Posters of Republics & Autonomous Regions
In 1990, the USSR ranked third in the world as the most populous nation with over 248 million people and yet only half of the population spoke Russian. With millions of non-Russian speakers, printed matter was issued in a myriad of languages other than Russian. Perhaps the most important period of multi-lingual printing in the USSR occurred during the 1920s to early 1930s when the Soviet government carried out linguistic augmentation in the nation's non-Russian speaking regions.
While Russian was classified as the common language of the USSR, bilingualism was a one-way street. Non-Russian speakers were obligated to learn Russian to communicate with the government and to acquire jobs. On the other hand, ethnic Russians typically did not learn a second language due to the overriding “linguistic rights” offered to them as Russians. As a result of this policy, fluency in Russian increased even though millions of USSR citizens in non-Russian republics or in the autonomous regions spoke their own languages.
In the 1920s, the USSR propagated non-Russian language instruction through literacy campaigns to speed political education after the Russian Civil War. By the mid-1930s, government emphasis downplayed individualism and with this came a campaign of Cyrillization and Russification reversing earlier linguistic efforts that augmented the status of non-Russian speakers.
The Poster Plakat Collection contains dozens of non-Russian language posters and each is specific to USSR history and to the languages used on them. Below are a few posters with some descriptions and essays.