Judge — February 13, 1932 — page 10: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# Political Cartoon Analysis This Judge magazine cartoon satirizes Soviet leadership, likely from the early 1930s. The massive wheel represents Stalin's "Five-Year Plan"—the Soviet Union's ambitious industrial development program. The figures appear to be Communist leaders callously allowing a person to continue being ground by the wheel for two additional years rather than stopping it to save him. The satire attacks the Five-Year Plan's human cost and the leadership's indifference to suffering caused by their policies. The exaggerated mechanical imagery emphasizes how the plan treated people as disposable cogs. This reflects American anti-Communist sentiment and criticism of Stalin's brutal industrialization, which caused widespread famine and hardship among Soviet citizens during this period.