New Books In Communications

In the arc of Soviet history, few government programs were as tenacious as the anti-religious campaign, which systematically set out to debunk organized religion as "the opium of the people." This political storm of heaven lasted from the earliest days of Bolshevik power up until the early eighties, when it simply ran out of steam, as did the Soviet State. But while it lasted, the anti-religious campaign was a sustained and virulent attack on the centuries-old bedrock of Russian culture and left a wave of violence and destruction in its wake. Faced with an almost feudal society and a population of predominantly illiterate peasants, the State cannily deployed one of its most potent propaganda weapons: the vibrant graphic art illustration in posters and atheist magazines that were distributed throughout the USSR. For a superstitious peasant, the images of an idealized Soviet worker smashing the idols of Orthodox Christianity must have been as horrific as they were ultimately compelling. The iconography of the a