Historiography

The period from 1920 to 1931 spans the development of Soviet propaganda when ideas were openly exchanged with capitalist advertising, and academic disciplines outside art history. This chronological scope follows a familiar periodization in the historiography of Soviet culture, in which the 1920s are distinct from the revolutionary period at one end and the Stalinist 1930s at the other. This is not to suggest, however, that there were not large areas of continuity across these so-called divides. Rather, by taking a different perspective on a well-studied period, it is possible to trace a new narrative of Soviet propaganda art: a narrative of images produced in constant negotiation with the viewer, in which the conditions of viewing and the tastes of the viewer form a major strand of the discourse regarding propaganda images. This allows us to reframe the artistic changes of the 1920s and 30s (particularly the turn to Socialist Realism) as neither the crushing of the avant-garde by Stalinist conservatism, nor the apogee of the avant-garde totalization of art and society as in Boris Grois's interpretation, but a reaction to the demands of the viewer and the conditions of viewing.Footnote ⁹ The Soviet political poster is thus imagined as a mediator in the dialogue between state and viewer, in which the state, anxious of rejection and incomprehension, strove to be understood by its interlocutors, to appeal to them, and to transform them in the process of viewing.Footnote ¹⁰

This has been largely overlooked in studies of Soviet posters to date. While viewer participation in the propaganda process was a major focus of 1920s texts, later scholarship (Soviet, western, and post-Soviet) tended to emphasize instead either iconography or the work of individual, usually avant-garde artists.Footnote ¹¹ While major works in Anglophone scholarship, such as Victoria Bonnell's Iconography of Power and Stephen White's The Bolshevik Poster, acknowledged the centrality of the viewer and the “privileging of the eye in the task of political education,” they nonetheless largely focused their analysis on iconography.Footnote ¹² A more recent work by Klaus Waschik and Nina Baburina argued that propaganda aimed to create a fantasy image of an alternate reality: “the poster created an additional level of discourse operating visually, which allowed the audience not only to understand this ideologically-synthesized ‘reality,’ but also to see it.”Footnote ¹³ By contrasting “reality” with “propaganda” in this way, it failed to address the ways in which the propaganda image was an integral part of material culture and “real” everyday life, and the complexity of the relationship between the producer and audience. Thus, to varying degrees, existing scholarship has reinforced the perception of political posters as a means by which the central state imposed an idea onto the populace via centrally-controlled, mass-produced propaganda. The present article does not, of course, deny that the propaganda poster emerged from a top-down state project (nor indeed that a study of iconography provides vital insight into the way in which meaning was constructed and communicated by Soviet propagandists), but rather aims to recontextualize posters in contemporary discourses about viewers and viewing.

Some studies of other aspects of Soviet culture have stressed the participatory nature of artistic production in this period, the importance of consumer taste, and the emergence of the consumer-as-author (this is particularly true of literature and theatre, and significant scholarly attention has been paid to early-Soviet readers).Footnote ¹⁴ Most notably, Evgeny Dobrenko defined Socialist Realism as “the disaster of middlebrow taste,” which “originated in neither state power nor the masses, but was the product of a hybrid, the ‘power-masses,’ functioning as a single creator.”Footnote ¹⁵ He argued that Socialist Realist literature developed as a response to the “gulf separating the mass consumer from the cultural repertoire of the age,” and that both art and the consumer adapted to each other in creating Stalinist culture.Footnote ¹⁶ Political posters underwent a similar process in the 1920s, in which artists and publishers responded to popular taste, the demands of distribution networks and display practices, and the need to make images that were comprehensible, desirable, and, increasingly, unambiguous.

Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo also critiqued the assumption that propaganda entails “a producer at one end, a receiver at the other, and a message in the middle,” arguing that this omits the networks of communication along which information travels, or the viewer (implicit or real) who consumes it.Footnote ¹⁷ “In focusing on the deliberate aims of producers, this model neglects the promiscuous, dynamic nature of information once it reaches a public,” and it overlooks the way that “during the circulation of discourse along nodes and networks, the roles of senders and receivers can change places.”Footnote ¹⁸ The present study argues that Soviet theorists in the 1920s directly engaged with exactly these ideas about the complexity and potential ambiguity of propaganda art, and explores the extent to which the viewer was imagined as an unreliable audience, a possessor of posters as objects, and amateur curator or artist.

