Maria Lafont

An excellent collection of Soviet era posters that adds serious value to any text-based study of a distinctive culture that lasted a mere three quarters of a century (though it survives in part in China) but which history will tell us produced art and artefacts of lasting significance.

The presentation is chronological. This is useful because you can see a clear trajectory of the experiment from revolutionary fervor to the undoubted sclerosis of the Brezhnev era - the last truly impressive show more poster is dated 1980 ("All honest people, stand with us against the fire of war").

Placed in correct context, the Stalinist cult of personality represents only a relatively small period of the whole, concentrated on the 1930s and then the immediate post-war reconstruction, when it was clear that the polity needed to maintain a narrative of unity after an exhausting and costly war.

If we remove the posters dealing with war and crisis, the themes of Soviet culture come out fairly clearly: the promotion of literacy and culture is an early concern and support for education and intellect is one of the most sustained cultural memes throughout the Soviet era.

Once the nation is not in a state of crisis, it reverts (unlike fascism) into strategies of peace and welfare very quickly - even some of the post war crisis material is clearly defensive of the 'don't even try it, buddy' type rather than an aggressive promotion of war and values externally.

This material is largely (with one or two late tourist posters excepted) directed at the Russian and related peoples and is about their aspirations and State-willed changes to their behaviour in their own interest (as seen by the super-welfarism of Soviet ideology).

The primary demand is for work efficiency with repeated refrains against slacking, negligence, criminality and alcoholism but the reason for all their work and determination is never lost - the aim is a better society rather than just personal betterment or (say) racial purity or the glory of God.

The switch out of crisis mode only begins to appear at the end of the 1920s, Even here the exhortatory domestic material is matched with material designed to prepare the Soviet peoples for the coming of war from outside.

One remarkable 1930s poster shows precisely what is to be aspired for - a mother and child (shades of the replaced Christian culture) with a background of clean streets, cars, apartment buildings and neat gardens all in pastel shades.

From the late 1940s, freed from immediate threat (short of nuclear exchange), the Soviet poster turns inwards - driving the latest five year plan, promoting agricultural production, promoting sports, commemorating the success of the previous three decades.

Here, the signal poster is Viktor Koretsky's 1947 'My Happiness Depends on Your Success' which is a highly individualistic image of a young girl pioneer with a smiling face in a montage of factory workers - once again, the theme is central: sacrifice now for 'them', the kids, the future.

The images of children and mothers dominate the 1950s alongside fit young workers, aviators and other warriors and sports men and women. There is a cult of youth here - matched by one of international friendship, notably with China - that really does define this culture.

The theme culminates perhaps in a 1960 poster of great charm. Young kids are on a snow slide with the simple propagandistic (!) headline: "Let there be fun for kids at every playground!" Yes, well, there have been worse slogans.

Something is lost - some coherence - from about this period as the society loosens up. The cost is the common one of a defined artistic vision although, in addition to the stunning 1980 poster noted above, there are a few other gems such as a 1968 anti-Vietnam War poster of great force.

So there we have it - a distinctive culture, born in blood and war with enemies all around reaches a certain peak for a couple of decades and then progresses no more. This is what the history teaches us and this is what the posters tell us.

Now it is customary at this point for the Western liberal to point out, as a matter of duty, the purges, the gulag, the lack of personal freedom and so forth, and all of this is true - but it is equally true that there is no civilisation, surrounded by barbarity, that has not become barbarous to survive.

Rome, the model for much of Western self worth, managed to kill some half a million human beings on one site far smaller than Auschwitz (the Coliseum) even if we forget the animals and the slave labour involved in the entire system.

More recently, we find that the current US prison population is around 4.5million, approximately half the world's total, according to the BBC - 6,899,000 adults were under correctional supervision according to Wikipedia. That is 2.8% of the adult population. Not all those people are 'evil'.

Under Stalinism from the mid-1930s to 1953, the Soviet record was worse than this though neither situation strikes me as civilised. Neither country comes out well but, as Russian levels fall below US levels, we have to ask why this lack of civilisation in its old rival persists.

Something is going on here that is being masked by the usual good versus evil debates between different cultural models. I prefer the West if only because the Soviet system's aspirations may have been noble on paper but failed to take account of the raw material - human complexity.

But I decline to believe that the Soviet system was wholly evil or the Western system wholly good especially if you take the Western system to be, like the Roman system, a massive international system of global exploitation founded originally, like Rome, on the kick start provided by slaves.

These posters are propaganda. They are not reality. However, like the delightful paintings of Norman Rockwell or the propaganda of the Nazis, they tell us something about what the culture respected and wanted even if its practice fell short of it.

Nazi culture was built on war and race. Western culture was built on individual freedom and debate. Soviet culture was built on a genuine desire for peace and for the welfare of the people through the collective effort. This puts it ahead of the Nazis and alongside the West as equal.

The Soviet system became sclerotic and died because of its utter failure to see the free flow of ideas and individual expression (except in 'teams') as essential to the welfare of the people. It was also paranoid - though never entirely without reason.

Perhaps the West is now decaying because of its addiction to force as an instrument of policy and its disregard for the welfare of the people except when concessions are forced out of the elite by the ballot box. Perhaps we should respect and learn from this dead culture albeit without emulating it. show less