Comprised of thirteen essays, the present volume of Experiment originated from recent discussions and conference panels which recognized contemporary scholarly interest in Russian caricature and political cartooning, and the need for their broader appreciation and assessment.¹ Building on the pioneering research of both Russian and Western scholars,² the essays in this volume delineate the evolution of graphic satire by exploring an array of contexts and themes. They demonstrate the popularity and remarkable versatility of caricature and its strategic deployment during Russia’s social and political history. The contributions reflect a chronological span with late Imperial, Revolutionary and early Soviet periods (ca. 1860s–1930s) receiving particular attention, while the two concluding essays explore caricature and cartooning created by select Russian artists in emigration ca. 1920s–1940s. Examining artistic legacies of many key practitioners of the genre, the collection focuses on the various functions of caricature and political cartooning – as a form of public and private entertainment and illustration, as the expression of a nationalistic agenda, as a tool of social protest, and as a weapon of political propaganda and agitation.

A distinct branch of the graphic arts, Russian caricature – as a professional and sophisticated genre – traces its origins to the beginning of the 19th c., coinciding with the reign of Tsar Alexander I. A cursory inspection of Russia’s first satirical journals of the second half of the 18th c. (i.e. Vsiakaia vsiachina [All Sorts, 1769] and Truten’ [The Drone, 1769]) shows that prior to the 1800s, and the subsequent appearance of Ivan Terebenev’s and Aleksei Venetsianov’s anti-French caricatures in 1813, satire in Russia was expressed almost exclusively through verbal means.³ Hence prior to 1813, graphic caricature and satirical cartoons were virtually absent.⁴

The volume opens with Andrey Rossomakhin and Vasily Uspensky’s essay “’An Imperial Stride’: Two Hundred and Thirty Years of Transforming a Metaphor (On the Visual History of Russia).” Rossomakhin and Uspensky explore the derivation, subsequent application, and transformation of the visual trope of “an imperial stride” in Western, and to some extent, Russian graphic art and caricature. The origins of the metaphor are traced to a caricature by an amateur British cartoonist, Frederick George Byron; reproduced as a lithograph in 1791 by the London publisher William Holland, it lampooned the imperialist appetites of Catherine the Great. Later British, French and German artists adopted this image to satirize the expansionist ambitions of Russia’s rulers, from Imperial to post-Soviet. Rossomakhin and Uspensky examine the rarely seen visual grotesques of Russian Tsars and generals, which, although produced by Western artists, nonetheless provide an appropriate point of departure for the further elaboration of caricature on Russian soil. Illuminated and contextualized by Rossomakhin and Uspensky, satirical depictions of Catherine the Great, Paul I, Nicholas I, and even Stalin, do much to fill an intellectual gap, such pictures being virtually absent from the published histories of the Russian graphic arts. In addition, Rossomakhin and Uspensky explore the multiple representational guises assumed by the principal protagonists taking the imperial stride; these range from high-ranking tsarist generals to Russian bears and peasants, traditional emblems of Imperial Russia. Rossomakhin and Uspensky’s discussion of the Russian patriotic lubok-style lithograph from the period of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905 (the anonymous ‘The Enemy is Frightening, but God is Merciful!..’) is particularly valuable since it shifts the focus onto indigenous caricature, demonstrating, inter alia, its use by Russian artists as an effective form to ridicule antithetical foreign powers.

Rossomakhin and Uspensky’s examination of lampoons of 18th c. Russian rulers produced in the West sets the stage for further discussion of satirical cartooning in 19th and early 20th c. Russia proper. In “Physiological Illustration and a Women’s Fashion Magazine: Vasilii Timm’s Satirical Cartoons in Listok dlia svetskikh liudei, 1843–1844,” Yelizaveta Raykhlina explores the career of the Russo-Baltic artist, Vasilii Timm (1820–1895). In the early 1840s, following his graduation from the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1839, Timm published his drawings in the St. Petersburg fashion and society magazine for women, Listok dlia svetskikh liudei (Pages for High Society), which served as an important forum for his work. Adapting the format of the popular physiological sketch, Timm supplied his audience with witty insights and visual commentary on social mores, urban ills, human vices, cultural phenomena and observations of life in town and country. Accepting Vasilii Vereshchagin’s definition of Timm’s Listok lithographs as “everyday satire in illustration,”⁵ Raykhlina further classifies Timm’s images as “satirical cartoons rendered in a realistic manner.” Selecting drawings that run the gamut from commentaries on the problematic behavior of upper and lower class men, to satirical portraits of some of the period’s most popular journalists, Raykhlina argues that Timm’s Listok cartoons should be viewed as integral to the content of the magazine and as representative of its readership, something that prior criticism has failed to acknowledge.

