Soviets: Danzig Baldaev and Sergei Vasiliev - Tapa dura

Many of Baldaev's dozens of angry caricatures and commentaries on life in Sovietdom are uncomfortable and grotesque, addressing subjects like anti-Semitism, alcoholism, and the Afghan War. Soviets covers so much that it's hard to summarize its value for students of Soviet-era or post-Soviet Russian literature and culture. For someone like me, a life-long learner in the field who lived for an extended period in 1990s Russia, (and admittedly has trouble making it through book-length nonfiction), the broad range of figures in Baldaev's drawings and Vasiliev's photos - the former draws everyone from a barfing drunk to a medal-covered Brezhnev, and the latter photographs everyone from soldiers meeting Yuri Gagarin to female prisoners 'volunteering' on their day off - goes a long way toward filling in gaps on aspects of Soviet life that I never had a chance to witness or learn about.
Vasiliev's photos, all black and white, depict official parades, sporting events, and workers. They make a beautiful complement to Baldaev's drawings, particularly because it's often difficult to decide which angle on Soviet reality feels more realistic. Or absurd. --Lisa Hayden Espenschade, Lizok's Bookshelf Blog

Danzig Baldaev's drawings dark-lined, stippled, blunt, often disturbing have become most familiar through his renderings of Russian criminal tattoos and later horrific scenes of life and death in the Gulags. A life working in the Soviet prison system would, one might think, squeeze the capacity for humour out of a man. Nonetheless, this posthumous collection of his cartoons and pictures secretly drawn from the 1950s to the late 1980s, show a sense of humour that is sometimes sly, often crude, but which nonetheless captures the surrealism, inanity, contradictions and cruelties of Soviet times in a powerful and passionate way that never fails to move and sometimes disconcert. Supplemented by useful explanatory notes from the editors and contemporary pictures from photographer Sergei Vasiliev, taken for the newspaper Vecherny Chelyabinsk and thus very much in the official Soviet idiom (not least the parade when the local factory produced its millionth tractor!) this book is a fascinating, unusual and I keep coming back to this word disturbing alternative take on the later years of the doomed Soviet experiment. As well as an important document in its own right, I think it will have great value as a tool for educators. The cliché of a picture being worth a thousand words really does apply here. Strongly recommended. --Mark Galeotti, In Moscow's Shadows Blog

Soviets features unpublished drawings from the archive of Danzig Baldaev. They satirize the Communist Party system, exposing the absurdities of Soviet life from drinking (Alcoholics and Shirkers) to the Afghan war (The Shady Enterprise), via dissent (Censorship, Paranoia and Suspicion) and religion (Atheism as an Ideology). Baldaev reveals the cracks in the crumbling socialist structure, detailing the increasing hardships tolerated by a population whose leaders are in pursuit of an ideal that will never arrive. Dating from 1950s to the period immediately before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, his caricatures depict communisms winners and losers: the corruption of its politicians, the stagnation of the system, and the effect of this on the ordinary soviet citizen. Baldaevs drawings are contrasted with classic propaganda style photographs taken by Sergei Vasiliev for the newspaper Vercherny Chelyabinsk. These photographs portray a world the Party leaders dreamed of: where workers fulfilled their five-year plans as parades of soldiers and weapons rumbled through Red Square. This book examines both broadly and in minute detail the official fiction and the austere, bleak reality, of living under such a system.