Soviet Propaganda Posters

Engendering Modern China: Visual Representations of the PRC

Propaganda posters have been one of many forms of political media used by modern governments such as the United States, Russia, England, and China, to spread a message across a large area to a wide audience. The popularity of the use of propaganda posters has sparked an interest in the study of posters. China has a long and varied history of the use of posters and propaganda posters. Pre-1949 p...

Soviet Secular Ritual: Atheist Propaganda or Spiritual Consumerism?

Saints Into Soviets: Russian Orthodox Symbolism and Soviet Political Posters

Visual archetypes from Russian Orthodox iconography shaped a widely understood visual vocabulary with politically important cultural meaning. Icons derived their symbolic authority from their status in Orthodox doctrine as divinely revealed sacred truth. Although the Bolsheviks who seized power in 1917 officially denounced organized religion, revolutionary artists nonetheless recycled iconic ar...

Marking Time Women and Nazi Propaganda Art during World War II

"Marking Time" considers the relative scarcity of woman's image in Nazi propaganda posters during World War II. This scarcity departs from the ubiquity of women in paintings and sculptures of the same period. In the fine arts, woman served to solidify the "Nazi myth" and its claim to the timeless time of an Aryan order simultaneously achieved and yet to come. Looking at poster art and using Ern...

Images of Propaganda: World War I and World War II Posters

America's entry into World War I on April 6, 1917 created an immediate need for a large-scale, nationwide publicity campaign such as this country had never before mounted. Posters played an important role in this endeavor and gained widespread use as instruments of propaganda. In the days before the development of electronic media, governments of fighting nations used this eye-catching, visuall...