government could not achieve the simplest task, that of matching the right
cover to the right saucepan, could perestroika really succeed? For the first
time in decades an artist publicly questioned official policy. “For the first
time in a long time, the artist had the right, and he took it immediately,
to communicate his own view of the world and its problems,” wrote a
contemporary critic. It further signaled a “new orientation in political
poster art,” and triggered a chain reaction that was felt even in Moscow.
Glasnost posters were “called to life by a revolution from above
and supported by the powerful mass movement from below,” wrote
historian Anna Suvorova. Unmentionable social ills were being addressed,
including compassion for the handicapped, drug and alcohol addiction,
prostitution, and AIDS. Governmental abuses were subject to criticism,
including the bloated bureaucracy and remnants of Stalinism. “All the
posters created by perestroika/demokratia in the setting of glasnost have
the same distinction: a peculiar ‘distrust’ of the word,” continued Dr.
Suvorova. Slogans that defined the social realist posters of the past were
rejected due to a “visual scheme and a plastic flow”—the very same artistic
attributes that were once deemed bourgeois baggage. Compared to
revolutionary posters of 1917 the perestroika posters lacked some of the
spontaneity, drive, and mobilizing emotion, but, claims Suvorova, made up
for it with logic and irony. With perestroika the poster became intellectual
and therefore demanded that the viewer perceive unfamiliar images and
codes, such as aphorism and grotesquery, to show the problems inherent in
Soviet society. One Russian observer noted, “The poster nowadays is
contradictory; it’s not always precise and understandable for everybody.”
This was a time of painful reappraisal of ingrained Soviet values
and a shattering of old stereotypes. It was also a period of great peril.
Immediately before the fall of the USSR glasnost was pronounced dead,
perestroika was called a myth, and the term demokratia was considerably
downplayed in official circles. Although the environment was more
conducive to the publication of some sanctioned controversial posters, the
union poster publishing house, Plakat, in Moscow, was still managed by old
party functionaries who imposed constraints and limited production based
on prejudice and fear.
There were still taboos. Glasnost and perestroika posters were
tolerated as long as they did not criticize the Premier. Gorbachev shut
down and fired the editor of Ogony, one of the leading publications in the
country, for criticizing his effectiveness. Many poster artists, most of whom
were under age forty, did not trust the system.
“There is freedom of speech. But what’s more important, if
glasnost holds up, the Russians will continue to have freedom after they
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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