Alexander Prokofievich Azhigirov was a Soviet painter and graphic artist. Born into an ethnic Tangut family from eastern Siberia, Azhigirov attended the Moscow Institute of Art from 1933 to 1939 whereupon he graduated. At the close of the 1930s, Azhigirov worked in the Buryat-Mongolian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic as a graphic artist and painter but his principal labor was designing posters. He became a member of the Communist Party in 1942. As a professional artist, Azhigirov began exhibiting ...

The 24th Lithography Workshop was located at Kronverkskaia and Mir Streets in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Historically, the workshop had its roots in Imperial Russia and it was a large printing operation founded in 1881 by Theodore Kibbel (a.k.a. Fedor Fyodorovich Kibbel). Shortly after the printer was nationalized by the Soviets, it became the 1st State Lithography Workshop. In 1924, the workshop was named in honor of Mikhail Pavlovich Tomskii (1880-1936), head of the Soviet trade ...

Iskusstvo was the Art Publishing House (A.K.A. Visual Arts Publishing) that was created in 1936 from Ogiz-Izogiz (State Art and Literature Publishing House). It disseminated books and journals dealing with graphic design and the fine arts, and it issued numerous posters. Since the Iskusstvo banner was part of the State Printing Works in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and Moscow, its two main offices were located in those two cities.