By William Husband
Title: Soviet Propaganda Posters Collection, 1929-1931
ID: MSS Soviet
Extent: 0.1 cubic feet. More info below.
Languages of Materials: Russian [rus]
The Russian Revolution gave birth to the modern political poster. Previously posters served political and commercial purposes throughout the world, but the Russian Revolution expanded and transformed this pre-existing medium in scope, volume, and content. The Bolsheviks, the official name of the Russian Communists before 1918, embraced the poster both by making a virtue of necessity-the need to communicate effectively with a population still largely illiterate-as well as a so-called invented tradition-the inculcation of new values and norms by suggesting some direct continuity with the past. To these ends, the Bolsheviks took the art of persuasion in a new and different direction: to convince citizens to accept in the present the values society they hoped to create in the future.
The Bolshevik propaganda poster directly addressed the necessity to communicate graphically with a population plagued by illiteracy. Literacy figures for 1917 do not exist, but a generation earlier the tsarist Imperial Government listed 83 percent of the rural population and 55 percent of the urban dwellers as illiterate. Upon coming to power the Bolsheviks launched a massive literacy campaign whose results can be read in different ways. By 1920, the revolutionary state classified about 38 percent of the rural population and 74 percent of the urban population as literate, but those reporting the results, who were under pressure to show positive gains, used non-uniform and unreliable methods to measure improvement. In some cases, the ability to sign one's name qualified a person as "literate." Others received this distinction with nothing more than a rudimentary command of the mechanics of reading and writing. The fact that promoting literacy remained a dominant theme in Soviet propaganda posters in the 1920-1930s testifies that the revolutionary regime considered the problem far from solved even after more than a decade in power. To complicate further the task of effective mass communication, shortages of paper limited the press runs of all newspapers and books throughout the early years of Bolshevik rule, thus mandating a search for alternatives even to address the legitimately literate.
As they turned to visual propaganda to reach an intended audience poorly equipped to comprehend complex written materials, the Bolsheviks actively sought new technology and formats. In addition to poster art, the revolutionary state embraced silent film. Party leader Vladimir Lenin called cinema "the most important of the arts" in 1919, and in the 1920s pioneering directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, Alexander Dovzhenko, Vsevelod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov introduced innovations in composition, editing, conceptualization, technology, and camera angles that still attract praise from film historians. Moreover, the very ability of the revolutionaries to deliver what was then still a novel technology-moving pictures premiered in France in 1895-to an uninitiated audience lent legitimacy to a regime still striving to win the hearts and minds of the population. Beyond this, the inter-titles of silent film could carry didactic content, thereby enabling producers to mix medium with message.
The revolutionaries also took pains to cast their new messages in forms meant to evoke traditions and formats already familiar to the illiterate and partially literate, and the poster surpassed even the Party's daily national newspapers in its ability to reach a potential audience. Inthe second half nineteenth century, when the marketing of printed materials to general readers expanded exponentially in Russia, publishers did not neglect the illiterate and partially literate consumer. They especially promoted picture books with straightforward illustrations above simple captions, called a lubok in Russia and a chapbook in the West. The commercially successful lubok thus provided the model for the propaganda poster, to which the post-revolutionary audience related easily. Ironically, the importance of iconography in the Russian Orthodox Church provided an additional familiar touchstone that undoubtedly underscored the appeal of visual propaganda in the antireligious Soviet state.
Bolshevik dependence on poster art began even before the Party came to power, and the Communists developed this medium to a level previously unprecedented globally. Posters played a central role for all political parties during the critical revolutionary months between February and October 1917, and by 1921-the ruinous Russian Civil War of 1918-1920 notwithstanding-the Bolsheviks had produced more than 4000 different images. In 1919 the Russian Telegraph Agency, ROSTA, assumed general responsibility for information, agitation, and the press in the entire country, and in its role as central organ of agitation ROSTA initially became the main source of poster art. A distinctly Bolshevik propaganda poster style, called "ROSTA windows,"took shape, and by 1922 some 1600 different windows, with a total press run of 237000, appeared. Once the State Publishing House, Gosizdat, and its literary subsidiary, Litizdat, also began poster production, totals soared further. In 1920 alone, Gosizdat produced 3.2 million copies of its seventy-five posters. And although they were the main producers, these three did not monopolize the process. Other agencies independently entered the field, so that as early as 1920 Gosizdat reported that it was "impossible not to notice the extraordinary flood of posters, put out by the most varied of institutions."
More Extent Information: 18 posters; 1 map folder
Statement on Access: The collection is open for research.
Acquisition Note: The source of this collection is unknown. In 1995, war posters housed by the Library were transferred to the University Archives. Shortly thereafter (in 1996), a small number of war posters that had been transferred from the Library to the Horner Museum in 1979 were also acquired by the University Archives. These two accessions comprised the University Archives' War Poster Collection. The World War I and II posters were separated in 2014 to form the World War I Poster Collection and the World War II Poster Collection, which both now reside in Oregon State University's Special Collections & Archives Research Center.
Related Materials: Other propaganda posters appear in the World War I Poster Collection and the World War II Poster Collection.
Preferred Citation: Soviet Propaganda Posters Collection, Oregon State University Special Collections and Archives Research Center, Corvallis, Oregon.
Posters, Soviet
Propaganda, Soviet