Atlas für Politik, Wirtschaft, Arbeiterbewegung / 1 Der Imperialismus.

Alexander Radolfi was his original name, child of a Hungarian jewish family. As a young man he felt attrackted to communism and participated in the short lived communist council republic of Bela Kun in 1919. In that year he had to flee, after a right wing counter-coup by Horthy, and found himself in Moscow. Here he changed his name in a more international sounding way to Alex Rado. He worked as cartographer in the Soviet Union for a decade or so in the twenties and thirties, starting with the first travel guide to the Soviet Union and expanding his work to subjects all over the world. Later he became a Soviet spy and lived in Berlin, France and Switzerland, using the anagram DORA (Rado) for his activities. During WWII he was an important information source for the Soviets, also using his great abilities as a cartographer. In the end he did get in trouble, fell in disgrace and was hunted down by the Soviet secret service in Cairo and forced on a plane to Moscow and is siad to have spend ten years or so in prison. When he was released in 1955 and send back to Budpaest, he Hungarized his name to Rado Sandor. He spent the rest of his life working on more academic styled cartography. These three variants of his name summarize the stages of his life: -born as Hungarian Jew, becoming an international communist and working as a spy, ending as an Hungarian academic. 

The style of this atlas, with fat lines, a few colors: black and red, hatched areas, and simple icons, made to visualize complex data for a general public, stems from a 'science and art movement' known under the name of 'Proletkult' (Proletcult). This movement began before the Russian Revolution of 1917 its chief inspirator was Alexander Bogdanov, who had a vision of the working together of a proletarian art and science, and has been influential in the early beginnings of the Bolsjewist party, with an "ultra-left" movement that wanted to break with all bourgeois culture. This radical novement soon was to be muffled by some manouvres of comrade Lenin and had to make way, slowly, for a different style that got to be known as 'social realism'. In hindsight we can see that the 'proletkult' movement was more the idea that left wing intellectuals had of what the proletariat should be than a genuine workers class initiative. The ideas of the unity of science Bogdanov and "proletarian" forms of culture do relate to similar ideas, in quiet a different context. This was in Vienna where Otto Neurath became an active propagator for a new 'unity of science' and also developed communication systems to help people in understanding society and thus become active actors in it. Neurath's statistcal schemes and maps, later named 'isotype', where meant as a start of a new visual language that would be the carrier of change and part of a new non-imperialistic internationalism. Neuarath has been working in Moscow for a short while in the thirties, being invited by the Communist Party. he helped setting up a bureau to map social changes and advances, but left soon enough, before Stalinist terror halted all such progressive ideas. if Rado and Neurath ever met is still something I like to research. It could well be, as both Neurath and Rado had been involved as young man in short lived Council republics in the year 1919. Neurath in the Republic. Both had at that time to fear for their lives. 

The style of Rado's atlas pages (drawn by K. Metzler and with a binding designed by John Heartfield) was, in retrospect, not just typical for left-wing communists, but can be seen also in some of the popular map materials produced by Nazi and fascist organizations, or British and American "imperialists" of the time. These are maps that are strongly suggesting that there is only one way to read them, they tend not to have any level of multiple interpretation. These are iconic devices rather than analytical tools. I refrain here from using the word "propaganda" that would be too easy, because as we can read in other examples of mapping shown on these webpages, maps always have some sort of power function, maps can not be made without "a point of view". 

I have added a few words from the introduction (in German) to the atlas by Th. Rothstein () written in 1929 in Moscow.

22-04-2003 - 08-01-2004 tj.