Future in the Past: Early Soviet Propaganda in the Cold War presents seventeen Soviet posters from the Burrison Art Gallery’s collection of over 30 Soviet political posters. Some 20 years ago, the political cartoonist and inventor of the term McCarthyism, Herbert Block, or more commonly known as Herblock, presented this collection to the prominent Soviet historian and professor emeritus at Penn, Moshe Lewin. How and when the posters left the Soviet Union and came into Herblock’s possession—whether during official visits of Soviet artists and politicians or from Russian émigrés—remains a mystery, but their history thereafter is far from mysterious. In his turn, professor Lewin donated the collection to the Burrison Gallery’s late curator and director Maury Burrison, whose deteriorating health prevented him from exhibiting the posters. Curiously, both Herblock and Maury Burrison were exact coevals: born in 1909, they lived to the age of 92, and shared an interest in the political caricature. The current exhibition pays tribute to both.

Reprinted in the second half of the 20th century, the Burrison posters are photographic re-editions of propaganda from the years directly following the October Revolution (1917-1921). They invite fascinating comparisons between two periods of transition in the Soviet Union, their respective agit-prop strategies, and the status of the mass-produced image. What social and political conditions prompted the reprinting of imagery created in the chaotic formative years of the Soviet state, economically and politically destabilized by Civil War, massive poverty, famine and constant strikes? Were these posters meant to decorate building facades and street corners, classrooms and homes? Did they function as a fully-fledged political agitation or collectibles?

Perhaps, these reprints of posters characterized by revolutionary zeal and boundless enthusiasm resurrected, during the Cold War, those formative Soviet years in order to neutralize the memory of Stalin’s oppressive rule and the idolizing and highly romanticized iconography of the leader. Perhaps they served to revive the promise of a bright communist future to be achieved under the new leader, whether Nikita Khrushchev or Leonid Brezhnev, and through recent and projected achievements in industry and technology. Or perhaps, the use of early propaganda images by Dmitri Moor, Vladimir Maiakovskii, Viktor Deni, and Aleksei Radakov acted as a device to manage the rising disillusionment of the masses and the ideological crisis following Stalin’s death.

Future in the Past shows how in an unusually open period a startlingly new political vocabulary could develop using well-established, varied artistic traditions. Iconographic sources in religious, folk, and satirical art were adapted to new political subject matter and rhetoric, yielding a rich stylistic hybrid. A blind serf walking off a cliff signified illiteracy incarnate; a St. Dimitrius-like figure on a winged horse proclaimed that “literacy was the path to communism;” traditional lubok-style frames together with simple rhyming verses announced military victories and demonized the enemy; styles from expressionism to journalistic caricature were employed to pillory the bourgeoisie and exalt new armies of Cossacks and peasant women.

During 1917-1921, as the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic—not yet called the Soviet Union—sought its way toward a new government, poster production furthered the cause of communist revolution but did not yet reflect the ideas of an institutionalized avant-garde or centralized political directives. Political posters were developed to inform about and comment on current events as they transpired, but also to bring together a mass audience, to construct a sense of collective consciousness and a new political subjectivity, and to instill enthusiasm and loyalty in a semi-literate population.

As early as 1894, Friedrich Engels had argued that posters formed the main means of influencing the proletariat, transforming “every street into a large newspaper,” and starting in 1918, the unprecedented ubiquity and easily accessible iconography of political posters began to impart a powerful message. The Bolsheviks utilized the visual media to “educate” the masses: posters, films, agitational trains and ships, displays, monumental sculpture, and reenactments took over the physical environment and hailed the new Soviet subject. When Walter Benjamin visited the Soviet Union in 1926, he noted the ubiquitous presence of colorful posters in workplaces, streets, clubs, and reading rooms.

By the 1950s, however, Soviet art and society had undergone successive epochal changes. The re-edition of revolutionary posters at this time and in the following decades prior to perestroika could have served the double purpose of restoring the optimism of early propaganda and compelling a comparison between the backward conditions of Russia c. 1920 and its consequent political, cultural, educational and economic reconstruction and enrichment. The exhibition suggests that reissuing these early posters served to broadcast an exhortatory fervor at the moment when the Soviet Union was entering a new era as a world superpower—the Cold War and the Space Race marking the inception of the competition.

One possible period for the re-printing of the Burrison posters may be the mid- to late 1950s. In 1953, a new publishing house, IZOGIZ, opened in Moscow in order to mass produce visual works, including “artistic political posters” previously issued by other publishers, portraits of political leaders, reproductions of art works, and post cards. Within a year, Izogiz had published approximately 35 million copies of 275 different political posters. During a five-year period, reproductions of individual artworks amounted to a total of 25.7 million copies of 825 different ones. Given these figures, the type of materials published by Izogiz, the fact that the production was for sale, and the Burrison posters’ uniform size, which in most cases does not differ significantly from the original size, the collection raises questions about the double status of the early Soviet political poster in the Cold War—as a form of popular culture and a work of art. Or, that all art production in the Soviet Union was popular.

Whether in the service of communist ideological propaganda, a critical tool for Soviet underground artists, or a practice often appropriated in post-Soviet art, Socialist Realist poster aesthetics has outlived the regime that created it and has turned out to be foolproof. Today, bookstores in Russia offer a variety of glossy albums with small-scale reproductions of political and advertising posters and accompanying text in both Russian and English.

* * * * *
Liliana Milkova is a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation explores the underground artistic practices in the Soviet Union during the late communist period. Her scholarly interests include the study of art, ideology, and propaganda in the Cold War as well as contemporary art and art market developments in post-socialist Eastern Europe.