A Rose a Day No.15

In 1949, the year the USSR conducted its first nuclear test, the artist Boris Vladimirksi painted ‘Roses for Stalin’, the work illustrated above. It depicts smiling Soviet children handing ‘Uncle Stalin’ a big bunch of white and red roses, and the artist has painted the red of the roses in exactly the same hue as the boys’ Communist Party bandanas. The red rose had become the official flower of the Socialist International in the nineteenth century, but in this painting it is exploited as part of the Stalinist ‘cult of children’ which began in the 1930s and sought to cast Stalin as a benign leader with the future of Soviet children at heart. ‘Thanks to Beloved Stalin for Our Happy Childhood’ runs a caption to a poster from 1950 showing a smiling boy and girl presenting Josef Stalin with a bouquet of red roses (this time of a deeper red hue than the bandana):

Adolf Hitler also systematically abused the traditionally benign message carried by roses, and many propaganda photographs show women and children offering him roses and other flowers – a photograph of the opening day of the Berlin Olympics of 1936 shows Hitler receiving a bouquet including roses from the five year old daughter of the organizer of the event: