Recently while browsing the Internet I came across the website of University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu. The digital library of this university has interesting Soviet artefacts. There is a large collection (~200) of Soviet pamphlets (from 30s to 50s)  published under the Foreign Languages Publishing House,  most of which I have not seen anywhere else. But they only have the covers in their collection and not the entire books. PS: If anyone from that university is reading this please consider scanning the pamphlets and making them available!

But what caught my eye is their digital collection of Soviet era posters scanned in hi-resolution. Some of them are gems of Soviet era design.

The visually stunning propaganda posters produced by the new Soviet government from 1917 onward are fairly well-known. Communist Party slogans to the masses were featured. There are many books on the subject, and several good collections now available on the internet: Hoover Institution, Duke University, New York Public Library, Swarthmore, Library of Congress, and so on. There are also sites on Yandex in Russian.

Our collection of 145 posters covers the Cold War period: roughly the end of World War II until Gorbachev’s perestroika/glasnost era (1984), and a few into the late 1980s. Socialist realism art and utopian images of life in the Soviet Union dominate. Political propaganda, anti-alcohol campaigns, world peace and friendship, and space propaganda are major themes.