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This painting portrays the Stalin era as a meat grinder in which people’s lives were ground up by a cruel machine that could not be stopped. Instead of meat, skulls fit together to form Stalin’s face and litter the ground below the ominous machine. These remnants allude to the brutal purges Stalin conducted throughout his rule, most notably in the late 1930s. Sitting in the pile at the top of the grinder, where the unprocessed meat would go, are the heads of various Party members intermixed with the heads of anonymous men and women, all ready to be executed under Stalin’s orders.
Alexei Rezaev, Meat Grinder, 1991–1992
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Stalin takes on the role of a butcher in this poster, hacking into a map of the Soviet Union with a hatchet that bears the face and name of secret police chief Lavrenti Beria. Beria’s name is forever tied with the Great Purge, as he carried out Stalin’s orders zealously. From 1938 on, Beria actively participated in administering the deportation of many people to the Gulag labor camps. The brick wall behind the image of Stalin is punctured with bullets. Incidentally, Beria himself was killed after his unsuccessful attempt to assume power after Stalin’s death; he was shot by a firing squad in December 1953. Ironically, he was condemned as an “enemy of the state,” a verdict he had used against thousands of his own victims.
Alexei Rezaev, The Kremlin Butcher and His Hatchet, 1991–1992
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A portrait of a man with no eyes, nose, or mouth; the only facial features are the hairline and moustache that clearly identify him as Stalin.The featureless portrait could speak to the transient nature of Soviet leaders, or it may represent that faceless multitude of Soviet citizens arrested, exiled, and executed under Stalin’s rule.
Yuri Leonov, Stalinism!, 1990
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