Holy shit. If this was the state of satire at the time, the people must be living a life of pure horror.
The context:Graphic satirists turned political during the Revolution of 1905 when a new array of artists arose - Brodsky, Kustodiev, and others - who would play a big role in 1917. Over 400 satirical journals came and went in the years of 1905-1907, replete with anti-government cartoons. In them artists produced extraordinarily violent and morbid depictions of governement repression, filled with religious and satanic images. The cover of the journal The Jester (Payats) showed a hand holding a severed Christ-like head of the martyred people against a blood red Kremlin and a raven-filled sky. Another presented Mother Russia as a young girl being devoured by the serpent of reaction. In the 1910s, cinema employed the satanic and serpentine images for the content of films and the imagery of their posters (see fig. 3). Both the pictures and the films were inspired by the dark occultist and mystical aura that enwrapped Russian society in these years.