The more bombers, the less room for doves of peace.

Long live everlasting, indestructible friendship and cooperation between Soviet and Cuban nations!
J Kershin, S Gurarij, 1963

The diplomatic relations between Cuba and Russia were established in 1902. They were terminated only during Fulgencio Batista’s rule, but were soon reestablished when Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. Soviet attitude to new Cuban government was neutral, until the Bay of Pigs invasion (1961), when USA tried to attack Cuba in order to overthrow the revolutionary regime and retain control of its property nationalized by Castro. This attempt was in vain as it did not spark the rising against Castro - the attacking forces were easily scattered by the trained Cuban army. This generated even more tension in Cuban-American relationships. Now in case of an embargo, the USA-oriented economy of Cuba had to find support somewhere (also see a Cuban Poster on the topic). Soviet Union grabbed the opportunity as this was a good way to establish a military base in a close firing range of its main foe – the USA, which in its turn had previously set up a number of nuclear missiles in Turkey, covering many potential targets in the Soviet Union. The following confrontation is known as the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), when the world was as close to the nuclear WW3 as ever.

In 1963 after the Soviet Missiles had been removed from Cuba Fidel Castro paid a visit to the Soviet Union. For a month he was traveling across the country observing the achievements of the soviet regime. The photo the poster above is based on, was made during one of the demonstrations (supposedly on the Red Square), where all the Soviet officials were present. It shows Fidel Castro, the President of Cuba, and Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union holding their hands in a greeting gesture. During this visit Fidel Castro was awarded “Hero of the Soviet Union” - the highest possible decoration in the country. On the photo above Nikita Khrushchev has one “Lenin Prize" medal and three “Hammer and Sickle” star medals (“Hero of Socialist Labor” decoration) on his chest. The irony is that Khrushchev received his “Lenin Prize” for “Strengthening of Peace in the world” in 1959, two years before the Cuban Missile Crisis took place.

Space... the final frontier.

While I was flying round the Earth on sputnik spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People of the world, let us preserve and never do harm to its magnificence! Yuri Gagarin.
A. Lozenko, 1987

First words upon returning to earth, to a woman and a girl near where his capsule landed. (12 April 1961) The woman asked: "Can it be that you have come from outer space?" to which Gagarin replied: "As a matter of fact, I have!"

On 12 of April 1961 spaceship Vostok 3KA-2 (Vostok 1) was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Its pilot was Yuri Gagarin. After a circuit around the Earth the ship landed on the Soviet Union territory in Saratov region. While in atmosphere Gagarin left the ship and performed a parachute jump to avoid touch down, which could be risky. The first manned space flight took 108 minutes.

Gagarin was born on March 9 1934 in a small village in Smolensk region. His father was a carpenter and his mother a milkmaid. During WW2 the region was under Nazi occupation for two years. After the war the family moved to the city of Gshatsk (later renamed "Gagarin" in his honor), where young Gagarin received professional education and became a qualified moulder-caster. In 1954 he entered an aeroclub in Saratov. Next year he was drafted and sent to the First Chkalov’s air-force school. Two years later he graduated cum laude, and was transferred to the North Navy, where he continued flying until 1959, when he applied for the cosmonauts’ program. Four months later, after numerous checks and medical inspections he was enlisted into the cosmonauts’ training group. There were 20 candidates of them there, 6 best selected for the flight. That was a year of endless trainings in pressure chambers, centrifuges and altitude flights. Finally, the two candidates were chosen – Yuri Gagarin and German Titov. Four days before the flight the Government Commission defined the order – Gagarin flies and Titov dubs him in case of emergency. Later Titov became the second person to orbit the Earth.

So at 9:07 a.m. on 12 of April 1961 the chief soviet rocket designer Sergey Korolev ignited the engines and the first spaceship pilot Yuri Gagarin said his historical word “Poehaly” – “Let’s go!” marking the start of space era in the history of humanity.

Here is an mp3 dialog (450 kb) between Gagarin and Korolev during the flight.

Gagarin: Poehaly! (cut)
Korolev: “Cedar”, this is “Dawn”, how are you? This is “Dawn”. Ten-two, roger.
Gagarin: “Dawn”, this is “Cedar”. Feeling well. Keep on flying. Acceleration grows. Vibrations. Handle everything fine. Feeling well. The mood is cheerful. I see the Earth through the illuminator “Vzor”. There are creases of terrain, a forest. Feeling well. How are you doing? Roger.

This is my rifle

Work is essential, the rifle is near.
V. Lebedev, 1920

Colour is a power which directly influences the soul. Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866 – 1944), Russian painter, printmaker and art theorist.

