1974 THE FIGHTING PENCILS - [Anti capitalism Soviet Union propaganda poster]

Propaganda mini anti-capitalism poster published in Russia during The Cold War. By the 1960’s and 1970’s, outrageous practices in Soviet bureaucracy flourished. Poor planning, endless paper-pushing, redundancy and shirking, phony reporting, and cover-ups at all levels of the centralized economy had become the norm.
The results included shoddy construction, inefficient farming methods, empty store shelves, environmental pollution, and a decidedly uncivil civil service.

To combat these ills, the government enlisted the help of cartoonists and poets from the Fighting Pencil, a Leningrad-based artists’ collective. Borrowing from the folk tradition of the satirical woodcut (lubo´k), the artists imaginatively combined image and text to lampoon villainous officialdom with irony and sharp bite.

The Fighting Pencils (1939-1989) was a group of Soviet artists and designers who created a trove of propaganda material for the Communist government until the fall of the U.S.S.R in 1989.

Their logo, a pencil overlaid across a palette, is a not-so-subtle reference to a gun – a weapon to be used in times of war and a powerful tool in times of peace.

Its founding members were graphic artists Ivan Astapov, Orest Vireysky, Valentin Kirdov, Vladimir Galba, Nikolai Muratov and Boris Semionov.

What started as a group of artists drawing sketches to boost morale during the Siege of Leningrad quickly became one of the most effective propaganda arms of the Russian government. Numerous times throughout the history of the organization, it was disbanded because the satirical wit was turned against the Communist Party.
The association continued to work until the early 1990s, eventually joined by artists such as MS Belomlinsky, VA Galba, JV Efimovsky, VA Zavyalov, GV Kovenchuk, YP Lobachev and YV Trunev .

The first collective poster was published on the subject of the winter war against Finland, "Christmas tree. In October 1943, the first exhibition of the Fighting Pencil group opened in Moscow at the Lenin Library. She gains the public's attention, both in Moscow and in Kuibyshev where the exhibition has been transported.
After stopping for a few years, the group resumed its activities in 1956. During this period, it produced posters of social and political satires on internal life in the USSR and against "world imperialism", to carry out political propaganda.

The Cold War (1979–1985) refers to the phase of a deterioration in relations between the Soviet Union and the West arising from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. With the election of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and United States President Ronald Reagan in 1980, a corresponding change in Western foreign policy approach towards the Soviet Union was marked with the abandonment of détente in favor of the Reagan Doctrine policy of rollback, with the stated goal of dissolving Soviet influence in Soviet Bloc countries.

During this time the threat of nuclear war had reached new heights not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

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