Cambridge exhibition reveals before and after versions of pro-revolution poster and show how Lenin was put in the picture Startlingly different versions of the same Russian poster, revealing an artist struggling to tone down his original vision in order to toe the party line, are revealed for the first time in an exhibition at Cambridge University library . Maksim Vladimirovich Ushakov-Poskochin, born in 1893 and best known as a book illustrator, was arrested as a political dissident in 1941 and survived just two years in the Gulag forced-labour prison camps, dying in 1943. The striking but conventional printed version of his 1925 poster showed a parade led by four heroic Soviet workers marching past a statue of Lenin, carrying a banner reading: “Hail the international proletariat revolution!”

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