Lasting less than two years, Timm’s involvement with Listok served as an important stepping stone (a decade later) for his collaboration with Russkii khudozhestvennyi listok (Russian Art Pages, 1851–1862), an almanac lavishly illustrated with lithographs by Timm and other prominent artists such as Ivan Aivazovsky and Mikhail Mikeshin. Although Russkii khudozhestvennyi listok did not emphasize caricature as such,⁶ the period – the era of the Great Reforms – coincided with a flowering of satirical journalism in which caricature became a preferred medium of social commentary. Several humor magazines emerged in Russia in the 1860s, and four of these publications, Iskra (Spark, 1859–1873), Budil’nik (Alarm Clock, 1865–1918), Strekoza (Dragonfly, 1875–1908), and Oskolki (Splinters, 1881–1916), are the focus of Jeffrey Brooks’s essay “Caricature and Print Culture in Late-Imperial Russia.” Brooks views these periodicals as vehicles for the popularization of caricature, which was understood by these journals as “satirical pictures depicting actual people in the news, social mores of the day, the ironies of human relations, and at times, themes of political significance.” Contextualizing caricatures and satirical drawings prepared for Iskra, Budil’nik, Strekoza and Oskolki by artists such as Vasilii Porfir’ev, Nikolai Stepanov, and Adrian Volkov, Brooks offers insightful and nuanced readings of these dated images.

Brooks also surmises that by prioritizing and promoting caricature, the humor magazines of the 1850s and 1860s, some of which, like Budil’nik, Strekoza and Oskolki, lasted well into the 20th c., laid the foundation for the further development of the genre – and the appearance, at the turn of the century, of a more virulent and oppositional form of satirical expression as well as of more specifically political caricature, an argument validated in the three subsequent essays. Focusing on the works of selected visual satirists, each article examines the various uses to which caricature was put in fin-de-siècle Russia – including commentary on international politics and questionable religious practices in the Empire’s ethnic regions as well as the condemnation of government-sponsored violence.

In “Stepan Sokolovskii, Novoe vremia, and the Cartoons of Empire,” Zachary Hoffman details the satirical output of one of the principal caricaturists for Aleksei Suvorin’s widely-read conservative newspaper. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, Sokolovskii regularly supplied Novoe vremia with cartoons on foreign affairs in which he transmitted Suvorin’s staunch nationalist stance and anti-European convictions while offering the domestic audience amusing, and necessarily critical, depictions of Russia’s imperial rivals, with the United States and the Great Powers of Europe occupying pride of place. Relying on the use of national stereotypes and deploying a range of caricature devices (i.e. grotesque features, facial distortions, bodily exaggerations), Sokolovskii sought to expose the duplicity and malevolence of Russia’s opponents by depicting them as treacherous and farcical “back-stabbers that represented the worst excesses of imperialist exploitation.” In addition to discussing Sokolovskii’s Novoe vremia cartoons, Hoffman sheds light on little-known details of the artist’s life, and, by examining his personal philosophy of effective cartooning, offers valuable insight into politically-oriented caricature, which, in this case, projected a loyalist stance regarding international politics.

A true flowering of political caricature in Russia took place in the wake of the Revolution of 1905 and the slackening of censorship. At the time, Sokolovskii was still lampooning foreign affairs for Novoe vremia. Triggered by the massive country-wide unrest, the freedom promised by the October Manifesto fostered the growth of Russian journalism in general, and of the satirical press in particular. Politicized satirical journals, published in vast numbers in the new environment of press freedom in the latter half of 1905 and throughout 1906, propelled caricature and satirical cartooning to a position of new importance. Appearing in the ubiquitous oppositionist satirical periodicals of the time, as well as on the pages of their less numerous right-wing counterparts, caricatures and cartoons reflected the political divisions of the day catering to both the radical and the partisan.

