‘TASS Windows’: How Soviet artists helped achieve victory over the Nazis (PICS)

On June 22, 1941, the Great Patriotic War began in the USSR, which, for Western countries, is known as the Eastern Front of World War II. In three days, on June 25, an editorial team was created to release propaganda posters, which were called ‘TASS Windows’.

15 million posters

The members of the Moscow organization of the Artists’ Union were the authors of the idea – Mikhail Cheremnykh, Nikolai Denisovsky and Pavel Sokolov-Skalya. They proposed to make posters combining a bright illustration and a trenchant military-themed quatrain. The posters were supposed to raise the morale of the Red Army and the workers on the homefront. The main artists of the association were the famous ‘Kukryniksy’ – a collective of artists composed of Mikhail Kupriyanov, Porfiri Krylov and Nikolai Sokolov.

TASS stands for ‘Telegrafnoye Agentstvo Sovetskogo Soyuza’ (‘Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union’) – all the bulletins of the Information Bureau went through this publication, so the agency received news faster than anyone. As such, TASS was responsible for the publication content control and the speed of its release.

The military posters received their name as the continuation of the famous revolutionary ‘ROSTA Windows’. These propaganda posters were created during the years of the Russian Civil War in support of the Red movement by the same agency, which, at that point, was called ROSTA, short for ‘Rossiyskoye Telegrafnoye agentstvo’ (‘Russian Telegraph Agency’). They were placed on empty storefronts, for which they were known as “windows”.

The work in the editorial team was organized harshly: no more than 24 hours passed from the production of the original to the release of the finished poster; no more than 10 colors were allowed to be used in the illustration. Five hundred and sixty artists worked in the collective at one point. The work was organized in three shifts, with up to 1,000 posters released per day.

The “Windows” were printed using stencils – a manual method of printing, when paint was applied to a cutout area of a stencil, after which the stencil was removed. Less labor- and time-consuming methods could have been used, but then the posters wouldn’t have been so vivid.

From June 25, 1941, to December 29, 1946, 15 million posters were produced. They were sent to the front, put up onto bulletin boards, lamp posts, storefronts and fences. For partisans, special small posters were made –  30 by 20 centimeters in size.

In reality, there were most likely many more posters. Editorial collectives similar to the Moscow one, but under different names, were created in different cities of the USSR: Leningrad (today – St. Petersburg), Irkutsk, Kuybyshev (today – Samara), Gorky (today – Nizhny Novgorod), Perm and others.

A victory over Nazi propaganda

Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany, was furious at the posters that ridiculed the German Army. So much so that he sentenced all the workers from the “Windows” editorial team to death in absentia. Duplicates of the posters were sent overseas, so the mocking caricatures became famous throughout the world.

We can trace the most important events in the history of the Great Patriotic War with ‘TASS Windows’: many of them were dedicated to heroic deeds and battles. For example, the poster below is dedicated to the feat of pilot Nikolai Gastello: his aircraft was hit and caught fire. Instead of leaving the aircraft, he aimed it at a column of enemy armored vehicles and blew up with it.

The feat of the artists

The editorial teams continued to release posters, despite harsh working conditions. During the Battle for Moscow, due to a deficit of an oil solvent, the artists worked with turpentine and acetone. Because of war blackouts, it was prohibited to open windows at night and, during night shifts, three to six workers would be taken away by ambulance, due to poisoning.

In Leningrad during the blockade in Spring 1942, only one worker was left in the office – Vasily Selivanov. He performed the duties of both an artist and editor; he also put up the posters himself. Selivanov created 108 “Windows”, each with up to 3,000 copies.

Some of the workers of the Moscow office received state prizes and were awarded ‘For the Defense of Moscow’ medals.

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