1. Tarabukin, Nikolai, “Lubochnyi plakat,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo, no. 3 (June 1925): 63–66Google Scholar, here 66.

2. Tarabukin, 66. Tarabukin did not use plakat, the standard Russian term for poster, but lubok, often translated as “folk print” or “broadsheet.” However, lithography had long surpassed the woodcut lubok, and in any case they were banned in April 1919: Tarabukin is referring here to a mass-produced lithograph for wall display, i.e. a poster, albeit perhaps in the style of a lubok. This justifies the unconventional translation of lubok as “poster.”

3. The Russian terms “propaganda” (propaganda) and “agitation” (agitatsiia) did not in this period carry the same negative connotations of deceit or manipulation that they do in English today. The Bolsheviks saw no distinction between propagating enlightenment and their own political ideology. This is less a reflection on their particular ideological approach than on contemporary usage of the term propaganda in Russian: it did not specifically connote the spreading of political messages, but rather an attempt to disseminate any information. Vladimir Dal΄’s dictionary defines propaganda simply as “the dissemination of any ideas or teaching; efforts to this end.” See Dal΄, Vladimir, Tolkovyi slovar΄ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka, 2^nd ed., vol. 3 (St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1882), 519Google Scholar. This is the sense in which the texts of this period use the term propaganda. A working definition of propaganda for the present article is taken from The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies: “publicly disseminated information that serves to influence others in belief and/or action,” with the addition that “the manner in which propaganda spreads and circulates is just as significant as the information that it imparts. The content of propaganda does not exist apart from its modes of transmission.” This qualification allows us to understand propaganda as both product and process: both the articulation of an idea and the act of disseminating it with the purpose of influencing an audience. Auerbach, Jonathan and Castronovo, Russ, “Introduction: Thirteen Propositions about Propaganda,” in Auerbach, J. and Castronovo, R., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies (New York, 2013), 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 6–8.

4. On the genealogy of this methodology see Kemp, Wolfgang, “The Work of Art and its Beholder: The Methodology of the Aesthetic of Reception,” in Cheetham, Mark A., Holly, Michael Ann, and Moxey, Keith, eds., The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), 180–96Google Scholar; Crary, Jonathan, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)Google Scholar; Anil K. Seth, “From Unconscious Inference to the Beholder’s Share: Predictive Perception and Human Experience” (2017), at https://psyarxiv.com/zvbkp/ (accessed June 26, 2019). Seth notes the parallel between the “beholder’s share” in art theory and the concept of “perception as inference” articulated in nineteenth-century neuroscience (in particular by Hermann von Helmholtz). See Helmholtz, Hermann von, “On the Relation of Optics to Painting,” in Cahan, David, ed., Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays (Chicago, 1995), 279–308Google Scholar.

5. Riegl, Alois, The Group Portraiture of Holland, trans. Kain, Evelyn M. and Britt, David (Los Angeles:, 1999)Google Scholar; Gombrich, Ernst, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London, 1960)Google Scholar. Beyond Riegl, the roots of this idea can be traced to Georg Hegel’s 1820s lectures on aesthetics.

6. On the flowering of literary and linguistic theory in this period, see Tikhanov, Galin, “Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe?: (And Why Is It Now Dead?),” Common Knowledge 10, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 61–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brandist, Craig and Chown, Katya, eds., Politics and the Theory of Language in the USSR 1917–1938: The Birth of Sociological Linguistics (London, 2011)Google Scholar.

7. Svetlana Boym has convincingly argued, in a framework that applies to tsarist and Soviet Russian culture alike, that the “major cultural opposition in Russia is not between private and public but rather between material and spiritual existence,” between the mundanity of byt (everyday life) and bytie (emotional, spiritual transcendence), in which context both the Orthodox icon and the propaganda poster might be seen to perform similar functions. Boym, Svetlana, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 83Google Scholar. On Marxism or Bolshevism as quasi-religion, see Zeldin, Mary Barbara, “The Religious Nature of Russian Marxism,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 8, no. 1 (Spring 1969): 100–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Klinghoffer, Arthur Jay, Red Apocalypse: The Religious Evolution of Soviet Communism (Lanham, Md., 1996)Google Scholar; Rylkin, Mikhail, Kommunizm kak religiia: Intellektualy i Oktiabr΄skaia revoliutsiia (Moscow, 2009)Google Scholar; Slezkine, Yuri, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton, 2017)Google Scholar.

8. On the theorization of current media consumers as co-producers of meaning and content, see Sullivan, John L., Media Audiences: Effects, Users, Institutions, and Power (Thousand Oaks, 2013)Google Scholar; Bechmann, Anja and Lomborg, Stine, “Mapping Actor Roles in Social Media: Different Perspectives on Value Creation in Theories of User Participation,” New Media & Society 15, no. 5 (2013): 765–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Livingstone, Sonia, “The Participation Paradigm in Audience Research,” Communication Review 16, no. 1–2 (2013): 21–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. Groys, Boris, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Rougle, Charles (Princeton, 1992)Google Scholar.

