Bowdoin College Museum of Art | - Vrangel is Coming

Preview image of work. lithograph on paper, Vrangel is Coming—to the Arms, Proletariat 33035

Recommend keywords

Help us make our collections more accessible by providing keywords to describe this artwork. The BCMA uses the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus to provide consistent keywords. Enter a keyword in the field below and you will be prompted with a list of possible matching AAT preferred terms.

Vrangel is Coming—to the Arms, Proletariat

Export record as: Plain text | JSON | CDWA-Lite | VRA Core 4

Artist

Nikolai Mikhailovich Kochergin (1897 - 1974)

Title

Vrangel is Coming—to the Arms, Proletariat

Creation Date

1920

Century

early 20th century

Dimensions

29 x 35 1/2 in. (73.66 x 90.17 cm)

Object Type

Creation Place

Asia, Russia

Medium and Support

lithograph on paper

Credit Line

Generously lent by Svetlana and Eric Silverman ’85, P’19

Copyright

This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s Copyright Terms and Conditions.

This caricature of a warrior illustrates the use of mass propaganda as a weapon. Baron Pyotr Wrangel (Vrangel) was the leading commanding officer of the anti-Bolshevik White Guards during the Civil War. He is depicted in the traditional Cossack cavalry uniform—a symbol of tsarist power. The Soviets fought such military might with derisive mass propaganda. The poster became a weapon and its production was indeed often relegated to the Litizdat division of the Political Directorate of the Revolutionary Military Council, then overseen by Leon Trotsky. (This Bolshevik, a Soviet politician, and an astute art critic and radical thinker was assassinated on Joseph Stalin’s orders in 1940.) In 1919, the writer Leonid Andreev boasted: “In the matter of world propaganda and the art of fighting with the world, the Bolsheviks could teach even the Germans.