![]() “A suggestion that Soviet Communism was an alternate religion: one that didn’t outlive competitors.” “The ‘holy’ skeleton figure reaches for the hammer and sickle,” highlighted using gold foil, “almost like a sacred object itself,” says Murray. The cover was also designed using references from religious imagery, adapted from a number of posters contained in the book. The book design uses similar gilt edging to that “found on holy books, inverting it to suit the material inside,” he says. ![]() The text, an essay on the history of Soviet anti-religious propaganda by Roland Elliott Brown, runs through the left-hand pages of the book in order to aid reader navigation, while horizontal captions differentiate them from the rest of the text. In designing the book, Murray placed each image on its own page-a “simple approach to give them maximum impact”-which in turn informs the overall design. We believed it was important to publish these images alongside the historical context in which they were produced.” Further investigation showed that the campaign lasted right to the end of the Soviet period. These were much more disturbing and seemed to raise relevant questions about religious tolerance. “On the surface they appeared to be typical Soviet designs of the day, but when we investigated further we came across many more previously unseen images. “We ’d read about anti-religious propaganda and seen some interesting images from the 1930s,” says Damon Murray, Fuel’s director and the designer of the book. Godless Utopiaįuel came across these images through working on previous Soviet-focused publications, including a book on the posters of the Soviet anti- alcohol campaign. That’s about to change with a new book published by Fuel, titled Godless Utopia, which presents images from early Soviet atheist magazines Godless and Godless at the Machine, as well as post-war posters by Communist Party publishers in order to show, in the words of Fuel, “an unsettling tour of atheist ideology in the USSR.” Many of these images are highly imaginative and almost surrealistic, featuring priests rubbing shoulders with cross-bearing colonial torturers, greedy mullahs, “a cyclopean Jehovah, and a crypto-fascist Jesus,” as well as Russian cosmonauts mocking God from space. Since the Soviet Union’s promotion of atheism was almost entirely targeted at those living within it, the posters, editorial illustrations, and other propaganda associated with it are largely unknown to Western designers. Their themes were dictated by the agenda of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and their purpose was to justify often-brutal Soviet anti-religious policies, from the mass repression the clergy and the destruction of historic temples to the hounding of religious minorities and the isolation of religious communities from the wider world.ĭrawing on decades’ worth of anti-religious imagery from the new book Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda, author Roland Elliott Brown and multi-award-winning cartoonist Martin Rowson - author of the book’s foreword and the creator of a humorous adaptation of Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto - will discuss the history of Soviet atheism, the evolution of Marxist-Leninist graphics, the ethics of cartooning, and modern-day cartoon controversies.Most of us have heard the Karl Marx description of religion as “the opium of the people,” yet we have little documentation of the designs behind the Russian Revolution’s drive to dissuade faith systems. But these images represented neither unfettered philosophical critique, nor the creative visions of independent-minded cartoonists. ![]() From the Russian Revolution in 1917 to Gorbachev’s glasnost, generations of Soviet illustrators waged satirical war on all religions - “the opium of the people” as Karl Marx had called them.
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