Kukryniksy Poster “We Will Mercilessly Rout and Destroy the Enemy!”

“We Will Mercilessly Rout and Destroy the Enemy!” was the first wartime poster by the Kukryniksy and one of the first posters of the Great Patriotic War. It appeared on the streets of Moscow in June 1941, immediately after Germany attacked the USSR.

The Kukryniksy were a creative team of three artists: Mikhail Kupriyanov, Porfiry Krylov and Nikolai Sokolov. The pseudonym is made up of the first syllables of the surnames of Kupriyanov and Krylov, the first letters of Sokolov’s first name and the initial of his surname. The artists worked throughout the war, producing posters for the TASS Windows, leaflets and political caricatures that were often printed in the newspaper Pravda.

The poster shows a Red Army soldier in a helmet with a star thrusting his bayonet into the head of Hitler, who is bursting through a sheet inscribed “Non-Aggression Pact between the USSR and Germany”; next to Hitler is a mask. The soldier is rendered in red, the enemy is drawn in black line, and at the bottom is the signature “Kukryniksy-41”. The poster is letterpress-printed on paper; according to the museum, it was published by the Iskusstvo publishing house.