Vintage Poster Archives
Soviet Peace Propaganda 1950s | Viktor Koretsky МИР
Soviet Peace Propaganda 1950s | Viktor Koretsky МИР
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A young worker raises a red-orange banner toward a blazing golden sunburst, the word МИР, Peace, inscribed behind him in pale ghost-lettering. In the lower-left corner, rendered in deliberate greyscale against the warm surrounding gold, a Ku Klux Klan figure, a helmeted soldier and a businessman clutching war plans recoil into shadow. The composition is built on a single structural argument: radiant peace above, the forces of racism and militarism driven into the dark below.
Designed by Viktor Koretsky (1909–1998), the Soviet Union's pre-eminent photographic poster artist, this work belongs to the postwar 'peace offensive' series he produced in the early 1950s. Koretsky built his images from photographic reference material combined with gouache and pencil, a hybrid technique that gave his figures an unusually physical presence and drew the ire of Soviet art critics who objected to his 'formalist deviation.' He received the Stalin Prize in 1946 and 1949, and in 1964 was awarded a gold medal by the Soviet Peace Committee. The Cyrillic slogans, 'Да здравствует солнце! Да скроется Тьма!', quote the closing line of Pushkin's 1825 poem 'Vakkhicheskaya Pesnya', a phrase the Soviet peace movement adopted as a Cold War rallying call.
As a historical document the poster sits at the intersection of Soviet graphic design, Cold War visual rhetoric, and the postwar international peace movement, the same moment, the mid-1950s, when Koretsky's work was the subject of major institutional debate about the role of photomontage in socialist realism.
Reproduced from an archival source. Printed using pigment-based inks on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper.
