Red Star Over Russia by David King

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Synopsis

Red Star Over Russia is a breathtaking visual history of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the death of Stalin, using a vast array of material including posters, photographs, paintings, magazine covers, advertisements, and ephemera to illustrate the dramatic birth and eventual decline of the Soviet Union. The book's urgent, cinema verite style plunges the reader into the shattering events that brought hope, chaos, heroism, and horror to the citizens of the world's first workers' state.
The Russian Revolution produced some of the most important advances in the fields of art, photography, and graphic design in the 20th century. More than 550 of these widely influential materials are reproduced here to the highest quality, accompanied by author David King's accessible text. Zooming in from the epic to the particular, King rescues from obscurity many lost heroes and villains through the work of the most brilliant Soviet artists, many of them anonymous or long forgotten.

The New York Times - Steven Heller

…if the first 200 pages of this 350-page volume are any indication, the graphics used to promote the workers' paradise deserve admiration. But the rest of this extraordinarily illustrated book provides witness to the corrosive effects of ham-handed propaganda, and to the role of state-sanctioned imagery in demeaning and subjugating the arts. Red Star Over Russia is a mammoth collection of rare Soviet applied art and photographs…organized not into individual chapters, but into pages and spreads devoted to a range of themes addressed in graphic and photographic materials, including "Political Abstraction," "Urban Proletariat" and "Workers of the World, Unite." Prominent artists like El Lissitzky and Gustav Klutsis are featured

Biography

David King is the author of The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia, Ordinary Citizens: The Victims of Stalin, and numerous other books on Soviet subjects. He was art editor of the Sunday Times from 1965 to 1975, and is the owner of one of the world’s preeminent collections of Russian artifacts. He lives in London.