Under the bedski 

• 1974 
• Lee, Joseph 
• Drawing 
• Historical item 

5464321

Drawings / paintings

Under the bedski

31 x 24.5 cm

1974

Original political cartoon on card in pen and ink, published in the Eastern Daily Press, 1974, shows Soviet leader Brezhnev under the ‘Solzhenitsyn spotlight’ while loudly proclaiming ‘Soviet “freedom”’ in the face of ‘world condemnation’. On 12 February 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported the next day from the Soviet Union to Frankfurt, West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, historian, and critic of Soviet totalitarianism. He helped to raise global awareness of the gulag and the Soviet Union's forced labour camp system, and his writings were long suppressed in the USSR. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. As a leading dissident, he was a thorn in the flesh of the Soviet authorities, and too well known in the west to be disposed of quietly. Card size 31 x 24.5 cm (12 x 10 inch), image size 29 x 22 cm, signed lower right, typed caption in lower border. In very good condition.