10. David Brandenberger traces the development of the Soviet “propaganda state” in the 1920s in relation to this anxiety, or to the perceived failure (from the perspective of the party hierarchy) of propaganda campaigns to make progress at grassroots level. He argues that this reached a crisis point around the War Scare of 1927, concluding that it was “the party hierarchy’s failure to popularize a more revolutionary sense of Soviet ideology that necessitated its populist revisionism.” See Brandenberger, David, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin, 1927–1941 (New Haven, 2011), 3Google Scholar.

11. See, for example, Butnik-Siverskii, Boris, Sovetskii plakat epokhi grazhdanskoi voiny 1918–1921 (Moscow, 1960)Google Scholar; White, Stephen, The Bolshevik Poster (New Haven, 1988)Google Scholar; Bonnell, Victoria, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley, 1999)Google Scholar; and Waschik, Klaus and Baburina, Nina, Realnost΄ utopii: Iskusstvo russkogo plakata XX veka (Moscow, 2004)Google Scholar.

12. Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 3.

13. Waschik and Baburina, Realnost΄ utopii, 93.

14. Brooks, Jeffrey, “Studies of the Reader in the 1920s NEP: Culture, Society, and Politics in the 1920s,” Russian History vol. 9 no. 2–3 (1982): 187–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lenoe, Matthew, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, Mass., 2004)Google Scholar; Dobrenko, Evgeny, “The Disaster of Middlebrow Taste, or Who ‘Invented’ Socialist Realism?,” in Dobrenko, Evgeny and Lahusen, Thomas, eds., Socialist Realism Without Shores (Durham 1997), 135–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. Dobrenko, “The Disaster of Middlebrow Taste,” 135. Emphasis original.

16. Ibid., 142.

17. Auerbach and Castronovo, “Introduction,” 10.

18. Ibid.

19. Lefebvre, Henri, Critique of Everyday Life, trans. Moore, John and Elliott, Gregory (London, 2014)Google Scholar; Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London, 2000).

20. Kiaer, Christina and Naiman, Eric, “Introduction,” in Kiaer, Christina and Naiman, Eric, eds., Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Bloomington, 2006), 2Google Scholar.

21. Vrazhin, L., “O zadachakh plakata,” Tvorchestvo, no. 5–6 (1920): 19–21Google Scholar.

22. “GAKhN—Gosudarstvannaia akademiia khudozhestvennykh nauk” in V. I. Rakitin and A. D. Sarabianov, eds., Entsiklopediia russkogo avangarda (Moscow, 2014), at http://rusavangard.ru/online/history/gakhn/ (accessed June 25, 2019).

23. The remit of Narkompros included overseeing education (in the broadest sense), research, publishing, the press, censorship, and the arts, which the Soviets considered facets of the same project (see also footnote 3).

24. Marina Nikolaeva, “Modeli identifikatsii cheloveka v sovetskoi kul΄tury (na materiale sovetskogo plakatnogo iskusstva 1917-1941),” (PhD diss., Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, 2013), 28.

25. Medvedev, Pavel and Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Wehrle, Albert J. (Baltimore, 1978), 131Google Scholar.

26. Renfrew, Alastair, Mikhail Bakhtin (Abingdon, Eng., 2015), 146Google Scholar.

27. On art’s expediency or being fit for purpose (tselesoobraznost΄) see Kiaer, Christina, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), 8Google Scholar.

28. Sosnovskii, L., “Plakatnaia agitatsiia. Opyt retsenzii,” Vestnik agitatsii i propagandy, no. 4 (1920), 17Google Scholar.

29. Vladimir Lenin, “Rech΄ na vserossiiskom s΄΄ezde transportnykh rabochikh” (March 27, 1921), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 43 (Moscow, 1963), 130–44, here 130.

30. My use of the term “legibility” follows Elizabeth A. Papazian, “Literacy or Legibility: The Trace of Subjectivity in Soviet Socialist Realism” in The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies, 67–90.

31. Lunacharskii, Anatolii, “Agitatsiia i iskusstvo,” Iskusstvo i revoliutsiia: Sbornik statei (Moscow, 1924), 74–76Google Scholar.

32. Dobrenko, “The Disaster of Middlebrow Taste.”

33. Papazian, “Literacy or Legibility,” 74.

34. Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis, 21.

35. Bekker, N., “Sel΄skokhoziaistvennyi plakat,” Za bol΄shevistskii plakat: Zadachi izoiskusstva v sviazi s resheniem TsKVKP(b) o plakatnoi literature: Diskussiia i vystupleniia v institute LIIA. (Moscow, 1932), 29–35Google Scholar, here 29–30.

