The Message of the XIII Party Congress (on Cooperation)

A four-minute agitational cartoon from the first year after Lenin's death, made to carry the Thirteenth Party Congress's 1924 resolutions on cooperation into halls that a printed decree could not reach. Alexander Bushkin, one of Soviet animation's earliest dedicated directors, working in cutout (perekladka), designed and directed this poster-film for Mezhrabpom-Rus. It is not a story. It is policy drawn by hand: collective work praised, the private trader turned into a cartoon enemy, the NEP-era slogan of cooperatives translated into pictures for peasants and workers. Western catalogs sometimes credit Dziga Vertov; Bushkin, who also supplied animated inserts for Vertov's Kino-Pravda, is the name on the Russian filmographies. The film survives as a document of how early Soviet animation understood itself: not as entertainment, but as a moving wall newspaper.