Red Star Over Russia

In exploring the intersection of art, politics and society, few collections in the world can compare with the David King collection. David King (1943?2016) was not only a passionate collector, but also an artist, designer and historian. Over a lifetime he amassed one of the world?s largest collections of Soviet political art and photographs. Every step of the Soviet journey is documented in visual media, photomontage, photographs, paintings, handwritten notes, books (signed with annotations and marginalia), enclosures and ephemera. The collection is also unique in examples of image manipulation techniques, erasures and deletions, and in the survival, despite the purges, of extremely rare books and manuscripts by the early revolutionaries who died in the?Show Trials? of 1936?38.00Exhibition: Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom (08.11.2017 - 18.02.2018).

"Red Star Over Russia is a visual history of the Soviet Union, from 1917 to the death of Stalin. Its urgent, cinema-verite style plunges the reader into the centre of the shattering events that brought hope, chaos, heroism and horror to the citizens of the world's first workers' state. Revolutionary upheaval turns into Civil War and famine; Stalin's Great Terror of the 1930s is followed by the brutal onslaught of Nazi invasion. The story ends with the intrigue surrounding the dictator's gruesome death in 1953." "More than 550 posters, photographs and graphics are reproduced to the highest quality, accompanied by insightful and informative texts. Many of these images are being reproduced here for the first time. Zooming in from the epic to the particular, the author rescues many lost heroes and villains from obscurity, through the work of the most brilliant Soviet designers, artists and photographers of the twentieth century." --Book Jacket.

“An Earth-man’s journey to the planet Mars, where he is treated to a wondrous vision of a communist future, complete with flying cars and 3D color movies.” —Wonders & Marvels A communist society on Mars, the Russian revolution, and class struggle on two planets is the subject of this arresting science fiction novel by Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928), one of the early organizers and prophets of the Russian Bolshevik party. The red star is Mars, but it is also the dream set to paper of the society that could emerge on earth after the dual victory of the socialist and scientific-technical revolutions. While portraying a harmonious and rational socialist society, Bogdanov sketches out the problems that will face industrialized nations, whether socialist or capitalist. “[A] surprisingly moving story.” —The New Yorker “The contemporary reader will marvel at [Bogdanov’s] foresight: nuclear fusion and propulsion, atomic weaponry and fallout, computers, blood transfusions, and (almost) unisexuality.” —Choice “Bogdanov’s novels reveal a great deal about their fascinating author, about his time and, ironically, ours, and about the genre of utopia as well as his contribution to it.” —Slavic Review

"The Hunt for Red October" meets "Blind Man's Bluff" in this chilling, true story of a rogue Soviet submarine that sank while trying to provoke a war between the U.S. and China.

Surprisingly little known, the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-20 was to change the course of twentieth-century history. In White Eagle, Red Star, Norman Davies gives a full account of the War, with its dramatic climax in August 1920 when the Red Army - sure of victory and pledged to carry the Revolution across Europe to 'water our horses on the Rhine' - was crushed by a devastating Polish attack. Since known as the 'miracle on the Vistula', it remains one of the most decisive battles of the Western world. Drawing on both Polish and Russian sources, Norman Davies illustrates the narrative with documentary material which hitherto has not been readily available and shows how the War was far more an 'episode' in East European affairs, but largely determined the course of European history for the next twenty years or more.

'Like the brilliant sun, the October Revolution shone over all five continents, awakening millions of oppressed and exploited people around the world. There has never existed such a revolution of such significance and scale in the history of humanity'. - Hồ Chí Minh// From Cuba to Vietnam, from China to South Africa, the October Revolution remains as an inspiration. After all, that Revolution proved that the working class and the peasantry could not only overthrow an autocratic government but that it could form its own government, in its image. It proved decisively that the working class and the peasantry could be allied. It proved as well the necessity of a vanguard party that was open to spontaneous currents of unrest, but which could guide a revolution to completion. This book explains the power of the October Revolution for the Third World. It is not a comprehensive study, but a small book with a large hope - that a new generation will come to see the importance of this revolution for the working class and peasantry in that part of the world that suffered under the heel of colonial domination.

This is the extraordinary story of Vasily B. Emelianenko, the veteran pilot of one of the Soviet Union’s most contradictory planes of WWII – the I1-2. This heavily armoured aircraft was practically unrivalled in terms of fire power, but it was slow to manoeuvre and an easy target for fighters. I1–2 had to attack enemy flak columns at extremely low altitudes, which led to enormous tolls both in equipment and personnel.

Describes the Russian space program, telling of unpublicized disasters as well as recent successes.

Original publication and copyright date: 2010.

A disturbing glimpse into the manipulation of photographs by Stalin shows retouched portraits