May Day posters were printed in the hundreds of thousands and pasted up for a week, which is why so few of them survive flat. This one carries the whole argument in a single image: a wall of faces from everywhere, and the word for peace stacked behind them in Latin, Cyrillic, Devanagari and Chinese. Peace. Friendship. Everybody is smiling and everybody is looking slightly past you.

Aleksei Kokorekin drew it. He was a house artist at Izogiz, the state publisher of pictorial art, a State Prize winner in 1946 for his wartime posters, and by 1958 about as established as a Soviet graphic artist could be. The imprint along the bottom edge records the machinery behind the picture: passed for press on 25 December 1957, three hundred thousand copies, one rouble, printed at the First Model Printing House in Moscow.

Two years later Kokorekin flew home from Delhi. He landed in Moscow on 23 December 1959 with what everyone took for a cold and was dead six days later of smallpox. Nine thousand people were quarantined, nine and a half million were vaccinated inside a week, and the thing was finished in nineteen days.