Don't Blab!

НЕ БОЛТАЙ! - Don't Blab! by Nina Vatolina, 1941.

The wording in the top right hand corner reads: "Be on guard, on days like these the walls have ears. It's not far from chatter and gossip to treason."

Nina Nikolaevicha Vatolina was born in 1915, studied at the Moscow Art Institute under Victor Deni and created some of the most iconic posters of the Soviet period, including: ‘Don’t Blab’ and ‘Fascism - the Enemy of Women’, both produced in massive print runs during 1941 following the Nazi invasion of Russia – Operation Barbarossa.

After the war, she continued to produce posters supporting the Soviet state and the five-year plans, promoting industrial development, and education.

Many of her post-war designs featured images of Stalin, while he was “taking away her relatives and friends”.

Before she died, in 2002, she revealed that, as a young artist - while it had been tempting to see her posters plastered up on the city walls, she had considered her poster design ‘an obligation’ and she preferred painting.

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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.