With the Soviet Union Forever!": Slogans and images of the East European posters of 1948-1956

The article studies the spreading of the Soviet values, institutions and practices among the nations different in mentality and historical fate by analyzing slogans and images of about 400 propaganda posters of Hungary, GDR, Poland and Czechoslovakia of 1948-1956. The analysis implies a quantitative and qualitative description of the visual material to determine the USSR's factor in the East European propaganda as well as to identify the national specific features in it. All the posters may be classified into four groups. The first one is lists about politically neutral everyday topics. The second, most numerous, group includes materials with clearly expressed stylistic borrowings from the Soviet visual propaganda, but the USSR did not appear in it directly. The third group is posters in which images connected with the USSR (and eventually other socialistic countries) were used. Finally, the fourth, least numerous, group of posters contained nationally colored topics. This classification and the following analysis of each group of posters showed that materials of the East European countries were completely influenced by the USSR. Their style and the special place of our country in their content confirm it. When some Communist Bloc states revised the policy of borrowing of the USSR's experience after the crisis year of 1956, the political poster practically stopped to develop like it was during the late 1940s and early 1950s. This circumstance allows assuming that visual propaganda as a system of ideologically colored slogans and images referring to all the aspects of the society's existence was a purely Soviet precedent. As for constructing of an identity, the emphasis was made on forming a fundamentally new type of self-consciousness, where national specifics was attributed to rather narrow, eventual contexts. However, it seems that the mechanic transfer of the Soviet lifestyle to the East European background was not sufficient for a fully positive perception of the USSR and the new values of socialism.

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