36. P. Aristova, “Industrialnyi plakat,” Za bol΄shevistskii plakat, 19–28.

37. Janos Macza (also known in Russian as Ivan Matsa), “Vstupitel΄noe slovo,” Za bol΄shevistskii plakat, 7–18, here 16.

38. On Soviet nationalities and the rhetoric of “backwardness” see Martin, Terry, Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Martin, Terry and Suny, Ronald G., eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford, NY, 2001)Google Scholar.

39. Macza, “Vstupitel΄noe slovo,” 18.

40. Respectively: Okhochinskii, V. K., Plakat: Razvitie i primenenie (Leningrad, 1928)Google Scholar; Tugendkhol΄d, Iakov, Iskusstvo oktiabr’skoi epokhi (Leningrad, 1930)Google Scholar; Gushchin, Aleksandr, Rabota s plakatom v klube i izbe-chital΄ne (Moscow and Leningrad, 1931)Google Scholar.

41. Tugendkhol’d, Iskusstvo oktiabr΄skoi epokhi, 182.

42. This is typical of texts on the history of the poster in this period, by a range of authors, including: Polonskii, Tugendkhol΄d, Tarabukin, Sosnovskii, Gushchin, Okhochinskii.

43. Polonskii, Viacheslav, Russkii revoliutsionnyi plakat (Moscow, 1925), 7Google Scholar.

44. For example: König, Theodor, Reklame-Psychologie, ihr gegenwartiger Stand—ihre praktische Bedeutung (Munich, 1924)Google Scholar / Kenig, Teodor, Reklama i plakat kak orudiia propagandy, trans. Egornov, A. N. (Leningrad, 1925)Google Scholar. This text was evidently quite well-known among Soviet theorists, and is directly cited by A. Bogachev, among others.

45. Randi Cox, “‘NEP Without Nepmen!’: Soviet Advertising and the Transition to Socialism,” in Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia, 119–52, here 134.

46. One particularly damning article described Polonskii, Tugendkhol΄d, and Tarabukin as “the founders of bourgeois poster theory.” Riabinkin, P., “Protiv chuzhdykh teorii o plakate,” Za proletarskoe iskusstvo, no. 5 (1932): 2–4Google Scholar, here 3.

47. Tarabukin, “Lubochnyi plakat,” 65.

48. Bogachev, A., Plakat (Leningrad, 1926), 7Google Scholar.

49. Tarabukin, Nikolai, Iskusstvo dnia, (Moscow, 1925), 41Google Scholar. The krasnyi ugol (holy corner) is a domestic altar in Orthodox dwellings, where icons are traditionally kept.

50. Tarabukin, “Lubochnyi plakat,” 66.

51. Nikolaeva, “Modeli identifikatsii,” 97.

52. Kurella, A., “Sovetskogo lubka net,” 30 dnei, no. 5 (1929): 45Google Scholar.

53. Tarabukin deliberately avoids this, describing the explicatory, narrative lubok as an agitator. “Lubochnyi plakat,” 66.

54. Maslenikov, Nikolai, “Ob agit-plakate,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo, no. 1 (April 1925): 42–47Google Scholar, here 42.

55. Tugendkhol΄d, Iskusstvo oktiabr΄skoi epokhi, 182.

56. Okhochinskii, V. K., ed., Plakat i reklama posle oktiabria (Leningrad, 1926), 29–32Google Scholar. See also Moisei Brodskii, “Tseli i zadachi vystavki,” in Plakat i reklama posle oktiabria, 4–9.

57. Krasnaia niva, no. 8 (1923). Cited by Nikolaeva, “Modelii identifikatsii,” 95.

58. Bogachev, Plakat, 7–8.

59. Tugendkhol΄d, Iskusstvo oktiabr’skoi epokhi, 173.

60. Ibid., 174.

61. Gushchin, Rabota s plakatom, 14.

62. König, Reklame-Psychologie, 9. Some Soviet authors acknowledged this commonality, e.g. Zivel΄chinskaia, L., “O plakate i ego roli v sotsialisticheskom stroitel΄stve,” Novyi mir, no. 9 (1931): 166–73Google Scholar, here 172.

63. Gushchin, Rabota s plakatom, 14.

64. Vera Gertsenberg, Plakat v politprosvetrabote (Moscow, 1932), 19. Her own editors added a footnote to the above, objecting to the “mechanical” division between agitation and propaganda, and contending that “agitation and propaganda must be understood in the unison and interpenetration of the moments of cognition and effect.”

65. Neradov, G., “Oktiabr΄skie zaslugi sovetskogo plakata,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo, no. 7 (October 1925): 27–32Google Scholar, here 27.

