The Iconography of Twentieth-Century Totalitarian Regimes

Abstract

Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power. Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 364 pp., 8 colour plates, 92 b/w illustrations, £38, ISBN 0–520–08712–7.

Enrico Sturani, Mussolini. Un dictateur en cartes postales (Paris: Somogy, 1997), 240 pp., 284 colour illustrations, FF 189, ISBN 2–850–56292–0.

The rhythm of the history of human societies is determined by the constitution of the powers which organise them. Violence, persuasion, acquiescence might be adduced as the three stages of a broad schema whereby a coherent system of reference, based on rules which are respected by most (if not all) people, succeeds in establishing itself on a lasting basis of political constitution, civil law, and a legal system to govern systems of work and exchange. Individuals, whose primeval subjection was to the law of family, tribe or gens, do not readily submit to absorption into an entity which does not coincide with this original cell. Therefore, by definition, the history of the creation of political systems in Western societies must be set in a context of permanent tension between the interests of the individual, or the primordial group, and those of new institutions or bodies which are more abstract, and therefore harder to identify, recognise and, eventually, accept. But it is also the history of how peoples view the world, of their common points of reference: in short, a history of mental representations, which can partly be written by studying their translation into figurative images – into political iconography developed for purposes of mass propaganda.