Alcohol: Soviet Anti-Alcohol Posters
£15.60£19.00 (-18%)
Soviet propaganda against the demon drink: the latest in Fuel’s Russian pop culture series
From the acclaimed authors of the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedias and Soviet Space Dogs comes Alcohol, a glorious and exhaustive collection of previously unpublished Soviet anti-alcohol posters. The book includes examples from the 1960s through to the 1980s, but focuses on posters produced during Mikhail Gorbachev’s campaign initiated in 1985. These posters attempted to sober up Soviet citizens by forcing them to confront the issues associated with excessive alcohol consumption. This government-led urgency allowed the poster designers to present the anti-alcohol message in the most graphic terms: they depicted drunks literally trapped inside the bottle or being strangled by “the green snake.” Their protagonists are paralytic freeloaders and shirkers who always neglect their families, drive under the influence, produce substandard work, are smashed when pregnant and present a constant danger to fellow citizens. A two-part essay by renowned cultural historian Alexei Plutser-Sarno attempts to explain, from a Russian perspective, the reasons behind this phenomenon.
Read more
Additional information
| Publisher | FUEL, Illustrated edition (6 April 2017) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Hardcover | 248 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 9780993191152 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0993191152 |
| Dimensions | 12.7 x 2.79 x 20.57 cm |
by Julia
I was born in Russia and I love this, it’s hilarious! Plus a very good quality. Going to order a second copy for my friend!
by SGrey
As anyone knows who has drunk far too much, and then carried on drinking far too much on top of that without a sufficient break, you soon find that you’ve surrendered yourself to a lugubrious half-life in which the drinking is the main feature and everything else is some kind of inconvenience or interruption. Well, what to do? The obvious answer is to stop, put up with the temporary effects of stopping, and then stay stopped – or at least start again light, and keep it light. And who should tell us these obvious facts? Well the booze is telling us constantly and it’s up to us to listen and act accordingly.
And who should tell us obvious fact…? In 1985 in the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev decided to tell everyone, not just through a raft of decrees and punitive measures which rapidly produced a new source of (drunken) forced labour, but also through a continuing tradition of posters, themselves like gloomy hallucinations, produced to show the harm that devoting yourself to getting blind drunk in this way does to self-respect, to productivity, to family life… This book contains reproductions of around 200 of these posters, along with a handful of photos of people lying down or falling over dead drunk. Everyone will have their favourites, of course. Mine is the wedding ring dissolving in booze.
There’s also a couple of informative essays to go with the pictures. One outlines the problem – a general desire to be drunk coupled with the easy availability of various murderous brews, perfumes, glues and solvents – and the disastrous governmental measures taken against it. The other covers the desire itself in its Russian context.
The whole package is a strange pleasure, a nice addition to Fuel’s catalogue of Soviet miserabilia.
by J W.
This is a fascinating slice of contemporary Soviet history. The posters and the translations are often hilarious even though the subject is anything but. I really enjoyed the book and have a couple more from this
publisher on order.