Vintage Poster Archives
Soviet Propaganda Poster 1937 | Viktor Deni Anti-Nazi
Soviet Propaganda Poster 1937 | Viktor Deni Anti-Nazi
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A caricature Nazi soldier, grey-uniformed with swastika armband and cloven hooves, stoops forward to thrust a black bomb labelled VOINA (War) toward a small fleeing figure labelled Iuda Trotsky (Judas Trotsky). Papers marked Dogovor and Soglashenie scatter underfoot. The composition moves on a rising left-to-right diagonal across a cream ground, with flat graphic line work and a deliberately constrained palette of grey, black, gold, and cream.
Designed by Viktor Deni (Viktor Nikolaevich Denisov, 1893–1946), one of the founding figures of the Soviet political poster, and published by OGIZ-Izogiz, Moscow and Leningrad, in 1937 in an edition of 150,000. The verse at upper left is by Demyan Bedny (1883–1945), the leading Soviet satirical poet of the period and a long-term collaborator with Deni on mass-circulation lithographs. The title, Shagayut k gibeli svoey (They Walk to Death on Their Own), comes from Bedny's verse condemning the perceived alliance between Trotskyism and fascism, produced at the height of Stalin's show-trial campaign against the exiled Trotsky.
Deni's work is held in the collections of the Tate Modern, London, and the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. This poster represents one of the clearest examples of how Soviet propaganda in the mid-1930s fused anti-Trotskyism with anti-fascism into a single visual argument: Trotsky as a tiny agent of enormous destructive forces, leading the enemies of the Soviet state toward their own ruin.
A natural point of interest for students of graphic propaganda, Soviet political art, the interwar period, and the design lineage that runs from Civil War agitprop through the 1930s Stalinist poster campaign. Reproduced from an archival source print on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper.
