This series of posters was created to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first edition of Archipelago Gulag by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In my work I was trying to create a visual thread that would connect earlier stages of the Soviet Totalitarian System with its transformation into Total Red Terror of the 1930s and then take it further into Putin’s Russia.

Vladimir Lenin Classification of Harmful Insects:

 ...Thousands of forms and methods of prac­tical accounting and control over the rich, rogues and parasites must be worked out and tested in practice by the communes themselves, small cells in the village and in the city.

 Variety here is a guarantee of vitality, a guarantee of success in achieving a common goal: cleaning the land of Russia from all harmful insects, from flea crooks, from bed­bugs-rich people. In one place, a dozen of rich men will be put in prison, a dozen crooks, half a dozen of workers shirking their work (as hoo­ligans as many typesetters in St. Petersburg, especially in party printing houses). In another — they will put them to clean the lavatories. In the third, they will be provided with yellow tickets, upon the departure to the punishment cell, so that all the people, before correcting them, would supervise them as if they were harmful. In the fourth - shot in place one in ten guilty of parasitism. In the fifth, combina­tions of different means will be invented.

Vladimir Lenin, 1919.

Stalin’s Economy:

Every industry, every factory, and every handicraft artel had to find wreckers in its ranks, and no sooner had they begun to look than they found them (with the help of the GPU).
If any pre-revolutionary engineer was not yet exposed as a traitor, then he could certainly be suspected of being one. Lazar Kogan, one of the bosses of the White Sea Canal construction, would, in fact, soon say: “I believe that you personally were not guilty of anything. But, as an educated person, you have to understand that social prophylax­is was being widely applied!”

From Archipelago Gulag by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.