Before Jude Dobson's bad hair day and Princess Di's butler...

Yes, this is a lazy post, but if I did Trotsky yesterday I might as well do the gravedigger of the Russian revolution today. And the picture isn't photoshopped - I'm too lazy for that. This 1940s Australian Women's Weekly cover is part of Monash University's online Communism exhibition. Monash's curator tells us that:

This was not a case of "radical chic" rather it was to promote an image of an avuncular "Uncle Joe" our powerful ally during the final days of the war. There was no article about Stalin in the magazine.

I suppose Stalin on the cover of the Women's Weekly is no stranger than The Internationale being sung during the Last Night of the Proms during the same period in Britain. The next item in Monash's exhibition reflects the way Stalin's image was remoulded in the West after the beginning of the Cold War:



Perhaps the most fascinating stuff in the exhibition, though, is the indigenous commie material like the cover of this book about the Eureka Youth League. (Readers with longish memories may recall my post on the Eureka rebellion and the famous flag it created...)