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
Note: Produced in 1930, this poster sold for 60 kopecks in a press run of 20,000. It was published by the Artistic Press of the Association of Artists of the Revolution [AXP] Society, a diverse group of artists that existed from 1928 to 1933 and receives credit for formulating the basis of the style to be known as Socialist Realism. Although many works in the artistic and literary community conformed voluntarily to the tenets of Soviet propaganda in the 1920s (Fedor Gladkov's 1926 work Cement is renowned as "the first proletarian novel"), the term Socialist Realism was not coined publicly by a Soviet official until May 1932. Later that year at a gathering of writers in the home of Maxim Gorky, Joseph Stalin described Socialist Realism as truthful representation in the arts, although in his view truth could only show the Soviet Union moving toward revolutionary socialism. Writers spent the next two years amplifying and refining Stalin's basic tenets, and when the first congress of the newly formed Union of Soviet Writers met in August 1934 Socialist Realism became official state policy-the only acceptable approach in all creative arts.
This poster depends far more on the elaborate art work than the cryptic caption to deliver its message, which is painted in a style that would suggest a connection to the old world and to the pre-1918 Russian alphabet. With an almost fairy tale quality to the representation, the poster simply accuses religious leaders of greed and avarice.
Note: This is a simple and standard salvo in the battle against alcohol--one the state was losing. The Russian Imperial Government had imposed a prohibition during World War I, but the revolution brought with it the widespread looting of the liquor reserves. The Soviet revolutionary government tried to revive the wartime prohibition in 1917, but even its Red Guards and workers= militias could not resist the temptation to drink. Inthese times of grain shortage, the state wanted the population to eat rather than drink existing supplies in the form of grain alcohol, but the illegal distillation of samogon (bootleg liquor) became a major enterprise that whole villages pursued as a cottage industry, despite harsh penalties for doing so.
The revolutionary regime passed draconian decrees against the distillation, sale, and consumption of samogon that it was virtually powerless to enforce. Rural moonshiners brought their wares to urban markets like any other agricultural product, and urban distillers sold from their homes. Distillers easily bribed the police sent to arrest them, often with samogon itself. The fact that the technology involved was not complex exacerbated matters, and some Party officials began wistfully to remember the state's pre-1913 liquor revenues. Inlate 1925, the Soviet state once again began producing vodka, without apparently diminishing the illegal homebrew industry. Needless to say, this did not produce an alcohol-free revolutionary society, but rather placed the revolutionary regime in the position of producing vodka for revenue purposes and opposing its consumption out of a concern for social welfare. Posters such as this testify to the ongoing-and seemingly futile-character of the battle.
This straightforward promotion of hygiene graphically depicts three sanitary processes: the benefits of fresh air, cleanliness through sweeping, and especially a detailed demonstration of the proper way to wash hands. Across the top: "Working Through General Participation in Carrying Out of the Sanitary Minimum [A Soviet expression used to define minimum standards in fields like hygiene, allotted living space, and public health]"
"We Will Reduce the Fulfillment of the Five Year Plan to Four Years" "Carry Out the Sanitary Minimum"
"In personal life / in living quarters /on the street / in enterprises / in local social encounters."
“We Will Restructure the Village in Atheist Socialist Harmony” reads the inscription across the top.
The slogan in the upper left quadrant, on the grounds of a former religious institution, reads:
“We Will Transform the Monastery
Into a Commune of the Poor.”
In the center of the background is the “Atheist Club,” and to its right is the “Labor School.”
In the upper center the slogan reads:
“The Tractor Leads Us on
the Road to Collectivization.”
Beneath the slogan on the former church is “Agricultural Machinery Warehouse.”
The slogan in the upper right quadrant, in a workers club that is an agitational center and reading room, reads:
“We Will Convert the Center of the Drug [a common reference to religion in antireligious propaganda]
Into a Cultural Center.”
On the wall is the slogan “Atheists, Build the Collective Farms.”
To its right hangs the slogan “Down with Sectarians and Priests.”
