In January 1945, Radó arrived unexpectedly at the British Embassy in Cairo, having apparently escaped from Soviet officials escorting him against his wishes from Paris to Moscow. This essay uses recently released intelligence files to consider a pivotal episode in the long and eventful career of Alexander (Sándor) Radó (1899–1981), geographer, journalist and Soviet intelligence agent who lived and worked in various European cities before and during World War Two and later became an internationally renowned cartographer during the 1960s and 1970s in his native Hungary. A coda considers Jacobi's belated return to her Soviet corpus for the first time in the late 1950s and early '60s, a period characterized by a post-Stalinist thaw and the nominal end of the Red Scare in the United States, to which she had emigrated in 1935 in the wake of Hitler's appointment as chancellor and Germany's subsequent transformation into a one-party dictatorship. The essay theorizes some of the key problems that her corpus raises: the relative weight of political commitment and external control in its production whether it operates in a realist or mythic mode the extent to which it presents Soviet Russia's role in Central Asia as that of a modernizing state or colonizing empire, as its tsarist predecessor had been and the critical status of what she called “types” with respect to the nineteenth-century racist “type” photograph. It discusses her portrayal of a diverse array of workers, collective farmers, peasants, street traders, intellectuals, and political figures, first in Moscow and Michurinsk and then in the newly established socialist republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, where she was hosted by leading indigenous communists such as Abdurahim Hojiboyev and Fayzulla Xo'jayev. Based on a study of the archive in its entirety, this essay tells the story of Jacobi's journey through the lens of her photographs, building a portrait of the worlds in which she moved under the auspices of the Soviet photo agency Soiuzfoto. Yet she never assembled a photo book or other reflection about her experience. Traveling in Russia and Central Asia in 1932–33, the German-Jewish portrait photographer Lotte Jacobi produced an extraordinary archive of several thousand photographs documenting Soviet industrialization, collectivization, modernization, and, most profoundly, the revolution's human face. This essay therefore sheds light on what has remained obscured by the political history of the interwar and postwar years.
An overlooked detail in this story is the role that Heartfield's brother Wieland Herzfelde played in expanding the reception of Heartfield's work among Spanish and French graphic artists in 1931. Consequently, Münzenberg formed a transnational network that relied unintentionally on the various publishers and illustrated magazines that imitated the AIZ or the graphic artists who reproduced Heartfield's montages in the name of pro-Soviet sympathy and antifascist solidarity. The collaboration between the Comintern's minister of propaganda for western Europe and this avant-garde artist led to the fusion of the international reputation of Heartfield's photomontages and of Münzenberg's Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ) in 1929.
This essay posits that the tactical alliance in the mid-1920s between Willi Münzenberg and John Heartfield shaped the imagery of a united political front for the Communist International (Comintern).
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