In addition, historians have posited everyday life or lived experience as the crucible of the subject in modernity, and, following Henri Lefebvre, the study of the everyday therefore as a critical concept for analyzing the creation of the modern subject.Footnote ¹⁹ It was only in the modern era that any intellectual elite had to consider ways of engaging with people of different social strata on a mass scale in this way, and Soviet elites were motivated by both ideology and necessity to address “the people” and their everyday lives, to analyze the ways in which they could intervene in the formation of a new type of subject. It has been argued in the Soviet context that “it is in the repeated, routine practices of everyday life rather than party edicts that the incomprehensible, world-shattering concept of revolution begins to take on meaning for subjects, begins to be lived by them, and begins to transform them.”Footnote ²⁰ A focus on the ways in which Soviet theorists wrote about the experience of viewing propaganda posters, and the acts of viewing, displaying, and owning such posters as ways of integrating political discourse into the everyday allows us to investigate the specific nature of Soviet modernity.

Studying the viewer

The Soviet approach to propaganda was scientific, and the new state invested in researching the methodology of communication and the function of images. The lack of pre-existing research was lamented by L. Vrazhin in 1920, who hoped that “by proper study of these methods we can avoid falling into a rut, as is done at present.”Footnote ²¹ In this period academia and state policy were intertwined in various ways, including the establishment of research centers to analyze visual communication. GAKhN (The State Academy of Artistic Sciences), for example, was an innovative, multidisciplinary institution engaged in just such research from 1921 to 1930.Footnote ²² Though GAKhN was not limited to propaganda, taking a broad approach to art theory, its research was nonetheless both supported by Narkompros (the Commissariat of Enlightenment) and of great interest to producers of propaganda images.Footnote ²³ Some later studies and institutions focused more closely on the political poster: in 1926 Narkompros created the Department for the Study of Artistic Agitation and Propaganda; a series of seminars on viewing posters was held at the Academy of Sciences in 1927–28; and poster artists such as Dmitrii Moor and Nikolai Maslenikov stressed the importance of studying viewer reactions. Moor tested the memorability of his own works by quizzing viewers, and Maslenikov recommended clandestinely observing viewers.Footnote ²⁴ Poster exhibitions were therefore valued not only as a way for viewers to learn about poster design, but also, or perhaps primarily, as a venue for observing viewer reactions. While it is unclear whether these studies yielded practicable results, they reveal consistent interest in understanding how we look at images, which would form the basis of propaganda theory. If it aimed to produce images that were desirable, comprehensible, and effective, the state could not merely speak; it also had to listen.

The idea that producers and consumers of images are in dialogue with one another has clear parallels in the literary theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Pavel Medvedev of the 1920s, who argued that every text is orientated towards a reader and towards definite conditions of performance and perception. “The work presupposes a particular audience of listeners or readers, a particular means for their reaction … the work enters into life and comes into contact with various aspects of its surrounding reality in the process of its actual realization as something performed, heard, read at a particular time, in a particular place, and in particular circumstances.”Footnote ²⁵ While Medvedev in this 1928 work referred specifically to linguistic phenomena (the utterance, the literary work), the same argument applies to the visual work if the “process of … actual realization” expands to include something looked at, seen at a particular time. There was, in short, a substantial academic interest in studying the communication of ideas via linguistic, literary, and visual means, and it is therefore unsurprising that considerable overlaps emerged between scholarly disciplines arguing that meaning “cannot in any way be divorced from the location and moment in which it is produced or from the listener/audience to which it is addressed.”Footnote ²⁶

While many theorists were unconcerned about the multivalence of images, however, the unreliability of the viewer was much more worrying to propagandists. This is hardly surprising: state propagandists were inevitably less comfortable with ambiguity than GAKhN academics or the Bakhtin circle of literary theorists. But increased scholarly attention to the role of the viewer in creating the meaning of an image posed a genuine problem to propagandists, as it indicated the difficulty of guaranteeing a particular effect, which is the ultimate purpose of propaganda art. Of mankind's malleability and perfectibility there was little doubt among ideologues: the question was how this could be achieved if the viewer could not be relied upon to engage with an image correctly. There was a consistent and increasing emphasis throughout the decade on both creating an image and staging the process of its viewing in a way that would minimize the risk of misinterpretation.

Therefore, while it is tempting from a century's distance to see Soviet political posters as the monolithic visual expression of state ideology, it is striking that the majority of contemporary texts focused on the wrongness of existing posters: they were of poor quality, incomprehensible, ill-suited to their purpose, or simply conveyed an incorrect message.Footnote ²⁷ L. Sosnovskii complained in 1920 that “posters are being published by absolutely anyone who fancies it, any institution, any organization. Unfortunately, successful, well-thought-through posters are few and far between.”Footnote ²⁸ Lenin himself, in a speech at the All-Russia Conference of Transport Workers, remarked: “just now, walking through your hall, I saw a poster with the slogan ‘The Rule of Workers and Peasants will Never End!’ And when I read that strange poster, I thought: what misunderstandings and incorrect knowledge we have here of even the most simple and basic things.”Footnote ²⁹ He went on to explain that an end to the rule of workers and peasants is, of course, a necessary and inevitable step on the path to socialism.

