The Globalization of the Soviet Everyday Life as Depicted on the Political Posters of 1946-64

In the article, the main objects of analysis are political posters of the USSR of 1946-64, as one of the most significant, intelligible and massive forms of the broadcasting of the state ideology in the conditions of the Cold War escalation. The aim of the article is, on the basis of posters, to reveal the kinds of contexts the official propaganda engaged the Soviet people in the global agenda and to identify how the propaganda slogans fitted the world outlook of the common citizens. In the study, from about of 3 000 posters of the period 780 samples were selected whose textual or pictorial content directly or indirectly represented the international situation at the time. The article also deals with the Soviet periodicals that discussed the ongoing development of poster production and with archives, which reflected public opinions in the USSR, such as various reports about massive propagandistic campaigns, direct citizens' responses as well as letters of the Soviet people to the supreme power. The visual sources were studied by the methods of content and intent analysis, which allow classifying thematic categories and images of posters and tracking the dynamics of their creation and interconnection. The comments about political events or phenomena reflected in archive sources were grouped by the social type of addresser and, according to the extrapolation method, were considered as a possible reaction to the relevant images of the posters. The analysis allows reaching the following conclusions. Based on the main types of characters of the posters, the principal contexts of the globalization of the Soviet everyday life are identified: defense, labor, family and internationalism. Frequently, there was no clear difference in the plot between them. The posters were to help the Soviet people perceive themselves as vindicators of peace and internationalism. For this, people only had to perform quite familiar and habitual social roles: a defender of Motherland (during the postwar era many people had military experience), a worker in a manufacture, a parent responsible for the destiny of children. Thereby, in the conditions of the Cold War, the main aim of propaganda was to give specific senses for everyday life rather than mobilize people for something extreme. The analysis of citizens' political mood shows that the relevance and the invocatory power of the posters of the mentioned types consisted in the dialog with ordinary Soviet people using a familiar figurative and symbolic language. Sometimes visual propaganda saw citizens of the USSR not only as the audience ready to respond to the slogans of the posters, but, to some extent, as real prototypes for images of positive characters, too.

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