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. ;)

Everybody goes to BAM!

Baikal-Amur Mainline is the construction project of the century!
1977, Babin N. S., Ovasapov I. T., Jakushin A. B.

The Baikal-Amur Mainline (unofficial website) is the second largest railroad in Russia, with a length of 4,234 km (2,305 mile). BAM traverses Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East and runs about 600 km (450 miles) north of and parallel to the Trans-Siberian railway (the largest railroad in the world, covering over 1/3 of the circumference of the Earth with its 10,000 km (6 000 miles) tracks).

BAM was built in the course of 20^th century as an alternative to the Trans-Siberian Railway, especially along the vulnerable sections close to the border with China. It has special durable tracks which are capable of supporting soviet rocket trains, equipped with nuclear warheads, which were designed to be a Soviet response to SDI.

BAM construction started in the thirties by Bamlag – a corrective labor camp and a part of notorious Gulag. During WW2 some of the BAM’s partly built tracks were disassembled to form strategic route to Stalingrad, where the biggest and the bloodiest battle in the history of human kind took place – the Battle of Stalingrad.

After Stalin’s death in 1953 the works on BAM stopped as there were no more Gulags with its free labor force and the project turned out to be too expensive. Only in 1974 when the Cold War was in full swing and there was increasing tension between China and the Soviet Union, the project was given a green light.

Huge funding was provided for BAM. It was called the “komsomol construction project of the century”, with numerous young komsomol members sent there to work for decent wages. The poster above was a part of BAM recruitment campaign.

The main part of the BAM was declared open in 1984, with some of the areas (like the ending bridge and the station in Yakutsk) are still being built.

BAM is a fantastic engineering project. It traverses 11 major rivers and seven mountain ridges. There were 8 big tunnels cut through the mountains. One of them is the Severomuyskiy tunnel (15 km), which is the longest tunnel in Russia (18^th longest in the world). Also check picture of the “Chertov bridge” (Devil’s bridge), which shows the scale of the obstacles had to be overcome during the construction.

What do you think of these my man?

Do you look after your breasts?
Unknown artist, 1930

This is a very famous poster, which shows the versatility of topics covered by the Soviet poster art.

It says: “Do you look after your breasts? Temper your breasts in cold water daily!” In the late twenties industrialization in heavy industry and collectivization in agriculture forced many peasants to migrate to cities and to become workers at factories and plants. Rural habits were useless in industry centers, so peasants had to adjust themselves to new customs.

Hygiene was one of the most acute problems in the cities with rapidly expanding population. Nicolay Semashko (1874-1949) was the first Narkom (minister) of Health Service (1918-1930), who defined the principles of water supply provision, disinfection, personal hygiene and other social services necessary for healthy development of the society. During his life time Semashko wrote more than 250 of works covering these topics, established a chair of hygiene in Moscow State University, organized a separate Hygiene university later, and did a great job of improving social and hygienic conditions in underdeveloped and traditional regions of Chuvashia, Bashkiria, Tataria, Dagestan and other North Caucasus areas. His invaluable input was one of the reasons, why in the thirties he was not repressed like many other officials, but was promoted to become a member of All-Russian Central Executive Committee, with his main assignment to organize orphanages and to make maternity care system.

This poster was a part of the maternity care campaign, which not only promoted personal hygiene, but was also aimed at tempering of female organisms before delivery. At that time it was believed that cold water strengthens mammaries and makes them ready for breast feeding. And today this vintage artwork looks nothing but amazing.

And all the sweet serenity of books...

Book trade-exhibition in spring
Unknown artist, 1926

This was 1926, when the country was still recovering from the WW1, the Civil War and the War Communism, introduced by Lenin. To avoid loosing power due to national distress, Lenin launched New Economic Policy which implied restoration of private property on a small scale in a number of fields. NEP boosted the agricultural output, resulting in significant rise of living standards. But many true Marxists considered NEP to be a betrayal of the communist ideals, so after Lenin’s death in 1924 the number of NEP supporters in the party started to decrease. Stalin who after Lenin’s death was gaining power finally killed NEP in 1929, replacing it with a program of global industrialization in a form of a first Five Year Plan.

This poster advertises the book trade-exhibition held in spring in Moscow somewhere on Petrovskay street, starting May 15, 1926. In the Soviet Times such exhibitions were a perfect way not only to meet with favorite authors but also to purchase a rare edition. Quality books were one of the main means of entertainment in the country so popularity of reading was skyrocketing, resulting in kilometer-long queues to events like this trade-exhibition.