More noteworthy, however, than the incompetence or ideological misunderstandings of poster-makers and slogan-writers is the issue of legibility.Footnote ³⁰ Texts of the period struggled with the contradictory aims of propaganda art to be both legible (and therefore popular), and challenging (a means of transforming, educating, enlightening the viewer): to pander to mass taste or to raise it. Anatolii Lunacharskii, Commissar of Enlightenment, acknowledged this tension, citing both the inspirational power of art as a reflection of “the highest ideals and feelings of its age” and the need to mobilize it as an accessible educational tool for the illiterate and ignorant.Footnote ³¹ Avant-garde authors were, perhaps predictably, dismissive of popular taste, while others advocated packaging socialist content into an easily-digestible form. The result was generally an awkward compromise, as Dobrenko argues in relation to literature and theatre.Footnote ³² This tension between literacy and legibility, what Elizabeth Papazian termed the “Soviet enlightenment paradox,” is usually discussed in the context of Socialist Realism, but I argue that the anxiety over illegibility is evident throughout the 1920s.Footnote ³³ It was paralleled by an anxiety about the ineffectiveness of enlightenment campaigns more broadly, which may have motivated more intensive educational efforts towards the end of the decade.Footnote ³⁴ In this context, the debate over the methodology of images, and the demands for theoretical principles to be worked out and viewer responses observed, emerged precisely because of the anxiety over illegibility: legibility was the attempt to ensure that the viewer saw the correct meaning in the image.

Overt calls for legibility in posters, however, certainly increased during the First Five-Year Plan, and texts of this period were peppered with anecdotes about misunderstandings, illustrating how viewer ignorance (or the artist's and viewer's ignorance of one another) obscured the poster's intended meaning. For the Bolshevik Poster recounted a poster shown to peasants in Kazakhstan, who:

Occasionally, these anecdotes of illegibility veered towards the ridiculous: one author complained that the slogan “We Shall Repay Our Coal Debt to The Country” failed to specify which country will be receiving said coal.Footnote ³⁶ Another ascribed to the inhabitants of majority-Muslim regions a strange and implausible inability to recognize figurative images: “We have national republics—Central Asia, Transcaucasia etc.—where if you show people a photograph or a naturalistic picture, they cannot understand what it is about, can't tell whether it is a cow or a person, because for centuries they have been used to seeing schematic images.”Footnote ³⁷ These anecdotes are symptomatic of an increasing concern about the failure of efforts to educate and raise the tastes of the masses, and a resultant fear that viewers would be unable to comprehend the intended message of a propaganda image.

The Identity of the Viewer

It is noteworthy that most anecdotes of illegibility highlighted an unenlightened viewer, usually the provincial peasant or one of the so-called “backward” nationalities.Footnote ³⁸ They imply that the specific social identity of the viewer determines the images that should be viewed by them, and that legibility is contingent on matching the right image to the right viewer. Janos Macza argued: ‘we must take into account not only the elaboration of an idea, nor the character of the idea and its link to reality, but also the point of view of the sphere for which the poster is intended. The village needs one poster, and the city another. Donbass requires a sort that is not needed in Moscow. The same goes for the national republics. We do not yet have an image of these sorts of posters.’Footnote ³⁹ During the mid-1920s this issue was often framed as a dichotomy between town and country. The distinction between urban and rural viewer is felt much more strongly in the texts of this period than between any other social groups (proletariat and NEPmen, for example, or genders, nationalities, or generations), and is related to narratives of the development of posters as an urban art form.

All 1920s theories of the poster cast it as a product of the urban environment. Art historians traced its origins, variously, to ancient Pompeii, the beginnings of trade capitalism in medieval Europe, or technical developments in lithography in the 1860s.Footnote ⁴⁰ They were nonetheless unanimous in understanding the poster as a specifically urban phenomenon: “the poster is the art of the street, the indicator of its pulse.”Footnote ⁴¹ In addition, theorists agreed (sometimes reluctantly) that the crucial point in understanding the modern poster's form and function was to study capitalist advertising. The vocabulary of commercial competition cast the poster as a weapon in a battle, fighting for the viewer's brief attention and aiming for a striking impact (udarnost΄) amidst the bustle of city life.Footnote ⁴² Viacheslav Polonskii put it thus: “The poster is born of the industrial city with its feverish movement, competition, and the slogan of its streets and squares: ‘don't dawdle!’ … While walking, running, rushing pell-mell, in a carriage or from the running board of a tram, in a motor or crossing from corner to corner, a person hears a powerful cry: ‘stop!’ That is the poster.”Footnote ⁴³ This association with the dynamism of urban space and mechanical production meant that the poster appealed to Constructivist critics. It was associated not merely with the city but specifically the industrial city in the era of mass-production.

