Six-engine aircraft with fixed landing gear flying askew? Imaginative licence on the part of Gustav Klutsis (1895-1938) who created this poster in 1935 to show his adulation for Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (who in 1938 ordered his execution). The planes that fly over Red Square in Moscow are named "Vladimir Lenin", "Joseph Stalin", "Maxim Gorki", "Mikhail Kalinin", "Vyacheslav Molotov" etc. and the formation on the far right draws the letters of "Stalin." The message at the bottom proclaims, "Long live our happy socialist motherland! Long live our beloved, the great Stalin!"
Uncle Joe first used his warplanes, with Hitler's connivance, in September 1939 to invade the eastern half of Poland, followed a couple of months later by Finland and then the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia (Klutsis's homeland) and Lithuania in 1940.
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