The Blavatnik Archive’s poster collection includes 74 items: 73 color posters and 1 map. The holdings consist of black-and-white and color posters in Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Serbian. The posters range in size from 42 x 29 to 20 x 24 inches. They feature Russian avant-garde and socialist realist aesthetics and include state communications targeting the Russian Jewish ethnic group, announcements of cinema shows and cultural events, promotions of aid drives, and images with anti-Semitic renderings.

The posters are subdivided into four groups: Soviet propaganda posters in Yiddish and Russian (1917–1940); Soviet theater and concert posters in Yiddish and Russian (1924–1970); movie posters from the USSR and Mandate Palestine in Russian, Yiddish, French, English, and Hebrew (1926–1932); and Yugoslav anti-Semitic propaganda posters in Serbian (1941–1942).

The largest group—Soviet propaganda posters in Yiddish and Russian—includes 25 items. These posters were published by the Bolshevik party propaganda organs, such as Tsentroizdat (Central Publishing House for the USSR Peoples) and “Emes” (The Truth, the state-sponsored Yiddish publishing house), to promote Soviet policies among the Jews. In the Russian Empire, Jews lived in shtetls, small market towns scattered across the vast countryside populated mostly by Slavic peasants. Since the early Middle Ages, Jews served as middlemen, buying and reselling agricultural products from peasants, selling peasants daily provisions such as sugar, tea, matches, kerosene, and vodka, and providing them with small loans. This division of labor was part of the world order in that part of Eastern Europe. However, things eventually changed with the onset of the modern era, when most of the Jews in the shtetls found themselves inside the Pale of Settlement, a designated area of Jewish residence in the empire under the control of the Russian imperial government, with the aim of transforming the members of traditional medieval Jewish communities into modern, “useful,” and productive Russian subjects. 

In 1917, the February revolution abolished the Pale and other restrictions imposed upon Russian Jews. The October revolution, which followed, sought to transform Jews further, making them thoroughly Soviet industrial workers and collective farmers. Thus, the revolution in the Jewish world, launched by the Bolshevik regime in USSR, targeted Jewish “medievalism,” including perceived idleness and petit-bourgeois occupations, and actual hunger, poverty, and unemployment in the overcrowded shtetls. To this end, the All-Union Association for the Agricultural Settlement of Jewish Workers in the USSR, known by its Russian acronym OZET, was established in 1925 in Moscow. 

OZET’s mission was to publicize, inside and outside the USSR, the plans to foster Jewish agriculture, and to collect funds for implementing those plans. A massive propaganda campaign, involving such media as literature, film, and visual art, was launched in the early 1930s. Cutting-edge technology, avant-garde art forms, and the most creative artists were employed. In 1932, the Yiddish propaganda poster “OZET member! Help transform the Jewish workers into active builders of socialist society” was published by Emes (POST.00033). The poster was designed by the Soviet Jewish artist Mark Epshtein, who utilized the pioneering style of one of the founding fathers of the Soviet avant-garde, Alexander Rodchenko, including a montage (a combination of photography, drawing, and typeset) and the primary colors of propaganda, red and green. In 1934, the Soviet state established a Jewish autonomous province in the Far East region of the USSR. The 1936 Russian propaganda poster “Let’s turn the Jewish autonomous province into a flourishing province of the Far-Eastern region” (POST.00037) celebrates the achievements of Jewish explorers, workers, and farmers. The poster includes images of happy Soviet people, socialist construction, improved living conditions, and two model workers, still with some features of avant-garde montage. However, stylistically and ideologically, it belongs to the emerging culture of Stalinism, featuring an excerpt from Joseph Stalin’s speech and statements illustrating Stalin’s thesis about the sweeping victory of socialism in the USSR, including the Jewish community: “There, where yesterday there was only wild and harsh taiga—today, happy, joyous, cultured socialist life is flourishing.”

The next group—Soviet theater and concert posters in Yiddish and Russian—includes 6 items. These posters advertise theatrical performances, concerts, and literary evenings in various USSR cities, including the Lev Braun Russian-Yiddish comedy show in Poltava in the 1920s (POST.00025); Anna Guzik concerts in Moscow in 1956 (POST.00002) and 1970 (POST.00005) featuring monologues and scenes from theatrical performances based on the works of Yiddish writers and poets, such as Sholem Aleichem and Yosef Kerler, folk songs, and Yiddish songs by Soviet authors; and Moscow literary evening celebrating the 100th anniversary of classical Yiddish writer Mendele Mocher Sforim (POST.00030), organized under the auspices of the Union of Soviet Writers and featuring speeches by major Soviet Yiddish and Russian authors and political and cultural figures, such as Isaak Babel, David Bergelson, Leonid Leonov, Moshe Litvakov, Perets Markish, Solomon Mikhoels, and Karl Radek.