The vocabulary of dynamism, noise, and competition was shared with contemporary texts on commercial advertising from Europe and North America, several of which were circulated in the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁴⁴ This commonality between advertising and agitprop, both in theory and in practice, meant that Soviet viewers had difficulty distinguishing them: one 1925 survey asked respondents to name commercial advertisements, but 27% of the responses were in fact political posters.Footnote ⁴⁵ Later, in the 1930s, this blurring with bourgeois advertising was condemned, but it is clear that for the 1920s the agitation or political poster was seen (uncontentiously) as a near relative, or direct descendant, of the commercial advertisement in that same urban context.Footnote ⁴⁶ From this perspective, it followed that the poster was intrinsically alien to the rural viewer, rendering the idea of a “rural poster” a contradiction in terms.

Theorists repeatedly returned to the assumption that the poster was, therefore, illegible to the peasant. Tarabukin wrote in 1925 that “an urban poster isn't always comprehensible in the village.”Footnote ⁴⁷ A. Bogachev argued: “One must know in what language to speak to the village, and what language to the town.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The concern was that the mismatch between the visual culture of (urban) poster artists and rural viewers would render the poster meaningless in the village. Tarabukin advocated a subgenre of posters for the peasantry, for which he coined the term lubok-poster, or posters in the style of a folk broadsheet. “The lubok is intended, primarily, for the village or for the artisanal, petty bourgeois section of the urban population, by which I mean the viewer who would hang a picture in the holy corner in their hut or flat, and slowly, but distinctly, absorb its simple idea. This explains the relatively fragmented, florid visual forms of the graphic design of folk prints (in contrast to the poster).”Footnote ⁴⁹ Tarabukin's hybrid lubok-poster was distinguished by vivid coloration, figurative and narrative form, and elaborate, decorative composition (as opposed to the minimalist stylization he recommended for city posters). “Knowing the slowness of the pace of village life, this lubok-poster cultivates the qualities of persuasion, explication, temptation, and a decorative plumage…. It appropriates the props and trappings of the traditional lubok … for it knows that it is destined for one of the most backward social strata.”Footnote ⁵⁰ For Tarabukin, therefore, the social identity of the viewer should determine the form of images produced for them. While some official organizations adopted the idea (both AKhR, the officially-sanctioned Association of Revolutionary Artists, and Gosizdat, the central state publishing house, launched competitions in 1929 to design the best “Soviet lubok”), the details of what a lubok-poster should look like were left vague.Footnote ⁵¹ One critic responded “nobody at the present time can answer the question: what is a lubok? What should it be like, in our present age? Artists, in any case, don't know the answer.”Footnote ⁵²

Other theorists also noted the need for posters that diverged from the Constructivist ideal of laconic design and immediate impact. Many did not frame this difference as urban vs. rural, however, but as agitation vs. propaganda.Footnote ⁵³ Many in the mid-1920s also mapped this difference onto chronological stages of development, in which agitation belonged to the Civil War era, and propaganda to NEP. Maslenikov wrote in 1925 that “away from the agit-poster, intended for the streets, for a quick, momentary effect on the masses, we have turned now to a more in-depth, propagandistic poster.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Iakov Tugendkhol΄d in the Art of the October Era echoed the idea: “while Russian life was boiling in the cauldron of revolution, it needed the vivid cry of the agit-poster. Now, in the era of peaceful construction, agitation has given way to a deeper, more extensive propaganda.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The catalogue for a 1926 poster exhibition in Leningrad gave a similar narrative, and its display layout implied that posters belonged to the period 1917–21, and advertisements post-1922.Footnote ⁵⁶ In this context we can understand the startling statement, made in the journal Red Field in 1923, that: “the work of the political poster ended a year ago.”Footnote ⁵⁷

What these arguments share—Tarabukin's lubok-poster, the division between agitation and propaganda posters, and the chronological development of poster styles—is that they reveal the limitations of the Constructivist ideal of the poster, the eye-catching, ever-changing, industrial product of the modern city. Numerous texts of the period focused on a very different experience of viewing, producing a different impression of what a poster was and should be, and argued that the viewer, not the producer, was paramount in determining the type of images that should be made in the name of the state.

