Despite the superficial commonalities and the extensive interchanges between the imagery of satirical journals and popular postcards, scholarly attention has so far focused mainly on the former. Tobie Mathew's study of anti-government postcards in Russia under the last three tsars aims to remedy this neglect. Covering the period 1866–1917, but primarily focused on the period 1905–1907—because this was when the overwhelming majority of anti-government postcards were produced—Mathew's book investigates the confluence of political liberalism in an autocratic state and modern popular commercial print media.

Divided neither neatly thematically nor chronologically, the book considers four main dimensions of the way the political postcard “repackaged [events such as] the 1905 revolution for popular consumption” (20). In the first main section, a chronological survey of the legal and political circumstances in which political postcards were produced and consumed, postcards are cast as “messengers of popular discontent” (49). Its richness of detail on “the many social and legal changes that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries [that] affected the production of anti-government postcards” (21) evokes not just the state's attempts to silence the utterances of the revolutionary printmakers, but also sheds light on the shady existence of those desperate to extract political and economic advantage from the popularity of their satirical critiques’ graphic expressions.

The book's second main section looks at organizations and individuals who produced the postcards, with a special interest in the different motivations and practices of the various producers. The Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionaries receive particular attention, because of their political as well as artistic prominence, as do the most notable private producers who joined the market after liberalization following the October Manifesto. The distinction between revolutionary and private producers, as Mathew notes (245), is a slight one, but the connections between postcard art and, for example, artistic organizations such as the World of Art are fruitfully drawn out in this section. Mathew's argument that these postcards’ value lies in their ability to reveal “a remarkable insight into the way in which the regime lost its sacred lustre” (21) seems to downplay their other contributions to the development of liberal-elite artistic culture in the pre-revolutionary period.

Methodological problems associated with studying postcard production and artwork are not fully explored in this work, but the author hints in numerous brief references to the problems of drawing such conclusions from this ephemera. Postcards are fugacious and unindexed, like political cartoons, but they are unique in their tracelessness. Mathew's expertise in divining authorship and publication information from graphic style is remarkable, but such methodological difficulties were obviated by the author's archival research in Russia, at the Main Administration for Press Affairs and the Department of Police, and at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.

Other recent analyses of Russian revolutionary postcards focus on pictorial analysis, and while this work's primary interest is in production practices and, furthermore, while the graphic art is never divorced from the discussion of producers, one section is devoted more deliberately to visual content. Overall, this book perhaps relies slightly too heavily on the narrative sweep of the political events depicted in the postcards to provide the text with structure. The organization of the analysis of the graphic content of the postcards could be frustrating for some readers, and we might wish for deeper exploration of how photographs might “narrate” events while satirical art “plays” politics, but the quality of the illustrations and the detail in the account are seductive. For readers used to the cautious Aesopian visual language of pre-revolutionary political cartoons, the radicalism and boldness of the images in this book are fascinating, and the wealth of visual material Mathew presents further enriches the discussion of the influences and implications of these postcards.

In contrast with the attention given to the production of these revolutionary postcards, the book's consideration of the consumption of such imagery is brief. Unsurprisingly, given the nature of the material and the historical circumstances, little is known about the way readers acquired, collected, and consumed this content, and Mathew's case study—an album collected between 1904 and 1907 by a medical student—provides an important insight, not least into the methodological challenges involved with this fascinating and very significant material.