Soviet war posters rediscovered

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Windows on the War: Soviet Tass Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941–1945

Edited by Peter Kort Zegers & Douglas W. Druick

This book accompanied a 2011 exhibition inspired by the rediscovery of a collection of war posters during work at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997.  Put out almost daily during the Second World War by the Soviet Union’s TASS news agency, a selection of posters were sent to the USSR’s allies in the West as propaganda and to show allied solidarity.  For the purposes of the 2011 exhibition and this book, the Art Institute’s holding, once it had been subject to the necessary conservation, was complemented by loans of posters from other collections. 

Compared with many of the books devoted to 20th-century posters that have appeared over the last couple of years, Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941–1945, might seem to be a very much more specialized volume.  It is certainly a substantial one in many ways, in the scholarship that is in evidence in the essays by the editors and a number of specialist contributors, and also in the sheer size of the book, with its wealth of illustrations of the posters themselves and other documentary material that helps the reader to see them in their historical context. 

A large part of the book is given over to a lavishly illustrated chronological study of the posters, showing the development of a visual and poetic iconography of Soviet courage, Allied cooperation and Nazi brutality in the period between the invasion of the Russia in mid-1941 and the war crimes trials in late 1945.  To supplement this, there are ample documentary resources, maps, timelines, biographies of significant poster artists and a useful bibliography, as well as essays on every aspect of the work of TASS in producing these posters. 

Particularly interesting is the information on the unusual coloured stencil techniques used to quickly produce very large posters (up to 6 feet in height) for public display in windows.  As well as the posters themselves, archive photographs of these ‘storied windows’, as Zegers calls them,  give a feeling for their importance in communicating vital messages about the progress of the war on the Eastern Front.  Hence this book, which at first glance may seem very specialized, has a great deal to offer readers who are interested in the history of that aspect of the Second World War and the way it was visualized by TASS for the Soviet population and their Western allies.

Windows on the War: Soviet Tass Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941–1945  edited by Peter Kort Zegers & Douglas W. Druick is published by Yale University Press in association with the Art Institute of Chicago 2011. 400 pp., 140 mono and 300 colour illus, £45.00. ISBN 978 0 300 17023 8