A lithograph issued in the first years of Soviet rule, showing Lenin sweeping crowned heads, priests and capitalists off the surface of the globe. It was distributed as celebration: the old order removed, the ground cleared for something better. The image is included here because the promise it makes has proven completely portable. Every political movement that has since promised to clear out a corrupt establishment has reused the same structure — a sweep, a clean surface, an unnamed category of filth. What the poster never contains is a definition of who qualifies. That vacancy is the mechanism, and it is refilled every election cycle.

A film poster for a Soviet satire about officialdom, built from documents, stamps and a magnifying glass in place of a face. The state was, briefly, willing to mock its own paperwork — provided the joke stopped at the individual clerk and never reached the system issuing the forms. That limit is what makes the image useful now. Modern institutions run the same manoeuvre: a named official is disciplined, the process that produced them is described as sound. The poster shows a man who is entirely procedure, which is a more accurate portrait of public office than any of the heroic ones produced in the same decade.

this two-sheet poster advertised a film commissioned for the Revolution’s tenth anniversary. It was withdrawn from circulation after the political record changed around it. The date matters. The image was not corrected because its composition failed, but because the face of Leon Trotsky had become politically unacceptable.That is the mechanism: censorship presented not as an argument against the past, but as routine maintenance of the official version. The event remains. The authorised cast is revised. Modern institutions rarely announce that they are rewriting a record. They update it, replace it, or quietly withdraw the previous version. History does not disappear. It becomes unsupported.

Deni recast factory work as a military act: each hammer strike lands on a caricatured enemy rather than on metal. The poster was aimed at workers who had no direct stake in the fighting, and it solved that problem by making the workplace itself a front. The construction survives intact in contemporary economic language, where output becomes a patriotic duty, competitiveness becomes a national security question, and a shortfall becomes something close to betrayal. The enemy in Deni’s image is drawn but never identified, which is precisely why the poster kept working after every specific enemy it referred to was gone.