By Lenin's way to happiness and glory": visual propaganda of the 1940s-1960s and the political ideal of the Soviet person

The aim of the article is the reconstruction of this ideal and the determination of its influence on the changes of the public mood in the USSR. In the article, the case of some aspects of the Soviet mass propaganda of the late 1940s - early 1960s, when after the victory in the Great Patriotic War communism was claimed as the global aim of the development of the Soviet society, is observed. On this background, the Soviet person's values, achievements, expectations and authorities were particularly comprehended, compiling a single political ideal. Two interconnected dimensions were observed: the official point of view, which was most intelligibly and vividly replicated by means of visual propaganda; and the opinions of the common Soviet citizens, who could express trust or distrust to some of the political slogans in their judgments. The basis of the researched sources consists of 2,860 propaganda posters of 19461964, poster-makers' notes, reviews about the development of visual propaganda in the USSR, as well as various sources of personal origin: letters to the supreme power from the funds of the State Archive of the Russian Federation and the author's interviews with the representatives of the older generation. The main methods of research were content- and intent-analysis, aimed at revealing the dynamics and specificity of depicting the notional political categories of Revolution, Socialism, Communism, Party, images of the Leaders in Soviet posters. In the analysis of the sources of personal origin, standard methodological activities of interpretation, typology, generalization were used. The analysis allows making the following conclusions. During the overall period, among the mentioned political categories of visual propaganda, only the image of V.I. Lenin and the Great October did not cause the Soviet citizens' principal objections. But, as part of the past, it could not sufficiently provide the propaganda with an active, progressive mindset, remaining just a moral ethos. The actual political ideals, reflected in the slogans and images of the time, including the idea of moving forward to communism first distributed during I.V. Stalin's rule, by the beginning of the 1960s, had been discredited by N.S. Khrushchev's unfavorable political portrait. Propagandists reacted to the following changes of the public mood by ideological reassurance: the most general abstract-neutral and little-motivating calls were replicated. Thereby, crisis phenomena, which may be regarded as moral premises of the disintegration of the USSR, appeared in the Soviet ideology.

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