Now, I do feel a bit old when posters I knew have become museum pieces.
I don’t have a date for this one but it was typical of a period of political propaganda dating from the 1930s through to the 1980s.
As a student I had similar ones which decorated the walls of flats I and friends lived in, which I picked up cheaply from left wing book shops.
Back then I believed the propaganda, or if I am honest, wanted to believe it, but it is a view of the world which even then distorted the reality and has all but gone.
This one comes from the museum situated in the old Stasi headquarters in Berlin.
The poster’s slogan runs,
“Von den Sowjetmenschen lernen heibt siegen lernen!” which translates as
“Learning from the Soviet people means learning to win!”
Peter went round the place yesterday and this is one of the posters he sent back, commenting that
“the back story to the poster is that son James’s apartment is in the district where the Stasi headquarters were. His flat is in In the building in front of the Stasi communications building. All these buildings are still standing. It’s like living in a museum!”
And that last comment got me thinking about what I still had from that period of Soviet propaganda.
The cheap Marxist/Leninist tracts printed in Moscow and Peking vanished a long time ago, as did a fascinating little book of Soviet short stories, but I did come across a book of poetry, and a collection of stories by Soviet Science Fiction writers.
Fifty Soviet Poets, included some like Yevgeni Yevtushenko who were well known in the West, and many who weren’t, and ranged over a variety of different themes, but given that this is a Russian book there is more than a few that are patriotic.
Yevtushenko’s poem,
Do the Russians want a War? opens with the lines, “
Say do the Russians want a war?- Go ask our land, then ask no more That silence lingering in the air Above the birch and poplar there Beneath those trees lie soldier lads Whose sons will answer for their Dads. To add to what you have learned before, Say- Do the Russians want a war?”
From the stand point of 1969 when the collection was published, just twenty four years after the end of the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany, when the USSR lost 20 million dead, and every community had its own war memorial, it was easy to see the honesty in that poem.
But now, with the Russian Federation flexing its muscles in many different ways, it seems an anachronism, and echoes the comments about Yevtushenko whose poetry is described as
“imbued with a sense of civic responsibility” who was
“an ardent champion of revolutionary ideas and principles”. *
And looking again at the small collection of Soviet Science Fiction which was published in the early 1970s, is to be reminded that unlike some Western Science Fiction, these stories are all optimistic, focusing on how human beings working together and applying science will create a better world.
Of course we know that that vision of progress as applied across the old Communist bloc was flawed. It was shot through with technological short cuts which were environmentally disastrous and was achieved at great human cost.
That said, our own Industrial Revolution, driven by the newly emerging capitalistic mode of production which was based on the exploitation of the workforce, assisted by the Slave Trade and conducted a time when only a handful of men had the vote.
At which point someone will mutter ....... and the point is?
To which I can say, there is no point, no lasting message other than that history is messy and sometimes what you thought would be a better way to order the world doesn't quite hack it.
Although the idea of a planet where people are treated equally, are respected and have the material means to live a life of their choice, free from war, tyranny, disease and hunger seems a good one to me.
Location; Stasi Museum, Berlin,
Pictures;
from Stasi Museum, Berlin courtesy of Peter Topping
* Fifty Soviet Poets, 1969, Progress Press, Moscow, page 176