Contexts of Display

In their focus on the experience of viewing, many texts addressed the poster as an object for leisured contemplation and even domestic decoration, upending the assumption that the poster is glimpsed, and must catch the attention of the passer-by. Bogachev, for example, wrote in 1926 that:

This description not only foregrounded the indoor poster but explicitly linked the context of display to the visual characteristics of the work. It does not suggest that the poster invites the viewer to look in a particular way, but rather the opposite: the conditions of looking must be a primary concern for the artist when designing the poster in the first place. Tugendkhol΄d states this most explicitly: “The aesthetics of the poster are largely determined by its ultimate purpose, in other words, the conditions of its reception. Posters for the street, for an interior room, for the village, are in this sense completely different categories of poster.”Footnote ⁵⁹ He added that an interior poster, “can be less impactful [udarnyi] and attract the viewer's eye more slowly and distinctly.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The quality of udarnost΄ was here no longer vital, relevant, nor even desirable. In fact, the whole familiar vocabulary of the street poster—concise or condensed (sgushchennyi), laconic, impactful, loud or shouting (krichashchii)—was notably absent from texts on the indoor poster, suggesting that the critical framework developed for the Civil War poster was redefined in the mid-1920s.

A.S. Gushchin went so far as to suggest that the indoor poster was a specifically Soviet phenomenon:

He was not correct in this, as bourgeois texts noted the same distinction: Theodor König's 1924 Advertising Psychology contrasted the “fleeting glimpse of the passer-by” to the “more lengthy contemplation under fixed attention” for which the indoor poster is designed.Footnote ⁶² Soviet texts interpreted the indoor poster, however, as a product of social conditions (as, indeed, according to Marxist-Leninist theory, all art is a product of the material conditions of its production), and a marker of the distinction between agitation and propaganda. Gushchin claimed: “this departure of the poster from the streets was caused by a change in the conditions of mass work, and its fundamental shift from the methods of agitation towards a propaganda method aiming at more solid results.”Footnote ⁶³ Vera Gertsenberg echoed this in 1932: “The poster's migration from street to room … is closely tied to the change in the language of posters, moving from agitation to propaganda.”Footnote ⁶⁴

These texts implied that the street poster was a historical phenomenon, belonging to a particular period in the history of the nascent Soviet Union, and that while it had common ancestry with the commercial advertisement, from 1917 the Soviet poster followed a distinct path, developing alongside new social structures and codes of behavior. G. Neradov claimed in 1925 that poster art “is a purely Soviet art. It rose to its feet together with the Soviets and developed together with Soviet power. In tsarist Russia, with its laziness, slowness, contempt for the masses, darkness, and backwardness, there was no place for the poster.”Footnote ⁶⁵ This narrative of Soviet exceptionalism obscured the fact that both the techniques and theories of the political poster developed in conjunction with advertising (both western and NEP-era Soviet commercial advertising), and that even their conceptualization of the act of viewing and the effect on the viewer—the site of production of the new Soviet subject—had much in common with capitalist ideas about the psychology of advertising.Footnote ⁶⁶

The indoor poster was intended for public spaces such as canteens, libraries, workers’ clubs, and village reading rooms, with the assumption that the Soviet subject should be frequenting such places anyway as a means of self-improvement, and that contemplating the posters displayed there was thus part of becoming a better Soviet citizen. (The flip side to this was the concern that informal gathering places could harbor counter-revolutionary activity, and that indoor posters were a prophylactic measure: an internal report by the Central Board of Agitation Points stated that “in order to liquidate this undesirable development, it has been decided to take control of all tea-rooms and taverns and to paper the interior walls with posters.”)Footnote ⁶⁷ To take care over the decoration of interior spaces could be a mark of Soviet modernity in itself (as opposed to bourgeois frivolity, as more radical utilitarian theorists argued): in 1920 Kerezhentsev wrote “if you go into any Soviet canteen, into any institution, to the station, the club, the new theatre etc., where do you see the hand of the artist? … Why [do artists] not hang up their pictures, panels and posters?”Footnote ⁶⁸ A decade later Gertsenberg wrote: “the walls of houses, clubs, canteens, workshops, and village council buildings are completely papered with posters: they have become so familiar that we've stopped noticing them, and despite that, or, more precisely, exactly because of that, we don't make use of posters in the way that we can and must.”Footnote ⁶⁹ While these texts conveyed polarized extremes in the proliferation of posters, both criticized a worrying lack of concern for the experience of viewing, not on the part of artists, but whoever is responsible for displaying posters in public spaces.

