Vintage Poster Archives
Soviet Soyuz 12 Cosmonauts 1973 | Sachkov Propaganda Poster
Soviet Soyuz 12 Cosmonauts 1973 | Sachkov Propaganda Poster
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Two cosmonauts in white helmets and red pressure suits are rendered in bold black-outline illustration against a cream ground. The upper figure, Vasily Lazarev, smiles broadly to the left. Below him, Oleg Makarov looks right. A Soyuz-12 rocket angles in from the upper right, its red flame streak crossing a cobalt-blue panel depicting the spacecraft's control console in white linework. At the foot, white Cyrillic sans-serif type reads: ТРУЖЕНИКАМ КОСМОСА, СЛАВА!, Glory to the Workers of Space.
Designed by Vladimir Sachkov (1928–2005) in 1973, this Soviet propaganda poster was produced to mark the Soyuz 12 mission of September that year: the first crewed Soviet spaceflight after the Soyuz 11 tragedy of 1971, in which capsule depressurisation killed all three crew during reentry. The redesigned Soyuz 7K-T carried only two cosmonauts, allowing both to wear Sokol pressure suits for launch and reentry. Sachkov's flat-colour offset style, shaped during his training under M. Cheremnyh at the Moscow State Art Institute and developed through the 1970s for Izobrazitelnoye Iskusstvo publishers, distils the mission into three elements: the crew, the rocket, and the mission hardware.
Sachkov was a Member of the Union of Artists of the USSR from 1957. His political poster output of the 1970s is represented in Russian state collections and internationally, including the Art Institute of Chicago. This design sits within the Soviet space-programme propaganda tradition of the Cold War era, which used poster art to communicate programme milestones to a domestic audience.
Reproduced using pigment-based archival inks on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper, a natural-white matte stock chosen to replicate the flat surface of original Soviet offset lithography. A considered addition to any collection focused on Cold War graphic design, the Soviet space programme, or mid-century political poster art.
