List of Illustrations¶
Core Argument¶
This is not a chapter in the conventional sense but a paratextual apparatus: a list of illustrations keyed to the book’s chapters and front matter. It serves as a visual inventory of the volume’s argument, mapping the iconographic arc from the October Revolution through to the Putin era. The sequence of images is itself a condensed narrative. It opens with Ted Grant (preface) and a poster of armed women workers (introduction), establishing the revolutionary subject. The section on the October balance sheet deploys photographs of the July Days demonstration, Baltic sailors, Red Guards from the Putilov Works, Trotsky addressing the Red Cavalry, and Lenin at Sverdlov Square — each a canonical image of mass mobilisation and Bolshevik leadership.
The rise of Stalinism is illustrated by group portraits of Lenin and Trotsky, then Trotsky with Rykov and Humbert-Droz, followed by Bukharin, Tomsky, the Left Opposition in 1927, and the United Oppositionists. This sequence traces the political defeat of the revolutionary wing. The Five-Year Plans and purges section juxtaposes collectivisation propaganda (peasants on a kolkhoz, a poster reading “Bash the Kulak off the Kolkhoz”) with Uralmashstroi construction, Stakhanovite hero posters, an NKVD death squad photograph, and a composite of Lenin’s Central Committee — the visual contrast between official triumphalism and state terror.
The nature of Stalinism is represented by Trotsky alone, then by posters subordinating Marx-Engels-Lenin to Stalin, the slogan “We are the Realisation of the Plan”, and Gustav Klutsis’s 1931 Politburo poster — images of bureaucratic collectivity and ideological rigidity. The war and de-Stalinisation section shifts to a Berlin cocktail party in 1940, Stalingrad factory fighting, refugees, a destroyed T-34 tank, and a 1959 party for American ice-show stars — the juxtaposition of war’s devastation with Cold War cultural exchange.
The stagnation period offers a collective farm lunch, a St Petersburg apartment bloc, Brezhnev, and a psychiatric hospital — a visual lexicon of decay, conformity, and repression. Perestroika is represented by Gorbachev, a Sochi dacha, and Yeltsin. The foreign policy and national question section shows Lech Wałęsa and the Berlin Wall being breached. The afterword, by Alan Woods, closes with the White House siege in Moscow, Zyuganov with Putin, and Putin at a 2016 military parade — a trajectory from revolutionary hope through Stalinist consolidation, stagnation, collapse, and restoration. The image credits reveal the collection’s provenance: the David King Collection, purchased by Tate Archive in 2016, supplemented by public domain and Creative Commons sources. The list is thus both a scholarly apparatus and a political argument in miniature.