Oldal 37 [37]
OCR
Constructing Images of the Other in Peace and War enemies are in fact enemies of each other, is characteristically Soviet, as we can see from Efimov’s cartoons published after Churchill’s famous Fulton speech in 1946 when he accurately declared “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” In one of Efimov’s (2005: 111) cleverest cartoons a banner-waving, cigar-puffing, Churchill gird with sword and pistol, dances before the microphone that will convey his speech. Behind the capering Churchill, his own shadow reveals him to be both Hitler and Goebbels combined. Churchill, Hitler’s most consistent enemy, who had fought him even when he was allied to Stalin, has now become Hitler. Absurd, mendacious and nasty but wonderfully conceived and drawn by the Soviet monster’s very talented underling. As with the anti-Semites we find in peacetime as well as wartime Soviet propaganda sources, the regular use of images of snakes and octopuses (Efimov 2013: 53-54, 57, 61, 63)—images of the ultimate Other—represent the enemy. Before he fell out of favour, Trotsky was as in Figure 11 shown as a knight in a mailed breast-plate on a snorting white horse, killing with his lance a top-hatted capitalist snake. He is not very convincing as St George. It is curious how those producing the images in this ‘progressive’ society often reach back to ancient mythology, even to Heracles and Perseus. Soviet images of the enemy Other refer not just to nations but to ‘othered’ economic groups, notably social classes, such as the kulaks, landlords, bankers, industrialists and recalcitrant peasants to be seen in Figure 12. Negative images of particular social classes in pictorial form are common enough in all countries but it was in the times of Soviet (and in China, Maoist) dominance that images of sheer hate based on class prevail. They may be seen as a natural outgrowth of MarxistLeninist ideology and of a political order that needed continually to manufacture enemies, to create hated Others in order to give some kind of legitimacy to a tyrannical regime and to explain away its grotesque failings. It needed its artists to be a production line for images of hate, for as a favoured Soviet slogan put it ‘the enemy never sleeps’. The kulak the rural peasant-entrepreneur was a favourite class enemy maligned in posters with such slogans as “Do not trust him! The kulak is the most hardened enemy of socialism” and “Punch the wealth out of the Kulak!”. The Fate of Eastern and Central Europe: From 1930s to 1950s The history of the countries of Eastern and Central Europe from the 1930s to the 1950s was dominated by the violent incursions of those two totalitarian aggressors, the Nazis and the Soviets, which led to the deaths of many millions of their inhabitants through persecution and murder as well as war (Rummel 1990: 151-216), with a particularly high death toll in the ‘bloodlands’ of Eastern Europe. The totalitarians’ use of images of the Other was qualitatively different from those seen in the Anglo-Saxon world or the those generated autonomously in Eastern and Central Europe during the brief intervals of freedom those countries enjoyed between the two World Wars. In the interval they could produce their own images including 35
