oct/nov2007 red pepper

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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