Red Star Over Russia is a breathtaking visual history of the Soviet Union, from 1917 to the death of Stalin. Its urgent, cinema-verité; style plunges the reader into the centre of the shattering events that brought hope, chaos, heroism and horror to the citizens of the world's first workers' state. Revolutionary upheaval turns into Civil War and famine; Stalin's Great Terror of the 1930s is followed by the brutal onslaught of Nazi invasion. The story ends with the intrigue surrounding the dictator's gruesome death in 1953.
More than 550 posters, photographs and graphics are reproduced to the highest quality, accompanied by insightful and informative texts. Many of these images are being reproduced here for the first time. Zooming in from the epic to the particular, the author rescues many lost heroes and villains from obscurity, through the work of the most brilliant Soviet designers, artists and photographers of the twentieth century.
David King is the author of The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia (1997) and Ordinary Citizens: The Victims of Stalin (2003) and numerous other books on Soviet subjects. He was art editor of The Sunday Times between 1965 and 1975 and is the owner of one of the world's pre-eminent collections of revolutionary Russian artefacts.
Author David King
Pages 352 pp
Number of illustrations Over 550 colour and black-and-white illustrations
Bannister Fletcher Award for the Best Book on Art or Architecture
Powerful and immaculately produced.
Eye Magazine
A magnificent work of stunning emotional power.
La Tribune
A copy of this book should be in every public library, in every secondary school and in the hands of anyone who aspires to understand what has made Russia the state it is today... Buy one to keep and one to give away.
