Soviet and Nazi Posters: Propaganda and Policies

This book examines the key content and propaganda value of posters in the dictatorships of Stalin’s USSR (1927-53) and Hitler’s Germany (1933-43), using posters as a point of entry for discussing key Soviet and Nazi policies. In so doing, Soviet and Nazi Posters provides a compelling account of the posters utilised by both regimes for the first time. Kees Boterbloem and Lisa Pine employ a comparative approach throughout, analysing commonalities and differences, and inspecting the regimes’ use of posters as propaganda.

Richly illustrated with 50 images, 25 of which are in colour, Soviet and Nazi Posters encourages the development of vital source skills in the pursuit of understanding the complexities of 20th-century European dictatorships. What do these posters yield to the historian? What do they tell us about the regimes and their intentions? Ultimately they offer a compelling visual point of entry into Nazism and Stalinism here explored in rewarding detail.

Boterbloem and Pine convincingly make the case that the use of posters as a medium of propaganda by Stalin and Hitler was advanced at the time and far-reaching. The poster campaigns were very powerful in terms of the impact on their populations and point to how the regimes could influence people outside their homes and in public places to support the regimes and their policies. The book looks at specific posters to discuss key regime policies associated with them and this offers us new insights into the nature of these authoritarian governments and the way in which they addressed their populations.

Kees Boterbloem is Professor of History at the University of South Florida, USA. He is the author of nine books on Russian, Soviet and World History, including A History of Russia and Its Empire (2nd edition, 2018), The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896-1948 (2004) and Life and Death under Stalin (1999). He was, from 2008 to 2018, editor of the journal The Historian. He is the editor of Life in Stalin’s Soviet Union (2019).

Lisa Pine is Associate Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, UK. She is the author of Nazi Family Policy, 1933-1945 (1997), Hitler’s ＂National Community＂ Society and Culture in Nazi Germany (2007, 2017), Education in Nazi Germany (2010) and Debating Genocide (2018). She is the editor of Life and Times in Nazi Germany (2016), The Family in Modern Germany (2020) and Dictatorship and Daily Life in Twentieth-Century Europe (2022).