Cambridge exhibition reveals before and after versions of pro-revolution poster and show how Lenin was put in the picture

Startlingly different versions of the same Russian poster, revealing an artist struggling to tone down his original vision in order to toe the party line, are revealed for the first time in an exhibition at Cambridge University library.

Maksim Vladimirovich Ushakov-Poskochin, born in 1893 and best known as a book illustrator, was arrested as a political dissident in 1941 and survived just two years in the Gulag forced-labour prison camps, dying in 1943.

The striking but conventional printed version of his 1925 poster showed a parade led by four heroic Soviet workers marching past a statue of Lenin, carrying a banner reading: "Hail the international proletariat revolution!".

It survives in a unique collection built up over a lifetime by Catherine Cooke, an architect and internationally renowned Russian scholar.

She died in a car accident in Cambridge in 2004, and the exhibition is drawn from her vast collection, which covers the 20th century from the end of empire to perestroika, including not only works of art, books, letters and journals, but perfume bottles, banknotes and cigarette packets.

Like thousands of other artists who became politically suspect, Ushakov-Poskochin had his work almost forgotten in the decades after his death, and the poster was unsigned.

Mel Bach, the curator of the exhibition, thought she recognised his style, managed to track down his grandson Andrei Ushakov through a Russian antiques forum, and was amazed to discover that his son was also still alive, aged 89.

They identified his work immediately, but had never seen the finished poster and had no idea that it had ever been printed and distributed. They sent a copy of the far more radical original drawing which had survived in the family's archives.

"Identical in many respects, the sketch and the finished poster differ most noticeably in one respect," Bach said.

"The place that is taken in the poster by a statue of Lenin is, in the sketch, a puppet representing the bourgeoisie dangling over a cauldron of fire."

She added: "His son and grandson are thrilled the poster will be part of the exhibition. They are delighted at the opportunity for their father and grandfather's name and work to be better known."

• A Soviet Design for Life: the Catherine Cooke Collection of 20th-century Russian architecture and design, free at Cambridge University library until April 2013.

• The first Russian motherboard based on ARM-processor Baikal-M