Vintage Poster Archives
Soviet Space Race 1965 | Voskhod 2 Propaganda Poster
Soviet Space Race 1965 | Voskhod 2 Propaganda Poster
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Two cosmonauts in orange-red pressure suits, CCCP lettered on their helmets, ride a Voskhod 2 rocket diagonally across the composition, a pale blue planet filling the background and a black starfield beyond. The slogan, Мы Впереди На Космическом Марше! (We Are Ahead On The Space March!), is set in bold orange-red Cyrillic across the upper right. The entire design is rendered in three colours, cadmium red, cobalt blue, and cream, the standard offset lithograph palette of Soviet state poster production.
Designed by the artist Vladimirov in 1965 to commemorate the Voskhod 2 mission of 18 March that year, when Alexei Leonov became the first person to perform a spacewalk, exiting the capsule for twelve minutes and nine seconds above the Earth. Commander Pavel Belyayev piloted the mission. Both men returned decorated Heroes of the Soviet Union. The poster belongs to the sustained Soviet practice of commissioning graphic artists to translate space achievements into state propaganda, a campaign that ran from Sputnik in 1957 through to the Apollo-Soyuz mission of 1975.
This is a Giclée reproduction printed on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper using archival pigment-based inks. The design is from 1965; the print is freshly produced.
A natural fit for anyone drawn to Cold War visual history, Soviet graphic design of the space age, or the particular graphic language that mid-century socialist realism brought to the subject of human spaceflight.
