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"...Climb Down and Get to Work!"
In Spring 1990, Czechoslovak artist and cartoonist Vladimir Rencin sends this message that is was time to stop the flag-waving euphoria surrounding the revolution's victory and to get to the hard work of rebuilding the country. The caption reads: "It's high time for you to climb down and get to work! The garden is neglected, the latrine" (actually a Czech word for an open-air refuse pit) "is….
Against Pig-Headedness and Corruption
Poster criticizing the Stasi - the GDR secret police - prior to March 18, 1990 East German election in which voters overwhelmingly backed unification with West Germany. The red letters in the poster "GEGEN STARRSINN UND KORRUPTION" - "AGAINST PID-HEADEDNESS AND CORRUPTION" - spell out the name of the hated secret agency, and the number "18" alludes to the upcoming….
301
A poster distributed by the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ), a liberal political party founded in 1988 in opposition to the Communist Party in power in Hungary. This poster alludes to the martyrs of the 1956 Soviet invasion to put down the Hungarian revolution. Imre Nagy and his associates who had promoted a "New Course" for socialism were buried in plot "301" of a Budapest cemetary, and….
Wolf Vostell - 9 November 1989
A more abstract image of the night the wall fell appears in this painting by an artist whose work had also appeared on the western side of the wall itself. This painting represented a March 1990 show of Vostell's work in a gallery in East Berlin - formerly a bastion of "socialist realist" art hailing the communist regime.
[description as stated in the guide for Goodbye, Comrade:….
It Must Not Happen Again (2)
One of a set of posters reflecting glasnost-era exposès of the crimes of the Stalin era - including collectivization, purges, and the gulag. The quotation from Pravda (5 April 1988) reads: "The guilt of Stalin, as well as the guilt of those around him, toward the party and people for the mass purges [and] lawlessness [they] committed is huge and unforgivable."
[description….
It Must Not Happen Again (1)
One of a set of posters reflecting glasnost-era exposès of the crimes of the Stalin era - including collectivization, purges, and the gulag. The quotation from Pravda (5 April 1988) reads: "The guilt of Stalin, as well as the guilt of those around him, toward the party and people for the mass purges [and] lawlessness [they] committed is huge and unforgivable."
[description….
For Them We Have Already "Voted"
March 1989 election poster for the nationalist "Sajudis" movement in Lithuania, wryly alluding to the Soviet leaders pictured here - Stalin, Molotov, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev - whose rule had been imposed on the Baltic countries since World War II and ratified through sham elections.
[description as stated in the guide for Goodbye, Comrade: An Exhibition of Images from the….
Comrades - It's Over!
Poster circulated by the anticommunist organization, Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) in the summer 1989 marking the anticipated departure-eviction of the Soviet Red Army troops who had kept Hungary in the Soviet bloc since the end of World War II.
[description as stated in the guide for Goodbye, Comrade: An Exhibition of Images from the Revolutions of ’89 and the Collapse of….
Berlin 9 November 1989
With the regime in disarry, an announcement that travel restrictions would be liberalized led East Germans to rush for the wall; confused guards let them pass, and by nightfall, Berliners from both sides had converged on the hated barrier and begun chipping away. This poster was sold in a (West) Berlin souvenir shop after 1989.
[description as stated in the guide for Goodbye,….
Goodbye, Comrade...
Of all of the East Central European revolutions, only Romania's turned violent. After government security forces killed protesters in the city of Timisoara, violence broke out between the army and the secret police, with the army standing by the protesters. Following a failed speech in the main square of Bucharest on December 21, 1989, Prime Minister Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were hunted….
Declaration of Charter 77
In 1976, the Czech psychedelic rock band, the Plastic People of the Universe, were arrested and tried by the Czech Communist government. The government convicted the band for disturbing the peace, with the band members serving 8 to 18 month sentences. In response to the arrest of the band, a group of Czech artists, writers, and musicians, including Vaclav Havel, circulated a petition for their….