Religion is Poison, Protect the Children

РЕЛИГИЯ-ЯД БЕРЕГИ РЕБЯТ - Religion is Poison, Protect the children by Nikolai Borisovich Terpsikhorov, 1930

Nikolai Terpsikhorov was born in 1890 in St Petersburg. He studied art at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. He painted bucolic Russian landscapes and scenes from villages.

He served in the Red Army during the Civil War. In 1922 hejoined the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia. He died in 1960 in Moscow.

While he mostly painted scenes he did design some agitational posters including one for the Russian Telegraph Agency: "Literate, teach the illiterate - To the Five-Year Plan of socialist construction, we are adding a three-year plan to liquidate illiteracy."

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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.