In the lower left quadrant, as the uninitiated witness a scientific demonstration, the slogan reads:
“Do Not Learn from the Bible, but Learn
at the Experimental Station [Laboratory].”
In the lower center the slogan reads:
“The Proletarian Town Will Help
The Atheist Village.”
The building in the left background is labeled “Nursery School.”
The building in the center of the background is labeled “Commune.”
In the lower right section, workers tour an electrical generator plant, and the slogan reads:
“Down with the Realm of the Prophet,
Long Live Electrification.”
Note: No element of the Russian Revolution suffers more frequently from misunderstanding than the Soviet assault on religion. Common misperceptions posit that immediately upon taking power the Bolsheviks closed all churches, executed clergy, and made individual worship illegal. In actuality, during the Russian Civil War and thereafter zealots did indeed close local churches, and there were instances in which priests who lost their lives. Monasteries and church property were confiscated and sacred objects defiled, including the opening of crypts of interred saints. But while the revolutionary regime made clear from the outset its intention to rid Russia of religion, the tactics of the Party leadership often differed from those of uncontrolled local activists, and it never outlawed personal belief.
In practice, revolutionary leaders frequently found themselves reining in “excesses” in antireligious work by local atheist zealots, while simultaneously promoting secularism with a combination of propaganda and repression. Thus, the Communist Party pursued atheism as its official position but also recognized pragmatically that overt attacks on religion, especially on the Russian Orthodox Church, did more to galvanize opposition among the rank-and-file than to win their hearts and minds. In schools and general propaganda, antireligious campaigns initially relied on a nonreligious (promoting science and rationalism to wean believers reflexively away from religion) rather than an antireligious (direct action against religious institutions) strategy.
Party leaders faced myriad problems. Religious belief persisted in Party ranks despite official prohibitions, and the League of the Godless (later the League of the Militant Godless) began operations only in 1925. From then until the Party disbanded it in 1944, the League drew continual criticism for its lack of effectiveness. Despite the regime’s overt public repudiation of religious institutions, Party documents show antireligious work to have been chronically underfunded, carried out by comrades considered less than the most talented, and frequently neglected by regional and local Party organs in favor of what were considered more pressing tasks.
This is not to deny the extensive attacks on religious institutions that did occur. The revolutionary state never lost sight of its goal of general atheism, and pressure was relentless. In 1922-1923, the Soviet state carried out an orchestrated confiscation of church valuables, and during the collectivization of agriculture that began in 1929 churches and priests were special targets, as was the seizure of church bells. And the Soviets never abandoned the goal of closing the maximum number of churches with the least possible social disruption.
Nothing justifies the violence against religion that took place, but we must recognize that the Soviet state depended just as heavily on propaganda to achieve its antireligious goals. And because antireligious work was a low priority in practice, such propaganda succeeded best when integrated with other objectives. This poster illustrates that principle well, as it links the elimination of religion to other revolutionary aims: creating a better material life through technology and science, alleviating poverty, providing nurseries for small children, establishing workers’ clubs, promoting the mechanization of agriculture, achieving the electrification of the country, and creating collectives.
Note: This poster advocates fulfilling the First Five Year Plan for industry (1928-1932) in four years, a prevailing slogan during the period. The First Five Year Plan (subtracting 1928 from 1932), however, was not a “five year plan” at all, and the starting date was actually projected backwards from when the plan functionally went into effect in 1929. In a large sense, it also was not a “plan” in any rational economic sense. It set unrealistically high goals and quotas for each branch of the economy that the developed industrial economies of the West would have strained to meet, but were impossible for the ravaged economy of the USSR. In reality, this was a mobilization campaign based loosely on the idea that pursuing unattainable levels would ensure maximum effort from all. Opposition from religion and fascism were also stock elements of this propaganda.
The artist Deni [Viktor N. Deni] signed at the lower right. Deni (real name Denisov) emerged as a prodigy of poster art in the early years of the Revolution, and he produced as steadily as his health permitted thereafter. By 1930s, however, some of his work was criticized for being insufficiently agitational, that is, more concerned with aesthetics than didacticism and the mobilization of opinion.
