Red Star Over Russia: A Visual History of the Soviet Union from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin

A visual history of the Soviet Union from the October Revolution to the death of Stalin, drawn entirely from the London designer David King's archive of Soviet graphic material.

More than 550 posters, photographs, paintings, magazine covers, book jackets, advertisements and pieces of street ephemera are reproduced in sequence, carrying King's account of the revolution, the civil war, the constructivist years, the purges and the personality cult. Photomontage by Klutsis and Rodchenko sits beside anonymous agitprop, doctored official photographs and pages from illustrated magazines such as USSR in Construction. King designed the book himself, in the dense red-and-black manner of his earlier Soviet titles.

David King (1943–2016) was art editor of the Sunday Times Magazine from 1965 to 1975 and spent four decades building what became one of the largest private collections of Soviet visual culture, now held by Tate. His related books include The Commissar Vanishes (1997), on the falsification of photographs under Stalin, and Ordinary Citizens (2003). Red Star Over Russia was published simultaneously by Abrams in New York and Tate in London; the Abrams edition carries the subtitle recorded here.