Drawing the Curtain: The Cold War in Cartoons

Drawing the Curtain is the compelling story of Soviet and western relations during the Cold War, as told through cartoons and propaganda art. Seventy-five beautifully drawn Soviet cartoons reveal the extraordinary obsessions and ferocious propaganda campaigns of the period. Most of them have never been seen before in the West. The Soviet works are juxtaposed throughout with western cartoons on similar themes. Together they not only reveal one of the Cold War’s most unlikely battlegrounds, but also highlight the remarkable similarities between each side’s depiction of the other. With a foreword by Sergei Khrushchev, son of the Soviet leader at the heart of some of the Cold War’s tensest exchanges, Drawing the Curtain contains essays by Timothy S. Benson, a leading authority on cartoons, and Polly Jones, Fellow in Russian at University College, Oxford. Igor Smirnov, one of the great Russian cartoonists of the 1970s and 80s, provides a glimpse of life as a cartoonist under the Soviet regime. Superbly designed as a book within a book, Drawing the Curtain is part cultural history, part art book. Sometimes funny, sometimes shocking, it offers a very different take on East-West relations in the second half of the twentieth century.