Note: Printed by the Art Department of the State Publishing House, IZOGIZ, in 1930 in 30,000 copies, this poster addresses one of the major concerns of the revolutionary state during the 1920s-1930s: illiteracy. While much of the focus during the 1920s was on adult illiteracy, the state made clear from the outset that it placed great hope in children and adolescents to create the revolutionary future (as older citizens who could not be converted inevitably would die). In this straightforward poster, three young boys [the child on the viewer’s right carries an ABC book] enthusiastically and purposefully walk toward school, beckoning a fourth to join them. He, however, cannot, since his mother—generally regarded in Soviet propaganda as carriers of culture with immense influence in shaping their offspring—holds him back. Hence, although ostensibly promoting child literacy, the target of the poster is above all recalcitrant parents.
The allusion to cities and fields as foundations of life reflects the radical experimental pedagogy of the period, which eliminated the study of distinct disciplines in elementary schools and integrated practical experience outside the classroom or in labor. Joseph Stalin would restore traditional methods and standards in the 1930s.
The word for “ignoramus” used here is actually a diminutive of the man’s name Mitrofan. The name became a synonym for “ignoramus” or “person of little education” in reference to the character Mitrofan in Denis Fonvizin’s 1781 play The Minor, sometimes translated as The Young Oaf.
Translation, beginning lower right quadrant: “Farm Collective, Learn How to Struggle with Infectious Diseases, Organize Readings [and] Discussions of Sanitary Issues, Drawing the Attention of the Local Doctor, Midwife, [or] Female or Male Nurse to This Business.
Establish Sanitary Corners [that is, exhibits for dispensing information] in Clubs [and] Reading Rooms, Having Supplied Them with Easy to Understand Books on Infectious Diseases [and] Obtaining Available Sanitary Film-Reels, Etc.
There does not have to be even one person fall ill with smallpox in the collective farm. See to it that all babies older than three months are given a preventive inoculation. Adults also need to be inoculated for smallpox every five years.
Scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhus, bloody diarrhea—are dangerous infectious diseases which are easily transmitted by surroundings. All these illnesses result in a fever for the ill person.
Transfer each person taken ill with an elevated temperature immediately to a separate isolation ward room. Such an ill person must remain in the isolation ward until he is sent to a hospital.
The place where the infected person was found must be thoroughly cleaned with hot water and soap or lye.”
Translation: “It Is Not True That Alcohol Nourishes, Warms, [and] Strengthens the Power of the Muscle.”
“Comparative Strengthening Qualities Of Foods:
Butter 100; Meat 55; Sugar 48; Bread 36; Potatoes 13; Vodka 0.
It is true that alcohol increases professional illnesses and poisoning, accidents and absenteeism, [and] diminishes labor productivity.
The number of accidents per 1000 people that involve loss of work time
Up to 4 weeks: Of all insured workers, 82; among alcoholics, 969.
More than 4 weeks: Of all insured workers, 15; among alcoholics, 53.
Alcohol is the Enemy of Healthy Labor”
This poster shows an alcoholic passed out on a bed with an empty bottle nearby. His barefoot wife washes laundry by hand while their infant child plays on the floor in the foreground. The didactic message reads:
“Stop! See for Yourself Whether This is a Good Picture—Alcohol—A Terrible Boggy Slime.
Grief, Illness, Sorrow and Need Always Follow Vodka.”
“Proletariat of the West[,] To the Scaffolding of the Socialist Construction in the USSR”
With a “5 in 4” banner in the background (a reference to the slogan of fulfilling the First Five Year Plan for industry of 1928-1932 in four years), a Western worker (as evident by his bag marked “Instrument” in English) is welcomed to a Soviet construction site by a comrade. The banner above the Soviet worker reads:
“For Sotscompetition [Socialist Competition]
For a Shock Work Tempo!”
At left is a befuddled bourgeois capitalist amid the symbols of Western decadence. He wears a swastika cuff link and carries an S-D [Social-Democrat (moderate Marxist)] declaration that reads: “The Horrible Atrocities of the Bolsheviks!”
