Be Ready to Defend the USSR

БУДЬГОТОВ НА ЗАЩИТУ СССР, СМЕНИТЬ СТАНОКиРУЛЬ ТРАКТОРА НА ВИНТОВКУ, ТАНК И БРОНЕВИК - Be Ready to Defend the USSR, Change the Tractor Mount and Steering Wheel for a Rifle, Tank and Armoured Car - by Dmitrij Naumovich Babichenko and Vladimir Vladimirovich Kudryashev, 1931.

Kudryashev was born in Tatarstan in 1902. From 1919 he worked as an artist in the Red Army and designed posters. He also specialised in sculpture. He died in Moscow in 1942.

Babichenko was a cartoonist working on animation and film posters. He died in 1991. He created Forward! The world revolution! Forward! To fight capitalism! in 1930

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In 1917, after three years of devastating war, food shortages and government corruption, the workers and peasants of Russia rose up to overthrow the ruling elite and attempted to create the world’s first communist society under the slogan “All Power to the Soviets”.

Throughout the year there were riots, mutinies and strikes, influenced by and involving Mensheviks, Anarchists, Social Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks.

By October, the Bolsheviks, who promised to end Russia’s involvement in the war, were able to overthrow the provisional government, which had been established after the abdication of the Tsar in February.

As the Bolsheviks centralised power and tightened their control over the new state, civil war broke out across Russia as monarchists and liberals (known as the Whites), supported by Western capitalist democracies, fought back against the Bolsheviks.

At the same time, various non-Russian independence movements, anarchists and anti-Bolshevik socialist parties rebelled against Bolshevik imposed terror.

By 1923 the Bolsheviks had defeated the White Army and suppressed internal dissent. The Civil War concluded with a Bolshevik victory.

Before the Revolution and throughout the period of the existence of the Soviet Union, visual propaganda was considered a significant means to inform, educate and motivate people.