From 1904 to 1914, Aleksandr Aleksandrov Selezen’ studied at the Kharkov Art School. He began to exhibit his works starting in 1917, in Sebastopol. During the Russian Civil War, he fought in the Red Army, and during this period, he produced posters, portraits and theater decorations. After the war, he worked at various Ukrainian publishing houses. He created paintings, such as Geroicheskii Donbass v 1919 [The Heroic Donbass in 1919] and Pushkin szhigaet svoi manuskripty [Pushkin Burns his Manuscripts] (1937), among ot...

Gosizdat was established in Moscow in May 1919 via the merger of the publishing departments of VTsIK (All-Russian Central Executive Committee), the Moscow Soviet, the Petrograd (St. Petersburg) Soviet, the People's Commissariat of the RSFSR, and others. Gosizdat was the first large-scale, state-controlled publisher formed with the purpose of joining the nation's printing and publishing entities under a single institution. While it existed somewhat independent of the government, by 1930 Gosizdat served as the base for the ...