“Okna ROSTA” – “Satirical ROSTA Windows” is a series of posters created in 1919-1921 by a group of soviet artists, who worked for ROSTA or Russian Telegraph Agency, which was the first state news agency in the young soviet republic. In Russian ROSTA is not only an abbreviation but the word has a meaning of its own – ROSTA means growth, giving group’s name a forward-motion flavor.

Working for a news agency implies rapid reaction on the pressing issues on the telegraph tape, so ROSTA posters were always bright, satirical and topical. Often they were done in comics’ manner. The series of posters were created by hand, later replaced with stencil technique, hence 2-3 color scheme and clear-cut images. Stencil allowed the agency to print small quantities of posters (typical circulation was about 150) without publishing houses and additional expenses. After printing the fresh posters were displayed in shop-windows across Saint-Petersburg. That’s why the group had “Windows” in its name. This was a great means of communication and propaganda – few could read and afford newspapers at the same time, and due to the shortages everybody had to spend hours standing in shop-queues.

Okna ROSTA group housed a lot of talented and revolutionary artists and poets like Kazimir Malevich - the pioneer of geometric abstract art, Aristarkh Lentulov - a major avant-garde artist, Ilya Mashkov, Dmitry (Moor) Orlov, Alexander Rodchenko - one of the founders of constructivism movement. The variety of artists resulted in wide scope of techniques used.

The author of the cubist poster above is Vladimir Lebedev (1891—1967) – a famous soviet graphical artist. He was one of the founders of Okna ROSTA group, where he created about 500 posters. Vladimir Mayakovsky – the futurist poet of the Revolution wrote a rhythmic and energetic text: “Work is essential, the rifle is near”. The poster has two meanings: the worker should work hard now, but in case of emergency, he is ready to fight. And another one is that those soldiers who were making the Revolution, were to start working and put their rifles aside.

That's, Grandma, the Yuri's Day!

The First All-Russian Sheep Breeding Exhibition and Congress
A. Komarov, 1912

That's, Grandma, the Yuri's Day
- a Russian proverb

Cultural Background: On St. Yuri(George)'s day (November 26th), peasants were allowed to move from one owner to another at their own will. In 1590s, this right was put on hold, and completely cancelled in 1649. Obviously, the peasants waiting for their freedom day, weren't quite happy when that was announced.

In 1910 Russian wheat constituted 36.4% of the total world export of wheat. At the same time the agricultural efficiency was low, due to the land property contradictions. At the beginning of 20^th century almost 90% of the total Russian population were peasants. And de facto they had no land in their property whatsoever. The two main owners of land were pomezchiki (ground landlords and the Tsar) and the Church. According to the Emancipation Reform of 1861 peasants were not only freed from serfdom but also received the right to cultivate their own land, which was to be alienated from the land owners. Of course land owners did not like the idea, so the payment for the land was established extremely high, and no peasant could buy a plot himself. So the land became a property of peasants’ communities (obschinas) in order to secure the redemption payments for the land. Technically after the reform the land belonged to all peasants in general, but to no one in particular. The plots were distributed between the peasants in community according to the amount of family members and other factors, which were defined at peasants’ meetings. Peasants could not leave the communities in favor of working at a factory, as in this case their plot of land would be redistributed between other community members. Or he had to pay smart-money to leave for a certain period of time. The peasants’ communities were not only killing the industrial development of the country but the peasants' dreams of better living as well.

Before the Revolution Russia was an agricultural state where prosperous land owners were introducing new agricultural techniques, buying machines and tractors to intensify the cultivation. At the same time the majority of peasants were using sickles, wooden plows and a community horse to pull it.

The poster above advertises the First All-Russian Sheep Breeding Exhibition and Congress held in Moscow on September 12-25, 1912. It contained several sections: living exhibits, sheep products, scientific section and on. And although this event was not intended for peasants, a peasant woman in a traditional full dress acts as a central figure on the poster.

I see red!

If you do a pointless chat, you are helping spying rat
Koretsky, 1954

Thank God somebody's doing it.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, of McCarthy's investigations.

The Cold War – a global confrontation between the USA and the Soviet Union started on March 12, 1947 with a Truman Doctrine unveiled. The Doctrine shifted American foreign policy as regards the Soviet Union from Detente to a policy of containment of Soviet expansion.

