Gender and Agency in Russia’s 1921 Revolutionary Narratives:From ROSTA Window No. 867 to Capitalism

The post-October Revolution Bolshevik government, mired in the Civil War in 1921, was

one that realized an unequivocal and organized propaganda agenda through a marriage with the avant-garde movement. Artists deeply involved in public information campaigns such as ROSTA Windows produced a vast amount of posters this year, including prominently ROSTA Window No. 867 and Capitalism Turns the Woman Worker into a Slave without Rights, and a comparison of the two could help us shed light on the differences in the narrative they deploy in motivational efforts toward the male and the female audience.

In the center of ROSTA Window No. 867, Vladimir Mayakovsky displays four questions in

rather bold and black-and-white text. Starting with the two shouting on the top, “Do you want to conquer the cold? Do you want to conquer hunger?”, he carefully frames the viewer to be a potential fighter for a greater cause, or a soldier of an powerful, expansionary empire if hunger and cold were the names of its neighboring countries that would be brought to their knees in defeat, rather than a working class in an impoverished state of living that deprives him of the minimum materials required to meet his basic biological needs. The corresponding graphics clearly resonate with such design, showing identically a hand gesture pointing toward the right a mythical, evil creature that embodies the imaginary enemy, a snow monster vis-a-vis the cold and a human skeleton the hunger. It is clear, therefore, that the intention to engage the viewers here is carried out through, not evoking any pre-existing dissatisfaction, but igniting an innate desire to conquer.

Followed are the two questions on the bottom, “Do you want to eat? Do you want to drink?”, which, accompanied by two depictions of a man with strong and angular lines pleasantly consuming bread and water, appear to be intuitive to a point that seems not the slightest politicized. This leads us to the text in the largest, boldest font, “Hurry to the shock workers’ group, Join exemplary labor!”, creating a focal point on the bottom of the page that renders the sentence not only an answer to all of the four questions but as a natural conclusion of the narrative. With red representing communism in the Soviet context, Mayakovsky aims to convince the viewers that through joining the exemplary labor, they can become the figures portrayed in red in the poster, the ones that eat and drink and conquer, as if simply the act of joining allows one to enjoy both guaranteed victories and meal coverage in the employee benefits package. His seamless and purposeful integration of graphic design and text conveys clarity, impact and more importantly an oversimplified logic, that just as the top of the poster reads, “Do you want? Join!”, the viewer, rather than on the receiving end of hector, is the initiator of actions, encouraged to sign up for the righteous war of his own free will.

In Capitalism Turns the Woman Worker into a Slave without Rights, however, the role of

agency, supposedly of the women audience who are yet to embrace communist ideals, is downplayed in what is to be done to the flawed status quo. This shows prominently in the carefully thought-out spatial arrangement of the poster: under capitalism, which is personified as an obese businessman holding chains with buildings of prison and brothel in the background under black thunderclouds, the oppressed, enslaved, and sexualized women occupy, if not significantly, less space than the oppressor, suggesting that such obscene capitalist system is the sole cause of the problem; similarly, in the world of socialism, the public establishments are the one taking up the larger portion of the visual field, with nurseries, kindergartens and schools for adults looming in bright red and yellow color over a group of educated and fully dressed women who are standing upright and solemnly looking up to the red banner reading “All Hail the Third Communist International!”. Here, a socialist society is the only solution to the problem, that it is the communist state that will save women from the otherwise tragic fate of exploitation, and empower them to enter the labor force and public politics, and the way of participation for women here is to accept the state presence, to let communism liberate them.

The texts on the bottom serve as a reinforcement of this rhetoric:

Capital turns the woman worker into a slave without rights, fated to a hungry

and shameful existence!

Capital deprives the woman worker of her right to maternity!

Soviet power brings the woman worker emancipation and personal freedom!

Soviet power returns to the woman worker the joy of maternity!

Soviet power is the path to communism and the rebirth of all humanity!

The subjects of these sentences are the state, either a capitalist one or the Soviet one, that leaves women to be the objects, effectively denying their agency in joining the revolution. It is worth noting that although the Bolshevik response to the “women problem,” i.e. “women’s oppression as an effect of capitalist conditions of exploitation”, emphasized the irrelevance of gender difference (1), this was proved to be a failed attempt, for the fact that there is a “women problem” being demarcated from the problem of the working class indicates the very sentiment that women’s experience is, as opposed to men’s, hardly universal and requires a desperately tailored propaganda narrative.

In conclusion, the divergence in men’s and women’s agency in the context of the Soviet

visual language for propaganda is evident in this comparison. While ROSTA Window No. 867 creates a narrative of action, passiveness is at the center of Capitalism Turns the Woman Worker into a Slave without Rights, both in the artist’s depiction of women’s experience and the state’s envision of their role in revolution.

1. Christina Kiaer, His and Her Constructivism, 145-147.