Soviet visual propaganda in the conditions of the Cold War: An experience of a source-study analysis of posters and caricatures of 1946–1964

The article presents a source-study analysis of Soviet posters and caricatures of 1946-1964. The author characterizes their properties and features as means of visual propaganda. He considers organizational, professional and psychological aspects of producing of this kind of materials based on the generalization of theoretical works, journalistic notes and memoirs of artists, publications of art critics, and archival documents. The author also studies the problem of reconstructing the system of verbal and non-verbal images that were forming during the Cold War and using methodologies for interpreting the content of a huge array of the propaganda (several thousand samples). The main resources for collecting the posters were open-access virtual catalogues of libraries, museums, auction houses and online-markets, private collections, thematic websites, photocopies from the Soviet or modern printed publications. The source of caricatures was periodical press, represented by the central party newspaper Pravda, the USSR’s main satirical magazine Krokodil and the Soviet artists’ profile newspaper Sovetskoe iskusstvo (Sovetskaya kul'tura since 1953). The study shows that several levels of typologization by the technological process of creation, purposes, or genre specifics can be applied to the Soviet visual propaganda. Each type had its own features of the creative and production cycle: time frame of the preparation of the material, rigor and duration of their review, degree of influence of external factors on the final content. Besides general ideological expediency, a certain agitation or satirical topic could be determined by the direct order of the state authorities, the professional flair of poster artists or cartoonists, responses of citizens, or even interests of trade. From the formalized analysis perspective, it is expedient to arrange textual and graphical components of posters and caricatures as a list of thematic categories formed on the basis of identification and grouping of certain ideologemes, images, symbols, etc. Content-analysis procedures and obtained quantitative data reveal, with due regard to the dynamics of development and interrelationship, a sufficiently representative complex of key political metaphors that existed during the escalation of the Cold War.

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