10 red pepperoct/nov2007

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