This carelessness was of great concern to Gushchin, who devoted a large section of his 1931 Working with Posters in the Club and Village Reading Room to this issue, arguing that careless display rendered posters entirely useless. “In reality, it is enough to visit a few clubs and recreation rooms and make out what posters they have, and how and where they are hung, to be convinced of the far-from-desirable state of this area of artistic work.”Footnote ⁷⁰ He gave examples of posters hung without any care for whether people could actually see them: in staircases or narrow corridors, in the dark, or directly under a lamp so that reflections distorted the image. He noted that posters were hung in spaces inappropriate for their theme (violent images amid the calm atmosphere of a common room, where they “disturb the viewer and, consequently, have the opposite effect to what they intended”), or where they clashed with the interior decoration.Footnote ⁷¹ In rural places posters were hung “several pieces in a row, sometimes to the extent of covering the entire wall, so that the posters turn into some sort of wallpaper,” the effect of which Gushchin compared to several musicians playing simultaneously in the same room.Footnote ⁷² His detailed account revealed a real concern that even a well-designed poster was rendered useless by careless display. To mitigate this, he recommended that institutions appoint a committee for selecting and displaying posters (which he claimed was usually done by “random people” without understanding of art or audience), and collect feedback from viewers.Footnote ⁷³ It is evident that for Gushchin the experience of viewing was paramount, and it was the responsibility of the institutional committees (one might even call them curators) to stage the act of viewing to maximum effect, taking into account factors inherent to the poster (theme, color, composition), the purpose and design of the display space, and the type of viewing it enabled.

Posters for the Home

Aside from the street corner and public institution, the Soviet poster was intended for a third context of display: the private home. As the opening quote of this article implied, the viewer of the poster was also a consumer, not only in the sense of consuming a message but also buying a product. In fact, it is striking that “consumer” (potrebitel΄) was nigh interchangeable with “viewer’” (zritel΄) in the texts of the 1920s. We might recall also that Tarabukin actually defined the rural viewer not by social metrics but by the experience of viewing in a domestic context: “the viewer who would hang a picture in the holy corner in their hut or flat.”Footnote ⁷⁴ There is, therefore, a sense in which the political poster can be understood not as a weapon of agitation, but a commodity, a piece of decorative, mass-produced kitsch. The reference to the holy corner hinted at how the political image might appropriate the function of the religious image, as an object through which the everyday is linked to a higher meaning, and which would be a catalyst for the moral transformation of the viewer. Thus the poster for home display could be a means of integrating political discourse into domestic space, championing the reform of everyday life, and fulfilling the aspiration of “art into life.”

Christina Kiaer's concept of the “comradely object” is illustrative here: the idea that the object in socialist modernity would “replace the pleasure of commodity possession, not with its presumed Communist opposite of material renunciation, but with something far more peculiar and psychologically powerful: the material object as an active, almost animate participant in social life.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Constructivist theorists saw little distinction between the poster and other mass-produced objects—“it is possible to construct and evaluate the form of a poster as a mass-produced product by comparing it to the most typical products of mass industry”—and the poster therefore could be considered among the comradely objects of the NEP era.Footnote ⁷⁶ Both Kiaer and Christina Lodder have argued that Constructivist artists, no longer able to rely on a planned economy to impose their products on consumers, had to take the problem of consumer desire seriously and confront the popular taste of the NEP public.Footnote ⁷⁷ This suggests an alternative reading of the move from agitation street poster to indoor poster during the NEP era: not the result of changing social conditions but of the requirement to chime with fashionable taste, to make posters that were genuinely popular as objects to be desired, purchased, and possessed, as opposed to commissioned, mass-produced, and displayed.Footnote ⁷⁸

The comradely object in the imagination of Constructivist theorists was not strictly a commodity (namely “something completed, fixed, static and, consequently, dead” in the words of Boris Arvatov in 1925) but a new type of object, one that redefined the relationship between people and their environment.Footnote ⁷⁹ The object had the agency to transform everyday life (byt), which became a subject of public debate following the publication of Lev Trotskii's 1923 essays Questions of Everyday Life.Footnote ⁸⁰ In addition to questions of health, hygiene, and family relations, this discourse of byt revealed a fixation on domestic material culture as a marker of modernity and progress (or, conversely, backwardness and counterrevolution).Footnote ⁸¹ Trotskii's vision of the new byt under socialism was decidedly antimaterial, purged of the detritus of the private space, and so it seems contradictory that a new type of material object was elsewhere imbued with the agency to transform social relations. The Soviet poster as possession was not conceived by these theorists in the same static category as the bourgeois commodity or decorative object: it was a dynamic “comrade” within the home.

