You say you wanna revolution

90^th Anniversary of the October Revolution
Bukheevy, 2007

Don't you know it's gonna be all right
all right, all right
Revolution by John Lennon, The Beatles

Today is the 90th Anniversary of the October Revolution. This was a milestone event in the history of Russia, and of course there were hundreds of posters created to commemorate and outline its features and consequences. Later I’ll be featuring them here.

But today I would like to show a poster which is definitely not a Soviet artwork. The style is different, and the release date also speaks for itself – this is a modern poster of the year 2007.

This poster is almost unartful, it has got very simple typographics, but, boy, has it got the idea!

The background is a modern Flag of Russia. It consists of three color fields – the white, the blue and the red. According to Wikipedia there are several meanings of these colors. The Flag may reflect the Russian social system under the monarchy: white represents God, blue the Tsar and red the peasants. Another very common interpretation is the association of colors with the main parts of the Russian Empire: white thus represents Belarus ("White Russia"), blue Ukraine (or Malorossia, "Little Russia"), and red "Great Russia". Note that Belarus and Ukraine are independent countries now (Before the Revolution they were part of the Russian Empire and later part of the Soviet Union). Back to the Flag. A different interpretation associates white with the bright future (where the color itself is associated with brightness, while its placement at the top - with future); blue with clouded present, and red with bloody past. These versions are not commonly known to everybody nowadays, and it is only the association between the red color and the Soviet Red Flag, which is recognized by majority of Russians.

So the authors add Hammer and Sickle to the red field turning it into a small Red Flag of the Soviet Union, symbolizing that although modern Russia does not resemble the old times, it still has the the 74 soviet years embedded into its history. The foundation of the economy, the superpower heritage (although acquired through numerous losses and hardships), the great Victory – and most importantly the lives of fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers – all this goes back to the Soviet times. Which were originated from the October Revolution of 1917.