The Cold War was fought not only in diplomat’s cabinets and on the battlefields of Africa, Middle East and East Asia, but also by means of propaganda. In the USA the main speaker of the anti-communist attitude was Joseph McCarthy – a Republican Senator from Wisconsin between 1947 and 1957. He was noted for making unsubstantiated claims that there were large numbers of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the federal government. In 1950 during his public speech on Lincoln Day (February 9), he announced that he got hold of a list of 205 names of those “being members of the Communist Party” and working for the Soviet Union by “shaping policy in the State Department”. This started the unprecedented soviet spy witch-hunt, with private investigations of citizens’ loyalty, shadowing of all leftist organizations, and supervision of every political and publican figure, who ever mentioned anything positive about the Soviet Union. The most notable was a case of Charlie Chaplin – an English comedy actor and a living cinema classic. He had major success in the USA and lived there from 1914 to 1952. During the era of McCarthyism, Chaplin was accused of "un-American activities" as a suspected communist sympathizer. With the Government pressure building up, he decides not to return to the USA after his brief trip to England. He wrote after that: ".....Since the end of the last world war, I have been the object of lies and propaganda by powerful reactionary groups who, by their influence and by the aid of America's yellow press, have created an unhealthy atmosphere in which liberal-minded individuals can be singled out and persecuted. Under these conditions I find it virtually impossible to continue my motion-picture work, and I have therefore given up my residence in the United States."

The situation in the Soviet Union was quite similar. The atmosphere of suspicion was evident with the graphical design playing significant role as usual. The poster above says: “If you do a pointless chat, you are helping spying rat”. On the poster the double faced undercover spy is portrayed with a monocle, which was considered to be a stereotypical accessory of German military officer from the WW2 period. Thus this fascist image was projected on the Western World.

How to rob a nation

Safe, Profitable, Convenient! Deposit in savings-bank!
Unknown artist, late forties

In Soviet times there were no banks available for public except for the Sberkassa. Here is a quote from Wikipedia: Sberkassa in Soviet Union is a financial institution to store the savings of the population. The term is traditionally translated as "savings bank", however sberkassas in the Soviet Union were not banks in common sense.

A personal document for keeping track of person's savings is a kind of a bankbook (Russian: "savings booklet", usually translated as savings book or savings-bank book). The track of deposits, withdrawals and accrued interest is written into the bankbook by a sberkassa clerk.

The man on the poster is holding this savings-book in his hand. But why to promote the one and only banking institution if there is no alternative whatsoever?

The thing is that after the war the money stock in the country was huge due to the military expenses of the WW2. And the rationing system seriously limited the consumption ability of the soviet citizens resulting in possible hyperinflation, which could completely destroy the weak financial system of the recuperating Soviet Union. So in 1947 the rationing system was abolished and a currency reform took place. It implied the exchange of all the old banknotes at a rate of 10:1 and the bank deposits at a rate of 1:1 for accounts below 3 thousand of rubbles, and at a rate of 3:1 for accounts with 3 to 10 thousand of rubbles. The reform significantly decreased the amount of money in circulation and hit hard those who were keeping savings at home. The only way for the people to avoid such personal finance crises in future was to keep money in sberkassa, hence making them available for governmental investments in heavy industry projects and agriculture.

Good Morning, Vietnam!

Vietnam Lives, Fights and Will Finally Win!
Suryaninov R., 1970

According to Geneva Accords which granted Indochina independence from France in 1954, Vietnam was partitioned into two states – the North Vietnam (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and the South Vietnam. The Northern part has got the communists in power, and the Southern, which was to remain under temporary protectorate of France, was governed by political forces supported by the USA. The situation in the split country was far from peace and quiet. Between 1963 and 1967, South Vietnam was extremely unstable as no government could keep power for long. So in 1965, the USA with its president Lyndon Johnson made a fatal mistake of sending troops to South Vietnam to secure the country from the communist influence. The USA generals had very limited experience of guerrilla warfare in the jungle. Also the North Vietnamese partisans were armed with latest arms provided by Soviet Union and China, like loads of sturdy AK’s-47 and soviet aces on MIG-21 “Fishbed” jet fighters. In 1975 the South Vietnam regime fell and the country was united under the communist government. Of course in Russia this was considered to be the victory of Soviet arms over the Evil Empire of the USA.

The poster above celebrates the 25 anniversary of Democratic Republic of Vietnam proclaimed by Ho Chi Minh in on September 2, 1945.

PS. I have just started another blog, which may be of some interest for you. It is totally devoted to Videos of Unusual Musical Instruments - like strange bongs, giant saxophones and every other thing which can sound in skillful hands. Hope you'll like it. ;)