Content note: Caricature of Hitler with a swastika. This object is shown as it was published. Why

Muscovites at TASS Window No. 5, 'What Hitler Wants', 1941 Soviet Union photograph: A crowd, a Red Army officer among them

Muscovites at TASS Window No. 5, 'What Hitler Wants' (Chego Gitler khochet)

A crowd, a Red Army officer among them, reads TASS Window No. 5 in a shop window on Kuznetsky Most in Moscow, weeks after the German invasion. The stencilled poster, headed 'What Hitler wants', sets out in four numbered cartoon panels what a German victory would bring, with Hitler drawn in caricature wearing a swastika, so the viewer is shown the threat rather than told about it.

Propaganda techniques used in this photograph

Fear appeal

Date: July 1941
Period: Second World War
Made by: TASS Window studio (Okna TASS), Moscow; poster by Mikhail Cheremnykh

Full record

Region, Country, Medium, Issuer type, Regime, Leader, Audience, Purpose, Themes, Event, Source, Rights

Region: Eastern Europe and Eurasia
Country: Soviet Union
Medium: Photograph
Issuer type: State
Regime: Soviet Union
Leader: Joseph Stalin
Audience: Domestic public
Purpose: Demonize
Themes: War and the military, Home front
Event: World War II
Regime: Soviet Union under Stalin
Leader: Joseph Stalin
Source: Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
Source: Wikimedia Commons (Moscow Main Archive via mos.ru), retrieved September 27, 2026
Rights: CC BY 4.0 (Moscow city government, mos.ru)
Photo: A. V. Ustinov, July 1941. Moscow Main Archive (Glavarkhiv Moskvy), mos.ru, CC BY 4.0.

Text on the object

Original (Russian) · read from the image, not independently checked

ОКНО ТАСС №5

ЧЕГО ГИТЛЕР ХОЧЕТ

[illegible — small captions beneath the four cartoon panels]

[A separate window visible at the left edge of the photograph:]
РАБОТАЙ БЫСТРО,
ЧЕТКО, ЛОВКО

English translation (machine translation by Claude, not verified by a fluent reader)

TASS WINDOW No. 5

WHAT HITLER WANTS

[illegible]

[A separate window visible at the left edge of the photograph:]
WORK FAST,
PRECISELY, DEFTLY

The numbered captions under each of TASS Window No. 5's four cartoon panels are too small to read reliably in this photograph and are not transcribed, consistent with this entry's own notes field. 'Work fast, precisely, deftly' is the heading of the separate TASS Window No. 11 visible at the left edge of the same street-corner photograph, not part of Window No. 5.