Red Army Parade

Red Army Parade is a wordless picture book. It is colorful and festive, filled with light, mostly line-based illustrations that feel highly dynamic and rhythmic. Deyneka drew with colored strokes — red and gray, black and yellow — freely moving away from naturalistic color and often abandoning conventional perspective. Cavalry riders gallop across the page in a rhythmic lace-like pattern, with the distant rows rising above the heads of those in front. Sailors march in columns arranged vertically from top to bottom, row after row. Motorcyclists race from left to right, their speed conveyed through long yellow streaks in the background. Horse artillery passes by, and so on. Each image is built around its own distinct rhythm of movement and its own graphic solutions.

And here are the spectators: excited children greet an enormous tank filling the facing page of the spread. Encouraging children to admire the army was one of the goals of Soviet political propaganda at the time, and Deyneka managed to do this beautifully and effortlessly. He himself was clearly fascinated by the coordination of movement, the energy, the richness of rhythm, and the colorfulness of the parade as a whole. A similar visual approach appears in one of his rare books without an explicit political message, About Horses by V. Vladimirov (1928).