In March 1932, the cover of Fortune magazine featured a painting of Red Square by Diego Rivera. A numberless crowd of faceless men marched with red banners, surrounding a locomotive engine emblazoned with hammer and sickle. This was the image of communist modernization the Soviets wished to transmit during Stalin’s first five-year plan: The achievement was impersonal, technical, unquestionable. The Soviet Union was transforming itself from an agrarian backwater into an industrial power through sheer disciplined understanding of the objective realities of history. Its citizens celebrated the revolution, as Rivera’s painting suggested, even as it molded them into a new kind of people.
Russia's War Against Ukraine
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A woman cries in front of coffins on Nov. 25, 2006, before a funeral ceremony during a day of remembrance for up to 10 million people who starved to death in the great famine of 1932-33, in the western city of Zhovkva. Two hundred and seventy bodies, including 61 children, killed by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's secret police, were found in a city monastery and burried Nov. 25, 2006.
