Paper tigers: A tour of Soviet-era propaganda posters, 100 years on
A century after the USSR was formed (and more than 31 years after it was dissolved), its boldest ideas live on in the millions of posters it issued to inspire the Soviet masses. See how art, imagery and fervent slogans fuelled the propaganda, and how the works have found new life as collectors’ items today.
What does it take to keep a revolution going? For the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), established 100 years ago in 1922, it was clear that overthrowing the Tsarist empire in 1917 alone was never going to be enough.
The Soviet Union was the world’s first working-class state, after all. Its people, once peasants and passive subjects, had just become equal, active participants in a new nation. Communist principles of a centralised economy, collective ownership and classless society were governing a nation for the first time. The world was watching.
There wasn’t much to see. The Soviet Union took up a whole sixth of Earth’s land area. But its population was diverse, poor, pious and overwhelmingly illiterate. For the socialist dream to work, the state needed people to believe that the dream was already working; that the utopian transformation they were promised had started rolling out.
“Ideas are useless unless you spread them,” says Archana Upadhyay, professor at the Centre for Russian and Central Asian Studies at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. Radios were too expensive. Peasants didn’t buy newspapers. But even those who couldn’t read, leafed over and over through luboki, picture books with large simple illustrations and straightforward captions, typically narrating a folktale or biblical story. They’d remember those pictures for years. So when posters about literacy, labour, five-year-plans, atheism and red-tapism began to be designed in Moscow and were disseminated across towns and villages, people took to them right away. “They became an important tool for the state to spread its ideas and legitimise its ideology,” says Upadhyay.
Ekaterina (Katya) Rogatchevskaia, lead curator of the East European Collections at the British Library, UK, says the posters were meant to be ubiquitous to print the message firmly in the people’s consciousness. “Strong visual messages trigger our emotional response much quicker than text or audio. We simply remember then better,” she says. The ones from the 1920s and ’30s used primary colours (especially red), bold and clear messages, sharp geometric shapes, and surprising angles in collages. “All these themes and methods represented the idea of breaking through and moving forward,” Rogatchevskaia says. And at the bottom of every poster was a warning: Anyone who tears down or covers up this poster is committing a counter-revolutionary act.
Posters eventually turned every aspect of Soviet life into a call for action. They instructed metal workers to recycle scraps, warned men against napping at work, pushed women into the workforce, urged communities to give up praying, and offered fervent assurances that the USSR was striding ahead in agriculture, industry, sports and science. “They were building the illusion of excellence,” says cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote.
There was no room for dissent. Posters, like all art, were subject to State censorship from the start. Artists were forced to abandon the early abstract style in favour of Stalin’s more straightforward socialist realism after 1934. “By that time, propaganda posters had lost their bold novelty,” says Rogatchevskaia. The new style allowed for no artistic experiments with form, no abstract images or potential for multiple interpretations. Poster art, its bluster at odds with a struggling economy, began to blend into the background as life in the USSR became increasingly grey. It enjoyed a brief revival in the 1980s and 1990s, when Rogatchevskaia says posters conveyed fresh social and political messages, from ecological concerns to the need for sex education and the need to fight and prevent the spread of AIDS.
Continental shifts
Much of India’s early years as a newly independent nation were shaped by how the Soviet Union addressed its people and problems. “[Poet and Nobel laureate] Rabindranath Tagore, when he visited in 1929, was inspired by how the 1917 Revolution had transformed the country in less than a decade. For Jawaharlal Nehru, the Soviet experiment was an inspiration to oppressed people around the world,” says Upadhyay. The USSR had a Constitution designed to be free of Western or colonial influence, it hinged on five-year plans, an ambitious space programme, and socially inclusive economic reforms. “This ideological thrust offered an alternative vision of development,” she says.
Soviet poster art strongly influenced the artistic traditions of political messaging in Vietnam, Cuba, China and parts of Central Europe. Those figures with raised arms, the bold typefaces, the exclamatory slogans all have echoes in works originally designed in the USSR.
The posters didn’t reach India, but propaganda literature — mainly children’s books, news magazines and periodicals — flooded in during the 1960s and 1970s. For many Indians, they offered a glimpse of a world away from American excesses and the all-too-familiar British culture.
