The article is dedicated to a close study of two kits of diapositives (slides) that were produced in 1983 and 1984 by Plakat, a Soviet state-owned publishing house, and were meant to be used as a visual aid within the infrastructure of political education, addressing a vast audience, including propagandists. The article combines close analysis of slides to reveal the particular visual and textual language of this sort of material, the affordances of the medium and the medial material specificity, placing all of the above against the backdrop of late Soviet mass domestic and institutional use of diapositives. Authors pay special attention to the ways in which the diapositives project the state norms of moral conduct and demands for self-discipline. Drawing upon printed press, institutional and ego documents, the text problematizes the use and usefulness of these slide kits within the demise of state propaganda and initiatives for its intensification.
This article analyses photo albums created as internal reports by Pioneer camps in the Southern Urals and Moscow Oblast from the 1950s to the 1980s. Combining close readings of the albums with interviews, autobiographical sources and normative pedagogical literature, it examines how Soviet visual standards were translated into the everyday setting of the summer camp. The albums construct a multilayered normative visuality: they present the child as an embodiment of the socialist future, the camp as a miniature children's republic, and the album as proof of institutional accomplishment. At the same time, they reveal a collaborative mode of image-making in which staff and children jointly shaped the visual narrative. The study shows how these locally produced artefacts materialised the ideal of a happy Soviet childhood while negotiating the relationship between official models and lived practice.
This article investigates how Soviet documentary film of the 1960s - 1970s constructed the visibility of women on screen, focusing on Thaw - era and later portraits of 'ordinary' workers and labor heroines. The study centers on the distinctive Leningrad style of poetic documentaries within the broader context of Thaw-era cinema, exploring how filmmakers balanced propaganda requirements with artistic expression. Through analysis of works featuring both 'ordinary women' and labor heroes, the paper reveals how documentary portraits employed observational techniques and artistic experimentation to construct nuanced representations of Soviet womanhood. It is shown how filmmakers used 'unnoticeable' camera, non - synchronous first - person narration, and carefully staged spontaneity to individualize female protagonists while still aligning them with socialist ideals of fulfillment through socially useful labor. Close readings of the portrait of ordinary working women show how wartime experience, local identity, and everyday emotional strain are woven into portraits of a waitress and a tram driver. The analysis of the portraits of labor heroines demonstrates the disjunction between newsreel images and what is observed by the filmmaker. Poetic documentaries relied on elements of observational method as a delimited aesthetic strategy that could not cross the boundary where normative visibility would be put in question.
