The 24th Lithography Workshop was located at Kronverkskaia and Mir Streets in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Historically, the workshop had its roots in Imperial Russia as a large printing operation founded in 1881 by Theodore Kibbel (Fedor Fyodorovich Kibbel). Shortly after the printer was nationalized by the Soviets, it became the 1st State Lithography Workshop and in 1924, it was named in honor of Mikhail Pavlovich Tomskii (1880-1936), head of the Soviet trade union and State Publishing House. During the early 1930s, the printer was reorganized as the 24th Lithography Workshop of Ogiz (Association of State Book and Magazine Publishers) and it was placed under a series of state printing trusts subordinate to the Council of Ministries of the USSR, the main executive agency of the nation from 1946 until 1991.