66. Edward Bernays’s seminal Propaganda, for example, discussed the power of advertising to raise the aesthetic tastes of the public and accustom it to change and progress. Bernays, Edward, Propaganda (New York, 1928)Google Scholar. On NEP-era advertising, see Cox, “NEP Without Nepmen!,” 119–52.

67. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), fond (f.) A2330, opis΄ (op.) 1, delo (d.) 13, list (ll.) 1–3, (Doklad Tsentral΄noi kollegii agitatsionnykh punktov o deiatel΄nosti za sentiabr΄-noiabr΄ 1919).

68. Kerezhentsev, Tvorcheskii teatr (Petrograd, 1920), 112.

69. Gertsenberg, Plakat v politprosvetrabote, 5.

70. Gushchin, Rabota s plakatom, 16–17.

71. Ibid., 18–24.

72. Ibid., 18.

73. Ibid., 22–23.

74. Tarabukin, “Lubochnyi plakat,” 66.

75. Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, 1.

76. Tarabukin, “Izobrazitel’nost’ v plakate,” Gorn, no. 9 (1923): 125–134, here 125.

77. Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven, 1983).

78. This coincided with the resurgence of the private art market and the emergence of the NEP bourgeoisie as a patron class. Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, 23.

79. Arvatov, Boris, “Byt i kul΄tura veshchi,” Almanakh proletkul΄ta (Moscow, 1925)Google Scholar, trans. Kiaer, Christina, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (Towards the Formulation of the Question),” October 81 (Summer 1997): 119–128Google Scholar.

80. Trotskii, Lev, Voprosy byta (Moscow, 1923)Google Scholar.

81. Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, 60.

82. Nikolaeva, “Modeli identifikatsii,” 101. Emphasis original.

83. GARF, f. P3316, op. 48, d. 85, (Otchet o provedenii Izbiratel΄noi kampanii 1926–27 po Uzbekskoi SSR).

84. Gushchin, Rabota s plakatom, 21; Tarabukin, “Lubochnyi plakat,” 64.

85. Tarabukin, “Lubochnyi plakat,” 65–66.

86. Maslenikov, “Ob agit-plakate,” 46.

87. Zemenkov, B., “Karikatura v sovetskoi obshchestvennosti” Sovetskoe iskusstvo, no. 6 (September 1925): 66–70Google Scholar, here 69.

88. Neradov, “Oktiabr΄skie zaslugi sovetskogo plakata,” 31.

89. Labunskaia, G. and Eisner, A., Kak sdelat΄ plakat (Moscow, 1927), 10Google Scholar.

90. Brodskii, Moisei, Kak sdelat΄ plakat lozung dekoratsiiu v izbe-chital΄ne (Leningrad, 1926), 34Google Scholar.

91. Brodskii, 47–49.

92. Gushchin, Rabota s plakatom, 38–40.

93. Babaeva, P., “Kakoi nam nuzhen plakat?” Za proletarskoe iskusstvo, no. 1 (January 1931): 8–11Google Scholar, here 11.

94. Brigada khudozhnikov, no. 1 (1931), 29.

95. Proletkul΄t (from proletarskaia kul΄tura or proletarian culture) aimed to create a radical, proletarian aesthetic by encouraging workers to become artists.

96. Tugendkhol΄d, Iskusstvo oktiabr΄skoi epokhi, 180–81.

97. Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, 17. INKhUK refers to the Moscow Institute of Artistic Culture, from which Constructivism and the first group of Constructivist artists emerged in 1921. Constructivism called on avant-garde artists to abandon their experiments in non-figurative painting and sculpture in favor of entering industrial production, applying their artistic expertise to designing practical, mass-producible objects for the new society.

98. It should be noted here that in 1931, the Central Committee issued a decree on poster production, bringing the responsibility for publishing posters under central governmental control. (Postanovlenie TsK VKP(b) o plakatnoi literature, March 11, 1931). This has usually been framed within the narrative of increasing centralized control of the arts in the early 1930s, followed by the banning of independent artistic organizations (1932), and the famous Soviet Writers’ Congress inaugurating Socialist Realism as the official method of literature (1934). However, in the case of posters, it may perhaps be re-interpreted as a case of extreme centralization at the state-level coinciding with increased localization at the grassroots. Some texts suggest that responsibility for immediacy, responding to current events, making political ideas legible in a local context (namely, much of what in the 1920s had defined the purpose of the political poster) may have passed over to the amateur poster, and some authors argued in 1931 that the localized poster (made by and for local groups, to the level of individual factories) was of paramount importance and should be prioritized (Babaeva, “Kakoi nam nuzhen plakat?”, 9). It is beyond the scope of this article to analyze the causes and effects of the decree, and further research is required to explore its implications for both centralized and amateur / local poster production in this period. See also Nikolaeva, “Modeli identifikatsii,” 88.