The next group—movie posters from the USSR and Mandate Palestine in Russian, Yiddish, French, English, and Hebrew—includes 13 items. Three of these posters (such as POST.00044) advertise the Soviet sound movie “The Return of Nathan Becker.” In 1932, celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, the Leningrad production facility of the Belgoskino studio released the movie featuring top stars of the Soviet Yiddish theater, Solomon Mikhoels, and of Soviet cinema, Boris Babochkin. The movie tells the story of a bricklayer named Nathan Becker, who joins other shtetl Jews getting a job at the construction site of Magnitogorsk, an emblematic metal plant successfully completed during the first Soviet five-year plan (1928–1932). The movie poster design used Alexander Rodchenko’s montage technique and included the image of Mikhoels in the role of Nathan Becker’s father, Tsale, and two stills from the movie—a dilapidated shtetl street and a group of shtetl Jews enthusiastically signing up for construction jobs in Magnitogorsk. The other ten posters advertise movies that ran at the Eden summer movie theater in Tel Aviv in 1926–1930. They include Hollywood pictures—such as the silent movies “Resurrection” (1927) (POST.00022), based on Leo Tolstoy’s novel, and “Oliver Twist” (1922) (POST.00023), based on the novel by Charles Dickens—and films produced in USSR, including the silent movies “Fire on Volga” (1927) (POST.00021) and “The Spy of Odessa” (1929) (POST.00028).

The last group—Yugoslav anti-Semitic propaganda posters in Serbian—includes 23 items. These posters were part of a Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda campaign during World War II, based on a “theory” of Judeo-Masonic conspiracy to win domination of the world. Starting in the late eighteenth century, at the outset of the modern era, enormous and complex events and phenomena such as the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the emancipation of the Jews, and the emergence of capitalism and nation states in Europe were more and more often simplistically explained as being the results of an evil conspiracy against the old Christian world, perpetrated by Jews, Freemasons, or an alleged secret coalition of both. By the end of the nineteenth century, with the rise of mass politics and increasing revolutionary radicalism in European societies, conservative and anti-Semitic thinkers in France, Germany, and Russia founded their ideology and politics upon these kinds of explanations and beliefs, developing a full-fledged Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory. Several texts, most notably “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (published in Russia in 1903), were “discovered” (in actuality, forged) in order to reveal and describe in detail a secret Jewish and Masonic plan for global domination. One of the key theses of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory articulated in “The Protocols” was the idea that all disparate and even conflicting modern political doctrines, systems, and movements—socialism, communism, capitalism, liberalism, democracy—were simply disguised Jewish schemes. Only true ethnic nationalism (German, Russian, French, Serbian, etc.) could be a bulwark against Jewish influence, the only effective force to rescue the world from the Judeo-Masonic threat. Such ideas framed the anti-Semitic politics (soon to become the lethal policies of the Holocaust) of “Mein Kampf” (1925), Hitler’s manifesto of Nazism. 

As part of Nazi propaganda, the “Grand Anti-Masonic Exhibition” opened during World War II—from October 22, 1941, to January 19, 1942—in Belgrade, the capital of Nazi Germany–established Military Administration Authority in occupied Serbia. Financed by the Germans with the support of the collaborationist Serbian leader Milan Nedić, it featured propaganda material distributed to the public, including 60,000 copies of twenty different posters and propaganda films that had previously been seen during “The Eternal Jew” exhibitions in Munich and Vienna in 1937. Despite being nominally anti-Masonic, the exhibition’s main purpose was to promote anti-Semitic ideas and intensify hatred of the Jews. The exhibits were intended to dehumanize the Jewish people and justify their extermination by the Germans. Some posters resembled 1920s anti-Semitic propaganda and repeated the claims put forward in “The Protocols.” The exhibition was organized by former members of the Serbian fascist movement, Zbor, and sought to expose an alleged Judeo-Masonic/Communist conspiracy for world domination. An estimated 80,000 people visited the exhibition. Several posters were designed for the exhibition. Some of them mocked the Allied leaders, such as the poster “I acted according to your wishes, the Comintern has been dissolved” (POST.00048) caricaturizing the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin saying to US President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that the Comintern (the USSR Communist party arm in Europe) had been dissolved, while under the table the former Comintern members, with Jewish facial features, are eagerly studying Stalin’s plans of secretly exerting Bolshevik influence on England and America. Other posters included the intimidating imagery of the conspirators and their weapons, such as the poster “His Weapons: Democracy, Masonry, Communism, Capitalism” (POST.00050). This poster depicts a vicious Jew with poisonous snakes growing from his beard, marked by symbols of the Freemasons, Soviet Communism, and a dollar sign, illustrating the main idea of “The Protocols” according to which all world politics and class struggle are merely a cover for Jewish global conspiracy. Yet other posters were designed in “documentary” style to emphasize the “true” extent of Judeo-Masonic influence. The poster “97% of the Press in the USA is in Jewish Hands” (POST.00073) depicts a Jew breaking through the front page of the “New York Times.”

Overall, the collection opens a window into the twentieth century’s most radical ideologies and policies toward the Jews, conceived and implemented by the Communist regime in the USSR in the 1920s–1930s and Nazi regime in Germany and Germany-occupied Europe in the 1940s. The ideological content of many posters is reinforced by the cutting-edge art created by leading avant-garde artists. Collection materials also reveal various forms of Jewish cultural life, including film, theater, literature, and music, in the USSR and Mandate Palestine in the 1920s–1930s.