Everything for the front!
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Other · File:Everything for the Front, USSR WWII propaganda poster.jpg · Public domain · Catalog record
The pins
Context
For discussion
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Repetition The list "More tanks, anti-tank rifles and guns, aircraft, cannon, mortars, shells, machine guns, rifles!" A list is a drumbeat; each item repeats the demand.
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Juxtaposition The faces A male and a female worker, goggles pushed up, looking into the distance. Photographs of real people turned into an ideal by lighting and montage.
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Card stacking The tank A finished tank and a finished bomber in a full machine shop. In the winter of 1941 the factories were on flatcars heading east; the poster shows the result, not the condition.
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Slogan "Everything for the front! Everything for victory!" Stalin's phrase of July 1941, on a red band in the largest type. The slogan did not exaggerate: it described the policy.
"Vse dlya fronta! Vse dlya pobedy!" was Stalin's slogan of July 1941 and the title of El Lissitzky's last poster, signed to press in December 1941 and published in 1942, the year he died of tuberculosis. A male and a female worker, photomontaged against a machine shop, with a bomber above and a tank below; the heading demands "more tanks, anti-tank rifles and guns, aircraft, cannon, mortars, shells, machine guns, rifles!" The slogan meant what it said: the entire economy was turned to the war, with rations and wages cut to do it.
- "Everything" is a large word. What did it mean in practice for the person reading the poster?
- The worker and the soldier are given equal size. Why?
- Compare this with "Food will win the war." Which asks more, and which says so?
See also
Same era, or the same techniques.
