“To Lie Like A Witness”: Civil War-Era Soviet Propaganda Posters at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Janardan, Rastislav
2025
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This thesis explores Civil War-era propaganda posters as visual sites of ideological construction, rupture, and contradiction in early Soviet Russia. Centered on an un-accessioned selection of Bolshevik and White Army posters from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the study situates these images within broader debates in and around visual rhetoric, institutional and revolutionary modernity, and ... read moreclass in print-media. Rather than reading these works through the oppositional binary of the Civil War, the project trace show each side’s visual culture negotiated anxieties around legitimacy, futurity, and historical continuity. Through formal analysis, material context, and cultural theory, the thesis argues that the Civil War poster was not merely agitational, but a polyvalentmedium in which tradition and avant-garde, sacred and profane, coalesced. By attendingto both style and ideological function, the project repositions Soviet agitprop as aformative expression of early twentieth-century visual culture - one that reveals theinstability and ambition at the heart of revolutionary art-making.
Thesis(B.A.)--Tufts University, 2025.
Submitted to the Department of the History of Art and Architecture.
Advisors: Miriam Said, Gregory Carletonread less - 189 pages
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