Vintage Poster Archives
Soviet Propaganda Poster 1987 | Study Communism Lenin
Soviet Propaganda Poster 1987 | Study Communism Lenin
Couldn't load pickup availability
A large flat red silhouette of Lenin in left-facing profile fills the upper half of this two-colour Soviet poster, set against cream and flanked by rows of library book spines in the same saturated red. In the foreground, a bespectacled young man and a young woman read from a book labelled 'Программа КПСС' (CPSU Programme); behind them a student takes notes at a desk. Three stacked volumes at lower left are lettered 'Ленин', 'История КПСС' and 'Маркс'. The white Cyrillic headline, 'Учиться коммунизму!' (Study Communism!), runs across a red band at the top in bold block capitals. The composition uses just two colours, cadmium red and cream, with black and grey for the figures: a spare, high-contrast palette that the Soviet poster tradition had refined over six decades.
Designed by Nikolai Semenovich Babin and Igor Ovasapov and published by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, this is a product of the ideological education campaigns that persisted through the Brezhnev years and into the early Gorbachev era. The CPSU Programme the students are shown reading is the 1961 Third Programme, which set out Soviet society's goals for 'building communism' and was officially circulated for study well into the 1980s. Babin trained at the Krasnodar Art School (1948–1951) and the Moscow Regional Art Pedagogical School (1955–1958), and worked for the publishing houses Izogiz and Plakat throughout his career, frequently collaborating with Ovasapov on education and party-themed commissions.
The poster belongs to the Socialist Realist graphic tradition of the late Soviet period: flat silhouettes, a two-colour palette built for legibility, and figures rendered in a semi-naturalistic illustrative style that distinguished 1970s–80s Soviet work from the Constructivist angularity of the 1920s. It is a considered historical document of how the CPSU communicated Marxist-Leninist education to Soviet citizens in the final decades of the USSR. Reproduced here as an archival print on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper, restored from an original source.
