The Press—A Weapon of the Proletariat

This 1968 Soviet poster by artist V.M. Briskin proclaims "Print is the Weapon of the Proletariat," demonstrating the persistence of revolutionary slogans and constructivist design elements more than fifty years after the 1917 October Revolution. Created during the late Soviet period when television had become the dominant mass medium, the poster's celebration of print culture reveals the Communist Party's continued faith in traditional propaganda methods for ideological indoctrination and social control. The scattered papers cascading from the monumental worker figure symbolize the dissemination of communist ideas as an act of class warfare, with printed materials serving as ammunition in the ongoing struggle against bourgeois consciousness.

The poster's aesthetic choices—bold geometric forms, dynamic composition, limited color palette dominated by revolutionary red—deliberately invoke the visual language of early Soviet constructivism when revolutionary enthusiasm ran high and avant-garde artists believed their work could help build a new socialist society. By 1968, however, such imagery had calcified into official propaganda style, its radical origins domesticated into state orthodoxy. The enduring emphasis on print reflects the Soviet system's dependence on continuous ideological reinforcement through newspapers, journals, pamphlets, and posters that saturated public space with party messaging. This poster exemplifies how revolutionary aesthetics and slogans, originally born from genuine upheaval, became tools for maintaining the status quo in an ossified bureaucratic state that still claimed revolutionary legitimacy.