The 1905–1906 right-wing satirical cartoons and caricatures, as well as the ideology informing them, have been discussed in greater detail in a preceding issue of Experiment and elsewhere.⁷ In this volume, two essays focus on caricatures in the left-leaning satirical periodicals both of St. Petersburg and of regional centers. In his “Take No Prisoners Caricature: Nikolai Remizov and the Revolution of 1905,” Marcus C. Levitt examines the early work of one of Imperial Russia’s most accomplished visual satirists, Nikolai Remizov (Nicholas Remisoff), best recognized by his artistic nom de guerre, “Re-Mi.” A native of St. Petersburg and, in 1905, a budding artist, who would later study at the Imperial Academy of Arts, Remizov produced very outspoken political caricatures. Oppositional in spirit, his drawings appeared (often as front covers) in a number of left-wing satirical periodicals at the peak of press freedom. Levitt describes the ethos of Remizov’s caricatures and cartoons as “new, no-holds-barred” visual satire, examining images in which the artist skillfully, audaciously and harshly satirizes prominent tsarist officials, army generals and religious leaders, including the country’s first Premier, Sergei Witte. Analyzing caricature as a genre of graphic art (thus helping to contextualize Remizov and other artists discussed in this volume), Levitt also traces the development of Remizov’s career as a major political and social cartoonist prior to his emigration in 1919; the impressive number of his works which appeared in two of late Imperial Russia’s most popular satirical journals, Satirikon and Novyi Satirikon, attest to his artistic accomplishments.

To strengthen the oppositional tenor of his caricatures, Remizov, like many artists of this tumultuous period, relied on “representations of death” as well as images with “demonic and apocalyptic overtones,” something that characterizes much of the visual satire appearing on the pages of the 1905–1906 satirical journals published across the Empire. The geographic and linguistic diversity of the 1905–1906 satirical press was extensive, even encompassing the southern regions – the subject of Naomi Caffee and Robert Denis’s essay “The Devil and the Mullah: Satirical Personae in the Pre-Revolutionary Press of the South Caucasus.” In their essay, the authors focus on the work of Oskar Schmerling, a prolific Tbilisi-based cartoonist whose illustrations and caricatures appeared in 1905–1906 and later in Armenian, Azeri, Georgian and Russian-language satirical periodicals. Exploring Schmerling’s artistic legacy, Caffee and Denis examine in particular his signature use of “two satirical personae – the titular devil from the Georgian journal eshmakis matrakhi (Devil’s Whip) and the mullah from the Azeri journal Molla Näsräddin.” The devil and the mullah reflect the satirist’s treatment of both the demonic and the ethnic, a tendency which, Caffee and Denis argue, enabled Schmerling “to simultaneously represent the world from more than one perspective, and to speak to communities with varying political agendas” on a host of “controversial issues including women’s emancipation, educational and ecclesiastical reform, economic development, language policies, and the domestic and international affairs of the Russian Empire.”

The theatrical, artistic, print and political culture of late Imperial Russia form the contextual backdrop to Irina Menchova’s “’Like Visions … Merely Fragments’: Sergei Sudeikin and His Milieu (1913–1917),” an essay divided into four parts, within which Menchova examines a particular episode in the cultural life of Sudeikin and his circle. Demonstrating their penchant for humor, satirical portrait, illustration and even political lampoon, Menchova discusses images which include Sudeikin’s playful portraits and self-portraits, created for the little-known and unique hand-made journal of theater and intimate life called “Babenchikov,” and his satirical cartoons for Satirikon and Novyi Satirikon. Considered also are Mstislav Dobuzhinsky’s one hundred satirical portraits of Russian artists, writers and publishers printed in 1917 in the children’s book Elka (Christmas Tree, eds. Alexandre Benois and Kornei Chukovsky), and Sudeikin’s March 1917 colorful lubok-style caricature, “Come together, You Free Birdies.” Perhaps not typical of a modernist artist, the latter image nonetheless captures the zeitgeist of the time, while celebrating the Revolution’s newfound freedom and poking fun at the deposed Russian Tsar.

