UkROSTA was a Soviet news organization founded in January 1920. Its creation served to replace the Bureau of the Ukrainian Press. While UkROSTA was a news organization, it also employed a cadre of artists to design posters for publication. Frequently, the artists (working as a collective) did not attribute their names to the artwork they designed for UkROSTA.

Little published information is available on the Kharkov-based lithography workshop of M.G. Ravitskii. However, Ravitskii was likely a working artist before and during the Soviet-era. Published sources from the Soviet Union indicate Ravitskii had a printing business in Kiev. Beyond that, Ravitskii’s name appears as an artist in at least one 21st century Russian publication on graphic art during World War I.

All-Ukrainian State Publishing House (Vseukrizdat) was founded in 1919 as the State Publishing House of Ukraine and its formation was based upon a directive by the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee. The publishing house had branches in the cities of Kharkov, Kiev, Volyn', Poltava and other locations in Ukraine. In 1920, the publisher was renamed All-Ukrainian State Publishing and in 1922, the publisher was renamed DVU (Derzhavne vydavnytstvo Ukrainy). DVU became the largest publisher in Soviet Ukraine and the ...