Soviet Poster Collection
Swarthmore
College Peace Collection
Frank W. Fetter (Swarthmore College Class of 1920) acquired
a series of posters during his visit to the Soviet Union
in the early 1930s. In 1932 Ellen Starr Brinton, the first
Curator of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, led
a study group of members of the Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom to the Soviet Union. In Moscow
authorities permitted her to select a number of posters
from a repository. E. Raymond Wilson, Quaker activist
and Washington lobbyist, also visited the Soviet Union
in this period and later donated the posters he had gathered
during his trip.
These one hundred rare propaganda posters fall into
two main categories. Approximately half cover child and
maternal health, and offer a rare glimpse into the efforts
of the early Soviet regime to promote the proper care
of infants and toddlers. The remaining posters date from
the period of the first five-year plan (1928-1932) and
focus not only on the goals and accomplishments of collectivization
and industrialization, but also on the class enemies of
the Soviet Union, namely the Russian Orthodox church and
the clergy, kulaks, capitalists, and foreign powers seeking
to sabotage the communist effort to build socialism.
There is information about each poster, including description,
size, date, agency and place of creation, artist (if known),
and, for some, translation of text into English.
Please contact wchmiel@swarthmore.edu
with questions or comments about the Soviet Poster Collection.
