Winston Churchill’s cousin, the sculptor Clare Sheridan, gazes up at her bust of Trotsky, made during a trip to Moscow in 1920. Her subjects were leading Bolsheviks including Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the KGB, Lenin and Trotsky. While she worked, she asked Lenin, via a translator, if Churchill was the most hated man in Russia. ‘He is our greatest enemy because all the forces of capitalism are behind him,’ he replied. Sheridan’s mother wrote to her on her return: ‘I forgive you, darling, as I would even if you had committed a murder,’ but Churchill never spoke to his cousin again. Sheridan left England for New York, where her busts were exhibited.
This is one of the many extraordinary stories told in Red Star Over Russia, a book of images taken from the David King archive. King is one of the great collectors of Soviet photographs, graphics, ephemera and stories. He has been collecting since 1970, and his archive of some 250,000 artefacts is exhibited in rotation in a room at the Tate Modern.
Many of the images are published for the first time, such as the grainy mug-shots of the Bolsheviks condemned in the show trials of 1936-38. The drama and tragedy of the Soviet century are conveyed via a collage of arresting images, many of which surprise: wonderful colourful textile designs, glamorous Bolshevik wives, female fighter pilots, and propaganda posters, as well as terrifying photographs of famine and war. David King has collected stories too: in his lively introduction he describes his first train journey from Moscow to Leningrad in 1970. The peasant women passengers wondered at his beard, traditionally worn by older men in Russia, and decided he was ‘Yessus Christus,’ and began crossing themselves and singing hymns.
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