Underscoring the folk roots of Russian caricature, in broader terms, Sudeikin’s satirical lubok signaled the liberation of political satire from the shackles of tsarist censorship. The maelstrom of the February Revolution encouraged a revival of the satirical press, stimulating caricature to gain new prominence and popularity. This art form could now be appreciated not only on the pages of satirical magazines and newspapers, but also in postcards. The postcard medium is the subject of Tobie Mathew’s essay, “Citizens and Tsars: Russian Caricature Postcards of the Provisional Government Era.” Mathew opens with a comprehensive account of the origins of the Russian political postcard and the production of postcards under the Provisional Government and focuses on postcards featuring satirical cartoons and caricatures. Like Sudeikin’s lubok, most caricature postcards appeared during the narrow window of March–April 1917, their satirical vitriol directed at the discredited monarchy with its most evident symbols, Tsar Nicholas, Grigorii Rasputin and Empress Alexandra. The text also examines postcards which both celebrated and commented on the Revolution itself. In this connection, Mathew argues that in doing so, such images enabled “the public to align themselves with the revolutionary events” and to locate them within the nascent “democratic world-view and value system, characterized by political freedom and social justice.”

Between the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, satirical journal and postcard publishers relied on both amateur and professional artists. Some, like Remizov and his Satirikon colleague, Aleksei Radakov, focused on graphic satire, while others, like Sudeikin, turned to caricature and satirical cartooning only on occasion. In her essay “Satire and Propaganda in the Graphic Art of Vladimir Lebedev,” Nicoletta Misler explores the artistic legacy of one of Russia’s most versatile Modernists whose career spanned both the late Imperial and the Soviet periods. Essentially a studio artist, Lebedev considered graphic art, in which caricature and satirical cartooning played a significant role, to be of more importance than large-scale oil paintings. Misler concentrates on Lebedev’s social cartoons and caricatures in Satirikon and Novyi Satirikon as well as on the iconic propagandistic posters he designed for the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) in the early 1920s. Misler contextualizes Lebedev’s Satirikon and Novyi Satirikon works within the contemporary socio-political environment, especially during the dramatic juncture of 1917–1918. These works, the originals of which were made available for research by Lebedev’s widow, reflect the ambivalence of the artist’s political views: some lament the strife of the revolutionary period, at times assuming an anti-Bolshevik stance, while others, shying away from the depiction of “the horrors of warfare, destruction and violence,” remain neutral. Meant for mass consumption and exemplifying what Misler calls “public art,” Lebedev’s ROSTA posters, on the other hand, projected a clear and “politically correct” propagandistic message, often reinforced by satire. This is not to say that Lebedev became an unequivocal spokesperson for the regime; as Misler argues, despite ideological pressures, Lebedev “managed to retain an esthetic distance” and, rather than becoming a conduit for ideology, sought creative escape in designing illustrations for the less politicized children’s books, which synthesized his approaches to the creation of both caricature and poster.

In comparison to Lebedev, the creative path of Boris Efimov, the protagonist of James Goodwin’s essay “Boris Efimov’s Early Soviet Drawings and the Hazards of Political Caricature,” was perhaps less ambiguous, although purportedly more perilous. Embarking on a career of graphic propagandist in the early 1920s, Efimov evolved into a skilled political caricaturist for the centrally-published Soviet newspapers and satirical magazines and pursued his calling throughout the Soviet period and even into the first years of perestroika. Focusing on Efimov’s works from the late 1920s and early to mid-1930s, Goodwin argues that the decade saw a dramatic shift in the ways caricature and political cartooning were used as “weapons” in both class warfare and the intra-party struggle for power. Satirizing Soviet Russia’s foreign adversaries, Efimov’s cartoons and caricatures of the mid- to late 1920s were lauded by Leon Trotsky, at that time still a revered revolutionary leader. Efimov also met Trotsky on a number of occasions and created several complimentary satirical portraits of him. With the ascendancy of Stalin and the defeat of the so-called United Opposition in 1927, association with Trotsky, the newly declared enemy of the Soviet people, became toxic for many, including Efimov. Goodwin contends that the fear of persecution, growing political pressure and the onset of Stalinist terror in the wake of the Kirov murder in December 1934 account for a significant change not only “in the spirit of Soviet caricature,” but also in the ways Efimov was now obliged to portray his former mentor, “strictly in conformity with official demands and expectations,” as “a fascist agent” and the sub-human adversary. Goodwin argues that this was a moment when Efimov’s caricatures of Trotsky in the late 1930s helped transform “witty political humor” into “a ruthless, if not savage” weapon of agitation.