Across the bottom reads: “The Proletariat of the West and America Come to the USSR to Participate in the Building of Socialism.”
The message for Soviet consumption reads: “The task for the workers of our countries is to adopt their production experience and technical knowledge, their tempos of work, their [poster torn; word missing] to operate machines.
Having [poster torn; word missing] leading technology with the support of the international proletariat
we will transform our country from a backward agrarian one into a vanguard industrial one; not only
learning but also surpassing the capitalist countries in the shortest possible time, [and] we will build socialism!
Note: This was produced by the Art Department of the State Publishing House, IZOGIZ, but other production information is covered. Generations of interested Americans have read John Scott’s Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel, first published in 1941 and still in print today. Scott, a dropout from the University of Wisconsin, emigrated to the Soviet Union during the Great Depression, when jobs in America were scarce and the USSR still offered the prospect of building a new world. In 1933, armed mainly with skills acquired in a single General Electric technical course, he went to work on the construction of Magnitogorsk, intended to be the largest steel mill in the world adjacent to a rationally planned model socialist city. There Scott married a Russian woman, enjoyed the (scant) privileges of a foreign technician, learned passable Russian, and in 1938 reluctantly departed when the onset of Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror placed foreigners in jeopardy. Even so, Scott continued to support the Soviet Union’s relentless program of rapid industrialization that placed heavy industry above human needs and costs. The end of defeating Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians call World War II, justified the means in Scott’s view. Less well known is the fact that Scott’s experience was far from unique. Motivated either by ideological sympathies, a desperate search for employment, or some combination of the two, large numbers of workers from the industrial West made their way to the USSR in the 1930s. No two stories, of course, replicate one another exactly, but Scott’s compelling account of his five years at Magnitogorsk offer penetrating insight into the experience of this legion of foreigners in Russia and, indeed, into the building of industrial socialism itself.
This poster encourages Soviet workers to welcome their Western comrades. Following some generic messages promoting socialism and industrialization in the top half of the poster, the real message to the Soviet work force appears at the bottom. Western workers possess both technical knowledge and labor discipline, which the Soviets not only need to use but to emulate. The poster characterizes Soviet Russia as economically backward, but it also promises rapid transformation and the construction of socialism if workers utilize Western technology and labor.
This upper right hand corner of this poster advocates fulfilling the First Five Year Plan for industry (1928-1932) in four years, the most predominant exhortation in posters focusing on the plan. On the left are the various opponents to progress and the plan: clergy with a cross; a capitalist in top hat; a Jew in night shirt and sleeping cap bearing the daily Yiddish newspaper, “Forverts;” a well-dressed counter-revolutionary carrying the “Menshevik Herald,” a newspaper of the less radical Menshevik Marxists who opposed the course the Bolshevik/Communist revolution followed; and a general hand at the bottom promoting forged documents
A benign and young Stalin observes them from the right side of the poster with reserved confidence and determination. The quotation in the lower right quadrant reads:
“With the banner of Lenin we prevailed in the battles for the October Revolution.
With the banner of Lenin we secured decisive successes in the struggle for the victory of the building socialism.
With this very banner the proletarian revolution will emerge victorious in the whole world.”
(Stalin. Political Report of the C[entral[ C[ommittee] of the XVI Congress of the VKP(b) [All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)].
Note: As with posters noted above, this is another exhortation to exam advocates fulfill the First Five Year Plan for industry (1928-1932) in four years. At this early date in Joseph Stalin’s rule, the poster quotes a pronouncement by Stalin at the Sixteenth Party Congress of the All-Russian Communist Party (June-July 1930), but the content still summons the authority of Vladimir Lenin for legitimacy. This would change in the 1930s.
Published by the State Publishing House in Moscow and Leningrad in 1930 in a press run of 20,000, it sold for 20 kopecks. The artist Deni [Viktor N. Deni] signed the lower right quadrant. As noted above, the prodigy of poster art, Deni (Denisov), produced from the early years of the Revolution, but by the 1930s his work was sometimes considered too more concerned with aesthetics and insufficiently didactic.
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