Red Star Rising

Unique images documenting the Soviet Union have been gathered together for the first time in a new book. Laura Kelly talks to the collector who has taken us behind the Iron Curtain

It was a trip to Moscow in 1970, amid a ferocious winter that frequently reached -30°C, that got David King hooked on Russia. There researching a feature on Lenin for the Sunday Times Magazine, he was plunged into an Orwellian world of tapped phones and rifled-through hotel rooms. It began a lifelong obsession with Soviet history.

Forty years on, 66-year-old King is the owner of one of the world’s most important and extensive collections of Soviet ephemera. From the thrusting revolutionary posters of constructivists Aleksandr Rodchenko and Lyubov Popova, to photographs of war and famine and rare images of the people Stalin tried to have erased from history, his 250,000-item archive is a unique document of life behind the Iron Curtain.

His striking book Red Star Over Russia, just released in paperback, collects the most important images to present a visual history of the Soviet Union from 1917 until Stalin’s death.

The David King Collection is the first port of call for many newspapers, books and academics for Russian images and has a room in the Tate Modern dedicated to it. But when King started out, one of the major obstacles he faced was saving these incredible images from indifference. “It’s strange, looking back on it,” he says. “Nobody was in the slightest bit interested except me. They’d say, why are you buying all this rubbish? Who’s interested in that? They were all interested in Andy Warhol. When things changed in the mid-80s with Gorbachev, suddenly the world and her husband was phoning me saying, ‘Have you got a picture of somebody called Lenin?’”

Among the most incredible acquisitions are mugshots of the victims of the Moscow Trials, published in the book for the first time. Often taken just before they were executed, these haunting pictures show individuals who had crossed Stalin and found themselves caught up in the Great Purge of 1936-1938.

Through a third party who had links with the former secret police archives, King found out that the pictures were on file in Siberia and after intense negotiation managed to have them shipped to Moscow to be copied. So important are they considered that a condition of being allowed to see them was that they must travel by special train – they were not allowed to fly. “Actually having those pictures was incredible. It’s never happened before and it was extraordinary,” says King.

King is now keen to redress the balance in how we view Russia. “So many books come out now – especially in America – that are just so anti-Russian and you just wonder why they bother,” he explains.

“I think it’s important to report the truth as far as one can and then it’s up to people to make up their own minds.”

Red Star Over Russia is out now on paperback (Tate, £19.99)

Dictator at play, the off-the-record pictures of stalin, by his personal secret agent lt general nikolai vlasik, known as “Stalin’s faithful dog”, caused a great stir in russia when they finally emerged in the early 1960s. Blue blouse, red victory a gouache and montage artwork promoting one of the ‘Blue blouse’ political theatre groups in the early 1920s. they took their agitational productions to workers in the factories and fields. Sacrifices for the future, “we are building a fleet of airships in the name of lenin.” a poster by georgii kibardin from 1931 with text in old-style azerbaijanian. Lenin’s fury, the full force of lenin’s fury as depicted by ukrainian artist adolf strakhov on the cover of the life of lenin is the story of the RKP (russian communist party). Watching over moscow, a gigantic sculpture of lenin by sergei merkurov rules the centre of moscow in the late 1930s. The futurist, taken in 1930, just 15 minutes after he shot himself through the heart, Futurist poet and playwright Vladimir mayakovsky is shown on his deathbed. He killed himself after harsh criticism in the soviet press. The greatest frame-up in history shown for the first time in king’s book, this is one of the secret police mugshots from the moscow show trials of 1936-8. a close friend of lenin’s, grigory zinoviev was sentenced to death as an oppositionist and sho Shell shock, Emmanuel Yevzerikhin’s photograph of a wounded artilleryman and his comrades was taken in 1944 as the red army swept the nazis out of russia’s blood-soaked territory. Book cover