It must however be noted that, in practice, the comradely object performed a similar function to the cult object or the decorative one. Marina Nikolaeva argued that “when theorists talk about the fact that visual symbols of the new way of life should enter in to the homes of the workers and peasants, they do not mean a direct exchange of cult objects (such as icons) for new images, or the appropriation of their function,” which holds true for several theorists, but does not reflect the ways in which other writers imagined the political poster functioning in the home.Footnote ⁸² The asceticism of Trotskii et al notwithstanding, the poster as domestic decoration could appropriate the function of icons, and sometimes compete with the icon in domestic space. Tarabukin, for example, sees the power of his lubok-poster precisely in the fact that its ornamental appeal will encourage peasants to replace their icons (often themselves in lubok form) with propaganda images. There was also a tension between the aspiration that domestic posters would transform both byt and viewer, and the concern that peasant consumers mostly used political posters as decoration without understanding their political message or being noticeably transformed by them. Gushchin's description of posters pasted like “some sort of wallpaper” exemplified this concern, and the party took a dim view of unenlightened consumers treating posters as domestic adornment. The official report on a 1926–27 propaganda campaign in the Uzbek SSR, for example, complained that “many workers responsible [for propaganda work] also do not understand the meaning of the posters, and there were cases when workers of the Election Committee pasted up to twenty-five posters of miscellaneous content on their own homes.”Footnote ⁸³

In addition, while it is inevitably difficult to determine what domestic poster displays looked like, it is clear that they did not conform to the ideal of novelty and constant change. While Gushchin, citing an (unnamed) American theorist, advocated changing poster displays daily, Tarabukin noted that peasants in 1925 still displayed prints from the Russo-Japanese War of two decades earlier.Footnote ⁸⁴ He reported that: “today in any hut all the holy corners are pasted with the most miscellaneous images. There is an image of Mount Athos, and the Battle of Tsushima, and General Kuropatkin, an advert for Vysotskii tea (which attracted the peasant with a picture of a camel train crossing the desert), and a coquettish woman advertising Broker & Co perfumers.”Footnote ⁸⁵ While displaying a Soviet poster amongst such a hodgepodge of politically-dubious images was not exactly subversive, neither was it a radical transformation of the domestic sphere as imagined by the campaigns for reforming byt. This anxiety over the wrong kind of domestic poster display both paralleled the propagandists’ anxiety over illegibility, and pointed to the problem of private or domestic space in early Soviet culture more broadly. For more radical thinkers, including Trotskii, the domestic sphere was inherently retrograde in its preservation of bourgeois family relations, private property, and the cult of material possessions; domestic space was therefore a place of potential subversion in which, rather than the image transforming the person, the poster as “comradely object” was transformed into domestic decoration.

Viewer as Artist and Curator

The viewer's engagement with the poster also went beyond domestic display; they were expected to engage in physical, tactile interaction with the poster as an object, and to participate actively in the communication network that constituted the propaganda process. A poster could be made portable and carried around “either in a ‘live newspaper,’ or a dramatization, or a procession or re-enactment.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The “wall-newspaper” (sten-gazeta)—a display consisting of painted or stenciled slogans, banners, and both professionally-printed and handmade posters—was a widespread, almost compulsory, feature of public buildings. It is likely that the most common context of display for mass posters was in fact within these amateur collage-murals, which were assembled by members of the given institution, often in voluntary art groups, but rarely by trained artists. Wall-newspapers were expected to address local issues as well as national ones, or, ideally, to contextualize state-wide political campaigns in local terms, and in producing them the viewer became a creator of a new, collaborative artwork. They even apparently facilitated a dialogue between viewers and publishers, as B. Zemenkov's 1925 anecdote suggests:

Zemenkov illustrated his article with a photograph of an “atheism corner,” consisting of a wall collage made from posters and banners. In its design it directly referred to the traditional holy corner (including a central image hung diagonally across the corner, near the ceiling), both appropriating and subverting the function of the religious image. This is a particularly clear example of an ideologically-correct way of staging the act of viewing, free from the potential ambiguities of domestic space. The mass-produced poster was here made more emphatic and, crucially, more explicit by its interaction with the creator of the wall-newspaper, the context of its display, and the amateur, homemade works with which it was framed.

