| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Stephen M. Norris. A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812–1945. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2006. Pp. xiii, 277. $40.00.
This book contributes to the growing body of literature on visual propaganda. Stephen M. Norris focuses on the lubok, a mass-produced illustrated broadside that enjoyed popularity among diverse strata of the rural and urban population. Combining a lively image with a brief text, the lubok depicted contemporary, historical, or fairy tale themes, most of them secular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Inexpensive lubok prints served as one of the most effective means of conveying government-sanctioned ideas—and some that were not sanctioned—in imperial Russia, a country with low levels of literacy and a strong tradition of visual culture. After the Bolsheviks seized power, they used political posters as a vehicle for mass mobilization. Lubok-style posters, familiar and appealing to many Russians, circulated in the Soviet Union through World War II.	1
Anyone who studies Russian history comes across the imaginative and engaging lubok, but little has been available in English about these remarkable wood prints. Norris offers an informative account of a particular type of lubok— one designed for wartime—as it evolved in seven military conflicts, beginning with the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 (the "Patriotic War") and concluding with World War II (the "Great Patriotic War"). Two major themes bind together these instances of bellicist propaganda conducted under the tsarist and then the Soviet regime. First and foremost, Norris accentuates the "visual world of nationhood" (p. xi) and the invention and repetition of certain visual markers of "Russianness." Russian identity acquires meaning, of course, only when it is juxtaposed to "the Other," and so it follows logically that Norris's second key theme centers around the visualization of the enemy. The author tracks these two themes in lubok prints and Soviet lubok-style posters aimed at mobilizing Russian patriotism in times of national peril.	. . .

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