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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The soviet propaganda posters are all so rich both artistically and visually, I am sad that many of the first years in this course never got a chance to see the wonderful exhibition of soviet propaganda that was in our art museum. Last class when we talked about what \u201csocialist realism\u201d should be, the propaganda posters are perfect illustrations of the doctrine. They show life not as it is but idealized. They are easily understood and serve a distinct purpose of the state. I know given the time frame of our class we won\u2019t have a chance to talk in-depth about each one, so I hope to in my post do a deep dive into one poster.<\/p>\n
The poster I want to talk of is from the \u201cLenin era\u201d specifically the one of the blind man (hopefully it is shown below). The intended message of the poster is written below \u201cAn illiterate man is like a blind man. Everywhere failures and misfortunes await him.\u201d Skillfully and subtly, this poster visually fortifies the written meaning. Most notably, the man is walking to the left, which is unnatural to the viewing eye who is used to reading left to right. This motion indicates the man is walking the wrong way, away from the left to right arrow of progress that is the norm. Additionally, the Man is seen with long hair and a beard, perhaps referencing \u201cold believers\u201d and showing their \u201cbackwardness.\u201d More so, the visual style of this poster is that of the wood prints we looked at early in the semester, antiquing illiteracy and the illiterate man. Interestingly also, the cliff seen here mirrors that of the statue of the bronze horseman. Whereas in that statue, Peter rears his horse pointing and looking off of the cliff into the modern world, the blind man instead stumbles backwards off of it.<\/p>\n
You can see the amount of meaning that these Soviet artists saturated their posters with! It is an incredible form of art, just dripping with cultural meaning. To open this up as a discussion, perhaps people can put in the thread other posters, and historical cultural references they see in them, and how those references are being used under the \u201csocialist realism\u201d doctrine.<\/p>\n
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The soviet propaganda posters are all so rich both artistically and visually, I am sad that many of the first years in this course never got a chance to see the wonderful exhibition of soviet propaganda that was in our art museum. Last class when we talked about what \u201csocialist realism\u201d should be, the propaganda […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":688,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unit-10-building-the-ussr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/688"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}