“If we see posters as an integral part of visual culture in general, we can say that what we consume now via online media and social networks is the continuation of the poster era,” says Rogatchevskaia. So it’s only natural that there’s a newfound interest in the source material too. The posters were dumped, in the tens of thousands, when the USSR was dissolved in 1991. Those that were salvaged by locals now command high prices at private auctions. Many of the buyers are newly wealthy Russians seeking souvenirs of their own history. Or they’re being snapped by museums.
“What was once mass ephemera is now fetishised as rare collectibles,” says Hoskote.
Given the content of most Soviet-era posters, this afterlife seems especially ironic – they’re objects coveted within the same capitalist system they were designed to overthrow. Don’t let this blind you to their aesthetic value, Rogatchevskaia says. “Gifted artists of the 20th century contributed to this format,” she says. “It is only right to distinguish their works from other posters produced at the time. It is difficult to speculate, but maybe visual art objects that we consume online today are even more vulnerable to loss. Who knows how much one might be willing to pay in 2122 for a web-archived file of a meme that has just disappeared from your screen?”
Take a tour of 10 iconic Soviet-era posters.
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The Illiterate Man Is The Same As The Blind Man
Failures And Misfortunes Await Him Everywhere
USSR, in its early years, was overwhelmingly illiterate. In Tsarist Russia just a generation earlier, about 83% of the rural population and over 50% in the cities couldn’t read. After the Revolution of 1917 came Likbez, a massive literacy campaign, but the programme was understaffed and underfunded. To meet state targets, many Soviets were counted as literate even if they could only write their name. A public decree was issued in late 1919 declaring that illiterate peopled aged 8 to 50 must start studying Russian or a local Soviet language. This poster was created by Aleksei Radakov in 1920. The push eventually showed results. “One of the triumphs of socialism is its mass education,” says cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote. By the 1950s, the USSR recorded a literacy rate of nearly 100%.
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Have You Signed Up As A Volunteer?
This is among the most iconic posters of the early Soviet years. It was created in 1920, and borrows visibly from America’s Uncle Sam posters (Uncle Sam Wants You; 1917 onwards). But here’s the Soviet spin: Artist Dmitry Moor, a master of Soviet political poster design, adds smoking factories in the background and uses an ordinary Red Army soldier rather than a figure of authority. But he places the figure above eye level; the soldier points at viewers from a position of dominance. The slogan is loaded too: It’s not an appeal or a suggestion, but a blunt query to confirm contribution.
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Soviet Athletes - The Pride Of Our Country
The new government didn’t promote sports right away. But soon enough, athletics and the pursuit of fitness began to be used as an ideological tool to foster a sense of collective pride. In addition to state-funded community centres, sports fields and leagues, the Soviet government set up residential sports schools for promising athletes, encouracing families to participate by offering better housing or food supplies. This 1935 collage, by artist Koretskij Viktor Borisovich, presented sportspersons as role models. Other posters supplied ambition. One, by Victor Govorkov, from 1935, features a sprinter reaching her finish line. The slogan: All the world records must be ours! The campaign’s crowning moment came in 1952, when athletes competed for the first time under the USSR flag at the Summer Olympics in Helsinki. They won 71 medals, second only to the USA’s 76. BY the time the USSR was dissolved in 1991, it had amassed a total of 1,024 Olympic medals.
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International Working Women’s Day
The state demanded much of Soviet women. They featured prominently in Soviet propaganda material, appearing alongside men in farms, sports fields and factories, featuring as brave and patriotic mothers urging young men to go to war, and fighting off domestic and religious duties in order to serve the state. Yet, most of the art of the time reflects the contradictory roles women played in the new socialist regime. They were expected to work, their labour was valued. But child-rearing was still largely viewed as a woman’s job. This photomontage, by prominent artist and exhibition designer Valentina Kulagina was created in 1930, the year Stalin closed the Zhenotdel (the party’s Women’s Bureau) in the belief that women’s emancipation had already been achieved.
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Bread is Our Strength...
