Capitalists of the World, Unite!

КАПИТАЛИСТЫ ВСЕХ СТРАН СОЕДИНЯЙТЕСЬ! - Capitalists of the World, Unite! - The Yellow International by Viktor Deni, 1920

Attacking the League of Nations, which was formed after the First World War.

Viktor Nikolaevich Denisov was born in 1893 in Moscow to upper-middle class parents who were broke. Before the Revolution he worked as a caricaturist and during the Civil War produced around fifty posters, including "Comrade Lenin cleans the Earth from scum" in 1920. 

His son Nikolai married Nina Vatolina who assisted Deni and was his student during the 1930s.

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In 1917, after three years of devastating war, food shortages and government corruption, the workers and peasants of Russia rose up to overthrow the ruling elite and attempted to create the world’s first communist society under the slogan “All Power to the Soviets”.

Throughout the year there were riots, mutinies and strikes, influenced by and involving Mensheviks, Anarchists, Social Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks.

By October, the Bolsheviks, who promised to end Russia’s involvement in the war, were able to overthrow the provisional government, which had been established after the abdication of the Tsar in February.

As the Bolsheviks centralised power and tightened their control over the new state, civil war broke out across Russia as monarchists and liberals (known as the Whites), supported by Western capitalist democracies, fought back against the Bolsheviks.

At the same time, various non-Russian independence movements, anarchists and anti-Bolshevik socialist parties rebelled against Bolshevik imposed terror.

By 1923 the Bolsheviks had defeated the White Army and suppressed internal dissent. The Civil War concluded with a Bolshevik victory.

Before the Revolution and throughout the period of the existence of the Soviet Union, visual propaganda was considered a significant means to inform, educate and motivate people.