If there’s any common ground between a revolutionary Communist and a Capitalist, one is obvious: tobacco. Whether red, or red, white and blue, everyone smokes—or used to. Tobacco and alcohol are the staples of every country and people on earth (add drugs to that and you have a troika of earthly delights). Cigarette brands are major sources of income regardless of economic paradigms, and the early Soviets, who where masters of branding the state, mastered state-of-the-art brand design. While not as memorable or alluring as Raymond Loewy’s American Lucky Strike packaging, USSR butts were not generic, as the labels from this collection of 70 examples for sale by my comrades at Productive Arts attest.
The group ranges the 1920s-’30s, with some examples from later decades, the dealers say. The designs span overtly political themes, nationalistic topics, far-flung regions and the purely fanciful.
As explained in Soviet Commercial Design of the Twenties (Abbeville Press, 1989): “Soviet advertising spoke in the State’s name and pursued the State’s interests. … Everything that was becoming socially, politically and economically most important for this new country was immediately picked up in the advertising. … The State competed with the private sector through the large conglomerates of State industry. The advertising of their products was handled by centralized organizations of each industrial sector rather than individual factories. … Advertising helped to establish their polysyllabic and often unpronounceable names by circulating them widely, and with them something of the fast, telegraphic style of the times.”
For more pravda (truth) on this kommercheskoye iskusstvo (commercial art) offering, go here—and check out more catalogs here.
The post The Daily Heller: Smoke ’em if You Got ’em: Cigarette Packs of the USSR appeared first on PRINT Magazine.