In addition, viewers were encouraged to create their own, amateur posters, usually not a reproduced or reproducible design but a unique artwork. In 1925, Neradov observed: “Poster craftsmen have appeared, who assemble posters using placards, printed slogans, cut-out letters, drawings, and cardboard figures.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Several basic how-to manuals were published: the 1926 How to Make a Poster, for example, claimed that “it is possible by simple and unpretentious means to make a better poster than the ones made by professional artists, who have mastered the technical skills.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Moisei Brodskii in How to Make a Poster, Slogan, Decoration for a Village Reading Room encouragingly wrote: “In order to make a simple poster you don't need to be very good at drawing … you can get by without human figures. You only need to understand the task and be able to find ready forms for conveying this or that theme.”Footnote ⁹⁰ For those whose draughtsmanship was not even up to copying, he recommended photomontage.Footnote ⁹¹ The purpose of the amateur poster, according to Gushchin, was “to reveal in local material the ongoing socialist construction,” that is, to make national developments accessible and comprehensible in terms of the individual factory or village.Footnote ⁹²

Amateur posters also, of course, had incidental functions: they enabled caricature on a local level, directed at kulaks or unpopular bosses; they created authorized space for unofficial interpretations of doctrine; and they integrated the individual into the propaganda process as a co-creator, rather than just a viewer. Their existence demands a re-definition of the political poster. These homemade, amateur, unique works differ drastically from the mass-printed, professionally-designed Soviet posters of conventional narrative, and yet they were still consistently described as “posters.” In the Soviet Art journal, articles on all posters were in the amateur section, separate from the professional art forms of cinema, theatre, painting, music, and literature. Some critics considered it not only desirable but highly necessary that the viewer should also create amateur posters and displays; in 1931 P. Babaeva wrote censoriously that “hitherto, the poster has been created in the artist's studio and the publisher's office.”Footnote ⁹³ The Artists’ Brigade in the same year wrote that every artist should go to the villages and organize a circle of local artists.Footnote ⁹⁴ In part, this was the legacy of proletkul΄t and the desire, justified by Marxist-Leninist theory, that the state should emphasize the participation of workers and peasants in its development—including artistic development.Footnote ⁹⁵

The emphasis on amateur poster making, however, can also be read in the context of the perceived failure of mass-produced posters, which were illegible in the provinces, displayed improperly, and could not be produced or distributed quickly enough or in large enough quantities to reflect current events. Industrial deficiencies in the early-mid 1920s meant that mass poster production was never achievable on the desired scale, and problems with distribution networks meant that posters arrived in the provinces already out of date. Tugendkhol΄d noted these failings: “If in the west the paper poster increasingly fades into the background, pushed out by other, more technological forms of advertisement, then here in the USSR it will remain the only form of agitational art accessible to us for some time yet.”Footnote ⁹⁶ As Christina Kiaer noted: “The rhetoric of early Constructivism and INKhUK Productivism envisioned ‘artist-engineers’ participating in advanced, technological industry to produce large-scale, collective environments, but the reality of Soviet industry lagged far behind this vision.”Footnote ⁹⁷ We might add that this vision erased the role of the individual viewer and amateur artist as a co-producer of the “collective environment,” the visual language of Soviet modernity. The amateur poster thus had the potential to fill a gap left by the failure of the official poster to interact effectively with the local viewer.Footnote ⁹⁸

There were numerous ways in which 1920s Soviet theorists imagined the viewer of propaganda posters, but they were unanimous on one point: the viewer was paramount in the propaganda process. Academic research and developments in visual and literary theory questioned whether a viewer was ever a static receiver of a message, and much effort by scholars, artists, and state officials was expended on studying how people looked at images, what kind of images they responded to, and indeed liked or wanted to see. The underlying assumption was that propaganda work must proceed from understanding the act of looking. The political boundaries in which propaganda artists worked were prescriptive, but the aesthetic framework was broad: there were few pre-existing models of what socialist or Soviet art should look like, and theorists argued that artists should therefore design their works according to the preferences of the viewer and the context of viewing. This argument gained urgency from the realization that viewers very often did not understand the posters designed for them. There resulted an anxiety over illegibility, which was a product both of academic theory (emphasizing the multivalence of images and the unpredictability of viewers) and more prosaic observation of viewer reactions and display practices (revealing widespread incomprehension and indifference). The proposed solution was different images for different viewers, conveying the same political message in a range of visual forms to appeal to specific groups and to encourage them to integrate political images into their everyday lives. This could only be justified in a system that prioritized the viewer of an image over its producer.

The theorization of the viewer in this period therefore reveals the state's anxiety over uncontrollable cultural moments: the act of viewing; the domestic space; the work of the amateur artist. In its desire to make images catalysts for socialist enlightenment, the Soviet state advocated not only producing posters that would appeal to viewers, but also attempted to stage the act of viewing by making posters desirable commodities for domestic space, by promoting specific display strategies in public buildings, and by engaging “viewers” as curators and artists, encouraging them to create wall newspapers and their own amateur posters. In this, it attempted to exercise increasing control over the creation of meaning at the site of the viewing, and, most importantly, to integrate viewers into a process and practice of propaganda. It was through participation in propaganda as a process, rather than as the passive audience for propaganda as a product, that the modern Soviet subject would emerge.