS studio operated as a “poster factory”, with teams of writers, poets, artists, stencil cutters, and painters working in shifts around the clock to create large, hand-stencilled propaganda posters known as Okno TASS (“the windows of TASS”). At its peak, the TASS studio employed 300 workers, and by 1946 had issued a staggering 700,000 hand-stencilled posters.

  During the 1418 days the Soviet Union was involved in the Second World War approximately 1240 TASS posters were designed and distributed in editions of 60 to 1000. Displayed in shop windows and distributed via subscription across the Soviet Union, TASS posters were also sent to Allied countries, including Australia.

  TASS posters were as much an expression of state ideologies as mechanically printed wartime propaganda. An editorial office developed officially sanctioned themes for interpretation by selected artists and writers. The nine posters on display at the Memorial exemplify the main styles used by TASS artists – heroic realism and graphic satire.

  A comic-strip format (OKNO Panno) was also used by TASS studio artists and writers to create narrative propaganda which effectively replayed and commented on events on the battlefields. These stories often used a cast of stereotypical players: bearded Soviet partisans, heroic Red Army soldiers, and reptilian Nazis. Popular themes presented in the posters included the guerrilla actions of Russian partisans and the lampooning of the German army.

  Soviet posters, including those by TASS artists, were admired internationally for their visual punch. Reproduced in Allied propaganda, including in Australia, they became symbolic of the strength of Soviet resistance against the German Army during the Second World War. This exhibition also includes British posters that used images from TASS posters to show the strong relationship between the Allies.

  The posters are on display for the first time in Australia.

  The production, content and care of the posters will be explored in a series of talks:

  TASS propaganda posters – Professor Sasha Grishin, 12.30pm Tuesday 29 July

  Stalin and the warrior archetype – Anita Pisch, 12.30pm Tuesday 5 August

  The TASS posters at the AWM, 12.30pm Tuesday 12 August
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  fulltimestudent

  I wish I was closer to Canberra. I'd like to hear this presentation. Perhaps it would answer some questions in my mind. When I was about 10, the house behind us belonged to an elderly Russia couple. In pride of place was a picture of Stalin. The old couple revered him. I asked my father who he was, and my father made a derogatory remark, which I (with a child's lack of guile) repeated to the old Russian couple - the result - an explosive loss of neighbourly camaraderie.

  Some years later, not too long before I was persuaded that the Yahweh/Jesus combo was the only hope for a better world, I was hanging around the left wing fringe in Sydney, including the Russian Club, which was completely supportive of the USSR. I used to go to see free films, some of them magnificent works of art. Others were propaganda in which Stalin was presented as a superhero who saved Russia from Hitler. I've always found the cognitive gap between western and Russia propaganda difficult to bridge

  So maybe this may help to bridge that gap.

  Lunchtime art talk: Stalin and the warrior archetype

  12:30pm Tue 5 Aug

  Join Anita Pisch, PhD candidate from the Australian National University, who will speak about a selection of posters from the Second World War.

  The creation of a symbolic persona for Joseph Stalin as leader was a deliberate process that drew on mythic archetypes, including the Father, the Warrior, the Architect, the Helmsman, the Teacher, the Saviour and the Magician. A key archetype, particularly during the years of the Second World War, was that of the Warrior. This presentation will examine the ways in which Stalin was presented in political posters as a successful warrior leading the Soviet Union to victory.