Red Pepper - October/November 2007

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The original Red Pepper – the Soviet satirical journal Krasnyy Perets – first appeared in 1923 as an occasional supplement to Rabochaya Moskva ( Workers' Moscow ), the newspaper of the Moscow Soviet and Communist Party organisation. Life was getting better in the new USSR: the country was now at peace, the famine areas were shrinking, the economy was beginning to recover. But inequality was growing; private

photo storyThefirst Red Pepper , USSR1923-1926

traders, ‘nepmen’, were becoming wealthy by speculating on the dire shortages of almost every consumer good. Meanwhile, incompetent bureaucrats proliferated in Soviet institutions. Krasnyy Perets vowed in its first issue to use satire to ‘struggle mercilessly against the bureaucrats, procrastinators, fools, crooks and

swindlers who have wormed their way into Soviet and economic institutions, against nepmen and the world bourgeoisie’. Like all Soviet satirical journals of the time, this was ostensibly politically-loyal satire, in which the top Soviet leadership was off limits. The journal’s satire worked on many levels, however. For example, the pick-and-mix

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originalsfromtheDavidKingCollection

caricatures of Trotsky, Marx and Radek shown here were presented as a ‘gift for artists’ struggling to produce portraits of political heroes for agitprop purposes. What is being mocked here - low-grade agitprop, the party culture of iconography, possibly even the party heroes themselves? The ambiguity is almost certainly deliberate. Krasnyy Perets ’ original target audience had been Moscow’s intelligentsia, which led to

criticisms that it was ‘divorced from real life’. In response, it tried to reorient itself to a working class audience, using worker correspondents to provide some of the copy. But its most noteworthy contributors were from the literary world: first and foremost, from 1924, Vladimir Mayakovsky, who published drawings and verses in most issues. Other notable collaborators included Mikhail Bulgakov, Il’ja Il’f, Evgenij Petrov and Lev Nikulin.

The journal’s circulation peaked at 50,000, but financial difficulties meant that in March 1926 it ceased publication and merged with Krokodil . The 1920s had been the heyday of Soviet satire, with dozens of journals and supplements produced. By the early 1930s, they had all been swallowed by Krokodil , which monopolised Soviet satire for the next six decades. Francis King