Danzig Baldaev’s drawings—dark-lined, stippled, blunt, often disturbing—have become most familiar through his renderings of Russian criminal tattoos and later horrific scenes of life and death in the Gulags. A life working in the Soviet prison system would, one might think, squeeze the capacity for humour out of a man. Nonetheless, this posthumous collection of his cartoons and pictures secretly drawn from the 1950s to the late 1980s, show a sense of humour that is sometimes sly, often crude, but which nonetheless captures the surrealism, inanity, contradictions and cruelties of Soviet times in a powerful and passionate way that never fails to move and sometimes disconcert.

This is a realm of cynical and self-serving bureaucrats, of bullies and informants, of victims of the system seeking refuge in the bottle, collaboration or denial. But it is interesting that Baldaev also seems to have some, perhaps vestigial, respect for Lenin and the ideals of the original Bolshevik Revolution, just as his drawing demonstrate a—possibly short-lived—hope in Gorbachev’s reforms, or at least an appreciation of the anger and dismay with which they were greeted by the bloated and corrupt officials.

The art is rarely subtle, with pigs’ snouts, devils’ horns and beasts’ fangs abounding. Indeed, the physical caricaturing is very reminiscent of the crude ways that official Soviet propaganda cartoons so often portrayed Western imperialists, Zionist conspirators and the like, physical grotesqueries indicating moral and political degeneration. But not only was Baldaev a man of his times and environment, his use of such techniques also subverts and appropriates the propaganda he so obviously abhors, something especially evident in the section devoted to his scathing portrayals of the Soviet imperial adventure in Afghanistan.

Supplemented by useful explanatory notes from the editors and contemporary pictures from photographer Sergei Vasiliev, taken for the newspaper Vecherny Chelyabinsk and thus very much in the official Soviet idiom (not least the parade when the local factory produced its millionth tractor!) this book is a fascinating, unusual and—I keep coming back to this word—disturbing alternative take on the later years of the doomed Soviet experiment. As well as an important document in its own right, I think it will have great value as a tool for educators. The cliché of a picture being worth a thousand words really does apply here. Strongly recommended.

Soviets. Danzig Baldaev & Sergei Vasiliev. London: FUEL, 2014