A little over a month ago, newspapers announced the passing of Lana Peters.  Born Svetlana Stalina, Peters was the only daughter of infamous Russian dictator Josef Stalin.  After defecting to the United States in 1967, Peters wrote several memoirs about her experience living in the shadow of her father, a man reviled as a murderous tyrant responsible for the deaths of millions of Russian citizens.  Her writing offers a uniquely intimate view of Stalin.

Thanks to collaboration between Yale University Press and the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, those interested in better understanding Josef Stalin as a man and as a political figure have an exciting new resource: the Stalin Digital Archive.  Comprised of hundreds of personal letters, books from Stalin’s personal libraries with notes in the margins, and even wartime correspondence with American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Stalin Digital Archive includes recently declassified material never-before seen digitally or in print.  Yale has translated some of the documents; for the rest, the archive includes tagging capabilities for scholars accessing the archive that allow for crowd-sourced translations. “We are so proud to be publishing the SDA, fulfilling our mission of disseminating research and scholarship in a way that marries digital innovation and scholarly traditions,” says YUP Director John Donatich in an interview for Publishers Weekly.

Josef Stalin’s reign, though characterized by brutality, repression, and genocide, had a positive impact in at least one area: its contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany during World War II.  Stalin was able to amass and mobilize a large army of Russian citizens that made the Eastern front one of Germany’s biggest struggles during the war, inflicting devastating defeats on the Nazis at Moscow and Stalingrad.  Aiding the war effort was Russia’s well-oiled propaganda machine.  During World War II, known in Russian as the “Great Patriotic War,” the Soviet TASS news agency produced thousands of hand-painted “agitational propaganda” posters depicting Nazis as a variety of vicious beasts and urging Russian citizens to contribute to the fight against evil.  Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters At Home and Abroad, 1941-1945, edited by Peter Kort Zegers and Douglas W. Druick is the first printed collection of these posters.  The catalogue accompanied a groundbreaking exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago this fall, which revealed how preeminent artists of the day used unconventional technical and visual means to contribute to the war effort.

The origins of Windows on the War are almost as fascinating as the exhibition itself. Back in 1997, 26 brown paper parcels were discovered in a storage area for the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago. Their presence was completely unknown, their contents a mystery. As conservators and curators carefully worked to open the envelopes, they were surprised and intrigued to find that they contained 50-year-old monumental posters created by TASS, the Soviet Union’s news agency, which had a monopoly on all state information. From this discovery, the major exhibition began to take shape.

The book explains how the TASS made their “high art” individually painted posters, as well as their “low art” pieces, which were mass-produced through an elaborate but efficient system of stencils.  Exquisitely designed and poetically written, the TASS posters mark the peak of propaganda art and its use in Stalin’s Russia. Windows on the War is not only a fascinating glimpse into one of the most significant government-sponsored cultural efforts of the 20th century but also a major scholarly undertaking that brings these posters into the public eye for the first time in six decades.