The specifics of visual satire in crisis periods: the Perestroika precedent (based on materials from satirical periodicals)

The article examines how the visual language and thematic repertoire of Soviet satirical periodicals transformed during Perestroika (1985-1991) compared to the preceding "stagnation" period (1964-1985). Based on a full-sample content analysis of all issues of the all-Union magazine Krokodil and its Ukrainian republican analogue Perets’ in selected benchmark years (for stagnation: 1964, 1974, 1984; for Perestroika: 1985, 1989, 1991), the study reconstructs the dynamics of image categories and their circulation frequencies, correlating them with shifts in censorship, editorial policy, and broader socio-cultural change. Methodologically, the research combines content, discourse, and intent analysis with historical-genetic and structural approaches. Visual data include all cartoons and drawings (with captions) in the issues, excluding advertising. The author operationalizes recurrent visual categories - both positive and negative - and tracks their prevalence across periods. Findings show that, under tighter censorship in the stagnation era, satire largely targeted "safe" themes: universal moral failings, domestic shortcomings, and "excesses at the local level", while systemic critique was displaced onto anonymous bureaucratic figures. Positive socialist images were systematically paired with negative, moralizing countertypes, maintaining an educative, agitational function. With Perestroika’s progressive relaxation of control, the repertoire and tone change markedly. Positive socialist images sharply decline and virtually disappear by 1991, while anti-capitalist propaganda collapses. New crisis-specific categories emerge and intensify: prostitution and sexualized "depravity", shortages and low living standards, environmental degradation, banditry. The once-stigmatized image of "pro-Western youth" becomes more neutral, reflecting a broader desanctification of prior symbolic binaries. Visual language grows more direct and increasingly sexualized, and critique shifts from local misdeeds to the systemic failures of socialism and the Soviet state itself. The study concludes that late-Soviet satirical periodicals leveraged loosening censorship amid deepening societal crisis to reorient from an educative-agitational mission to entertainment-centric content. The collapse of affirmative imagery, the rise of crisis-centric negatives, and the recalibration of prior stereotypes indicate a profound reconfiguration of public discourse and civic identity at the end of the USSR. The author suggests these patterns may be cautiously extrapolated to other crisis epochs, pending further comparative research. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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