Russia Accursed!: Red Terror through the eyes of an artist

Hardcover | 27.94 x 4.06 x 27.94 cm | 335 pp

Unicorn Press | 2021 | 9781913491369

The Russian Revolution and Civil War – as never seen before! Packed with jaw-dropping, at times blood-curdling images, Russia Accursed! showcases the reaction of Ivan Vladmirov (1869-1947) to the human suffering and Bolshevik barbarity he observed as an artist-reporter during the years 1917-25.

Some of Vladmirov's paintings and watercolours appeared in magazines and periodicals, including London weekly The Graphic (his mother was English). But other scenes – featuring point-blank executions, passers-by cutting chunks of meat from a dead horse or dogs gnawing at a human corpse – were deemed too shocking for publication and had to be secretly exported from the USSR by American relief workers.

Selected from private collections, Russian museums and the Hoover Library at Stanford University, California, most of the 160 Vladimirov images in this majestic 324-page volume are published here for the first time. Placed in their historic context by scholarly essays, contemporary photographs and eye-witness quotes, they revolutionise our understanding of the beginnings of the Soviet Union.