'I can't believe my eyes' - Drawing. Public domain image.

Cartoon shows Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Joseph Stalin, resting on a cloud labeled "Communist Paradise," looking down in dismay at Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev leading a funeral procession bearing a coffin labeled "Communism." Between 1985 and 1990, Gorbachev steered his country's foreign relations in a new conciliatory direction by working with Presidents Reagan and Bush to sign a series of arms control agreements, withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan, and improving relations with China. He also transferred power from the Communist Party to elected legislatures in Russia's union republics. Such developments, along with the fall of the Berlin Wall and unification of East and West Germany, signaled the end of the Cold War. Valtman imagines the consternation with which the hallowed Communist trinity, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, would have viewed these developments.
Published in: The Waterbury Republican.
Published in: The Middletown press.
Published in Valtman : the editorial cartoons of Edmund S. Valtman, 1961-1991. Baltimore, Md. : Esto, 1991, p. 15.
Published in The best editorial cartoons of the year, 1992, p. 21.
Exhibited: American treasures of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 2003.
Exhibited: "Timely and Timeless" at the Graphic Arts Gallery, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 2011-2012.
(DLC/PP-1999:142.065)
ljr / 020411.
Unprocessed in PR13 CN 1999:142.065
Publication information from the artist.