Drawing the Curtain

Drawing the Curtain takes key moments in cold-war history - for example, the Space Race, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the VietnamWar - and shows how they were represented in Soviet and Western cartoons and illustrations. A short introduction to each chapter provides the historical background to the events depicted; extended captions give further insight into the cartoons and illustrations themselves, revealing unexpected similarities, as well as more obvious differences, in the societies in which the illustrators were working. The cartoons come from a superb private collection of Soviet propaganda art and drawings, as well as that of the Political Cartoon Gallery in London. Juxtaposing many of the most famous Soviet cartoonists with their American and British counterparts, Drawing the Curtain offers an intriguing and amusing slant on the 20th century through national humour and propaganda. It also provides a very different take on the history of international relations between the Soviet Union and theWest during the long years of superpower rivalry in the second half of the 20th century.