Page 232 [232]
230
Liisi Laineste, Margus Laane
digging in the dirt and garbage every day in the ‘red paradise’. Soviet officials were
not interested in their life or death. They have masses they don’t care to count. (...)
‘The bodies of people who had died of hunger were laying about, uncovered, until
dusk. (...) Once when I was waiting my turn at the barber, an old shabbily dressed
woman entered. Her hair was as dirty as her hands, face and clothes. I thought
she was a beggar, but to my surprise she had come for a manicure. Because this is
kulturna (‘cultured’).”* This can be visualised through images, for example the giant
cockroaches that supposedly lived in Russia, referring to the low level of ‘culture’
in hygiene in general, or by advising train passengers coming from Russia to wipe
their feet after exiting the train station so that the streets will not get too dirty
(Fig. 91).
As already mentioned, the number of caricatures in Postimees was smaller and
the topics less varied than elsewhere. This marks the start of a detective story: why
were some matrices that we can see in the Postimees archive prepared for print, but
not published after all? When we take a closer look at the images in this archive,
the first thing to notice is that they are quite unfunny; instead, their tone is sinister
(Fig. 92). They focus on political matters (cf. the light and largely non-political
tone of Rindeleht), depict the pragmatic marriage of the unionists and Soviets, and
its (hopeful) failure, describe the dilemmas and point of view of the allies (Figs
94 and 95), refer to Soviet brutalities in war. The images do not use opposition as
a visual strategy but prefer a straightforward derogation of the enemy or allow their
alleged crimes to speak for themselves (Fig. 93; opposition was common, as we wit¬
nessed, in the Soviet caricatures). They do, however, try to assume the point of view
of the enemy, for instance in caricatures that depict Stalin’s discontent and even
rage at unfavourable political developments. References to the Jewish conspiracy
behind politics (see also Davies, this volume) are frequent, evident already at the
visual level, for example in the physical features of the depicted enemy (Fig. 95).
The unpublished caricatures all follow a similar style and might be the work of one
or two different authors (the author is not identified in the archive). Content-wise,
they are carried by a remarkable enmity towards the Soviets and launch a bitter,
almost desperate attack against them. Although it is not possible to name with full
certainly the reasons why these pictures were not chosen for print, some hypotheses
based on previous studies of war propaganda and humour can be proposed here.
First and foremost, historical sources and the writings of ideologists from
WWT tell us that (humorous) propaganda was a highly valued channel for distrib¬
uting the ‘correct’ political sentiments. Nevertheless, as history proves, the propa¬
ganda function of humour was strongly overrated both by the Soviets and the
Nazis. Studies of humour and advertising, for example, have shown that although
a humorous message helps to pave the way to audience understanding, it does
> Postimees, August 27, 1943: Péike téuseb idast (‘Sun rises from the East’), a newspaper column where
a soldier mobilised in the Red Army but having deserted afterwards shares his impressions of life in Russia.