The Bolshevik Poster

From Publishers Weekly "You find posters on all the walls, in thousands of Moscow shops, on telegraph poles, in pubs, in factories, everywhere you find posters," said a traveler of 1920. Then, the Soviet civil war poster was a call to arms, an exhortation to have anti-cholera inoculations, a celebration of May Day. A 1918 lithograph by Alexander Apsit, one of the first Soviet poster artists, depicts the bad old days and offers a representative title The Tsar, the Priest and the Rich Man on the Shoulders of the Labouring People . White ( Britain and the Bolshevik Revolution ) writes a fast-moving history of this unique confluence of art and "agitational literature," reporting on the effectiveness of individual posters, describing the people and circumstances that brought about the (relatively) famous "Rosta windows," and introducing some of the more exceptional artists, including Vladimir Mayakovsky, Dmitri S. Moor, Mikhail Cheremnykh and Victor Deni. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.