Gustav Klutsis is considered the foremost artist of Soviet photomontage. Born near the small town of Ruiena, Latvia, (when Lativa was part of the Russian Empire), Klutsis attended the State Art School in Riga from 1913 to 1915 and then moved to Petrograd (St. Petersburg) during immediately prior to the October Revolution. Klutsis took part in a volunteer rifle regiment that helped overturn the Tsarist regime during the revolution. After the revolution, he continued his studies in ...

The Krasnii Proletarii Workshop originated under the ownership of Ivan Kushnerev, a Russian entrepreneur who founded the Kushnerev & Company Printing Shop in 1869 in Moscow. When Kushnerev died in 1896, his printing operation was one of the largest in Imperial Russia. In 1919, the printer was nationalized by the Soviets and consigned to the Printing Section of the Moscow Economic Council (MSNKh). Around 1920, it was placed under the Poligrafkiniga (Book and Magazine Printing) Trust and was given ...

Ogiz was the Association of the State Book and Magazine Publishers. Its main offices were located in Moscow and in Leningrad. The Sovnarkom of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic established Ogiz in 1930 to centralize publishing activities under a state monopoly in order to eliminate duplication of printed material, streamline and control publishing production and output, and to create a base for marketing books, training and technical manuals. In 1931, the Central Committee of the USSR ...