(and) the Interventionists’ Grave: Gather the Harvest
“Posters ushered in a new visual culture to the revolution, in art and typography,” says cultural critic Ranjit Hoskote. “It was a movement in which aesthetics and technology were in sync.” Note the scarves the women peasants wear in this 1930 poster by Dmitry Moor. They’ve tied it not under their chins but behind their heads, in the new style, a sign that rural workers have let go of the imperial past and are assuming their rightful place in a bountiful Soviet future. This poster is a picture of wishful thinking. In reality, rural folk were resistant to new ideas, farm yields were low even in normal times, and in 1930 a devastating famine was sweeping through Soviet Russia.
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Religion Is Poison, Protect The Children
Karl Marx had already called religion the opium of the masses and blamed it for the intellectual deadening of society. In the Soviet state, it was seen a wasteful use of public time and resources, and another way for elites to hold on to power. Women were seen as easily susceptible, and likely to pass on these ideas to their children. Artist Nikolai Terpsikhorov’s iconic 1930 poster paints the grandmother almost as a witch, dragging a uniformed child away from school and towards a church that looks distinctly spooky (and structurally unstable). Atheism was designated the USSR’s official ideology, with dedicated magazines and literature. Orthodox Christianity witnessed a public resurgence after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. “There is unimaginable religiosity and new spirituality in Russia today,” says Upadhyay. “Grand churches are coming up on little streets. Islam, Buddhism and Judaism are part of life too.”
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There Is No God!
In 1962, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin told an audience at the Seattle World’s Fair that he had seen no gods or angels in space. He added that he believed in strength and reason, not in God. This 1975 poster by Vladimir Menshikov, imagining Gagarin floating among the stars, is a cheeky nod to that statement. The Soviet support of the sciences took on a new dimension in the space race with the US. Artists warmed to the idea of discovery and new worlds. “We were born to make the fairy-tale come true” one poster from the 1960s proclaimed. “We will open the distant worlds,” promised another. Rocket ships were pictured emblazoned with the hammer and sickle.
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Do Not Blab!
Think of this as the less-witty version of the famous “Loose Lips Might Sink Ships” poster published by Seagram Distillers in the US in 1941. Created later that year by artist Nina N Vatolina, it’s no accident that the poster features a woman. The model female worker, red scarf and all, was a popular figure in the messaging of the time. Vatolina modelled this character on her neighbour, who had two sons fighting in World War 2. The poem in the corner was written by children’s author Samuil Marshak. It states: “Be vigilant -- these days the walls have ears. It’s a short step from chatter and gossip to treason”. There were other concerns too, Upadhyay says. “Gossip can give rise to talk of politics, and eventually admission of dissatisfaction with the state.”
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They Only Have Plenty For The Rich.
But We Aim To Have Plenty For Everyone
There wasn’t much of anything in the USSR of the 1950s, but that didn’t stop posters from turning scarcity into a win for Soviet collectivism. The text on this 1957 poster by Viktor Govorkov stated that around 20 million Americans can’t afford to buy more than a litre of milk a month, or eat more than 6 kg of meat per year. Note the depictions of the rich, smug, suited, American and his penny-pinching compatriot. It’s a clear dig at the acquisitive, self-centered nature of capitalism. Publicly, Soviets criticised the idea. In private, material goods and wealth were yearned for and envied. Today, Russians are among the richest (and most ostentatious) oligarchs in the world.
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The Concern Of Our Party, The Purpose Of Our Life -
Is The Well-Being Of Our People, The Strength Of Our Fatherland!
In the Soviet Union, citizens would recognise this image right away. The figures are inspired by Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, a giant stainless-steel sculpture made by artist Vera Mukhina for the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris, and later installed in Moscow. The figures in the monument hold up just a hammer and a sickle. In the 1971 poster, they hold an atom symbol and a sheaf of wheat too, symbols of science and agriculture. The text in the corner quotes from Article 1 of the USSR Constitution: There is a Socialist State of Workers and Peasants. “Posters were effective tools of mass persuasion,” says Archana Upadhyay, professor at the Centre for Russian and Central Asian Studies at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. The triumphant arms-raised Soviet Man and Woman, strong, disciplined, egalitarian heroes of labour, was an enduring archetype.