Let's build up! 1947V.B. Koretskij
After the World War II the Soviet Union was celebrating the glorious victory over Nazi aggressors. Motherland was saved and the spirits were elevated. But the war wounds were hard to heal - the country was scathed, the factories, which were built during the industrialization of the 30s were partially destroyed. Those which remained, had been transported to the safe areas, and were very hard to get back to normal operation. Moreover all Soviet industries had been working for victory during the last 5 years and had to be set up to make civil goods and not tanks and munitions.
Soldiers were coming back home to find buildings demolished by bombs, houses burned down to ashes and roads with pavement torn apart by tank tracks. During the War 70 thousand of cities and towns were ruined across Soviet Union. And due to enormous causalities there were not enough strong men to recover. However Soviet people were facing the future with optimism - regular shortages (even famine in several parts of the country) and poor housing were still a lot better then muddy trenches and constant fear of death.
3 comments:
Re: the iconography. Note the grown out hair and beard -- a conscious divergence from military grooming. Early postwar culture was consumed with the reintegration of soldiers into civilian life. Hard to tell from the reproduction, but this may be a two-color poster, which would make it cheaper to print. A larger image would also make it easier to tell whether the rightmost background figure is supposed to look like Lenin.
Yes, this is a black and white print indeed. The paper turned yellowish because of the time.
I have seen the large scale reprint of the poster. Definitely this is not Lenin. ;)
By the way, i have another "Let's build up" poster, dated 1941. It differs greatly from this one. I will surely post it some day here.
I'm continually amazed at the effort spent on rebuilding Russia after the war with the Nazis. I've written research papers, took a year of Russian, and information is always changing. Some volumes just seem to vanish into the back shelves of the library. Here, a quick glance and a mystery revealed.
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