Exhibition reveals Stalin's 'nude drawings hobby'
An unprecedented exhibition opened in Moscow Friday of nude prints
with scrawled comments apparently written by former Soviet leader Joseph
Stalin that make ribald references to his party comrades.
Titled "Messages from the Great Leader: Stalin's Autographs," the
week-long exhibition shows prints of 19th- and 20th-century art works
that Stalin is said to have defaced with messages in coloured pencil.
"Ginger bastard Radek, if he hadn't pissed against the wind, if he
hadn't been angry, he would be alive," he wrote across the leg of a
weighty male nude.
The macabre comment was an apparent reference to Karl Radek, the
former head of the international communist organisation, the Comintern,
believed to have been shot dead by Stalin's secret police in 1939.
Another comment refers to Marxist theorist Georgy Plekhanov, who
opposed the October Revolution. The writer scribbles on a drawing of a
nude man, "Plekhanov, why are you pointing backwards? Coward and enemy
of the people."
Other comments are simply coarse jokes about nudity. "Don't sit with
a bare arse on stones," Stalin writes on a drawing of a man sitting on a
pedestal. "Give the boy some pants."
The collection was preserved by people who worked in Stalin's
security service, said the organisers who include the popular online
newspaper gazeta.ru. But the owner of the collection wants to remain
anonymous. AFP |