Efimov’s scathing grotesques of Trotsky, often depicted as a German spy, exemplify the kind of militant political caricature created in Soviet Russia at the height of the Great Terror. Directed at both internal and external, imaginary and real enemies of the regime and the nation, this type of political cartooning is examined further by Stephen M. Norris through the lens of its reception by ordinary Soviet citizens in “Copying Cartoons: An Intimate History of the Stalinist Caricature.” The subject of Norris’s case study is Aleksandr Frolovskii, a retired math teacher and amateur artist from Moscow, who, in the mid-1930s, felt compelled to fill the pages of his drawing albums with copies of Soviet political caricatures, many by Efimov. Appearing in centrally-published newspapers and satirical magazines, the caricatures attacked enemies of the Soviet state, from Trotskyite conspirators to the Nazis. Norris argues that in helping to narrate the history of Stalinism between 1934 and 1940, the practice of copying such cartoons by “ordinary” citizens like Frolovskii speaks of a more universal embrace by the country’s population of the political values these works were meant to transmit. This, in turn, attests to the power of the visual medium to mold “the socialist viewer” and help citizens develop a new, Soviet consciousness. Norris also suggests that this process may be more complicated than meets the eye; as Frolovskii’s case demonstrates, beyond this private citizen’s desire to retain favorite images or hone his drawing skills, copying political cartoons might also be influenced by the need to conform and comply with state prescriptions.

Satirical drawings by Boris Efimov, Yulii Ganf and other state artists copied by Frolovskii and discussed by Norris, show the trajectory that political cartooning followed in Soviet Russia and the USSR after the October Revolution. Inadvertently, however, that same Revolution gave rise to a radically different kind of visual satire, which, originating in the early 1920s in places of Russian emigration, took aim at Bolshevik Russia as the primary target of its rancorous laughter. An integral part of the history of Russian graphic satire, émigré political cartoons and caricatures, as well as the publications in which they appeared, are examined by Oleg Minin in his “Soviet Russia and Its Leaders in the Satirical Press of the Early Russian Emigration.” Minin’s focus is on Bitche and Satirikon, two émigré journals of political satire published in Paris in 1920 and 1930 respectively. Marking the genesis of Russian political cartooning beyond the Russian borders, a phenomenon which, somewhat haphazardly, persisted well into the 1950s, Bitche and Satirikon featured outspoken anti-Soviet caricatures, cartoons and satirical portraits. Prepared for the journals by such talented artists as Yurii Annenkov, Mikhail Drizo and Mikhail Linskii, these images portrayed Soviet Russia as a monster, while poking fun at its political and military leadership, Stalin included. Minin argues that the nature and tenor of émigré graphic satire, a dramatic counterpoint to the cartoons and caricatures produced in Soviet Russia, is best understood as a gesture of ressentiment on the part of Russian people displaced from their native country by the Bolshevik insurrection.

An emphatic coda to this volume, the story of the curious synergy between emigration and caricature plays out in an unexpected but felicitous way in “Alex Gard (Aleksei Kremkov): “An Accidentally Americanized Cartoonist.” In this article, Viktor Golubinov reconstructs the early life and artistic legacy of Alex Gard, an American cartoonist of Russian descent. Gard was well-known in New York in the 1920s and the 1940s for his caricatures of celebrities from the entertainment industry. Born Aleksei Kremkov in Kazan, following the trials and tribulations of World War I and the Civil War, conflicts in which he served as a naval cadet (garde-marine), after a brief sojourn in Europe, Gard arrived at the decision to devote himself to graphic art. Around 1924, he moved to the United States, soon reaching a legendary and mutually beneficial agreement with the owner of Sardi’s, a prestigious restaurant in New York’s theater district – to produce caricature portraits of the restaurant’s prominent patrons in exchange for meals, even publishing books featuring his work. Sardi’s restaurant remained the principal and long-time venue for the display of Gard’s caricatures in which he sought to accentuate, both to the delight and fear of his sitters, their most prominent facial features or bodily characteristics, often in a very unappealing light. Gard also created many caricatures of Russian émigrés, specifically those belonging to the world of ballet and music, with which he was intimately familiar. Collected in two books and published in the 1940s, these cartoons poked “hilarious yet loving fun” at well-known Russian dancers, ballerinas, choreographers and composers, with George Balanchine, Michel Fokine, Leonid Massine, Vera Nemtchinova, Dimitri Rostoff and Igor Stravinsky among them.

It is to be hoped that the present collection of articles will make a strong contribution to our further knowledge and appreciation not only of Russian caricature, but also of the richness and diversity of Russian graphic arts, the printing industry and the synthesis of styles, vernacular and international, which contributed to 19th and 20th century Russian culture, both domestic and in emigration.

Oleg Minin

November 2022