-40%

Soviet anti-religion poster

$ 9.23

Availability: 92 in stock
  • Year: 1984
  • Party: Communist
  • Type: Posters
  • Condition: This Soviet-era poster is from about 1984. The poster is printed on poster-grade paper. It was rolled, but will flatten with time and weight or if matted and/or framed.
  • Country/Region of Manufacture: Russian Federation
  • All returns accepted: ReturnsNotAccepted
  • Signed: No
  • Material: Poster-grade paper
  • Modified Item: No
  • Country: USSR

    Description

    This is a Soviet-era Russian poster that shows a man ringing church bells. The poster measures 12.5 x 19 inches.
    “We’ve finished the earthly tsars and we’re coming for the heavenly ones!” Thus spoke the Soviet Union’s first atheist propagandists as they declared war on “the opium of the people” across the USSR. Soviet atheism is the great lost subject of the 20th century. Pope Pius XI led a “crusade of prayer” against it; George Orwell satirized it in Animal Farm; the Nazis called it a Jewish plot; Franklin D. Roosevelt pressured Stalin to abandon it: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn blamed it for Russia’s catastrophes; and Ronald Reagan put it at the core of his “Evil Empire” speech. And yet, because the Soviet Union promoted atheism almost entirely for domestic consumption, decades’ worth of arcane and astonishing anti-religious imagery remains unknown in the West.