Socio-political posters of the perestroika period: carnival-utopian discourse in the communicative space of the “Late Soviet civilization”

Abstract

The article investigates the soviet authorial socio-political posters of the 1986–1991 years in terms of axiological discourse and categories of humorous culture, interpreted in terms of Mikhail M. Bakhtin. The independent authorial posters of the Perestroika period are considered as an evidence of corrosion of the late Soviet social and cultural landscape, as a reflection of mental search of the period of the “break of the Empire”, as an identification of the “current streams” of social metabolism. The article interprets the images and devices by means of which the poster artists debunked the mythical narrative of the “great utopia”, demonstrating often in a carnival-travesty way the ideological structures of the official culture. It concludes that an artist in Russia always retain an ideal-utopian perception of the reality to a certain extent and therefore doesn’t break ultimately with the paradised metanarrative even at the time of considerable historical changes.

Keywords:

graphic design, socio-political poster, Soviet graphics, authorial poster, carnival-utopian thinking, communication, Perestroika, axiological discourse